This wasn’t supposed to happen to me.
The doctor chopped out my uterus. And while he was down there he thought, what the heck, and cut out my fallopian tubes and ovaries, as well. The cervix, part of the vagina, the lymph nodes, too.
It took nearly six weeks to recover. Physically. Emotionally I never would.
What I hadn’t expected were the hot flashes that flared up out of the blue. The sudden, intense heat waves that washed over my body. The rosacea that took over my skin. My heart, beating out of control, the need to drop into a chair and catch my breath as I saw older women—older women—often do. The night sweats that kept me up when I wasn’t being kept awake by my young child. The insomnia that gave way to moodiness and irritability. The ember flashes that lingered for years after the hot flashes were through.
I was going through menopause. I wasn’t yet thirty years old.
I noticed that my metabolism, too, had slowed, inches accumulating on my once-slim waist. Chris claimed not to notice, but I most certainly did. I noticed when pants went from a size four to a size eight, when I began to eye women like Cassidy Knudsen—young, slim and fertile—like some green-eyed monster. Green with envy. They were bountiful, fruitful, productive.
And I was barren. Dry and desolate, unable to support growth.
Growing older all the time, much too fast for a woman my age.
“Think of it this way,” Chris had said, in an effort to appease me. “You’ll never have to worry about getting your period again,” uttering that word—period—in a squeamish way, and yet I imagined it longingly. What I wouldn’t give to go to the drugstore and buy a box of tampons. To experience that monthly flow, a reminder of the life inside me. The anticipation of a life inside me.
But that life was gone.
“Cancer,” I whisper, forcing that ugly word out. “Cervical cancer. They had to remove my uterus.” I wonder if Willow understands what any of this means.
She sits on the sofa, staring at that TV. Bert and Ernie pass through, with their beloved rubber ducky. Ernie begins to sing.
Her voice is subdued, like a pale shade of pink. Pastel. Subtle. “But you wanted more babies?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, feeling vanquished by that hole in my heart. The one where Juliet used to reside. “Very much so.”
Chris said we’d adopt more children. All the orphans in the world, he said. Every last one of them. But after giving birth to my own flesh and blood, I didn’t want those children. I wanted my own. Adoption was no longer a viable option; I couldn’t imagine raising a child who was not my own. I felt cheated, swindled. My heart was closed for business.
“You make a good momma,” Willow says, and then her eyes drift to the lightning outside, the rumble of thunder that encroaches into the city, like a cancerous growth, and she says, more to herself than to me, “My momma was good.”
“Tell me about your momma,” I breathe.
And she does. Waveringly.
She tells me about her dark hair.
She tells me about her blue eyes.
She tells me her name. Holly.
She tells me that she did hair. In the bathroom. Cuts and perms and updos. She tells me she liked to cook, but she wasn’t too good at it. She’d burn things, or else they’d be undercooked, the inside of her chicken still pink when she bit into it. She liked to listen to music. Country music. Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn. Patsy Cline.
She isn’t looking at me when she speaks, but rather at the Muppets on the TV screen, Big Bird and Elmo, Cookie Monster. She stares at their bright colors, their eccentricities.
“Where is your mother?” I ask, but she ignores this.
I tell her about my father, and as I do so, a hand instinctively goes to his wedding band dangling from the gold chain around my neck. At the mention of Patsy Cline, her voice returns to me, running like a soundtrack through my mind. Patsy Cline’s death left such an impression on my own mother during her teenage years that songs like “Crazy” and “Walkin’ After Midnight” became part of my childhood, as did the images of my mother and father twirling around the copper brown living room carpeting, hand in hand, cheek to cheek, dancing.
“That ring,” Willow asks, pointing at it. “That’s his?” and I say that yes, it is.
And then for whatever reason I tell her about the wild-goose chase Chris and I went on to find a gold chain that matched. It had to be a perfect match. Close wasn’t good enough for me, wasn’t good enough for my father. Chris special ordered the chain, a purchase that cost him over a thousand dollars.
“We could buy a TV for that kind of money. A new computer,” he said. “Put it toward a vacation.”
But I said no. I had to have the chain.