For no apparent reason today, I found my mind wandering while I was at the vet's office today (that's another story, maybe later), counting how many major surgeries I have had - 8, and how many minor, 3, and how many scars - 11, one for each surgery.  Plus one on my forehead from one of those I-can't-believe-you-survived-that- kind of an accident you can only have when you are a little kid.  And one other:  the tattoo I have just above my left breast.  The tattoo I chose to get because I had all these other 11 scars that were all for circumstances beyond my control.  I got this tattoo because I wanted the choice to scar myself. 

When I arrived back home and checked my email messages, I had one from my brother-in-law.  It was a photo, and all he wrote to accompany the image was a question:  beauty?  It was a photo of a breast cancer survivor, who had a double mastectomy and tattooed over her whole chest.  This is the link of story I read: 
http://ca.shine.yahoo.com/blogs/shine-on/breast-cancer-survivor-chest-tattoo-photo-goes-viral-193759450.html
I think it is breath-taking.  I think it is a beautiful example of taking a tragedy and marking it on your own terms.  (It also must have really hurt to get it done, but then so would a mastectomy.  I tip my hat to this brave woman).  According to the story, the photo was posted on her facebook page and then taken down.  Posted again, and  again removed, apparently because it violates facebook's rules regarding nudity.  This is the kind of nudity I want to see though.  The kind of nudity that makes me proud to be a woman.  The kind of nudity I want to show to my daughter.  The kind of nudity I want to talk about.  And that is why I am writing about it here.

Although I have 13 scars, I have both my breasts and I can not know what losing that part/those parts of me would be like.  I went to my old tattered copy of Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals today, and re-read what it was like for her to have a mastectomy.  She writes her story of losing a breast, but also about the bigger questions of what it means to be a woman in this world, and to deal with the pressures of having to look and function a certain way in order to be acceptable, valuable, and beautiful.  It is a most inspiring book, and I encourage you to read it, but let me leave you with a passage on page 66:  "I am personally affronted by the message that I am only acceptable if I look 'right' or 'normal,' where those norms have nothing to do with my own perceptions of who I am.  Where 'normal' means the 'right' color, shape, size, or number of breasts, a woman's perception of her own body and the strengths that come from that perception are discouraged, trivialized, and ignored...I must consider what my body means to me." (My italics)

Not every woman who loses a breast, or both breasts will want to, or feel the need to, tattoo her chest or write a book about it.  But she should not be silenced when expressing what her experience was like, or if she wants to somehow take her experience, choose a different perception of it, and create a new identity for herself.  It is her story.  It is her body.  Audre Lorde also says (page 22): "For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury  of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.  The fact that we are here and that I speak now these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.  And there are so many silences to be broken." 

wishing you beauty, in any way you chose to define it,
hk

Lorde, A. (1997).  The Cancer Journals: Special Edition.  aunt lute books: San Francisco, CA.

p.s.  Thanks, Curtis.  :)