“We have gone so much”: Jean Hannah Edelstein on the breast – and life without them | Women

THEAnd they will tell me about my breasts, of blessed memory. It’s not something I would have said while I still had them. I was quite primary, see, and perhaps they are still, but a double mastectomy gives you the license to say “breast” over and over again, without the usual consequences. My breasts were real and were spectacular.

This is a Seinfeld Reference, if you are not familiar. Seinfeld It was one of the shows that I often saw in my teenage years when my breast affirmed for the first time. It was among our key texts. We were at the end of the twentieth century in America, to my breasts and I. it was once and a place that taught me that the bodies of women-breasts, in particular-are objects of desire, jokes and dangers. Friends, Baywatch, Melrose Place. Dark, Cry. Britney, Beyoncé. Monica Lewinsky.

My husband says that I have looked 35 for a lifetime and recovering my high school photo albums that you can see where it comes from. I understood that my young breasts could be problematic, so I practiced self -defense by remaining sketched. I had more likely to be mistaken for a replacement teacher by a younger student (this happened) than appointed as Queen of the dance (this, of course, no). The atmosphere in my state school was quite conservative. There was a significant contingent of evangelical Christians, as well as a cohort of children with laser concentration on the Ivy League. “Going to Harvard” was our hyper-room jargon for sexual intercourse. Two goals for main teenagers.

I didn’t go to Harvard. I was not that type of girl. For the university, my breast and I crossed the border with Canada, where the age of drinking was 18 years old, not 21. We wore sweatshirts that referred to the Harvard of Canada, and there was a strip club called the Super Sexe a few hundred meters from the library. In Montreal I started to explore the possibilities that my breast had to offer. That is to say, I started to wear what was known as a “Skank tank” in discos with my similar friends, where the oldest men would buy, or our breasts, affected dollars seasoned with whipped cream. They were called “blowjobs”. You drank them with your hands behind the back.

My university boyfriend, which I attended for a couple of years, told me that my breast was perfect, unlike my face, to which he said he should have used to. It was true that my breasts were a source of great, although private, pleasure. At home for the summer, I thought of filling in a job question from Hooters (I had heard that the suggestions were good), but I opted for Starbucks.

I moved to London as a post -Laurea. Here, my breast made me work behind the bars when my experience of Pinta (zero) would have disqualified me. While I tried to make my mark in the journalism he paid on display, I did my alcohol flush for rent in tightened and uniform children. When a bettor in a particularly low factory grabbed my breasts, I moved it away, but I didn’t complain. I needed work more than I needed the problem.

Sometimes, my breasts also attracted positive attention to me. After separating with the boy I had moved to London with, I wished to fell in love to me. It was not easy. During the nights outside, when I chose to wear a top that my friends called “man’s capture”, it was quite easy to establish visual contact with the type of choice and screw it. It was more difficult to meet someone who wanted to stay around, who wanted to get to know me well after meeting my breasts.

My career has progressed in adaptations and begins. Once, two, three times illustrious male editors offered to help me with my career, but then they asked me to discuss that career in pubs or in the members of private members on wine glasses. I went to meetings and then I didn’t follow because I couldn’t manage the subtext. Perhaps some women were able to manage it, I thought, and this made me envy and hate them. Sometimes I tried to talk to the people close to me about these distressing encounters. Quite often, “what did you wear?” It was the answer. I knew that this did not mean that I had shown a risky amount of ankle.

I gave up my dream of earning to live with writing myself and I got a job in advertising. Not a sector known for his progressive attitude towards women, but at 30 I thought I was too old because my breast was of such convincing interest. Alas, come to the office Christmas party, I found myself on the dance floor with a colleague suddenly that the nipples twisted me through the fabric of my dress. “This is a problem of consent against non -consent,” the great boss told me when I presented a formal complaint. I struggled to imagine the breast that would have agreed, the person attacked to them. A few months later, I left and moved abroad. My breasts were tired of England.

Breastfeeding, I thoughtIt would be the resolution. Why had we shared all those years of struggle, me and my breast, if not to feed my children? I was 37 when I had my first child, with the date of Tinder of my dreams. At our first appointment, in Brooklyn, I apologized for talked too much. “I could listen to you forever,” he said. Ok! We got married within a year. I was pregnant a year later. In recent weeks I am amazed at a shower to how great it had become great my breast, insignificantly big with nipples like the saucers. Sandwich dishes? They – we – were ready.

Of course, it didn’t go well. My impression is that this is the case of most of the new mothers; That at the beginning it goes badly for so many of us, but somehow I felt only by those who found it wonderful, natural and easy. Maybe they are the only ones I care about? Perhaps the reason for the friction of breastfeeding is that it is often horrible.

At the appointment of a month of my son the doctor declared him dangerously thin. I could not understand it: I was giving him to eat constantly, in debilitating pain. The night before his father had brought me to me for another feed and I gave up. “See a breastfeeding consultant,” said the doctor, and that’s it. No other advice. Not, for example, a recommendation for the formula. It was the lowest moment of my life. My breast had betrayed us both.

The breastfeeding consultant diagnosed me with a serious nipple infection and a circulation problem and put me on an exhausting routine in the field style field of power boot, pumping, power and pumping. Six days after the child and I shot. Easy. He had only destroyed me mentally and physically. Over time, I became the type of mother who could sit in a coffee and bring out a guy to feed my baby without fear or shame. When a man changed his place to avoid the scene, I thought: You need well. It was not a specific problem, but it symbolized one.

Returning to work six months after childbirth (a generous leave for America), I hooked the office pump and put my milk luggage in the refrigerator, well labeled with the name of my baby. I felt bad, but I did it until my boyfriend spent his first birthday. I did it again, for my second child. He did not share his brother’s initial feeding difficulties, but at nine months he began to refuse the milk I pumped. Offensive. I stopped pumping, but I continued to breastfeed it at home. It drove me and pinched me. He didn’t want it anymore. A week before his first birthday, I made a business trip and stopped the cold turkey. The last of my breast milk washed the unloading in a shower in a chic hotel in Santa Monica. I was happy to see him go.

“It’s like having A broken mole “is something that my breast surgeon told me that I will never forget, an observation among many that I have heard and noticed during what some could call” my journey for breast cancer “. surface.

For all the troubles that my breast had caused me over the years, I wanted to cling to them. We were the same. But here’s the biggest problem of all: cancer. I was 41 years old and was captured early. I had started young mammographs, a gift from my genetics, which was planned to have cancer at some point, in some body position. I knew he was coming, but I was not ready for that time and that place. Cancer was just a glitter on the image when it was presented. Good cancer to obtain, if you intend to get cancer. (Ideally, you would not get cancer). Mine was the first type of cancer, but widespread, which is why I didn’t need chemotherapy or radiation, but I ended up in line for a double mastectomy.

I lived in America now, with fantasy health insurance, which meant that everything happened quickly. I had six weeks to decide how my new “breast” would have been. Now I could choose. I may have a perfect breast! And, of course, at that moment I knew that the only breasts I wanted were the ones I already had, huge and falling after all that breastfeeding, floppy and pendulum, 32g and mine. Suddenly, I realized how much I loved them, how much we passed, how much I imagined us to age together. Now, I would leave them behind, replacing them with an senseless simulacrum.

In the days preceding the intervention I tried to prevent our physical detachment with an emotional one. It seemed the end of the university, when my roommates and I became short with each other, rude, as if this protected us from the terrible loss of moving and onwards with our lives. What were my breasts good for, however? I tied them to an uncomfortable sports bra and went to the gym, I observed how they felt when I jumped the rope. Embraced my children. I wondered how my new hug would feel.

The day before the operation, I went to a clinic to inject radioactive dyes into my armpit, to trace any sign that cancer had traveled in the lymph nodes (he did not, thanks to heaven). Lying on the table, I was asked to rub the area with a circular movement for 10 minutes. This is so boring, I thought of myself, but then I felt so tender: this was the last whole day that we would have had together, my breast and me. In the changing room I took a photo. Me – we – we were beautiful and whole. The next day we separated.

It still seems that I have the breast. In clothes, at least. When you have breast cancer and people know that you have had breast cancer, they look at the breast. They cannot do without themselves. A quick look and then again. Embarrassed. I don’t mind too much. I return to our period of maximum splendor, me and my breast late. What is in my chest are now silicone systems, full of saline solution. I can hear all my thoracic cage under them. If you jump, sometimes I can hear them as slosh. Sometimes I forget I’m there. Sometimes I go out on a cold day and I wait for my nipples to harden, but they don’t do it, because I don’t have nipples.

My new breasts are much smaller than the natural ones. This is what I asked. They are fine; This is what I say if someone wonders how I feel. They are fine, I say. They are false and are irrelevant. I’m not my breast. I miss.

Senzi: a relatively short relationship by Jean Hannah Edelstein It is published by Phoenix to £ 12. Order it from Guardianbookshop.com For £ 10.80