I had already planned on getting my first tattoo before my boyfriend noticed the lump while playfully grabbing a handful of morning boob. “What’s this?” he asked. I froze for an instant. Surely, it couldn’t be cancerous. I didn’t want to think about it, but nothing could stop me from dwelling on the lump’s presence. It leered at me from just beneath my skin while I would countlessly touch and gawk at it in the bathroom mirror. I would turn forty in two weeks.
Two years earlier, my then-husband walked out the front door and never came back. I’d worried myself sick, filing a missing person’s report only to soon discover he’d disappeared to a foreign land with two credit cards and the funds from his 401k in tow. In so many ways, I’d spent years turning a blind eye to his addictions. I’m just one of the millions of spouses who looked the other way for the sake of stability.
Yet his abandonment made it possible to begin gaining clarity on my childhood wounds. Growing up in the shadow of an extraordinarily bipolar and often-hospitalized mother made it almost inevitable that I’d end up with someone like him—someone not entirely present and not quite comfortable in their own skin.
A stranger-than-fiction life has molded me into someone who gets knocked down repeatedly but grows stronger, because the only choice I allow myself is to keep getting back up again.
My mother, a woman who didn’t think clearly, was my idea of “normal.” The most significant people in my life never knew how to meet their own wants and needs in healthy ways. As a young girl, I remember trying to reason with my mother when she would get her pills mixed up and confuse day and night. I would come home from school to find a fresh pot of coffee brewing as she geared up to do her morning Jane Fonda routine yet again. I tried to reason with my husband about all the time he spent playing computer games. I once drove a hammer through the screen of an old cathode-ray-tube monitor so he would find it in the garage upon coming home. He only got better at hiding his habits.
During my 40th birthday weekend, I laid face down as “Resilient.” was tattooed in a bold, old-fashioned typewriter font across my upper back. I’d earned that word. The period at the end hadn’t figured consciously into my design, but in retrospect, that tiny mark of punctuation said it all. A stranger-than-fiction life has molded me into someone who gets knocked down repeatedly but grows stronger, because the only choice I allow myself is to keep getting back up again.
I received my diagnosis over the phone on Groundhog Day. I chuckled to myself, thinking maybe it was all a bad dream. Perhaps I’d wake up the next morning and everything would be back to normal. Then came an onslaught of wondering what I might have done to cause those demon cells to grow in my otherwise strong and healthy body, a body I took care of, a body many mistook for being half its age. Could it have been the strong cleaning chemicals I’d mixed when working as a housekeeping manager in Yellowstone? I’d rarely worn rubber gloves. The same goes for the times I’d used gasoline to clean fence stain from paint brushes and siding, and the time I’d bagged up a bunch of loose asbestos insulation from my parents’ attic in middle school to earn a few bucks.
We are all made of stronger stuff than we tend to give ourselves credit for. My propensity to write has enabled me to embrace vulnerability and accountability. Support from others has its benefits, but getting out of a personal quagmire is mostly a solo process. Growth is hard, but it should not be feared. I am resilient. Period.
Jeri Walker‘s creative nonfiction and short stories have been published in Idaho Magazine and cold-drill. Most recently, she won first place in the 2018 Idaho Writers Guild essay contest.
We are all made of stronger stuff than we tend to give ourselves credit for. My propensity to write has enabled me to embrace vulnerability and accountability. Support from others has its benefits, but getting out of a personal quagmire is mostly a solo process. Growth is hard, but it should not be feared. I am resilient. Period.
