They Were Never Mine

The River is Deep and Wide.

Big trigger warnings on this one, Folx.

Original collage art by Stella Lyn Norris. Title “The River Estrangement”

I know I’ve been talking about breasts nonstop since learning mine had to go last fall. If you’re into breasts, if you’ve ever nursed a baby or tried to, or were a baby that received nourishment from them, or didn’t; if you have them, or have lost yours somewhere along the way, or just like to think about boobs a lot, perhaps you’ll understand the obsession. For everyone else: I’m sorry. I can’t quite explain what they’ve meant to me, and why this double mastectomy has been such a big deal.

In all honesty, my feelings about breasts have been contentious since Day One. The problem probably began with the fact that the first ones I became acquainted with were attached to my front of my mentally ill mother. I’m told I was only nursed for a short time, and while I don’t know what happened to end our breastfeeding relationship so abruptly, I feel sure that whatever it was, that story ties into why everything else about our relationship was cut short.

Our mother-daughter relationship started out badly, progressed to worse, and basically ended when I was fourteen. Well, ended is too final a word. Became estranged is more like it. I’ve wondered at times if more definite closure, such as that brought on by actual death, might have felt simpler at times. I’m not at all saying I wish my mother dead, just that hanging, suspended, in the undead-state of having her gone but not gone, completely out of reach while walking around on the same planet, and acting as though we don’t both exist, creates a lost feeling that never ends.

I know better than to think there would be anything easier about having a parent depart this earthly plane. That day will come, and then how will I feel? Will I even know when she has left the building?

Whether a parent dies a swift and unexpected death, or suffers a long, drawn-out, slow and painful one, I know processing the loss of any kind of passing comes with its own complexity. To be sure, it is no less lonely a country, even under the best of circumstances. I’m well aware that many have lost their mothers quite painfully, grieve forever, and would give anything for more time with them. There’s nothing the slightest bit easy about being orphaned, no matter how it all goes down.

While there’s no gentle way, it does seem there’s a natural order to things when a parent is eventually laid to rest. Ideally, when that finality takes hold, community comes to rally around the survivors. Bringing casseroles and giving the bereaved room to mourn, people find comfort in each other, and hold hands through the raw and universal eventuality that we all must travel through this inescapable fact of life. 

The loss of my mother has been unceremonious, and largely unrecognized by the vast majority of people around me at any given time. So much churns in the mix of this disconnection: misplaced guilt, shame, grief, anger, sadness…and it finds no resolution. Feelings of bereavement for my mother are so deep and cellular, I wonder if I drank them right from her body.

Knowing that I could reach out and try to call, email, or send a text is no comfort. Because what experience has taught me over and over again for decades, is that I will either get no answer, or, after leaving many messages over several months, I might receive, at best, a one-sided conversation that’s all about her, and denies any of the realities of our history. 

As it stands, it’s been over a year since our last phone interaction, and that was when she texted (texted!) to tell me she’d had a stroke. When I extended my hand and offered to help, to advocate, or to sign up to be her voice if she could no longer speak for herself, she didn’t bite. I don’t know why I told her I would be willing to do those things. I think it’s because Please and Appease is one of the knee-jerk responses the brain stem comes up with when presented with shock, in an effort to take care of itself. Fight and flight are the other choices on the menu, and I’ve exhausted those already. Perhaps the reptile that lives at the base of my skull was stirring, making one last attempt at trying to earn a place in her heart. It only gets about fifty milliseconds to sift through it’s limited options, so my therapist says. 

“It sounds like you’re having a hard time making sense of the medical information,” I said to my mom. “I’m willing to help you interperet the reports. You could email them to me and we could talk through it? Or I could come and visit?”

“Weeellllll…don’t come next month. I’ll be remodeling my bathroom.”

My mother has a way of saying a lot with a little. Since that brief interaction 14 months ago, which was the first in a whole year that had passed since our last brief chat, many holidays, birthdays, and other notable occasions have come and gone without a word. In that time, major illness and surgery on my end, relocation to a new state, and many other momentous life events have occurred. And still, there’s been no interest from the mother-sector. This is not unprecedented. Years at a time have passed before without us speaking, when we’ve not known if the other is dead, alive, or what.

The braided channels of The River Estrangement are quite difficult to navigate, given its lengthy and varied terrain. At certain points, funneled tightly through the narrow canyons of life’s more harrowing tests, it can be trecherously deep, and cut away ruthlessly at the bank. Charting such waters, there has only ever been one thing to do: hold fast. Just get through it. I learned at a very young age that calling out for my mother doesn’t work.

When time protracts, and the rocks spread out a little, there have been moments when I’ve waded in, thinking it safe to forge. But even ankle-deep, I’ve found those waters can chill you to the bone. The other shore can seem deceptively close at times, but in trying to reach across, one can be swept away, pulled into an eddy, caught up in sweepers, or pulled under, near to drowning. And the thing about rivers is, they all run to the sea. I often feel like a salmon who desperately wants to return to her natal ground, but cannot find the point of entry.

The other half of the equation of motherhood, of course, is being one. That has been an arduous sojourn, as well. Becoming pregnant at eighteen with my first son meant that while my peers were beginning to explore the wider world and their newly-minted, adult bodies, my path narrowed and I watched with horror as my figure shape-shifted. Carrying a child within my still-child body was a rocky physical, emotional, and hormonal experience reminiscent of puberty — a wolf who was still nipping at my heels. I had not yet fully returned from that hero’s journey. Like my brain, important lessons were still only partly formed.

I’ve been exploring my feelings around recently having a double mastectomy with my new and wonderful trauma therapist. She uses a technique called Deep Brain Reorientation (DBR), which has been an absolute game changer for me. I’ve come to understand more about the reactions of the nervous system and its coping mechanismas, such as disassociation. It’s starting to make sense why my body has never really felt like it’s belonged to me. 

In discussing my earliest history, starting with infancy, my therapist snapped her head up from her note-taking when I shared what my mother had told me about my baby-self: that I would scream until I’d pass out. 

“That speaks volumes about the level of neglect. For a baby to call out for help and give up like that says everything about how deeeply your needs were unmet.” Yes, the lack of nurture went well beyond access to a soft and milky bosom.

Hearing more of the story, she’s helped distill down some of the themes of my life, and why this body of mine has been such an uncomfortable place to live. Besides signing my body over to children for about seven straight years, and being physically abused by a parent, then a partner, there was also trading sex for “housing” as a homeless teenager. By “housing,” I mean horrific places, like falling down abandoned buildings, unsafe to occupy even before it came to taking my pants off. Being sexually violated as a young child (a story unto itself), and growing up in a home where strange men traipsed in and out at night after I’d gone to bed did not help me grow up feeling safe. It was made clear by my mother that in the presence of these men, should a need of my own arise, I was even more of an inconvenience than usual. Waking to their sounds echoing through the walls made me feel hollow inside, and even more alone.

“The deepest kind of aloneness,” my therapist says, and I want to fall into the well of kind understanding that lives in her deep brown eyes.

She asked what I knew about my mother’s life during her pregnancy with me. I gave the broad brush strokes: young marriage, depression, displacement to Colorado, homesickness, and difficulties with my father. The seeds of her mental illness would germinate in isolation, sprout in just a few months time, and mature when she ran away with me, back to Berkeley.

“We’ve been learning that when babies are in the wombs of stressed mothers, they will actually turn away from the umbilical cord, even though it is their only source of nourishment,” the therapist tells me. “That’s how deeply seated the instinct for emotional self-preservation is.”

“I was born blue and lifeless, with my cord wrapped three times around neck. I had to be resuscitated.” More head-snapping, scribbling and gasping from the therapist, who nods her head, and needs to say nothing. We can both see it.

Did our nursing relationship end because I turned away out of self-protection, or because my mom pulled back?

I know from my own studies of midwifery that the hind-brains of babies growing in the bellies of traumatized mothers will overdevelop. This is the oldest section of the brain, left over from reptilian-times — the part that governs fight or flight instincts. Nature is helping these babies prepare for the unsafe or unstable environment they are about to be born into.

I understood from a young age that my female body, and especially breasts, were something of a commodity- my culture showed me that. Ingrained at a bone-deep level was the understanding that along with the ability to nourish and sustain new life, the mounds of flesh protruding from our chests have the power to turn heads, and garner attention. They are social currency.

In middle school, girls were divided unjustly into two camps: the haves and the have-nots. There were girls with bosoms already beginning to blossom, who had boys falling all over themselves with non-stop obsession, living for a brief glimpse, or a quick feel behind the bleachers. I could plainly see that being one of the “haves” elevated certain young women to a Goddess-like status. But I was late to bloom. No one’s eyes lit up at the sight of me. Those curvy girls left me behind in the dust, and I despaired. Cursed with small buds that never seemed to open, I lay awake nights, fearing my life had died on the vine.

Dissociative disorder is common among people who grow up with physical and sexual abuse. It’s a type of trauma that can make one’s body feel as though it doesn’t belong to her. Much of my life, I have lived with the sense that I’m floating along just outside of myself, watching with no agency as these limbs carry me in and out of relationships, opening and closing with my heart. It’s a bit like being numb from the neck, down.

Certain events have pinned me to the spot, painfully enforcing the embodiment of experiences I might have preferred to completely check out for. This can be quite retraumatizing. Pregnancy is one such example, illness, another. For me, four-plus years of nursing babies was another way of giving myself away, of belonging to others. I was an occupied territory, not a sovereign nation. One baby nursed as though, if he pulled hard enough, he might be able to carry my breasts away into the other room. And he stuck to me like Velcro. We’d lay in bed, him twiddling my exhausted nipples for hours each morning, long before I was ready to wake for the day, until finally, I’d peel myself from him, ready to scream with sensory over-load. I recall feeling very “touched-out” for years on end.

While others were leaving home after high school, with a wide road opening before them, setting off to discover their interests and develop skills, most built their lives from the safety of scaffolding — parents who continued to offer a net; something to catch them if they fell. To me, that looked dreamy, like a walk in the garden. I was jealous of their ability to stop to smell the freshly opened flowers of beckoning adulthood, while I existed in sheer survival-mode.

The only thing that burst into bloom for me at that age were the sunbursts of stretch marks that spread across the thinning skin of my breasts, old before their time. First, they blew up with new milk like huge balloons and I felt, for the first time, the eyes of men following them — the breasts, not me. Down sidewalks and through grocery store aisles, I felt their eyes burning like lasers, then darting away at the sight of a stroller, or the shrill cry of a baby. 

Then, all too quickly, having been nursed to death, as quickly as they’d emerged, my sudden porn star-breasts lay heavy and deflated, lifeless as fried eggs. While friends dressed to go out to nightclubs in low-necklined dresses, I fastened on my old, dingy nursing bra, and hid my body beneath oversized T-shirts. 

“They aren’t much to look at,” I’d been told once, hurtfully, by a man I was deeply in love with. And I knew it was true. They couldn’t compare to the fresh and perky, impeccable skin of the childless. Specifically, those of the young babysitter he admitted to thinking about, even as he held me in his arms. I held such envy for the way she danced in his eyes. Her, and too many other women, yet to have the supple territory of their bodies invaded, pulled under by the gravity of insatiable children. These breasts were not my own, and never had been. Besides, with reviews like that, I barely wanted to claim them for myself. I felt like an eyesore, a poorly built, heavily trafficked building falling to pieces; a milk-factory, with hungry ghosts haunting me day and night.

The children were not mine, either. I was theirs, to be sure. Their mamma. The one they’d run to for comfort- a kiss, a quick nursing session, or just to be held, wordlessly, knowing that a soft, warm lap was always at the ready. 

Until slowly, they ran to me less and less, then not much at all. Now, too late, I realize during their hardest adolescent years, when they must have needed me most, I should’ve done more to insist that they let me hold them closer. It was a tough balancing act. Granting them freedoms was an easy choice when I felt burned out, and in my exhaustion, it was hard to want to hold on when they’d turn on me, questioning every little thing I thought, said, and did. Still, prickly at times, or not, I was their safe harbor when they needed one, the captain of their ship. They were my captive passengers. Sometimes —  too often — there were mutinies, and I was constantly reminded that nothing was under control, and parental authority, a total farce. My children’s lives were like water in my hands, briefly passing through, unable, really, to be held. They were never mine.

My youngest son, now almost 27, suffers with schizophrenia and substance abuse, is in and out of homelessless, and last year, spent a lot of time in jail. It feels impossible to nurture him the way my heart yearns to. At my last attempt to gather him back into the fold, my husband and I came to stand dangerously close to the edge of his abyss. For the sake of self-preservation, I had to throw up some seriously hard boundaries. And so, painful stabs come at me from both sides of this maternal wound. While I can’t be mothered, I also can’t be mother to one of my children the way I desperately want to. Just like with my mom, he is not gone, but I grieve him daily. There is no headstone to visit, and no one comes to call with casseroles.

After the calamity of trying to house my son during the pandemic, when he left, I felt the grief afresh. Cut the cord, I told myself. Cut the cord. Cut the cord. Cut the cord. 

I’ve kept his umbilical stump in a special box along with baby teeth, a first lock of hair, and a little rosebud- the first flower he ever took an interest in. There’s a “mojo box,” as I call it, for each of my children filled with these kinds of souvenirs, that I keep high on a shelf. 

After my son left in that terrible way, I got a new puppy. (Sometimes nothing else will do, you know.) Cut the cord, cut the cord, cut the cord. I had to say it to myself a hundred times an hour, sometimes, when the urge arose to reach out to him, and I couldn’t. 

Imagine my surprise when I looked down and saw that Mabel, my dachshund-shaped replacement child of the moment, had somehow gotten ahold of his mojo box, and was just swallowing his umbilical stump when I lunged toward her.

My mother and son are two sides of a coin. The calcifications of my heart, a thin hardness, lay compressed between the losses of the two of them. These two griefs share a lot in common, especially in that I am grieving for people who are, essentially, still here. In both cases, there are long periods with no communication. A person who can barely function has a hard time keeping track of a cell phone, let alone keeping it charged, and even in the “best of times,” he doesn’t check voicemail. His schizophrenia is something that, deep down, in spite of all the therapy, I blame myself for. Yes, yes, I know. I’m not supposed to do that. But during my pregnancy with him, I was more than traumatized. I was homeless. I was with an abusive psychopath. He became fatherless at eight weeks old. It’s hard to convince me he wouldn’t have ended up this way, had I been in a better place when I acted as his port of entry to this world.

My son often goes off his medication, losing all grip with reality. During these periods, he sleeps rough, in parking garages and the like, living from one fix to the next. I’ve learned the hard way that helping him means enabling drug use, and yet, cutting him off to try and prevent access to destructive elements also means I’m letting a sick person flounder. And not just any person- the tender, sweet child of my heart. 

There are no easy answers, and I can be quite cruel to myself about it. The urge to keep him close will never leave me; to hold him against my breast, to stroke his cheek, and try to fix everything for him, and to offer myself as nourishment. On my hardest days I’m crushed to see that, somehow unwittingly, I’ve become to him the one thing I swore I’d never be: a mother, like mine, who does not reach across. I am that mother. And I am that child. He is of me, but he is not me. Not mine.

Last week I went and got a new belly button at the belly button-gettin’ place. Normally, this is done at the same time as the rest of the DIEP Flap breast reconstruction. But since I had bigger breasts than belly, the repurposing of my abdominal tissue to my chest in order to build new breasts after the mastectomy meant a discrepancy — more skin than bulk, and my tummy was strung too tightly to safely replace my umbilicus immediately. So, for about three weeks, I walked around without one. 

“See, I really was found under a rock,” I told my husband, showing him this newfound proof of motherlessness.

At the time of the mastectomy and transplant, the plastic surgeon flagged the area where my belly button belonged with a long piece of suture, and left it dangling from my trunk like survey tape. I walked around with it while I waited for some slack to return to my skin, like a tree marked for the chipper. 

Then, in the cold and sterile office, he donned his gloves and with the scalpel, cut down to what lay below: the monument of scarred arteries, long defunct, clamped and cut at the time of my birth. He opened this tender place at the core of me back up, to re-expose the relics of this old hardware. Stitching around the original mother-wound, he pulled back the skin like weeds from around an old, forgotten headstone. 

At the surface, the original connection to my mother has been cut away. That void has now been closed, our oneness buried deep inside me, beneath the long and jagged scar bisecting my top from my bottom, like long line in the sand. This crosses the river of my body like a narrow bridge of rope, from hip-to-hip. As above, so below. And at the surface of my skin, my new belly button, still raw and bloody, hurts when anything rubs against it. It’s unnecessary, physiologically, but pays homage to the fact that, yes, I am mammalian born, after all.

The other day, I broke down to my friend about the loss of my breasts. This multi-phased reconstruction project feels like a waking nightmare, and is in a very messy place at the moment. I told her how horrified I am by the foreign lumps of mangled flesh, cut and pasted to my chest, somehow painful and numb at the same time. 

“I know the original version was pretty hammered and saggy. Certainly nothing magazine-worthy to write home about. Not much to look at. I thought they could never be worse, and now they are,” I cried.

Having been ravaged by motherhood and illness herself, she pursed her lips, tilted her head, and sympathized, nodding in understanding. “Yeah, but at least they were yours.”

Oh, but it’s so hard to explain. They were never mine.

PS: I dare you to listen to this song and not cry.

Paper collage made with recycled magazines by the author.