By Marylou DiPietro
Monologue excerpted from solo play, In Love with Cancer
MARYLOU’S INNER VOICE
The number eight hangs on a hook in my brain.
Why eight? Why not seven?
Seven's been my lucky number since the third grade, when I won the most beautiful picture of a blonde-haired, blue eyed, prepubescent Virgin Mary.
Yup, you heard me right: a blonde-haired, blue-eyed prepubescent Virgin Mary.
Made perfect sense at the time.
(Looking up “prepubescent” on my phone.)
Prepubescent: Young girls who are prepubescent are experiencing their purest sense of self before adulthood.
Their purest sense of self...
That’s why I wanted to become a nun!
If I married Christ I could remain a virgin. What could be better than that? I’d have God’s eternal love, and secure my place in heaven.
But wait a minute; weren’t nuns born with the indelible stain of original sin on their souls like the rest of us?
Maybe hiding their bodies in reams of black wool, and shielding their breasts with a hard plastic bib was a kind of preordained penance for the sin they inherited from Eve.
Besides, how could I be a nun when all I wanted to do was stand in front of the mirror --naked-- looking for a sign that my prepubescent body was becoming pubescent?
Would I be punished for praying that my breasts would grow as big as the most popular girl’s in class?
Why did I want a woman’s body, if it was a sin to have one in the first place?
Oh my God that’s it! That’s the direct line from God shaming Adam and Eve, to my parents yelling at my sisters and me to “go put something on”, whenever we went downstairs in a slip or even a nightgown, as if we had come down stark naked.
No wonder my mother, and all her Catholic friends, didn’t breastfeed. The shame was so overwhelming they lost their instinct to feed their own children.
No wonder my mother seemed almost relieved to have one of her breasts cut off when, in her seventies, she learned she had breast cancer.
Is losing a breast to cancer my punishment for having one to begin with?
Just who is the real traitor? God or my own body?
It wasn’t winning the prize of purity that shaped my life; it was trading the prize in for that badge of shame.
It’s not that I didn’t want people to know I had breast cancer; I didn’t want them to know I had breasts.
The breasts I dreamed of having.
The breasts I made believe I did have, when I stuffed my training bra with cotton.
Breasts so small they made me invisible to boys.
Breasts, like my eyes, that gave too much away.
The breasts that, even though they were far from perfect, were all mine.
Breasts I proudly fed my children with.
Breasts I took for granted.
Breasts -- one breast -- that became a feeding ground for cancer; and needed to be cut off from its life source, which was me.
The breasts that taught me Shame is the real cancer that needs to be lopped off and thrown in the trash.
I’m in love with everything cancer has given me... Like the memory of eating my first pomegranate.
Or the time I laid on the beach for hours watching a parade of animal clouds drift by.
Or how I convinced my baby sister -- and myself -- that I knew how to fly! And that she was to meet me every morning at 5:15 for flying lessons.
Or how I dreamed of painting and drawing and writing poems as good as my older sister’s. And when I did, she wasn’t jealous.
Or the moment my two-month-old daughter popped her head out of the Snuggly and noticed the world for the first time.
Or the time my five-year-old son announced he didn’t believe God was in the sky, but that he was the good in each person.
Cancer taught me that surviving cancer is like surviving childbirth. Except with cancer it is your own life you end up with.
Cancer gave me the strength to come to terms with what it took away.
You want to know why I really fell in love with cancer?
Because it got me here today.
Connect with Marylou: www.maryloudipietro.com
Read More:
On the Podcast: Breast Cancer Conversations
Voices of Resilience: A Night of Poetry and Healing
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