A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (22 page)

Chapter 20

October 1999–March 2001

K
im was busy with her first year at the junior college, dating, working, and performing in the theatre. She also applied to a few more colleges so she could transfer for the next academic year. She was rarely home and was not going to account to us for anything involving her life. I stopped waiting up for her or for the phone call in the middle of the night. I was letting go.

Y2K wasn’t the Armageddon predicted. It wasn’t anything that even blipped.

I started smoking again on Valentine’s Day 2000. On the way home from our romantic dinner I wanted a cigarette, so we stopped at the market. When we came home I lit up, sitting out on the back deck. It was relaxing. I noticed starting to smoke was something you have to really work hard at to like. The first taste was horrible, improving with each subsequent cigarette. I don’t know what I was thinking—addictive personality disorder, part of letting go, learning to relax, giving up the fight, all of the above? At first I limited my smoking to two cigarettes a day, then four. I didn’t smoke enough to be chemically addicted but I became addicted to the behavior.

It was interesting to note that to have a cigarette, I had to stop what I was doing, go outside, and commune with nature. I had the time to stop and think, which I believe for me was a drug-induced form of meditation. Certainly there was no social aspect to it, since no one knew I smoked and I knew no one else who did or would admit to it anyway.

In March, Brad and I drove up to Grass Valley to purchase an adorable 6-month-old male papillon puppy from a breeder we’d met at a dog show in San Jose. He was my new baby. Doug had told me that if I wanted to get a dog, then get a “real” dog. This wasn’t in that category, but too bad. I liked this breed because they were smart, self-grooming, their hair didn’t mat, they were great companion dogs, and they were small.

Brad and I named the dog Indigo since his hair was a bluish black and white. He became my new best friend and was a great companion. I am sure my decision to finally get a dog was in response to no longer being able to have children. The good news was there were no diapers, laundry, temper tantrums, or answering back, just unconditional love and companionship. He really brightened my days and my spirits.

Shortly after he arrived on the scene, Doug grew to really enjoy him. Kim and Brad seemed a little jealous. Indigo never became their dog, probably due to my possessiveness, who knows. As a result of getting a puppy in conjunction with the beginning of spring in California, I began taking longer walks and spending more time in the yard for house-breaking purposes—which naturally led to more smoking.

As Indigo was exploring the backyard, I began to imagine a body part cemetery with white crosses in the corner of the property up on the hill. There would be one for each breast, my uterus, two fallopian tubes, and two ovaries, seven in all. Wow, I realized, there was a cross for every body part that is associated with the body as female. Was I even a woman anymore? Did I now have to take hormone pills to be artificially female? Does being a woman come from a bottle of pills? I felt like I had been a male, a warrior, for so long, I really didn’t know what being female felt like. I wondered if on some level that functioning as a male—a sole provider, ambitious professional, cancer warrior—had made the female parts of me become diseased, rejected, discarded, violently removed for some unconscious reason. I knew I enjoyed being a mother, although not a very touchy-feely one. I enjoyed home endeavors, crafts, sewing, embroidery, my Gene dolls, friendships, flowers, color, music, talking on the phone, shopping, clothes, makeup.

Were these some of the attributes of being female? I presumed I had two X chromosomes in each of my cells, does that make one a female? Yes, it does, by medical definition. Also, I still had my genitalia. So I concluded I was still female. I rationalized that nobody else could see the erasure of the now missing critical pieces of me, obliterated forever.

The XX part of me gave some fantastical notion of the idea of having a funeral service for these parts, complete with some burning (candles, campfire) and other women dancing, chanting in circles with flowing dresses as part of a grieving process, signifying the end of some era in my life. But it was brought up short by the strong current of male yang within me that said I was being ridiculous, Snap out of it.

In spite of the yang, I still felt heartsick and sad. Why was it that even though my former breasts were referred to as nothing more than sweat glands and their reconstruction good enough to fill a bra, I missed my breasts, their softness and excitability? And now that the uterus and associated reproductive organs were removed—the cause of melancholy, nervousness, depression, and hysterical fits, at least in misogynistic historical circles—I still felt all those things. Life is too bizarre!

My trips to the backyard also helped me wrestle with the notion of my sexuality. I finally deduced that sexuality was “all in my head” and therefore hadn’t been removed. However, my interest in sex depended on the state of my marital relationship. When it was good, I felt sexual; when it was bad, I felt asexual. But I thought that was probably true for most people. I thought, Too bad that it wasn’t mostly good, because when things were good, the sex was great.

I continued playing with my dolls. The collection by this time was obscene. I had multiple dolls in each major room of the house; I continued to change each doll’s outfit based on my mood and the season. I delighted in costumes like Champagne Supper, which the preferred customer catalog described as follows:

Romance blossoms during an intimate candlelight dinner in London. How could he resist her in this sumptuous gown of rich copper satin with fur collar and cuffs on the hourglass jacket? Cream roses accent the uniquely cuffed bodice, while two underlayers of gold crinoline add feminine fullness to the skirt. The outfit includes topaz rhinestone and golden jewelry, lined clutch purse with hand strap, gloves, seamed hose and shoes—Circa 1957.

I collected outfits like Hello Hollywood, Hello and Goodbye New York. I couldn’t resist Love Letters, which included the costume’s story in the booklet:

In the film “Love Letters” pen-pals plan to meet. He writes: “How will I know you?” She responds: “I’ll wear something red.” What an understatement! Love Letters is a two-piece cocktail suit in an explosion of vibrant red, circa 1947, trimmed with red bows and a red organza rose. Includes trimmed red hat, red bead hatpin, red gloves, handbag and shoes (all with red crystal beading), seamed hosiery (not red!).

I created a doll townhouse complete with all the official Gene furniture and doll props on the shelves of the armoire in our bedroom. (Armoire needed but purchased with Gene in mind.) The credenza at the front door was a doll scene that continued to change monthly. Doug said nothing of this. He was actually very tolerant.

Kim was accepted into Philadelphia School of the Arts’ Musical Theatre department as a transfer student, so we headed to Philly to check it out. She met with numerous faculty members and was even offered a monetary scholarship. In the end, though, she decided that she wanted to take more academic classes and not just classes in performance, dance, and voice. She decided to finish her associate’s degree and then transfer to a four-year college for some yet-to-be-chosen major.

I went to see a psychiatrist and was started on yet another antidepressant. I also started seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist. If I needed to pay someone to listen I thought maybe this would be a new twist, to find someone who could help me change some of my patterns of thinking, anger, depression, sadness. I just wanted to feel better, sooner rather than later.

I kept myself busy, my usual modus operandi. Nothing was clicking on the job scene after several interviews. I started working on crafts, mosaics, painting flower pots, and adding whimsy to the house on the order of Mary Engelbreit. I refurbished my childhood toy box and stenciled the laundry room.

During the spring I was co-coaching Brad and his friends, seven 9 and 10 year olds, for a Destination Imagination competition. The children selected a “challenge,” constructing a roller coaster that would maximize the number of oranges that would successfully make the trip in the time allotted. This had to be built on a limited budget and within very tight parameters for size, height, weight, etc. We visited the roller coaster exhibit at the Tech Museum in San Jose. We visited hardware stores. The kids had to come up with all the planning and solutions to the problem at hand. It was hard to be quiet and not lend advice, but without intervention they negotiated, planned, designed, and executed their solution. The other coach’s garage became the construction site as the prototype for the project emerged—between our lessons on tool safety.

On the day of the competition we all drove up to UC Davis. The energy and excitement in the car was effervescent. At the competition, they completed the egg portion of the program, successfully transferring an uncooked egg seven times around a circle using a spoon (after numerous not-so-successful practices and clean-ups).

When their team was called to assemble and compete with their roller coaster, I held my breath and then cheered once the buzzer started the action. The kids worked together like a pit crew for NASCAR. There were a few glitches, but they calmly picked up and moved forward. Each of the team members had a job to do. Every orange went through a roller coaster course, and the fruit that successfully made it to the collection box at the end was worth one point. The gymnasium sounded like the Final Four, all for the grade school kids. Doug quietly stood manning the video recorder.

Brad’s team came in fifth for the State of California. Brad was so happy, proclaiming, “This is the best day of my life!” Being part of that day and his joy made my living worth whatever it took to stay alive.

That summer was five and a half years since the first breast cancer diagnosis and four years since the second. When I wasn’t overscheduled, I continued to ruminate in the backyard. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I see my life as a huge gift, and cancer, as the spinning of straw into gold, making lemonade out of lemons, the turning point? Was I just happiest being miserable? I knew somewhere in those years I had lost my sense of humor and my love of life.

Cancer may not have killed me but it killed a part of me that wasn’t in the body part cemetery. The problem with this war is that you can’t identify who is the enemy and who shares the battle cry. The war is with your own self. Every instinct is to hate the enemy, but when the enemy is your own body, the anger turns inward, and becomes depression. The surge of battle is intuitively thwarted at the onset. There is nowhere to run or to hide. The problem with all these questions, questions, questions is that there doesn’t seem to be an answer. Therefore, Cancer is the ultimate rhetorical question. The question, always the same with the Big C, is why?

The sickest part of all of this was that the rest of the world, including most of my closest friends, knew nothing of the demons chatting up a storm inside my head or the clouds of smoke billowing in the backyard. I believed the rest of the world saw me as fun-loving, having a zest for life, sometimes even wild and crazy—someone who was making the most of her life. But as Doug told me, “They don’t really know you.”

During the summer my upper back began to bother me. I assumed that I must have pulled a muscle, or that maybe it was stress and tension. Then I thought maybe it was due to the different sizes or weights of my reconstructed breasts. When it didn’t seem to be getting much better, after weeks of Advil and heating pads, I went to my primary care doctor and was referred to physical therapy. They worked with deep heat, ultrasound, moist hot packs, and massage, and we pinpointed the focal points of the pain as primarily in the right rhomboid muscles under the shoulder blade and a few intensely painful areas along my spine. After a few sessions without seeing any improvement, they told me that they didn’t know what else they could do. After seeing how upset I was, they decided to keep trying.

Pain wears you down and makes you very cranky. I was on one antidepressant during the day, a different one at night, hormone replacement therapy, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for the pain. This was in addition to all the vitamins, antioxidants and herbal supplements I now took every day.

My love for my children, my dog, and the make-pretend world of my dolls was all that seemed to keep me going. The cognitive behavioral therapist wasn’t helping in any recognizable way. I was just paying him $100 per hour to listen to my miseries.

Since I avoided all the darkest corners of my mind, I decided that some of my depression might be due to living in such a dark house. I felt that there was something wrong with the energy of the house. Feng shui was starting to become popular, so I hired a feng shui consultant to help me set things right. She told me that our house layout was all wrong but in feng shui theories there were remedies using crystals, water elements, plants, color, and mirrors. These were things that reflected light, redirected energy flow, and created balance. According to the consultant we had a problem with our career and money center. All the energy was rushing in a line through the front door, hitting the wall, and going nowhere. Our love corner was all wrong. We needed to add red for empowerment and to improve the career center, use carefully placed crystals to focus energy, buy a fountain, and other assorted remedies. I implemented some of her suggestions and became determined to remedy the entire house and to “feng shui” my life. But that would take time.

In October, I flew to Chicago for the annual Gene Doll convention. The theme was “A Toast at Midnight” to celebrate the new millennium. It was amazing to be with hundreds of people with the same obsession. My eyebrows were raised by the scores of people—including men—who were wearing exact, life-sized replicas of the doll’s clothes and had not just one, but numerous costumes. The “Meet the Doll’s Creator” seminar was like a mosh pit at a rock concert.