Going into it, I was leaning mightily on one of the great pillars of my life: my women friends.
Coming out of it, never in a million years could I have imagined they would have propped up my life in so many ways that only a woman would think of.
One slept–soundly, she contended–in the chair beside my hospital bed that long, achy first night after the surgery. Another one brought me the salad of my dreams, packed with every nutritional punch she could round up, and then she served it bedside on blue-and-white china bowls, complete with silver.
When I got home, my sister-in-law brought me wheatgrass juice by the gallon, and jugs of something that looked as though it had oozed from the bottom of the sea, but it was filling me, cell by cell, with micronutrients to bring pink back to my washed-out, hollowed-out cheeks.
Another friend, one who understands the power of the healing goddess within, brought me a pink rock that reminded me a whole lot of the uterus that was among the parts subtracted from my whole. She told me to clench it tight. I did, nearly to the door of the operating room, and once again when the hundreds of stitches inside made me wince, and not even morphine made the hurt go away.
A week or so after surgery, that friend came back with what she called her doctor bag. She said it was time to cleanse the rock and take away all it had absorbed. She held a plastic butane lighter to some South American stick and with a clutch of eagle feathers, she cleansed the rock and me and my little room with wafts of smoke that later made my husband ask if I smelled something burning.
In all, a river of women, some 50 strong, flowed into my life before and during and after a surgery that I dreaded with every cell of my being. It was a surgery that I thought was robbing me of the very essence of what made me a woman. A surgery that I feared–crazily, irrationally, but go tell that to a woman on the brink of instant menopause–would leave me old and wrinkled and without the glow that had always been about the only thing I had going in the Looks OK Department.
And the thing about the women in my life, the miraculous, wonderful, jaw-dropping thing, is this: They understood all that without words, understood the import, the symbolism, the metaphor that I carried in my womb.
Now, none of this is to say that no one else was right there for me. My husband, bless him, made me laugh out loud, again and again, in that dreadful suspended pause before they wheel you through the big steel doors. He’s gold for life for knowing just how to melt away the panic. And my mother, bless her, took my 3-year-old for two nights and two days, which means she’s in line for serious celestial real estate.
My women friends, though, neither married me nor delivered me into this world. There’s no signed contract, no stepping up to the plate required. They just knew what women know.
And so the women came: They roasted chickens, baked cobblers, straightened the things that cluttered the table beside the couch where I lay for the first few days. When I was not allowed to drive, one old friend even brought the silly things I always give my husband for his birthday breakfast. Another set aside every Friday for weeks, and whether I needed an arm to clutch as I shuffled around the block, or a ride to the copy store so I could send off my almost 4-year-old’s birthday invitations, she was there.
Basically, the women of my life stepped in and did everything I couldn’t do. And a hundred things I never would have thought to ask.
That’s what women do.
But until you’re the one leaning on counters because it hurts to stand up, until you’re the one for whom the prune brownies were baked, or the one watching your dishwasher get emptied and your clothes cleaned, folded and carried up the stairs, you have no idea of the power of women doing what women do. You have no idea how very strong their arms are, how very heavily you can lean into their rounded edges.
I have a best friend in New York. She had sent me a box of the very things she carried into the hospital when she had breast cancer–the lavender, the sacred dirt from New Mexico. But still I asked her for one more thing in the days when I was starting to shuffle around again.
I needed to say thank you, and I wanted not just any store-bought paper. I asked her if she could make me a stack of cards with words born in my heart one afternoon as I lay listening to the sounds of someone washing the stack of plates in my sink: “On wings, a flotilla of women carried me over the great abyss.”
Safe on the other side now, I have started to pen notes on those cards, to try to say thank you for knowing, in that way that women know, just what I needed even when I didn’t know to ask.
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Barbara Mahany, nearly healed and eager to lift anything heavier than a milk bottle, is of course forever indebted to the men and boys in her life; they are many and they are marvelous.
bmahany@tribune.com
