Page 138 of While I’m Still Here

I bury my face against her. “I haven't got any tits.”

Her hand moves over the back of my hair. “I know, sweetheart.”

“They're actually gone.”

“I know.”

“I thought knowing they were going would make it less fucking weird.”

Mum's arms tighten around me. “It doesn't.”

Two words. That's all it takes because she knows. I pull back enough to look at her, and suddenly I'm not thirty years old in a hospital bed with three boyfriends and cancer. I'm somebody's daughter, and my mum has already been through a version of this. “Did you feel like this?”

Her face changes. “Yes.”

I look down at Margaret because looking at Mum is suddenly too much. “But you had reconstruction.”

“I did.”

“Straight away?”

Mum nods as she sits in Marcus's vacated chair and reaches for my hand. “Yes, as soon as I could.”

I know this. Of course I know this. I've known about Mum's breast cancer for years, but knowing facts about your mother's body is completely different from lying in a hospital bed after losing your own breasts and realising that once, she woke up and had to look down too.

“What was it like?”

Mum is quiet for a moment. “Strange,” she says eventually. “Really strange. I knew what they'd done before I looked, obviously. We'd talked about it, I'd signed everything, I'd made decisions. None of that stopped the shock of seeing my body afterwards.”

I swallow. “But you still had breasts.”

“I had reconstruction,” Mum corrects gently. “That's not quite the same thing.”

My eyes lift to hers.

She squeezes my fingers. “I woke up with a shape there, yes. You woke up flat. I'm not going to pretend those are the same experience because they're not. But I remember looking down and knowing my body had changed while I was asleep. I remember knowing I'd agreed to it and still feeling upset that it had happened.”

“I keep thinking that.” My voice cracks. “I asked them to do this. So why am I lying here wanting them back?”

“Because choosing something doesn't mean you're required to enjoy every consequence of it.”

Marcus shifts somewhere behind Mum, and I know without looking that he agrees. Nobody interrupts. I stare at my mother's hand wrapped around mine. “Did you like your reconstruction?”

“Immediately?” Mum asks.

I nod.

“No.”

That surprises me enough that I look at her. She gives me a small, sad smile. “You think I woke up, looked down and thought, lovely, that'll do?”

Despite myself, I laugh. “No, but... I don't know. You always seemed okay with it.”

“I had rather more time to become okay with it than you're giving yourself.”

My eyes sting again.

Mum's thumb moves over the side of my hand. “It was swollen. It was sore. It didn't feel like the breast I'd had before because it wasn't. There were parts I couldn't feel properly. There were scars. I had to learn what was normal for my new body instead of constantly comparing it to the one I'd had before.”