Vanity

Admittedly, going back to work was not easy. For the most part it had to do with the simple physical drain. Who knew it could hurt to staple something, or use the paper cutter? Being on my feet after nearly three weeks of only wandering from the kitchen to couch, was a challenge that had me back on the couch again the minute I got home until I dragged myself to bed. Yet each day got better, and my range of movement so improved that I’m thinking the paper cutter will offer no challenge at all next week.

But the difficulty of returning also had to do with the way I look. I stood before the mirror the night before trying on different outfits in a futile attempt to find something that would hide the fact that I no longer have breasts. I will have breasts. I had reconstruction along with my mastectomy, but what that means is the plastic surgeon implanted tissue expanders, which will be filled each week, until I essentially “grow” a new pair.

I wondered if I should have returned with a prosthesis—falsies—thus sparing myself this conspicuous feeling. My daughter assures me that no one is staring at my boobs (of course not, I don’t have any!) and that it is my vanity that is the issue.

It certainly is.

Funny how cancer seems to want to teach us lessons about all the major sins. I’ve written about one already—gluttony. But vanity is the sin of the moment, even though I’ve never considered myself an overly vain person.

Here’s the truth though. I’m pretty vain about my hair.
I hated my thick red hair when I was little. My mom would take me to a barber instead of a beauty salon, because it was so thick and unruly. Embarrassing. For the first 12 years it was always short and coarse and bushy. Then an illness kept me at home for three months and oh darn, my hair grew and from then on, I had long red hair. One nice quirk about being a red head is that teachers always knew my name by the second day. Another thing that happened was that strangers would stop and compliment my hair. I was asked if it was real, asked if it was the natural color. I guess it was my one good feature, a crowning touch to crooked teeth, squinty eyes and freckles. So that even now, despite the dulling of age and lightening of gray that on my head happily looks likes highlights, I ‘ve come to love my red hair, even if I am never content with the specific haircut.

It makes me sad that with the migrating patterns of the world’s population, the dominant hair color genes vs. recessive genes means that red hair doesn’t have a chance of surviving beyond another few decades.
It makes me somewhat annoyed that my kids cringe at the possibility of their having a “ginger baby.”

But it really bothers me that my hair is going to fall out, and I will be one lumpy, bald woman with crooked teeth and squinty eyes and a wig that is not red at all because the red-haired wigs all looked too fake.

Yes, it is temporary...but is it? Many people I know had their hair return white, often curly. Interesting and horrifying.

Still, in the real scheme of things, how important is this? We are talking about survival, and so this must seem a trite and superficial thing to whine about.

But sometimes a person needs to whine about insignificant things, because often they loom up there with the significant things. Because after all, there are three basic issues every human, from age 16 to 95 worries about: Is there a God? Who do I love and who loves me? And, “does my hair look okay today?”