Skip to main content
Monster in the Closet/Where the Wild Things Aren’t


A monster might emerge from the closet. The monster might eat me. I don’t want the monster to get me.

Oh, look, the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine has an article about a TV presenter I don’t know. I’ll read this story so I won’t think about the monster in the closet.  It says here Simon Barnett and his lovely wife have four daughters. They’ve been married twenty years…

Is the monster coming? Is the monster going to eat me?

AND GNASHED THEIR TERRIBLE TEETH…

Simon says (hey, that’s like the children’s game…) there’s no manual for the two most important things you can do in life – get married and have children. Oh, that’s true. He reads books about relationships. Really? A guy does that? I just finished reading the Five Love Languages and thought its ideas were logical and doable. We invest more hours researching houses or cars than we do before supercolliding our life with someone else’s. Or procreating…

This is working. I’m totally not thinking about the monster in the closet. It’s like he’s not even there.

AND ROLLED THEIR TERRIBLE EYES…

I hear laughter on the other side of the door. Is that a good thing? Would the radiologist share a joke with the technician if he suspected I had cancer? Surely not.

AND SHOWED THEIR TERRIBLE CLAWS…

Simon has four children. His wife is 50 years old, but looks about 40…

The door opens, and a man with more-salt-than-pepper hair emerges. He introduces himself as Dr. Duncan Something-or-other (you expect me to remember last names at a time like this?). Sweat creates an uncomfortably cold tingle under my arms – it’s the product of nerves, fomented by prohibition on underarm deodorant that’s de rigueur for a mammogram.  I sit and shiver in my white gown with its blue flowers, pulling it tighter in a V across my chest.

Are you my monster?  Will you make a life-changing proclamation?

Dr. Duncan says, “We compared the scans we just did of your right breast to past mammograms. I feel confident the changes are in line with benign calcifications…”

You’re not my monster. Thank God you’re not my monster. I knew that. I totally knew that. I wasn’t worried. Even though the first mammogram said, ‘inconclusive,’ and the tech today said something about ‘investigating the changes in your right breast…’

Not that I have reason to worry – it’s not like my mom had breast cancer at age 55, or her sister at the same age, or her grandmother (or was it great-grandmother?) had ovarian cancer. Not like it runs in the family, or anything… And it’s not as if any of my friends have been diagnosed in their forties (three of them, no – four, five… I’ve lost count). And I definitely didn’t sit inside this very facility to hold my friend’s hand after she was called back for a second mammogram and got a surprise needle jab just minutes later (the ‘ambush biopsy’).  It’s not like the biopsy confirmed my friend had breast cancer.

No reason to worry. No monsters here.

AND I STEPPED INTO MY PRIVATE CAR AND WAVED GOOD-BYE AND DROVE BACK ALMOST OVER A YEAR AND IN AND OUT OF WEEKS AND THROUGH A DAY. AND THAT MORNING, I FOUND MY FRIENDS WAITING, AND THE MOUNT WAITING, SO I RAN UP AND DOWN AND ALL AROUND. AFTER, I GOT A SOY LATTE. “AND IT WAS STILL HOT!”


(with thanks and apologies to the late Maurice Sendak for his unforgettable, Where the Wild Things Are)

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 1, 2013 at 11:30 AM

    Hi Dawn! I just stopped by and had a quick question about your blog. Could you please email me at emilywalsh688 (at) gmail.com when you get the chance? Thanks!

    Emily

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remove Before Flight

Remove Before Flight “The elevator’s trim, rudder’s trim, mixture’s rich, flaps are at ten degrees…” Pete, the PAHT-nah (partner), is talking through a pre-flight checklist as we wait to taxi from the Tauranga airport. In the nearly 12 months we’ve known each other, Pete’s talked about taking me flying. Now, with my departure from New Zealand less than ten days away, the weather, schedules, and aircraft maintenance have obliged so Pete can fulfill his promise. The sky is overcast, but the cloud ceiling will allow us to fly at 2,500 feet; it’s the weekend, so we’re not competing with flight school students for air time; and there’s a new-ish plane (called FCO, or Foxtrot Charlie Oscar) Pete has enough confidence in to haul what he calls “precious cargo,” which is me. Pete checks the Cessna 152 single-engine propeller aircraft as I watch. He walks the plane’s perimeter, inspecting flaps, wheels, the rudder… He gives me a couple wooden door-stopper-looking blocks (called chocks). “Remo...
4 comments
Read more

The Affair

The Affair Ohope Beach, NZ I had an affair last week. I’m not ashamed to tell you, either. It was sweet and sad. It made me laugh, cry, sigh and dance in my chair to James Brown and Rupert Holmes. My Kiwi PAHT-nah, Pete, even facilitated the tryst, though neither of us knew what to expect beforehand. Pete watched the kids while I was gone for five nights. Five whole nights.  No kids. No TV. No partner.  I enjoyed a dalliance with my late husband, Sean (though I should write instead, ‘dead husband,’ because Sean hated being late). It happened in a wood-paneled house across the street from the ocean, in Ohope Beach, New Zealand. I attended a writer’s retreat to work on the memoir. I revised six sections totaling more than 40,000 words. In the course of revising- subtracting old text and adding entries from letters Sean had written me when we first started dating, plus journal entries he wrote around the time Fiona was born - I fell in love again. With Sea...
2 comments
Read more

Jumping Off a Cliff

 I jumped from a cliff in Oregon last Friday. Actually, I ran straight off. There was nothing unpleasant about that particular patch of grass high above Oceanside. But standing with my feet planted on the ground was preventing me from completing an item on my “bucket list:” flying. Strapped to a harness, an emergency parachute and my instructor pilot, Todd, I launched into my first paragliding experience (for an explanation of what paragliding is, click here): http://discoverparagliding.com/Pages/faq.html#WhatisPG It was glorious. I sat against the back of my chute and felt the wind against my face. I felt birdlike, calm, free. Todd steered over the tops of pine trees and the roofs of houses. I waved to a man on his deck below. I listened to waves crashing against Three Arches rocks and inhaled the salt air. Flinging yourself from terra firma isn’t easy. I could’ve knit a sweater between my knocking knees, I was shaking so much. But the desire to soar triumphed over attachment t...
13 comments
Read more