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)