The Handless Maiden & The Indigo Gown

(Breast Health Experience From a Mythopoetic Perspective)

I was here already last week. Parking B, elevator, 6th floor, waiting room, changing room: shirt and bra off, gown open in the front. It was my first mammogram ever. In and out, easy.

The gown was indigo, dark blue, 100% cotton, and fit perfectly. My favorite color: Indigo, the color of depth.

But "in and out, easy" got a second call. And I am here for another mammogram. This time, I have to wait afterward while the images are examined right away. I am in a different room: more spacious, with big windows facing the park. It feels like an upgrade. I watch people come out of their cars in the parking lot below, and I wonder if they are here for themselves or to visit someone. 

There are now four of us waiting: different ages, different ethnicities, different backgrounds. A thread, solid and invisible, connects us to each other. And we all wear that same gown. Somehow, it fits each of us despite all our differences in age and shape and stories. Indigo - a call for depth. I am stepping into a new circle, a new community of people I belong to without ever wanting to be in it. I think of all the women who came here before, in this waiting room, with all the fears and questions. I want to hug them all. 

And there, the familiar muffled sound: there is a story nearby.

I feel her coming, approaching me slowly with her arms full.

But the nurse calls my name. I step outside the door, and she says, "we need to do an ultrasound. Just wait here. Someone will come for you." My brain pauses, but my lips are moving, and I hear myself say, from a place out of reach: "does this mean...?" "Oh no!" she exclaims, too loud and too fast. "We just want to check."

A little while later, I am called into the dark space of the ultrasound room. It takes a while. It is quiet. The nurse leaves, I am by myself again.

Now. 

Now the story explodes, like a runner out of breath arriving first at the finish line, relieved. She spills all her gifts at my feet. Baskets and boxes pile up on the grey linoleum floor.

What is behind your house? she asks.

My heart races, my soul is fed: at last, one clear thing. I know that story: The Handless Maiden.

Once upon a time, there was a starving family. In the woods, the father strikes a deal with a shadow figure who promises endless bounty and treasures in exchange for whatever is behind the man's house at that exact moment.

"Of course!" says the father. It is such an easy transaction. The only thing that stands behind his house is an old apple tree.

He comes back home so happy and full of hope, and asks his wife where their daughter is. "As usual," she answers, "she is on the swing under the apple tree, behind the house."

It is a story of initiation, of a maiden who draws circles of protection around herself, of the loss of her hands and with it the loss of her dreams. Until she grows her hands back.

A knock on the door pulls me out of the woods and brings me back to the hospital room. Three people come in. Another upgrade. They talk to me with a smile and a compassionate look in their eyes. They are careful with their language. They have a peculiar combination of caring and being distant, repeating words for the thousandth time in their career, knowing what could be next. The room is flooded with caution.

"Here are the names of breast surgeons. You will make an appointment with one of them. Schedule a biopsy. We just want to check", they say.

I wonder who is "we".

Until I see it: the father, the shadow figure, the daughter.

A bargain is struck.

What is behind your house?

I am into the woods again, sensing the rich leaf decay under my bare feet, not knowing yet if I will lose my hands or another part of my body, or a part of my heart.

Wrapped in Indigo, I am moving toward depth.

The daughter stands behind the house. The shadow figure comes to take her, but she draws a chalk circle around her body, and he can not enter.

Too clean.

Too pure.

Too much grounded in her own sense of self.

He leaves. And comes back. Again, she draws a circle around herself. She draws a circle with

white chalk

golden Ginkgo leaves,

snake skin,

white little pebbles,

the braided hair of my daughters,

tears of her great-grandmother.

He can't take it. He can't take her.

He comes back a third time and orders the father to cut the young maiden's hands. He needs her to be desperate and filthy. "Do it", she says to the loving man who involuntarily sacrificed her. She knows there is no going back. She knows there is only one way through initiation.

She becomes the Handless Maiden on that Autumn afternoon. The air is fresh, and the sun shines like a plump baby who has just been fed. The blue jay calls from the apple tree. The tears flow from her eyes and wash her dress, hair, bloody wrists, and muddy feet.

She becomes clean again.

The shadow figure leaves. And does not return.

I am in bed. There are threads of fire weaving through my right breast. My heart is bruised. I spent the morning at the breast center for a long and grueling surgical biopsy. My bedroom is dark, the faint sound of my husband and daughters' voices from downstairs tethers me to another aspect of my reality.

The Handless Maiden appears and sits on my bed. She looks at me and says, "Come. It's time to go to the woods". I follow her. The air smells of earth, and the dappled light coming through the branches feels like silk on my skin. She shows me the absence that lives where her hands used to be, and she asks me to show her my breast. I lift my shirt. Some dried blood around my right nipple, and two holes. They are big, and they are small; it depends on what you have been through before in your own body.

As we walk, the forest floor disappears, replaced by the grey-and-blue-striped carpet of the breast center. The Handless Maiden pushes the door open to the now-empty biopsy room. She and I stand silently for a while, and then I watch her draw a circle around the biopsy table. She smiles.

We walk in the corridor between the waiting room and the nurses' desks. I find a piece of smooth chalk in my pocket and draw a circle on the floor for my friend Jules. And another one for Angelica. One for Michèle, one for Flori, Robin, and Susan. Annie, Erica, Lee, Lauren, Terrie, Shana, Stacey... the Handless Maiden joins me - there are so many circles to draw. We cover the floor and walls between mammogram rooms and ultrasound machines.

I feel all these women: the ones who are waiting and do not know yet. The ones who know, the ones who are alive, the ones who are dead, the ones who are in-between.

I sense them in my bones: I feel the frustration and hopelessness of going again and again to the hospital for radiation. I sense the abysmal emptiness of removed breasts. The relief. And the loneliness. The fear in their children, the tears of their partners. I feel the joy of those ending their treatment and having all the space of the world in their heart to keep living.

The Handless Maiden and I take the elevator down to the first floor, to the little round table near the large window where I sat and cried after the biopsy. She draws a circle around it: bright neon pink. Trees and bushes start to grow everywhere around that table because we all have roots in the places where we've been vulnerable.

Then we walk to the parking, where I cried again. We draw multiple circles for everyone who has sobbed there before me, and those who will after me. We make a rainbow of circles that takes over the three levels of the parking garage. It is glorious. You should see it. You should come and kneel on the concrete, and look very close, to understand the secret of the Handless Maiden:

Each circle is made of tiny words.

They have gone around and around since once upon a time. From the apple tree to the woods and the castle, from the biopsy table and the waiting rooms to the parking lot. Three phrases looping into one endless mantra. They keep circling. They are made of love. They are made of gold. They are made of the voices of those who have walked this path before and say to me, to you, to all of us:

I see you.

I hear you.

I love you.

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Find the story of the Handless Maiden in the wonderful book Smokehole by Martin Shaw at Cista Mystica Press.

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Other posts in the Indigo Series:

Indigo

Mountains of Blue