Too Scared to Fight Like a Girl

It's breast cancer awareness month. The pink ribbon is everywhere and the members of the Yahoo Motherboard are blogging about breast cancer.

I've seen breast cancer try to beat generations of women in my family. My mother. Two of her sisters. My grandmother. All were robbed of some or all of their breasts. All faced their mortality much too early, and came out fighting. All of them beat cancer.

Last night I read a post on Stacy's blog about the strength of women as they fight breast cancer. And it's true. We are strong. We do fight like girls.

• We march.
• We give.
• We spread clever Facebook campaigns.
• We are vigilant.
• And when the time comes for some of us to fight breast cancer, we rise to the challenge. Treatment continues to improve along with survival rates.

But even as I applaud all these strong women in my life for their courage and strength in fighting this horrible disease, I hide like a coward. I carry a kernel of fear inside me that flares up in the shower every morning, as I wonder if today will be the day that I first feel that foreign lump, if today will be the day to face my legacy of breast cancer. The fear flares up again when my daughters ask me when their breast will come, and all I can do is imagine their perfect bodies ravaged with puckered scars.

I should face my fear, be strong, learn whether I carry the BRCA gene, whether it was the cause of our family's bad luck. One blood test and I could lessen the anxiety and take steps to banish breast cancer from my life and better prepare my daughters for their legacy. I could. I should. But I don't.

I take the doctors' pamphlets, thank them for their advice, and walk out into the sunshine with the fear gnawing my gut. The time might come for me to be strong, to take the poisons, to lose my hair, and my breasts, and say my goodbyes just in case. But until that time, I'll continue to be weak and hide, too scared to consider my legacy, too scared to know, too scared to fight like a girl.