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Monster Woman

How I got here.

By Tinka Boudit She/HerPublished 2 years ago 9 min read
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Unsplash Image - Kiahna Mollette

12/1/2021

I wrote about being a lemon, giving away pieces of myself, and screaming into the void. Bette On It: Weird Adolescence is a highly-fictionalized story inspired by distant memories of my teenage years. All of these pieces were supposed to be ways to share my feelings about how I got to be a 35 year old woman who identifies as a scarred, monster, loved, lonely, and hopeful. Anyone listening?

*crickets*

Nope, at least no one tells me so. I write for myself. You know that Tinka. You write for yourself and you have to remind yourself again and again.

Scarred.

Today, I had my final follow-up doctor's appointment with my surgeon. The surgeon who performed my total hysterectomy this past spring and took out a cyst the size of a potato two and a half weeks ago. She mentioned the amount of scar tissue in my abdomen from the last surgery; she took responsibility for it. I somehow don't think it's her fault. This is the NINTH surgery I have had since June 2020. The one I had two weeks ago was my sixth(?) one on my abdomen.

My stomach is not the only thing scarred. Surgery #2 was a preventative double mastectomy. Good-bye Double-D cup breasts and nipples. My plastic surgeon butchered me. I have bumpy, scar-tissue breasts. No nipple tattoos could make them look remotely normal. This is not my first run in with scars. I had my appendix out when I was a teenager, leaving three scars on my stomach, including one right on my belly button. That was when I said good-bye to any hope of a belly button piercing.

When I was young, I played hard: scrapes, bruises, burns, cuts. I have so many scars. I decided a long time ago that scars were the world's way of trying to take you down, and failing. They are nature's tattoos. I'm a survivor, a warrior.

But the worst scars are the ones that are on the ones on the inside. I'm a survivor. I am a monster.

Monster.

There were days during my surgical recovery in 2020 when I couldn't look myself in the mirror. My beautiful breasts were gone. My stomach had been hacked and sewn three times. But this was the first time I ever saw on the outside what I thought other people saw on me.

I consider myself lucky. I marched to the beat of my own drum at a young age. I wore whatever clothes I liked. I didn't adhere to most mainstream/cliche fashion trends in my teen years. I wore hand-me-downs from my sisters into my 20s. That is not to say I didn't actively try to be different. I tried to be me. As a child of the 90s, as a Millennial, I was encouraged that I could do and be anything. (I did NOT get participation trophies, thank God.) I was a free spirit, an old soul, sensitive, a terrible student, a mostly-sensible child of Boomer parents. The point being: I was different and bullied and excluded a lot.

In middle school, my 'friends' would intentionally do things to gross me out to the point of vomiting and crying. When I would call one of them to hang out and a bunch of them were already together, they would intentionally not let me join them, even though I was a bike ride away. Or they would intentionally ride their bikes by my house. You might read this and say, "Those were not your friends if they did that to you." When you're in middle school and 80% of the time things are good and 20% of the time things are terrible, you look back and remember things in a different way. I know there are undeveloped brains, hormones, and craving the attention of others, even if it's in a terrible way. I was their monster.

When I got to high school, the bullying dropped a lot. By that time, I learned to absorb the teasing and how that deflates a bully. I had grown sharper. But this monster still wanted love and attention. I was still a free spirit, an old soul, and had crazy clothing choices...not a great combination at 15.

Once in a while, some people saw me, cared, and became friends. And then there were the rare ones: boys. I never went through a 'cootie' phase as a child. I always liked boys as a kid. I only had one serious boyfriend in high school, and we didn't go to the same school, which is why it worked for us. I didn't exactly date much otherwise. There were glimmers in those years. But even in those glimmers, things weren't great. I was too weird. I was too much. I was so sexually frustrated and repressed by the time I graduated, if I hadn't been armed with such good reproductive health knowledge, I could have done some really stupid stuff.

You always hear that college is better. Those first few months of college were like middle school, except I lived with people who didn't like me. They kicked me out. They lived with a monster.

Then my next home in college was better: The Red Head Shed. We were all redheads. (Eventually becoming The Red Head Shed featuring Julie the blonde.) We were like-minded monsters. We laughed and cried together. I met 'Noah' and fell in love with him at that time. The monster stops being a monster when everyone around you has similar fur, eating, and mating habits. The monster becomes loved.

Loved.

I met Mr. Noah Boudit April 22, 2005. Seven months later he proposed. Eleven months after that, we were married. I was 20 years old. People thought we were crazy or too young. As of writing this, we have been married for 15 years. A big part of our success as a couple, is that he sees the scarred monster, and he loves her, because he is his own sexy beast. We compliment each other. We grew together through our 20s. We learned to be broke, compromise, share, enjoy, and love as a team. At the same time, we are very much separate entities. We have different interests, hobbies, and friends outside our shared interests.

Through the last two years of COVID, finding out I was a BRCA1 gene carrier, and all the medical issues that followed the prognosis, Noah is the best partner I could ask for. I was scared, anxious, depressed, and he was right there. He came with me to doctor's appointments. He nursed me. He pushed me to recover. And this is all during COVID; we had no one else but each other. I love him more than I ever could imagine. He sees the monster scars on the outside now and still finds me as desirable as he did when we were 19. I will never be done kissing him. My darling love. After a year and a half of social distancing and isolation, I became lonely. Remember those outside interests? Kinda hard to have those when your bedridden for 16 weeks, working from home, and everything in the world is telling you: don't go see people. Loneliness is a cruel shadow that has returned.

Loneliness.

March 2021. Social distancing is still in place. It's been six months since my last abdominal procedure. My doctor's have deemed me ready for my hysterectomy. I'm in for a two week wait before the procedure. I hate this time. The lead up days before surgery are the worst. I'm the most anxious and upset. I can't logic and science my way out of it. The fear outweighs the science.

Then came the dream. Most dreams are fleeting, unimportant, and don't mean much. But sometimes a dream comes to me and it means something. A few times in the past, it was part of a story. This was one of those times. I started writing the scene I dreamed of and as I came to the end of it, I realized it was part of a much bigger story. That story became my obsession. That obsession was Bette On It: Weird Adolescence. Bette Wheelan became the fictionalized, imagined, better version of my own teenage experience. For 11 weeks I delved into this story and character.

This story about adolescent years required research. Time to dig through old yearbooks, photos, albums, and scariest of all...contacting old friends. It had been 17 years since graduation. Researching old memories only goes so far in my own head, I had to ask other people. Was it really how I remember? Turns out, I had a better memory than lots of other people. All that NOT partying did my brain a lot of favors. I connected with people who were not close friends in school but are very good friends now. We are all still spread out across the state, but this was a salve on the old scars. This was a treatment for loneliness. I specifically say treatment, not cure. Once I got a taste for old friendships, my Covid shots, and the book finished in mid-May, I was hungry for more. It had been a year and a half of lockdown, pain, and suffering. I was ready for spring, in more ways than one.

In spring and summer time, people are pretty receptive to getting together, especially after getting their vaccinations. It was an incredible summer and fall. And then everything dropped off. It was as if as soon as it got cold, everyone disappeared. And then, another surgery, #9. Loneliness returned. Now I've returned to work. Shortly after starting to write this, I found out an old friend passed away. Over the 24 hours it took to write this, I've seen dozens of people post their love and condolences for the deceased and their family. It's a reminder why I have been so actively reaching out to people. This friend was one of the people I reached out to when I was writing in spring. That person responded. It had been 12 years since we had spoken aside from facebook comments and basic birthday wishes. Death is not something I deal with well. I don't know anyone who does. But it always leaves me with something: hope. Hope that people will feel shaken enough in their own lives to reach out, make a change, do better, be grateful. I hope.

Hope.

I've gone through a journey that has been...interesting. Here in Minnesota, we say. "Interesting is code for I don't like it." But my journey wasn't awful. I've had problems like everyone else. I came to Vocal to share them. I came to reach out to people and hopefully someone reads my words and thinks: she understood, that helped. My heart is open. My hands are open. I have hope. This scarred, loved, lonely monster has hope.

Contact Tinka on Facebook I hope you do.

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About the Creator

Tinka Boudit She/Her

contact on FB & IG

linktr.ee/tinkaboudit

The Soundtrack BOI: WA

FP

Bette On It: Puddle, Desks, Door, Gym, Condoms, Couch, Dancers, Graduate.

Purveyor of Metaphorical Hyperbole, Boundless, Ridiculous, Amazing...and Humble.

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