There was a time when you couldn’t escape the earnest, verging-on-falsettoness of Five for Fighting’s “Superman.” It’s the kind of song you don’t realize has stopped littering the airwaves until you hear it again years later.

When I came across it this morning, I instantly thought of my mother-in-law (we’ll call her that despite the fact that, to her horror, we have not yet managed to properly marry). I remember her being quite taken by the song at one point, and trying to figure out who sang it so she could track it down.

But that’s really a thinly veiled excuse to talk about her. She’s having a suspicious lump removed from her breast today, and her world (and ours) is either about to turn completely upside down, or not. It’s a strange sort of limbo to be in, the normalcy and sunshine of a late-June day overshadowed by life’s greatest uncertainty.

Beyond the empathy and the extra hugs for my fella, I find that I’ve been regarding my own breasts differently these last few days. This form of illness seems particularly unfair to women, that it should strike this body part so tied in with self-identity, whether as object of lust or object of fashion or object of hungry baby’s needs. And that it should strike right there, in your face, inescapable.

Needless to say, I hope the news today is good news. It might not even come today. But if I were prone to prayer, I would pray that when it comes, it be what we all want to hear.

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