When I was a little girl, I'd lie on my back and kick my scrawny legs up in the air. My feet would dangle, a summer sandal slipping off, maybe it was purple, and with my freckles I would find pictures in my skin. My grandmother would lie with me on her lawn, shoulder to shoulder, in one of her denim outfits and we'd look into the sky for pictures we could claim as our own. I saw castles, a pair of shoes once, while she traced outlines of dragons, motorboats and told me about the time my mother asked for go-go boots on her birthday. For me, searching for pictures across the sky was like looking for the pictures in my skin. Taking an inventory at a young age, I found a distinguished looking freckle on the backside of my right knee; a perfectly symmetrical triangle of these dark spots on my lower back, which I attributed to an alien invasion; and a few that took up an undesired residence across my face. These marks are proof that I am my mother's daughter.

My mother grew up in a military family, always moving from base to base. The Navy transferred my grandparents, my mother and my two uncles between Hawaii, Guam, Japan, and a fistful of other balmy landscapes. When I was about seven, my parents took me to Hawaii where I learned how to pull a tail off of a gecko and ride the waves on a boogie board. There's an incriminating home video of me accidentally poking my eye in the middle of the rain forest while trying to show off. Sitting on the beaches with my mother, I often saw the spray of freckles which covered her shoulders, her back, and even the far tips of her toes. I admired these tiny spots of color because they gave her body character where I had none. My mother's lean body resembled an adolescent boy's because she never seemed to get bigger than a size six. She has always been skinny, always the picture of health.

My mother often allowed her nakedness to be seen. She's never been a prude like I am. I'd sit on the warm linoleum floor of the bathroom and look for the differences in our bodies while I brushed my teeth, while she blow-dried her hair into a fluff that was popular in the early nineties. In the dressing room of Jay Jacobs, my mother would curse her petite breasts and ask me to find her the same outfit in a smaller size. Sometimes I'd stare down at my own two breasts that looked more like blemishes at the time and wonder why these weighted cones of skin were so important to my mom. In middle school I began developing and skipped through thirteen bra sizes before I graduated high school. My mother would tease me that the cups I filled were as big as my head, and I would watch her flinch when I shot back that at least I could fill one. My mother has always wanted a bigger bust line, and I have always wanted to look more like my mom. A small, brownish spot on the skin, freckles often turn darker or increase in number depending upon exposure to the sun. Usually slightly raised and dark-pigmented, a mole is a small congenital growth on the human skin.

Not until my last semester of college did I realize the freckles painted across my mother's back were not freckles at all. The freckles were moles, and the moles, she told me one night as I gripped the edge of my dirty, tiled kitchen counter, were cancerous. More precisely, melanoma, she had said. I cried, holding the hot telephone as she told me the news. My eyes fell across the countertop, to the crumbs of a leftover dinner, and into a stainless steel sink full of dishes that my boyfriend would end up washing. The woman who gave birth to me, who listened to me play the piano, practice my choir songs, dance the same routine sixty-two times with tap shoes, and feel the vibrations of my jump roping on the back deck, was sick. I couldn't decide what words of mine would make it better, which paragraphs I might write to make it go away, so after a few long pauses, we said our "goodbye's" and our "I-love-you's" until the line went dead. I thought about my father and asked myself if it was my responsibility to tell him. I looked through my fuzzy tears for the door, and told my boyfriend that I would be back. I walked into the cold, past the rows of dingy homes, in the middle of Fairview, shivering and contemplating how this diagnosis would affect the only family I had.

Melanoma is a malignant tumor of melanocytes. Melonocytes predominantly occur in the skin, but can be found elsewhere. Melanoma is the most lethal form of skin cancer. Also referred to as Melanoblastoma, Melanocarcinoma, and Melanotic carcinoma.

My nipples stand erect as I trace the large square-ish freckle on my right breast while looking at my cold body in the full length mirror. The size of a pencil eraser, the freckle's darkness scares me. Is this freckle going to change my world? Would this part of my breast that I keep hidden from boyfriends and doctors be for me what it was for my mother? Why should it make any difference now that I have this news I asked myself. After all, it was my body and she had always told me that I looked more like my father anyhow. I'd shake these cruel thoughts away every time I came out of the shower, every time my boyfriend made love to me. It was my body, not hers. We don't even resemble the same shapes, I told myself. It was she who was sick, not me. Why should my freckles, my breasts, my body, have to suffer?

I arrived late to my mother's appointment with Dr. Sarah, and then I sat there in a cramped waiting room for over an hour, on an over-plush sofa, with my mother's boyfriend, who ate the almonds I'd had in my book bag for the last three weeks. I thought they tasted like perfume and pencils. When the doctor called us in, we asked our questions, made a few forced jokes at my mother's expense, and looked the other way when we thought she would cry. Sarah told us that my mom would have surgery the following day. Why so soon I had asked. The doctor briefly nodded her head and began to describe the procedure my mother would endure and the effects we should expect after. Walking a prescription for pain relievers down to the hospital pharmacy, I thought about my freckles, and wondered if any of them were hiding the same secrets my mothers were. The next day my mother would have some of the most defining features of her body removed, and as I gave the pharmacy technician my mother's birth date and insurance card, I tried to shrug it off.

Epidemiologic studies from Australia suggest that exposure to ultraviolet radiation is one of the major contributors to the development of melanoma.

My grandfather looked guilty when I found him sitting beside my grandmother in the operation waiting room. Was he blaming himself? Was he thinking about his son, and making a connection between my uncle's Hodgkin's disease and my mother's Melanoma. Did my grandfather see my mother as a child, playing out in the hot sun, barefoot and blonde? Did he blame the Navy for introducing these devastations to his only children? My gaze shifted toward my grandmother, and I wondered if she blamed herself for neglecting to slather more sunscreen across her toddlers' chubby arms, for allowing my mother to stray from the safety of the umbrella suspended in the sand, for following my grandfather from place to place. I thought about my guilt. I let it rise, and sink again, much like the contents in my stomach, and wished that I hadn't been so eager to lie on the rooftop with my mother when I was a teenager, oiled and laughing. Maybe I shouldn't have asked my mother to stay on the beach that extra hour when we were last in Maui. I let my guilt fall again and went to order Americanos for my grandparents. They like their coffee stiff, my mother likes hers sweet.

When I was in elementary school, my parents spent a lot of time training at the gym and eating healthy. Between weightlifting and step-aerobics, my mother began tanning. The local Tub N' Tan smelled like coconut and the Mexican wicker chairs provided comfort when my mom disappeared inside the mouth of ultraviolet bulbs. She would wear plastic glasses with green lenses and the veins on her body looked darker under the bright light. Every time my mother or father went tanning, I would enter them in the contest box on the front counter. I never knew what the prize was until they actually won. My mother smiled and my dad tussled my hair when they won a free week of tanning.

Following a visual examination and a dermatoscopic exam (an instrument that illuminates a mole, revealing its underlying pigment and vascular network structure), the doctor may biopsy the suspicious mole. If it is malignant, the mole and the area around the mole should be excised. A punch biopsy, where a surgical punch is used to remove a plug of skin down to the subcutaneous layer from a portion of a large suspicious lesion, or to completely remove a smaller lesion, can be done. An excisional biopsy can be performed, where the suspect lesion is totally removed by cutting an ellipse of the tissue around it. Complete surgical excision with adequate margins and assessment for the presence of detectable metastatic disease is necessary.

Five or six hours after her surgery began; Sarah came out to tell our family that the first portion of her surgery was over, but they now had to turn my mother over to remove the remainder of the lesions which speckled her body. Later, my mother, in her time of need, asked for her boyfriend before she asked for me. I tried really hard not to be angry at her, but I was. I reminded myself that she had a lot of drugs in her system. I picked up the corded phone in the lobby and dialed the nurse's desk for what must have been the fifth time that hour.

"This is Andrea's daughter, is she asking for me yet?" I breathed into the telephone nervously and shifted from foot to foot. I was wearing my caramel colored Mary Jane's that Ezra had given me for my birthday last year. Only two pairs of shoes to choose from, I thought. I needed to buy another pair.

"No, honey, she hasn't. We'll beep you when she does," the nurse said and I heard the line hum to a click.

I was led into the post-operative recovery room by a nurse with turquoise scrubs a little after nine thirty that night. I kept thinking about the way my mother's turquoise bracelet looked while she stood in the middle of the street in Sedona, Arizona. It had been one of the last trips we had taken together, as a family, before my parents were divorced. I fingered the moonstone necklace I was wearing and thought about Sedona, the white German Shepard I watched die on the floor of the veterinary office when my parents couldn't decide who should care for the aging dog. I thought about my father. He should be here. I remember the nurse pushing open rectangular slabs of silver into a bright, curtained room where my mother's pain became clear. What I saw shook me.

Under the bright lights, my mother's eyes looked weak, empty of their color, and resembled nothing I saw in the strong woman I had eaten dinner with the night before. She had ordered a cream soda and ate from the Moose's Tooth pizza we shared. Her depleted body looked like it needed a borrowed breath. The hospital gown wore limp against her small frame. She didn't open her eyes to smile or make a joke like I expected her to. Why wasn't she smiling and laughing? Why couldn't I see the way two of her front teeth touched each other in a slant? At that moment, if I could have given her my freckles, I would have hole-punched them off my body and taped them to her ashy skin. She ate ice chips from my shaky spoon and swallowed her pain with difficulty. I had always been the sick one. Why wasn't I in this bed I asked myself? This should be me.

It took two hours to get her upstairs into a dark hospital room and another forty minutes to say goodbye. I didn't cry until after I heard my boyfriend's deep breathing as he slept next to me. By the time my head hit the pillow, I couldn't even begin to think about the twenty-four credits of college I had skipped to wait on my mother. The number seemed so small when I compared it to the number of lesions Sarah cut out of my mom that day. Over forty she had said.

Stitches are used to re-join lacerations, surgical cuts, and other deep wounds in the human skin. Depending on the severity and type of stitch, a scar, which is a trace and lasting effect of such a procedure, can become present within the skin.

Recently, I watched my mother pull her shirt above her waist line and look at her reflection in the oval mirror on the wall of my tiny kitchen. Stitches out, wounds healed, the scars raised bumps across my mother's abdomen, almost like a painting might across a beige canvas. She caught me looking at her, and made some off-colored comment. I think she said, "So much for wearing a bikini." Maybe she said something else. I shook her comment off my shoulders like I might shake water off my body coming out of the shower. I should have told her what those scars should represent for her, and what they mean to me. In a later decade, instead of playing connect the dots across her beauty marks, her grandchildren can play connect the dots with her scars like my grandmother and I traced clouds in the sky. What my mother has in addition to her forgotten moles and freckles is proof that she survived this massive devastation to her body. What my mother has to complement her beauty marks is a story of survival. What I have, is a square freckle on my right breast which might one day determine the fate of my own story.