Tucked in a corner in my kitchen, between my microwave and cutting board, is a mosaic-style clay pot. That pot has moved around in my office and in multiple spots in my home. If you are with me long enough to have a meal, you just might notice something familiar. The pattern in the mosaic pot, is the same one you see on your lunch plate.

The dinnerware I most frequently use is a set I purchased 30ish years ago, when I had small children at home. I lived in an abusive environment then, where almost every decision was scrutinized and criticized. So, when I saw this set of china and loved it, it was a very big step for me to just buy it. I did buy it and I did pay the price for that decision, but I’ve always loved those dishes because they represent a time when I refused to shrink.

Over the years, several of the bowls have been broken through use, but since the set was so meaningful to me, you can imagine how I felt when the very first one slipped out of a child’s hands and crashed on the floor. You know the feeling…the gut clench, deep breath, and the mix of emotions, because you’re upset but also know the child didn’t mean to drop the bowl and you don’t want to wound their little hearts.

I hugged my son, told him it was okay, then picked up the pieces gently. Yes, to keep from being cut, but also because they felt sacred. I didn’t throw the pieces away that day…not because I had a plan, but because I “just couldn’t” at that moment. I gathered the pieces into a plastic bag and kept them for several years.

What I didn’t know at the time, was that this pretty bowl with the blue design, would teach me something about brokenness…and transformation.

Years later, after I had discovered that Inflammatory Breast Cancer had made a home in my body, I remembered that bowl and that pot. Just like I didn’t plan or wish for the bowl to break, I didn’t plan or wish for IBC. I didn’t expect either the break or the cancer, and likely neither did you. And just like we didn’t expect the diagnosis, we didn’t expect the impact of chemo, radiation, amputation, scars, neuropathy, heightened anxiety and fatigue. But here we are.

We were living our normal lives…and everything changed the instant we were told we had Inflammatory Breast Cancer.

The “break” wasn’t our fault. It wasn’t failure on anyone’s part. It was an extremely difficult change in life course that we did not invite, and yet…

A few years after I gathered those broken pieces, a friend was teaching a craft class…she was teaching how to create mosaics from broken china, and I signed up.

I remember there being a big mess in that room. Newspapers all over the floor, the sound rubber mallets breaking pieces of china, porcelain dust…basically a lot of carnage. It looked like a mess…just like I later felt when I was trying to manage keeping up with medical appointments, keeping up with scan and blood results, crying over the hair on my pillow, watching my husband strip my drains, gently patting Jean’s cream on my burned chest…I was a real, hot mess…and it felt like carnage.

During the class, as I worked to create the pot, the shards and pieces from my bowl felt sharp in places and needed to be handled gently to protect my hands…just like my body felt sharp and unfamiliar during those first few years following diagnosis. I remember standing in front of my mirror, looking at my body that had been changed in a way that looked violent, and trying to find myself in that new and wounded – unrecognizable – body.

But the magical meaning I see in both my broken body and my broken bowl is that…

…broken does not mean discarded.

And even more deeply felt…I discovered that broken can be a new kind of beauty.

This set of dinnerware was valuable to me when I purchased it because it symbolized for me, a moment when I leaned into my own strength and made a decision for myself. I owned a piece of my future.

Then the break happened. The break was accidental. It was a child being a child. But the redesign became intentional.

Just like we didn’t choose cancer…but have full right and ability to decide how we will respond.

We can decide how we choose to carry ourselves through our journey. We can decide who we will allow in our circle of trust. Deciding how we can speak to our changed and wounded body is up to us. We get to decide how we will dress, who we will tell, and how we will grieve. It all becomes a part of the mosaic that is our life.

During the mosaic class, I also had the right to decide how I wanted the pot to look. I could decide which pieces to reshape, which wouldn’t fit, how to place them, what I wanted the design to be…just like I eventually was able to make those same decisions as I moved forward in my cancer experience.

The breaking of my bowl was an accident, but the beauty was a decision.

And that is us…

The breaking of our bodies with IBC was

completely unexpected and definitely not planned…

but the decision of how to move forward with beauty

is ours to make.

You can see the pot in the photo with this article, which means you can see the broken pieces of pottery and the grout lines. The grout lines remind me a bit of my scars from the mastectomy and the port. There is nothing symmetrical about the design, and nothing symmetrical about my body now! And the roughness of the grout reminds me of the changes in my tissue following radiation.

And yet…yet…even with the brokenness, the lack of symmetry, the loss of original use…the pot is quite beautiful. It makes me smile when I see it and I think it is strong and it is useful…just in a different way.

You’ve seen the finished product now. There is nothing symmetrical about that pot.

There is nothing symmetrical about my body now, either.

The grout lines are visible. The edges are imperfect. The original bowl can no longer hold soup…or oatmeal…or salad. My body no longer looks the way it once did. There are scars where smooth skin used to be. There are places that feel tight, numb, or unfamiliar, and a lot of it doesn’t fit society’s definition of beauty.

And yet.

The pot is beautiful…not because it is flawless, but because it tells the truth about what it has survived, and it is useful in a way it never could be before.

And it is the same for us. For you. For me.

Inflammatory breast cancer altered our bodies without permission. It changed our outlines. It rewrote our expectations. It asked more of us than we ever would have volunteered to give.

But it did not take away our ability to choose.

We get to decide whether we will see only what was lost…or whether we will also honor what was forged in us…strength, depth, compassion, that fierce clarity about what matters now, even a tenderness toward our own scars…a recognition of the incalculable value of time.

Beauty, after IBC, may not look like symmetry.

It may look like courage.

It may look like a woman standing in her altered body and saying, “This is still me.”

It may look like living fully in a body that carries evidence of survival.

Some days I believe this easily.

Some days I still greatly and sadly miss the body I had.

But it empowers me to remember, that although the breaking was not my choice…

… the way I remake and carry my pieces forward — with dignity, with softness, with intention…that is mine, and my sweet sister, it is yours.

And like my mosaic pot, we are not less because we were broken.

We are layered.

We are intentional.

We are one of a kind.

And there is a kind of beauty in that which could never have existed without the break.