I grew up in a series of houses in which nothing matched. We had an odd assortment of dishes and glasses, towels whose colors spanned the rainbow and whose years of service varied widely, and furniture that was either given to us or was purchased a piece at a time as needed. It’s not that we didn’t have enough money; we were comfortably middle class. My thrifty New England parents just didn’t believe in replacing appliances that worked, plates and towels that remained whole, or functional couches with worn spots.

In response to this upbringing, I positively adore matching things. I’m a little obsessed.

In the 80s I had a pair of slouch socks to match every outfit. I’m incapable of wearing two different shades of black together. All of my dishware is (relatively inexpensive) cobalt blue Fiestaware–three sizes of plates, six different shapes of bowls, two types of mugs, and lots of serving dishes. I fully recognize both the financial privilege the enables me to worry about something as inconsequential as color and the essential silliness of this endeavor. But neither of those prevent me from eagerly perusing the online catalogues to see how I can add to my collection.

I once brought a pillow sham from a new set of bedding to the paint store so they could use a computer to precisely match the paint for our bedroom. When Glenn and I  selected furniture for our living room, an interior designer at the furniture store responded to my preliminary choice of fabric colors with a dismayed, “But we don’t want it to look too matchy-matchy!” When a favored fiction author releases a book in hardcover for the first time, I am dismayed that the new book will not match the others in my paperback collection.

I’ve got it bad.

For sure, the longing for things to match is one expression of my chronic perfectionism. Making sets of personal and household items match is one way of imposing order in my little universe.

So it isn’t easy to have mismatched legs. Of course, there are many worse struggles with being an amputee (like blisters in my groin), and at least one really good thing (I’m not dying of a staph infection in my dilapidated leg). But the mismatch still bothers me.

Given my lust for matched sets, you’d probably assume that I requested foam covering for my prosthetic leg so that it would come as close as possible to matching the shape and color of my biological leg. But I didn’t. While foam is straightforward for below-the-knee amputees, it is far more complicated with above-the-knee prostheses that use a computerized knee that must be charged daily. The finished effect approximates “normal” only when providing shape under long pants.

But even if prosthetic foam could be made to look more realistic for my prosthesis, it still wouldn’t match my bio-leg. It would be pretending to be flesh, masking its true biotechnological nature with an imperfect facsimile.

This inability to have my legs match in appearance and in function gets me where I’m vulnerable, in the part of me that longs to be perfect or at least normal. Perfectly normal.

Even after decades of late effects of cancer treatment, part of me wants to go back to who I was before the cancer, to that version of me where my limbs matched. She is irrevocably gone, of course. And perhaps more significantly, she never felt as though everything in her life matched either, even when she wasn’t sick and had all her limbs.

One of the most misleading things that well meaning folks say to people when their cancer treatment ends is some variation on “now you can go back to normal,” as though you could possibly re-inhabit the point of view of your pre-cancer self. Or “now you can  go live your life,” as though cancer treatment were some sort of “time-out” from living instead of a visceral, intense, frightening period in which you were more aware of living than ever before.

For good and for bad, I can’t ever go back to having a matched set of legs. Health communication scholar Dr. Lynn Harter writes eloquently about how survivors imagine “new normals” for ourselves to inhabit after a life-threatening illness, because there is no going backwards in our life stories, only forward.

My new normal as a long-term survivor allows for much joy, love, and productivity, while necessarily making room for blisters, medical appointments, and sadness. My new normal is always changing as I continue to imagine possibilities for my life with two dissimilar legs, each of which I am grateful to have. Most days I concentrate on imagining creative ways of living a new normal, rather than clinging to old ways that no longer fit me.

That said, the new possibilities for living will not extend to mismatched dishes.