It’s been, rather oddly, an Angelina Jolie kind of week.

Strange, to have the not-so-private life of a Hollywood sex goddess actor/director take up so much of my time and headspace, especially since my Hollywood actor/director headspace is usually — and much more minimally — devoted to Robert Downey Jr., and you can make of the information whatever you will.

But since Jolie’s disclosure in the New York Times that she had a prophylactic double mastectomy (and breast reconstruction) in the wake of discovering she’s BRCA1 positive, I’m guilty as what seems to be the rest of the Western world of weighing in, at least slightly, on the implications of that news.

On Tuesday, my carefully orchestrated workday was derailed when CBC syndication tapped me to do a round of interviews on the subject — my mom was a BRCA1 carrier, and I was tested for the mutation and made a documentary about that process 2006.

Yesterday, I wrote a bit more about Jolie over at Today’s Parent (the personal):

I didn’t have to make the same decisions that Angelina Jolie and countless other women have had to make. I’m profoundly grateful for that. I don’t pretend to know anything more about Jolie’s decision-making process than what she has disclosed so eloquently in the New York Times — but I’ll speculate at least this much: She knows what it’s like to lose a mother. She’s seen up close what it means to have — and die from — cancer. She wants to see her children grow up.

Today, I have another post (the political), over at Ms. Magazine’s blog, in which I discuss two of Jolie’s body parts that aren’t her breasts:

What I haven’t seen, however, in my admittedly inexhaustive review of the reactions to Jolie’s disclosure, is much in the way of discussion about another surgery the actor/director alludes to: oophorectomy, or the (preventive) surgical removal of her ovaries. Jolie notes that she has a 50 percent chance of developing ovarian cancer. “I started with my breasts,” she says, “as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.”

It would seem that Jolie is planning to have her ovaries removed at some point, in a procedure that, while less medically complicated than her breast surgery, is—in my opinion at least—equally, if not more, significant.

And my question is this: In the event that Angelina Jolie has her ovaries (and likely her uterus) removed, will we care as much as we do about her breasts?

Oophorectomy, while not as readily “visible” as mastectomy, is a radical procedure, thrusting women into immediate surgical menopause. In addition to the obvious negation of fertility, the sudden and dramatic change in hormone levels can have several side effects, including changes to sex drive and function, metabolism, mood, bone density and muscle mass, and cognitive function. The surgery and its potential effects are a big deal—but we wouldn’t know that by the amount of ink and bandwidth devoted to it in relation to Jolie.

Please read, and let me know what you think. Wishing you all a weekend of good news.

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I dreamed on Sunday evening that I had mistakenly sent out two sets of e-mail invitations to Isaac’s sixth birthday party: one inviting a group of kids over from 11 AM to one, the other inviting a bunch of kids from one to 2:30 PM.

Of course, in my dream I had actually completely forgotten about both birthday parties until I arrived at my house (an entirely different house than my actual one, by the way: some kind of rambling Gothic mansion that we had just moved to, so why not throw a dream housewarming party at the same time as the dream birthday parties? What a totally great idea!) and found it populated with a dozen rangy children and their judgmental parents. I had nothing to feed any of them except for some raw pizza dough, and nothing to entertain them with, so they just bounced around the Gothic mansion as its rooms continued to unfold and expand like we were in some video game. At one point in the dream, I hid in the pantry. I kept trying to dream-text Rachel, asking her to please get home already and help me out, but of course I couldn’t make the keyboard work properly, or couldn’t finish typing a message before being waylaid by another crisis in miniature, another wave of tiny guests, and so of course she never got the message.

All of which is by way of saying that I am solo parenting this week.

I am pleased to report that things have gone much more smoothly than my subconscious may have led me to believe. In fact, it’s been fairly easy-going. Rachel left on Sunday and returns on Saturday and in between the two what with school and soccer and playdates and the like I’ve barely seen my children. And when I have, they’re nothing I can’t handle on my own — it’s the usual joys and bumps, the getting dinner on the table and cycling through laundry and reading. I’m even managing to relax a bit, to talk myself down from the OMG! SOLO! PARENTING! MODE! I can sometimes get into, wherein I feel that unless I have premade five lunches and neatly lined up five casserole dinners in the freezer and laid out all the clothes and baked fresh croissants for breakfast each morning THEN WE WILL ALL DIE of the JUST! ONE! MAMA! Like it’s some kind of disease, instead of actually just fine with a few more or different details to consider, a little less sleep.

Like it’s not something that millions of women (not to mention a sizable number of men) —and I salute you all — do every single day. Get over it, Goldberg.

“Do you miss me?” Rachel asked me from the phone in her hotel room this morning. “It doesn’t sound like you miss me.”

And it’s not that I don’t miss her, it’s just that doing this stuff on my own, fitting in my work around the extra days of early school pickups and soccer practice and dinner-making and bedtime routines (and, of course, Angelina Jolie — on Tuesday I did eight CBC syndicated interviews in a row, commenting on the BRCA1 genetic mutation and what it was like to get tested for it. Eight rounds, five minutes apart, of going through that story, like some kind of emotional boot camp.), means moving from one thing to the next in a way that demands that I focus only on the present moment.

“It’s not that I don’t miss you, exactly,” I told her. Is it just that there’s not much space to miss her, to account for what’s not here when there’s already so much here to account for.

Two more sleeps, and she’ll be home. And I will be happy to see her when she gets here.

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My mother died nine years ago today.

I’m not trying to be maudlin; that’s just how it is and what can you do about that? Some sentences are like that, especially when they push against the swelling wave of all the Mother’s Day messaging that starts rolling towards shore this time of year, crashing into me the second Sunday of each May and leaving me soaked in some unpalatable mixture of longing and resentment.

Each Mother’s Day, the fact that I myself am a mother, that Rowan and Isaac are going to bring home some kind of sweetly crafted double–Mother’s Day gifts, feels like an afterthought: that’s nice, dear, but where do I send my card?

Okay, that last sentence was maudlin.

But that first sentence: “My mother died nine years ago today.” It has two parts, and I am pondering the difficulties of both: the simple modifier-subject-verb of the first half and the descriptive clause (is that what we call that? I’m supposed to know those things, but today I’m not looking anything up. And is “modifier” correct?) of the second half. “Nine years ago” is just as unbelievable as the fact that she actually died — how is it that she’s been gone for nearly a quarter of my life? And yet, she shapes it, informs it, almost daily, and the memories and emotions are as clear now as they were then, unless I’m fooling myself into thinking otherwise. Am I?

That’s the most difficult thing about death — what I know today about the past nine years and what my mother doesn’t, can’t. Those two boys, of course, but all the tiny, daily things that make up a life, like what we’re having for dinner and that the roof is still leaking. I imagine daily phone calls in which we discuss these things; I imagine seeing her name pop up on the call display and sighing because I have things to do besides talk; I imagine picking up the phone anyway, every day. I console myself with the ways in which she does shape my life. I talked about it with a friend in Los Angeles last week, as she and I made up the guest bed in her home for me. “Really,” I kept protesting, “you don’t have to help. I can do this by myself.”

“Nah,” she said, stuffing a pillow into its case, “I can’t let go of the way my mother raised me.”

And we talked about that, the ways in which neither of us believe in ghosts but feel our mothers’ presence all around, live our lives according to (occasionally, or often, in defiance of) the way they would have, but always with them around us.

So she’s gone, has been for nine years now. But she’s here, too, so today, Sunday, every day, we’ll focus on that.

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I feel as though I’m neglecting this blog this week — probably the net result of my jaunt to LA (more on that anon, but the short version here is that it was fantastic, and not just because I made it to the reading(!), which was populated by a group of uniformly excellent writers). Yes, Los Angeles, and also the necessity of Writing All the Other Things. Including but not limited to my third draft, which has been quietly humming along. I have finished a really intense readthrough and am now attempting beginning the process of actually revising. As Yoda says, there is no try, there is only writing with a timer sitting next to you until it beeps. Or until your eyes bleed, whichever comes first.

Of course, this kind of work requires its own amount of healthy procrastination. Today, that involved clearing off the top of my wardrobe. Here is a photograph of all the long, pointy objects I found there, objects I have confiscated from small boys over the past few years and secreted way up high. They’re all back up there now — I’m no fool. Well, unless you count that part about trying to write writing a novel.

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Oh God, the sweetness of that picture just slays me every time. Look at those two — they get along as well today as they did then, all lovey-dovey and kisses, all the time.

Ahem.

Actually, when Rowan first met his baby brother, the morning after Isaac’s tumultuous arrival into the world, he said, “I take her downstairs. I read her a book.” And Rachel and I melted from All The Cute. That’s part of our family lore, which I discuss in this week’s post on Today’sParent.com.

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What do you call a group of dragons? A pride? A shrewdness, as in “a shrewdness of apes”? There’s a a battery of barracudas, a parliament of owls, an ostentation of peacocks, a quiver of cobras, a  zeal of zebras and — possibly my favourite — an exaltation of larks.

Perhaps I will call these the latest fancy of my eight-year-old, sitting for hours at the back desk with markers and lined paper, realizing visions in his head. “I draw them to calm down,” he told me. A calm of dragons? A meditation of dragons? An obsession of dragons? A magnet of dragons, who can stick by themselves to the fridge door now that we’ve run out of actual magnets? They all work.

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“This morning, apropos of nothing, Isaac went through his shirt drawer and pulled out everything pink and princess-y. ‘I don’t want these anymore,’ he said. ‘You can sell them now.’

“I looked down at the four size-four shirts arrayed on the hallway carpet. They’re too small for my nearly-six-year-old, stained and shabby in the way that much-loved little-kid clothing becomes, especially the stuff that we picked up, pre-loved, for a song at the thrift store. I’m not quite sure where he gets the idea that we sell his clothes when he’s done with them, but I love the fact that he’s still innocent enough to think that we can make some serious cash off his cast-off scraps of silkscreened cotton. Because financially, those shirts are pretty much a write-off.

“Emotionally, though, it’s a different story. …”

Read the rest on my post this week for TodaysParent.com.

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Second time’s the charm.

* * *

Look, I’m just going to write this post and fling it out there to the powers that be to do what they feel best with my karma.

Some of you may recall that day last July I spent holed up in Pearson airport, pacing the departures gates and watching the hours tick by until there was no way I was going to make my reading at Bluestockings Bookstore and Activist Center. I had been so excited, so optimistic. I’d written a cheery, optimistic, post about my excitement: my second reading at Bluestockings and how lucky was I to be part of an event launching Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort’s anthology Here Come the Brides: Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage.

I never made the reading. My flight was seven hours’ delayed, and I showed up, gutted, just as the last folding chair had been folded, the last few audience members straggling out.

But. Maybe there are things such as second chances, and if there are, I’m cautiously optimistic that I may get one. Here’s the deal: Here Come the Brides has been – obviously! — nominated for a 2013 Lambda Literary Award. There’s going to be a reading for West Coast nominees at the West Hollywood Public Library this coming Saturday, April 27, from 3 to 4:30 PM. And, through a series of fortunate coincidences, I’m going to be there, making up in some small way for my Bluestockings debacle by reading from my essay in the anthology.

So. Karma cooperating, I will fly in the day before and hopefully show up in plenty of time for what is, for me at least,  a long-overdue event. If any Angelenos (that’s what you’re called, right?) are reading this — come! It’s free! And say hi!

(Karma: cooperate. Or I’m putting you in a serious timeout.)

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Hey all – greetings from a perfect winter day in December, where we have 8 to 10 inches of snow and more on the way. No wonder the kids are resorting to body modification to amuse themselves indoors. Here’s my latest on TodaysParent.com.

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If you read these pages regularly, you are no doubt aware that

1. Rowan is highly obsessed with Pokémon, and that
2. I am highly obsessed with organization. And, further, that
3. I dislike playing Pokémon, particularly when I have to play against a winner-takes-all eight-year-old who quite literally stacks the decks against me. “Here,” he’ll say, tossing me some wimpy little deck full of crappy cards like Solosis or Sewaddle or Tynemo, “these are your cards.” Meanwhile, his deck is full of Lugia EXes and White Kyurams and Zekroms. And then he proceeds to annihilate me, all the while maintaining some kind of fantasy that he is a gifted player and not just a hustler. (My brother-in-law has a theory that all games with prepubescent boys are simply versions of, “Hey! Do you want to play ‘Victor’? I’ll be the Victor!”) But I digress.

Although on the surface Rowan’s obsession and my obsession may appear to have little to do with each other, in reality, there’s lots of room for overlap. There are, I believe, nine distinct types of Pokémon (off the top of my head: water, air, grass, psychic, darkness, dragon, metal, fighting, electric, and… something else — and look at me, devoting precious brain cells to Pokémon types!), plus assorted energy cards for each type, and so-called “trainer” cards to boot. All of which for years have been jumbled into untidy heaps around the house and Rowan’s room. At best, under duress, he will pile all of the cards into willy-nilly into a cardboard box in his room, which he later dumps unceremoniously onto his floor, scrabbling through a thousand-plus cards to find the ones he wants to create his power decks. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a constant point of contention between me and him — not simply the mess, which is bad enough, but the potential, the potential, the thwarted potential to sort all those cards into their various types, to place each type into its own separate container for easy access, to create, in short, a system — ideally, one that involves the use of a label-maker. I don’t like the game, but my fingers have itched for so long now to organize those cards. “Do you think you’d like to sort out those cards?” I have asked him at various points, and he shrugs his shoulders and says, “Maybe later.” “How about now?” I’ll say, and he will refuse to answer. But on Saturday, for some reason, we hit the sweet spot. He wanted to make a new deck, and I said I would help. And thus began the great Pokémon card organizational extravaganza. Isaac got in on the action too, and he and I sat on Rowan’s bedroom floor, colour-coding cards into various piles while Rowan handpicked the ones he wanted to make an ever-more-powerful deck. It took the better part of an hour, with me sneaking back into the room at various points during the day to finesse the system, but we got it done. There are labels. It’s been the better part of a week now, and it seems to be holding — although I won’t hold my breath.

The best part of it all was listening to my older boy exclaim, over and over, “Mom! I really like this! It makes it so much easier to find the cards I want!” Words straight to my colour-coded little heart. He’s Pokémon geek. I’m an organizational geek. And maybe, just maybe, we’ve found some kind of middle ground.

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