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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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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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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I used to go to this sort of fancy gym where the insides of the lockers were nice and clean and I could watch my own individual television while I worked out on one of the two dozen cross trainers and they set out stuff like cotton balls and Q-tips and tampons that you could just have for the taking. Like, ZOMG, as many free Q-tips and makeup sponges as I wanted! (As Rowan might say, “It’s like, they sell it to you for free!”)

But I stopped going to that gym, in favour of a different gym that was closer to our house. The new gym has a pool, which makes it great for the kids. Also, the new gym is cheaper. I figured I could sacrifice the individualized televisions and the free feminine hygiene products and all for the sake of the household bottom line, even if the lockers at the new gym are gritty on the bottom and I often have to do this complicated shuffling dance with all the other women getting changed at the same time as me.

I thought that it might take a bit of time to get used to the new gym, what with having to bring my own cotton balls and all, but it’s been a pretty smooth transition. In fact, I like the new place better. I like the bootcamp classes and the instructors. I like watching the toddlers and their parents. I like that I can walk there in ten minutes. I like eavesdropping on the teenage swim-team girls, and watching them grow up over the course of the year. (Once, I witnessed one of them change out of her bathing suit and into her street clothes inside her locker with the door closed, not even aware she was there until she popped out like some kind of modest groundhog, and I remembered that angsty time when I cared so much what people thought about my body. Just wait till you have a baby or two, honey, I thought, to cure you of caring whether people see you naked in the gym changeroom.)

But mostly, I like the old ladies.

That’s what they are, the dozens of women in their late 60s and 70s and for all I know 80s who are constantly at the gym, sometimes twice a day, going from boot camp to aqua fit to the weights room to the cross trainers and beyond, talking the whole time. The gym is their hub, their social circle, their second home. And they chat away — with each other, with me — about the weather and their children and grandchildren, who’s getting married and who’s coming home for the holidays. They talk about shopping and what they eat and their work and their families and their bodies: what aches, their haircuts (“Why do they always cut your hair so short once you’re old?” one of the old ladies bemoaned the other day. She turned to me: “You’ll understand when you’re old,” she said, and I felt instantly as though I were 20.), how their clothes fit. A few days ago, all the showers were lukewarm and it was like there was some Greek chorus on the subject, wave after wave of women asking and answering each other “Is your shower hot?” “No, no, is yours?” “Oh no, are they cold?” The showers are cold, the showers are cold — I don’t know why exactly, but the urgency of it all made me smile.

I love the old ladies. I love how they take up so much space, how unapologetic they are about their bodies, their scars, the weight of age and experience stripped naked. I listen and occasionally laugh and kibitz. I watch as an old lady spreads her towel carefully across the bench, how she needs to sit down to put her sweatpants on one leg at a time, how she skips a bra because it’s just too exhausting to put on. I love how they always smile, or at least nod and say hello. I love how familiar they are: yesterday, one of them walked by me as I was doing up the hooks and eyes on my ratty old sports bra and actually reached over and twisted off a dangling string. FROM MY BRA. It was awesome.

“There!” she said. “You’re going to get a nice long letter now! At least that’s what they say.” She paused. “Maybe an email in this day and age.”

And then she went on her merry way, leaving me with the sense-memory — just for a moment — of what it must be like to still have a mother.

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Yesterday, I performed one of the boringest tasks known to the millennial generation: I switched e-mail accounts. The process involved tracking down and updating every last one of the jillion or so sites (and I’m sure I’ve forgotten many) and businesses and organizations that somehow rely on contacting me via e-mail, as well as messaging every single contact in my address book to let them know about the change.

Tedious as it is, it’s a useful process, every so often, to go through your contacts and see who’s actually still there, which of those whimsical Hotmail and Gmail addresses still works, which contacts haven’t yet expired, which people I want to hear from and those I imagine I’ll never talk to again. A couple of dozen dead e-mail addresses bounced back to me and I — diligent girl that I am — deleted them from my contact files, along with names I no longer recognized.

And then I did something simultaneously tiny and enormous.

I deleted my mother.

For close to nine years, I’ve kept her in my Outlook contacts, importing her information from system to system along with everyone else’s: the street address of the house she died in; the long-cancelled phone number; the e-mail address she never used but that my father set up for her because he was tired of her using his account; information about her spouse, now remarried. I’d go to look up another Goldberg and there she would be, her name popping up always a slight jab to my gut, a tiny twisting in my soul. Like when, several months after she died, I had a roll of film developed (was it really such a short time ago that we developed film?) and when I opened the envelope of photographs, there she was like a ghost staring back at me and I couldn’t breathe.

I’m mixed about this. On the one hand, who needs the reminder of heartbreak? Like the semi-conciliatory phone message from my high school boyfriend that I never erased from my answering machine (remember answering machines?), just flipping the cassette to the other side: why? On the other hand, it’s a big step, or at least it’s a step that feels significant: to hit “delete” on the name of the person you miss most in the world, whose name popping up today in my inbox or on my caller ID would be the most welcome of everyday miracles.

I made the call, in the end, on the basis of futility: keeping her in my contact list will never provide me with closure, let alone contact. Keeping her there isn’t so much a form of respect as it is desperation or denial. Much better to wear her rings so that part of her is with me constantly. Much better to pull out a picture and show her to my kids, write another story and say her name out loud: Ruth Laine Goldberg, I have a new e-mail address. You’ll never use it, but I know that we both would have wished that otherwise.

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I canned peaches with a friend last night. I’ve never canned anything before, aside from that brief foray into pickled beets a couple of weeks ago (and, frankly, I’m not entirely sure I got that one right, although I don’t have the heart yet to go check on my jars sitting there so hopeful in the cupboard). I’ve wanted to learn how to can for years and years, to line up the jars of summer and sweat in the cupboard. But the project has seemed so daunting for so long from the outside: all that sterilizing and boiling and popping out of air bubbles and processing and waiting and hoping for the seal and the threat all round of death.

So many things to get wrong, such huge repercussions.

But then Stephanie texted me like a gift to say she’d ordered peaches and did I want her to order me a box, too, and then I could come over and she could show me how. And I wrote back, YES! of course, and she mentioned that they would arrive in the next couple of weeks, these British Columbia Freestone peaches, and that once they arrived we would have to can them the very moment they were ripe. What followed was a comedy of errors in terms of scheduling: the traditional and the modern colliding as we tried desperately in the midst of Jewish holidays and soccer tryouts and wine club dinners and Symphony tickets and work schedules to find an evening that would work. Last night, we finally opened a bottle of wine and two boxes of peaches as tender as a baby’s bruise, and got to work.

“They won’t be pretty,” she said. “But they’ll taste good.”

So much is going on right now, all those beginnings and endings of chapters and pieces that I am sorting through in my life. It’s the kind of time that makes me crave a big project that can be accomplished over the course of an evening and a bottle of wine when two people stand and score and scald and cut fruit and place it gently, cut side down, in hot, clean jars. Fill with syrup, knock out the air bubbles, screw on lids fingertip-tight and process, process, process in boiling water for 25 minutes. At each step me saying, “Just so long as nobody dies, I’m okay.” And her saying, “Nobody’s gonna die.”
She should know; she’s a doctor. For what that’s worth.

In between those steps, I made peach pies (also for the first time), rolling out dough and mixing cut fruit with lemon juice and flour, cinnamon and salt, stirring it together with my hands. I held them up, dripping with fruit and sugar, and asked Stephanie if she would forgive me if I licked my fingers — too much sweetness to rinse away. She, meanwhile, was boiling down the tiny bits of peach left over to make juice for her kids, and why not?

We chatted, mostly about the process at hand and how we grew up: what we’ve learned on our own, what our mothers taught us (for the record, while my mom loved to feed people, canning would never have interested her. She did, however, make several dozen apple crisps each fall, when the apples were at their peak, and froze them — a tradition I have continued and that my children adore.).  I asked her what it actually meant to be on call all weekend: does that mean you sit at home and wait for your beeper to go off? Are you at the hospital all day? What’s involved? What do you do? The things I don’t know about a doctor’s life. She asked how the writing was going, mused about the difference between being an avid reader and an absolutely reluctant writer. Did I like rereading what I had already written, she wanted to know. When enough time has passed, I said.

And when what I wrote was good in the first place.

And then we were done, the project completed well before midnight, beginning to end, nothing killed but the bottle.

So far.

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I was thinking this morning about this time when I was nine or ten and I took a sheet of puffy stickers with googly eyes — remember those? — and I decided, on a whim, to stick all the stickers, the entire sheet’s worth, in random places in my parents’ bathroom: the underside of the toilet seat, next to the shower head, inside the medicine cabinet, the plant stand. Secret places, not readily visible. About a dozen stickers. I stuck them all on, and I didn’t say anything about them, and they didn’t say anything about them. And then, what I remember now as a couple of months later, I was in their bathroom and I remembered the stickers, and I said to my mom, “Hey, did you ever—” and she laughed quietly and said, “Daddy and I had so much fun finding those.”

Sometimes I think that’s my favourite childhood memory, everything good wrapped up in a single moment: the Day-Glo colors and 3-D textures, the secret whimsy, the intimacy and silliness of it all and the way they kept my secret. The way they never got mad at me for messing up their bathroom. The way they never removed those stickers; I had that plant stand for years, all through my university-apartment days, and every so often I would catch a glimpse of that ice cream cone with a cherry on top still stuck on it and it always made me smile.

I wonder what my kids’ memories will be. I wonder if they already have them.

(What’s your favourite, tiny, childhood memory? Why?)

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Oh, yeah: I have a blog. It’s just that I have been submerged at the bottom of a sea of deadlines. And so I have been Writing Things for Other People (all lovely people, by the way). And when I am not doing that, I am Shuttling Children to Summer Activities. In particular, I am shuttling Rowan to soccer-related activities. Thus far, his summer seems to consist of soccer, with a side of soccer, with a wee soccer chaser and the occasional soccer nightcap. All washed down with some great big thirsty guzzling gulps of swimming pool.

I’m working on a longer post about how weird it is to have a sporty kid when one is avowedly not sporty. But for now, I just wanted to note that all this shuttling of my son to and from soccer has left me seeing an awful lot of this kind of thing on various minivans around town:

And, at the risk of alienating any of you perfectly lovely folks who have such stickers on your minivans, they make me barf a bit in my mouth.

It must be something to do with their reeking of heteronormativity, practically an advertisement for Mom+Dad+boy+girl+dog+cat. Or the fact that they reduce “family” to a set of mix-and-match stickers, all of whom seemed to be Caucasian and happy. Or that anyone should care so much about just exactly who’s riding in your minivan, or that you’re so damn proud of it that you need to put it on your car window for everyone to see.

Or maybe it pisses me off that some kind of families can put those kinds of stickers on their cars and not worry about getting rear-ended.

As someone who drove a series of my parents’ dying cars for the majority of my driving life, maybe I’m just averse to the idea that your car should be a reflection of your personality or, say, your lifestyle choices (ask me about this later when I acquire my red MG, but for now let’s live in the present moment, shall we?). Maybe driving a 2000 Buick Regal for the past six years, and an aging Chrysler before that, and before that a Cadillac Sedan de Ville that cost me $60 a week to fill well before gas prices got crazy (but, now, there was a smooth ride) made me happy to dissociate my car from my personality. Or maybe it just was a raging advertisement for my own frugality (or my parents’ taste for big cars) — who knows? When we finally sucked it up and bought our own new vehicle, it was with some reservation that I finally stuck a Pride decal to our rear window. What if someone keys us? I thought. What if someone smashes the window, or gives me the finger as I drive? What if, what if… For those reasons alone, I decided to bite the bullet and affix the rainbow sticker, if only to prove myself wrong. If only because I have perhaps internalized the corporate messaging from LuluLemon that you should do things that scare you just a little bit.

And, of course, absolutely nothing has happened.

They do, for the record, have decals of little boys playing soccer. Or maybe they’re little girl with short hair? Or maybe the long-haired figures on the site are actually boys with long hair, which is what I hear happens to boys when you don’t cut their hair for a year and a half. I haven’t checked to see whether they have decals of little boys dressed in tutus, which is what Isaac wore to preschool this morning, along with a pair of Rachel’s heels. And, true, there’s nothing stopping me from ordering of decals of two mom figures and slapping them on the rear window of our car because I’m just so damn excited about our family. Apparently, you can get Star Wars decals as well: I could possibly see my way to having two Princess Leias wielding light sabers up there, along with two little R2-D2 droid figures, one in a tutu and one with a soccer ball (any takers?): it would be a way to sum up just about everything that my children have brought into my life, in all its complicated glory. Maybe if I still had the Caddy…

But really, I overshare about my family plenty already, right here on the Internet — do I really need to boil them down to an uncomplicated set of bland conformity on my vehicle? I’ve already got a basic-model car, no heated seats or six-CD changer here: but my household? Anything but.

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You know, the one with an essay by — oh —ME in it?

[Pause here for silent gleeful scream into my elbow.]

Yep, that’s me, in Ms. Right there.

There.

[Heeeeeeeeeeeeeee!]

(Just so we’re clear, that’s not me on the cover, in case you’re curious . That’s Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.)

My contribution to Ms. is, while slightly less awe-inspiring than Aung San Suu Kyia’s,  still very happy-making to me: it’s a new version of an essay that made a not-insignificant number of you cry a while back: about planning (and planning again, and again, and still again) my wedding in the face of my mother’s final battle with breast cancer. “Four (Same-Sex) Weddings & a Funeral” is being published in Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort’s soon-to-be released anthology Here Come the Brides: Reflections on Lesbian Love & Marriage (put out by the very fantastic Seal Press) and I am thrilled (in case you couldn’t tell) that my contribution to the book was chosen to be excerpted in Ms.

Ms.! As in, maybe Gloria Steinem has read my writing now.

So all of you doing that combo English/Women’s Studies degree and wondering  — or fending off questions about — what exactly you’ll do with this particular degree: here’s one option. I am about to clear out the Northern Woman’s Bookstore of all the available copies, so if you live in Thunder Bay, let me know if you want me to leave a couple on the shelves. A certain large chain, apparently, does not carry this particular magazine. If you can imagine that.

(This one’s for you, Ruthi! Well, they all are.)

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Our friend is dying; a matter of days, her doctors say. Come soon – now – stay for just a few minutes. I tell this to the children, that our friend is dying, soon; tell Rachel as she walks in the door from some errand or other: don’t take off your coat, just go.

Isaac is already gathering up treasure, presents, pressing a silver filigree ring from one of his troves into her hands, asking to come with. Later, when it’s my turn to duck into our friend’s quiet room, I will see the ring on her bedside table. Not sure if she knows it’s there, but now Isaac does and that is important to him.

He’s on a mission the next morning, gathering, gathering, gathering shiny things in the house, layering them in boxes, insisting that we take them, take him, to see her. He doesn’t take no easily for an answer, this boy, asking again and again why he can’t go. He’ll be very quiet, he says. He won’t disturb her. He’s going to give her all his money, he says, all the money in his little jar marked “Isaac’s bank.” Then she can buy some food. He’ll take it to her. And we try to explain that what our friend needs right now is not money, or food. Just love. And care. Then I’ll give the money to the doctors, he says, dogged. To use to help her, the morning a chorus of refrains of why and why and why not.

I guess we won’t go on any more walks in the country with our friend, he says.

No, I guess we won’t.

Explaining all of these things to him is so layered, so exhausting: the etiquette of death and dying on top of hospitals on top of rite and ritual and finance and generosity. How do you encourage a four-year-old’s selflessness while also encouraging restraint? Which is it, then? We can’t just burst into her hospital room with boxes full of treasures and feather boas, and even as I’m trying to explain this, I’m thinking of our friend’s house, full of shiny rocks and sparkly things and pop-up books and photographs, her shy cat peeping out through the layers of wonder, her, smiling out from photographs on the fridge. And Isaac is right, it doesn’t make any sense that what she might now need is quiet, order. And I don’t want him to see her now, asleep, and slack-jawed, and to remember that image of her instead of the buoyant woman with a head full of hair, playing checkers on the floor with him and his brother.

How do you explain to him that his impulse to give, to want to do something, is precisely right — and yet, that doesn’t mean that he can take the two silver boxes off Rachel’s dresser and give them away? I mean, it sounds so petty, so selfish of me to say no (what kind of a douchebag are you? She’s dying.): of course I would hand them and more over in a heartbeat if it would make any difference, but it won’t and you can’t really give other people’s things away… the explanation, the logic of it, fizzle away in the face of the situation, my explanations as ridiculous as his questions: Can we put the money on her gravestone? (She’s not dead yet, Isaac, I want to say, but) No, we don’t put money on gravestones. Why? Well, because we… Well, then we can scatter it in the grass. Oh sweetie, that won’t help our friend. But let’s find sparkly rocks when the time comes. When the time is right, we’ll take some of the money from our house and give it in our friend’s honour to a place that will help to make sure that no one else…

And then I can’t finish the sentence. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because he’s already dumping out the change and the five-dollar bill from his bank and asking me to count it and I turn from the window, where I have been staring out at the snowy driveway, fighting tears, to tally up twelve dollars and nineteen cents.

Mama, you’re looking like you have a sad look on your face, Mama.

I do. I’m sad.

About our friend?

Yeah. Do you want to be sad together for a little while? Cuddle up on the couch and be sad together?

Okay.

[Beat.]

But can’t I go see her?

No.

Why not?

I don’t know.

* * *

In memory of HS. For GS & JB.

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