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 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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“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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Oh, be very, very careful when you announce to the entire Interwebs that you will absolutely, definitely have the third draft of your novel done by spring. I mean, of course there’s still plenty of time, but the calendar is already filling up and there is client work to be done and I can see how if I’m not careful, nothing’s going to happen.

And then I had to go and crack open Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and now everything must change. The pacing, the complex inner lives, the tackling head-on of the most evil possible impulses in humanity with language so precise and sparing that it’s almost compassionate. The absolute, unwavering resistance to sentimentality. Oh, Alice Sebold, you are either going to save me or be my undoing: call me melodramatic, or grandiose, but I don’t want to put a first novel out into the world that doesn’t at least try very hard to be half as good as yours. No pressure, of course.

Of course, not putting a novel out into the world at all would be worse. So, back at it. (And in other news, the seeds on my windowsill are sprouting, except for the stubborn eggplant. Time, time.)

PS: In a different universe, here’s my latest at Today’sParent.com, on Rowan’s lovely hair and when I am and am not bothered when people mistake him for a girl.

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I write most mornings: those three longhand pages made famous by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. I write in spiral-bound Hilroy notebooks with my fine-point Pentel RSVP ballpoint pens, have filled probably two dozen such notebooks over the last couple of decades.

When you think about it, it’s vaguely impressive: thousands of pages of my words. But then, when you think about it, it’s a bit nauseating: thousands of pages of my to-do lists and what-I-ate-for-breakfast posts, angst over relationships or my hair, musings about the fact that I should write more, exercise more, stop eating sugar, generally be a better person. Thousands of pages of remember-to-buy-milk, where I’m at with various client projects, the weather. I’ve been writing as long as Rachel and I have been together, and the books are a one-sided conversation charting our entire relationship. Two entire notebooks document my ovulation cycle, with mucus (sorry) updates and my morning body temperatures charted in the top right-hand corner and speculations about am-I-or-am-I-not-pregnant filling the pages. Many more notebooks chart my mother’s ongoing cancer experience, her triumphs and declines, and then her death. After Rowan was born, the writing becomes more sporadic and the pages are mostly desperate musings on when I might sleep again. More recently, with children who generally sleep through the night (ptu! ptu!) and are in school full-time, my output has become more regular, weekends excepted.

Yes, occasionally, there’s a nugget of truth in there, some dog-eared pages that I return to later when I’m looking for material. Pages have become raw material for essays, performances. Occasionally, they help me work out some specific creative or personal problem. But that’s rare. Mostly, they’re just an exercise in mental throat-clearing/vomiting, making way for the real business of day.

I think regularly and somewhat neurotically about what will happen to my pages, my collection of Hilroy notebooks, in the event of my death. Ideally, my heirs and executors will immediately burn them without reading a page — in fact, let the record show here that these are my explicit instructions. Don’t read them: not only or primarily because of the fact that they are an unvarnished glimpse into my soul’s weaknesses, my pettiness, my preoccupation with the mundane, my sins, but mostly because they are so incredibly boring that I can’t stomach the idea that anyone might take the time to flip through them and decide that they are my legacy. Got it? Good.

On mornings when it’s Rachel’s turn to get up with the kids, I sometimes haul myself out of bed and sneak into my office with a cup of tea to write. This is a calculated risk; often, these particular morning pages are punctuated by my notes on which kid is shrieking about what and why. Isaac in particular finds it hard to leave me alone when I’m writing, my closed door just so tempting. I try, for the most part, to take his intrusions in stride, to smile and give him a quick kiss and then get back to my words, my hair, my milk, my jobs, my I-should-exercise.

But, on a couple of mornings recently, he’s climbed into my lap and taken up his own pen. And I have handed him a half-blank notebook and he has “written” next to me, copying down letters and numbers and imitating my cursive. We sit together, writing our pages, and those are some of the best mornings ever.

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Read about why I (mostly) don’t care in my column this week at Today’sParent.ca.

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I woke up this morning in a funk.

And already, I’m critiquing myself: isn’t there a better way than “in a funk” to describe current my state of mind? Such a cliché. I could do better, I’m sure; I could find the right words to describe the general sense of malaise that has overtaken me, the scrabbling in my chest, the heightened irritation at the children (who want only more honey on their toast, enough to spread with a knife so that it doesn’t melt in, just some more honey, is that such a big deal?) coupled with the heavy knowledge that I am a terrible mother. Just terrible. Because I can’t even get through a simple breakfast transaction without arguing about honey. I was stupid enough to weigh myself this morning and now I have those voices singing along in my funk choir, the melody la-la-la-ing away about the fact that it doesn’t like that number while the harmony warbles in and out with a shame that my feminist self even cares about a number on the scale because you look great, you really do, and all your clothes fit just fine so what are you going to judge by?

But of course I’m going to find things to judge myself by (and, by the way, I do not “look great”: I hate my haircut and I am bored to tears by all my clothes), chief of which is my lack of productivity, is the fact that three months have sped by thus far in 2013 and what do I have to show for it? What have I been doing for a quarter of a year besides writing the occasional blog post and even those feel insubstantial, thin, as though I can’t get to the heart of the matter.

And that, really, is the crux of it: I fear that there is no heart to the matter. I worry that I’ve become someone whose life is measured out in loads of laundry and forms filled out and mailed off. I have alphabetized the spice drawer and taken bags of cast-off clothes and toys to the thrift shop. I have removed and wiped down the individual shelves in the refrigerator, and I get a perverse thrill each time I open the fridge and see them — and then I remember that I wanted to be someone whose life was more exciting than this.

What if I’m not? What if I’m simply not more exciting?

And so I am funky. It doesn’t help that we have this never-ending winter, five days into spring and I am bundled in four layers of sweaters. I want to punch winter in the throat. I’ve stopped shovelling the driveway — because, fuck you, snow, we’re just going to drive over you from here on in and pretend that you don’t exist. La la la fingers in my ears to you when you talk.

I sat down this morning with my notebook and a pen (always the same brand of notebook: Hilroy five-subject spiral-bound; always the same Pentel RSVP fine point pen, in black — I special-order refills for them when I run out, because I am that exciting) and started to whine, to rant, to try to get to the bottom of my mental state.

And then, of course, it bubbled up: yesterday, I took out my novel manuscript and I began to read through it. But before I did that, I took out a different notebook, a notebook in which to make notes about the manuscript, and I wrote at the top of a fresh page, “I will have a complete third draft by June 20, 2013.”

And then I sat down for an hour and I read only ten pages but I took copious notes on those pages and I realized that I have a major challenge ahead of me but it seemed kind of exciting at the same time.

And so no wonder I’m feeling the way I am — no wonder that actually sitting down to work on, writing down a promise about, the largest creative project of my life thus far might just engender a wee bit of emotional backlash from my inner demons. That funk? Those voices? They are fear. They are fear of actually spending the entire spring wrestling with this thing until it’s done. They are fear that it might be bad — and they are fear that it might be very, very good and that I will have to live up to it in some way.

So, they can natter away. I’ma keep working. I’m going to take my notes and throw myself at this thing again and again and by the end of spring I will have a third draft. And possibly another quilt top. And a planted (and entirely non-metaphorical) garden. And my house may be a disaster or it may be impeccably organized. I’ll figure out my hair, I’ll try to lighten up (oh God, no pun intended) about the number on the scale, and I will hand the squeezy bottle of honey over to my son and say, “Have at ‘er, my love — spread it around, and remember to lick your fingers, too.”

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