Oh, The Busy.

My pet peeve (okay, one of them) is people who talk about how busy they are, because, frankly, that conversation just never leads to anything good. We’re all busy, and so who, really, has time to blog regularly in the face of the excellence of things like of family visits (and four delicious boys — mine and two of my brother’s sons — running around together all weekend; oh, the cousin memories!) and children’s birthday parties and deadlines and the like? Nobody, that’s who, but most of the time we make some time and occasionally we don’t and all of this is by way of saying that I haven’t blogged much recently, but I’ll get back on it one of these days, but in the meantime I am popping up like a groundhog from underneath The Busy to say the following to all of you in Thunder Bay:

Yank yourself away from all your stuff for a couple of hours this evening and had on over to the Mary J. L. Black branch of the public library to spend some quality time with the wonderful writer Farzana Doctor! She’s this year’s headline reader for the Thunder Pride literary and storytelling evening, and she’s backed by a great round up of local queer writers, and I can promise you that it’s going to be a lot of fun.

If you’re not busy tonight, you have no excuse not to be there. And if you’re already too busy, you need the break. Trust me.

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I took myself to the local (read: only one in town) movie theatre to see The Great Gatsby the other night.

Quick crowdsource poll: How many of you go to movies by yourselves? Some people are horrified, or at least somewhat skeptical, when I mention going to movies by myself. Which I really don’t get — I mean, first of all there’s the whole child-care issue: if Rachel and I had to hire a sitter every time we wanted to see a movie, would see far fewer movies than the scant few we already do. Further, if we do splurge on a sitter, then I generally want to spend the time actually talking to her, not sitting side by side in the dark. I’m as happy as the next person for movie company, but, really, it’s not like we’re going to have a conversation, or anything.

Except. Except that I live here, in Thunder Bay, where people do. They do have conversations. People in this city chat all the way through the commercials (including that asinine anti-obesity commercial sponsored by, of all companies Coca-Cola, that protector of all things healthy) and the previews and the film itself. Sometimes they talk to their seatmates — usually inane comments like “Didja see that?” or “She looks pretty angry!” or “Now, Doris, what is the name of that actress again? Oh! Oh! She’s the one from that show!”— and sometimes they talk directly to the characters in the movie themselves. It’s like watching Dora the Explorer with a bunch of adult-sized toddlers yelling “Backpack!” Except that they’re yelling things like “Yeah! Get him!”

All this talking irritates me. And not just because I came here from Toronto, where nobody talks during the movies — where nobody you don’t know might talk to you at all, for days. Similarly, Toronto supermarket cashiers do not comment on or question your purchases the way they do here.

No, all this talking irritates me because it means — drumroll please — I’m a bitch I CAN’T HEAR THE MOVIE. Look. I already live with two young children who make it nearly impossible to have any kind of continuous conversation, and on the rare evening that I get to fully immerse myself in some kind of cultural production, I don’t need fully grown adults treating a public movie theatre like their own private living room.

I snagged a seat on the aisle for Gatsby, all the better to stretch out my right leg with its wonky knee. I dutifully put my phone away when the commercial told me to, and then I listened to the two older women behind me chat. I don’t remember the content of their conversation, just that there was one, one that continued through the previews (that new Tom Hanks movie looks pretty good, I think, but how would I know for sure, ladies?), through the opening credits, and then into the opening scenes.

Usually, I try to give people at least the previews to get the verbiage out of their systems. I pretend that once the movie starts they will actually smarten up, and sometimes I am correct in that assumption, but more often than not I am not. And as much as I am trying to focus on the previews, I am also mentally rehearsing my next steps. Which means gritting my teeth and thinking of a suitably friendly yet firm way to turn around at an appropriate moment and say something brief yet coherent that will put an end to the problem, but what I actually said at Gatsby was something like, “Hi sorry, but when you talk I can’t focus on the movie so could you please … not?” So smooth, but it worked: they stopped, their momentarily stunned silence and looks of horror fading into the comfortable silence of people actually watching the movie with their mouths shut. Except for popcorn. I heard one person ask, “What did she say?” but other than that I got no blowback. Which I was thankful for, because, on occasion, I have received blowback. Not pretty.

Is it so hard, people of Thunder Bay? Is it so hard to just keep quiet for the couple of hours that the film is showing? I don’t think so, but maybe I’m just that crazy lady who came to see a movie all by herself.

* * *

PS — If you haven’t already, please do leave a comment here to win a copy of Stealing Time magazine, which includes my essay, “A Version of Upright.”I have to say, your chances are looking pretty good right now, so go. Click. Comment.just not out loud at the movie theatre.

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“Granddad Bob die?”

My three-year-old son is currently fascinated by his Granddad Bob. More precisely, Rowan is fascinated by the death of his Granddad Bob, after a short and brutal stint with lung cancer, years before Rowan was even conceived.

“What Granddad Bob say when he die?”

The questions come at random moments: while I help him take off his snowpants, on the toilet, playing trains.

“Why he die?” […]

I want to tell him that, even though I hesitate I get what he’s doing. I get the need to make it make sense, and how it doesn’t. I get how death is always hovering.

Over, say, me at 10, practicing handstands over and over in the front hall, willing myself to stay upright and counting the seconds until I topple over, the one Mississippi, two Mississippi, in syncopation with a larger goal: Fifteen seconds and Mom won’t die. Fifteen seconds and Mom won’t die. […]

We’re not the only ones who do this, are we? Not the only ones who storyboard the deaths of our loved ones while we make dinner, take out the garbage, run the evening bathwater? It could happen at any time, we imagine, and so we’d best think it through, so as not to be completely unprepared.

 * * *

That’s an excerpt from “A version of upright,” my essay in the current, luscious, issue of Stealing Time, a new literary magazine for parents.

I received my contributor’s copies in the mail the other day, and was sucked in immediately, the way that happens with a good magazine. There’s fiction (including a great flash story by Randon Billings Noble, whom I met last year at BlogHer. Killer opening: “After my wedding, I start to have infidelity dreams. Or rather, that’s what they become. Before that they were just dreams.”), poetry (Heather Bell’s “Wolves each children” is brutal and haunting: “And so I am here to tell you what the doctors / will not: that when you lose a baby, you will feel like a Nazi and the sadness will fill /the room quietly on stilts, hovering at the ceiling.), nonfiction, reviews, more.

I’m pretty thrilled to be part of the “Relations” issue of this magazine — the essay I have in it is honestly one of my most cherished pieces of writing, one that took forever to find a home, one that I despaired might never find a home. And now I’m glad it took as long as it did to find the right place.

I have a few extra copies to share. If you’d like one, please leave a comment on this post by, say, end of day Friday, and I’ll pick three names randomly to receive a copy. In the meantime, why not subscribe? They need you, and it’s a fairly safe bet that you probably need them.

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My latest over at Today’sParent.com, in which I am ambivalent about just how mom-like/hausfrau-y I sound. (I am somewhat less ambivalent, it would seem, about passively concealing evil vegetables in my sons’ food.)

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And so it goes. Novel draft the third, that is. I have made at least provisionally through the first of three sections, the shortest but possibly the most difficult, although we’ll see about that. I’m plugging away at it for an hour each day (no more, no less — when that timer goes off, you know I stop writing). That in itself feels miraculous: since I pledged to commit an hour to the manuscript each workday, I actually have, with the exception of the day that was derailed by Angelina Jolie.

And although I’m not anxious to write beyond my hour, I don’t dread it, either. Kind of a new sensation.

What also feels miraculous is that it’s easier than I thought. At this point, it’s less as though I’m tunnelling through a mountain with a plastic spoon and a bit more as though I’m doing a very thorough reorganization of my closet: trying new combinations of old pieces; pulling out and discarding the old, tattered stuff that no longer fits; figuring out that I really do need a couple of good, solid basics to pull the whole thing together; moving a summer sundress out from amongst to the winter wools. I’ll realize that I have the equivalent of, say, six green cardigans — and even though I really and truly do love green cardigans, I probably need to consign at least four (all right, five) of them to the Goodwill box, along with that dress I bought in a fit of optimism 15 years ago but that never really did anything for me. In some cases, I need to accessorize; more often, I need to strip away some of the belts and scarves and jewelry that clutter up the clean lines of an otherwise just fine ensemble. And so on.

Of course, what I’m hoping for is an entire wardrobe that works really well together, something that looks as though it was pulled together by a stylist to the literary stars. But that part — whether I’ll end up with something as finally tailored as a Chanel blazer or something made of 100% Orlon — is not, currently, my problem. My problem is to finish the draft in an hour a day till it’s done.

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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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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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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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