Bridge to Terabithia

Rowan’s class is reading this book right now:

And I have shivers.

Did you ever read Katherine Paterson's  Bridge to Terabithia? Published in 1977? I must have read it shortly after it came out, and then it was one of those books I kept on repeat for years afterwards. I’m sure I wrote at least a couple of book reports on it. It was a brutal read even then, tackling class structure, sexism, poverty, death, the cruelty of children and their parents. Rereading it now (because how can I not?) it’s no less brutal. I’m already tearing up and — spoiler alert — Leslie hasn’t even died yet.

(That line is seared into my brain: “Your girl friend’s dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.” And here I go with the tears.)

Rowan loves this book, and I love him even more for loving it. He loves it despite or because of its brutality, or maybe he doesn’t even notice how rough life is for Jesse and his siblings, his schoolmates, in rural Virginia in the 1970s. Did I notice, then? I must have. I asked him if his teacher has talked about the way that things have changed since the book was written — how boys and girls are, say, generally allowed to play on the same parts of the playground, how people don’t generally snort about “some hippies.”

“No,” he said.

“Do you think life is much different for you that it was for Jess and Leslie?”

He shrugged. His favourite character in the book, he tells me, is the dog. Followed by the cow, Miss Bessie. (My voice recognition software just typed in “Ms. Bessie” and I giggled — because calling anyone “Ms.” in the context of this book would have been a dangerously political act.)

It occurs to me that a kid raised in a Jewish household by two moms would have been dead in the water back then.

And then I wonder if maybe much has really changed. In my privileged, Canadian bubble, absolutely it has. But other days, with other news stories as far away as other countries and on other continents and as close as my backyard, it’s hard to tell.

* * *

Day 26 of #NaBloPoMo, and I have to say I feel like I'm losing steam. Four more days!

Giveaway: Stealing Time magazine

 

“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.

Angelina Jolie and me

 

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.