Archive | July, 2007

A.P.B.: You don’t have to have a lump to have breast cancer

[Via Looky, Daddy!, I learned of Toddler Planet, the blog of a woman who's a "scientist turned stay-at-home-mom." Since some of my best friends and dearest family members are scientists turned stay-at-home-moms (no, really!), I've enjoyed reading her. Six weeks ago she became a scientist turned stay-at-home-mom who has inflammatory breast cancer. I found out from L,D! that she wrote a post that she wants folks to "steal" and pass on, so that fewer women are caught as unawares by this as she initially was.

Disclosure: my mother, a hydrologist turned stay-at-home-mom, died of breast cancer fourteen years ago this September. The hole in the universe is as big now as it was then, only I have since become accustomed to its being there. Not so the hole my nephew just left two springs ago (Glioblastoma Multiforme, or brain/spinal cord cancer). So I accutely appreciate this woman's missionary zeal. My family was only just there. Please read what she wrote, pass it on, and help her make a difference.

After you read the Inflammatory Breast Cancer piece below: if you're a lesbian (or love one), check out Kathy Belge's Lesbians and Breast Cancer, too. Lots more to think about on the subject, but that's a concise start. And consider what Twisty Faster has to say about her own "tiptoe through the garden of [breast] cancer,” if you haven’t been following her fierce, unsentimental, unvarnished undressing of it all.]


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Guest post from Toddler Planet: Inflammatory Breast Cancer

We hear a lot about breast cancer these days. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetimes, and there are millions living with it in the U.S. today alone. But did you know that there is more than one type of breast cancer?

I didn’t. I thought that breast cancer was all the same. I figured that if I did my monthly breast self-exams, and found no lump, I’d be fine.

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A portrait of the artist as a young man

Face paint job by the artist in question, who started out with “I’m a lion! I’m a lion” (see the red underneath?) and moved on to “I have a moustache! I have a moustache!” To be filed in the growing file folder, When Baba Multitasks. Or perhaps When Monkey Embeards Herself.

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Weekend bonus shot, 07.28.07

piñatashock

Watching her first piñata wacking, Oakland, CA.

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Our family is like a lot of families

The other night I was reading to the downstairs cousins and the lil’ monkey together. We live upstairs from the beloved’s brother and his family, and we each swap childcare an afternoon and a night a week. The nearby Granny and the GrandBaba take on an afternoon of kids themselves. Basically, it takes a village of family labor to give us all time for work and dates.

So there I am on our kid night, poised to read the book chosen by my nephew — eldest son, I might add, of a white, Christian (insofar as no one’s Jewish), currently able-bodied family of ample means. Did I mention he is blond, blue-eyed, tall, and smart? Well he is! And guess what book is his current favorite, for night-time all-cousin reading (since he reads his own baseball stories in bed)? Todd Parr’s The Family Book !

Many of you with kids know Todd Parr’s work; he’s done It’s Okay to be Different, another LGBT family favorite. For those who don’t already know it, The Family Book celebrates family diversity, illustrated in Parr’s Keith Haring-esque, primary colored, graphically bold style.

We’re all hunkered down together on the couch, cuddled up close. Page after page, the big thrill for one and all, led by Apple Pie Boy, let’s call him, is to quickly identify which ways our family — which to him is always already an extended family — fit the condition named on the page. It’s usually a disappointment in the rare cases where we don’t.

“Some families are big,” I read.
“That’s us!” they call out triumphantly, since they begin with both up and downstairs families plus the grannies, and then start counting.

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After the music class

Thanks to the patronage of her DadDad, we enrolled the lil’ monkey and her peanut brother in a local Music Together class, a thrill for us all. Okay, a qualified thrill. In class, the LM does her best impersonation of Michigan J. Frog, the one-hit wonder of the Warner Brothers’ cartoon “One Froggy Evening,” pasted below. Michigan J. Monkey sings every damn song from the CD at home, even plays them on kazoo while “reading” the sheet music. Kid you not. Then at the class: Ribbit.

Though she will dance.

If you’re not already a Michigan J. Frog fan, I won’t give away the plot, you really just have to watch all seven minutes of it. Especially if you’re at work.

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Making it up as we go along

neologism

In my “It’s all relatives” post last week, I neglected to clarify that the group of LGBT parents to whom I was primarily (though not exclusively) referring was “intentional” queer parents: people whose families are planned and realized from inside their queer relationships. The phrase “queer family-making” carried the burden, but too obliquely.

The ever-astute Dana Rudolph clarified that distinction, and noted that “intentional” parenthood characterizes some, but by no means all families in the current “gayby” boom. Many kids are born into heterosexual families, before one or another parent comes out and continues to raise them. Significantly, at least as of the moment, families planned and realized from within LGBT community skew towards the white and the middle class on up, Dana notes, citing research by Gary Gates, of UCLA’s Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy (himself cited in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about which she posted).

All this inspired me to dust off and enliven a page that had long been in the hopper: a wee LesbianDad Glossary, now gracing the primary page links stretching across the base of the header up there (around about my right armpit, actually). Several factors spurred this glossary:

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Weekend bonus shot, 07.21.07


President Poopyhead, Berkeley, CA.

T-shirt available here at Baby Wit, for the fashion forward set. The link’s prompted by this image’s appearance as a comment thread reference at Daily Kos (Chrisc’s “I’d like to see… him [Romney] kiss this baby without reading his t-shirt.”) Could a Baba be prouder? The shop sells a raft of gems, a sampling of which are shown below.

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It’s all relatives


Clockwise, from upper right: friend, sister, mother’s partner, mother, and sister-in-law send welcome.

[Cross-posted at the Family Pride Blog.]

Your Gamete, Myself

Many of you will have read Peggy Orenstein’s cover piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “Your Gamete, Myself.” For those who didn’t, or who just now linked to it and balked when you saw that it spans nine pages online, here’s a synopsis: Orenstein, an astute writer on matters feminist and maternal, looks at the medical and social evolution of egg donor conception. She interviews several families (mostly the mothers therein) who conceived their kids using donor eggs. She talks to doctors at fertility clinics, and weaves in anecdotal notes from her own journey to motherhood.* Throughout, she explores the ethical and emotional ramifications (to parent and child) of donor egg conception. She muses about how, in ways both like and unlike sperm donor conception and adoption, donor egg conception blurs the “bright lines” that ordinary, “biogenetic” parenthood draws around parents’ “genetic, biological and social relationships to their children.” Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I have an answer, though you’ll have to wade through my own thicket of paragraphs to find out.

Those queer and queer-cognizant readers that do mosey through the entirety of Orenstein’s piece might find themselves nodding and murmuring in assent to this or that point, all the while waiting patiently for the moment when Orenstein would of course consider how queer family-making sheds a bright light from a fresh angle on the myriad emotional issues she’s examining. After all, we couldn’t be bigger boosters of alternative conception, both via egg- and sperm-donation. “Ah,” these readers might have said to themselves as they watched paragraph after paragraph slip by, “the sly dog! Orenstein’s holding her big guns ‘til the last section of the article!”

And many of these readers will have, like me, scratched their heads when they arrived at the end of the piece having never seen the word “lesbian” or “gay” in print. Well I have just one thing to say to that: lesbianlesbianlesbian!

Okay, maybe I have more than one thing to say. Continue Reading →

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