[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.
Making it up as we go along
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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