4 words that will change your family

My boy has been going through some stuff -- having nights when sleep doesn't come easily and then stressing about the sleep not coming easily and then getting all brain-spinny about anything sleep-preventative in the room. Every little sound from the big-sound-maker T-Rex neighbors downstairs or the dishwasher or a bird outside can send him, in those long moments, into a spiral of worry and exhausted alertness. 

We are working on it. Slowly. 

One way is with this book, recommended to me by another mom who gets it and several others who know how important sleep, particularly restful sleep, is to kids and parents, particularly single parents who handle the terrors and worries and waking night-hours solo. 

One of the most gripping parts of delving into soothing your thoughts and putting worries away for the night so a kid can sleep is talking openly about feelings -- what makes you feel afraid, what makes you feel excited, what makes you feel worried. We've taken turns discussing daily things that stir up feelings for us and E has asked me to share memories of moments when I couldn't sleep or wanted my mom in the room with me when I was a kid. 

I've always known he was a deep processor, a sage child who could understand relationships and situations without much explanation, even from a very early age. That hasn't stopped me from explaining things to him -- we talked autopsies when he was three, and many big topics from gay marriage to drugs to sex to elections have been covered along the way, too. Still, these newer conversations that use a formula for talking about feelings have broken new ground.

For all my own fretting about his sleep stresses and expert advice and guidance on how to handle it from other parents and natural remedies sprayed on his pillow and possible foods that will help slow his spinning thoughts and fidgety body, I heard him use this formula and got that he can be the guide through this. 

Here are the four words he's been challenged to say, and how one conversation using them shifted a lot for our little family. Including who took the trash out.

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The problem with chaperoning a field trip

It isn't that there are one thousand second-graders carrying paper lunch bags that are torn or half-open with bags of Sun Chips and baby carrots and hot Cheetos spilling out.

Or that they are supposed to be making notes on worksheets they've been given that are tucked into clipboards with pencils that have chewed off erasers. And that they must come to a dead stop to make those notes in the middle of a crowd of other school children that has a current that sweeps even the adults away quickly.

It isn't the bumpy, slightly stenchy, hot bus that makes even the most iron-bellied passengers feel nauseous.

It isn't that there is always one half of a seatbelt missing so that one of the three students squeezed into the bus seat cries when she has to sit with other kids, alone, or worse, the chaperone.

It isn't that the hours tick slowly, and that there are always too many hours to spend at the zoo, the museum, listening to a tour guide use that annoying baby-talk voice he thinks will engage kids who are in no way engaged.

It isn't the gripping fear that one child in your care will flee, vanish, pause momentarily, wander off, accidentally cling to another group or get pulled under in the current of kids in the ape house, backstage at the theater, while boarding the bus -- and will be gone. Like, REALLY GONE.

And it will be the child who has been whining, kicking, bullying, accidentally-on-purpose poking at your boob, pouting, talking incessantly, causing you to spontaneously think without thinking, "Wow, it's so gloriously quiet" in the split second after you realize he's not there.

It's not the guilt that follows that thought. Nor the panic after that. Not even the deep, ojai breathing you learned in sweaty yoga, therapy, Lamaze class, during the worst finals test ever to keep yourself just barely calm enough to see your way through a crisis and FIND THAT KID.

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We were closer to Angelina Jolie than we knew

Angelina Jolie's own metered and honest words about undergoing an elective double mastectomy are printed in the New York Times today, making her vastly removed celebrity voice feeling closer to the many, many women who fear the real chances of developing breast cancer. 

I, like most of us, watch Jolie from afar, flip past her outstretched, miles-long leg on a red-carpet piece in a gossip magazine. I see her on a movie screen occasionally, watch her on news clips about humanitarian work as she walks through orphanages and war-torn countries, covered in a head scarf, carrying someone else's children, leading a small group of her own kids. But her essay in the paper, and on my screen, today, no matter how measured and carefully thought-out, felt familiar.

I know women who have extraordinary odds of the bad cells, the kind that can all-too easily and far-too quickly, take a mother from her babies and work and dreams. I am friends with women who have had scares, who've been through surgeries and treatments. I have lost women I've loved and admired to cancer. And after she wrote honestly and humorously and tearfully about her own decision to cut the odds of developing the cancer that killed her own mother by having an elective mastectomy like Jolie, I became acquainted with Jackie Morgan MacDougall.

Jackie (friendlier than the last-name basis Jolie) spilled out her experience in a Huffington Post piece, "How losing my breasts made me feel beautiful", and gave the OK for me to write a reaction to it, which also ran on GalTime and Huffington Post. My words were not about my own choice to have the surgery to save my life, but rather, my respect for women who make such a personal decision. 

I admitted my fear of my breasts, of feeling a lump of the bad cells myself, of the panic that overwhelms any discomfort of a cold mammogram pressing against my skin and tissue. I didn't -- and still don't -- want to live in fear, particularly of my breasts. I love that these two women (and all of those others I have known, and so many more of you) looked right back at the fear, results, history, possibilities and said, "I choose different." It's a personal act that reaches out to all of us who don't know you well enough to have coffee and won't run into you at school pick-up or don't have the best number to send you a late-night text, and it feels profound.

Jackie and Jolie share the BRCA1 gene and could be bound by the choice to have what some people once called a "radical" surgery. But what I read in words they both wrote is more overwhelming, positive, empowering, emotional. It is the fire to live, to say yes to medical technology we are privileged to have access to and no to a scary probability that the bad cells will show up, to nod to raising kids and stressing over stuff other than statistics and circular exams and no to any criticism or questioning.

Jackie responded to Jolie's NYT piece here today (and here on HuffPost) with a thank you. And I feel like the gratitude should be extended to Jackie and the many other brave women who share their stories of cancer and fear and self-care. That honesty helps all of us. And I hope -- I really hope -- that these women and all of those worrying about results, undergoing treatment, fighting for their lives or who will get the dreaded phone call today live long and beautiful and healing lives.

That won't happen. Too many women will die of cancer. Scores more will worry over it without the resources or support to be tested or take steps or make it to their doctor's office for an exam. But for this one still moment while Jackie and Jolie's words are still on our screens and in our papers, while we are gathered around together to say our own yeses to more options and research and funding for women's health care, perhaps we can be connected, closer -- hands to our own chests, breaths deep and steady, hearts pounding with both confidence and hope. 

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