I woke up this morning at the usual time.\u00a0 I slept on the couch last night.\u00a0 Sometimes, when I\u2019m very, very stressed, when life is getting to be to much and I\u2019m in the midst of a maelstrom, I have to go sleep on the couch.\u00a0 It is smaller, cozy, and the feeling of having the strong vertical back of the couch that I can back up against gives me a feeling of security.\u00a0 Sleeping vulnerable on a flat mattress just doesn\u2019t cut it sometimes.\u00a0 So I was asleep on the couch under a blanket that I crocheted, cozy and warm, and then the alarm on my phone went off for the first time.\u00a0 I heard my son up and about getting ready for school.\u00a0 My waking at this time is his safety net. Once in a while he\u2019ll sleep through his alarm, so I sacrifice an hour of sleep to ensure he has woken up, and then to make sure he didn\u2019t fall asleep on the couch waiting until it was time to walk out the door.\u00a0 Today he was fine and left at seven.\u00a0 I turned on the TV and checked out CNN.\u00a0 They covered the usual big news of the day, but the story that caught me, the one that affected me, was the story about Angelina Jolie.\u00a0 She\u2019s an actress. I\u2019ve seen several of her movies.\u00a0 She\u2019s mashaAllah a beautiful woman, blessed with a loving partner and several children.\u00a0 She\u2019s a philanthropist and this is the role I see her in most.\u00a0 She and her husband, Brad Pitt, really put their money where their mouths are.\u00a0 They have donated money for earthquake relief in Pakistan; they have spread their considerable wealth around and have raised their voices to bring attention to people in need all over the world.\u00a0 I have made du\u2019a for them and had warm thoughts.\u00a0 Now, this morning, we learn that Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy to help her avoid cancer.\u00a0 Turns out she has a particular gene which is a major marker for a high risk of a particular, aggressive strain of breast cancer, so she had the double mastectomy done in order to hopefully eliminate this risk.\u00a0 Her own mother died of ovarian cancer after a decade of struggle.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure it was a difficult decision for her.\u00a0 She has traded on her looks for years as part of the Hollywood scene.\u00a0 I think she\u2019s a much deeper person than that and she\u2019s not one of those empty women who have nothing to offer other than cleavage, but her beauty is part of her fame.\u00a0 Anyone who follows the movie world (I don\u2019t, not so much, but even when you\u2019re channel surfing you\u2019ll come across the same stories of famous people again and again) has probably seen the now-iconic photo of her on the red carpet flashing a long long long length of leg.\u00a0 She has been proud of her looks, so I\u2019m sure the idea of losing her breasts was a monumental one.\u00a0 And yet.\u00a0 Probably all she had to do was look at her kids to come to the decision that a live woman minus boobs was better than a dead woman with them.\u00a0 So she had\u00a0 the surgery and had reconstruction as well.\u00a0 She\u2019s about four months post-op now and wrote an article giving the broad outlines of what she went through.\u00a0 I think, for a public figure who is so very private about some things, it was very generous of her to share this with us.\u00a0 She made a conscious decision to do that, to tell the world what she did so that other women would understand that they were not alone.\u00a0 And there are many women who need to hear this.<\/p>\n
Part of what made the story so poignant was that on\u00a0 CNN, one of the reporters covering it was Zoraida Sambolin, who shared with the world that she also has cancer and will also be having a double mastectomy.\u00a0 The professional \/personal nature of the story really hit me, and I found myself with tears streaming down my face.\u00a0 As real and as difficult as any challenge in the world, this one story about one person is as important as anything on the news.\u00a0 Imagine you are a news anchor reporting about murders, disasters, death singly and in large numbers, all the while faced with your own mortality in a very real way.\u00a0 Sometimes we can\u2019t relate to a big disaster but we can relate to something that happens to someone we know, and we often feel we \u201cknow\u201d movie stars or TV personalities since we see them every day.<\/p>\n
So, that was how my morning started.\u00a0 I\u2019m sad for Angelina Jolie and Zoraida Sambolin, but I am also very proud of them for doing what is necessary to preserve their lives, and for having the grace to share what is a very traumatic, private event with the world.\u00a0 I pray that Allah guides them to what is best in this world and the next, that they are cured of their illness, and that they are blessed with many more years to raise their families and do good works, Ameen.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I woke up this morning at the usual time.\u00a0 I slept on the couch last night.\u00a0 Sometimes, when I\u2019m very, very stressed, when life is getting to be to much and I\u2019m in the midst of a maelstrom, I have to go sleep on the couch.\u00a0 It is smaller, cozy, and the feeling of having […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islam-2"],"yoast_head":"\n