Yesterday morning I had a date with a boob man.

I had a surgical biopsy on my right breast, which really turned out to be more of a lumpectomy as the surgeon removed two walnut-size masses that he said were severe fibrocystic disease. I’ll go back December 10 for the definitive lab results, but I feel pretty confident that I am OK. I’m sure I’d ever have a “normal” mammogram until the fibrocystic area in question was taken out, so I’m glad to have almost all of this behind me and out of me. I keep reminding myself to be thankful the radiologists were proactive in suggesting I go ahead and have surgery.

When they started prepping me the nurse wrote in big black letters the word “yes” on my right boob. You know, just in case they couldn’t figure that out from my charts. I also got a kick of eavesdropping on the little old Southern old lady next door in the prep area. When the anesthesiologist asked her if she’d ever had surgery she replied, “Which one? I can tell you about the time I swallered a corsage pin.”

This was an outpatient procedure and yesterday evening the girls were yes ma’aming and no ma’aming me and I love you mommying me and, if that wasn’t enough to throughly kiss this mama’s booty and make me envision the girls bringing me Bon Bons and pushing me around in a wheelchair when I’m 90, Miss A willingly peed in the potty all by herself! The hubby has also been most awesome and my mother watched Miss C yesterday because she was running a fever and could not go to school. We just won’t talk about the fact that I gave her cold and cough medicine on an empty stomach and not once, but twice, on the way to my mom’s the hubby had to stop the car so Miss C could throw up. The hubby and I had to laugh when a nurse asked if we had had a pleasant drive in to the hospital. Actually by then I considered just checking myself in to the hospital so I could get a little peace and quiet, not to mention room service.

I felt pretty out of it yesterday and tried to get up around 5 while the hubby was out with the girls and got knocked down with a wave of major nausea, due to the anesthesia I presume. I am feeling good today, though, just sore.

Between now and my follow up appointment I’ll keep busy to keep my mind off my boob– probably Christmas shopping (I got matched up with the awesome Miss Debunot herself in her Christmas gift exchange) and consuming copious amounts of chocolate and spiked eggnog. Tonight the girls are staying with my inlaws so hubby and I can have a little break.

I kind of wish my surgeon could have helped make things, I don’t know, perkier, while he was in there. Otherwise I think Santa will be filling mama’s stocking with Wonderbras.

Don’t you hate it when you buy snacks and juice boxes specifically for school and then your child has a friend over to play and they find them and wipe out a third of them in one sitting?

Also, the high-pitched screaming of little girls around 4 p.m. yesterday that rendered dogs deaf as far away as Bowling Green, Kentucky, was coming from my house.

Last fall I got an e-mail from someone with Real Girls Media, a new Internet company in San Francisco. This was on the tail end of me being rejected as a Club Mom blogger (didn’t every other mommy blogger far and wide apply?)

They found my blog, some how, some way, for some reason, from 2,000 miles away and they liked it and they wanted me to be part of an advisory team as they launched their new women’s website, DivineCaroline. Rebecca Weeks with their company flew to Nashville (she of the very cool robin’s egg blue trench coat that I coveted) and over chocolate and coffee at a hip coffee shop she showed me the mockups of their website and asked my opinion. She wanted my opinion on a new women’s website.

This week I am officially part of their beta ad network for at least one year. It’s an I scratch your back, you scratch my back sort of Internet deal. I drive traffic to them and their advertisers and they drive traffic to me by featuring me as a featured partner on their parenting page, along with the super awesome Amy Clark at MomAdvice.

I will not be quiting my day job. I do hope that this will bring me a little “mad money,” as I call it, but what I really hope is that this will open some doors for me as a writer. Although I do work in publishing as an editor, I don’t really get to write creatively. Trust me, there are only so many ways you can write about M&A and corporate governance over six years.

Back to my point, and there is one. Why is it that women, especially, doubt themselves?

My friend Mrs. Flinger just wrote about being the generic Cheerios of the Internet. What I would like to tell her, and you, is I battle self-doubt daily. When I met the other DivineCaroline advisors, including the fabulous Lindsay Ferrier of Suburban Turmoil from Nashville, several of them nonchalantly mentioned their book deals, their agents, their “business.” I sat at a table in San Francisco and felt a wave of anxiety come over me when it was my turn to introduce myself. How in the world did I fit into the grand scheme of all of this? What is my niche? What the hell is my brand? My God! Do I even have one? I felt like the never will be a popular girl, always the smart/good girl of high school all over again. I am the girl who has never lived more than 60 miles from her hometown, who has never appeared on television or written a book, who doesn’t have a master’s degree, who has never been to Europe, who wonders constantly if she could have done this or that better, who wishes she could lose five (OK eight, dammit) pounds, and who wonders when she will turn what she loves to do best, writing, into a career?

Any time I doubt myself, I buckle down and continue writing and try to take pride in my current work. I remind myself that only a few months on the job at Vanderbilt University, fresh out of college and oh so young and skinny, I was named interim editor of the faculty/staff newspaper. When I left six and a half years later, I was the public affairs officer for the university’s largest school, the College of Arts and Science. At my current job I had the opportunity to interview the former CEO of Pepsi.

I am a professional. I am not “just” a mommy. And yes, that is important to me.

I hope I start believing in myself more and telling my self-doubt to take a hike. To quote one of Miss C’s favorite books, “When I grow up, I want to be me.”

Saturday night the hubby and I were engaged in some nocturnal activities and we decided to go in our front living room, which is a safe distance from the girls’ bedrooms as well as the den, which is favorited by the dogs, who tend to fling themselves at our feet or on to our laps for haunch scratching if he and I so much as glance at each other past 9 p.m.

I got up from the loveseat to turn off our Christmas tree lights and my foot kicked a small plastic object on wheels.

Suddenly a circus tune started merrily blasting away from a toy train as if we were under the Big Top. Let’s just say the timing was really off.

Foreplay is pretty much doomed if the only toys in the vicinity are from Fisher Price.

p.s. Did someone misplace their order for an extra helping of Monday? We have no hot water and both Miss A and the hubby are under the weather. This is the third Monday in a row I have requested to work from home. Sometimes I wonder why I bother to attempt to go into the office at all, but then I do like to dabble in occasional adult conversation.

Little Girl, Big Hat, originally uploaded by blondemom.

The girls helped oversee the drawing for the Kodak EasyShare Printer and Renee at Froggie Mom is the winner!

I’ve been reading Renee for about two years and discovered her after cruising the blogosphere for other working moms in the South. And no, that’s not as seedy as it sounds.

Congrats Renee! I know she’ll be busy printing and scanning pictures of her three beautiful kids.

I promised my friend Mrs. Flinger that I’d help spread the word about the giveaway she is having this week on her awesome new site, MamasPod. Just channel your inner Dr. Seuss for a chance to win a $100 gift basket from Charming Sam, where I am eyeing their beautiful jewelry. Mama needs some Christmas bling!

While we’re on the topic of giveaways, I have one planned for December featuring the coolest mom t-shirt you’ll ever see from PeaceLoveMom and another one planned for January with a very hip outdoor portable play mat from GoBaby (it will put the old ratty quilt you carry to soccer practice to shame.)

Is it too early for a glass of wine? I had to make an 8 a.m. run to Walgreens because I mistakenly bought condensed sweetened milk, as opposed to evaporated milk, and the girls are having fits over what to wear today and have been trying to “out-Princess” one another all morning.

We have two meals with family today, so we’ll be stuffed like turkeys for the next 24 hours.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The phone rings early Sunday.

Hubby and I are circling the coffeemaker like buzzards in a house that is unusually quiet except for the percolating.

The girls spent the night at my mom’s Saturday while we had a lovely steak dinner out with three other couples from our hometown that we’ve known a bazillion years. OK, more like twenty, which is still hard for me to believe. (Coincidentally today is the rerelease of U2’s Joshua Tree, which I listened to a bazillion times during that pivotal transition year from high school to college.)

I grab the phone and see it’s my dad. I assume he is on his way to church and calling to see if we want to meet at the Cracker Barrel, where we eat our weight in biscuits and hash brown casserole monthly.

Hi Daddy!

I realize my gravelly voice is suffering the effects of no caffeine and my mini martini tasting from the previous evening.

“Turn on channel 5! They’re interviewing a farmer about corn. It’s a crap vegetable! He won’t even feed it to his cows!”

Oh, the girls don’t even like corn.

“Doesn’t matter…anything made with corn. Corn, corn syrup, anything!”

Even tortilla chips? Even blue tortilla chips?

“Channel 5!”

“Corn!”

Click.