Lesbians and Non-Binary Queer Folks Getting Divorced

This morning finds me not waking up to a small child smiling and reaching to pat my shoulder, not waking to a small child yelling angrily "Mama, I want cereal." Instead I'm drinking my coffee black because I forgot to buy milk, chopping parsley for tabouli, checking OKC.  What did we do before the internet? I'm part of a group for divorced lesbian moms, and on the whole it is a good thing.  People who have been there, people to give advice and support, but in some cases these women are doing to their partners the very thing that was done to me.  That's hard.  Sometimes the group makes me feel incredibly lucky to have a good, mature co-parenting relationship, sometimes it just makes feel bummed out about our inevitable failures as human beings.

I don't know why I feel compelled to compile posts about lesbians divorcing, but here they are:

Susan, "Two Moms, Two Boys, Two Homes."

Casey has a few relevant posts, but I'm going to link to, "I won't tell you I miss you."  I actually do say "I miss you when you aren't here," to LB, but in the context of "I miss you when you aren't here, but I always know I'll see you soon."  My feeling is that LB will feel sadness/wistfullness/loss, so I want to model those emotions and how to manage those emotions.  That said, I really appreciate how Casey talks about being a positive parent when you aren't feeling positive inside.

Cheryl, "When Marriage Equality Activists Break Up."   This post really gets at the special guilt that comes with being gay-married and then gay-divorced.

J has been blogging her long journey surviving infidelity, divorce, and now building a new blended family.  Many of her more recent posts are password protected, but you can read back about her divorce and healing.  This post, "Loyalty," is representative of the journey.

And an article about lesbian divorce from 1992, in case you've forgotten that the only thing worse that getting divorced is not being able to get divorced.

#queermutiny (a blogging for LGBTQ Families Day post)

There's a new kid in LB's class.  Sometimes Estelle seems happy, sometimes she seems sad.  Last week her mom carried her into school crying, and said to me "when do they adjust, because I can't take this!" Over the weekend I reminded LB to ask Estelle to play.  "I ask her, but sometimes she just cries." "Well, ask her again. It makes people happy when they have friends to play with. You used to cry at school, but now you have friends and you play all the time."

When I picked LB up today I got a report from her teacher that "LB was a very kind friend today and played with Estelle." I am so proud of that Sweetapuss!

A year ago, almost to the day, I was at home trying to balance mom-ing and working while my wife was away on business and, unbeknownst to me, turning her emotional affair into a full-on affair.  Today at work I got served with divorce papers.  I knew it was coming, but that didn't make standing in the rain signing off on paperwork with a kindly older gentleman who said, with feeling, "I'm wishing you all the best," any easier.

Since I found out I've run a lot of miles. I've done a lot of pushups. I spend some months trying to save my marriage.  I found a new place to live. I've made new friends. I've reconnected with old friends. I've gone to therapy. I've bonded with my daughter. I've been given so much materially, emotionally, and socially.

If you've read this blog before, you know I don't have much time for queer respectability-the idea that gays and friends are "just like everybody else" or even have a responsibility to strive to be "just like everybody else."  I spent a couple months this past year waking up every morning and telling myself "the only thing you have to do today is be a decent person."

This year has stripped away many of my trappings of respectability and forced me to think about what matters to me as a divorcee, a queer mom, a daughter, a friend-to love and be loved, to engage with the world, to live by my own values.  That's not necessarily a gay thing, but it is because some twenty or twenty five years ago I felt like being gay freed me from the trap of respectability and here I am again.

Many thanks to Mombian for hosting the 10th Annual Blogging for LGBTQ Families Day! I hope you'll click over here all the posts!

How Hard It Is

I've been rocking it as an over-compensating, abandoned, soon-to-be-divorced, lesbian mom.  My introverted self has been constantly busy, and when I'm busy I'm happy.  This week brought a sinus infection and terrible allergies with a tightness in my chest, and it was time to slow down.  I wasn't worried about mother's day, because it's never been a huge deal to me.  But today with no fun plans (but rather, run, work, paint if energy remains), I feel a deep sadness for what I've lost.

There's a go-getum-girl school of divorce that says the way to get over your lost relationship is to get out into the world, and I do think it's good for me to be busy, but I think that school of thought conflates the period of time after mourning with the action people take at that time.  So right now, I can take all the actions of a person not in mourning, but I'll still feel the sadness.  And it sucks.  But it's an appropriate kind of sadness that leads to emotional health. Kind of like the way exercise hurts and leads to physical health.

I've also become the Cassandra of struggling and just-okay marriages.  I just want to scream: "if you want to remain married, you aren't trying hard enough! Your marriage is struggling and you can't find two hours to spend alone with your spouse, you've got to be kidding me!" Nobody hears that person, I didn't listen to that person, until it's too late.

But despite all that there is my wonderful little girl, who got me a pink toothbrush for mother's day, who said: "If you miss me and feel sad, just look at the flowers grandmom and I got you." I'm sad, but lucky.

That Time I Unfollowed My Wife on Facebook

Like Jr. High-aged couples everywhere, social media has been a point of contention between me and B since she told me she no longer wants to be married.  The low point came when I was on vacation with B and child.  B's soulmate commented on a thread in which B had checked in with me at a bar and posted a picture of me (although in B's defense, I think the beer was supposed to be the main point-not me).

I reflected on the time I punched a girl in the face on a street in Boston because she slept with my boyfriend (in the Biblical sense).  And then I didn't know what to do, so I punched her again and called her various names (don't worry I also made sure he got his).  Now, some number of decades later, I did not take a redeye back to Providence to punch someone in the face.  I did not curse someone out on virtual Main Street.  I didn't even make any acerbic comments.  I just backed away and felt embarrassed and angry.  I assured myself that the Other Woman was likely not a scary stalker who would break into our house and cut up all our sheets while we were away, but just another insecure and jealous soul like the rest of us-albeit one with less self-control. And I drew this diagram and gave it to B to give to her.

I am bitter.  I'll own that, but I'll keep it here in my space.  My street fighting days are over.

I married Don Draper (pw protected)

Here it is in all its glory:

http://lbbreadandroses.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/i-married-don-draper/

Same pw, comment or email me if you want to read.

Kid Lit Review: This Day in June

It's a picture book about Pride: something I hadn't realized we needed, but now know that we do.  This Day in June is a winner, and I'm glad that I bought a copy (a hardcover, no less).  I am not going to complain about gay kid-lit, because I'm glad it exists, but I will say that this book is so lively and energetic and refreshing, and it's also SO GAY and even SO QUEER.

The narrative part of the book is a series of couplets, for example: "Clad in Leather/Perfect weather" and "Artists painting/Sisters sainting".  So, clearly, this is not "my family is like yours, but a tiny bit different, but really alike."  This book celebrates not just gay families, but gay culture.  And the illustrations are fabulous, and very detailed.  LB was drawn to the "pink page," and B and I spend a long time looking at all the drawings.

There is also a reading guide in the back that provides background and history for all the themes explored in the book.  Someone in an online group I'm part of recently asked, "what does wearing leather and showing your butt have to do with being gay?"  Well, this book can give you the beginner's explanation.  And then we can all hang out and read Gay New York together.  [There is also a separate guide for talking to children about LGBT issues.]

As the LGBTQ tent gets bigger, and as it become more possible to both be gay and remain in the "normal" club, our shared history becomes less clear.  Almost everything I've read this year from the sort of progressive queer folk, with whom I share some political perspectives, has been wistful-thankful for a world where many of us (more so the LG&Bs) are not so marginalized, but wistful for past of shared politics and culture in the face of a seemingly ever growing contingent that wants to JUST BE NORMAL.  As an adult reader, This Day in June is appealing in part because it's Pride as I would love Pride to be.  It all the fabulous and quirkiness, with a mix of radicalness and staidness, without the cigarettes, cheap vodka shooters, and corporate sponsorships that make me shake my head.

Dana at Mombian has a nice review of This Day in June that puts it in LGBT kid-lit historical perspective.  Dana compares This Day in June to Gloria Goes to Gay Pride, a kid's book published in 1991 by the author of Heather Has Two Mommies that, like me, you may not have heard of before now.  GGGP is no longer in print, a key problem for kids "diversity lit."  Many titles are published through small or non-profit publishers, and if they aren't picked up by a major publisher they are out of print (gone) within a few years.  This Day in June is published my Magination Press, a division of the APA Press which is the press of the American Psychological Association (how far we've come).  Magination publishes books like Full Mouse, Empty Mouse: A Tale of Food and Feelings and The Boy Who Didn't Want to Be Sad.

I read a lot of kids books, and a lot of out of print kids books.  I think This Day in June could be a classic in some ten or twenty years, I just hope it stays in print long enough to have a chance (so you should buy a copy or three).

Short version: thumbs up (and let it be noted that I bought this book with my own money, although if someone wanted to send me some copies to share I would gladly accept).

Because my daughter could have died alone

This post is the one I don't want to spend the weekend writing.  I thought of funnier topics and cuter topics, but this is the post I need to write.  This post is part of Blogging for LGBTQ Families Day sponsored by Mombian, but today I'm not talking to my usual audience of friends, lesbian moms, feminists, and fellow travelers.  Instead my imagined audience for this post is someone like Kendra, who blogs at Catholic All Year.  I hope she won't mind a shout out (and just a note that this post contains no cursing, no explicit content, and a minimum of typos).  I thought of Kendra when I began this post because she is an intelligent and thoughtful blogger who engages with political and social issues, and also finds gay marriage in my words: morally, culturally, and theologically abhorrent, and in her words "immoral" and "sinful."

This is our story:  I married B in a civil ceremony at the courthouse in D.C., attended by our parents, and occurring two days after we found out our first attempt at IUI was unsuccessful.  A month later I was pregnant.  A few months into my pregnancy (2nd clinic IUI, anonymous donor from a bank), we made the obligatory trip to a family lawyer.  In most urban areas you can find a small cadre of lawyers specializing in gay families and you find them by asking around or googling.  I believe we paid $2,500 for a 2nd parent adoption and an additional $1000 for estate planning. In Maryland, our part of the process included a doctor's note, some essay questions, letters of support from friends and family, and pictures including a required picture of our front door.

While we were happy with ourselves for being diligent and starting the process early, the legal reality was that no guardianship or adoption paperwork could be filed before a living baby was born.  I could make my belief that this baby belonged to both B and me and that we would parent the baby together known through unofficial channels, but we could not formalize B's relationship to our baby until after the baby was born.

At the time, that didn't seem like a big deal.  Life continued, lots of sleeping, trips to IKEA, inhaling chicken and bulgogi beef, picking up extra work to earn extra money, procuring my great grandmother's rocking chair.  Throughout I was nervous but healthy, as was B.

Then, an ultrasound showed that baby's previously normal growth had slowed: monitoring.  And long after my nausea had subsided, I had some episodes of violent puking (in the bushes outside my classroom and in a plastic bag in the car and on the sidewalks of my neighborhood where only junkies puke).  Not great, but I knew that puking could be a normal 3rd tri thing.  Then were some headaches so bad that they made me cry, but my screenings and blood work were okay, so I went about my business.

We hit week 27 and I was headed out of town for one final conference.  I went in for my regular checkup: blood pressure pretty high, concerning level of protein in my urine - for the first time, blood work ordered.  The next day I was prepping for class and one of the midwives called to request my presence at L&D - immediately.  The blood work had shown significantly raised liver enzymes.  "But I have a class to teach.  I don't have a bag packed." I negotiated for two hours, hustled over to my classroom to put a sign on the door, burst into staff meeting crying, and called B. to come get me.

At the hospital we went immediately to the MFM practice.  I had previously met the doctor there when he brought some med students in to observe my impressive fibroids.  Extended and anxious scanning, discussion of IUGR, a steroid shot, and the doctor: "You have severe preeclampsia.  We need to prepare for you to have this baby in the next 48 hours," he said pulling a sad face.

On L&D we sat on a bench in the hall.  They brought a woman through as she screamed that she was losing her baby. Our midwife waved from behind the nurses' station, but didn't come out to greet us (still bitter).  My blood pressure was 160/100.

The night in the hospital was long and loud.  The nurse's default was to turn up the baby's monitors as loud as possible so that it sounded like I was in my own womb, women screamed endlessly, my blood pressure monitor alarmed every 15 minutes because my pressure was too high and no one came to turn off the alarm.  But I had B there with me, sleeping fitfully, together.

A second night B went home to stay with our freaked out dogs.  A nurse told me she wouldn't be able to come back until visiting hours started again the next morning.  "We're married, we have a certificate, she's my next of kin."  The nurse said we could get it sorted in the morning.  B remembers that the visitors desk swapped her "visitor" wristband for a "family" wristband that gave her access to L&D 24 hours a day without any hassle.

Despite the frustrations of the hospital, I started to simply exist.  The days blurred quietly together with tests and scans and quiet.  I read steadily through the collected Sherlock Holmes stories.

B and I couldn't discuss the what-ifs, we lay in my little hospital bed and tried to imagine our baby's future.  I had a half-waking dream about a little boy and a little girl on a beach, and I felt a wave of peace.  We had already chosen LB's first and middle names after her great-grandmothers, but I told B that if they baby was a girl and she lived, we should give her a second middle name, Grace, after the Our Lady of Grace statue in the hospital lobby.

Time felt soft, I was floating and waiting.  Baby stayed strong.  And then her heart rate was alarming.  And she went off the monitors and couldn't be found.  The head resident efficiently and calmly, too calmly, pulled the portable ultrasound into the room.  She was so calm that I didn't know when she found the heartbeat, and asked several minutes later "is she there?" I called B and asked her to leave work and come sit with me.

B talked to our lawyer, who said she would drive up to Baltimore after the baby was born with our paperwork.  "What if something happens to me during the birth?" I asked a nurse.  "You'll be okay," she said.  It wasn't a question I asked with fear for my own mortality, it was a technical question.  "What if something happens to me?  They'll put our baby in foster care," I said to B.  "We have a lawyer, if there's a problem your parents will come down and sign over custody, it will be okay." B understood, but we didn't have much of plan, and I couldn't dwell on the future.  When I did, I was forced to consider a future in which our baby did not live.

For the first nine days in the hospital, I felt okay.  On the 10th day, I did not.  I saw floaters before my eyes, that I did not report.  I felt off.  My MFM popped back in with the verdict: rising liver enzymes, stubbornly high BP despite major meds, baby not growing, and now dropping platelets.  "It's time, you'll have this baby tomorrow morning."

B stayed with me that night and we cried and imagined our baby.  Surgery prep started early, but we were already awake.  A nurse came in to start the magnesium sulfate, which I describe here.  Mag acts as a muscle relaxant, and after I stopped sweating and puking bile, I felt very calm.  B put on her gown and held my hand as I was wheeled to the OR.

The anesthesiologist was waiting for us, he asked me to sit on the table and put both my arms around B's shoulders.  "It will feel like bee stings" he said.  I was too relaxed to talk, but I thought, "I've totally got this!" having been stung several times by a wasp in my office with no ill-effects.  I lay on the table, relaxed and unable to see without my glasses.

I'm sure B was trying to crack some jokes, but I don't remember much until there was a flurry of movement and someone said "You have a daughter."  "Is she alive?" I asked.  "Yes, Yes" and a tiny pink bundle was flashed somewhere near my face.  I thought I heard a tiny mew.  "She's breathing on her own."  B ran back and forth between me and LB(G) managing to snap the first baby-in-a-plastic-bag (to conserve body heat) photos.

As the NICU nurses prepped LB, my team got louder and more energetic.  "Blood, I need blood!" became "WHERE'S THE DAMN BLOOD!"  Muttering, orders, cursing.  "Okay, we need to put you under, okay?  B, you'll need to step outside after she goes under." I tried to nod, thinking "yes, I don't really want to be awake for this." I breathed as deeply as I could, trying to make it go as fast as possible.

The next five hours or so are not my story, but what has been told to me.  Medically, my low platelet and fibroids combo had complicated delivery, and led to extensive bleeding requiring extensive surgery.  Thankfully the replacement blood did arrive in time.  Meanwhile, B was sent back to my room to wait with a friend who had just happened to come visit us.  She prayed the rosary with a Quaker, and sweated through a Code Blue not knowing that it wasn't me.  A nurse came in and sent her up to the NICU to see LB.  Born at 29weeks, weighing 2lbs 3oz, LB was holding her own.  B kangarooed her (I would share the lovely pics, but B isn't wearing a shirt), and took more pictures.

LB's first hour in the NICU

I came to around noon, looking and feeling rough.  It was hard to remember what had happened, but I did remember "you have a daughter," and I felt waves of joy and love.  A nurse, one of the ones who was both kind and efficient brought me a gingerale with a straw and it was the best thing I ever drank. B came bouncing into the room flashing pictures and telling me all about the NICU and about how she held LB.

In 1995, Julie and Hillary Goodridge had a daughter:

"When their daughter was born, she breathed in fluid and was sent to neonatal intensive care. Julie had a difficult caesarian and was in recovery for several hours. Even with a health care proxy, Hillary had difficulty gaining access to Julie and their newborn daughter at the hospital."[full text here]

As Julie lay in the OR, Hillary sought to see their daughter in the NICU.  She was turned away because  she had no legal relationship with the baby.  She waited until shift change and lied to a new nurse, saying she was her baby's aunt, and was allowed access. Hillary and Julie became the lead plaintiffs in the case Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health, the case that brought gay marriage to Massachusetts.

If not for Hillary and Julie, what would have happened to our LB?  Would she have laid alone in an isolette while B fought to get to her?  Would she have been denied that time sleeping against her mother's skin?  If things had gone worse, would she have died never being held by someone who loved her?

"We're married" were magic words for us, words that opened doors and produced wristbands.  These are the stories of unfortunate couples who possessed only lowly civil unions: Brittney Leon and Terri-Ann Simonelli, Janice Langbehn and Lisa Pond, Kathryn Wilderotter and Linda Cole, and Bill Flanigan and Robert Daniel.  This latter case is particularly sad, because Robert died alone after Bill was denied access to his hospital bed.  In each of these cases the couples were in a legal domestic partnership.

The sad fact is that "we're in a domestic partnership" is not a magic phrase.  Say domestic partnership and very few people know exactly what rights you possess. Say marriage and everyone knows you should be at your spouse's bedside.  In 2010, the federal government offered additional guidance to hospitals receiving some types of federal funds, telling hospitals that they must allow patients to designate their own visitors.  That's a step forward, however, at least one of the cases above occurred after 2010.  The workers at the hospital front desk don't necessarily follow changes in federal guidance, but they do know what marriage means.  Marriage means you get the bracelet.

I am not equipped to speak to matters of theology.  I have freely chosen not to know what, if anything, exists after this life.  I am living this life with love: the intense love I feel for my wife and daughter, the joy I feel for my friends and coworkers, for clerks and bus drivers and randos, the perplexity and fascination I feel for those who claim to love me, but would deny my daughter a mother's love.

as a big girl

Thanks to Mombian for hosting the 9th Annual Blogging for LGBTQ Families!

Books on my list

Jazz history and excellent illustrations

gay parent history

Pride in a picture book, what could be better

Small Mercies: Mothers' Day Edition

"Why is Mommy Special?: Because I like them (mom and mommy)"

If Mothers' Day had fallen a mere two weeks ago, LB's answer likely would have been: "I like Mommy, not Mama, just Mommy.  I like Mommy." But she's moved on.

A smartphone App for Queer Families

This piece from the New York Times "The New Old Age" blog caught my eye.  It describes the My Health Care Wishes app developed by the American Bar Association.  It lets you upload your advance directives that can then be accessed through your smartphone.  I'm intrigued.  This solution sounds much better than our current pile-of-papers-buried-in-the-closet system or the carry-your-docs-on-a-flashdrive option recommended by lawyerly types.

Many of us queer families are now of the married/2nd parent adoption/birth certificate level of official recognition.  But history has shown that it just takes that one hater in hospital intake to block access to a sick or dying loved one.  Of course you can demand access to hospital council, lie, or plead your case, but being a hospital patient or loved one of a patient is such a vulnerable position and you may have little time to work through official channels.  And, the comments on the blog post are filled with cases where paperwork was explicitly ignored.  Despite all that, having easy access to the documents we so carefully collected, when we most need them seems like a very good thing.

If I actually get it together to try this, I will report back.

From the Preschool Files

Yesterday LB woke up in a terrible mood.  She cried and fussed and windged like it was her job.  And as she lay prostrate on the stairs, overcome by the idea of putting on her socks, I said to B, "WHY IS SHE SUCH A HUGE CRAB!"  LB increased the volume screaming "I AM NOT A HUGE CRAP, I AM NOT!"  Awkward.  But, at least she wasn't yelling "Fuck you, and fuck her too" [NOTE: B just expressed concern that gentle readers might not realize that those are song lyrics from a song by the artist CeeLo Green.  Not to worry, we are not cursing each other out here at the cozy house, we are simply singing along to inappropriate pop songs.] or any of the other non-daycare-appropriate phases that are spoken, sung, and yelled around here.

The younger set has gotten hip to the fact that LB has two mommies. Her classmate Allen had a little conversation with me that went like this:

A: What's your name?
Me: Mary
A: Does LB have two moms?
Me: Yes, LB has a Mama and a Mommy.
A: Hank has two moms.
Me: Cool.

End scene

End then today from another kid:

J: What's your name?
Me: Mary
J: Does LB have a daddy?
Me: No, she doesn't
J: Why doesn't LB have a daddy or a sister or a brother
Me: Maybe she'll have a brother or sister some day

And from LB after one of our very few playdates:

LB: Why R has a daddy?
Me: Some kids have a daddy, you have a mommy and a mama
LB: ...and a grammy and a grandad and a Jojo (our dog)

Books that should be written

I picked up this little gem from the library sale cart.  It was more appealing to me as a historian than as lesbian mom.  Zack's Story was published in 1996, and it's crazy to think that was almost 20 years ago.  At the company store, you can buy a new copy of this book for $119.00 or a used copy for 1 cent. 

1996.  B was a Sophomore at a Catholic high school, listening to Gansta rap, playing sports, etc. I was probably on my second break from college (not counting a "gap year," which at the time was just called "not going to college").  I was living in Boston with a bunch of people, working a crappy job, going to shows, drinking beer, eating tofu pot pie.  DOMA vaguely registered with me as yet another Clinton betrayal.  I had been a Rock-the-Vote-er in 1992, and Clinton's myriad betrayals (particularly on welfare "reform" and Don't Ask/Don't Tell) shaped my political self.  I kept voting in major elections, but Obama was the the first major party candidate I voted for after Clinton. 

Gay marriage did allow me to graduate from college.  I worked a minor scam, claiming to be gay married in order to live off campus, and therefore could afford my last two years of school.  Otherwise, gay marriage didn't mean much to me, I never planned to get marriage-having no interest in being bourgeois.  Ideologically, I'm still in that place, but live intervenes in one's non-bourgeois fantasies.  I was once talking to a woman who was a former Black Panther at a faculty dinner.  She told me "People your age, you can't understand.  We thought, we KNEW, the Revolution was about to begin-it was going to happen.  You don't save for retirement when you're planning the Revolution.  And here I am."

Zack's Story is a nice book.  The text is wordy for my taste, and the photos are old enough to be dated, but not old enough to be vintage, but it is nicely written.  I don't think LB will ever read this book, but I'm happy to have it for my collection.

I'd gone to the library looking for books about race and parenting.  I ordered from the library The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism, although I think it's a book that many people have issues with-I wanted to check it out from myself.  The next book that came up was one published in 1929 that I used for my dissertation.  Nothing I found in the library system was really what I was looking for-more of a handbook about how to build coalitions among diverse groups of parents across lines of class, ethnicity, race, and language.  How do you do that?  If anyone out there has resources to suggest, I'd love to hear about them.

Talking about Terrible Things (with young people)

I read this post, "When do we teach our kids about hate," over at VillageQ with interest.  Historical hate is pretty much my bread and butter.  Today I spent a couple hours researching the derivation of an antiquated used racial slur.  And as a teacher, a big part of my job has been introducing students to terrible events in history.

So maybe I should be pro-"teach all the hate and teach it now."  I remember as a little girl growing up in New Hampshire, meeting another little (brown) girl on the beach and playing with her.  She told me that she was afraid of the Ku Klux Klan, who were bad men who would come out of the woods.  I wasn't afraid because that had no meaning for me.  So there's the problem of telling children things that will make them afraid.  In some situations fear can be protective, but if your children aren't in danger, perhaps they can be spared that fear.

But as we teach our children only the fears closest to them, fear becomes an unequal burden.  Some children need to know that when you hear a loud noise you hit the floor, and others don't.  Some children need to hear that "sometimes people don't like people who are different and want to hurt them," while for other children that lesson feels as irrelevant as the Klan was to my eight-year-old self.

The fear issue is a big one, but, for me, I think the larger issue is one of honesty.  I'm all for honesty, but I don't think honesty means telling kids a lot at a young age, rather I think it requires waiting for a pretty high level of emotional and intellectual maturity before discussing really difficult topics.  When we try to explain terrible things to young people who aren't able to comprehend them, our instincts to remove the brutality and despair are so strong that we end up telling a dishonest version.  Or we tell a story that kids can understand in the way that they would understand a horror movie, but not on a deeper level.

I suppose there are people who teach college courses without crying.  I am not one of them.  And I'm not alone.  I've been in a lot of classrooms with crying professors, and I think for many of us that is a deliberate vulnerability among those who teach difficult subjects.  If you can look at the photos from Without Sanctuary, or watch children being deliberately attacked with police dogs without crying maybe you're not fully understanding that this is what real people chose to do to other real people.  That's a devastating lesson.  It may never be fully understandable, but to even begin to comprehend requires some time on this earth.

And having said that, sometimes life catches us and we have to have conversations our kids aren't ready for.  I can understand why a black parent in Chicago in 1955 would send her child to view the body of Emmett Till.  The horror of that viewing was burned into the minds of a generation, and they turned it into action.  I'm more likely to have to explain to LB why there are small children holding "God hates fags!" signs.  Hopefully by the time she can read I'll have a better answer than "haters gonna hate."

Year of the Gayby

It's been a pretty good year to be a gay person and a gay parent.

Gayby with bear.

For us, gay marriage is now available in our former home city and our current home city.  Gay folks are getting a lot of public support from our straight allies (thank you Mr. President).  We're watching the Supreme Court with a not unhopeful eye. The Boy Scouts have acknowledged that gay kids are people worthy of inclusion, even if they think gay adults are sketchy pervs.  Cue rainbow-hued unicorns gamboling through fields of non-GMO wildflowers...

So what's not to like.  Sadly for me, much of my professional training was dedicated to the following statement: "Never trust a narrative of progress."  By which I mean, if you were living in the cosmopolitan, multicultural paradise of Sarajevo in 1989, life was good, and if there were some hints of danger, really, what could go wrong in such a place?  By 1992 Sarajevans found out.  History is replete with similar examples.  But my point isn't to get all apocalyptic on you, or even to sell you hand knitted go-bags made from sustainable yak fur now available in my etsy shop (jk!).

My point is that we still have a long road ahead and its obstacles are unequally distributed.  As a queer lefty, I've heard a fair amount of talk that gay marriage only serves the gay elite.  Even though I have my own ideological issues with marriage, I disagree with that argument.  On average gay families are poor and more vulnerable than our straight counterparts, and marriage can be a cheap way to secure some basic rights.

But marriage won't solve all our problems.  As a community of queer people we are vulnerable.  Despite our current popularity (collectively we are the geeky girl who had a makeover and got asked out by the captain of the football team), we are still an unequal, and sometimes distrusted and despised minority.  This inequality is particularly burdensome for those who also occupy some other vulnerable category(s).  Now that we are riding high, we should make this the year of the QUEER and old, and disabled, and young, and chronically ill, and undocumented, and incarcerated, and poor, and don't forget our trans friends and allies (and I just couldn't fit person first language into that sentence).  And don't forget that gay people face many mental health problems, particularly high rates of addiction.  Even for those of us who don't fit into a category that adds additional complications to our gay experience, life can throw us into situations that make us vulnerable.

For our family, our strongest sense of vulnerability came in the days before and after LB's birth.  She came before our paperwork was signed and I was very sick.  I never asked my half-formed questions about what would happen to our family in a variety of medical worst case scenarios.  I had been in the hospital for ten days, when the doctor finally said it was time for LB to come.  I was 29w and had been desperately holding on, but by that moment I felt so sick that I new that it truly was time.  We went into the birth counting on the kindness of strangers to protect our family because that was all we had.

I was unconscious for about five hours after LB's birth.  In this, our experience was similar to Hillary and Julie Goodridge, the lead plaintiffs in Goodridge et al. v. Dept. of Health (the Massachusetts gay marriage case).  While her partner was unconscious, Hillary Goodridge was denied access to her baby daughter in the NICU.  She only gained access by lying and saying she was the baby's aunt.  In our case, B. was quickly sent up to the NICU.  She was the first family member to hold LB and did kangaroo care while I was still in recovery.  The hospital staff treated her like the mom that she is.

Why were things different? Broader social acceptance of gay people, a progressive teaching hospital, a recent lawsuit in our city against a different hospital that denied a gay man access to his dying partner?  Whatever the reason, I was thankful, but also pained and saddened by the thought that our girl could have been born and died alone.  What if she had been sicker?  What if B. hadn't been allowed in?

Anyone who's gay can be gay and vulnerable.  As we seek to built on these recent victories, I hope we can also find ways to share the burdens.  And for me, personally, that is a lofty idea that I'm not quite sure how to put into practice.  Suggestions solicited.

Check out the many other posts for Blogging for LGBT Families Day at Mombian.

Really Gay Parenting

I'm not sure that my mom realizes that rainbows are a gay thing, but she always manages to buy LB some rainbow items, so rock on my little gayby.

And that's really all the gay content I've got.  It's a good thing, not because B and I strive to be aggressively normative, but because gay is more of a parenting issue when we're vulnerable, and if this moment is not very gay it's because things are going well.

Not-very-gay gay parenting is a luxury I know that we are lucky to experience.  We are blue-state, legally married, fully documented, and dealing with a minimum of state interventions and experts.  It seems like there should be more ways to share the wealth.

After writing this, I opened the paper and read the sad story of the murder of Mark Carson.

"...those conceived by passionate, heterosexual coupling"

Life after gay marriage: babies lie with Elmos, Elmos lie with kittycats, etc.

And suddenly, thanks to the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage and their amicus brief, I have a new phrase for my SCOTUS drinking game.

The briefs that are anti-DOMA and Prop 8 have reminded me that marriage is fundamentally a conservative institutions, something I have been trying hard to forget.  The brief from the American Historical Association reminds readers that for our orthodox Protestant ancestors in Colonial America, marriage was a civil institution rather than a religious one.  The AHA also examines the history of couverture (a married woman has no legal status as an individual) and its eventual rejection as a legal doctrine in the US.  The fact that Protestants in early America shaped their ideas of marriage in accordance with their hatred of the Papists and the fact that we have become enlightened enough to allow married women their own legal identities really doesn't leave me feeling that high on the institution of marriage.

On the other side the arguments are far ranging, most seem to reflect a lack of experience with actual LGBT people.  For example the brief submitted by the Concerned Women of America explains why gay people and not "politically powerless," a designation that might allow gay people to be considered a protected class of people.  Apparently, now that we've won a few political victory and President Obama is out and proud as our friend, we don't need any additional protections.  CWA also tries to make the case that LGBT people are rich political elites.  Yes, there are some rich and politically powerful gay people, but the argument that we are all rich and powerful and therefore can't be considered an oppressed class or minority group seems to drift toward popular characterizations of Jews by anti-semites.  Never mind that most statistical data suggests exactly the opposite, that LGBT families are on average poorer than their straight counterparts.

The brief from the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage raises issues that I find more discussion worthy.  One interesting argument raised by the CPM is that "man and woman marriages" produce "natural families" that do not require state intervention or supervision.  The implication is that with the rise of alternative families, the "natural family," which I will call the straight family, will face heightened scrutiny and intervention from the state.  It is certainly true that straight people can establish their families much more easily than other families.  In states with common law marriage, a man and woman can simply hold themselves out as married and they are married.  They will likely need to apply for birth certificates for their children, but no one will challenge them in this process, even if they show up in an ER with no paperwork.

In contrast, gay families depend on the government to legitimize our relationships.  However, I would argue that we only require this government intervention because we are an oppressed minority group whose families are seen an illegitimate.  If we were not a stigmatized group, we could simply use the common law model and declare ourselves families and act accordingly.

I think CPM's argument is much smarter and point to a much deeper philosophical divide than the many varieties of "God hats fags."  CPM hits a libertarian/natural rights/common sense conservatism that is very powerful in American culture, but hopefully it is too subtle to get much attention.

Edited to add below, because I had to leave to go do daycare pickup.

In many of the pro-DOMA/pro-Prop 8 briefs, the children of gay people are afterthoughts, asides, and oddities.  In the minds of the authors of these briefs gay life is a huge dance party of rich white gay may in boxer briefs with a few darker, poorer, female-er gays standing on the sidelines with our kids (precise method of conception, and passion therein, unknown).  The reality is we're here, we're queer with kids, and there will only be more of us in the future.  And our kids, mostly, but not always, conceived by means other than passionate, heterosexual coupling, need some sort of uniform recognition of their parentage.  We need that recognition in all fifty states and we need it to not cost thousands of dollars.  For straight married couples, the state presumes that the possibility of shared biological parentage establishes parentage.  The state does not require mandatory paternity tests to establish parentage, and in cases where a man parents and then finds out he is not actually the biological parent of his child, the law often still views him as a parent, with all the attached rights and responsibilities.  While I'm not comfortable with the idea that marriage should be required to establish parentage, that seems like a move backward, marriage should be one means by which gay couples can establish their intention to parent together.

Gay Parents and Health Care Professionals

Recently the Huffington Post published this essay titled "The Question You Should Never Ask a Lesbian Mom." Of course it was about the infamous "who is the real mom" question. That question sucks, so does going to one of LB's appointments with B and having a nurse/PA/doctor only interact with one of us, while completely ignoring the other adult in the room. In the essay the author describes her son's surgery, and the multiple ways that health care providers denied her son's family structure.  I would feel better about the world if I never read the internet comments on news stories, but I can't help but look.  The comments on this essay were largely of the "Why don't you just relax and get over it, it's not like someone beat you with a crowbar because you're a lesbian."  And yes, I would rather have someone ask me "Are you her real mom?" than have someone beat me with a crowbar, but that imagined choice seems to miss the point.

I feel the petty insults of the world.  B and I spent time and money formalizing our relationship as mothers to our daughter, and it smarts to have someone waltz into an exam room and assume that I am my daughter's grandma or a random +1 who just happens to attend medical appointments with a child and her mother.  Those mistakes are small and easily corrected, but they point to the potential for higher stakes problems.  At a well-child appointment or a developmental appointment we can clarify or complain, but what about the night when we run through the emergency room doors?  What about the intake clerk who doesn't see our family as real?  For me, like many other gay parents, that fear turns to anger when I encounter life's slights and misunderstandings.

In my taxonomy of acceptance, the most accepting health care workers are those with long experience working in urban hospitals.  They save their ire for the high, addicted, hopeless, and, of course, teen moms, while stable, well-spoken lesbian moms are just another variation of normal.  The worst are med students, residents, and social work students.  I realize we all need to learn, but sitting with my daughter in the NICU or waiting for the results of her developmental evaluation are really not good times for me to be someone else's teachable moment.  It seems like there should be an orientation session, or at least a pamphlet called: "Shit you shouldn't say to racial/ethnic/religious/sexual minorities,"  but maybe that's the section when people duck out for a coffee. 

My very practical solution to this problem would be a little slip of paper: a little voluntary form, preferably in florescent color, that would say "Patient" and "Who else is attending this appointment" and "relationship to patient" that we could choose to fill out and would then be attached to some prominent place on LB's file.  If I had a dollar for every time I've though "Why did I just spend 15 minutes filling out paperwork, if you aren't even going to fucking look at it!" I would definitely have enough money to buy B a six-pack of her latest fav microbrew.  But I realize that people sometimes don't have time to look through a whole file as they walk in to see a patient, or the records may be unclear, or they may be dealing with parents who are closeted or partially closeted, or they may not want to come off as too nosy, or they may not want to assume that a sister/aunt/case worker is a lesbian lover.  Hospitals and doctor's offices need to come up with a simple way to let families define themselves and share what they feel comfortable sharing.  It would make life easier for gay parents [and as pointed out by a friend, gay parents can also be single parents, foster parents, kinship caregivers, etc.] and our kids, and it would make life less awkward for health care providers.

Marriage: Love and Contracts

"Let me check my schedule." I think that's how our engagement began.

Married life over the past 24 hours has involved shifts taking care of an up-all-night sick toddler, cleaning up vomit, and administering nebulizers.  Thankfulness that I will not have to travel away from B or LB for the next ten days or so.  Appreciation of the cozy house.  Debates over likely outcomes of a Supreme Court decision on DOMA.  Coffee at 6:00am, dinner at 6:00pm.  A good and simple married life.

As a feminist and a hater of the wedding industrial complex, I never planned to marry and I've never been particularly invested in the social approval that comes with marriage.  Then when B and I had been together for five years or so, Maine put marriage on the ballot and we started thinking that a little civil marriage ceremony at the courthouse, with a few friends and family members, and a nice dinner afterward, might work for us.  And then the people voted down marriage equality in Maine.  And with that rejection, we became more invested in marriage.  We were living in Baltimore when gay marriage was approved in D.C., we decided to go for it, and since our schedules were clear that first day they were offering licenses, we thought we might as well hustle down on the train in case they suddenly changed the rules.

We were couple #81 (I think) on the first day that D.C. offered marriage licenses to same sex couples, and it was a fun and happy experience.  People were giving out cupcakes and flowers.  The couples waiting in line were a diverse group, men and women, elders and youths (including some who looked a little too young by my standards), people of many races and ethnicities, those in business formal and those in sweatsuits, people from the District, from Maryland, and from Virginia.  The line was long and slow, but spirits were high.  We married a few weeks later at the courthouse with our parents present and everyone cried.

Eight months later we had a baby (she was two and half months early if you're counting).  Our marriage was, in no small part, an effort to ensure all possible protections for that future child.  Marriage was a public declaration of our love for each other, and our responsibilities to each other, but we could have made those declarations privately.  I've never felt that our love for each other needed state sanction, or that I needed the state to tell me our relationship was legitimate, but the legal rights and responsibility provided by official recognition of our marriage have been very important.

I really admire legal theorists like Nancy Polikoff, who point out the structured inequality embedded in a system where marriage provides access to rights and benefits.  However, I don't think academics like Polikoff recognize the situation on the ground.  Marriage (if you can get one) is cheap and easy.  It provides protections to gay couples who lack the financial means or background in the law to cobble together those protections by other means.  I'm doubtful about the cultural good arguments for marriage-that marriage will solve all our social problems of poverty, crime, and whatever-but I do think that when you tell someone, say the clerk at the admitting desk in the hospital, that you are married, the word carries a cultural power that forces people to acknowledge your relationship even if they don't want to do so.

I'm curious to see where the fight for same-sex marriage will take us.  I hope it will help us create a country that is more inclusive and equitable to all, and not a world where singleness is vilified and marriage is exalted.  I fear that, as anti-marriage activists have said publicly, the next fight against same-sex marriage will be uglier, a return to the worst homophobic stereotypes and threats.  Either way, life at the cozy house marches on with our little piece of political embedded in the personal.

I'm writing this post for the Love Makes a Family Blog Carnival, which can be found here.

To go directly to the next post, click here.

Mamas

LB is in the midst of a modest language explosion, which is incredibly fun.  She knows she has a mama and a mommy, however, she calls us both mama and collectively we are the mamas.  This weekend my parents were visiting and she also called grandmom and granddad "mama."  LB definitely uses mama in several ways.  Mama refers to me and to B specifically, and even if she uses the same word, she knows exactly who she wants.  Mama also refers more generically to grown up or maybe grown up caregiver.  I know that she has called her old DCP "mama," but would also call her by her name.  LB can point out mamas and babies in books, which is pretty simple: mamas are big and babies are little.  It occurred to me when LB kept pointing at my dad and saying "mama!" that she doesn't have a language for men.

LB has a gramps and a granddad, and she also has a few friends she likes very much who are men, the man friend of her old DCP, the husband of her babysitter, and several neighbors.  But we have never talked about these people as a category.  If we knew these people through LB's friends, it would be natural that they would be "daddies" or "papas," but they are just a random assortment of people who happen to be men.  So, without meaning to, we seem to have realized the lesbian feminist separatist dream.  I'm sure Paul Ryan is choking on his communion wine as I admit publicly that my gayby has no language for men.  Without language, does a category of men exist for LB? Do men have any power in her world? I told B that it's probably time for us to head out for Wimmin's Land to keep this thing going.  Instead, being the hopelessly conventional types that we are, I expect that within the next month LB will know both "granddad" and "gramps" and all men will be some variation on those words.

LB in her new "boys" shoes.

Roy and Silo Broke Up

That's what I learned this weekend.  If you read a lot of children's book, or follow trends in book challenges (bans), or are a gay parent, you probably know that Roy and Silo are the two penguin dads of Tango in the picture book And Tango Makes Three.

Apparently, Silo abandoned Roy and took up with a lady penguin, who he has since left.  Roy joined a group of single male penguins.  When Tango reached maturity she also found a lady penguin to keep her company-one of a different penguin species.  So, should the author of Tango updated the book's notes to reflect these facts?  Can we tell kids a story about non-monogamous, bisexual, cross-speciesist penguins? And do they want that story?

At the conference where I learned about Roy and Silo, there was a strong anti-anthropomorphism sentiment. The problem wasn't so much characters that are human in animal skins-like Frances the badger, but those characters and books that blur the lines between human behavior and motivation and animal thought and motivation.  Watership Down got some strong condemnation, because apparently the author presented rabbit colonies as naturally patriarchal, while knowing full well that rabbits are actually matriarchal.  The problem being that those  patriarchal rabbits were made to seem natural and biologically determined.  The takeaway: simplifying nature to fit our own political and cultural projects is dishonest and does a disservice to child readers.

As gay parents navigating popular culture it's easy to get sucked into the normalcy trap.  If the choice is between complete silence about families like ours, or gay druggy satanist penguin families, we'll take the monogamous gay penguin book and love it.  We are normal people raising children in a culture that sometimes sees us as abnormal, unnatural, perverted, etc.  So shouldn't books about and for families like ours make us seem as natural/normal as possible?  The dangers of normalcy are many.  There is the social realism problem.  For examples, you should definitely click over and look at the Sweet Juniper blog, where the author has a series of posts tagged "terrifying Nixon Era children's literature."  I think the book I Wish Daddy Didn't Drink So Much is my favorite in the series.  It's not that I think alcoholism is necessarily an inappropriate topic for a kid's book, but rather that hyper-realistic problem book genre offends my aesthetic sensibilities.  Don't the children of alcoholics deserve lovely, lively, vibrant books?  Must the kids from "problem" family always have the dull books?  It seems like we should be able to have beautiful, cozy, charming, fantastical books about all kinds of families and all kinds of lives-even the lives of bisexual, non-monogamous penguins. 

I'm also uncomfortable embracing the status of a "privileged" minority.  Should all the gay family books be about middle-class, educated, white, married families like ours-because that makes us more palatable to the world?  I don't want "our books" to be limited to those that are a close approximation to idealized straight families, but I suppose LB doesn't really need to read Mommy Drinks a Bottle of Wine and Cries, While Mama Checks Out Hotties at the Club (not a true story, because our book would be titled Mommy and Mama Watch Grimm Together and Fall Asleep), or My Adoption Day! On Which Mommy Had to Pay a Large Amount of Money to Adopt My Ass Because the System Fucking Sucks.  But neither does she need to be confined to the gay version of Dick and Jane (and she could also do without that pathetic ending to the Harry Potter series).  A friend of mine is one mom in a two-mom family that is also racially mixed, and includes adoptive and foster children some of whom have disabilities.  She cannot find books that reflect their experience as a family, and likely if she did that book would focus only on their differentness.

One of the learned scholars at the conference where I learned about Roy and Silo made the point that the most important thing about children's literature is that it should be multiple and varied.  Kids should encounter a rich world of words and pictures.  We should be creative enough to offer our children a world of children's books that includes their usual and their unusual-and can find the beauty and excitement in any reality.