"Good Morning America How Are You?"

One of my New Year resolutions was to play more music at home, so today I played LB a mix* of songs from my own childhood.  Last week I was talking to B about the fact that we listen to a lot of music we grew up with, but I don't remember my own parents ever playing the Andrews Sisters or Glenn Miller or whatever music they grew up with.  While my parents are conventional people in many ways, the embraced the zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s, left their families, grew their hair, bought a farm, and raised goats and geese and a child.  I was a child of the hippie years.  I drank raw goat's milk from our goat, wore hand-embroidered linen clothes made by my mom, and played with wooden toys carved by my dad.

Those years shaped the way I think about myself, and as a result, I think of myself as a much more natural and crunchy person than I actually am.  B and I run a materially conventional household. We shop at the regular grocery store, buy pallets of stuff at Target, and our house could be a low-end IKEA showroom.  I've been taught to weave, quilt, knit, sew, grow food, can food, dry food, make cheese, forage, and dumpster dive.  Currently I use none of those skills.  Clearly I've made a choice, but I'm not quite sure when or why I did so, or rather, I'm not sure why things that matter somewhat to me in theory, don't matter very much at all in my practice.

Gay, of course, is the one area where B and I are in the vanguard (which is not to say there weren't people doing it decades-centuries?-ago, but to say that today it's a thing with new political and cultural possibilities). We are part of the gayby revolution, which doesn't feel particularly transgressive in our day to day.   Nevertheless, when LB looks back on her childhood, I think being the kid of gay moms in the aughts will be a significant part of her identity.  It will be up to her to decide how that experience will shape her life.

For now, LB is too busy to worry about all that.  She has babies to wash, and nebulizers treatments to complete.

*LB's Playlist

"Big Yellow Taxi"
"A Change is Gonna Come"
"City of New Orleans"
"Deportee"
"Do-Re-Mi"
"Everyday People"
"Fortunate Son"
"Here Comes the Sun"
"I Heard It through the Grapevine"
"I Shall Be Released"
"If I Were a Carpenter"
"Into the Mystic"
"No Woman No Cry"
"Oh Happy Day"
"Our House"
"Take Me Home Country Road"
"Teach Your Children"
"This Land is Your Land"
"Union Maid"
"Wild World"