Liminal Space

It's Tuesday, so I must be in Baltimore.  I left the house at 4:30am, and as I was catching the bus up to work at 9:00am I realized I'd already been up for almost 5 hours.  So if nothing I write makes any sense, just keep that schedule in mind.  Getting up at 4 really sucks, and it disrupts B and LB as well.  By the time I get to Baltimore, I usually feel okay, but this is not so fun.

On the upside, I think all this coming and going is making LB much more aware of us.  She seems much more aware of the mamas, and wants to know where we are, and gets upset when we leave.  Not always fun, but so mature. 

Last week we, that is all of us at gate B19 in BWI, watched the debates.  It was an americana moment as we all worked together to figure out how to turn on the sound on the t.v.  Then there was an arriving honor flight (flights of WWII and Korean War Era veterans who fly to BWI to begin tours of D.C.). So the night was spent watching, clapping, watching, clapping, etc. 

Tonight (Wednesday) we are delayed again, waiting for our pilot.  So far I've seen one woman who refused to board her flight as the doors were closing because she lost her pillow.  She lost her pillow because she left it unattended while she went and got food.  Once she found the pillow, she didn't seem to understand why she couldn't get on her flight.  Then there was another unattended bag. 

I don't really mind airports, but my body feels so wrecked from the traveling, and poor sleep, and traveling.

Axes and Fisher Cats, Oh My!

Hell Month is over!  We are all living together under the same, very nice, roof.  Dogs and baby have been transported north, as has a house worth of stuff.  It's such a relief to be settled here, but I have also begun extreme commuting back to Baltimore or one or two days a week, and LB is picking up lots of nice new cold bugs.  Hell Month has been replaced by the mid-level stress that we like to call life.

Providence is a little different than Baltimore.  Sadly, there are fewer feral cats to meet on our walks.  I don't know that I've seen even one outside cat since we've been here.  On our first visit to the farmer's market we saw a man carrying an axe.  Admittedly, he was just taking it to get it sharpened, but still, I think there must be an ordinance against that in Baltimore.  The next day there was report of a fisher cat attack on the front page of the ProJo.  Basically, we're living in the country.

Horsey Set

When I went to pick June up from daycare, one of her friends? colleagues? fellow attendees? told me, "Daddy bought bananas and I petted the horsey."  Baltimore still has a few street peddlers who sell fruits and vegetables from horse-drawn carts.  Here they are called "Arabbers," which is pronounced with a hard A like A-rab-ers.  All the Arabbers I see are Black, but I assume the name is a holdover from a time when there were a lot of Syrian peddlers in the city.  Arabbers are definitely an interesting and unusual feature of Baltimore, although much of their produce usually looks rotten, and many people say their horses are poorly treated.  Some dogooder public health types did have the idea to work with Arabbers to try and address the food desert issue in the city.  But, the Arabbers were a little to independent to be amenable to that sort of control. 

I'm not going anywhere with this information, I just wanted to make sure that I remember this after we move.  And today I saw the Arabbers coming down the street and heard them singing their calls, which I still can't understand at all.

One week until we are all back together, and this is what we're up to.

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.

Put Your Baby to Work Day

Badger day 8/28 (over 1/4 of the way!)

We went on walks, went to the park, played in the sink, and cleaned the pack n' play.  LB is eating much better now that I am giving her less milk.  She's been going to sleep fairly easily, but she has terrible tantrums when she starts to get tired.

It's hard to believe that we thought she was so big in this picture.

Kiss Goodnight!

Badger day 7/28

Chill baby!

Badger day 6/28