Lesbian Behaving Badly (in a non-sexy way)

So much Lesbians Behaving Badly news.  I believe the term LBB was adopted by LGBT lawyers to describe cases where lesbian moms attempt to use a often homophobic legal system to deny a partner (and mom) custody rights. I've previously complained about this issue here.  This weekend, the NYT had a long investigative article about Lisa Miller's abduction of her own daughter in an attempt to deny the child's other mother, Janet Jenkins, access to the child.  Legally, this case was positive for gay families, with even a Virginia court eventually ruling that Vermont courts jurisdiction to rule in favor of custody rights for Jenkins, however, because of the abduction Jenkins lost everything.

In the Bates v. Bates case out of Georgia, another ruling in a lesbian custody dispute made the future of second parent adoption in that state look very shaky (thanks Nicole Bates).  This editorial in the GA Voice explains why these cases have the potential to hurt all gay parents.  Sigh.

In happier LBB news, in this case from New Mexico, a lesbian mom whose partner sought to deny her custody will be allowed to try and prove that she is legally the child's mother through the doctrine of "holding out" as a parent-similar to the concept of Common Law marriage, by acting publicly as the child's mother, she has legally become the child's mother.  However, this case only allows her to move forward with her claim, so she still has a long road ahead.

A Little Nursery

I love the rowhouse that we rent here in Baltimore.  It was built in 1915, and the owner did a really nice rehab that retained some of the historic elements, while making it more functional for how we live now.  LB has a nursery made up of two little rooms, the back room was added on sometime after the house was built and still has what would have originally been the exterior window.

My aunt gave me my great-grandmother's rocking chair, which means so much to me and is surprisingly comfortable

Ikea crib, repainted dresser, and the world's most dangerous sharks

The little rocker was built by my great-grandfather and we call it the baby electric chair

Love the built in shelves

Seen and Heard

From a gaggle of little girls playing on the sidewalk: "Okay, you're the mom, but you don't know that we're all zombies."

On the t-shirt of an older woman walking down the street, "I break hearts and wallets."

I'm trying to keep myself laughing so I don't get hung up on the insults of life, both mundane (why are Baltimore cab drivers so shitty, and none of them even seem to live here) and profound (simultaneously watching a documentary about the Olympics and gentrification in the East End of London, while looking a photos of a century of redevelopment/gentrification/urban renewal in Baltimore).

Don't let the world get you down little Ladybug

More Preemie Reviews: Little Man: A Documentary Film

Badger was away this weekend trying to find us a new home, so I hung out with a baby, ate a chicken box, and watched the six part BBC documentary Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State.  Let it be noted that I did not do all of these thing simultaneously, and I may be a sick fuck.

I also watched the documentary Little Man.  The film was made by a lesbian mom with a son by surrogacy, who was a micro preemie.  This film was incredibly painful to watch.  I've been watching a fair number of documentaries recently because we got a Roku, so I can watch any streaming Netflix content on our TV.  After watching those films, I've decided I don't really like the first person documentary.  As a genre, it's just too raw and emotional.  I know that some people really like that unmediated quality, but I prefer documentaries that are more measured and analytical.  Little man was very close to death multiple times in the film.  Those episodes are presented quite graphically (they filmed while he was in the NICU), and that was hard to watch, but harder was the relationship between his two moms.  I searched to see if they are still together, and was very surprised to see that they are.  In the film, their relationship was in the land somewhere between non-existant and totally dysfunctional.  Their conflict was centered around the fact that one of the moms had wanted to terminate the pregnancy when they found out that the baby was likely to have serious health issues, and the other mom insisted that they would continue the pregnancy.  After the baby was born, the filmmaking mom continued to want a high level of interventions, while the other mom did not.  Seeing the two of them react to each other from a place of anger, distance, and perceived superiority was just so upsetting.  I don't know how B and I would have survived without each other, and I don't know how we would have a relationship now if we had failed each other in such a fundamental way during LB's early life.  Overall, the film left me queasy and unsettled.  I think some of the ideas embedded in the film about neo-natal ethics, family, and relationships is probably quite interesting, but I was too close to some of the subject matter to be able to consider those bigger ideas.

I definitely would not recommend this film for recent preemie parents.

"Home is Wherever I'm with You"

The heat broke.

And a baby watched the rain with glee.  The adults are busy trying to organize ourselves for the big move.  Baltimore has been a decent city to us for the past five years.  I love the way this city looks.  I love the rowhouse with its endless variations on a theme, and Baltimore has particularly good rowhouses.  Sometimes I'll see a block that is a mix of natural brick, painted primary colors, painted pastels, and even some formstone, and it the right light it is amazingly lovely.  Our neighbors are good quirky people, and I don't think it would be possible to be pretentious and live here, at least not in this part of the city.

And then there's the part that sucks.  Like many people here, we live close to home.  That is we shop and socialize within blocks of our house.  Our little piece of the city is functional, although I seemed to remember being shocked by the disfunctionality of basic city services when we moved here from Chicago.  "The City that Works," Baltimore is not.  Currently there is a massive water main break downtown, which is just one little piece of a crumbling infrastructure.  And there are the vacants, in some parts of the city blocks and blocks of them.  I've seen a lot of crumbling city landscapes, but Baltimore is such a small city to house so much destruction.

With those crumbling landscapes come suffering people.  I remember being on the bus on the morning after the Obama election, and everyone was joyous.  Three different men stood to offer me a seat.  The mood was buoyant, and I was just as happy as everyone else.  I looked around at the usual crowd of decent, happy people with broken bodies that told the stories of their hard lives, and I knew that Baltimore wasn't something that Obama, or any man, could fix.  I learned the party line that cities break because people make choices, therefore people can make other choices an unbreak them.  But when I look at Baltimore I just don't know how that will happen.  It is possible to fix this place, but there isn't enough will or enough money.

In order to function as a person of privilege in the city, you have to harden yourself.  You have to create distance so that young looking prostitute, that lady who is high out of her mind, that dude with no legs who doesn't look like he's doing so well, is not your problem.  I once read a blog post by a woman living in rural Virginia, who described sitting in a coffee shop in Manhattan and watching as all the other patrons studiously ignored a young child begging for money.  She used the incident to contrast the christlike generosity of (Christian) rural folk, with the hard (secular) amorality of city folk.  I guess if you see one begging child a year, you are highly motivated to help that child.  If everything outside your door is a gristly seething mass of cursing, addiction, and weeping sores, you learn to turn away.  That's why I saw two (white) junkies (mom and daughter, I think) fighting on the street and laughed.  Then I realized I had become that person who sees two living human beings and laughs because they're junkies fighting on the street.  I know so many good, interesting people here, people who want this city to live, but the city fights us at every turn.

"I am affronted!"

So says Tabitha Twitchit at the end of The Tale of Tom Kitten.  That line always cracks us up.  I loved Beatrix Potter books as a kid and still love them, but now I also realize how strange they are in the context of the early 21st century.  They are full of pinafores, coal scuttles, nurseries, and small animals being baked into pies (some while still alive).  How did I make sense of that as a child?  Pooh is even more confounding.  I read part of Winnie-the-Pooh aloud to LB in the NICU and B was convinced that either 1) I was high as a kite, or 2) I was reading it wrong.  Something about the shifting narrative voice made it completely nonsensical as a read aloud, and the entire series seems to have a strangely modernist style that I never noticed before.

Apparently, as a child, one of my most favorite books was the The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings (1931).  As an adult, I realize that this book is a heartwarming ode to the value of conformity, which seems distinctly at odds with most of the other lessons of my childhood, and the person I've become.  My mother despises this book to this day, but she read it to me again and again.  I guess I need to remember that when LB wants me to read her crap books about princesses and fairies.

I loved playing records on my parents' hifi when I was little and I've been trying to build LB a little music mix based on my favorites.  We've been listening to some '70s soul and light rock, and I added "Deportee," "City of New Orleans,""Do-Re-Mi,""If I Were a Carpenter," and "Oh Happy Day."  I think it's a good mix, but the child will dance to anything.

The little rabbit who realized just in a nick of time that only homos, communists, and other asocials want red wings

Even more books about preemies

I've previously reviewed books about preemies here and here.

If you have been looking for books about preemies, you have probably come across the following books: The Preemie Primer: A Complete Guide for Parents of Premature Babies-From Birth through the Toddler Years and Beyond by Jennifer Gunter, MD and Preemies: The Essential Guide for Parents of Premature Babies by Linden, Paroli and Doron.  B. bought both of these books after LB was born.  According to B., both were disappointing because they lacked medical detail, and she would have preferred having a medical textbook about premature infants (this is, after all, the woman who was mistaken for a NICU worker for an embarrassingly long period of time by a group of med students).

I only wanted medical information on a need to know basis, but since I was so forgetful, it was nice to have a reference at home.  I think if I had to choose one of these books, I would choose The Preemie Primer because I found it better organized for my needs.  The Preemie Primer is divided by bodily systems (heart, lungs, eyes, etc.), while Preemies!  is divided by time period (first day, first week, hospital, home).  Since I was usually looking for information specific to LB's particular medical conditions, it was easier to find the specific information I was looking for in The Preemie Primer.  While these books can be useful as you try and formulate questions you want to ask the doctors and nurses in the NICU, I found it better to get my information directly from the NICU.  I suspect that the information in these book quickly becomes out of date, and the explanations lack the nuance you get from a conversation from someone working in the field.  LB's NICU was a teaching hospital, and our conversations with her doctors often when something like "Some studies have show A and some studies have shown B.  At this point we really don't have definitive evidence.  My preference is to do X for the following reasons, but some of my colleagues choseY for the following reasons, it's really a matter of preference."  Good doctors who you trust are worth a million books.  Seeing doctors and nurses at work in the NICU made me realize the mix of science and art that goes into caring for babies. Preemies can be so complicated and their symptoms often don't have clearcut causes, and no book can really explain that complexity, so the purpose of the books are to provide some basic information and some sense of control.