.a new day.

I have to say that I woke up giddy with anticipation this morning.

 
I came out as a lesbian in 1995 at the age of thirteen, years after the outset of the AIDS epidemic, the year after Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was implemented, and the year before DOMA was signed into law. I witnessed the deaths of peers to bashing and suicide. I was in hot water with every high school principal I met ;-) And now, eighteen years later, I sit with my wife and son awaiting a certain something from the highest court in the nation (not validation, certainly, but a certain degree of recognition; of contrition, perhaps?). Because I came out so young, I’ve always felt a certain parallelism between my personal growth and that of the gay and lesbian movement. I’ve found comfort and camaraderie in the shared struggle for identity, for equality, and for a welcome place at the table of life.

 
I think of those millions who came before that are not now here to see this monumental shift. And I think of the millions who will come after to see a world that is beyond our current imaginings. And I think how lucky I am to be alive in history. Despite its challenges, I am so grateful to be here now.
And then I picture our children as young adults moving through a world that strives to be more and do more for its brothers and sisters. It’s an ideal, yes, but isn’t that what the living is for? I treasure the daily trudge to higher ground and more fertile dialogue as it’s masked in family, marriage, career, and activism.

 

legalities

So, big news. This month, while traveling, we were able to complete a second-parent adoption. I am now Bram’s equal, legal parent. The state we live in (but in which we did not/could not do second parent adoption) will have to reissue my son’s birth certificate with my name on it. His new birth certificate should arrive in the next two months. My name will be on the “father” line, but it will be there.

I can’t tell you where we went to make this happen without jeopardizing this process for future families. All I can say is that we were informed of a judge in another state who is taking advantage of a loophole in that state’s adoption code to grand second-parent adoptions to queer families in other states. $5,000 + travel expenses + the invasion of a home study + lots of emotional turmoil later and we are in possession of a legally-binding adoption decree.

We have been told to be very (read: extremely. read: painstakingly) cautious with this information. If word got out to the media, this loophole could easily be shut down. Or the judge’s life could be threatened. I want to write about it here, though, because I know we have readers whose families are legally vulnerable. If that’s you, please write to me and I’ll private message you with details. We need to be very careful with this information, but I don’t want to be so careful that I keep other families for such necessary protections. So, this is how we’re handling it. I also don’t want to be completely silent because: I’m a legal parent now! This is a big, big deal, and it doesn’t feel fair that I should have to keep that fact a secret.

There’s also been some fallout to all of this. It’s complicated emotionally, and that’s the kind of thing that I bring here. First of all, spending that kind of money after seven total rounds of TTC + a sickening amount of medical bills after losing EE has been hard on us. Then there’s the home study. Ours went great: our social worker was AMAZING, and she never treated this like anything but a formality. In fact, since this seemed like the perfect chance to open up our family to adoption (since we were paying for the home study anyway), she made our conversations very much about future placement, and less about Bram. Still, someone came into my home to see if I’m a fit parent for my own child. This feels (is) degrading. Then there’s traveling for the purposes of adopting your own son. And the vulnerability of standing there before judge and attorney feeling (even if sweetly, lovingly so) scrutinized. There’s the “congratulations” that abound afterwards, which make you feel both happy and somehow hurt because you’re being congratulated on something you never should have had to do. It feels sweet. It feels insulting.

I hope to the gods I don’t sound ungrateful because I am full of gratitude. My son will see my name on his birth certificate. And I got to fight for him, which I’d do a thousand times over. He’ll know that: that I am always always always willing to fight for him. If gods forbid, anything ever happened to J, my place as B’s mama would not be threatened. I can sleep at night (you know, when he lets me). This adoption will be part of our family’s narrative, and I [mostly] love that fact. My wife was so sweet on the stand; she called me a “born mom” when asked if I was a good mother. Still, she was asked if I was a good mother. On the stand. In a courtroom. This is so much more complex than it seems at first glance.

I feel like I’m dealing with a lot of emotional fallout. Just like after the birth. Only, no one writes second-parent adoption stories the way they write birth stories. Maybe I should try: take the time to trace out the process, from that first phone call from our lawyer to reading the adoption decree on the plane home. Would that be of value to anyone?

Anyway, some photos. Here’s our last family photo, pre-adoption. Bram seems to be giving the whole notion the bird:

 

Also, J’s mom was able to travel there to be with us, which meant so much to all of us:

 

 

Finally, this is the first photo of us as a legal family of three, which we took with the retired judge who comes in several times a year just to do this. Just to do this. For families like ours. We live in a country with heroes:

 

 

 

.keyed-up pomo.

As a scholar of all things queer family, I was surprised to have only just heard about the debacle underscoring Mark Regenerus’ article in Social Science Research (if you too have missed this, here’s a recent primer). That a conservative sociologist (also, expert witness for such vitriolic campaigns as the National Organization for Marriage) would work to undermine the credibility of extant research on same-sex parenting is insulting, but that he would (in the same breath) then advance an indescribably flawed methodology in order to produce his own skewed conclusions on the subject just pisses me off. And, apparently, it’s got the academic community quite steamed as well. Says the internal auditor assigned to investigate how this article made it through the peer review process, “It’s bullshit.”

In this day of gay marriage as a wedge issue in a divisive election year, where fast-food chicken is the token of a movement of bigots, and where our families are put under microscopes from the left and the right, I have the increasing need to temper a rising rage. Call it mama bear syndrome, but I hereby disavow all attempts to discredit my family, intimidate my marriage, or make my children to feel less than their peers. I know that R has more eloquently spelled out her concerns and limits recently on the blog, but I feel the need to put my two cents in. If, in 2012, there are friends or family members in my life who don’t support universal gay marriage and parental rights, then we have no need of one another’s company. I’m done changing hearts and minds; I just want the freedom to live my life in peace and security. It’s not enough for you (a ubiquitous you, not “you” gentle blog readers) to like my family, but disagree with the issue on a global level. Either you respect me as an equal, or you don’t. And if you don’t, then we have no reason to carry on amicably. I suppose this is to say that I am drawing a line in the sand. Having come out 17 years ago, I have gone through a number of stages of activism (rage-filled civil disobedience, well-reasoned calm collective action, leading by example, etc), but I have to say that I’m settling into a “Don’t tread on me” mindset. Other people’s religions need to get their fairytales off of my family and the government needs to protect my rights as a citizen. Until both of those things are happening to my satisfaction, well then I guess the US has one more pissed-off masculine lesbian on its hands…

What’s funny, though, is that the angrier I become in my political/cultural brain, the more vulnerable and happy I become in my personal life. All the bad can get directed at an abstracted “out there” and all the good gets stored up to be savored “in here.” And speaking of “in here,” here’s a recent picture of our 6.5 month old being a ridiculously cute thing along with his gorgeous mama. Who would seek to make these people less than!?!

 

to polemics and back

Here’s the polemical part:

I dread election season. I can’t believe another one is already upon us. This year – no doubt because of Bram – I’m especially weary of the ludicrous discourse that surrounds every bid for office. I’m thrilled with both of the supreme court’s recent decisions (well, I’m thrilled with health care; I can tolerate Arizona), and with President Obama’s newly “evolved” stance on gay rights. Still, it is demoralizing to have our civil liberties up for debate under any circumstances, and when that debate becomes near-daily front-page news, when people (including the president) tell us that legalized bigotry is “a states’ rights issue,” when lesbians are shot in parks and viable presidential candidates win votes by making clear just how inferior we “homosexuals” are, I get bitter and angry and want to scream. This was made worse for me last week when friends began a particularly degrading home study process in an effort to secure second-parent adoption of a child who is, obviously, already theirs. That this non-birth mama could be put through such invasive and humiliating questioning – along with dozens of other time-consuming and expensive hoops – while the rights of many (many. many. many.) abusive and neglectful parents remain secure and unquestioned is too much for me. It’s just too much.

Being forced to go through this implies that my friend is a little less than a real parent (which she’s not), just as having debates about civil liberties implies that whether or not whole groups of people deserve civil liberties is a reasonable thing for people to vote on (which it’s not). And because the bigotry that fuels all of this has been allowed to thrive, I’m now (as I know so many of you have done) steeling myself for the moment when we’ll sit our son down before he starts preschool, or kindergarten, or some camp or another to explain to him that some people don’t think his family should BE a family. That some of the kids he’ll encounter will have had their heads filled with arcane, pedantic, self-righteous bullshit. That those poor children will believe their family to be morally superior to his. That he will face people who want (and are willing to actively fight) to deny us rights, which by the way is a form of violence. Because I’ve said it before and I’ll keep on saying it: the people who tried to run us off the mountain in Ohio were not substantially more violent towards us than the people who’ve walked into voting booths and voted to have us stripped of our rights. The latter behavior is more publicly sanctioned, but it feeds the former behavior – in its own way it sanctions it – and both behaviors are violent. It’s those people who should have to defend themselves as parents, not my friend, and not me. Those people are abusive. It’s abuse to teach people to hate, to abandon critical thinking in favor of dogma (which is what they’re doing, no matter how well they convince themselves of the soundness of their rhetoric). It should not be enough to say that their religion teaches it. We should not have to tiptoe around religious people’s hatred, to pretend that their faith excuses it. We should be allowed to say that we will not abide their violence no matter how they sell it to us. Their parental rights should be questioned, not ours. Instilling bigotry is abuse.

So I don’t grant the basic premise here: that civil liberties are up for debate. As we head into yet another election season where our worth as people is a daily public discussion, I find myself wanting more and more to refuse to participate. If a group of people today (including a presidential candidate) started publicly insisting that black people should not be allowed to marry white people, or that it should be legal to deny black people housing or jobs simply because they’re black, that would (with any decency) be shut down right away. Those people would be publicly shamed. The only reason anyone feels that LGBT civil rights are up for debate is because we’ve been surrounded by that debate for our entire lives. We’re used to it, and we’re used to the basic devaluation of human worth that comes along with any group’s discussion of another group’s equality. Just as we were used to slavery. Just as we were used to Jim Crow. Just as we were used to women not having the vote. It’s just as shameful; we just don’t see it that way because homophobia has been nourished in these past decades.

So when I see people engaging in a goodhearted debate about whether or not my wife and I deserve equal rights as citizens, I shudder. And that’s not misplaced; that’s just right. What I’m saying is, the conversation itself is a disgrace. That we allow it to go on is an embarrassment that we should feel keenly. My marriage is not recognized by the state to which I pay taxes. My name is not on my son’s birth certificate. And any of the activist judges in this state could take him away from me. My child, to whom I am wholly devoted. All because of a religion to which my family does not ascribe. That is a failure of profound proportions. I do not grant the premise that this is up for debate. I don’t think we should participate in these discussions because the discussions themselves do violence. There’s no nuance here, there’s just this: the laws are unconscionable. They must be changed. We should not grant anyone the right to a spirited discussion about our freedoms as American citizens. If we’re still here in another generation, this will be obvious. It will be obvious just as it’s been obvious in the aftermath of every other cycle of discrimination the world has ever known.

So that’s the polemical part. I’ve spent the past several months devoted to the belief that I’m done compassionately educating people on this issue. All done. That I will no longer carry signs that plead my equality. That I will take it as a given, and that I will seize it when it is not given to me because it is rightly mine.

But then, here’s the human part:

I got this comment on a blog post a couple of weeks back:

“Your story and the eloquent way in which you tell it, as well as some of the blogs I clicked to from yours, has for ever banished from my mind the last shreds of prejudice against same-sex couples. Thank you.”

And I’ll be damned if this didn’t make me feel pretty great. About all of us, really, this community of ours. Because I always think of us as helping each other, which we clearly do, but I’ve never – not even once – thought about the possibility that our communal voices are positioned to change people’s hearts. That our devotion to parenting, to partnership, to community, to love: that it all might actually do something external to us. Maybe the rest of you know that’s part of what you’re doing here. Maybe you’ve been writing in part to break down bigotry all along. But I swear: it never occurred to me that any of our audience struggled with lingering homophobia.

And then I got this message. From this wonderful, generous reader, whose life looks different from mine in some ways, and similar in others. And I thought: okay, then. That’s part of what we’re doing here. I could refuse this, but doing so would be selfish. It would serve only to protect me (a little). It wouldn’t protect my children, as it wouldn’t help change things. So I still don’t accept the premise. I’m entirely unwilling to see this as a states’ rights issue; I find that argument absurd. We must stop – immediately and without exception – allowing the majority to vote on the rights of minorities. I still believe all of that passionately. But this comment (for which I am immeasurably grateful) restored in me a willingness to join you all in the work of educating those who’ve been misled. So this is me, wearily picking back up the protests signs. This is me conceding once more that Black Power alone didn’t end apartheid, that Malcolm X needed Martin Luther King, that peace and education have a critical role in all civil rights movements.

But I do so with a heavy heart. So I guess I’m reaching out to ask: how do you stare these seasons down? Do you respond with patience and compassion? Does the discourse itself hurt you as much as it hurts me? Does it awaken any lingering internalized homophobia, or does it enrage you enough to help you squash what bits of that still haunt you? How do you walk through elections seasons and not let yourself become engulfed with anger?

* J and me at a post-Prop 8 election rally in 2008.

 

.you can call me pomo.

I’ve written on here before about the fact that TTC, pregnancy, and childbirth were strange bedfellows with my usual gender representation. I am a very masculine female. As such, there have been many aspects of pregnancy (and now breastfeeding) that were uncomfortable. My clothes had to adapt to my changing body (and male maternity clothes are pretty much out of the question, though if I had more time and energy, I think I could come up with a kick-ass line of androgynous maternity clothes!). Nearly all of the pregnancy and childbirth books that I read were geared toward a feminine heterosexual readership. The mere fact of my being pregnant made my social interactions with strangers very different from my usual way of walking through the world. And while I loved being pregnant with Bram, I am happy to get back into my usual mode of being. I’m back into almost all of my pre-pregnancy clothes (albeit, a bit more “snuggly”), and, with the exception of breastfeeding, I think that I am back to relating to the world in my particular way.

The world of parenting, though, has brought with it a slew of new gendered expectations to dismantle. Everyone assumes that because I gave birth to Bram, because I’m breastfeeding him, I must be his “mother.” And while, obviously, I am one of his mothers, I see R as his “mothering” figure. What I hate about this whole conversation, though, is how always already sexed it is. There is no existing way for me to talk about parenting Bram based on my particular strengths, weaknesses, and preferences as an individual without having that language tied to my sex and/or gender representation. For R, the parenting “shoe” fits better. She’s a feminine woman. She is every bit the traditional “maternal” figure. She is nurturing, empathetic, consummately patient, and highly attuned to Bram’s desires. She offers him routines and stability throughout each day (and I don’t think this is just because she’s home with him full-time). As he grows, I expect that she will be the parent more likely to offer reassurances for bumps and bruises, gentle discipline, and consistent boundaries.

The gendered binary that society has constructed around parenting roles would then thrust me into a father’s role, a “paternal” figure. But that’s not sufficient to describe what kind of parent I am to Bram (and our future children). It’s true that, right now, I’m the breadwinner, but that likely won’t be true even two years from now. It’s also true that I tend to be silly and fun, I like spontaneity with the baby, and I tend to get frustrated more quickly when I’m not able to “fix” the situation. I handle our finances, our car, and fixing things around the house. I will likely be the person to teach our kids how to handle these areas of their own lives. I love all of the aspects of parenting: stories, songs, snuggles, baby wearing, feeding, bathing, massage, yoga, etc., but I’m less likely than R to initiate and maintain rituals and routines over time. All of these components put me into the stereotypically “paternal” camp. But concomitant to all of this, I love to breastfeed this baby, and I will likely induce lactation in order to breastfeed future adopted babies. I love intimacy and vulnerability with my family. I want Bram to sleep in our bed once it’s safe (we don’t have an appropriate family bed right now). I offer him sweetness and kisses and soft voices. In these ways, I can be seen to also “mother” him. Bram doesn’t need a traditional mother and father. He needs two committed adults who love each other and brought him into the fold of our family because of that love. He needs to know that he’s safe, that he’s valued, and that he will always have a supportive place to turn throughout his life.

Before he was born, R and I assumed that we would go by “mama” and “mommy,” respectively. These are the terms that we each call our own mothers, so they felt the most natural to us. But now that he’s here and we’re doing this daily work, I feel drawn to a different term. I like the moniker “pomo” for myself. It feels like a hybridization of “papa” and “mom.” It’s also a nickname for postmodernism, whose relativism appeals to me in this regard. It’s a sweet little nickname. And since it’s only mine, it doesn’t come saddled with linguistic baggage that builds constraints and/or expectations into its usage.

I have some reservations in making this switch, though. I worry that, because I’m the more masculine parent, using a non-normative name will cause me to be perceived by others as a secondary parent to R’s “mama.” In some ways, I’m okay with this. I already have the biological connection, the breastfeeding relationship, and automatic legal rights. In this way, it makes all the sense in the world that we should find ways to promote R’s equality in the eyes of the world. I also worry that other parents, namely straight women, might perceive two mothers as being in competition with one another for primacy in the “mother” role. But it’s like comparing apples and asparagus. We are two very different people, occupying two unique and necessary roles, both in our marriage and our parenting. It’s why I hate it when people say “same-gender marriage” or ‘same-gender parenting.” My gender has nothing to do with my sex. Two people with the same genitalia are perfectly capable of possessing wildly diverse skill sets, interests, and desires. This variance is really important to the health and well-being of a child. It’s important to see different subject positions growing up. It’s also important to bear witness to how two different people work together to find balance and harmony. This is where the crux of the movement for the rights of gay parents should be focused. It’s not about two men, two women, or a man and a woman; it’s about two individual people working together as a team to foster the health and development of a child into a contented, capable adult.

I think we’re limiting the expertise of parents through the gendering of parental roles and terms. We’re making mothers and fathers feel like failures when they may offer their children the perfect manifestation of their particular talents. We carve out arbitrary lines whereby one parent can feel judgmental of (or encroached upon by) another parent. R and I are practicing attachment parenting, but I’ve been disappointed by the foundational heteronormativity of this parenting model. I was even more disappointed to learn about the overt homophobia of some of its main champions (namely, Dr. Sears and Jean Leidloff). AP makes the biological bond between mother and child so sacrosanct that the other parent is helpless to do anything but work to foster and emulate that bond. And while there are certain essential truths to most parenting relationships (heterosexuality usually begets a biological connection; breastfeeding usually happens with the gestational parent), these are the lines drawn by early parenting. Yet we see these roles manifest throughout the parent/child relationship long after weaning.

There’s a lot of work to do here. I know that I’m barely scratching the surface in this post. The work of writing about this is important, but the work of finding a way to live my life as an expression of these thoughts is more important. I want to be the very best “pomo” that I can be to Bram, to be the best spouse that I can be to R, and to be a strong, autonomous, androgynous woman to boot. I’ll keep pushing my tie out of the way of my breast pump at work. I won’t be afraid to go to Bram each time he cries. I’ll revel in nursing him in the middle of the night, knowing that this early time is fleeting. And I’ll look forward to the many adventures we’ll have together as a team, as a family. It’s a blessing (albeit often in disguise) to be this conscientious, this intentional, in building our lives. It’s an awesome journey.

 

baby, fellowship, food, & photos

the baby: Is either sick with his first minor cold or teething really early. To wit: he’s stuffy, but no fever. He wants to suck on everything, and even to chew a little. He’s drooling like a mastiff puppy. He can’t get comfortable enough to sleep very long. He only wants to nurse, to be worn, and to listen to Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans. The child will listen to anything (seriously, he was jamming out to some polka on Prairie Home Companion yesterday), but he has his preferences. Lots of strings. Big orchestral numbers delight him. And Sufjan Stevens seems to be his first favorite musician. He also adores a board book we have full of Matisse paintings (which is making me notice Matisse in a new way – how incredible is that? my son is teaching me about art!) and Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. Red seems to be a favorite color: when he sees it (especially on book pages) he just kicks and grins, grins and kicks (which is how he responds to almost every book page, but he does so with more vigor if there’s red on it). He lights up around his little baby mirror: he loves that little baby, whether or not he knows it’s him. He’s started to like zerberts, but only very gentle ones, and only if after you’ve given him one, you look up at him and laugh. Then he’ll laugh too. And he started rolling over last week. It is the cute cute cutest thing to watch his face when he realizes he’s suddenly on his back.

the fellowship: I got it (one of the three I applied for)! I got a full year of dissertation funding through my university. This means that as soon as I’m done teaching this class (in five weeks), I can focus exclusively (work-wise) on my dissertation for ONE WHOLE YEAR. No teaching for a full year. I still can’t believe it. The freedom this gives me to spend lots and lots of time with this baby is indescribably great. It’s just a dream. And the time to immerse myself in my project is thrilling. I need to finish by May of next year. The next twelve months will be full of hard work, but it’s work I WANT to do. I can’t tell you what a privilege this is. I really am over the moon with gratitude, relief, and excitement.

the food: So the story here is that J has had to give up dairy, gluten, and soy to get this boy’s rash to go away. This has meant some changes in the way I cook/we eat, but we’ve used the opportunity to make a shift we’ve been heading towards for years. I have been dogmatically vegetarian for a long time. For my first five years, I felt righteous in the knowledge that I ate (lived) ethically because I didn’t eat animals. A few years ago, I started to think about non-food products – soap, shampoo, make-up – and we began to eliminate things that were tested on animals from our household. What good is not eating meat if you buy from a company that, for example, coats a rat’s eyes in mascara? Isn’t that even more cruel? Then I started to avoid factory-farmed dairy. Especially as we neared the TTC period of our lives (and began to think about breastfeeding), I stopped feeling comfortable buying diary that came from animals that were kept for years on end in tiny box stalls being milked by machines all day, This is worse, I would argue, than eating meat because at least beef cattle have a shorter period of suffering. I still believe in all of this. To my knowledge, we buy no (or very few) animal-tested products. But here’s the piece I didn’t get until now. Not eating meat for so long led me to incorporate more and more fake meat products into my diet. Tofu. Tofurkey. Tempeh. Veggie burgers. And when I started thinking about THESE products, I felt troubled. We’d done so much work to eliminate anything but whole, real foods from our diets – to learn how to cook using single ingredients – but fake meat products are full of ingredients I can barely pronounce. And their status as vegan doesn’t tell us anything about the ethicality of manufacturing them. Because they’re mass produced, I can only assume they’re made in assembly line conditions, by factory workers. How well are those factory workers compensated? I don’t know. How far must the products be shipped to reach my supermarket shelf (i.e. what’s their carbon footprint)? No idea. What’s in them, really; I mean, what ARE all those ingredients? I don’t have any idea. This is something J and I have been discussing a lot lately. She’s been eating fewer and fewer of these products and more and more local, ethically-farmed meat for the last year or so. And now I’m finally on board. So here’s what we’re doing. We’ve stopped shopping at the huge regional-chain grocery in town and joined the co-op. If we can’t find it there, it probably isn’t something we need to eat. And for the record: so far it hasn’t cost us any more money to stock up there than it did at the chain. We’ve started to buy local meat that we can trace back to a farm here in town. We could go visit this summer if we wanted to. There’s very little packaging on our groceries now, which means we’re cutting down on the waste products we produce. I still eat a very small hunk of local, ethical (the cows are pasture-raised and hand-milked only twice a day) cheese each week, which feels like such a delicious treat now that it’s rationed. I’ll still eat gluten if we go out, but at home, I’m cooking with lots of brown and wild rice instead. And it’s delicious. I no longer believe that vegetarianism is the feather in the crown of ethical living. I think it’s too tempting to conclude that you’re being conscientious just because you don’t eat meat. I know I felt that way for a long, long time. Now I’m trying to understand the full effects of what I purchase. What I put in my body. Even if animals don’t die to make a particular food, are they mistreated? If so, I shouldn’t eat it. How are the humans who are a part of making a product treated? If I don’t know they’re treated well, I probably shouldn’t eat it. Who’s ultimately profiting off of my food choices? If it’s a farmer, great. If it’s a corporation getting rich off of genetic modifications, I’m not interested. Or at least not regularly so. Because that’s the other piece here: letting go of all-things-dogmatic. Because anytime we think dogmatically, we think un-critically, right? I mean, that’s sort of the point of dogma. This is true of religions, and it’s also true of political stances and movements like vegetarianism. But what I want to teach our son is to make decisions thoughtfully, not based on black and white conclusions he’s drawn up ahead of time. If I’m out celebrating, and I want to eat dessert but it’s been made with conventional butter, I want to do it anyway, and I want to do it guiltlessly. Then I want to come home and eat only local/ethical dairy for awhile. I want to support my community’s farmers most of the time. I want to impact animals and workers alike as positively as I can manage while still staying joyful and unobsessed. So that’s how we’re approaching this new no-soy, no-dairy, and no-gluten diet. And on that note, if anyone has recipes that might work, I’d love them! I’ve almost never cooked meat in my whole life, so this is all new to me. So far, I’m mostly eating chicken and wild caught fish. Tell me what to do!

the photos:

B visits mommy at work (and is smitten):

Bram and mama greet spring:

See those active arms? That’s our boy. His legs usually move that fast too! Gods help us when he’s a toddler:

This face:

 

feminist concerns about the natural childbirth community

We finished our series of natural childbirth classes a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been reflecting since on the experience. Before I get into my concerns, let me first make clear that my gratitude for the (mostly) women who’ve fought to educate families about natural childbirth cannot be overstated. I cannot imagine how out of control things would have felt – how at the mercy of medical authorities – without the privilege of this education. A short history of the evolution of hospital births in this country would convince almost anyone of the criticality of the natural birth movement. You simply cannot love women without loving people who’ve worked to revolutionize and empower an experience (birth) that at least 80% of American women face. To the women who dedicate their lives to serving others in this way: my hat is off to you. Our childbirth instructor in particular is nothing short of amazing. So much wisdom. So much generosity. I felt nurtured, and included, and supported. None of my concerns have anything to do with her. Instead, they’re all about the (inadvertent?) politics of the natural birth movement itself.

I should also acknowledge how much my perceptions are a product of my subject position as a non-gestational parent. I wonder sometimes how much of this I would have noticed had I carried to full-term, had we taken these classes (as we were about to do) while I was pregnant with E. Would J – who felt at home in the NGP role – have felt as excluded as I sometimes have? Would I have felt that way on her behalf? My guess is: a little. But I think some things would have been invisible to me (that’s the way privilege is, isn’t it? despite our most sincere efforts?), and I don’t think she would have minded. But here we are, and something about the newness (achiness) of my subject position, combined with my research interests, has created an awareness. Not the first awareness to be born of feelings of exclusion, and no doubt not the last.

So here’s what I’ve noticed. In this post-third-wave culture, we’re finally getting down to the business of redefining power. This is a good, good thing. No longer willing to let masculinist structures of dominance define what it means to possess power, we’re finding it other places. One of these places is the female body, and recognition of its awesomeness comes to us via the natural childbirth community. Women create life. And they usually don’t need rescued (by a strong, male doctor in a long white coat) in the course of doing so; their bodies know what to do. We had damned well better respect this. The history there (birthing women) is immense and awe-inspiring. And the natural childbirth community is finally telling us that, which is lovely and necessary. You are powerful, they tell pregnant women. The connection you share with this being is unmatched. You are God-like in this role. Pregnant women are a source of power that cannot be replicated. Not with all the science, and the money, and the authority in the man-made world.

What worries me, however, is that – like almost every bid for power that’s come before this one – the approach is exclusionary. In this way, it follows the exclusionary power-in-dominance mode of masculine authority. This happens in this particular community in three ways:

• The first is obvious, and it’s something women who aren’t called to mother (or can’t) have been fighting for decades: If this is the locus of female power, then women who don’t give birth to babies are less powerful. Less woman. Less God-like in the one way women can be so. But must these women find power in the masculine? Might we not make sincere space within the feminine for a power that does not procreate? We’ve done strong work in this area, but the natural childbirth community privileges motherhood in a way that might be said to undermine that work.

• The second is similar. It’s the reality that some women do need medical intervention. For these women, the strong rhetoric of this movement is at risk of instilling shame. Not all of our bodies do this safely. Some of us don’t make it through that way, and we need to create space for power that can exist in light of that fact. Not in spite of it; in light of it. Because when we define power as a woman’s ability to give birth naturally, what are we to think about women who don’t?

• The third is this: If we claim this space as entirely female (and birth-mama centric), then NGPs have no role here. This incredible right/journey/privilege is marked as one that birth-moms take alone. And on the surface, this makes sense. I mean, why shouldn’t birthing women claim this power as theirs and theirs alone? They offer life, for Pete’s sake; they offer life-sustaining milk. These facts are used to empower them. Your babies need you much, much more than they need anyone else. But even as it offers empowerment, this rhetoric puts the heavy weight of early parenthood back on women. If J is the person Rabbit needs most – the only person he really needs at first – then her responsibility to him is massive because she doesn’t share it. For this reason, their bonding is all that matters. There’s very little talk in the natural childbirth community about NGP-child bonding because it’s understood to be secondary. It can wait. But can it? Without the benefit of holding these little beings inside of our bodies, isn’t it especially important to attend to NGP-child bonding? If all we carefully cultivate is bonding between women and their (birth) babies, aren’t we relegating them to being the primary parent at six months, too? And at two years? And at five years? Aren’t we contributing to the creation of the very distance between fathers and their children that we simultaneously bemoan?

If we know how formative those early experiences are, and we care about women (and thus don’t want them to bear unnecessary burdens), shouldn’t we do all we can to create some equity in this community? We might do well, for example, to use this forum to teach men about the awesome power of fatherhood. To teach all NGPs about the gift – and the responsibility – that is parenthood. To help all parents-to-be understand the transformative (bodily. spiritually. emotionally. cognitively.) reality of this journey. Because I have to believe that parenthood is transformative in ALL of these ways for ALL parents (adoptive. gestational. non-gestational.). If we’re going to advocate for the idea that child-rearing is a calling – that it is worthy of our serious attention – shouldn’t we insist that that’s true for parents no matter how they take on that role?

I guess I’m worried that this approach might backfire, that by defining maternal power in such exclusionary terms, we’re relegating birth-mothers to bearing it alone. Because childbirth is (in most cases) followed by a lifetime of parenting, and those early narratives are sure to stick around. Hierarchies, once established, are pretty hard to overthrow. This seems reason enough to be cautious in our definitions of parental power. To be as inclusive as it is possible to be. As it stands, the power of this rhetoric is strong. And it’s confusing because in its exclusion of NGPs (mostly dads), it mirrors the rhetoric we see coming out of much more conservative organizations. A friend recently called my attention to a new study showing how much more working moms multitask than working dads. Though things have clearly changed a great deal since we were kids (more, surely, than I can recognize), we’re nowhere near a state of parenting equity. And there are plenty of right-wing proponents of maintaining that fact: the women-occupy-the-domestic-sphere ideology ain’t even close to dead. So it worries me to see a progressive movement like natural childbirth advocating for a resurgence of division, even if the party line is that division is a product of female power, not – as it’s used elsewhere – a mark of subordination. I love it that we’re telling the institutions that seek to control women’s bodies to fuck off. I’d just like to see us send the same message to institutions that tell us that fathers can’t nurture, as well.  

Power is a tricky vixen. It cascades, evades, dominoes in unforeseen ways. I guess I’m just hoping to see it used a little more carefully in this arena. To see it claimed in ways that make space for the life-long relationships that are born each time babies come into this world. To see it resist not just female inferiority, but the notion that carrying a child inside of you is what best suits one to parenthood. We have this platform. Let’s use it to design not just the births we want, but the families we’d like to see.

 

the (mostly) highs and (few) lows of THIRTY weeks

Thirty weeks. Thirty. Weeks. Those two little words are like magic, and somehow, I never thought we’d get to say them. This week has been full.full.full, and there’s no time to properly document everything. In lieu of something thorough, then, here’s a snapshot of these past few days.

• Our shower was yesterday. Rabbit’s amazing Aunts Adrienne and Kippie (Christine) threw us a positively delightful celebration. They baked and baked, made mulled cider, gave baskets of local apples as prizes for an adorable baby photo recognition game, and made everyone feel warm and cozy and happy. A co-worker of J’s commented that it’s obvious how supported we are and how loved Rabbit River is. I could go on for hours about all the incredible baby stuff we got, and how fabulous the whole event was, but I’m not sure I could say anything more fitting than that: it was obvious how supported we are and how loved our little boy already is. If you’re reading this, and you were a part of our day yesterday (from near or afar), I thank you. You are this little boy’s village.

• One particularly amusing moment: when we opened Christine’s gift, which was a Kleen Kanteen sippy cup (seriously. impossibly cute.), a friend shouted out: “now you’ve done it. This baby will be a republican.” Hilarious. Apparently, baby’s first Kleen Kanteen is the quintessential emblem of liberalism and is thus ripe to be rebelled against. So Rabbit: if you’re reading this in sixteen years or so, please don’t become a republican. Drink out of styrofoam if you need to. Be super athletic: neither of your moms will know what to do with that. But don’t become an advocate for big money. Our little hearts couldn’t bear it. :)

• J’s mom was in town for the whole weekend, and it was incredible to see her bonding with her grandson for the first time. We’re so lucky to have her; she will be an excellent grandmom.

• We went to see a modern dance performance on Saturday night. We saw the same company’s fall performance last year, too, when I was pregnant with E. This time, Rabbit danced along. There were two pieces he seemed especially to love, and, as I watched with my hand on J’s belly, I had the thought that maybe our son will be a dancer. He certainly already has rhythm!

• We finished our first round of legal paperwork, and I’m now in possession of a parental designation form that J has to sign every six months. I know it should feel good to have it with me – I mean, it’s my only form of legal recognition – but it’s extremely painful to have to be given six months’ worth of parental rights at a time. I don’t even have to sign the document; J’s signature is the only one that matters because she’s the boy’s only legal parent. I’m having a hard time with this.

• Our dear friend Laura defended her dissertation on Thursday, and we got to celebrate with her Thursday night. We are so proud of her. Also: thanks, Laura, for proving that it can be done! Sometimes it gets the look of the impossible. :)

• I realized when we got home with all of our gifts last night that this little boy will wreak havoc on the minimalist aesthetics that I’ve spent the last decade cultivating. I know we will develop systems; J and I love a system. We already have a whole crate thing going in the basement. And I know that we won’t always live in such a tiny house. But wow: this little being already has some stuff. Post-baby minimalism won’t look the same as pre-baby minimalism, that is for sure.

• Rabbit has the hiccups a LOT. Like: every three hours or so. Our midwife tells us this is normal, that her daughter had them this often too, but J is having a hard time with it. They make her anxious, and she read about a connection with cord compression that, though not relevant at this stage, seems to be haunting her. Any reassurances would be appreciated. We can be worriers up in this house.

• I’ll get new belly shots on here soon, but know this: my wife is huge! She carries it incredibly well, but that belly is not messing around. It is, quite simply, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

 

vulnerability

I’ve been thinking about the new question Gretchen posted over at Regular Midwesterners. She asked:

For queer couples with kids, there is a necessary third figure in our children’s lives. How do you plan to explain or acknowledge this person?

Indeed (as Gretchen goes on to acknowledge), there’s at least one other figure. For those of us intent on adopting, there are two. And we typically need the support of lots of other people: sperm bank or adoption agency support staff, medical practitioners, lawyers, family, friends. It’s one way that our families just aren’t like lots of straight families (though this connects us to plenty of adoptive hets). It’s an important question.

Since J and I don’t yet have children here to parent (though we are in the third trimester today, thank you very much!), our plans for handling this with our kids are still entirely hypothetical. I don’t know what we’ll say about Rabbit’s donor (a man I feel deeply and intimately connected with). I know that we plan on creating a consistent and cohesive narrative about donor conception, but I don’t know exactly what that will look like. I guess I think it’ll depend on our son, on how he seems to hear and internalize these ideas. On what kinds of narratives make sense to him, given his unique worldview. But I’m not sure that what we plan to say is as important as how we really feel about this reality because my guess is that our kids will hear how we feel about this lots more than we will actually talk about it.

So in terms of how I really feel about it, I’d say this: it comes down to vulnerability, which means that it comes down to how I, as a parent, handle being vulnerable.

Vulnerability is something I’m super interested in. It is the foundational concept of my dissertation, where I use alternative feminisms (queer. postcolonial. black. Islamic.) to try to read power in vulnerability. In the west, we tend to perceive vulnerability as a weakness, as something we’re supposed to fight against. Conversely, we perceive strength in all things impenetrable. In sovereignty. In liberation. But in looking at national sovereignty and the harm that’s done in its name (for example: our retaliation to the threat of 9/11; our belief that the need to protect the self justifies any assault on the other), this definition of strength seems problematic. The question here is: what does our resistance to vulnerability cost us in the end? So I tend to think politically about vulnerability, about what it might stand to accomplish. Because the truth behind all of our attempts to convince ourselves otherwise is that we are always already vulnerable. We are ceaselessly exposed to violence, to accidents, and to the breakdown of the body’s natural processes. At any moment, our lives – or the lives of the people on whom we depend (bodily, emotionally) – can be extinguished. We can lose. That reality is so viscerally threatening that we work hard to deny it. To shore up our sense of empowerment, and control, and invincibility. We pretend.

Maybe it’s the fact that I spend so much time thinking about these issues, but to me, parental narratives of possession are inseparable from all of this. We’re conditioned to think of the things we love as ours: our lives, our loves, our children, our homes, our friends. And in claiming all of this, we feel tethered to it. In owning it, we convince ourselves that it cannot be taken away.

But in his answer to Gretchen’s question, Josh said something really beautiful:

[This] goes to the heart of the radical nature of adoption and maybe other forms of alternative family(?): we share our children with others and do not wholly possess them.

This is the core reality of adoption – of non-biological parenting in general – to which people seem most resistant. They’re not really our kids. Or they’re less our kids. Or they can only be two people’s kids, and those roles are already filled. So here’s where I think we are ironically privileged: we know better from the start. We aren’t at liberty to ignore the fact that none of us ever “wholly possess[es]” his or her children. They are shared, as, I would argue, all children are shared. They are not our sovereign territory. And we know it before we even lay eyes on them.

So how do I think this functions in the lived reality of alternative parenting? I’m not sure yet. If I had to guess, I’d say that queer and adoptive (and queer adoptive) parents are positioned to teach their children this early on, that the children of queer/adoptive parents spend less time under the illusion of sovereignty. The dangerous traditions of in-group privilege and out-group exclusion. That, if they see us grappling with these issues, they’ll grow up grappling with them too. And that this is good for them.

I was born to an adopted father who was neither married to nor in a committed relationship with my incredible mother. To a brave, unwed woman who had never planned on parenting. For a long time, I saw pieces of this as a liability. I wanted a “normal” family, to feel a part of a secure, unbreakable unit. But I like these facts now. I think they’ve helped me immeasurably on this path. When I came out, when I married a woman, when I decided not to try to carry again, I gave up other pieces of a narrative that has never really served me anyway. It was probably easier to let go because I was already on the outside.

So it’s important to me that my children are raised in a committed, two-parent household. It’s important to me that they know they are safe and loved beyond measure. That they know that their well-being is our top concern, always always. But the idea that they might feel connected to the other people who helped give them life? That isn’t threatening to me. Because they should feel connected to those people, right? I feel connected to them. And it seems, to me, better to show my children how interconnected we all are than to have them sense that interconnectivity, but think of it as a betrayal to me. Like the women of the novels I write about, I think there’s more to be gained from the acceptance of vulnerability than there is to be lost. I think there’s more to be gained from the acceptance that other people are a part of my children than in the denial of that fact. Because doesn’t that break down so much of what we, as queers, are positioned to see through anyway? I love Rabbit’s donor. Though they may never meet, I hope that Rabbit will love him too. That he will be a silent, absent, beautiful, undeniable part of our family. That allowing lots of space for that will only serve to connect me more tightly to my son.

Nota Bene 1: I probably sound like I’m completely comfortable with vulnerability, and you should know that this couldn’t be further from the truth. I get so scared about so many things. I worry that something serious is wrong with my health, that I won’t get to see my kids grow up. I spent much of this weekend OBSESSED with one off-hand comment that a doctor made about a symptom I’ve been having. I worry that, in my lack of legal recognition, this little boy will be taken from me. I don’t mind sharing him, but I mind very much the horrible possibility of losing time with him. Still, I don’t think this serves me, and I work constantly (in therapy, with friends, with my wife) to find ways of letting go of these driving fears. They keep me thinking about what I might lose and not what I actually have right now.

Nota Bene 2: In losing Emmett, I learned a lot about the cost of vulnerability, so I don’t say any of this lightly. Still, I know this is theoretical, and therefore inherently simplistic. I know that, when we begin the adoption process, we could face painful realities I can barely imagine now. This is how I want to walk into this process, but I hold no illusions that the process itself won’t shatter these notions and force me to construct new ones again and again.

 

contact

Last night was the second meeting of our natural child birth class (which will meet eight times). So far, I think we’re both learning a great deal. The facilitator is deeply knowledgeable, sweet, and compassionate. Though she doesn’t always use inclusive language, I usually feel included. The other couples are all heterosexual, but they’re also all interesting and open. It’s sometimes painful (as discussing the details of childbirth sometimes triggers flashbacks to the trauma of birthing Emmett), but overall I’ve enjoyed it tremendously, and I’m glad we signed up. I think it will help prepare us for Rabbit’s entrance into the world (whether or not that birth looks the way we’d like it to).

But last night’s material included a long discussion about the importance of skin-to-skin contact, and it solidified some concerns I’ve been having about this culture’s treatment of non-gestational parents. I’ve said here before that J being pregnant has made me feel newly sympathetic to dads. Newly offended on their behalf. Newly connected to them. This is a concrete example of what I mean.

I should say first of all that I LOVE the attention skin-to-skin contact (or Kangaroo Care) has gotten of late. Birth has been far too (forcibly) medicalized for far too long in this country, and it’s thrilling to see us return to (and lend credence to through research) some common sense notions, such as the idea that babies are advantaged by proximity to their parents right after birth. This is a lovely thing if parents are able to do it.* We know now that skin-to-skin contact helps babies regulate heart rates and breathing. We know that it reduces respiratory distress. We know that it helps to facilitate both breastfeeding and bonding. This is all good stuff. I can’t remember my own experience of being born (as I was, you know, just born), but I can imagine that entering the world is some tough, scary business. How lovely to think about dimming the lights. About slowing down the frenetic pace of post-birth processes (like the vitamin K shot, and weighing in, and cleaning up). And I cannot imagine a more joyful sight in all of the world than this little boy in J’s arms. The two of them touching. Her holding to her chest what for months she will have held within her body. I get emotional every time I imagine that moment, and I’m so grateful to be surrounded by medical professionals who advocate for and support it.

The problem is that (so far anyway) I’ve never heard anyone talk about the importance of skin-to-skin contact with non-gestational parents (not of their own will, anyway; only when I’ve advocated for it). Indeed (and I hope that all of you have evidence that I’m wrong on this), I fear that very few people in the childbirth community are advocating for non-gestational parents (most of whom, of course, are dads) at all. And because the.birthing.of.babies is treated with a mysterious sort of reverence (a fierce insider/outsider dichotomy wherein if you haven’t done it, you’re always already less than someone who has), dads seem to feel silenced. If they have an opinion about how they’d like to experience meeting their children, they don’t say so. They don’t seem to think it’s their right.

Even in this open, loving, progressive birth class, the handout we were given about this moment says that moms should focus exclusively on bonding with their babies – that no one should “disturb” them during this critical time (even their partners or co-parents) – but that dads should spend these early moments advocating for moms. Making sure the cord pulses for long enough. Making sure the birth plan is followed. Not bonding, but doing the WORK that the moment requires. Staying busy. Providing for their family as (of course) dads have been expected to do for…well…always (at least in the U.S.)? Nowhere on this otherwise extremely helpful handout does it even mention that, perhaps, non-gestation parents might also want to take a moment to gaze at their new baby. To touch him or her. To kiss him. To connect as a new family. A whole family. The message here is clear: dads are extraneous, or, if they are useful, it is only for their ability to make sure that mom and baby are well.

And what’s worse: NGPs are told that they’re at risk of being an impediment to this intimate moment. When I asked our facilitator about non-gestational skin-to-skin contact, she said that that’s fine, but not until baby and mom get a good latch, and that can take hours. And she warned me not to break a latch just to get to hold our son. This was a hurtful moment. I would NEVER break my son’s first latch with his mom’s breast. Nor, I suspect, would any of the dads in this class. Our presence in that room makes apparent our deep desire to help, in any way we can, as our partners labor to bring our children into the world. We feel helpless. We feel left out, but we’re mostly okay with that. But warning me that it would hurt my child if I separated him from his mom (who he needs, this warning makes clear, much more than he needs me) is a way of letting me know my place as an outsider.

What worries me is that I’m the only one in the class so far who has mentioned that there is (for all two-parent families) a third person in the situation. That it’s actually GOOD for NGPs to think about bonding. That we, too, have waited and waited to meet our little one. That our lives have utterly changed in that moment. That, lacking the benefit of carrying, the benefit of breastfeeding, we might need advocacy in those critical first moments too. That those moments of bonding between NGP and child might be important to consider alongside such physiological concerns as heart rate and temperature.

That the relationship between NGP and child is actually as important as that between GP and child; thus the benefit of bonding should be shared.

This exclusionary tendency makes me intensely sad. Lots and lots of children have absent fathers (dads who leave, dads who stay but don’t participate actively in child-rearing). We fault them (hello: the phrase “deadbeat dad”), but we forcibly create distance that must be (for some fathers, at least) incredibly difficult to overcome. We act as if mothers are naturally closer to their children than fathers, but, even in our most thoughtful spaces, we cultivate that as a reality. We make it so, and then we criticize it.

And it doesn’t need to be that way. When I asked about this at our first Meet the Midwives meeting, most of the midwives at our clinic (ours wasn’t there) said skin-to-skin contact needed to be with the bio-mom, that all of those regulatory benefits work much much better with her. That I shouldn’t even think of holding our son until an hour after he’s born. “Okay, an hour,” I thought. I cried. I adjusted. I can do an hour. Our facilitator last night said the same thing – J’s body will be much better for Rabbit than mine – only she said I shouldn’t even think about it until two hours, and then only if he’s already nursed. But here’s the thing: the research I’ve done indicates that dads (there’s no research on non-bio mamas) can give their babies almost as much benefit. Really: as much benefit in almost every way. That NGPs can facilitate temperature and heart beat regulation. That NGPs can even facilitate breastfeeding.**

Yet our plan to do an hour of skin-to-skin contact with J (longer, obviously, if at the hour point Rabbit is nursing), followed by an hour of skin-to-skin contact with me, has most often been met with warnings and hesitation.*** “Sure,” most professionals seem to say. “You can do that. But later. But don’t be selfish. Don’t put your needs out there too much. This isn’t about you.”

But isn’t it? Rabbit has two parents. Isn’t it in his lifelong best interest to have connected with both of us in these early hours? I think that – in our well-needed realization that babies don’t benefit from being whisked away and cleaned up immediately – we’ve gotten a bit of tunnel vision. We see birth moms now, and we see babies, but we’re blind to NGPs. And I resent that, not just for me, but for dads. None of the fathers-to-be said anything during the class (or when I asked about this issue and mentioned my concerns). But after class, one of the dads came up to me and said that he’d never thought of any of this before. When the facilitator said that two+ hours of skin-to-skin (exclusively with birth moms) was best for our babies, he was upset. He’d been assuming he’d hold their baby right away, and having this dismissed as unhealthy for his baby (with no acknowledgment that he might want to share in the experience, that his baby might benefit from his presence) was jarring. I’m sure he wasn’t alone. But neither he nor the other dads stopped and asked the question. I think this is because they’re told they are outsiders to this experience. That their job is to support, not just during labor (when supporting is obviously all they can do), but after, as well.

It doesn’t need to be this way. It’s great that we’re beginning to understand the importance of so many of the systems we disrupted when we started over-medicalizing birth. But there must be ways of doing that without telling NGPs that their role at birth is akin to that of any other birth partner: someone who’s there to support a mom through labor, but whose child isn’t being born. Because if we have studies suggesting that skin-to-skin contact is a powerful tool for one parent, shouldn’t we talk about using it for two?

* Of course, these early moments are a luxury altogether. If we’re blessed with adopted children, we won’t have them at all, and we’ll have to mourn that (for ourselves and for our children, who would no doubt have benefited from this early intimacy). Just as I’m already planning for ways to bond in lieu of breastfeeding, we’ll have to be creative to overcome the loss of this time. And we’ll do that with gratitude and joy. So though I know this post is shortsightedly birth-centric, it’s where we are now. And it’s how lots and lots of parents become parents, so it feels important to talk about.

** If you’re interested in the research I found on this, please let me know!

*** Our midwife has never offered these warnings. In fact, she brought this up a few appointments back, saying basically: “You two do whatever you want. He’s your child. You’ll make the right choices for him.” We super love her.