trans discourse

I have lots of updates to make about the tortures of finishing a dissertation (can I get an amen?), and the joys of parenting a one-year-old (I know I can get one for this!), and the pleasures of reconnecting (dates and renewed communication) with your love after the first year of co-parenting, so stay tuned for all of that. But J and I have been talking a lot lately about gender, and – partly inspired by this post over at Love Invents Us, and the fact that, like Yogi’s mama, I’ve also been reading T Cooper’s Real Man Adventures* – I thought I’d reach out here to see what this community has to say about the big ole’ off-limits topic of transitioning.

I want to say out the gate that none of my thoughts about transitioning are absolute. I don’t believe that I’m the best one to make decisions for anyone other than myself and, for now, Bram. I think there are lots and lots of reasons that women transition to become men (which is what I’ll talk about here; I won’t discuss MTF women), and I would hate it if I implied that those reasons are all unsound. This version of happiness – the one I’ve carved out for myself – wouldn’t work for most people, and I wouldn’t expect it to. I give my money (limited though it is) to organizations that spend most of theirs fighting for trans rights, and I feel plenty good about doing that. I know that we have trans readers, and even if it were any of my business (which it’s not), I would absolutely, unequivocally support them. Support and respect them.

In truth, my concerns about transitioning are less about transitioning at all, and more about the way we respond to it in contemporary American culture. I get worried whenever something, anything, becomes off limits in terms of critical discourse. When you can’t ask questions about its implications, its consequences, its motivations without being shut down, or accused of being hostile, or accused of being phobic, or accused of being unpatriotic (whatever the specifics). I get worried when we’re not supposed to talk about something, when we’re just supposed to maintain silent agreement or else. And I think that’s happened around the fairly sizable new wave of transmen.* And I find this especially worrisome because it means that we’re not supposed to ask questions about a choice that lots and lots of people are making even though that choice means the life-long injection of synthetic hormones and the surgical alternation of bodies. In my opinion, the seriousness of these steps calls not for silence, but for a robust conversation. And we’re the ones to have it because, frankly, these are our people we’re talking about. Or they start out that way. The only other people who are going to talk about this are actually transphobic. They are bigots. So for fuck’s sake, let’s don’t let them dominate the conversation.

As for my thoughts, they come from an admittedly biased place. Though it took me some time to narrow it down, I am deeply and profoundly attracted to masculine women. My wife is the single sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, and that’s no lie. My wife in tailored men’s pants and a tie? Well, you don’t need to know about this. ;) J. Halberstam. Judith Butler. But to be fair, I’m plenty attracted to transmen too. Read: my still abiding crush on T Cooper. I don’t find him as sexy now as I once did, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t there. And though I can’t imagine she’d ever make this choice, if J decided to transition again in the future (has she written here before about the two years she spent as a man?), nothing about her draw for me would change. I love female masculinity, but trans masculinity will do.

I’m just a little concerned right now to see us subscribe so unquestioningly to the intense medicalization of identity. And when I say “unquestioningly,” I don’t mean individual transmen because I’m sure they’ve questioned plenty; I mean us at large. When we’re finally talking about the media-driven body image issues that bring women (and men) to the brink of starvation, or under the knife, or just to sustained self-loathing, I worry about sending a whole new category of people there too. Moreover, if J did decide to transition again, I would worry about the health risks of T. I mean, we try not to take aspirin when we get headaches, you know? So, I worry.

I also wonder about the message of still working so damn hard to fit within the binary gender system. I mean, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had in issuing a resounding fuck off to the notion of being either a woman or a man. A mama or a papa. A girly-girl or macho. Truly: why the hell haven’t we picked at least one non-gendered pronoun and made it stick? I remember reading Sandra Bem’s research on gender, and how she discovered that we’re healthiest, psychologically-speaking, when we possess LOTS of both stereotypically female AND stereotypically male characteristics. That we’re UNHEALTHY if we possess neither (if we’re sort of ungendered), but that we’re also not doing so hot if we manifest one to the exclusion of the other. I am for sure on one side. I love most of the stereotypical “girl” stuff: red lipstick, and empathy, and Downton Abbey. :) And J is in lots of ways intensely masculine. Still, I’d say there are areas of overlap, and I’d say those areas are important to us. My worry about transitioning is that in order to pass, transmen have to exaggerate one set to the exclusion of the other. Otherwise they might be found out. Otherwise they might be in danger of hateful bigots. But if they’re exaggerating and suppressing, that’s not so authentic either, right? That worries me.

I’m also a little concerned about the degree to which this is sometimes (maybe?) a furtherance of sexism. In the passage Yogi’s mama is talking about in her post, Cooper (the character?) says: “the word lesbian? I have never and would never use that term in reference to myself. Never. In fact, I’m probably one of the most lesbophobic people on the planet, probably because of my won fucked-up issues of not wanting to be assumed to be one. I got no beef with lesbians; I’m just not one. I’ve never seen even one episode of the The L Word. Never been to the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, don’t know who Dinah Shore is, and coertainly never donned a thumb ring or ear cuff” (15-16). Sigh. Maybe it’s just me, but does this read as sexist to you? And do you think it’s unique to T Cooper? It feels to me like transitioning is, to some degree, a rejection of the vestiges of femaleness that one can’t shake with the right clothes, or haircut, or body carriage. And of course that’s okay: we are entitled to reject femaleness if it’s not our thing. But is there any point at which that rejection might be said to be reflective of the sexism that we seem intent on maintaining in this culture? And if so, if it’s just still better to be a man, isn’t that a conversation worth having? Because here’s the thing: that’s a way out of fighting for gay rights. If our masculine women all become men, we can get legally married. And have benefits. But does that make us straight? And by doing it, are we saying that straight is best?

Question: If J transitioned, would that make me straight? And if a choice she made made me straight, doesn’t that mean that none of this (straight, gay, man, woman) is quite really real anyway?  And if it’s not quite really real, shouldn’t we be having lots and lots of conversations about what it means?

I don’t know. I have questions, but no answers. What I do have, though, is a true and abiding love for queer people, so I care about this choice, to which so many queer people are turning. I respect anyone who struggles to find themselves amidst all of the voices that try to distract us. I’ll call anyone whatever they want me to. For the most part, I’ll even think of them however they want me to. I love my masculine wife, and I’d love her if she were my masculine husband. Still, I’m glad she’s my masculine wife. I love that she’s chivalrous towards me. T Cooper’s wife says that being with him makes her feel more like a woman than she’s ever felt before, and I get that because that’s what J has done for me. But I also love that my masculine wife breastfeeds our children, and that she does it in ties, no less. I love the contradictions, the assumptions she upends, the offhand way she dismisses what is expected of her in favor of what feels authentically right. Had she gone through with her plan to transition all those years back, she wouldn’t have given birth to our perfect son. That’s unimaginable to me, though it could have happened. I mean, how could she have known how important her female body would come to be for her family? I hate it when people call her a “lady,” because she’s not that, but she isn’t a man either. I’m glad we’re sending the message to our son that gender categories need to be exploded. Now. And I worry about sending the message that they should be adhered to, which feels like a part of transitioning.

I also worry about our resistance to the simple, difficult fact that we are only able to have this human experience because we live in these human bodies. That, though these bodies are flawed, though they fail us, they are our only ways into life. I don’t know what it’s like to be born in a body that doesn’t reflect my gender. But I do know what it’s like to feel deeply, devastatingly let down by my body. Letting go of the narrative of pregnancy and childbirth – which was for so long deeply embedded in my beliefs about what it is to be a woman – has been crushing and painful, but it’s also been profoundly beautiful and formative: a matter of surrendering to my basic humanity, which is, in the end, vulnerable and exposed and disappointing. Which is something.short.of.what.I.want.but.so.much.more.than.I.have.a.right.to.ask.for. I could fight to fulfill the thing that I expected of my body, to bring my body to meet the standards I hold for it. But would I risk losing something of my basic humanity if I could just fix the ways I feel let down? Is there something to be gained from meeting my body where it is instead? I don’t mean these questions rhetorically; I really mean them. Are we purely blessed by our ability to overcome so many of our perceived weaknesses, or is there something meaningful in just not doing that sometimes?

I ran across this line in a Stacey Waite poem this morning: “I will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body.” Is there something in this?

Truly, I’d love your thoughts. Please keep them kind, though. Breaking Into Blossom has only ever been a space of compassionate community. I very much want to keep it that way.

* Do you have a friend who would go to a reading of one of your favorite writers, and get copies of their books that you teach with signed for you, and buy you their new book, and get it signed too while they’re at it? Because we do. And as T Cooper himself notes in his inscription to us in said book, that is one “nice-ass friend.”

** Does anyone have figures for this? Recent studies as to the percentages of lesbians who are now choosing to transition? I know it’s growing, but I don’t know how much.

Post-publication edit: There are already great comments here, which I’m SO thrilled to see. I would love for this to become a thriving conversation: so many of you have insights to offer. Please especially check out the the comment from Maybe a New Leaf, whose author speaks eloquently from the position of a trans guy. And thanks to all of you who trust this space enough to share. 

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.

.on getting here.

“So I know it’s just a spring haze
But I don’t much like the look of it
And all we do is circle it
And I found out where my edge is
And it bleeds into where you resist
And my only way, way out is to go
So far in” — “Spring Haze” (Tori Amos)

This post has nothing and everything to do with parenting. This is a subject that has been the work of a strenuous inner-dialogue, though it’s the first time that I’ve written anything publicly on the matter.

The day that my maternity leave ended, a large road construction project began smack dab in the middle of my route to work. As such, I’ve had to take a longer detour into the office each morning. Along this detour, I pass a settlement of recovery houses by the side of the road. The whole mismatched complex boasts the sign, “Serenity House” at the entrance. From what I can make of it, there are two residential houses with satellite trailers sprinkled on the grounds. Each morning when I pass (a few minutes before 8am), there are small throngs of folks hanging out at picnic tables outside. They are mostly scruffy smokers, some young, some old. There are a number of questionable fashion choices and scraggly haircuts. For some reason, seeing this sight in the morning (maybe because it’s early and I’m still very tired) brings about in me an extremely visceral reaction.

The reaction comes from the truth that I used to be one of those people. For years. This isn’t something that I talk about a lot anymore. To be honest, I’m not sure it’s a topic I’ve ever touched on this blog. In my teens and early-twenties, I had a serious alcohol and drug problem. I first got clean at 17, relapsed at 20, got sober again at 21, and have been clean since then (over eight years). My “program of recovery” has evolved to look very different from the 12-step prescription that’s so prevalent in America today. I don’t go to meetings, have a sponsor, or believe in an interventionist god. I’ve done all of those things in the past, and they were helpful in their own way, but the dogma couldn’t overcome the lack of authenticity that I found in myself in that space. For me, and I can only speak from my personal experience, the constant attention to the problems of my past (and other people’s chaotic lives) kept me in a sick spiral. Breaking out of that mode of thinking about recovery, like breaking out of the cycle of addiction, has been one of the most formative intrapersonal experiences of my adult life.

I find that this topic ruffles a lot of feathers within the structured recovery community. It’s never my intention to offend, but I can’t help but think that the subject upsets people because it casts a little grey area on the black and white rhetoric of 12-step programs. The bent is usually something to the effect of, “those who don’t go to meetings are dry drunks who will use again.” Nothing in life is that clear cut. I value my sobriety. I value my formative years in a structured program of recovery. But now, I value the time and energy that it takes to attend to the life I’ve built out of that recovery. Perhaps that’s a selfish conclusion (i.e., I’m not paying forward the time and attention given me by others). Still, I feel that the life I lead today best enables me to be of service and love to my wife, our son, my friends, parents, and colleagues.

When I sit back and think about what it took for me to get here, I’m floored by the complexity of my experience. While I hit a low “bottom” when I was actively using, I think that I sustained more unhealthy behaviors and relationships over time in recovery than at any other point in my life. Some of this was the by-product of getting sober so young, but some of it is what happens when sick members justify the behavior of other sick members. Dis-ease breeds dis-ease. This was by no means my across the board experience, so I don’t mean to sound petty. I was also inspired to new levels by many of the friends I’ve made in my years in recovery. There are some beautiful, healthy, intimate, vulnerable, loving people out there. And I’ve had the good fortune to share the road with many of them during some difficult times. That said, I haven’t found 12-step programs to be the magic bullet promised. I’m always striving for authenticity, which is fluid, not prescriptive. It’s like the dilemma in R’s last post about food: How do we strive toward higher ideals without sacrificing our critical thinking?

I don’t have the answers to that question, but I’m learning to trust my intuition more readily. I can make healthy choices for myself and my family. I can eat cleaner, locally grown foods. I can parent my child openly and actively. I can protect and strengthen my marriage each day. I can make smart choices of how to spend my time, money, and energy. I can find a way to work for myself while empowering other people. I can fight for my civil rights. I can strive to be a better friend and a better daughter. I can choose to tell the truth. I can choose to amend my behavior. I can choose to accept and love myself as a whole and unique person. I don’t think it’s true humility to walk through each day thinking of oneself as an emotionally diseased person who must submit their agency, as one is not to be “trusted.” I want to find my humility in reverence to life, to nature, and to the experience of love. I don’t need religion for that. And, I find, that as I strive for these goals, I’m able to measure myself by the yardstick of my own life. I spent much of my young life fruitlessly comparing myself to others. Inevitably, I always prided myself on my seeming superiority or chastised myself for my seeming inferiority. But when I take myself on my own terms, I can see the ways in which I have already outpaced my best self of last year. And I hope that I’ll be able to say the same thing with each subsequent year. Mostly, I don’t want to quell that deep inner voice with the thunderous pronouncements of external direction. If I want to teach my children that they need to learn and follow their own internal compass, then I have to be willing to lead by example.

All of this is just to say that I’m the most satisfied that I’ve ever been. Not because everything has fallen into place, not because I’ve solved all of the conflicts in my relationships, and certainly not because I think I have the answers, but because I am slowly surrendering what I think I “know” to what I actually need.

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:

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.

.thoughts on using donor sperm.

I’ve had the good fortune this week to read two excellent posts on the complexities of donor sperm. Both blogs are taking part in a round-robin on the subject, and I feel called to respond. You can read the original posts here and here.

Like both blogs suggest, I think that I’ll have shifting ideas about our sperm donor(s) as time goes on. I know that, for me, thinking of the donation as a life-giving gift (much as I would think of donated blood, organs, or marrow) is helpful in circumnavigating the feelings of insecurity that having a third person (a strange man, no less) involved in the construction of our family brings up in me. But I suspect that the Rabbit (or other children) might not feel that way about him in the long run. And we’ll have very limited control over that.

Obviously, the narratives we construct surrounding the donor when Rabbit is little will likely be influential in his burgeoning self-identity. And I certainly trust that, having spent time as a solid, two-parent family, the fear of the donor as a “third-parent” will fade (as, I suspect, will the fear of our adopted children’s birth parents). However, it’s hard not to imagine taking stuff personally (children’s curiosity or attachment to their genetic lineage; interest in and care for a symbolic father who donated his sperm, or an absent birth mother who carried a child inside of her).

Though I know that R will have/does have her own struggles in carving out her NGP niche – which will take time, trust, and experience to find peace and stability within – I worry more about my character defects in this regard. I think that R is wired to be more open, more adaptable, more interested in others’ subject-positions. And while R is also fiercely protective of our family, I am more prone to defensiveness and jealousy of anything that I perceive as a threat to our family. So I worry that the process of accepting the evolving narratives surrounding the other adults who (by-proxy) join our family lineage may prove exceptionally difficult at times.

I do think, though, that the Donor Sibling Registry doesn’t stress me out too much. I think of it as a resource on a shelf. I have no desire to post to it, or to seek out other genetic siblings, but I do like knowing it’s there (if ever we had a medical reason to seek it out, or, if later in life, our children are compelled to look into it). Just my two cents…

.gender dissonance.

The folks over at Regular Midwesterners posed this question earlier in the week, which really caught my attention:

Do you think of yourself as a “mother”? A “father”? Something in between? Why?

Interestingly, while I occupy a very physically maternal role at current, I suspect that my long-term relationships with my children will be defined by a more progressively paternal approach. And while R, as the non-gestational parent, is currently occupying a traditionally “father” oriented role right now, I trust that she will be pure-mama once this Rabbit is born.

I have become increasingly aware of the dissonance between my gender representation and my newfound status as a gestational parent. Since my early teenage years, I have identified as a masculine female. This identity marker has run a gamut of manifestations, from the bad bowl cut and ripped jeans of high school to the two years in my early-twenties spent experimenting with permanent transition while living in male monikers. In recent years, my gender has come to rest in a very metrosexual masculinity. I wear ties and eyeliner. I love tailored pants and expensive haircuts. My body has become an increasingly comfortable vehicle for moving about the world in. Generally speaking, I am interpreted as female. This is in stark contrast to my late teens and early twenties (spent in the deep south) where I often coded as male. But, these days, I feel most often coded as simply queer. I occasionally bristle when faced with scowls from the women in the ladies’ room. I am very rarely hit on by heterosexual men (though I have occasionally been cruised by nearsighted gay men in dimly lit establishments). I really love the kind of female that I’ve grown into.

And then, there’s pregnancy. I have truly begun to love the experience of being pregnant. Yes, it’s bittersweet, as this wasn’t Plan A. Yes, it can be very uncomfortable at times (especially the first trimester). But I do love the pleasure of feeling physically connected to our son. I do love the peace I feel (for the first time, in many ways) towards my female reproductive self. But they don’t make metrosexual maternity clothes. And I find in my day-to-day interactions a sense of having lost my queer card. I value not having heterosexual privilege. I don’t like the dance in and out of heteronormativity that so many of the more feminine lesbians in my life (R included) have to do on a daily basis. Questioning when and how to come out? Wondering if it’s safe? Wondering what the underlying motives of a person’s interest in lesbianism might be? Overall, I’ve dodged all of these issues, as my gender representation gives up the ghost of staying closeted in most situations. And while I’ve dealt with my share of violence and homophobia as a result of this consistent “outness,” I’ve always felt proud to wear my truth on my sleeve.

Now I wear my truth somewhere under the stretch pants that come up to my increasingly ample bra. While I’ve done my best to choose maternity clothes that are closer to my pre-pregnancy style (pants, neutral color palette, fitted everything), it’s incredible to me how differently I feel in my daily interactions with new people. This has been especially true as I’ve begun this new job. It’s particularly interesting to consider the assumptions that many folks probably make about R’s gender representation by proxy to me (as no one has actually met R yet). Obviously, there are other queers and feminists in my workplace who, I’m sure, can appreciate that my appearance pregnant is likely not congruent with my non-pregnant self. But for many others, men in particular, I imagine that I code very much as a feminine, pregnant woman. I’ve felt the same disconnect in spaces with other pregnant women (at pre-natal yoga, at the midwives clinic). It’s akin to the sense that I had in the women’s locker room in high school. That I didn’t belong there. That someone had made a mistake in letting me into the club.

When R was pregnant, I loved occupying a more paternal role. I reveled in telling everyone I met that we were expecting. I loved taking care of R’s needs, of talking to E each night through R’s belly. I felt confident and at peace. This role, though, has taken some getting used to. When R was pregnant, there were times in my day when I felt totally “normal” (read: not defined by our pregnancy). Those times are getting very few and far between now, especially as I can feel the Rabbit moving around consistently, which I do love. Maybe this doesn’t make much sense, but it takes humility to put down the vanity of wearing the kinds of clothes that I like, vulnerability to know that people I encounter are making assumptions about my sexuality that simply aren’t true, and patience to trust that (while forever changed by the experience), I will be able to return to a non-pregnant, masculine self post-partum. I’m far from perfect at it, but I’m learning to find peace in the divide.

the false binaries of parenthood

Nota Bene: This post is long, but I think it’s an important discussion to have. It’s something I’ve wanted to write for awhile now, and, whatever your subject position, I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this, either in a comment or through private message.

I had a hard day yesterday (lots of sadness: I think it was a cathartic, end.of.summer, the.Rabbit.is.doing.well, J.is.feeling.better, I.can.fall.apart sort of thing), so when J got home last night, she took me downtown to eat carry-out on an outdoor table and hit a movie (a perfect RLG pick.me.up). We ran into our friend G and her incredibly sweet mama, who did something adorable. She asked what I weighed at birth, and then what J weighed at birth, and then she told us that her kids weighed the average of her husband’s birth weight and her own, so, she speculated, the Rabbit would probably weigh the average of ours. G’s mom is a badass, and I’m pretty sure she’s not senile, so one of two things happened: either she was just being sweet in including me, or she forgot (because she’s the kind of person who might just forget about biological necessities). This moment made me feel incredible.

I was being asked a question about myself by way of speculating something about my son!

Reflecting on this last night and this morning, I’ve asked myself why these kinds of comments make me feel so good, all the while I’m dreading the constant commentary that I anticipate we’ll hear about how much Rabbit looks like my wife. It isn’t that I don’t want him to look like her, so let me be clear:

• She’s gorgeous.
• She’s brilliant.
• She’s my favorite person in the world.
• I would LOVE for this boy to have her amazing eyes, her upturned upper-lip, her high cheek-bones, her long neck, her long limbs. I tell our son this all the time, speaking through her belly, loving them both and the connection they share.

And I never needed for my children to look like me. If I could choose which parts of me my babies would inherit, I would give them my loyalty, my self-discipline, my steady sense of gratitude, my joy. And I’m just as likely to give these qualities to a non-bio child as I am to one with whom I share genetic material. So for me, it’s not about any actual desire for a biological relationship with my children. What it is about is perception. It’s about the deep investment our culture has with biology, the not.so.subtle privileging of blood-relations.

This morning, I ran across a new post by Lyn – over at First Time Second Time – who wrote these words in response to the question, “are there any differences in how you feel about your gestational kids and your partner’s gestational children?” Lyn and her partner, Gail, each gave birth to one of their two children. Like all of the First Time Second Time posts (I’ve been a silent reader of this blog for some time now), this one was full of insight and honesty. Though – as a mom who will probably only share genetic material with a child who didn’t make it – some of what I read there was painful, I’m glad to be a part of a community that can discuss these questions openly and vulnerably. So in that spirit, here are my thoughts:

The problem isn’t that we draw distinctions between biological parent/child relationships and non-biological parent/child relationships. There’s nothing wrong with distinctions. The problem is that we do so in a society wherein this binary is always already weighted. From our first utterance on the issue, we’re fighting against the assumption not that there are differences, but that because of those differences, relationships can be valued and ranked. We live in a culture where biology is so privileged that any acknowledgment of difference amounts, essentially, to confirmation of a hierarchy. It’s the same reason we have to fight, as members of the LGBT community, to insist that our families are the same, even though in many ways they’re not. It’s why “separate but equal” never works. We can’t be trusted to allow differences between groups of people because we are so deeply conditioned to rank and compare. And once we make value judgments, we stick to them.

Men are better than women? Check.

White is better than black? Check.

Straight is better than gay? Check.

Moms are closer to their kids than dads? Check.

A biological connection with your children is always best, and anything else is a back-up plan? Check.

These are the terms. And, as is typical, these terms dictate what we can even think about, forcing us to ignore the complexity that actually drives these issues. If Emmett Ever had made it, I probably would have had a different relationship with her than I will with my other (from J’s body, from other women’s bodies) children. But why would we assume it would be better? Maybe it would have reflected that common mother/daughter tension. Maybe she would have been so much like me that we would have fought a lot. Maybe she would just have been closer with J. I’ve had our two black cats for thirteen years now, and our boy-cat (they’re siblings) is my soul-animal. He and I fell in love at first sight. His sister and I learned to love each other, but when J came into our lives, that girl-cat finally found her soul-mama. I love her, but we don’t have that same, magical thing. But loving her is, in some ways, sweeter for the work that it’s taken us. There’s a different kind of depth because it wasn’t instantaneous. Connections aren’t so easily predicted. They’re a product of too much complexity for that.

And the reality is that, because I’m a different person than everyone else, I’ll be a different mother too. J and I were both raised by our biological moms, but they’re very different parents, and my guess is that if you asked them to describe how they think about motherhood (which I’d love to hear them do!), they’d give you very different answers. The problem is, nobody compares their answers because, as biological mothers, they’re both assumed to have experienced ideal motherhood.

What hurts me is not that E is the only child I’ll share DNA with. What hurts me is that, just as I have to fight against the mainstream assumption that my family is lesser than because it happens to include two women, I’ll have to fight against the assumption that my relationship with my children is lesser than too. Personally, I think there’s something beautiful about the likelihood that I won’t be related to any of the children I get to raise. It creates an equality that I like. The Rabbit, and any other children we decide for J to carry, and any children we’re blessed to adopt: their relationship to me will be based completely on my love for them as people in the world. It won’t be based on shared features. I think of this as a privilege. It just hurts me that few others do too.

And I find this whole conversation a little absurd because – just as with this country’s divorce rate, it’s laughable to suggest that gay marriage will harm the “sanctity of the institution of marriage” – it’s laughable to think that all bio-moms are inherently more connected to their children than I will be to mine. Being a mama is the most important thing in my life. I’ve waited a long time to be sure that I’ll be good at this, that I’m ready to put myself down in the ways this will necessitate, that I have room in my life for these people to grow. I am humbled by the prospect of being invested with the safety of my children, with their happiness, with their ability to become the best possible versions of themselves. But I’m supposed to think that, even with all that intentionality, I’ll always be second to their “real” moms? Or that, because they don’t share my nose shape, I’ll do all of that a bit less enthusiastically?

I remember having lunch with a friend who had struggled for years with infertility. When I asked about adoption, she said that couples had to fully mourn the possibility of conceiving before they could move onto adoption. This was true for her, and she’s since become an incredible adoptive mama. But I bristled at the generality of her statement, largely because it never felt true to me. I wanted both: to adopt and to carry. And I wanted them equally. I’ve always sensed that my children would come to me in a variety of ways, and that’s never made me feel like some of them will be any less my children than others. But what she said is culturally true (ideologically-driven), precisely BECAUSE we tell women that adoption is a back-up-plan. It’s something you do if you can’t have the real thing. It’s something you settle for. But I refuse to think of my relationships with my children as “settling.” I’m not infertile, but trying again might be dangerous for me, and if I did try again, I’d be doing it because my culture tells me that’s the better experience, the true-mama experience. But why would I believe that? I don’t believe that I’d be happier if I’d just found the right man. J is my unequivocal right person. And my children will be my right children. E made me a mama, but she didn’t need the things from me that I wanted her to need. I pray that the Rabbit will. And assuming he does, that experience won’t be cheaper than it would have been had it been her. It won’t be lesser than. If anything, it will be even greater for the lessons I’ve learned in losing her. The depth with which I already love this little boy astonishes me.

I think that we should talk about difference, but we shouldn’t talk about it as though it’s entirely biologically driven, or as though the biological differences can be valued. We have different relationships with each of our children because they are different human beings. They need different things of us. They bring different things to the table. Unless they came into our lives at the same moment, we’re different people when we meet them. I’m a different mama than any of the mothers I’ve observed in my life. I’ve learned from each of them: picked up bits of wisdom, things I’d like to emulate, things that wouldn’t be right for me and my family, but in the end, I am and will be the kind of mama that only I can be. That would be true no matter how my children came to me, but if I were a heterosexual bio-mom, the uniqueness of that would be invisible. It’s only visible (up for discussion) because of the alternative nature of our family structure. And that’s kinda silly. I wish we could all be like G’s mom: could just forget that we’re supposed to notice these kinds of things. I think that if we stopped noticing them, they would stop being true.

A note for further reading:

Two blogs have helped me to undermine the privileging of biology. I share them with you now in case you’re walking through any of this yourself, or in case you want to better understand someone who is.

• The first is Love Invents Us. I ADORE this family, and I’ve learned a lot from this mama’s refusal to submit to the mandates of shared genetics. She is a total role-model for me.

• The second is Regular Midwesterners, especially Josh’s posts about his adopted son. There are lots of ways in which I feel connected to a gay male experience of fatherhood: because of my bodily limitations, because I’ve always wanted to adopt. I just found this blog a couple of months ago, but it’s already proven helpful.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, if you find yourself willing.

unbecoming

So I’m working on the fourth chapter of my dissertation, which focuses on motherhood. (Not that I’ve drafted the other three yet; I skipped ahead for reasons that aren’t relevant here.) One of these days, I’ll explain my project on this blog as it actually relates in interesting ways. But for now, this work on motherhood has been difficult. I vacillate between acceptance of this new state of being, and a terrible ache for all I have lost. And I can never (or I couldn’t until now) tell if immersing myself this way in the study of motherhood has been helpful to me, or if it has made things worse.

But today, tonight, I was sitting here in the midst of a tornado watch (the same weather that brought us Emmett Ever) reading Diana L. Gustafson’s Unbecoming Mothers: The Social Production of Maternal Absence. Gustafson writes about what it is to “become” a mother (a regulated process that involves, of course, conceiving and giving birth to biological children, and instilling in those children beliefs consistent with “white, middle-class, Judeo-Christian family values” (26), among other things). Failure to “reproduce” these values is, of course, a mark of bad mothering. And there are a dozen ways one can be automatically positioned outside of motherhood proper (so, always already marked a failure): being poor, not being white, being a lesbian, adopting (and not making) your children. Gustafson writes:

The cultural priorities of blood relations, family preservation, and family autonomy create the underpinnings for our social policies on child welfare. In spite of significant diversity in the composition of family-like groups, a limited definition of the family still persists – a definition that treats traditional heterosexual marriage and biological offspring as the paradigm of the legitimate family. Numerous constituencies find themselves shuffled outside of this cultural definition, including adoptive families, gay and lesbian families, homeless families, stepfamilies, foster families, and kinship care families. (179)

The women of these “constituencies” will always fall short of the guidelines for ideal motherhood. To which I thought: FUCK THAT.

WHY am I allowing myself to be this destroyed because I am once more removed from a system I already see through?** A system that treats adopted children as second best. A system that quietly, insidiously, treats women whose children are not biologically related to them as less than mothers of children who are. A system that insists that my wife and I are inherently less qualified to parent than a heterosexual couple. No amount of struggling is going to make me fit in that mold.

And it isn’t like me to try. 

And why have I always wanted to?

Last night, my beautiful wife told me that sometimes she gets scared that I see Rabbit River as a back-up plan. And it’s true: if E had been okay, this new being wouldn’t be with us. But I don’t, not for a second, love him or her any less than I loved our little girl, and it broke my heart to hear that J ever – even for moments – doubted that.

I have been indulging in the sadness of this, and that’s okay. I’ve needed to. And I’m not naive enough to think that the process of grieving my fertility is over (nor will the process of grieving our daughter ever end). But I feel myself unbecoming the kind of mother that this society wants me to be, and the freedom in that is thrilling. I don’t accept those mandates. I don’t cede to the perpetuation of a status quo that my entire working life is set against.

In place of the person who always wanted to give birth to a healthy child because that’s what would make her a woman, I feel a new person emerging. One who knows absolutely that her children are hers and does not need bloodlines to prove it. One who actually (not only in words, but in practice) challenges the entire notion of the patriarchal family model. And when I feel her starting to take over, I feel stronger than I ever have. And more certain of my role as a mother.

I will fiercely protect my family, and part of what I’ll protect it from is the notion that it is any less a unit because of the beautiful complexity with which it emerged. That baby growing inside of my wife? God help the people who imply that s/he is anything less than wholly mine.

It feels indescribably great to be this sure of who I am. (I would say “again,” but I sense that this kind of clarity is a whole new thing.)

** Obviously, I’m speaking here about my struggles with infertility. There’s no question in my mind as to why I’m still devastated about E being gone, or why I always will be.