Recent illustration of goddess knows what, hopefully not Baba, by the lil’ monkey.
Baba’s mood is…skittish. Or maybe brooding. Yeah, that’s it. Brooding in a kind of a skittish sort of a way. Later today I’m to have minor surgery (I check into the “In N’ Out” floor of the hospital), during which various longstanding and nettlesome matters relating to my female reproductive organs and surrounding innards will be attended to and researched further. Ordinarily I’d be reluctant to even mention this medical broo-ha-ha, being dedicated as I am both to the benign neglect of these self-same organs and to the downplaying of medical broo-ha-ha as it relates to my person. But I’ll be out of comission for a bit and wanted to set up the Alternative Fare I’ll be posting here whilst I recoup my joie de vivre.
I thought that for the next week while I’m out, I would post, bit-by-bit, an essay of mine which appeared in the storied volume Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All (thanks again to the incomparable Harlyn Aizley, who’s now opened up her own blogging shop, for making that anthology both possible and fantastic). You just might have noticed reference to the book over in the sidebar of the blog’s homepage. Just maybe.
In the essay I have there, “Confessions of a Lesbian Dad,” I introduce to a breathlessly waiting world the memorable term “lesbian dad,” and chart my movement from worried, pre-inseminatory, would-be non-bio parent, to freshly annointed (but as-yet clueless) lesbian dad. I wrote the whole of it before I began this blog, so it consititutes the official back story to what I’ve recorded here. And since I wrote it back then, I also wrote it before I began to answer some of the questions I pose in it. I had a hunch how I would want to try to position myself, parentally speaking, but I had no idea whether it would all work out. For any of you folks reading this who are in the plotting and worrying phase of your parenthood — particularly if you’re a gal who’s going to be parenting alongside a sweetie who’ll be all pregnant and birthing and radiating with Authentic Biological Motherhood — it might be nice to compare the tone and content of that essay then (dating three years old this spring) with this blog now.
From time to time, I think that some of the things I wrote there would help explain or extend various conversations here, so in addition to keeping things lively and filled with content! content! content! here while I recoup, I can also have something to refer back to in the future. I apologize for the redundancy to those of you who’ve already read the piece. I also wince at the stark contrast that will emerge between the well-thought out, properly ironed prose that one prepares for print, and the tossled, mussed, just-rolled-out-of-bed kind of prose which one tosses up into the digital ether day after day, with reckless disregard for typos or half-baked thoughts, simply because there’s such a built-in informality to an essay when it appears in the medium of blog. Or so one seems to think.
(So far as I understand, we authors didn’t lose copyright on the material when our essays were published — right, Robin? — so it’s not an infringement on that upstanding press, Beacon, if I reprint the stuff here. If it is, I will totally cross out everything.)
If I’m feeling perky enough, I’ll chit-chat back in comments. Otherwise, I’ll simply try to talk my daughter / beloved / long-suffering childcare S.W.A.T. team friends through the process of moderating comments from my prone position on the bed / couch / floor / wherever I may find myself.
15 Responses to “Baba’s mood is…”
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Lesbian Dad is written by a parent who answers to the name "Baba" and works toward a world in which amor does indeed vincit omnia. 
You’re in our thoughts and I’m sure I’m speaking for a whole host of people out there when I say anxiously awaiting more posts. Good luck!
Good luck today! We’ll be here when you’re feeling ready to return.
Good luck! We here in Bloggerland will be thinking of you.
what’s ailing you my hero in baba-dom? here’s your sista blogger and ex-editor/current polly fan wishing you an uneventful surgical journey and recovery. come back to the written word soon.
harlie
good luck, and a swift recovery to you!
Good luck with the intervention.
My SO is going in for something similar next Thursday, but it will leave her out of commission for 8 weeks, of which at least four will be spent flat on her back.
Hope everything works out!
I look forward to reading the piece.
Here’s wishing you all the best for your surgery and recovery. I’m really looking forward to the essay.
Oooh LD sweet thoughts to you on your medical event, may all go very well on all fronts for you and I hope you have all forms of succor pending on your behalf. As far as posting parts of your landmark essay, I think that’s great. I’ve read it and would enjoy reading it again…and hope to read other essays in the future (hint!).
Reporting for Baba – she is A-OK and resting in a well-earned Vicodin haze. Innards have been attended to with complete success, and research results were two thumbs up! Skittishness and brooding are history.
Annz, I’m not sure that, when reporting on the research of someone’s, um, hoo-hoo, it is appropriate to say the results were “two thumbs up.” Or maybe that’s too crude for anyone else to think of but me. Anyhoo, glad to know all is as well as can be.
Many, many thanks to you kindly well-wishers. Annz’s synopsis is on the button (no pun intended, L,D). Minus detailing about how like a wet kitten I felt wearing that ridiculous paper dress and the shower cap thingy. They must give patients these things to keep us docile. Worked on me.
Skittishness and brooding are indeed history, now soreness, queasiness, and headachiness are present! Which I’ll take over skittish brooding any day.
I’m so glad the news is good and I hope your recovery is uneventful. I will enjoy reading your essay in installments, even though I own the book and have already read it–in fact, that’s how we discovered your blog. I confess to some dread, since the second time I read it, which was quite recently, my beloved and I realized with grief that one of the boys you write about with such affection in the last section is the one who is gone. Going back to that piece after reading about him here made me feel the loss as if I’d known him myself.
Ah, yes. Yes, well you know.
I had begun the essay before he was diagnosed, as the mumbled beginnings of a book. The book idea was knocked into the stratosphere with his diagnosis, and I finished the essay — after being directed to Harlyn, who was still on the hunt for pieces — after he died. Coming back to it and writing the essay was in many ways theraputic, since so much of the first six months of our daughter’s life was filled with the battle royal during the last six months of my nephew’s. But I had to write him into the story. Remembering what had happened in the airport was a blessing, since it gave me both an ending for the essay, and a way to see his name in print.
A small something, but a something.
Thank you for the compassion.
Ach, theres nothing like being a a patient to make you feel ill! This get well comment is so delayed, I’m thinking dignity will have already been restored, well-being regained.
Even the most minor of procedures can be major in other ways, and the the general anaesthetic is one-size-fits-all. How would this be as a a tonic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFKmY63FTwc
Google the lyrics if the songs not familiar, they’re beautiful: very rhetorical, all about description. Better than vicodin? Bread and butter, no?