After letting loose a week’s worth of spit-polished essay (the better to pass our time as I nursed my surgery wounds), I am a tad sheepish. I give your average blog post a whole lot less rehearsal time, shoving it in front of the footlights, wig akimbo and costume unbuttoned, with only a fraction of its lines committed to memory. Poor thing.

But I suppose that’s a bit of what a blog is: an open rehearsal. A notebook, a sketch pad, a drafting board. Particularly if it is done in the off hours, as this one is. The leg a blog has up over print media — and it’s substantial — is that it thrives on, is even substantiated by, dialog. Which is well worth the embarrassment of flashing a bit of writerly plumber’s butt on a regular basis.

Re-reading my Confessions essay, I’m reminded of the welter of unanswered questions that defined the beginning of my parenthood. What shall I be called? How shall I prove to others, if not my child, or myself, that I am an authentic parent? Just what is an authentic parent, anyway? And on and on, ad infinitum. I’m so very glad to report that, three or so years into the journey, plenty of my early questions have been answered by the quiet, insistent truth that I am on the job every day. It’s not so hard to define Baba: it’s a parent, which is me.

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Part six of a six-part series of excerpts from “Confessions of a Lesbian Dad,” originally published in Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-biological Lesbian Moms Tell All (Ed. Harlyn Aizley. Boston: Beacon, 2006). If you made it through the lot of them, I want to thank you for indulging this stroll down memory lane during my recouperation. Back to the present moment as of Monday.

[Series intro and backstory here.]

I wasn’t at this lesbian dad thing for very long before I developed a repertoire of responses to the more predictable questions and assumptions.

“Yes, she’s my daughter.”
“Our donor friend’s just that: our donor friend. If anyone’s the daddy, it’s me.”
“My sweetie did all the hard work; I just got to watch.”
“I like to call myself Baba.”
“I feel more like something in-between a Mom and a Dad, and this word says that to me. But I’ll answer to anything she calls me, once she acquires the gift of speech.”

Like that.

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