I advise my children they are welcome to supply me with gifts and/or cards for either or both occasions, since, as I say to them around this time of the year, and generally at this Hallmark time only, “Since I am both mother and father to you.” And I feel like both. Or neither. I am perceived as The Mother, since I birthed and nursed these children. But I act more like The Father, having an easier time throwing a football around and letting the children eat ice cream than doing stuff like finding and applying bandaids to imagined owies.

It is a strange place to be in. When asked, my children will reply in ways that suggest they certainly do not see me in any clearly defined gender (or gender particular parental) role. And as I get deeper into my own life and this parenting journey, I feel it is not all that easily defined for me either.

So I’ll take both days. Thanks.

This post for me could be part of an answer to the questions posed in your post ‘Can a ‘hir’ talk at Blogher’.

I just can’t keep up. I spent a week reflecting on whether the clutch of lesfam blogs I read (or my reading of them) are radical. I realised that I spend a lot of time not thinking about things, just being: or rather just doing something else. It feels like coming of age, coming ‘home’ even, the luxury of total absorbtion in the wonder of family life. Could the mundane somehow be the new radical?

Then this post touched on so many mental dilemmas that I became aware of having in the run up to Father’s Day. In the midst of much doing, within a few keystrokes, my dilemmas were somehow teased apart and assuaged and I was off mulling over the wonders of our evolving family in new ways. And it seemed all of a sudden so terribly RADICAL!!

When I worked as a maintenance gardnener, after grad school (a natural employment progression), my two different bosses were straight gals who were of smaller stature than me. Both hauled wheelbarrows and slate stones and massive materiél many times their weight (they were ants, and one could not be kept from climbing up trees with a chainsaw (”Look out below!”) Me, I would simply gape at them in wonder.

Porschay, here’s to limitless possibility, from new on into old agey!

Shereen, I am so glad you point out the “blessing in unlooked for ways” that adoptive parenthood is: “equal in all ways, and unequal in all ways.” I think about that a lot, having many dear friends who are both (same sex) adoptive parents. Their struggles around roles, gendered and otherwise, are very different than mine and my partners’. The battle over who is the more “authentic” mother doesn’t emerge in the same ways, if at all. And the factors which have ultimately most influenced my kids’ relationship to me — essentially, who has been more the primary care-giver in the early months and years — have been recognized much earlier. These friends cleared the body-bound hurdles at the start, and saw that so much simply derives from the time you clock with the kids.

I couldn’t be more happy to help spread around the opportunity for you (and any others) to think about and elucidate your family-shaping insights. Hell, even alongside a neighborhood lesbian parent group, this online family conversation is vital to me.

Props for makin’ it - it ain’t easy.

I wanted to respond to this:

“And dadgum it I believe there are a lot of us out there, in spirit if not in name; hetero women as well as lesbians; men both gay and straight.”

I totally agree with you, as a hetero woman. I don’t like the cultural definitions of what it means to be masculine or feminine, and I often find myself on the masculine side of that definition. What is interesting about that is how disorienting other people find that. When I was telling a male co-worker a story about how incredibly irritating I found it when my ex-husband couldn’t answer a simple question like what did you have for lunch? without a 10 minute dissertation on his thought process in getting to what he chose, he looked at me very oddly. Clearly, the conversation wasn’t what he was having trouble with, it was the role that I took in it.

I often find that I need to consciously modify my manner at work to fit others expectations of how I should act. Not that I care what they think of me, but it makes it easier to get things done if I try to be a bit more norm-conforming. I work as a project manager, which is, in large part, a job about forming relationships with people, so I have to do things that make it easier for others to get along with me, and feel comfortable with me. I find it very strange that I have to pretend to be more womanly, though.

Because everthing reminds me of a book, or I’ve read a book about every topic that interests me, I thought right away of Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man. She talks quite a bit in there about how deeply gender is entrenched in our world views and self views. Very interesting stuff.

I am so glad you are back from your hiatus, I missed you! That must be what’s spurring me on to all this commenting, lol.