As to the rest of this leg of the journey, to the hearing of arguments on March 5 and then the wait. Only an old picture my daughter drew really conveys the feeling:

As a former teacher myself, I agree with everything he said except his conclusion…Gay marriage gives kids hope & security.

PS, I’m glad I’m not the only one sweating March 5 onward…here we go again.

check out this (infuriating and wrong-headed) quote:
“It was frustrating,” says Fred Vanderhoof, a sixth-grade teacher who has taught at Nelson Elementary in Pinedale, Calif., for the past 20 years. “But I was not surprised, because they’ve had a liberal agenda for a couple of decades.”

Vanderhoof, who does not belong to the union, gave $650 to support the gay marriage ban. To him, it is unremarkable that teachers gave more money in favor of the ban than against it.

“I think that as public school teachers, we are with these young people every day and we see the problems that they have — not understanding their sexual identity and their sexual roles, male and female.” Gay marriage, he says, “is one more thing happening that is not going to help them. I think we teachers see that.”

I don’t know, but it would be an interesting challenge.

Ruffian, o, do I hope it will be a happy birthday for you this year!

You are kind to note a wiggly, slightly upwardly trending graph line over here, in the way of the frequency &/or cheeriness of posts. You know, it was impossible not to try to direct all available energies into that Prop 8 fight, since nothing less than the legal, social, and emotional well-being of my kids felt to be hanging in the balance. That’s how it felt, at least.

What it wound up doing was throwing all the emotional ballast in one part of the boat. (? not a sailor, me.) It has taken a very long time to redistribute the weight, and to find, really, what the voice of this blog should be, or maybe even was. In fits and starts I remember that the everyday is still there waiting, always was.

I hope one day to be able to convey, particularly to interested hetero folks, and to younger queer folks as well, just why it is that this particular bait-and-switch hit folks like me so hard in the solar plexus. The nugget of it is definitely that a few months into the legal recognition thing, when we began to realize what it was like to be treated (legally at least) as equals, we began to realize how much anger we had been sitting on for ten, twenty, thirty or more years. At the homophobic/ heterosexist/ heteronormative society around us, but probably also at ourselves, for the degrees to which we absorbed or accepted that. Trippy, and painful, but true. That is a lot of past due anger, enough to give you an ulcer.

Many people I’ve talked to have eventually come to think of it this way. Total pacifist types feeling like they could punch holes in walls, etc. Or not be able to reconcile friendships/relationships with folks on the other side of this vote. It just took something out of me that twenty-plus years of eyes open engagement (and forty-plus years of being me) did not prepare me for.

Anyhow. So thank you. It’s been an interesting challenge to be host/convener of this public forum that’s so organized around celebrating and exploring the thing that felt so under attack last summer/fall. Hard to write around the topic. Yet hard to write about it. Therefore hard to write, period. Then, compounding that, hard to host a writing-based conversation and not writing.

But it’s done the same very salutary thing to this particular emotional journey as it’s done to my parenthood overall, which has been to pry me into a slightly higher level of productive self-examination, with a stronger commitment to transforming the fruits of that examination into something of use to others. Even if, often, when I have been able to peep much, the use has been to reflect the wind-knocked-out feeling of my peers.

(Which, coincidentally, is also my b’day. It will be a monumental birthday one way or another…I just wish I knew which way!!)

I’ve been glad to see your posts making a bit of a rebound, LD. I’ve noticed the growing re-emergence of many folks who were hit particularly emotionally hard by the loss in November. I know for me, President Obama’s inauguration went a long way towards that!

I’ll be wringing my hands right along with you, but I have to say that it gave me a thrill to see my employer’s name up there in your list. It feels so nice to finally work for a company that (often) is noted for fighting the good fight.

(N, from twohotmamas)