Gotta let me buy lunch, though.

You were amazing! Gracias for bringing your heart and mind to Other Voices. Our students left inspired, knowing that they too can “grow the food” they need to eat. The thoughtful advice you gave, your anecdotes and references, were brilliant jewels you made into an Other Voices hierloom, a lecture perfectly balanced between discussion of craft and explanation of your political passion.

I felt honored by the warmth with which you made reference to our friendship. In truth, I realized again as I was sitting in the first row that I am now and will continue to be your student.

Let’s meet for lunch soon.

—Alberto

Lamentably paraphrased, and I may be missing nuances, but:

Q1: How do you manage the challenge of trying to write to such a broad audience? Insofar as you consider what you write part of a social movement [& I do]? Essentially, who do you write to, when you’re writing?

Q2: About accessibility: online accessibility isn’t all that widespread — public libraries, maybe, but that’s it. So if you’re trying to effect positive social change, wouldn’t you want to try to communicate in other ways?

Q3: On a personal note: I have a friend whose sister is a single lesbian raising her child, and she’s beginning to run into issues about how to talk about “the dad,” or rather “the lack of dad.” How do you contend with this yourself?

And again, lamentably paraphrased and definitely compacted, but here’s how I answered them (not that you asked for that, too), but I couldn’t just let only one shoe drop.

A1: Good question! For one, it’s taken some time for me to get a good sense of who’s reading. Comments help, and [also one year I did a reader's survey]. It helps a lot that my roots are as a teacher and a discussion facilitator. So it comes naturally for me to try to tune in to “who’s in the room” and then calibrate what I say accordingly. Not to edit, but to make the best impact.

When I feel like I might be venturing into areas that might seem to some to be “in-groupish,” I can provide synonyms, or links. I certainly don’t censor what I feel, by any means. But I also folks know, particularly with this medium, that they enter various sub-communities, and expect a degree of unfamiliarity from time to time. What I would hope to do is keep folks reading who are at the edges, but open. I provided a Glossary to help provide some back-story for folks, for instance.

A2: Good question! It’s definitely a medium that begins with clear bounds around it: access to a computer, ability to afford a monthly line to the internet, etc. So that’s certainly a given. I don’t know what the “penetration” (I think that’s the word used) of the internet is in U.S. households is, for instance, but it’s far from 100%, far from where general literacy is. But for me right now, given the age of my kids and my being the primary caregiver, the short, disaggregated chunks of writing that make up a blog is all I can clear time for. Or at least without great effort. And I do love what it has done for me as a writer — it’s like lifting weights in front of your living room window. It’s obvious when I’m at work, and equally obvious when I’m in the other room eating potato chips watching TV. It creates a positive imperative to keep at it.

But I certainly value communicating in every other way — print media, which I’ve published in and, given the time to do the hustling, intend to continue to publish in in the future — and by talking. I do hope, though, that the impact our words do have online is translated, that it hops the boundary between virtual and actual. People carry what they’ve read with them as they move into the world.

A3: [Some of this was continued after the talk one-on-one] Good question! The beautiful part of raising kids from when they’re small ’til when their big is, they’ll ask you what they need to know, when they need to know it. Whatever else is extra will spill over the dam anyway. So it starts simple. But that’s a lot of why I started writing this way, in public, with the invitation of others to join in and help. I didn’t know how to answer that question either (i.e., “Where is the dad?”).

We simply tell our kids the truth, from early on, about everything. Our family is in the minority; most people have a mom and a dad, but by no means all. We are special. But we’re not the only ones that are special. In explaining this to our kids, it’s helpful to remember that there is a larger context for family diversity: it’s not just gay families. In the schools, with young people everywhere, education around this stuff is simple: it’s about anti-bullying, and it’s about family diversity. It’s important to know that since the 2000 census, everything other than the “nuclear norm” — one mom, one dad, both biological parents to their kids — is no longer the majority family structure in the U.S. Most of us are part of the larger amalgam of everything else: “blended” families w/ kids from different marriages; step-parents; kids being raised by an aunt or an uncle or grandparents; adopted families; donor-assisted conception within heterosexual couples where the father has fertility issues.

I say that I’m like a fairy: not everyone can see me, who I really am; just some. Some will look at me and see “Mom,” but you — I say to my kids — you know what I am. I am your Baba. Which I really and truly and totally am. My daughter finds it so clear. She explains it so simply to kids. Just last week we were at a playground, and a kid looked at me and said “Is that your dad?” — kids totally see gender, totally — and my daughter said, “No, that’s my Baba.” That’s enough for kids, often. [They're used to being given the names for new things that they see, but haven't learned about yet.] But she’s also told us how she’s explained it to other kids at school: “A Baba is part-way between a Mama and a Papa.” Which again is totally true.

We certainly provide her the tools for this: we’ve layered on the explanations gradually, provided the explanatory script. Just as we do for everything else in life [morals, ethics, social expectations, death, nutrition, the imagination, etc.]. We know she’ll be asked these things, and since long before anyone asked her, she knew they might, and knew what to say. Because it totally made sense to her.

A last thing is: we define our family based on the social relationships in it, rather than the biological. So our donor is not an absent “father,” he’s a present “special uncle.” He is in her life, in exactly the relation to her that he occupies: not her primary parent, but someone very very close to us whose whole family — spouse and kids — holds a very special place next to ours. Parallel, but not inside. That paradigm is really very important, and once you see things that way — that biology is what made us, but our social relationships are what we live inside of — the family and parental relationships, for those of us in alternative families, become clearer.

[Yegods. What a tome. But that's what it's like when you write out every word. Let's be glad all's I posted was an outline of the chat itself.]

Which part of your talk did the students engage most with: what questions did they ask?