“Christmas Lullaby,” by Jason Robert Brown, eavesdropped after dinner early December last year. [Ed note: Once you start the video, double-clicking the image expands it to full screen, a decidedly mixed blessing since then you get more jostled by my improv'ed lo-tech iPhone cinematography.]

I couldn’t help but re-run this sweet gem which I first posted a year ago. Still sweet, still–with the exception of the diapers on the boy–true.  Love to all who reads and listens here.

All this rhythm and ritual has been road-tested by years of parenting and a statistically significant number of controlled experiments (no ritual? bedlam!). It’s no simple matter, to ease their young bodies and minds from the hurly-burly of the day into the waiting arms of Morpheus. Before, I would never have put such stock in this kind of stuff–in fact, I would have considered it far more “routine” than “ritual,” and derided it. No longer. I’ve learned.

I had just finished reading Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen to the boychild whilst the girlchild bore a hole in page after page of her latest American Girl historical yarn.  We were gathering our things, and the boychild was already heading into the bathroom on Mama’s back.  I had been thinking something as I was reading Night Kitchen.  I’m not sure what led me to it, but I made the judgement call that his older sister was old enough to hear a little something about the slings and arrows that fly around the books they read.

“You know, some folks don’t want kids to read that book,” I say, pointing to Maurice Sendak’s sweet, quasi-Dadaist tale of a boy’s dreamtime adventures.

“What does that mean, ‘Don’t want kids to read the book’?”

“Well, they don’t want school or town libraries to stock the book, and they write letters and wage campaigns for the libraries not to make the books available to the public.”

“Why, Baba?” she asks.

“Some folks are uncomfortable that it includes pictures of the boy naked.” I assume that’s the main complaint. Otherwise there’s some kind of anti-Oliver Hardy movement that I’m unaware of.  Why every cook in “The Night Kitchen” is a Oliver Hardy lookalike remains one of life’s mysteries.

“That’s crazy!” she says, and I agree with her.

“Yep. Some folks read picture books to kids that they’ve just plucked out of the bath, which they’ve usually taken naked, often splashing next to siblings who are also naked.  I don’t totally get it myself why seeing another kid naked in a book, most likely right after you were naked in the bath, is any kind of big deal.  But lots of people get upset about lots of different things.”

She carefully places her bookmark in her book.  This time it was a torn piece of cloth. Other bookmarks: Kleenex tissue, scraps of paper, swizzle sticks, found wrappers.

“You know, the guy who wrote that had a man sweetie. I’m not sure if he had kids, but I know his lifetime sweetie was a man.”

“Really?”  She takes in info like this with a new depth of interest, I note.

“Yep. Though I don’t think it was that that people objected to. Most of his life most people didn’t know.  It’s just the nekkid kid that upsets folks.”

We begin to walk into the bathroom.  Her brother, ahead of us through this whole process, was now exiting the bathroom on Mama’s back, and headed to their shared bedroom for station four (pick out clothes for tomorrow).

“You know, Harry Potter’s another book some folks don’t want to have in public libraries.” I know I’m bringing out the big guns here.

“What?!! What is it about Harry POTTER?!!”  There is no overstating the degree of passion she holds in her heart for all things Potter. We haven’t even gotten past the third book (at seven, it’s a bit too scary for her, yet) and she’s only just now seen the first movie.  But she would sell all of us off to a traveling circus for just ten minutes inside of Hogwarts.

“Well. Some Christian folks feel like the book, by celebrating witches and witchcraft and magic, somehow is anti-Christian.” Admittedly, I may not have been making the most informed, persuasive case. I was doing the best I could.

“Just because you believe in magic doesn’t mean you’re against Christians,” she says. “I mean, wasn’t Jesus Christ a magician?  Kind of?”

“I think lots of people would probably think that was a very apt way to put that. Plenty of Christians even.” We hold magic in high regard in our family, and right now it stands for nearly all things ineffable, spiritually abstract, and dearly held.

By now she was squeezing just a little too much toothpaste on her toothbrush as she stood on the stool at the sink.

Some opportunities avail themselves, and when they do, we are honor-bound to take them up, and prepare our kids (even if ever-so-gently and by degrees) for the fact that some of those slings and arrows are going to hit them.  Plus hell, I’d already opened the whole Harry Potter is the antichrist door.  Why not finish off by indicting that embattled little penguin family?

“Another book some folks object to is And Tango Makes Three,” I say as casually as I can construe.  (It goes without saying that every good kid’s book that features alternative families, especially those with same-sex parents, is in our family library and familiar to, if not especially beloved by, our kids.)  Interestingly, this time there’s no surprise at all on her face. She just holds the tooth paste tube and the toothbrush in air, and looks at me with that special kind of youthful inquisitiveness that says, “I know what I believe is true. Now I want to hear what you’re going to say.”

I go on to state what is perhaps now, to her, the obvious.

“Some people don’t like it that it’s two dad penguins, and not a mom and a dad penguin.” Brief pause. Then, as if I have to defend the poor birds: “Even though it’s a true story.”

She is older than I know. Because the next statement was hers, not mine.

“I think I know why people feel like that, Baba.”

“Really, Punkin? What do you think?”

“I think the two dad penguins are different than what they know.  And they’re afraid of what they don’t know. And they react to their being afraid by being angry.”

Lord love me I swear that’s what she said. And with that, she put the toothbrush in her mouth, looked at herself in the mirror, and began to brush carefully around her wobbly front baby tooth.

Above, what I ate for dinner, oh, a number of weeks back.  A favorite meal.  Stir-fried tofu, sauteed purple onions, roasted pine nuts, stir fried kale. Probably olive oil, some Spike and other seasonings, probably a dash of sesame oil, a squirt of Bragg’s Liquid Amino Acids, and a shake of toasted sesame seeds. Dinner of tree-hugging vegetarians.

It’s in a kid’s bowl, because for reasons even I can’t explain, I still hold out hope that they’ll be enticed. There are a gazillion ways parents successfully lure their kids into healthy eating habits, and most of those are assayed by people with more patience and tenacity than my beloved and I, more willing to stay up late and read nifty books and blogs about how to induce your kid into healthy eating habits (there are scads of ‘em). I did listen to Laurie David (environmental champion, producer of the huge documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and advocate for green and mindful eatery) break it down simply, thus: she decides what to bring to the table, her kids decide how much they’ll eat.  That was when her daughters were younger and in the inducement age. Now that they’re teenagers, they’re more vegan and locavore than their mom. Hope springs eternal.

I figure we might get there. But in the never-ending parental steeple chase, you can get up over only so many hurdles, and after everything else (cleaning up after themselves! making creative stuff in some hands-on activity instead of staring at a screen of some sort! engaging in sincere conflict resolution after the inevitable fights do happen!) the tired ol’ mares among us will just have to rear up and trot around that last, one hurdle too many. Working some kind of miracle mojo and conjuring fantabulously non-picky, adventuresome eaters (particularly when a sucrose product bribe is just plain off the table, literally and figuratively) is smply one of those parental hurdles we just gave up on clearing. At least thus far. We’re only seven years into this gig, any thing could happen.

Still, I couldn’t resist at least inviting my kids tuck into this particular bowl of iron-rich, low-on-the-food chain, resource-thrifty victuals.  ”Mmm, yum! Want some?” After being met with adamant refulsals, I queried my kids just what, exactly, caused them to cast such gimlet eyes upon the bowl. This is what I jotted down:

• “It’s funny looking.”
• “It has salad, but only the dark kind. I only like the light kind.”
• “It’s mushy and dark and weird and slimy and green.”
• “It reminds me of green beans that are cooked and I don’t like cooked green beans. I only like raw green beans.”
• “It’s fried. I don’t like many fried things.  Oh, except fried eggs, especially with salt and butter on them.”
• “It has weird, slimy onions.”

Yeah, go ahead and laugh. I won’t blame you. But at least it was Annie’s mac and cheese without the glow-in-the-dark fluorescent food coloring, the veggies were organic and grown locally, the hot dogs had no nitrites, hormone supplements, or antibiotics in ‘em, and the cattle that gave their lives for those dogs were fed an all vegetarian diet and were raised humanely on environmentally sustainable ranches also not more than an hour or two away from here. You know, before the unthinkable happened to them.

The kids’ vegan locavore stage can’t happen soon enough.

Not realizing the careful periodization in the 1950s, a straight woman friend, mom of one of my daughter’s chums, thought maybe my dad outfit might be improved by rigging up a TV with a sports game on it somehow extended in front of me, maybe with a bowl of chips affixed to one wrist and a beer to the other. At the time we were talking, her husband was off at a day-long 49er’s game (if you factor in the generous tailgating time built in pre-game) while she was saddled with both kids: who’s to blame her for veering toward the Archie Bunkeresque?

A rolling Barcalounger would have really been the only proper way to execute this concept, but then how would I be motivated to get up and reposition it from house to house? The kids are too little yet to be able to push me in a wheeled Barcalounger. You can see the challenge.

One sad year I was a walking ballot, with the exact language of Proposition 8 written out on one side, and the line-up of presidential choices on the other. Suggested votes “X’ed” in, natch. (In the fog of the intervening years, the kids now have it that I was one of the sycophantic playing cards in service to the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Wonderland. All in all, I felt just about as effectual.)

This year, nada. I dressed up as no patriarchal stereotype, good or bad; no cause célèbre. The kids wanted me to be Flynn Rider, from Tangled, but I didn’t pull it off. I was just an actual parent, trading off with the other actual parent, either doing circuits up the block with the kids, or stints on the porch doling out totally unhealthy sucrose products. We can’t hand out raisins because my beloved was raised by a Buddhist lesbian radical feminist hippie theater artist (who surely doled out raisins, or apples, or granola balls), and ours will be The House That Gives Out Raisins over her dead body.

I had duck-taped a large rubber tarantula to the brim of my baseball cap, in a feeble last-minute attempt at a costume, but it kept slithering off the brim and plopping down into the candy bowl at unexpected moments, which, though entertaining, was not the effect I was looking for.

Next door, my brother-in-law donned his regular Halloween Snow White get-up. For those rusty on the secondary character backstory here, he’s a 6’8″, bearded, loud-voiced, conventionally balding, football-watching guy. Who, also having been raised by the selfsame Buddhist lesbian radical feminist hippie theater artist, is as pro-feminist as they come, and can and will process his feelings with the best of them. Just let that sink in, and then slip that into a silken Snow White outfit and put a black wig on it.

When I was working the porch shift, I would periodically trot over to my brother-in-law at his station near his front gate, and flash a flashlight under his chin so as to heighten the overall effect. (No offense to my brother-in-law, but we really aren’t working with the Johnny Depp glam kind of drag here, way more the gender f*ck kind).

All the grown-up chaperones loved his outfit, and most of the kids did, too. I misjudged the capacities of one young Spiderman-clad trick-or-treater and did the spooky flashlight effect for him. After he froze for a moment, he declined the candy, slowly eased behind his mom’s legs, and said, “Snow White scares me.” Oops.

Not every young visitor was as innocent. A tween-aged boy, when he took in all of Snow White, laughed extra long, extra hard, and unambiguously derisively as he walked away, serving up a vivid portrait of precisely what is in store for anyone who f*cks with his already granite-chiseled notions of how women’s and men’s genders must be performed. Which, of course, didn’t originate with him.

Ridicule is an ugly thing to see at any age. In a craven world in which some punishment is doled out for those who don’t conform to “hegemonic” notions of masculinity, ridicule seems preferable over physical violence, which of course is the next alert level up from what this kid was dishing out. But suicide statistics among feminine young men (either gay, bisexual, or perceived to be) tell us that systematic ridicule and harassment can trigger as devastating an effect as a raised fist. (Here’s a fantastically comprehensive page of studies compiled by a University of Calgary professor of Social Work, if you appreciate a good study or so. Ok, upwards of 50, replete with hyperlinks.)

My son dodged a bullet this year, having opted to dress up as a pirate. There he is at right, taking a bow in the annual Halloween block party costume contest, with Laura Ingalls Wilder at his left, and Snow White, a natural emcee, at his right. (Last year my son was a princess in a gorgeous, pink, tulle gown.) I’ve written before about his evolving boyness, which for the moment continues to not be monolithic (here’s one piece; here’s another).

At seven and four, my kids already know that gender is better understood on a spectrum than with an either/or, mutually exclusive binary. They know: most people have either a boy body or a girl body, some have a little of both. That takes care of the biological/ sex part, for now. They also know that there are boyish boys, girlish boys, boyish girls, and girlish girls; they have people in their lives that occupy each spot on that (admittedly rough-hewn and chunky) spectrum, so it’s by no means theoretical. That takes care of the social/ gender part, for now.

The tougher lesson (the one I dread) is going to be the one about how harshly they may be punished, not just by something so abstract as “society,” but by people as specific as their immediate peers in their schoolyards and in their town, for deviating from “boyish boy” and “girlish girl.” And it’s going to take everything I’ve got to not want to go beat the tar out of the first kid, like last night’s gender policing trick-or-treater, who makes either of them cry, or worse. Which in one fell swoop would of course both defeat the point of redefining masculinity, and demonstrate how very hard it is to break out of prevailing cycles and do so.  Fortunately for me, Halloween’s once a year.

Intrepid campers, Olema, CA.

We took a camping trip a few weekends back. A micro-trip: one overnight, left town Saturday afternoon after work, came back Sunday night. Camped out in the brother-in-law’s camper van. Stayed in one of those commercial RV park dealies, because of course the whole thing was spur-of-the moment and nothing at a state campground was free.  At least in our state.  But lord love us we went.

The beloved and I were both in foul states of mind, en route. Stressed, sad.  Neither of us has made appreciable headway in our respective work/life arm wrestling matches.  Balance, we each feel confident, is on the horizon. But at the moment the horizon line remains tipped.

The kids were not about to let our gloom obscure their delight with the entire experience. The fact that we attempted and were rebuffed at three state campgrounds dimmed their spirits not a jot. Neither did the steady mist that turned into a rain.  Nor our setting up in the dark, cussing, muttering. At the end of the line, there were hot dogs and s’mores. That, they later reported, was the best part about the camping trip.

The next morning, as Mama and I were rubbing our backs and nursing our coffees, they remained in the pop-top area of the camper van, spinning one elaborate imaginary tale after another.  Couldn’t have been happier.  Their resilience–really, their single-minded dedication to finding the fun, even at the bottom of an empty tin can–was  instructive, nearly shamingly so.

We need some more. Time, together. Balance.

My output here has slowed to a trickle, due, as I have noted before, to the fact that the spare time I used to squeeze blogging into has all but evaporated, and now I squeeze my kids into that spare time. Work, which I STILL haven’t told you about (what’s to tell? it’s all-consuming and also really nifty), looks to finally have a period of (relative) quiet coming up. I hope to exploit that by finding a way back to writing here. Since I have found that some of my sadness has come from not writing. (Want to know a sign you’ve finally arrived as a writer? When not writing makes you sad.)

So! Though I have a tendency to over-promise and under-deliver (I have a hunch it’s supposed to be the other way around), I am going to take up that dagnab NaBloPoMo challenge in November.  Yes, yes I am.  And you can’t talk me out of it. Here’s a preview of what I expect to Po during that Mo:

• pictures of kids
• pictures of inanimate objects that are not kids
• short bits, not much on current events but some (it is HARD for me to not actually weigh in w/ thoughtful analysis, so what I’m left with is a blank silence)
• an essay or two or three? (o please o please let me find the time for an essay)
• some reflection even on the change in focus here from kids (they are private beings, I learn, and respect) to…?

Window watcher, Berkeley, CA.

The window he’s looking out is the back door, not the front.  We live in Berkeley, CA (better known, perhaps, as “Berzerkeley” or “The People’s Republic of Berkeley”) and we’ve seen stilt walkers, solitary harmonica players, muttering grocery cart pushers, cell phone-clutching subway-bound commuters, skateboard riders, and a three-legged neighbor dog stroll, roll, hustle, and lope east and west in front of our house.  Still, all the real action takes place out the back window.

Out back is where the shared yard is, through which his cousins daily pass en route to their home at the north of the lot; out back is where his kind, endlessly fascinating neighbor friend (my own friend, of over 20 years) lives in the building to the east; out back is where most of his and his sister’s adventures unfold: on the grass, under the bushes, on the trampoline (and under it), in the hammock, around the veggie bed, and on the chalk drawing-bedecked concrete between two of the houses.

His and his sisters’ ages only just last week began to add up to more than ten years. A big milestone, that. The hub of their adventures is sure to shift away from the homestead, and sooner than we’ll be ready. Meanwhile, this is where it’s at, and it’s quite an at.

This shared yard he’s lookin’ at didn’t come without effort.  In timing that was both the worst and best it could have been, we began work on it immediately following the devastating terminal illness of a child in the middle of my family.  No matter how challenging it was or would become to figure out our housing, my beloved and I knew all of it was small potatoes: we were going to be essentially all right regardless of how it turned out;  we knew “it could be worse,” since it very recently had been as bad or worse than we had previously been capable of imagining.

Still, after that outsize caveat, the work to secure this window view has turned out to have been exceeded only by the amount my beloved and I put into having our kids (no mean feat for our kind; for us, a seven-year journey), and into our significant other relationship (seventeen years and several therapists’ worth). We didn’t expect it to be so challenging, but we did dream it would be so rewarding.

For five years we stressed buckets, we wedged our growing family into an attic apartment (accessed by two flights of outdoor stairs which we climbed and descended through five rainy seasons, most of which with an aging dog, a toddler and/or a newborn).  We ran emotional and financial mazes (and steeplechases, and scenarios) over and over again and, over time, confirmed that in spite of our differences and all this effort, our shared dream of shared housing was worth the effort.  Three generations ultimately made it all happen: one grandparent invested and another gave in advance so that it could come to pass and their grandkids could flourish.  Five hard-working adults, four hard-playing children, two cats, countless neighboring songbirds, and a guinea pig now call this place home.

A year ago this month our own house, the last of the three to do so, assumed its final shape: the attic that was once our whole home is now home to our bedrooms, my workspace, and a dreamy, dreamy kids’ play area. Brother-in-law, spouse, and two kids live in a house they built at the north end of the lot; my old friend of twenty-plus years lives in the duplex at the east. We four, in our 97 year-old house, anchor the southwest corner of “the village.”  Weekend mornings we share baked goods among us (this past Sunday: popovers from the cousins’ house, waffles from ours).  Sunday nights this time of year, when it’s pleasant and warm, we grill our supper and gather around a long picnic table beneath the pepper and willow trees, to revel in the harvest.

Lake Merritt Boat House, Oakland, CA

Here’s something to listen to as you read. (One day I’ll figure how to embed. I really will. For now, open in a new window & come back, eh? DianeCu has inspired me how to go ahead slice the YouTube page to the operable part of the music player, sans big visual. Here I was waiting to figure out how to do my own pretty media bar thingy. Cheers, Mother of Invention! And somebody tell me if I just ran afoul of YouTube’s link policy so I don’t bite the hand that’s feeding me the music! Which is a song of the same title as this post, from The Story‘s 1993 The Angel in the House.)

Lean times at the blog. Really lean. Which must mean: boom times offline! Really booming. Like, KA-booming. In the very wee post-work hours ‘twixt a Friday night & a Saturday morning, I figger I can pause and post this picture.

The kiddles were romping outdoors at their grandma’s 75th birthday party last weekend, an event of indescribable deliciousness.  Grandma’s 75th was combined with that of her partner; both of ‘em heavyweights in the Buddhist lesbian mafia; both of them feminist cultural sheroes of significance.  The evening was peppered with toasts and a show-stopping interpretive dance–yes, people actually do interpretive dances, and don’t think you can’t jam-pack one with both comedy and depth: you can, and I saw it right before my very eyes.

The whole shebang wrapped with a recital by my beloved (natch), which included some Bizet, some Weil, some Sondheim, and performance of a song written especially for the occasion by her dad, being the gay ex-husband of her mom (who is the 75 year old lesbian Buddhist feminist cultural icon).  Are you following along? Yeah, I thought so. I was confused too, the first five years. One of the old friends who stood up to toast them said she needed a flow chart to make sense of the family, and I don’t blame her.

The grandkids, however, had nary a clue about the artistic and political powerhouses indoors reveling in the warmth of lives well- and long-lived. They ran and ran and ran as the sun set, held in that special safe space that all good loving grown-up events offer (the cats are distracted and happy! so the mice will eat birthday cake and play way past their bedtimes!).

Twilight indoors; twilight out; all parties, old and young, grateful for the blessings of the present moment. A gift to all.

The author (far left), pleased as punch to be posing with (l-r) KALW San Francisco City Visions producer Lisa Denenmark, NCLR Executive Director Kate Kendell, City Visions host Joseph Pace, and Equality California Marriage Equality & Coalition Strategies Director Andrea Shorter, following the July 11, 2011 show “What’s Next for the Marriage Equality Movement in CA?” (Photo credit: Keiko Lane)

Radio

The photo above is visual punctuation on a really nifty event: I had the amazing opportunity a week ago to talk with KALW’s City Visions host Joseph Pace about the marriage equality movement in California alongside two of the smartest, most consequential women you’re going to find on the issue: NCLR’s Kate Kendell and EQCA’s Andrea Shorter. (I know, right? Pinch me! Wait! Don’t do that: it would just hurt.)

Producer Lisa Denenmark wanted me to speak to the big picture cultural matters that the issue brings up, and provide a first person and parental viewpoint to flesh out the top-notch legal and tactical vantage points provided by Kate Kendell and Andrea Shorter. So lord love me I did.

Just the fact that I got to spend an hour in a room with these sheroes of mine was enough. That I was actually providing color commentary on a radio show with them bamboozles me still. But: life is nothing if not bamboozling.

Go listen to the show, by the way: it was a very interesting conversation. I learned a lot during the course of it, and confirmed my belief that if the whole movement were in Andrea’s and Kate’s hands, I’d sleep pretty well at night.  I’m not saying the battles wouldn’t be hard, and it wouldn’t take generations to get where I want us to be: just saying I’d sleep well knowing steady hands were on the tiller, guided by razor-sharp acumen and hearts as big as they need to be and egos as small as they ought to be (i.e., unencumbering these women’s work, leastwise to my naked eye).

Coalition with (non-queer and queer) communities of color and faith communities will of necessity be part of the ongoing work on this issue in this state, and this issue does not and must not eclipse–at least in the view of those of us at City Visions last wee–other totally critical LGBTQ civil rights battles, such as those over immigration reform, full DADT repeal for trans servicemembers, employment and housing discrimination, to name just a few.

I was very lucky to have the opportunity to repeat my strongly-held belief that a ballot initiative to repeal Prop 8 would be about as wrong-headed as the ballot initiative was to instate it. (See also this post.)  One of the many more pithy quotables that occurred to me after-the-fact was: “I don’t want civil rights because I’m no longer unpopular; I want them because it’s right.” What I wound up saying was kinda like that, only less pithy and involving references to constitutional democracies and the like.

As the show was wrapping, Joseph asked each of us for some parting words. What I wish I said, a bit more succinctly than I managed, was:

The most important work right now for LGBTQ families in this movement? First: ongoing self-love. Next?  Tell our stories and make common cause with everyone else outside the normative understanding of family: blended families, interracial families, adoptive kids, special needs kids, single parents, families with queer parents: together, we’re what the American family really looks like. “Love makes a family” is a very big story with wide-reaching consequences.

Right: so, that’s what I’d wished I said. I kinda got a running start at it and Joseph had to do the “Aaaaaand, wrap” hand gesture on me just as I was warming up. If ever they ask me back on the radio again, I will try to bring more 3 x 5 cards and fewer sentences.

Infrequency

Whether or not I was ready for prime time, the pleased-as-punch smile on my face in the photo above is testament to how proud I was to be a part of that conversation. The fact that it took nearly a week for this picture to get up here, however, is testament to how eventful my life has been. Eventful in the short term: later that night, our boychild awoke suddenly to an out-of-nowhere seal-bark of a cough, and a near closed-off breathing passage, thanks to extremely rapid onset of croup+stridor. It took less than two minutes to find our ordinary croup interventions ineffectual; thereafter a rapid call to 911, then a tear-filled ambulance trip (his tears; I was summoning whatever calm I could) to Children’s Hospital, then a stay there ’til, oh, about dawn. He’s okay now, but I have another 10-20 grey hairs.

Given my history with that building, I know how lucky I was to have him sleeping peacefully, slung over my shoulder, as I walked back to the car.

Eventful in the long term: life now includes a very big J-O-B that I’ve still not taken the time to tell you about.  Not that I’m wanting to be a tease. It’s just that it’s been rather difficult for me to spend sufficient time for something like an actual thought-out, content-y post (which is what that will take) when I am spending most every spare moment dogpaddling like mad to stay afloat at work.  (I should say, “spare” in the parental sense of the word: i.e., not dedicated to childcare or minimal # hours sleep nightly.)  And yes, of course, I often (usually?)work after kids go to bed; yes, of course, I often (usually?) work on the weekends if ever I have a childcare-free patch of time.

The self-evident observation: all this excess workload fits precisely into the time I used to dedicate to ye olde writing life and the care and feeding of this blog.

Yet and still, I persist in my optimism: I will get a handle on the J-O-B; its exigencies will wane as well as wax; I will eventually forgive myself my imperfections (I will! I will!); balance will find its way back into my life, simply because I will be no good at any one of the several elements of it if I am out of balance in the others.

Sign of any and all of the above: a little more trickling in here. One day. Hope springs internal.

“It’s okay to hav a Baba,” (sic) from the girlchild, Kindergarten year (2010).

The sun still hasn’t set on Baba’s Day this year, and I can’t pause long, but do want to leave a little something here for the occasion, in solidarity with any other comrade who happens by. The only way it’ll happen is with bullet points and incomplete sentences, so! Herewith:

• •  Talked at length to my Pops this morning about fatherhood, lesbian and otherwise. His loving support and openness to my whole self has a value beyond words.  It is anointing, validating, liberating, inspirational. He essentially gets it, which is about as much as you want from anyone, especially a family member, particularly a parent.




• •  There’s much to say about our conversation, but not on the fly on the day itself. In short, we concur: when you disengage the clutch and allow your gears to coast unhindered by the space stamped out for them (allotted movement, only here and only in this way), all sorts of stuff that might otherwise bamboozle begins to make sense: masculine femininity, feminine masculinity, the fact that each of us who fights for more space for ourselves, who elbows more elbow room for a fuller, truer self, makes more space for others.




• •  We have more allies in this process than we know. Specifically, women trying to make space for parenthoods like mine have allies in gay men fathers and straight men fathers who themselves want company as they, too, expand the notions of what’s possible.  I think my father appreciates my parental/gender journey because he’s just such a man. Either one (gay man father or straight). He’s 90 already, so if I don’t know now, I’ll probably never know which. His favorite answer to questions he can’t quite hear: “Probably.”




• • Before I return to my day, here are some ditties from years past of topical interest:




• • Things I have in common with dads, from 2006,
  • A Baba’s Day Proclamation, from 2007, and
  • A Baba’s Day pictorial, from 2009

Happy day, to one and all.

A year and nine months ago, we went to San Francisco’s Palace Hotel for tea at the end of the girlie’s first week of Kindergarten (more wordy account here).  Her brother was too young to come along then, but he’s more than ready now, and so this afternoon we launched what we hope will be an ongoing end-of-the-school-year tradition.

For his part, the boy child acquitted himself with panache. Sure, he ate his PB&J only and no other sandwiches. And yes, he wanted to slither under the table once. But it turned out it was for legitimate reasons: his back-up pair of sunglasses had dropped under there.

The sunglasses were accessories to a very carefully pieced-together outfit. He had picked out matching bow ties for us to wear (yep: Baba’s not the only dandy in the family). But that was just the beginning: he saw to it that we matched in every way possible. Same color belt, same color shoes, same color jeans. It took a lot for me to convince him that it was okay for me to wear my grey blazer (he didn’t have one). But he felt all right when he wore a dark sweatshirt with the hood folded in. He couldn’t find his “dress up” Baba glasses — an old pair of reading glasses of mine, with the glass no longer in them — and so instead, he proposed we both wear sunglasses.

We were very warmly welcomed by every single person we saw, from the chaps where we parked the car, to the doormen just outside the hotel, to the maître d’, to the patrons we passed en route to our table, to our waiter. I will admit some concern that a woman dressed more or less like an ice cream salesman would draw attention. Turns out, not as much as her criminally adorable mini-me of a son with the matching bow tie.

(For the record, I elected not to visit the loo. It’s all fun and games ’til you cause ladies to shriek and zig-zag out of the bathroom with their arms outstretched in front of them in abject terror. While the chances may have been slim that I’d elicit such a response, I didn’t feel like pushing my luck on such a nice outing with the kids.)

“How many years do you think you guys will want to do this with us?” I asked ‘em, between bites of chocolate-dipped strawberry and sips of hot chocolate (the Palace defines “tea” fairly loosely for the younger set).”‘Cause we’re prepared to keep at it all the way through your college years.  Just warnin’ ya.”

“I’ll do it as long as I can, Baba,” said the girlie, and I believe her. My main goal is to outlive their desire to take a year-end tea here with me.  That, or have their Mama across from me a dozen or so years hence, as we sigh together over the empty chairs at the table and toast one another over a job well done.