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.)
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.
“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:
In the nick of time, and I mean the nick, I post a lil’ something for Dana Rudolph’s gift to the queer family blogoverse, Blogging for LGBT Families Day. This post here of course means I’ll have to push forward to yet another day my in-the-queue explano-post, the one in which I outline just what day job it is that has sucked up nearly all available oxygen from my posting here. Don’t resent the job, though! It’s the parenting thing: Very. Hard. To be full-time. Worker. Plus all-time. Parent. If this were any other kind of blog than a parenting one, I suspect you’d have seen hide and hair of me, rather than neither.  Still, flying in the face of the past three month’s anemic posting, I have faith the blog’s oxygen supply will get squoze out of somewhere. I do.
Meanwhile! A few notes on the occasion of Dana’s 6th Blogging for LGBT Families Day! First, here are things I contributed to her 1st, 2nd, 3rd, & 4th. & 5th.  We’ve both been at this a while. In fact, I still remember where I was (in the living room of the beloved’s and my first wee home, on a laptop) when I ran into Mombian.com for the first time, and shouted “Eureka!” What a revelation. I was  just a half-year into my parenthood at the time, and was already starved for what she had to offer, astounded that she was offering it up. For free. On the internet. (Nostalgic? Here’s her first post.)
Those fortunate readers who have not slogged through upwards of 5,000 diaper changes — ha! ya think I’m exaggerating! no, I AM ACTUALLY UNDERESTIMATING, I COUNTED — might think the above is merely an unremarkable, if slightly overshare-y image of somebody’s toilet. But that’s where you’d be sadly mistaken, my friend. The above is an image of victory! Triumph over recalcitrance! The onward march of youth toward their destiny, eventually fishing Mama and Baba out of the bowl of despair!
For months, nay, years, I would whimper quietly as I pulled the package of organic, free-range, fairly unbiodegradable diapers from the grocery store cart and placed it up onto the checkout counter. The larger the size on the diaper — 3, then 4, then 5, and then, finally and most humiliatingly, the dread 6 (and for you diaper-ignorami, they just don’t get any bigger than 6: next stop, Depend® undergarments) — the more pitious my sotto voce whimpering. It got to the point where the clerks simply could not meet my eyes. I didn’t blame them.  The beloved and I swap grocery store runs weekly with our co-housing in-laws, and whenever I would write in the word “diapers” on the list for them, I would follow it with a little sad face.  We didn’t talk about it.
But today! Today, I strode into our neighborhood grocer’s, head held high, baseball cap cocked at a jaunty angle, just so, and I traipsed up and down those narrow aisles, and I hummed as I packed my cart full of all manner of items, NOT ONE OF WHICH WAS A PACKAGE OF DIAPERS! Ha! Ha ha!
You will forgive me the heady delerium.
I leave you now with a wee (!) musical selection, here. O hell, lemme just paste it:
[Note: youngsters ignorant of musical history and a bit impatient, give what's on the other side of that link this quaint ditty at least 30 seconds. Rest of youse: turn yer monitors up to 10.]
“I’m part garden fairy and part witch, you know,” my daughter says, gathering dandelion and sourgrass stems in her basket for a potion.
“I’m not surprised,” I say. Which I’m not.
She puts down the basket and begins to balance along a run of wood, claiming it helps her practice her balance for when she flies on her broom.
“I’ve got something from both sides of the family,” she continues.
“I know you got the witchery from Mama’s side,” I say. No doubt on this front.
“Yep. And you like the garden.” She pauses a little bit, thinking.
“You’ve influenced me emotionally,” she explains. She knows where she has come from; what part I do and don’t have in it; how our Special Uncle Pat (and by extension his family) gave to our family what I didn’t have to give.
“You helped me get born emotionally.” Repetition, for emphaisis and clarity.
“So have you, sweetie,” I tell her, “so have you.”
She looks at me with a sobriety that is at once beyond her years, and utterly familiar. Then she’s off, flying her broom back and forth, back and forth, over the garden.
[Have you voted for your favorite blogs in the 2011 Bloggies yet? No? Well this one's up for best LGBT Blog (scroll waaaaaay down). You know, in case you were sitting on the fence for that category. Just a suggestion.]
Ornament, Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, CA.
That’s San Francisco City Hall reflected in the ornament (along with your host and her partner’s camera phone). We were there (Davies) a few weeks back for a performance of John Adams’ El Niño, a gorgeous, gorgeous re-imagining of the nativity oratorio.
I didn’t write much about it at the time because I returned from that date (the first in a long while) to find an egregiously hi-jacked blog, which is to say other (quite cranky) folks’ messages were being broadcast out of this URL frequency, and not mine. I spent the better part of the rest of that night, ’til the wee hours and on into the weekend, back and forth with the good folks at my blog host trying to un-hijack it. Instead, I would rather have been waxing lyrical about the oratorio, about what a job it must be to try to set to music the kinda challenging event of the annunciation and/or sex with god, or at least insemination by god, or whatever you want to call the whole big ole conception of the Baby Jesus thing. John Adams’ take on it, musically, is as tremendous as it ought to be.
Someone videotaped their videotape (or DVD) of the very passage where the incomparable Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (and, eventually, 2:30 in, a big ole chorus) sings the event. Three angelic countertenor “angels” sing following it, and Dawn Upshaw (the other Mary) appears at the close of this clip:
 We didn’t talk about it.
