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.)

I’d snagged my own domain name nearly a year before Dana’s first post at Mombian, but promptly sat on it, since a few weeks after I squatted LesbianDad-dot-everything, my nephew was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, and our world tilted on its axis.  A year after that I made a peep, and nearly a year after that I began to write into this thing.

Over the past six years, it feels like both my parenthood and the collective presence of LGBT families — not just for target practice on ballot initiatives, but in the news and in the culture around  us, on Emmy-Award-winning TV shows, bit by bit in many places — has grown enormously. Six years into this journey I am no longer in the least petrified about the things I was totally petrified about, way back when I had nary a clue about changing diapers (much less confidence in the fact that my kids would, indeed, lovingly rely upon me as their bona fide parent).

Plenty of things unnerve me and concern me as a parent, plenty of which are still tied to the LGBT-ness of my parenthood and therefore my kids’ family. But the insecurity I once had is by and large a sweet artifact of the very early days.  Like the sheet we taped on the wall of our bedroom, parenthood week two, noting our daughter’s nursing and elimination schedule. Kid you not. We had no clue it was all going to turn out okay.

Well, I am here to tell you, it has all turned out okay.  Or at least, with a six-year-old about to graduate from first grade, plus a four-year-old utterly thriving in preschool: so far so good.

Last week, at the girlie’s school’s Open House, she was as thrilled as she was the year before, at her Kindergarten one. (Above, a rare moment in which she was not jumping up and down and grabbing at my wrist to show me something else.) While I was wracked with guilt that I’d spent so little time at the school since I got my big fat full-time job in late February, she was totally unperturbed. I used to volunteer in the school garden every ding-dong week, supporting the lessons and work and play there, not to mention doing ongoing maintenance. Used to pick up the girlie every afternoon but one (Grandma Day), talking to her teacher and the other parents, lingering around the classroom. This Open House, the class was far more unfamiliar to me, and for every pang that gave me it gave my girlie a frisson.

“It’s way better that you haven’t been here all that much, Baba! I have more stuff to show you now!”  Holy christ. Is all I can say. Kids. I will never, ever, be capable of aiming high enough to properly estimate them.

She grabbed my hand, pulled me to the colored rug on the floor, and proceeded to read me the entirety of Desert Giant: The World of the Seguaro Cactus (by Barbara Bash). She had dropped the beloved’s and my jaws one evening a few weeks back when she recited, from memory and in the bath, at least 30% of the book’s contents, down to minutia regarding the fauna, fowl, and insects that found food and shelter in the mighty seguaro.  The in-person reading was destined, and though the book was 28 pages, there was no question we were going to squeeze every droplet of enjoyment from the experience.

All the while, the little brother soaked it all in: colorful displays, educational posters, kid projects, book-lined bookshelves, puffer fish in the aquarium.

He was utterly at home in his big sister’s classroom, the way all younger siblings are in the spaces their older siblings pioneer for them.  Imagining, imagining: one day, this will be mine.

During a moment when Mama was the object of the girlie’s attention, I was able to pour heartfelt thanks all over her teacher for what she’d done to ignite — or, really, just keep aflame, and fan and fan — our daughter’s love of learning over the past year.  She returned my thanks with a story.

At one point some weeks back, during a discussion of one thing or another (I forget the details now), the word “gay” came up in the classroom. One kid said, “That’s a bad word!” To which the teacher said, “Well, that depends.” And she took it as an opportunity to reflect on the double meaning of many words, given their context and the intent of the speaker.

The teacher told me that she began to explain the various meanings of the word, and then said that when she was in the middle of describing the factual (as vs. pejorative) usage of the term, all of a sudden my girlie burst out, “That’s me! That’s my family!”  She was filled with the enthusiasm you’d get when you all of a sudden looked down at your card and realized you got a BINGO.

The teacher was so heartwarmed by our girl’s mixture of discovery, excitement, and pride. But not so much as she was by her classmates’ enthusiastic chiming in: “Yeah, that’s right!” Like: wow, yay, you count in this discussion. Which of course is a very special thing.

You count in this discussion.

That’s where we need to be now. In a discussion, in the classroom, where our kids’ formative sense of community is built. Our kids, inclusive of the families they come from, need to be in this discussion. Of family. Of community. Of civil rights leaders (Harvey Milk Day, in California, is only beginning to be celebrated, and boy could we use Harvey to inspire us in the journey that will take to becoming an ordinary thing from school to school.)

My own kids are very, very fortunate to be in the first school district in the country to implement materials from the Human Rights Campaign’s Welcoming Schools guide district wide, as part of its educational policy.  Beginning this fall, when the girlie enters second grade, each school will integrate grade-appropriate lessons designed to help students (and school communities) understand and embrace family diversity (in all its forms, including LGBT families), avoid gender stereotyping, and end bullying.

Those who have worked very hard on this — the Berkeley Unified School District Family Diversity Task Force, comprising parents and teachers and administrators, with the tireless support of Judy Appel and Our Family Coalition — don’t expect the curriculum to unfurl without a hitch. Not in the least. We know from first hand experience at our own school that when conversation in the school opens up these areas, kids feel more free to express themselves honestly. Which means all kids, the gender-nonconforming and the bullies alike. It will not be an easy door to open, but open it we must, with care and and courage, like our kids do when they go to school the first day.

I was asked by someone sometime recently how things were for us, being a lesbian-headed family in Berkeley.  And I recall saying something to the effect of, “You know, it feels about as good as it could, given our modest numbers.” There’s always the huge gap to make up between the gobs of us and our kind that we’re accustomed to seeing in the lesbo-centric social spaces of our courtin’ years.  Come parenthood, the spaces we move in are largely kid-centric ones (except for date nights!).  For most of us, our kids occasion a decided bump back out into our demographic truth, which is that there really still isn’t a ton of us out there (here’s your Williams Institute study link, in case you forgot it; operative synopsis: LGBT folk are comparable in percentage of US population more to Jews than to African Americans). Even here, in one of the most queer-friendly towns in the nation, we still constitute a puny percentage of the families in any given school. Puny.

Two years at school and our girlie has not  yet been in a class with any other kid with same sex parents; it’s only remotely possible she will: one other girl at school in her class has two moms; she has an older brother, and there’s one other girl in the fourth grade who has two moms. That’s it. For the whole school.

I realized as I was describing our lot, which I consider phenomenally fortunate, that we have thusfar experienced no malice. Which I am glad to report, because I know that’s not a given. But absence of malice is not enough. What I followed that up with was also key: we have been, as yet, just marginally visible in the curriculum and close to completely invisible in the representative culture our kids know. Families like ours are totally invisible in the pop and commercial culture pitched to our kids, and so to counteract that, we’ve purchased nearly every single picture book we can (or at least the good ones; just got Donovan’s Big Day last week), plus the one Dottie’s Magic Pockets DVD and the one Buddy G, My Two Moms and Me DVD. Wore holes in ‘em.

It mattered that our girl’s Kindergarten teacher made it a point, when they were doing a unit about family, to bring in several great books, some of which were hers, some of which were mine on loan. It matters that when our girl’s first grade teacher matched up her students as pen pals with those of a teacher friend in Washington, she matched our girl up with a gal in a third grade class who also has two moms. It matters that in the hallway near our daughter’s classroom hangs a poster from Our Family Coalition, just like the one we have in our home. It matters that the preschool director and teachers our daughter has had thusfar have not only been understanding and supportive, but curious to learn more about how our kids see and need to see their families. Such gestures are more than vital. They’re godsends.

It’s only together with people like this — allies: each of these women has been a hetero ally — that we move past the absence of malice which should be a given for every loving family and into the presence of rich understanding of our families’ uniqueness, toward full-hearted celebration of it and what it’s giving our kids. Which is a lot, because of, not in spite of who we are.  So far, so good. Now let’s spread the good around, and do even better.

So said Harvey Milk.  Decades later, poll after poll (here’s the most recent one at Gallup) confirms this. Respondents’ positions on gay civil equality issues are hugely different when they actually know the LGBT people in their families and their lives. Sure, a surprising number continue to justify withholding constitutional protections from LGBT people even when they know us. But a majority who know us believe we deserve equality.  Clearly we must make ourselves known.

Many of us write the stories of our families’ lives online — you can find scores of them among Monday’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day  entries over at Mombian.  I’ll bet most of us began to chronicle our families so as to help keep one another company, maybe to solicit and share insight about how to pilot our families through the whitewaters we’re in as “alternative” families squarely in the political crosshairs.  That’s what motivated me, initially.  But we’re also writing for, and with, others. 

Two such Blogging for LGBT Families Day contributors are St from Playa Minded and Haley from eyeJunkie.  St is a straight and devout Christian ally, and in “Blogging for Equality,” she writes about research she’s done on New Testament scripture and homosexuality.  Haley is also straight and Christian and deeply examining the core truths in LGBT families, as well as her feelings about us. Her post, “The One Where I Come Out… And Say It” is amazingly honest, and heart-felt, showing those of us who would wish to touch someone like her just what it’s like to be in the middle of a challenging process of change.  Where this process will lead to, not even she knows.  But it’s very much worth bearing witness to. So are the comments following it.  Dana Rudolph drew attention to it at Mombian following Blogging for LGBT Families day, and today reposted her Mombian post at Bilerico.  If you haven’t read it yet, please do.

This whole conversation takes place at a very different register than the political debates online, or in the media, or the legislature, or the streets.  This whole conversation — the ones we invite when we tell our families’ stories — is told in anecdote, and deals in the currency of shared love for our partners and for the young people in our charge. This love is all-powerful.  Ironically, anti-gay ballot initiatives try to prey on that very feeling of parental protectiveness.  It’s been a predictable strategy, in 30 of 30 successful such battles nation-wide. But until we tell the stories of our own families, the only children in need of protection will appear to be the children of straight parents, not ours.  

This is changing, family by family, story by story, told in the local park, at the local grocery store, at church, synagogue, or temple, even online (you can tell yours right here, right now, at NoDumbQuestions.org). 

Days after Dana’s blog carnival expired, I’ve finally added an old story of my own to the list.  On Monday (and Tuesday, and Wednesday) I was still too-battle fatigued by the California Supreme Court decision, and by the flurry of activist debate regarding what next move we should make (how ’bout: all of ‘em! simultaneously!). I had succumbed to a combination of nihilism (comes and goes in fits, alas) and distraction.  Sometimes the sense that the house is on fire (cf Tuesday’s post) distracts me from the flowers growing outside the house. And sometimes — Haley’s post reminds me of this — sometimes, what I think are flames licking out from behind the house is actually the brilliance of the sun, blinding my vision for a moment.

The story I added to Dana’s list is one about my daughter’s and my trip to see a holiday performance of The Velveteen Rabbit, and a conversation with a woman we met on the subway ride home.  Here’s a bit of it:

The farther from home we get, the more I feel us assuming the mantle of exemplar: for better or worse, a public slice of queer family. The folks who just lost big in the recent election. I wonder, over the course of our commute, whether the love we casually radiate to one another does anything thematically specific for those around us. I wonder whether it makes those who voted for us feel a pride in their role in our state’s checkered social history, even if bittersweet. Those who voted against us are, at base, an enigma to me. I don’t really recognize them, when I see them. But I assume they recognize us. What with me being all butchly and all.

I wonder, when they get a chance to see, in person, part of a family whose rights were just rescinded: do they feel a catch of regret? I simply don’t know how to understand those who don’t – though I know many don’t: many look at me with my child and feel disgust, or concern, or pity; if they were to know she was born to my partner and not to me, I know many would think me an interloper. Nearly four people out of any given ten that I might see in my county thought some variation on this theme, and voted so.

In the train station, I wonder if they see how effortlessly I hoist my daughter into my arms for the escalator ride. How, as we perch ourselves at the base of the escalator to watch the people descend, or as we settle into our seat on the train ride into the city, how comfortably she drapes herself in my lap. How she picks up my hand and plays with the fingers, or pulls my baseball hat off and rubs her hand on my hair.

Before the vote, such moments felt more freighted. They felt – to me, at least – as if they were all impromptu lobbying moments. Actual people whose legal recognitions and protections were on the line. A pair of faces to help the undecided people make the abstractions real. That woman, there; that child. It is their bond I’m respecting, and protecting. Or not.

The rest of “Pas de deux” is here.  Thanks for reading, and thank you for telling your story, wherever and however you do.

For all the time I spend caring for the little munchkins, it’s been rare that she and I have gone on a special Baba-daughter outing. Her craving for Mama is great, and perhaps would be so regardless of the fact that Mama works outside the house more hours than Baba does. So the arrangements we usually make for solo time with the kids tend to accommodate the lil’ monkey’s ever-unslaked Mama-thirst. This time around, though, the LGBT family-friendly performance was smack dab in the middle of Mama’s prime-time work hours. Grampy gladly watched the boy, and my girlie and I skipped footloose into the city to see what kind of fun we might have together.

Before we even make it the few blocks to the subway, I can tell by her mood that she is loving this every bit as much as I was. Singing, prancing, the outsize imagination vibrating and sizzling and shooting off in all directions. Since the beloved’s production of Fiddler is fading slowly into memory, I am less frequently conscripted into the role of Tevye (to her Tzeitel). The next theater production, Les Miserables, is months away, and the seasonal fave Amahl and the Night Visitors hasn’t yet encroached, so what’s filling the lil’ monkey’s mind has been the characters in our current reading: L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. We plowed through The Wonderful Wizard of, just polished off The Land of and are launching into the third, Ozma of, with reckless abandon (bringing her chapter book total — Alice and Pipi and Mary Poppins are also in her wake — way above that of the number of books Baba has read this year). Today, I am the Tin Woodman.

The farther from home we get, the more I feel us assuming the mantle of exemplar: for better or worse, a public slice of queer family. The folks who just lost big in the recent election. I wonder, over the course of our commute, whether the love we casually radiate to one another does anything thematically specific for those around us. I wonder whether it makes those who voted for us feel a pride in their role in our state’s checkered social history, even if bittersweet. Those who voted against us are, at base, an enigma to me. I don’t really recognize them, when I see them. But I assume they recognize us. What with me being all butchly and all.

I wonder, when they get a chance to see, in person, part of a family whose rights were just rescinded: do they feel a catch of regret? I simply don’t know how to understand those who don’t – though I know many don’t: many look at me with my child and feel disgust, or concern, or pity; if they were to know she was born to my partner and not to me, I know many would think me an interloper. Nearly four people out of any given ten that I might see in my county thought some variation on this theme, and voted so.

In the train station, I wonder if they see how effortlessly I hoist my daughter into my arms for the escalator ride. How, as we perch ourselves at the base of the escalator to watch the people descend, or as we settle into our seat on the train ride into the city, how comfortably she drapes herself in my lap. How she picks up my hand and plays with the fingers, or pulls my baseball hat off and rubs her hand on my hair.

Before the vote, such moments felt more freighted. They felt – to me, at least – as if they were all impromptu lobbying moments. Actual people whose legal recognitions and protections were on the line. A pair of faces to help the undecided people make the abstractions real. That woman, there; that child. It is their bond I’m respecting, and protecting. Or not.

Once we’ve ascended the escalator at our downtown station, we break into a trot for the theater. And since it is an egghead four-year old I’m trotting with, until the final block, “we” is actually me holding the girlie up in my arms.

We made it in time for the curtain, and the show was a delight. Bunnies and animated toys and fairies and the like. George Ballanchine meets Twyla Tharp. No scary villains. No commercial tie-ins.

On the way back from the show, I tuck us into the Palace Hotel for a peek at its spectacular glass-domed atrium and the umpteen-foot-tall Christmas tree soaring up in it. The lil’ monkey is goggle-eyed at it all, the ornate marble pillars, the gold gilt detailing.

“I could make myself a hundred keys with all this gold,” she says, “and open doors all over the world.”

The BART ride home is a little more crowded than I’d expect it to be for a Saturday afternoon. Holiday shoppers, I suspect. A woman takes the seat next to us, the girlie having elected to sit on my lap, as she had before. It’s impossible not to notice the sweet smile on the woman as she watches my daughter.

I look up and smile at her, and she says, “She looks exactly like my own daughter. Thirty years ago.”

We drop down and enter the tunnel under the Bay, and the girlie’s ears begin to hurt from the slight increse in air pressure. I suggest to her that we pretend to chew and swallow something, to help.

“Gingerbread!” she says, and commences to hold up an imaginary gingerbread person, offering me a bite. We sit and chew and swallow a bit, and at the next juncture when the woman is looking and smiling again, I offer her some of the imaginary gingerbread. She immediately takes it, breaks off little bits, and stuffs them into her ears. The lil’ monkey is delighted.

We begin to talk. She’s in the Bay Area visiting her daughter, who lives in Berkeley and works at an environmental organization. She has lived in a small town in Tuolomne County in the Sierras for the past thirty years, and comes down on the train to visit her daughter. I think about the No on 8 button that’s still on my jacket on the lapel facing her. Her county and mine were mirror opposites of one another on this vote: mine went 38% Yes, 62% No. Hers: 62% Yes, 38% No.

Being in the city is a little unsettling, she says, and especially on such a crowded train. She’s a little worried she won’t know what stop to get off at, and I notice the subway map is obscured by now. Standing room only passengers hang onto the handrail along the roof of the car, swaying from side to side. I describe for her the remainder of her route, that it will end above ground, and the Amtrak transfer is just at the end of the line. By then the car will be vastly thinned. She visibly relaxes.

The lil’ monkey frequently threads herself in and out of my conversation with the woman, who seems to be becoming more charmed by the mile. I tell her my name, and the girlie’s.

“It’s my mother’s maiden name,” I say. “She was the only grandparent in heaven when our daughter was born, so now I get to call my mother’s name whenever I call out for her.”

The woman says the same of her neice. “She has my mother’s name as her middle name.” She says the whole name out, first, middle, last. “My mother died four months ago and I still can’t talk about it.”

I tell her that family members who are no longer here are a big part of my daughter’s life. I withhold reference to my nephew. A half hour’s train ride with a stranger is long enough to talk about my mother, but not nearly long enough even for a reference to a ten year old child lost to brain cancer. There is no passing reference to such a thing, no conversation it does not weight down and absorb.

“I tell my daughter, every time she’s awake late enough to see the stars come out, that the first star we see every night is my mother’s spirit. I tell her how all the stars in the heavens represent all the people no longer on earth, but looking out for ones they love still here. Like the stars, they’re there all the time. But only when we pay careful attention, when enough of everything else is quiet around us, do we see them.”

Again I’m interrupted by the lil’ monkey, and as I attend to her, the woman discreetly wipes at the corner of her eyes. I realize that I didn’t tell her I was sorry for her loss; I realized that I assumed, by her age, that the loss of her mother would take on a more muted kind of sadness. I don’t know it yet – the death of a parent due to old age – but I’m guessing it is different than accidental death, or death from illness or (heaven forbid) violence. I was younger than this woman’s daughter is now when my own mother died. Still, I now wish I had acknowledged it.

The girlie has slithered down to the spot at my feet, impossibly cramped, yet totally engaged in play with the little rabbit we got at the show. I make some disparaging remark about the schmutz on the floor in front of us, and feebly hope no one has affixed gum where her cheek is grazing. Or worse. Not that I can plausibly imagine worse stuff, but I do. Oh, you know, stray razor blades, porn. What have you.

I say, “Someone once told me, and I wholeheartedly believe it now, that you never really have to trust the world around you the way you do when you have children. There’s just so much you can’t control, you know? I can only hope there’s more goodness out there than badness.”

Without missing a beat, and without a trace of doubt, she says, “I think there’s more goodness.”

The train pulls into our station, and I begin to gather up the lil’ monkey and our stuff.

“Have a nice rest of your trip,” I say. I invite the girlie to say goodbye to the nice lady, which, predictably, she does not (by this point her brother would have a fully extended arm, with the scrunchy hand at the end of it, floating out “Goodbye” in his impossibly sweet falsetto). The girlie does wave, though, which is something. I smile at the woman and shrug the shrug of the parent-of-this-kind-of-a-four-year-old. The woman returns the smile, with sympathy. Maybe the resemblance to her daughter goes beyond appearance.

“Happy holidays!” I add, as we make our way to the door. “You, too,” she says. And regardless of how she voted and why, I know she means it.

[next in this marraige equality series: Some/thing old]

Last Thursday, at 10:30 at night, the beloved and I were propped in front of several pounds of organic English peas, shelling pod after pod. We were preparing the lunch we would be bringing in for all the kids at the lil’ monkey’s preschool the next day, and the mother of my children was trying to talk some sense into me. It’s not too late, she implored, staring wistfully at the yet-to-be-shelled pile, to opt for the perfectly serviceable bags of frozen peas sitting patiently in the freezer.

But I would hear no reason. See, our child was Child of the Week last week. It would be fair to say that I took on the campaign with a zeal of presidential proportions. What happens when you’re Child of the Week, you ask? Well! When you’re Child of the Week, you get to bring in a favorite toy or book to share at Circle Time. Your parents interview you about your likes and dislikes (favorite color? favorite vegetable? thing you love to do?), and the results are shared. They are encouraged to make little poster boards with pictures on them, indicating a bit about your life outside the preschool. Some parents come in and do demonstrations of various sorts, or lead the kids in a crafty activity. And at the end of the week, parents often bring in their kids’ favorite lunch to serve up to their little mates.

You can imagine how much wiggle room all this leaves an over-enthusiastic, worry-wart Baba.

For the meal at the end of the week, our girlie wanted us to bring in bowtie pasta with parmesan cheese, peas with butter, and strawberries. All of which, I should say, was a welcome alternative to what I was braced for: a series of empty plates. One of her favorite statements around the house, upon being asked whether she’s hungry for lunch yet, is “I eat the air.” She emits a little giggle after that. And then returns to her fast. When her Child of the Week week approached I wondered: she wouldn’t actually starve her little mates along with her, would she? The empty plates would have been an insoluble riddle, divinable only to her. The sound of one hand eating. What have you. There’d be little sniffles from all around the table. And a glaring preschool director.

But it was pasta ‘n peas this Friday, and goddess love me I was going to make them good, if it took me and the beloved all night.

“They’re only three and four-year olds,” said the beloved, well into the dozenth pod. “It’s not like they’re going to notice if the peas are fresh or frozen.”

“But what if one kid doesn’t like peas, and these are so fresh and sweet-tasting, they tempt him on board? And then he’s a pea-lover, thanks to us! What a coup! That kid’s parents would love us for at least a week.”

Really, what it is I’m looking for is for the kid’s parents to love us for the duration of our daughter’s enrollment in preschool. Better yet, I’m hoping that their kids will love our daughter. You can’t will that kind of stuff to happen, though, as much as I’d like to. What parent doesn’t want that for their child?

And for sure, what queer parent doesn’t?

I could stuff my pockets with worries about my kids — I do, in fact; they’re overflowing; I leave a trail of them behind me, like crumbs from Hansel, wherever I go. I wouldn’t have to dig far before I happened upon this big one: that we, by virtue of our being an unusual parental duo (bound by left-handed love in a right-handed world), will be anything but a boon to their fullest flowering, their unbridled happiness in the world.

Before her Child of the Week week began, I sent a note out to the other parents, letting them know about the lunch on Friday. Then I added a wee little extra ditty. Like, a 500-word essay about our alternative family, and some pointers, should they like any, about how they might explain it to their kids. Should their kids ask. Which most, if not all, probably won’t.

When I worried aloud to a friend that I might be insulting those for whom my Queer Family Primer would be review material, she noted that such folks would by nature be understanding. Another, when I said I might be preaching to the choir, said “You never know who’s not in the choir.” Fair enough. Plus, aren’t the sermons part of what brings the choristers back, week after week? Some very kindly notes came back my way, some right away, some over the course of the next few days, helping blunt my worries about the week.

What worries? Oh, nothing specific. The worry is abstract. It’s that there’s something house of cards-like about our children’s family structure. It’s not simply that it’s a minority structure, it’s that about half the voters in our home state believe my partner’s and my relationship is wrong enough to deserve to be excluded from a thousand-plus state protections and benefits. Does the condemnation extend to the families we make? You betcha. We’re supposedly making families not as a natural expression of our emotional development, our connectedness to the “familiness” from which we came, but to prove a point, somehow. Our kids are used by us as tools, goes this reasoning. Kids in heterosexually-headed families: not political footballs. Ours: political footballs.

My abstract worry, and the one shared by probably 98% of LGBT-headed families, is that the very real vulnerability of our family will be exploited one day, somehow, to the detriment of our kids. Ridicule. Cruelty. Derision. Worse. Aimed at us and witnessed by our kids, or even aimed directly at our kids. Adults would take aim at us, kids at them. Schoolyard harassment and bullying statistics certainly bear out my worries. Never mind that the people who seek to hurt our kids will be, by definition, not our kids’ friends. Never mind, even, that the family we have made is phenomenally strong, riddled with love, of nearly every ilk, across generations and blood lines and counties and more. Worry doesn’t listen to reason.

At the beginning of Child of the Week week, I had burned the midnight oil putting the finishing touches on the “poster boards.” Not one but two, and not simply a window on her life, but a national conference-worthy explication of how it is that she is a Happy and Well-Adjusted Child, with a Copious and Loving Extended Family. Here: look!

I exaggerate, but only just a bit. I mean, I did actually render a whole family tree in water color, with pasted-in photographs of the various extended family faces looming out of it like so many frighteningly large apples. It might have seemed over-compensatory, but I like a good art project. And also, it made sense. I put the same kind of loving attention into the rendering of that family tree that my partner and I have put into the growing of it. A lot of its strength derives from the families from which we come. But whole branches of it are of our own design, the work we’ve made together with friends. It is a thing of pride.

The last day of our Child of the Week week, we came in to do our parent participation stuff. Of course, the beloved sang a little opera, warmed up the kids’ voices and led them in a rousing round of “My Favorite Things.” She was a hit. For my part, I had been stewing ever since, at the beginning of the school year, I heard that a firefighter dad came in. I mean, how am I going to measure up to a firefighter? I could lie and say I was an astronaut. Come in with a big scary suit, goldfish bowl on my head, breathing in and out with a Darth Vader kind of sound. But I’d crumble with the first innocent engineering question. Hell, I’d fall apart if some kid had the impetuousness to ask me why the sky was blue, or how cold it was in space.

But it’s not like I was going to come in and do a demonstration of how to un-dangle a modifier.

In the end, I read a book. Not any of the ones in which alternative- and lesbian-headed families are visible, but the lil’ monkey’s current favorite, by request. Because this journey into the world is hers, and our family’s ethos is that we strike a balance between our worries and her need to experience. Between our knowledge about what makes her unique, and her curiosities as an ordinary kid. I brought The Philharmonic Gets Dressed, and, per the lil’ monkey’s request, read it as written, no freestyling, like we often do at home. The ninety some-odd men wore suits, the dozen or so women wore dresses.

I did add a fancy detail, though: I brought it in my mother’s violin case. I sat down in the little kid-sized chair in front of the half-circle of kneeling kids, and carefully removed her violin and bow, placing them on the bookcase next to me for the children to ponder as I read. A little show and tell. A way to rest my mother’s hand on my shoulder, as I find my own way as a parent.

I know you have the little image over there in the sidebar to tell you, but I thought I’d plug something in here, too, to remind readers that Friday was Mombian’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day. At final count, over 140 posts were submitted, by people from all kinds of LGBT families as well as their friends, from the U.S. and abroad. It’ll take me a while to read through them all, and I will. Fortunately Dana will also be culling through the bunch to group them and pair them and such, for easier reading. Browse through the listing here, and marvel at how much love and perseverance abounds.

Happy Blogging for LGBT Families Day, Dana Rudolph’s inspired jamboree of blogular LGBT family love and visibility! For those of us who are L or G or B or T, and whose writing online is occasioned by and peopled with our families, every day is Blogging for LGBT Families Day. It’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day when we write about the tempest-toss’d route from wannabe to actual parenthood (an epic journey, pretty much, for all of us). It is when we write about our queer families’ experiences of exclusion — or inclusion — at the childbirth education class at the hospital, or at the adoption agency, or at the preschool orientation, or in our kids’ schools’ educational materials. It’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day when we share our children’s brave and heartwarming statements of pride in their families, like Vikki has on her blog Up Popped a Fox.

But it’s also Blogging for LGBT Families Day when we write about the kinds of day-to-day conception or adoption or surrogacy woes that couples in straight families face. Because many of them face those woes too, and we can provide them compassion, and probably some fresh insight. After all, it’s not a matter of shame or embarassment or bodily challenge that we need help in forming our families: it’s how we do it, and we know a lot about how. It’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day when those of us who are LGBT single parents write about the challenges and rewards of that solo journey. For that matter, it’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day when any of us write of the joys and trials of parenthood that everyone shares. In these moments—and we all know, they constitute most moments of the day—we are being parents, the same as any other parents. Only different.

There’s an odd paradox about every civil rights struggle. The aggrieved group, in agitating to receive the civil rights to which others are entitled (e.g., access to the institution of marriage and its legal protections), is ultimately demanding not special treatment, but ordinary treatment. The absence of discrimination equals the presence of ordinariness.

So when we work to make LGBT families visible—such as through group participation in online events such as this one—we are ultimately working to make these families so evident that we eventually become ordinary. We’re working to make the unfamiliar familiar, so that it may eventually become part of the fabric of American family life, the way, over the past generation or so, “blended” families post-divorce and remarriage have, or interracial ones, or families headed by single mothers or fathers. We’re on our way to becoming nothing more nor less special than a new weave in that rich, multi-colored fabric. Of course until we are more fully integrated into dominant visions of family—until, in other words, the pernicious impact of homophobia/heterosexism diminishes, and our kids’ schools and doctors and peers and peers’ parents and books and cultural products include, as a matter of course, our families’ images and stories—we will be special. We will be exceptional.

But while being exceptional can feel like a pain or even a trial, it can also empower. It’s a well-documented social phenomenon that attacks from outside a group — attacks meant to isolate — catalyze a stronger sense of cohesion and identity from within it. Amazing bonds are formed as a direct result of the very duresses our families endure, familiar to anyone who has engaged in any civil rights battle. (LGBT historians would tell us, by the way, that gay people weren’t really a gay “people” until they began to be persecuted more and more fiercely.)

This chapter of the LGBT civil rights battle is different from previous ones, however. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s exceptional. Because we are now defending not just ourselves, but our children. And that, I would argue, explodes the numbers of us willing to speak out and act, and the passion with which we do so. Ask any parent of any stripe how powerful that feeling of protectiveness is. Is it any wonder that the classic illustration of people’s capacities for super-human strength (whether folk truth or real) is the scenario in which someone manages to hoist a car from on top of a kid trapped underneath it?

Queer families share that fierce sense of protectiveness with all other families, generally. Given how hard we worked to have our kids in the first place, you can’t imagine we don’t want them to grow up well, and we’ll do all the things other parents do to see to that. Good nutrition, good education, ample opportunities. The same old stuff. But with an added difference. Together with other queer families and our allies, we’re working to lift a heavy weight—the social impact of homophobia/heterosexism—off the bodies of our children. That bonds us, and the bond is palpable across all these posts on Blogging for LGBT Families Day.

Vikki’s son Miguel wrote and sang a song with the repeated refrain, “My family is different.” And he’s right. His family is different. It’s the same as any other assemblage of loving adults raising children. Only different.

June first’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day, the brain child of Dana Rudolph, who publishes Mombian: Sustenance for Lesbian Moms. An exciting idea, especially for me who is: (a) still fairly recently a parent (lil’ monkey is clocking in at 22 mo. old later in June); (b) still fairly new to bloggery; yet (c) decades into a dedication to civil/human rights advocacy & community network building, via whatever means works best. And obviously the uncensored, unmediated, under-the-radar, into-your-home access of blogs would be a very effective means. So, first, a resounding Huzzah! to Ms. Rudolph for a great idea.

As with many of the other blogs who’ve participated in Blogging for LGBT Families Day (corralled here; it’s a thrill to see the number & range), the whole topic of this blog falls squarely in the midst of queer/lgbt family. By that measure, any ole entry might do to honor the occasion. I’ve already talked about my personal path to parenthood in an essay in Confessions of the Other Mother (the opening section of my piece is excerpted on editor Harlyn Aizley’s site). So in honor of Blogging for LGBT Families Day, I thought I might share my thus far warmest most revelatory moment, regarding the impact queer families will have on queer civil/human rights, and hopefully all civil/human rights.

Last year we marched in San Francisco’s bodacious queer family contingent, reportedly one of the largest in the parade, and collected, as did most families, in the kiddie playground at Civic Center Plaza. (Our Family Coalition and COLAGE and legions of volunteer help see to it that this space happens, which is a post-parade godsend.) Oh, certainly, strolling up Market Street with my impossibly adorable daughter atop my shoulders was a huge thrill; huger still was the thrill I got whenever I had a chance to see how much fun she was having, too.

One among many high points en route was a crib on wheels, emblazoned on the side with the sign “Rainbow Kids Will Save the Day.” That might have been what got me thinking. Because when we got to the end of the march, and encamped in the kiddie playground with our posse of lesbo family friends, I had a revelation.

The playground was choked with kids: big kids, little kids, kids sporting the entire gorgeous range of possible human complexion, tired kids, crying kids, drooling asleep on their parent’s shoulder kids, hopped up kids, totally immersed in their play kids. And I realized: 100% of these kids’ parents are queer, in one way or another, yet only a handful of these kids will wind up that way, most likely. And by handful I mean the standard 15-25% we expect in any given cohort, under current heteronormative/homophobic cultural conditions. But that makes for something really interesting.

These kids will grow up and be whoever they are (gardeners, cooks, CPAs, teachers, mechanics, bike messengers, capitalists, collectivistas, what have you) and take for granted the necessity that their family be legally and socially recognized. And when the straight kids among them advocate for queer civil/human rights, they will be doing so from a unique position. They will be both outside and inside the group whose civil/human rights they are agitating for. They will be both personally unimpeachable, on the one hand, and yet personally utterly committed and immersed. That paradox is fascinating to me.

And I know this is old news to folks who have older kids, and for those who are activist kids in lgbt families (god love ya, you people!). But it’s brand new to me. As I took in the riot of possibility in the “Family Garden” at Civic Center, I thought, Hot damn, I cannot wait for these kids to grow up and see what they do. Then I looked down at my wee sleeping daughter and thought, But none too fast, little monkey, none too fast.

Amor vincit omnia.