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If you build it, they will come

By on April 12, 2013 in Metacommentary, Seraphim/dakini

Folks, I’ve arrived! That piece that came out in the Advocate earlier this week did indeed flush some detritus out from under the bushes.  My first ad hominem homophobic attack (in seven years of online publishing) arrived in ye olde inbox this morning!  Name redacted to protect the woefully ignorant:

After reading about you in the ADVOCATE, I’d like to say some things.

When you were very young, you became emotionally alienated from your
mother/mother figure(s).  Maybe she was absent.  Maybe she was mean, or weak, or
too girly.  She didn’t connect with you well, and didn’t give you the mothering
you needed.  You came to identify with males, and continued to crave that mother
connection, but transferred it to other females.

See [URL of some wacky antigay website].

That is the truth.  You weren’t born that way.

Your kids do need a dad, but you are not a dad.

[URL of another wacky antigay website]
[URL of yet another wacky antigay website]

“Gays” have been useful to the Left.  They have been exploited by both
parties.

The ex-gay truth will prevail.  It will not cease to be true.

Mrs. Dad, ever of the theater world, quipped: “It’s like you’re an off-Broadway show and you just got picketed! This is great!”

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Welcome, Advocate readers!

By on April 8, 2013 in Baba familias, Metacommentary

AdvocateScreenShotSome of you may find yourself here after following a Google trail from the Advocate piece, “The New Lesbian Dad,” by Abby Dorsey, published earlier today. Welcome!  (And old LD readers: hey, look! and also, comment, if you feel compelled!)

I’ve been publishing this blog since not long after the birth of our first daughter, ’round about 2006.  I don’t do any SEO, nor do I tag or categorize posts in much of a sensible way (whimsy carries the day!). But to help you follow up some of the questions Dorsey’s piece may have raised: you could check out posts under “Nomenclature & taxonomy” (sensibly titled, exploring naming and such), or “Anima animus” (obscurely titled, but about gender).

Of course the Best of page collects material I think represents a good range, well-done.

Ask whatever questions you like in the comments here! Or connect directly via my contact page. And thanks for stopping by.

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Twenty blogiversary observations (plus video selfie)

By on March 16, 2013 in Metacommentary, Moving pictures

IMG_4325This blog is by now comfortable with itself, in fact knows where it’s going, and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s  running by now on a combination of whimsy and fellowship, so it is with whimsy and fellowship that I post this ditty so late on a Friday night it’s early Saturday morning, officially The Time When Nobody Ever Really Looks At Your Blog. I’ve always loved  thinking about this whole blogging enterprise as a series of (pause, while I tuck away and count) 1,190 messages in as many bottles. With this post, 1,191. Posting as erratically as I do, at the lowest possible traffickey moments, ensures that the bottles can pick up a nice distressed patina before any of y’all are drawn to the glint of light down there near your feet, as the bottle for a moment catches a bit of the sun.

Over the past seven itchy years, 5,904 times did someone or another pause–not just pause, but vault over and shimmy under the various WordPress hurdles I’ve placed in your way–to say, “Hey. I thought that, too.” Or maybe, “Who knew I wasn’t the only one who thought that? But did you think of this…” Or sometimes, “Really? Really?”

Seven-plus years into this whole bare as much of my soul as I feel comfortable baring out of a stubborn belief that it will help more than just myself thing, this whole chit-chat with strangers and friends about intimate things in a public forum thing, I find that many of the observations I made within the first year or so remain true:

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Unconditional

By on February 14, 2013 in Metacommentary

sudsyheartSome soapy Valentine’s Day love to all of y’all gentle readers.

I waxed anecdotal and sentimental about the day and my parental love over at Lesbian Family, here: “Unconditional Love.”  Mosey over and check it out, if you like! And may your day be open, warm, and confirming, in every which way it can.

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Year in Review: LD 2012

By on December 31, 2012 in Metacommentary

saintnicktreeThe year 2012 in a single run-on sentence: Work, work, work, meet some great people, accomplish some things I’m really proud of, learn a lot along the way; have a little bit of family life but not nearly enough, though for the first time, pay for enrichment classes and summer camp and vacation without going into debt; have hardly any writing life a’tall; get sacked; be flabberghasted in a way fresh to me in umptity-ump years of employed life; lick wounds, and in the yawning space that opens up before me, contemplate fresh possibilities and look again, longer and harder, at old neglected ones; turn 50 (Jubilee!) and, with much struggle, commence the process of giving myself the priceless gift of unshakeable self-esteem, because while others can abet or thwart this, it is at its core something one can only really give oneself. A truth yet to be sufficiently well-lodged, at 50. Never too late.

Gift of loving family: there all along and, in the final quarter of 2012, mercifully back in all three dimensions. Not giving that up again, or even setting it aside,  for the world.

Or, the year 2012 in ten LD posts:

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Greetings, Babble folk

By on December 19, 2012 in Metacommentary

Greetings folk coming to visit from Babble, and thank you Babble editors for naming this blog one of this year’s Top 50 Dad Blogs!

I  consider many of the other bloggers on that list friends and colleagues, and am honored to be recognized alongside them. Together I think this generation of writer dads, blogging their parenthood daily, is blowing the lid off the whole “fatherhood” thing. That’s going to be nothing but good news for both my kids, daughter and son.

If you’re new to this blog, here’s a primer: I’ve been writing it since 2006; my kids call me “Baba,” which is a diminutive or straight-up name for “father” in a ton of languages. I identify most comfortably as a parent (the elbow room!), less so as a mom, more so as a dad, socially at least. Legally speaking, only small bits and pieces of me are recognized a’tall. My partner gave birth to both our kids (a son now 5, a daughter now 8), and our donor chum is the ex-husband of one of my oldest friends. Our kids know him as family and, along with his own kids, know that he helped us be able to have them. He is their “special uncle,” his kids are their “special cousins.” Socially, it makes complete sense to us all.

A whistle-stop tour of useful posts, lesbian fatherhood-wise:

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Power trio

By on August 16, 2012 in Metacommentary, Mostly a picture

Fungai_Cheryl_Maha

Fungai Machirori, Cheryl Contee, and Maha El-Sanosi, BlogHer ’12, New York, NY.

Three bloggers basking for a moment at the recent BlogHer ’12 conference in New York. This was just following their panel, in which they talked about how they use their words online to make substantive change in their communities and nations.

Not an overstatment, that. Fungai, at the left, came to New York from Zimbabwe; Maha, at right, by way of Sudan, following detention in prison there for her activism and journalism. Cheryl, founder and publisher of the essential read Jack & Jill Politics, expertly guided the conversation they had with fellow International Activist BlogHer Scholarship recipients Tara Livesay and Ana Santos (not pictured: whisked away by admirers before this moment).  Cheryl wrote about the conference and the panel she moderated, as well as a day-long pre-conference session on using your blog as a change agent at her blog, here.  Please go read up, and stay a while.

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New day

By on April 14, 2012 in Baba familias, Metacommentary, Mostly a picture

SEoverthebay.Apr12
Looking southeast from the Hayward-San Mateo Bridge, traveling westbound over the San Francisco Bay, CA.

Each morning that I’ve commuted to work, since I started my job a little over a year ago, I have taken a picture to send (via text message) back to my kids, to lessen the sting of my distance.   By now, I’m sure the sting is mostly mine. But initially, when I started working (far more than) full time, it was tough on them, too.  I had been their primary caregiver: I used to read them stories at school; tend and volunteer in the school vegetable garden; know all the school staff and their friends’ parents by name. I would pick each of  them up after school and slowly walk them home.  It was not uncommon for us to take detours and follow our whimsies en route: this park, that bakery.

Now, in place of abundant time caring for them during the weekdays, we have full health care and financial security. The first month after I started the job, we enrolled not one but two of them in a six-week Saturday gymnastics class.  Just because we could.

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