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If you build it, they will come

By Lesbian Dad 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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“It’s okay, sweetie.”

By Lesbian Dad on March 19, 2013 in Baba familias, Seraphim/dakini

Note from mom, found posthumously.

A note from a father to a son, posted on FCKH8.com’s Facebook page (and their Twitter feed), has gone viral and is going viraler even as you read this. It was written by a dad to his son after he overheard his son talking to a friend about how to come out to his parents. I first saw it at The Good Men Project, in a post by William Lucas Walker. According to Parentdish, “FCKH8.com founder Luke Montgomery said the letter was mailed to them by Nate, a high school student in Michigan.” Bless Nate; bless Nate’s parents.

These publicly shared moments, in which straight parents express their love and understanding of their gay children, are becoming more and common, thanks to the concurrent (and not at all coincidental) growths of social media and mainstream support of LGBT people. They’re also bittersweet. Sweet, surely life-changing (and sometimes life-saving) for the kids of these parents, who are hearing them now. Bitter for those of us whose parents neither knew nor understood this hugely consequential facet of us, or at least not at the time we were young, vulnerable, and in deepest need of their understanding and approval.

I say this as one such who, at the time, considered myself lucky. I felt sure that my parents wouldn’t have disowned me, had they known the truth about my first love. But what they would do or say, I didn’t quite know. I sensed that they would be disappointed and not understand, which was more or less the case.

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Godspeed

By Lesbian Dad on December 18, 2012 in Baba familias, Seraphim/dakini

I am thinking about my sister today.

This February, three days before her eldest son’s birthday, it’ll mark three years that my sister communicated, through her best friend (the woman who married my beloved and me on the steps of San Francisco City Hall in 2008), that she didn’t want to hear from me or about me, “ever.” For her own reasons, which surely made sense to her at the time–I’ve only been able to make sense of them from a novelistic standpoint; the indirect, unlikely path the heart picks through grief–and evidently they continue to work for her now (or at least so I hope; otherwise, what a tragic waste, a pointless denouement to a far bigger tragedy).

’Til now, though writing is a deeply therapeutic map-making enterprise, I’ve not written about it here, out of a vain hope to keep a door open, a light on. But “ever,” I’m starting to consider, is longer than a few years. I will leave the door open and the light on, but it’s time I got up and went about the business of being and healing myself.

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Gathering

By Lesbian Dad on December 17, 2012 in School work, Seraphim/dakini

Scattered notes in attempt to pull together threads and make sense.

The day after the school shootings (I have such a very hard time even typing the more accurate term, “massacre”) in Newtown, CT, we went to Mark Morris’ The Hard Nut, a romp which makes it difficult to sit through an ordinary Nutcracker again. We’d gotten the tickets months ago. I held my son on my lap the whole entire time, had my arm around my daughter the whole entire time.

She was frightened during the scene when the soldiers fight the mice. The dancers had amazing mouse masks on, and when the mice were attacking the soldiers, they reared their heads back to reveal sharp teeth (merely part of the design on the cloth of the mask). My daughter buried her head in my shoulder and asked me to tell her when the scene ended. Did the same again each time the mice came on stage.

That was a dance scene at The Nutcracker.

I have no doubts about whether I should tell her about what just happened to twenty children between her and her brother’s age. Not right now.

During the day the next day, Sunday, I took my son to a magic show put on by our school’s second grade teacher as a fundraiser for the school’s art program. Our school’s principal was there with her two children (a daughter and son, each the exact age of our daughter and son). I hugged her long and hard, and she readily hugged back. I told her I would be hugging her as frequently as I could in the coming weeks, if that was okay by her. She said definitely, it was okay by her.

The weight on her shoulders, both mother and principal, is enormous.

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After Newtown

By Lesbian Dad on December 15, 2012 in Baba familias, Seraphim/dakini

Leveled, like so many. Staring at my children, whose age range is precisely that of most of the child victims of the mass shooting at the Newtown, CT school earlier today. Breath knocked out, and here I am at the other side of the country, with two living children.

As often happens when I am working with particular diligence to grasp the dimensions and implications of some change or challenge in my everyday life, I had fallen into a quiet here. This sets up (as often happens) a dilemma: which image/ thought/ event should be the one to break the silence? This time: heart-rending national tragedy and the need to process it–the desire, even to invite collective processing of it.

I collected a list of resources at a post at Lesbian Family, by the way. Among the many, I found this Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration PDF, Tips for Talking With and Helping Children and Youth Cope After a Disaster or Traumatic Event, to be the most effective combination of succinct and detailed, particularly regarding age-specific reactions immediately and over time.

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Mom’s passing, 19 years later (Weekend bonus shot, 09.02.12)

By Lesbian Dad on September 2, 2012 in Seraphim/dakini, Weekend bonus shot

Pops and family, Castro Valley, CA.

The summer of 1993 I was slowly adjusting to a breakup (not my choice; the axe fell just outside a Lesbian Avengers meeting in NYC). My mother spent that summer in a convalescent hospital, ostensibly healing from first one, then another bone break earlier that spring. She was a heavyweight and older woman, unaccustomed to advocating for herself anywhere as fiercely as she advocated for others. These were the reasons, I decided later, that no doctor had valued her body enough to thoroughly examine the x-rays of her bones as of her first bone break. She had had a double mastectomy just three years before, and the bones that broke (we would find, posthumously) were textbook bones for a breast cancer metastasis in a woman her age.

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Fall Guy

By Lesbian Dad on August 31, 2012 in Baba familias, Re: the lil' peanut, Seraphim/dakini

Fall, the hinge season: time of transition, from warm to chilly, from preferred (by many) to tolerated (by most). Longer, pleasant days give way to shorter, often less pleasant ones. So-called because leaves fall from trees, which image–leaf separating from tree, doing so in obedience to the inexorable pull, life’s need to purge and eliminate so as to make space for the new–will always be associated with my mother’s passing. She will have died 19 years ago tomorrow, and the doctor in the oncology ward where she lay in a coma used this image to try to explain to my father, my sister, and me, with all the gentleness he could muster, that we needed to let her die. She was a leaf at the end of its life cycle, and we needed to let her detatch and fall.

For a long time now I’ve thought that if life were a film screenplay in development, even the most sentimental and wide-eyed of readers would toss it back with “You gotta be kidding me!” or “Patently unbelievable; scale back!” in its margins. But of course art tries its darndest to imitate the incredulity of life, and not the other way around.

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Evening time

By Lesbian Dad on June 1, 2012 in Baba familias, Blogging for LGBT Families Day, Seraphim/dakini, Sunrise Sunset file

[One evening in lesbian family life, as contribution to the 7th Annual Blogging for LGBT Families Day, hosted by Dana at Mombian.]

Dusk, the crepuscular hour, the gloaming. Gentle, delicious. I am laying in the post-day, pre-sleep moments with my son, now five. My daughter is downstairs with her Mama, listening to chapter seven of C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian.

It is balmy out for a late May Berkeley–67 degrees–and a light breeze fingers the curtains open and shut. They’re home-made, these curtains: someone we can’t remember brought a sarape to sit on during one of our family’s back yard puppet shows some years back, and left it. We put the word out, but no one claimed it, and as sometimes can happen with forgotten sarapes, our kids’ grandmother stitched bedroom curtains out of them.

Through the open window float the sounds of folks talking as they walk up the street below; an occasional car swooshes by. A car door slams and by his voice, I hear my brother-in-law has come home; as he talks to his son, he pulls the garbage and recycling cans off the street where I had left them in my haste to make it home to dinner with the kids. We each live in houses on the same large lot in the center of the city; we share a vegetable garden and the abundant outdoor garden and play space, we share childcare and grocery shopping, a mortgage, and garbage can duties. He takes the cans to the curb, I bring them back. Except that since I began working full-time, I can never bring myself to lose a minute’s evening time with my children still awake, so I usually retrieve the cans long after they’re in bed.

Tonight, as he often does, he has brought them in for me.

A small passenger plane passes overhead; robins, finches, sparrows, and California Towhees sing the sun down, fewer and fewer with each passing minute.

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