Shoe, Berkeley, CA.

I asked his big sister to help get us out the door faster by putting his shoes and socks on. This was what she considered “done.”

It’s sung by Diana Ross, and here are the lyrics:

When we grow up will I be pretty
Will you be big and strong
Will I wear dresses that show off my knees
Will you wear trousers twice as long

Well, I don’t care if I’m pretty at all
And I don’t care if you never get tall
I like what I look like and you’re nice small
We don’t have to change at all

Hey, when we grow up, will I be a lady
Will you be an engineer
If I have to wear things like perfume and gloves
I can still pull the whistle while you steer

{repeat refrain}

When I grow up, I’m gonna be happy
And do what I like to do
Like makin’ noise, and makin’ faces
And makin’ friends like you

And when we grow up, do you think we’ll see
That I’m still like you, and you’re still like me
I might be pretty, you might grow tall
But we don’t have to change at all

I don’t want to change, see, ’cause
I still want to be your friend
For ever and ever and ever

As we near home, my sweet boy starts to sing along with it — he of the coiled-spring body energy and the jabbing sword thrusts and the fierce, fast tears and the insistence, this morning, on bringing his sister’s fairy wings and wand with him — and a swirl of contradictory thoughts elbow one another in my head. What a beautiful vision of the future. What a load of malarkey. Everything’s changing these days; anything’s possible. Think about that tomboy girl you saw on the playground the other day: she was surely loved by her parents, who did her hair like that. My son will be pummeled — like that kid in the middle school a few scant blocks to the north of us; wait, no, like that kid at our daughter’s very own elementary school — the minute he wears his fairy skirt outside the house. “We don’t have to change at all”– how sweet. How impossible.

Change is everywhere, all the time: good, bad, indifferent. Change is what made them — my son, my daughter — emerge from nothing but a nebula of hope and love and trust in our friends’ enormous generosity into two real, actual, living people.  Change is also what transformed their oldest cousin from a flesh-and-blood boy — an actual, living person — into a constant but invisible presence in their lives, their youngest, most intense guardian angel.

Change can bring transcendent relief — the materialization of the children you’ve wanted so badly for years and years — and it can be a fast ride in a heavy bus  deep into the jaws of hell, no brakes, no seatbelts, and it’s going faster and faster and all you can do is brace for impact and remember about love, if you can. Of course we have to “change at all.” We have no choice.  But I can see where it’s such a very sweet dream to the young.  It’d be sweet to the old if we didn’t know better.

Still, that knowledge doesn’t keep me from telling my kids I’ll love them for ever and ever and ever, which I used to say to them every so often, thinking about my mother (who art in heaven). And then last year a friend suddenly died, leaving daughters of eight and thirteen, and now I say it always, as the coda to every single call/response (Q: How much do I love you? A: So much. Now, also the Q: And how long will I love you? A: Forever!).

Free to Be You and Me was also a television special, which our family saw on the big screen at San Francisco’s Castro Theater last Baba’s Day.  ”When We Grow Up” was sung by the incomparable Roberta Flack and a teenaged, chocolate-skinned Michael Jackson. There we all were in the grande dame movie theater, mostly queer folk and queer friendly and many many queer-headed families.  Many of us knew the album, but probably only some had actually seen it in its television special form. It was rendered for a touched-up big-screen showing special for this event.  When we saw Michael Jackson singing that song — “When I grow up, I’m gonna be happy” – many of us involuntarily took in a breath. He was still alive then — it was just days away from his death — but of course it was already clear to all of us that this young man was singing of a contentment with himself that would be as fictional as the innocence in so much of his beautiful, beautiful music.

We pull up in front of the house, my boy and me. The song finishes, and he says, “Baba, he can’t be she, though.” I look at him in the rear view mirror and say, “Well, if it feels more right to be she, then yes, he can.” To myself I think: Gwen Araujo. Lawrence King. Jorge Steven López. I twist around and face him and add: “The point is, there are lots of ways to be a she, and lots of ways to be a he.” That, I believe.

Belly swingers, Berkeley, CA.

Archival image from about a half a year (and one significant boy haircut) ago. Swinging predilections and techniques remain as depicted.

Face painting self-administered, for the occasion of her Gramma’s birthday. She wanted to write “Happy Birthday” on her face, but we convinced her that writing backwards into the mirror with grease pencils onto a fairly small surface area was a doomed, if imaginative, undertaking.

For the fun of it, here’s the self-administered face paint job circa two-and-a-half years ago. Bit of a shift in technique. Same joie de vivre.

Many of you watched or heard the President’s State of the Union speech last night.  So did my daughter, much to her great thrill (”We’re staying up late! To watch the news!” she said, with a frisson of excitement).  Throughout the speech, though, she was left with a great number of quesitons.  Some were easy to answer, some were stumpers. Judge for yourself:

• •   Does he know that he’s on TV?
• •   Why are there mostly men in there?
• •   Why do all the men have ties on?  They all have dark suits, white shirts, and ties. And the women are wearing a ton of different clothing.
• •   Do you have a black suit like that, Baba?
• •   Why is he talking about China?
• •   Why is it such a fancy theater?
• •   Is that woman in purple his wife?
• •   Does he know that his own wife is watching him?
• •   Why are the people clapping for themselves?

She decided to try to take notes on the whole thing, but this proved more challenging than expected.

“I can’t write as fast as he talks,” she said, still utterly cheery. (We were staying up late! To watch the news!)  Still, she made a valliant effort.

“I just heard him say the word ‘So’!” Down it went on her notepad.  I saw a whole sentence I could have sworn I heard President Obama just said. But after a while, she scaled back her goals.

“I’m just gonna write what I catch up with.” Here’s hoping that technique retains its usefulness when she wakes up in another dozen years to find herself slumped and drooling on her notebook while a lit professor prattles on about Finnegan’s Wake.

She did catch up a bit, but only with fitful success. Before long, she had given up notetaking, and was filling in pages in a “Name Dictionary,” which featured the first names of nearly every kid in her Kindergarten class, plus sundry family members.  It ended with a couple more non-Kindergaren names we knew, and some fictional names just for good measure.

Was it an effective speech, in her view? Hard to say. But I look upon the juxtaposition of “Obma” and “Santa Clos” quite favorably.

Who knew?! Clearly not me.

If it weren’t for a friendly note from someone who found out about Lesbian Dad from the voting page, I’d have never, ever known.

Nominations opened January 1st, closed January 12th, and then randomly selected voters chose finalists from a list of the most-nominated weblogs. And yegods, LD made the cut for one of four “Best GLBT Weblog” contenders!

Knock me over with a feather.

People even been voting on this stuff for, like, almost a week already.  Voting closes this coming Sunday, January 31st.

Here I was, in semi-retirement (right, well, I am prone to exaggeration), chewing over various dilemmas regarding how to write honestly through events — whether personal or global – that defy words and wear down the spirit, pondering how to continue to write about my kids when one of them is now aggressively literate.  When my daughter looks at the WordPress admin page over my shoulder and asks, “Is that you, Lesbian Dad?”  I still can’t tell if it’s an “Et tu, Brutus?” type of a question or a “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” one.  Time will tell.

Meanwhile, whilst I was dozing at the wheel, the vehicle rolled onto Broadway, all megawat-lit, sidewalks overflowing with people and press and paparazzi! Oh my!

So: for you still-faithful LD readers who haven’t abandoned ship, even though it might have seemed as if we were lazily drifting toward an iceberg (we so weren’t, it just looked like it): would you consider meandering over to the Bloggies voting page and cast a vote for LD for Best GLBT Weblog? Unless of course you read and prefer to honk the horn for Aussielicious, Lesbifriends, Queerly Complex, or Naked Blog.

Thank the dieties, this is a one-vote jobbie. You vote once; you have to confirm it via responding to a link in an email sent back at you; if you vote a second time your first vote is replaced. Bingo! ‘At’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Unlike in weblog award competition-jamborees past, I feel no competitive zeal (these are my sistren and brethren, after all), and neither will I shamelessly pander for your votes by reminding you to do so at the end of EACH and EVERY post.  Ahem.

And for the rest of youse, you recent, Bloggie-driven visitors who are asking yourselves, “Who are you, Lesbian Dad?” I can help answer the question with a flurry of links:

• •   I have an About page, with all the requisite background-filling and context-setting;
• •   I recently did a round-up of most-commented posts for each month last year;
• •   I keep a slowly growing Best Of page; and
• •   I compiled an exhasutive (and exhausting) collection of the posts I did leading up to, during, and following the bruising Prop 8 battle in California, where I hail from and am raising my two kiddles.

There’s that, plus sundry other pages attempting to help guide queer parents — or the LGBT-headed family-curious — through the wilderness.

Help yourself, please.  You may have to pour yerself another cup.

You’ll find a friendly community of folks at this salon here, goaded on and facilitated by a mannish lesbian writing mostly about her parenthood and (per single-author, personal narrative  blog tendencey) often a great many other semi-related matters that cross her mind, weigh down her heart, or wad up her knickers.  I’ve been at this since about a year-and-a-half after our first child’s birth.  She’s in Kindergarten now, and she has a little brother.

I’d say more by way of introduction but YEGODS PEOPLE I GOT TO GET PRODUCING CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT!

</histrionics>

Boy with pinkie, Berkeley, CA.

And so we enter the terrible threes. Again.

The variation on this theme? BOY! Who, like his sister, certainly isn’t limiting his contentiousness to his second year. All folks near young humans know that the phrase “terrible twos” is only in common usage because of the alliteration thing.  Three years old is when most young humans hit their peak of INSANITY.  Which he does daily, thankyouverymuch.

[For comparison's sake, his sister in the same shirt, a little over two years ago on her birthday.]

“Martin Luther King Jr, Birmingham Alabama, 1963,” by Ernst Haas.

One of my favorite photographs of Dr. King. Given the year and the setting (a jail), I think we can be fairly sure this was not just any jail, but a Birmingham one, and that the text being passed was one which included Dr. King’s now canonical letter.

Here are two past Dr. King-themed LD posts: A King among men, and It is the law of love that rules mankind. [Ed note, re: that second link: 'til I can fix it, imagine a photograph of Bayard Rustin in that question mark spot where an image should be. Fixed.]

Here’s the whole of Bitch,Ph.D.’s post Help Haiti:

If you are among the many who wish there was something you could do to help Haitians right now, here is some advice in choosing organizations to support. Short version: send $, not stuff, and send it to organizations that were there before the earthquake.

The two easiest ways to donate:

Text YELE to 501501 to donate $5, which will be added to your next cell phone bill. Yele “is a grassroots movement that builds global awareness for Haiti while helping to transform the country through programs in education, sports, the arts and environment. Yéle’s community service programs include food distribution and mobilizing emergency relief. Grammy-Award winning musician, humanitarian and Goodwill Ambassador to Haiti Wyclef Jean founded Yéle Haiti in 2005.”

Text Haiti to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross, same deal with the $ charged to your bill next month.

In both cases my understanding is that the entire amount goes to the dedicated organization.

Other suggestions:

Partners in Health has been in Haiti since 1985, and “ranks as one of the largest nongovernmental health care providers in Haiti – and the only provider of comprehensive primary care, regardless of ability to pay, for more than half a million impoverished people living in the mountainous Central Plateau.”

Oxfam, which is one of my favorite international relief orgs.

UNICEF, which is another.

Catholic Relief Services has been in Haiti for 50 years and is one of the largest human service organizations there.

A few more organizations, many of which are specifically focused on Haiti, can be found here.

And finally, tons of bloggers are generously offering to donate goods and/or services to the highest bidders on the LiveJournal Help Haiti page, with proceeds going to benefit Haiti recovery efforts. Deadline for bidding is Weds, Jan 20. Just don’t bid on the box of Spanish goodies from La Rioja listed here, because that one is mine.

I can’t stress enough the value of the info in her first link from the blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough: An honest conversation about the impact of aid: “Choosing organizations to donate to after the Haiti earthquake.” It’s advice to donors direct from aid workers — posted just yesterday, with Haiti in heart and mind — and it includes links to other blogs posting on how to help Haitians, and suggestions for organizations to support, again posed by aid workers who know a great deal about conditions (and aid orgs) in Haiti before and after the devastating earthquake. GO VISIT.

I’ve also received a few other relief suggestions in my email inbox, most compelling of which is Doctors Without Borders, donations to which are coordinated in this link by a rapidly coalesced group Progressives For Haiti.

100% of the money goes directly to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières which, according to the email I got from Democracy for America, “operates one of the few free trauma centers in Port-au-Prince as well as an emergency hospital in the capital for pregnant women, new mothers, and newborn children. All three of its primary medical centers collapsed during the quake, but working quickly, Doctors Without Borders has already set up temporary shelters and is offering emergency care on the ground.”

[Addendum later in the day after the break]

Back to the computer after some time away, I got this email from Color of Change, well worth sharing:

Dear LD,

As you almost certainly know, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti on Tuesday. Tens of thousands of people or more are likely dead, and a third of the country’s residents may need emergency aid.^1,2

As we watch images from the region, it’s hard not to think of the shock and helplessness we felt after Hurricane Katrina when we watched the lives of large numbers of people, largely Black, torn apart by natural disaster, and in another poverty-stricken and neglected part of the world

In response to Katrina, ColorOfChange members stood up by the thousands to help.  Today, we’re asking you to consider doing so again.  Partners in Health is one of several organizations doing good work, and we’re confident that dollars contributed to them will go far in providing direct, immediate aid.  Click the link below to get started:

http://act.colorofchange.org/go/13?akid=1326.112244.FetnjS&t=4

Haiti was the world’s first independent Black republic, and many of us feel a special pride in the country’s origins. Haiti’s former slaves took on Napoleon and declared their independence from France in 1804, decades before the U.S. and the rest of the Western Hemisphere would end slavery. In those years, the small island nation was seen as a thorn in the side of its neighbors in the Americas and Europe. With their act of defiance, Haitians proved that Black people could govern themselves at a time when leaders of the world’s most powerful countries considered Africans and African descendants less than human.³

Since that revolutionary moment, the country’s residents have often suffered. Haiti is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, with four out of five people living in poverty even before disaster struck. More than 3,000 people died because of hurricanes and tropical storms in the last decade, and thousands more were left homeless.⁴

Tuesday’s earthquake dealt the latest and most devastating blow for Haiti.  The recovery will be long and hard.  And like the Gulf, it will take a long-term commitment.  The financial support we give today needs to be just the beginning, but it is a crucial start.  Please consider giving what you can, either to Partners in Health or another organization that is providing critically-needed services.

http://act.colorofchange.org/go/13?akid=1326.112244.FetnjS&t=6

Thanks and Peace,

– James, Gabriel, William, Dani, Milton and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
January 14, 2010

References

1. “Tens Of Thousands Feared Dead In Haiti Quake,” The New York Times, 1-13-10
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/11?akid=1326.112244.FetnjS&t=8

2. “Even Haiti’s president is homeless,” The Miami Herald, 1-13-10
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/7?akid=1326.112244.FetnjS&t=10

3. “Saving Haiti,” The Root, 1-13-10
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/8?akid=1326.112244.FetnjS&t=12

4. “Haiti, Hopeful Yesterday, Suddenly Plunged Back Into Chaos,” Newsweek blog, 1-13-10
http://act.colorofchange.org/go/9?akid=1326.112244.FetnjS&t=14