The boy and I are driving back from a morning’s peregrinations — hardware store (my idea, natch), bakery (we both agreed, natch), library (his suggestion) — and we were listening to one of his favorite songs on the Free to Be You and Me album: “When We Grow Up.”

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.

Continue reading ‘For ever and ever and ever’

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.

Continue reading ‘Some SOTU notes for your edification’

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.

Continue reading ‘Mother of God, LD is up for a Bloggie!’

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.]