No, it wasn’t in the gift department.  Sassafras loved all her gifts.  And I don’t even consider the fact that she ate only jelly for breakfast, only gummy lifesavers for lunch, and had a less than 40 minute nap as messing up. Heck, even SuperParent has to concede to the rigors of the day.

No, I messed up in the last 2 hours of the day.

We took our sugar-fueled, nap-deprived toddler over to our good friends’ house for Christmas Dinner and Movie watching that evening.  My child was running on determination and inertia alone.  I figured that the magical sleepiness of turkey would overcome those forbidding obstacles and lull my child into dreamland for me.  As we tromped down the stairs to watch the final installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, I wasn’t worried about the inappropriateness of the show: the violence, the scariness.  No, I figured, as soon as we curled up in the giant beanbag she’d be out for the count. 

Oh how I misjudged the strength of her determination.  She didn’t fall asleep, and as I tried to coax her into dreamland, while selfishly watching the movie, I realized how badly I messed up when she looked up at a battle scene and began narrating, “he’s dead, and he’s dead, and he’s dead, and he’s dead.”  All four of us adults present began talking about how it was all pretend, and how silly it was really, as my 2 year old stared at the screen in captive horror, pointing at the “scary octopus” (Davy Jones) and talking about how the pirates were going to bite her foot.

We packed up and left, movie unfinished.

I read her stories that night and we talked about lots of different things trying to get the movie out of her head.  But still, at 3 am, Klove and I were woken by her screams of terror.  When I went into her room, flipped on her lights, she was huddled in her bed.  As I knelt by her she looked at me and said, “there’s too many babies, mom.  Too many babies.”  Tears streaming down her face.  I would never have thought that a well-loved and cherished 2 year old could know hopelessness and despair, but it was there in her voice and my heart broke because I had let this happen to her. 

The “too many babies” comes from her favorite movie, Shrek the Third, but she’s never been even a little bit afraid of the Shrek movies.  The scene where Shrek has the nightmare about babies is usually her favorite scene.  She shrieks “too many babies!” with glee as the babies pour through the window.  But in thinking about it, and the scenes she saw of pirates and monsters overwhelming ships and people in the first half hour or so of the Pirates movie, I can see the similarities and see how her dreaming mind could combine the two.  She didn’t ask to watch Shrek once yesterday.

I’d say that the next morning everything was fine, but she still talks about the Octopus she saw on our friend’s T.V. and she still talks of Pirates biting her foot.  With as imaginative as my daughter is, and as long a memory as she has, I think it’ll be quite a while before the threat of pirates and octopi fades.  And there’s nothing I can do about it, but reassure her of our love and the imaginariness of the monsters.

***

Too often, in our fight for equality and respect, we gild our parenting skills; we laud our wisdom and foresight in how we planned and researched and raised our children.  But we’re only human.  We mess up.  This does not make us less worthy parents.  True equality will be manifest when we can ‘fess up about our mistakes – the times when selfishness, laziness, ignorance, impotence, frustration, impatience trip us up.  I don’t know about you, but when I mess up, I feel paralyzed inside.  Too busy battling the internalized homophobia that says I’m inherently unworthy to parent a child (and that this mistake is a sign of that unworthiness) to really live in the present for a while.  My mistakes eat at me and wear me down.

So this is my confession, and my resolution: I am not a perfect parent, and I do not have to be.

Join me.  When have you messed up, and how?

We developed easy, quick answers to the first two, but that last one was a doozie for quite a while.  We just flat-out didn’t know WHAT the baby was going to call us.

Kristin got quite touchy about the whole thing: why do we have to pick names?  Why can’t she pick her own names for us?  Why can’t she call us BOTH Mom; we ARE both mom. 

You’d be surprised at how insistent people can get when you refuse to label yourself.  How will she know whom she’s calling?  How will you know whom she wants?  My mother, god love her, was one of the worst, getting increasingly anxious about it after Julia was born.  I think she even brought it up in the hospital when Kristin was recovering from her c-section.  One day she tried a new tactic.  “Look,” she said, “I know that you will know who she means, and I know that she will know who she means, if she’s using the same word for both of you; but don’t you want to give her terminology and a language that she can use to help explain her family when people ask her questions?  Don’t you want to give her a way to label her mothers for other people so THEY know who she’s talking about?  She’ll be in kindergarten drawing pictures of her family and when people ask her who the tall, adult figures are, what will she say?  She’s going to be an ambassador, aren’t you going to give her the tools for the job?”

Ouch.

She didn’t come out and say it, but I think she was worried for me and people’s perception of me as a “real” mother.  If we’re both mommy, or mother, then any time we’re being talked about together one of us is the mommy, and the other of us is… well, the Other.  But if we’ve already chosen names, well, then we’re mommy and mama with nary a sign of the dreaded O word.  Of course, in a world that has a very limited understanding of what a “real” mother is, the dreaded O word is always present, spoken or not.  No getting around it unless you’re both on the birth certificate.  And maybe not even then.

So, we decided to choose.  Kristin had an indelible (or so she thought) impression of the word “mama” as only referring to a fat, older woman; whereas I have a similarly irrational prejudice (involving a different stereotype) against the word “mommy”.  So it was easy: I’ll be mama and Kristin would be mommy.  Not that it mattered, Julia couldn’t speak yet, and she couldn’t really follow instructions such as: take that diaper to mommy and ask her to change you!  So what was the point in having different titles?  The only point was that it made other people more comfortable.  Yay us.

I guess because the names were never all that important to us, we got a bit confused as to who was to be called what.  Eventually it seemed that Kristin completely forgot that she was supposed to be mommy and she started referring to herself as mama and ME as mommy.  I, of course, still prefer the name mama and so I refer to myself as that and to Kristin as the name she was supposed to be — Mommy.  There went the whole point of having different names, other people’s comfort be damned. 

Regardless of the confusion, our early suspicions proved correct: Julia never gets confused about who is who.  She always knows who she wants.  One day when I was home with her and Kristin was working, Julia was sitting in her highchair while I cleaned.  Suddenly she started screetching “Mama!”  “What sweetheart?” I called out to her.  “No!  MAMA!” Julia replied.  How silly of me.  She meant the other mama, of course.

As Julia has gotten older, Kristin and I have given up squabbling over the name mama.  Our names have become conditional.  The person who is speaking, the person who is present, is always mama.  The other one, the absent one, the one not speaking, is always mommy.  And Julia gets it.  If she’s talking to me then I’m mama, and if she’s talking about me to Kristin then I’m mommy while Kristin is mama.

Of course, what we’re not sure that she gets is the exclusivity of the two terms to us, that this is a private grammar that marks our family.  Mama is a mobile word and thus Julia’s been known to walk up to ANY woman and address her as mama when asking for something.  At this point I think Julia thinks the word “mama” means: any woman who will do something for me.  Alas.

Inappropriate mama-ing of non-mama people notwithstanding, the system, irregular as it is, works for us. 

So.  What works for you?  How do you label yourself?  How do you resist labeling?  How do you feel about labeling in general?   

But I’ve also been thinking a lot about which stories are unheard, which guideposts missing.  I write a lot about the plight of non-bio mothers losing rights and visitation to their children, but surely this is just the extreme end of the spectrum, right?

I’ve been nervous to put this call out because I don’t want people to think that my own relationship is in danger of falling apart and thus I’m in a search for personal guidance, but I really do think that there is a void when it comes to what happens when a lesbian couple with young children decides not to be together any more.  It’s as if we want to turn our eyes away and say that if we don’t speak about it, if we don’t look at it, then it won’t happen; it’s only the horror of the extreme examples that breaks our silence — and only, I suspect, because we think that terrible occurrance could never happen to us and thus it’s safe to speak about.

A few months ago my partner and I attended a seminar on how best to protect the legal rights of our family now and in the future.  All of the steps given (rights of attorney, estate planning, donor contract, parenting contract) we’ve done, except for one: it was advised that we formulate a contract specifying what is to happen should we dissolve our union — how would we handle custody?  child support?  the division of property?  The plan is designed in the first place to keep us out of the courtroom during and after our break up, as well as to give the judge a picture of what we had truly intended when planning our family should we end up in the courtroom anyway. 

This is the most difficult piece of the whole packet of paperwork — no one likes to think that they’re going to break up.  No one likes to think that the family they’ve worked so hard to create won’t stay the same as it was created.  Still, we’re working on it.  Thinking about it.  Planning even though we’re planning never to have to use the plan.  There’s no adoption here, so if a lesbian couple were to break up any division of child custody would have to be cooperative.

What I’m wondering is, does anyone know of cases where this has actually happened? Stories, examples?  Are there blogs out there of people successfully sharing custody where they weren’t forced to by adoption decree?  Or where the adoption decree doesn’t play that big a role?

These are stories that we need to hear.  Enough of the horror stories, enough of the heartbreak and loss.  Those stories are important, too.  But I feel like our stories and talk are out of balance.  Instances of cooperation must form the bulk of break-ups, correct?  Let’s hear them.

I just spent some time going through our link pages adding and moving people around as needed.  Thank you to those of you who patiently reqested links and then were left waiting for a while.

If you want to go check out the links, let me know if I’ve missed somone, or someone’s missing, or some info is wrong… And heck, go check out the babies page as there are a lot of really cute additions waiting to meet you there…

What I do want to do is point you to someone else’s series that is definitely worth taking the time to read.  If you haven’t already, please check out Susan of Crunchy Granola’s Days of Four series (I liked to the first one, I think you can find them all just by hitting “next post” off of that one.)

Also,

congratulations to Two Moms are Better than One and Heretical Hedonism who both found out that they’re pregnant this week and to Shelli and Narda of Hydrangeas are Pretty for finalizing their adoption of Malka today.  And, finally, Dee and Shelly of 3 Dogs, 2 Moms, 1 Baby are going to get to meet their daughter, Riley, outside of the womb this weekend!

And… how could I have left off Rae finding out that she’s pregnant this week, too?  Sheesh, I need to do a better job at this… 

And, I can’t believe I left off Jenny’s pregnancy, too.  Crap, I need to be fired… I’m off updating links as we speak.

Sarah at Journey of a Co-Mom de-briefs us on their Easter visit with her partner’s parents, and how it felt to be dismissed as her son’s mother by her in-laws.

Charlotte at Dos Mamas describes how she feels lost now that her job of getting S pregnant is done.   She feels like she doesn’t really have a place right now, and that feeling has been reinforced by the people who seem to consider S the only expectant mother worthy of special congratulations.

and Lo of Family O takes up the subject as well, describing her feelings around her shifting roles and the ways she’s being viewed by the people surrounding her family as they move further into Co’s pregnancy.

Finally, Lesbian Dad has something to say about the connection and love of a Baba to her children.

That connection, while you’re looking deep into your child’s eyes, wipes all the hurful comments and ignorant slights away.

If I missed a blog post or three, please comment and I’ll go wrangle them in, weekends aren’t exactly the most to blog surfing for me…

When I was a teenager, just beginning to come out to myself, I bought a book of lesbian short stories.  In the collection was the story “When it Changed” by Joanna Russ.  This story blew me away.  It encapsulated every amorphous feeling that I was having about the possibilities of creating a life with a woman.  Here, in this story, it was normal.  Natural.  It wasn’t that men were absent, it was that loving women and creating a life with one was normalized.  The women were stong and capable and they loved passionately.  There was possibility made manifest in a way that made me ache for the reality.  And then the story forcloses on that possibility, because we see that society only at the moment that everything changes, and suddenly that imperfect, hard place is revealed as a utopia disrupted.

I cried after reading that story the first time.  Not only because of the loss of that fictional utopia, but out of joy for seeing that life with a woman partner could be fulfilling and not the story of alienation and loss that had so often been thrust at me.  Over the years I’ve thought of that story with longing more than once.  Not for the post-apocalyptic lifestyle, or the separatist society it portrays, but because the women in that story had access to a technological process that allowed them to have children who were biologically the offspring of both women.

In If These Walls Could Talk 2, Ellen DeGeneres’ character exclaims in frustration and sadness how she wishes she could get her partner pregnant herself, without the tank and some unrelated person’s sperm.  Or something to that effect (it’s been a while since I’ve seen the show).  And oh how I’ve often felt that.  As much as Kristin and I love our known donor, how would our lives be if it were possible to impregnate each other with our own genetic material?  If Julia was biologically both of ours and no one could take her away from either of us just because we’re not her “real” mother? 

S and I have shed numerous tears during our ttc journey, and often times one of us will say “I wish I could/you could just get you/me pregnant.”  Perhaps knowing that this is not an option is part of the reason we keep saying it. I mean, plenty of straight infertiles have male factor as part of their issues, and I’m sure that in moments of a multitude of emotions, those same words are uttered.  In addition, I will admit some feelings of loss knowing that our children won’t look like S, and she has so many wonderful features, that I’d love to have combined with my genetics.

It seemed a possibility destined to remain on the scifi shelf at the library.

But now researchers have created immature sperm cells from bone marrow.

Scientists say they have successfully made immature sperm cells from human bone marrow samples.

If these can be grown into fully developed sperm, which the researchers hope to do within five years, they may be useful in fertility treatments.

The article talks about how the treatment would be used to help men who’ve been rendered sterile by disease or defect.  But I can see lesbians and transmen clamoring for this technology, too.  If they can make sperm from a male’s stem cells, why not a female’s?  The generation of lesbians right behind us, or at most my daughter’s generation, might be able to have children this way.  Transmen would be able to impregnate their partners with their own sperm.

I echo Trista’s wonderment about the possibility of creating sperm from female stem cells.  That’s not to say that this is something that I fully endorse, but I’m more curious about the male/governmental (worldwide) reactions to this science which could render them…obsolete.

Also, creating sperm from females would make the offspring guaranteed girls, and that just adds more complication and implications to the stew….

There are so many things to be “thought” about this discovery – it seems like a step beyond anything we’ve imagined could happen!  But is that such a great thing?

Discuss.

Parrott’s ruling ordered Emma Rose to be returned to Deborah Schultz within 10 days, or be declared a “deprived child” and turned over the Georgia Department of Family & Children Services. Hadaway and Shultz met at a truck stop in Jeffersonville, Ga., on Jan. 12, 2007, but Shultz refused to take Emma Rose back to Florida with her, instead reiterating her wish for Hadaway to raise the young girl.  

Prior to Parrott’s Jan. 8 ruling, Hadaway left her longtime partner and moved to Bibb County, 70 miles south of Atlanta, which she considered more progressive and tolerant than Wilkinson County. After Shultz refused to regain custody of Emma Rose, Hadaway said she was encouraged by attorneys and DFCS workers to apply for an adoption in Bibb County Superior Court.  

 

Upon discovering that Emma Rose remained in Hadaway’s custody, Parrott issued two more rulings: a Feb. 12 order to place Emma Rose in DFCS custody, and a March 23 ruling finding Hadaway and her attorney in criminal contempt for not following his order to transfer custody of the child. The two women were sentenced to 10 days in jail, or five days plus a $500 fine, but are currently appealing Parrott’s decision.  

 

Citing a report by Alicia Gregory, a doctor hired by Wilkinson County DFCS to conduct an independent assessment of Emma Rose’s situation, Bibb County Superior Court Judge Tilman Self ruled March 30 that Hadaway be restored custody.  

 

“Dr. Gregory concluded, and in fact was quite adamant, that Emma’s best interests would be served by returning Emma to [Hadaway’s] custody,” Self wrote. “Indeed, Dr. Gregory stated that Emma’s current foster placement was the worst possible scenario for Emma.”  

 

But when Hadaway and Wilkinson County sheriff’s deputies attempted to retrieve Emma Rose from her foster family on April 3, they were rebuffed.  

 

“The foster family would not turn her over to me,” Hadaway said. When the sheriff’s deputies informed the foster family that they had a Bibb County court order demanding Emma Rose be returned to Hadaway, the foster father allegedly called Parrott. The judge told the officer that he was not recognizing the Bibb County order, and if Hadaway wanted custody of Emma Rose she would have to re-apply in Wilkinson County.  

 

 

via Peter’s Cross Station

I can only imagine what kind of foster home the child was placed in…

Would you use a coupon on a first date?

This question was asked on queercents this week as part of their WWYD series.  To me, it seems like a non-issue: If I have a coupon I’ll use it.  If I’m not the one paying, I’d still offer it up.  I was surprised to see that most of the respondants (admittedly a small sample) said that they would not use a coupon on a first date.

This, to me, seems to take making a good impression too far.  What does it say about you that you would use a coupon on a first date?  And I’m not talking about planning your first date expressly so you can use a coupon, but hey, you’re going out, you happen to have a coupon for the place, why not use it?  So, I thought I’d ask the demographic of a different blog, this blog, to see if the answers differ.

So.  What would you do?  I’m curious now.  Would you use a coupon on a first date?  Why or why not?