More than eight thousand families in Massachusetts would have their current legal status endangered, and both marriage rights and civil unions would be off the table for the rest of us queers. If we can kill this bill today in the Constitutional Convention, it’s over – there are no more versions of the amendment in the pipeline. It feels like do or die today.

I am off to the State House in a bit with Roo and will write more later when we know the outcome. A vote is expected between 1 and 3 today, and it’s going to be breathtakingly close.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in obsessively refreshing for up-to-the-minute reports, Bay Windows is live-blogging the day. If you live in Massachusetts, or if you have family or friends here, please make a phone call before 1 pm today.

***

ETA: if you’re looking for a more personal perspective on what marriage means for LGBT families – both in Massachusetts and elsewhere – Dana just posted a great review of a book called The Brides of March.

***

4:04: Just got home. Someone is refusing to nap when it’s convenient for Mama (the nerve), so for now, I’ll just say: HELLS, YEAH!!!

Details to follow.

***

So what we will do with ourselves now? Since November 2004, when the state’s Supreme Judicial Court rules that nothing in the state constitution prohibited consenting adults to get married, regardless of gender, the state legislature has voted on marriage rights no fewer than 14 times.

In the meantime, thousands of couples have gotten married, and dozens of lawsuits – some successful – have been filed by out-of-state couples to get their Massachusetts marriage recognized at home. The impact has gone beyond Massachusetts and the surrounding states, though: as people have seen the sky not falling, and the poll numbers show that an ever-increasing number of people in Massachusetts do support same-gender marriage, a handful of states have established civil unions or domestic partnerships. This is progress, despite the national backlash.

And today was huge. The amendment, which needed 50 votes to turn into a 2008 ballot initiative, got just 44 votes. Some legislators changed their mind at the last second, including the state rep in my mother-in-law’s district (and this after she wrote him an angry letter declaring that she hoped none of his children would grow up to be gay. Fair enough.)

I can’t help but feel pissed at those 44 legislators for having the audacity to think they get to choose who gets to be a legal family and who doesn’t. But 151 legislators – including some republicans in conservative districts – voted with their conscience. Wow, do I love this Commonwealth.

Because of Murphy’s law of babies, Roo took the longest nap of his life this morning, so we were on the train on our way to the State House when NSG called with the news of how the vote went down. I couldn’t believe we missed it. But the State House was still a site to behold when we arrived: throngs of people cheering, hugging, crying, and screaming congratulations across the crowd. A woman grabbed Roo’s hands and yelled “hooray for your moms!”

Across the street were the protesters. Their signs ranged from typically offensive – “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” – to appalling – “Fags burn in hell, wedding ring or no.” An older man screamed at some Episcopal priests about how all we wanted to do was teach “buggery” in elementary school. And then there was the guy with the sign that said “Unitarians are Jew-haters.” (Maybe he was lost.)

When the pro-equality legislators emerged with their staff to greet the crowd, the scattered screams and songs turned into a more unified chant of “thank you, thank you, thank you.” Some of them were crying. All of them were beaming.

I felt so grateful to be there to experience this, and to have Roo there with me. I can’t wait to tell him about this day, so he can say he was there the day his state made history by making sure his family would stay legal.

(Pictures courtesy of The Boston Globe, since I can’t figure out how to get mine of my phone).

[Background: When you decide on an open domestic adoption, one of the things you have to do is put together a family album (or profile) that describes who you are, your life, your community, your family, your hopes for any future children, etc. Agencies show these profiles (or make them available electronically) to expectant moms making an adoption plan.]  

Yesterday, the National Center for Lesbian Rights won a case they took on on behalf of the Butlers, a gay couple who had been denied the right to post their profiles on two different adoption sites (read specifics about their lawsuit against Adoption.com and ParentProfiles.com).

NCLR wrote:

As a result of yesterday’s settlement, Adoption.com and ParentProfiles.com agreed that they must either make their services available to all qualified prospective adoptive parents in California – regardless of their sexual orientation or marital status – or stop profiting from California consumers.

***

Well, it’s about time.

When NSG and I started out on the process to adopt our son, we made the mistake of looking at agencies on-line. We’re children of the 80′s: why wouldn’t we start with the internet? Turns out that a queer couple doing internet research on adoption is like going to Google med school in the middle of the night to look up why your throat is itching – by the time the sun comes up, you’ve not only convinced you’re dying of untreatable throat cancer, but you’ve already contacted 6 internet lawyers about drawing up a new will.

The profiles we saw, with few exceptions, were of couples who seemed to be straight, white, wealthy, church-going, and rich – with lovely lawns and beautiful golden retrievers. We were… well, white. We panicked.

In this vein, we started sending inquiries out at random to agencies that had any profiles posted of families who varied even just a little from the norm. We didn’t find any postings with queer couples in them, or even single people. What we wanted to know was: how would they handle our profile? Since we were planning on an open adoption, we needed to know that an agency would support us – not just tolerate us.

Here is my favorite response (and yes, I saved the email):

Dear Round:

Thanks for your inquiry. Yes, we are a very liberal agency and would be happy to work with you and your partner.

It is our policy that we would have you post your profile as a single woman looking to adopt. If a birthmom were to choose you to parent her child, we would of course encourage you to be honest with her about your sexual orientation and partnership status.

As you know, honesty is extremely important in an open adoption.

Best of luck to you, and please let me know how else I can be of assistance.

Sincerely,

Agency Worker from Giant St*rb*cks-Like Adoption Agency

***

Where do I start? Naah, you can do it better. Have at it, gang.

It’s a good day for you, and a good day for our queer family. As of January 1st, New Hampshire will officially offer rights and recognition to same-sex couples in the form of civil unions.

Marriage, it’s not, but it’s a big step forward.

My wife, NSG’s, step-grandfather died last week, and the family has been busily planning a memorial service for him and making plans to fly in from Kentucky, Hawaii, and other far-flung places.

The emails have been flying between NSG’s stepmother and her siblings, and the other day she sent out the obituary she had submitted to the paper.

She waxed poetic about her dad, about his struggle with Alzheimer’s, his love of music, his fervent environmentalism. She listed those left behind: his wife, his four children and each of their spouses, his 5 grandchildren, and Roo, his great-grandchild.

Conspicuously absent: me, and my sister-in-law’s wife. The lesbos. When they’ve mentioned 15 other family members by name – and included those who are family by marriage, what other reason would there be to leave the two of us out?

Are we not past this bullshit? NSG and her sister have their own difficulties in her relationship with their stepmother, but, to my knowledge, it’s never been about this. This is the very same stepmother who busted her hump to GROW the flowers for our wedding. What the hell?

It occured to me when I was complaining to my sister-in-law about this that the same thing happened when my grandmother died four years ago. My mother did the obit and listed every single person by name – but there was no mention of NSG. We’d been together for several years and were living together. When I confronted her about it – with exquisite timing, the same week my grandmother died and my father totalled his car – she got defensive, I realized my timing was going to get me nowhere, and I dropped it. Neither of us ever touched it again, but I realized this week how hurt I still am about it. The anniversary of her death is approaching, which probably has something to do with it.

I still want an apology from my mother. It just occured to me that I have to ask for it or I’m never going to get it.

I know: I live in happy queer-land, where we have rights and protections and family support that many people can’t dream of. Truly, I count my blessings. I think because of all this, and because our life truly is such the mundane queer life – Grocery shop! Change diapers! Go to work! Get an oil change! – that when something like this comes up it’s just a smack in the face.

I truly believe that NSG’s stepmother supports her stepdaughters, and my own relationship with her only underscores that. I think she choked: she was under stress, and was putting something about her family in the newspaper, and she panicked. I don’t mean to make excuses for her: I’m pissed. But I get it.

We’re bathed in these concepts of certain issues as being secrets, or shameful or embarassing, or something that one generation can accept but another can’t. And we try consciously to move past all that garbage, but I think sometimes consciously squashing our first instinct so we can do what we consciously know is right is as good as it gets.

We learn our lessons well.

He’s been sick all week, and, while he’s on the mend, he’s still cranky and fantastically snotty. The progress we’ve been making in getting him to sleep enough at a stretch that his mamas are functional human beings has been temporarily waylaid.

And then there are our normal lives. An expanding job and less time to spend at it because of shifting priorities. Rush rush rush. Most nights by the time we’ve gotten home, had some time to spend with the baby, and put him down to bed, we’re sitting down to dinner at 8:30 or even later. The amount of bad TV we’ve watched in the past few months is incredible – but the only thing we have the energy for after the pace of our days.

In all honesty, I’m overwhelmed almost all the time these days.

I know I’m not alone in feeling like this. And I know that it’s not unique to queer families, but I do wonder how that plays into things.

Last week my mother-in-law suggested that maybe two-mom families are more equitable because our culture’s expectations for moms is that they’ll be involved in the day-to-day details of their children’s lives, and so both parents are more willing to roll up their sleeves with their kids when it comes to all the little time-consuming and energy-intensive things kids need.

I don’t want to over-generalize or put too much stock in the stereotype, but I wonder if she’s onto something.

Everyone has heard the statistics about how, because men tend to earn more than women, gay male couples are likely to earn more money than the average and lesbian couples are likely to earn less.

I wonder how this plays into our parenting, into our ways of dealing with the stress and non-stop push-pull of parenting.

What do you think? If you’re a queer parent, do you see yourself handling this differently than your straight-parent friends because of the gender dynamics of your relationship?

And has anyone figured out a way to catch your breath during all of this?

She’s particularly interested in interviewing folks, among others,  who used assisted conception because they are in a same-sex relationship.

If you’re up for talking to her, you can email her at thetowncriers@gmail.com and she’ll send you a questionnaire, or you can head over there and read about it for yourself.

We use cloth diapers, so we switched to the thicker night covers. Then night covers with doublers. Then those brown disposables from Whole Paycheck. Then the good old-fashioned ultra-bleached, Bert-and-Ernie-on-the-front Pampers.

Leaks, leaks, leaks. One night we actually ran out of pajamas, and, at four in the morning, tried unsuccessfully to stuff him into pajamas he’d worn as a newborn (6 months ago), and ended up bundling him in a fleece baby sleeping bag thing since we could only fit the top half of his body into the pajamas.

Finally, NSG hit on the problem: we were neglecting to put his diaper on with his p*nis (avoiding the search engines, not the biology) pointing down. Was that a first-time parent mistake, or what?

Anyway, it reminded me again of what it really means to be parenting a child whose experiences will be so different than those we faced growing up.

When we were just talking about having babies, talking about transracial adoption, several people asked me about raising boys without a dad – what were we going to do, they asked, about making sure our son had plenty of male role models? One of the people who asked me this question was a white woman with a white husband who lived in an almost entirely white neighborhood and had almost exclusively white friends.

Huh.

Our culture is pretty used to mixing it up, gender-wise (men and women, that is – not so much with the in-betweens). Racially we’re a whole lot more segregated, and so it’s much easier for people to blame a lack of role models from different ethnicities and cultures on “how our society is” instead of seeing it as a responsibility.

When we bought our house last spring, we specifically looked for a racially and ethnically mixed neighborhood. We love it, but it’s only a start. And we’ve made an effort to have Roo spend time with our male friends, but let’s face it: most of them are gay or trans, and most of them are white. They’re incredible models for the kind of masculinity we’d like our son to see, but again, it’s only a beginning.

We’ve only experienced racism from the perspective of white women. So how do we get him ready for what he’s going to face? 

If we teach him to speak in certain ways and present himself in certain ways that will help him gain respect in the big wide world, are we equipping him with tools to be successful, or are we feeding into racism by encouraging to work within the boundaries of a white world?

This is one of those parenting challenges that, in the abstract, makes me feel tired, but in the concrete, looking at my baby son, makes me feel like I Am Mama, Hear Me Roar.

How do you plan to get your kids ready for what lies ahead?

Like Trista and Kristin, NSG and I wanted to adopt. And like Kristin, I really wanted to get pregnant. Seems straightforward enough: 2 uteruses, 2 adults who definitely want more than one child, multiple ways to bring kids into your family. Only, not so simple.

NSG was completely uninterested in having kids biologically. One uterus down. She was also uninterested in having any children who weren’t adopted. And, while I didn’t care about having a bio connection to me kid, I just couldn’t imagine how to prepare to become a parent without someone in the family growing the first one.

Now is the point where, if you’ve been through a home study, you realize you’ve just peed yourself laughing. The homestudy was, in retrospect, a MUCH more involved way to prepare to become a parent – if not from the perspective of the body, at least from the perspective of the mind.

Now, before those of you who have been pregnant or who have supported someone through pregnancy get mad at me, I’m not trying to suggest that you weren’t intensely thoughtful about every aspect of pregnancy and parenting. But a homestudy, when it’s done the way it meant to be done, is set up so that you have no choice but to be mindful. We had conversations ad nauseam about every situation that could possibly come up with an expectant mom making an adoption plan: no pre-natal care, depression, didn’t know the father, was married to the father, was 14, was 44, was a high school dropout, had a PhD, was from any imaginable cultural or ethnic background, and on and on. If I had been pregnant I imagine we wouldn’t have thought through nearly so many things.

Before we were actually ready to have kids, we had those behind-the-hand conversations so many about-to-be-TTC lesbian couples have about our male friends and our friend’s husbands.  He’s a great guy, we would whisper to each other. And we’ve been friends with his wife for so long I bet she’d go for it.

But when it came down to it, NSG really didn’t want us to get pregnant. She made me a deal: take a serious look at adoption. If you’re happy, we’ll do it first, and if you still want to get pregnant, I’ll support you. So I did, and I was happy. And it really didn’t take long. Now here we are on the other end of it, and, well, we have Roo. How could I help but be overjoyed at this little being who I get to call my son?

NSG meant it when she made her bargain, but I know she thought after we adopted one that I wouldn’t care about getting pregnant after that. But I have to say: I’m more clear than ever that having a biological connection to my child isn’t important to me, but I’m still not clear if I’m willing to give up the experience of being pregnant. 

Charlotte’s posts this week make it abundantly clear that having more options does not equal an easier process. And, despite all the jokes about lesbians and processing, I think lesbian couples by definition have to be pretty thoughtful about how to have a baby (though if anyone has figured out a way to get fingers to produce sperm, please leave your email address in the comments: I think there’s a wealthy future in store for you).

Where am I going with all this? Nowhere directly, that’s for sure. But I wanted to add my two cents (two dollars, maybe – this is a long post) to the discussion about negotiating adding to a family when the necessary equipment is not all built-in.

Anyone else want to run with this one?

So far, what I wrote could apply to - I think it’s 38 these days? – states.

But today is a slightly different kind of kick in the teeth, because we already have same-sex marriage in our state. It’s not enough to say to 10% or so of the population: your families don’t really count. In this case, if the legislature decides to move forward, they’re telling us that, though we did actually count for a few years, now we don’t count any more… again.

I am so sick of this argument. I won’t waste my breath preaching to the choir on this issue – you all get it. But I’m just amazed that something like 6,000 same-sex couples have gotten married in this state, the sky hasn’t fallen, and WE’RE STILL ARGUING ABOUT THIS. They’re keeping us so busy running in circles over a nuts-and-bolt right that we don’t have any time to focus on other issues that matter to our community. And for that matter, don’t they have something else to do with their time? Shouldn’t they be out burning copies of And Tango Makes Three, or promoting A Silver Ring Thing?

I never thought I would be such a big proponent of marriage. The rights and privileges that come with marriage are pretty fundamental, and it makes me insane that you need a marriage license to get them. And yet here we are, and it DOES matter.

The local GLBT paper is blogging the Constitutional Convention, if you’re inclined to follow along as obsessively as I am. I’ll update here later in the day.

***

1 pm: The Governor-elect just came out with a strong statement urging the legislature to kill the bill. It’s going to be a good four years…

***

2:24 pm: Crap. They’re voting. As we speak. CRAP!

***

2:48 pm: Blindsided! We lost by 11 votes. There’s all sorts of political manuevering going on, so I guess it’s not over until the fat lady sings. But it doesn’t look good – the folks on the other side of this issue just put out a victory statement. Now they’re on an hour break, and then we’ll know more.

***

9:10: She sang. It’s done. Next year they vote again, and if they pass it again than the people of this great state get to make decisions about the legal validity of our families. But these are two big hurdles to clear, so, while it’s not too early to feel like Eeyore about this, it IS too early to panic.

And in the meantime, some of those 61 legislators may find a bag o’ burning shit on their front door.

Dear Governor Romney:

I was thrilled to read today about your strong opposition to discrimination against gays and lesbians, despite your continued opposition to same-sex marriage in the very state you govern.

Where do I start?

The marriage thing isn’t a big deal. The rights that my partner and I have now? We haven’t had to make emergency medical decisions for each other ONE SINGLE TIME in over two years! And though it’ll be pretty exciting, I guess it wouldn’t really matter if we finalized our son’s adoption at different times. One legal parent is plenty.

The warm glow I felt after I read this article more than made up for any ugliness I felt towards you after you warned the U.S. Senate last summer not to “Mass. it up” by failing to pass a federal marriage amendment.

Now that I know you’re a friend of the family, I can also let go of any anger I feel over your recent decision to cut $100,000 from programs that support LGBT youth. Listen – those kids don’t need it anyway. They’re fine. And they didn’t need any advocacy from that Commission you disbanded anyway.

While I’m at it, all is forgiven over that little tiff we had recently over funding for LGBT seniors and LGBT domestic violence programs. Let’s let bygones be bygones. I’m sorry I yelled.

I just want to let you know that it really been a great 4 years, and the community appreciates your support very much. Good luck with your future endeavors – I hear you have lots of support among friends.

Keep in touch!