[Note (A): This dittie is cross-posted at LesbianDad. Note (B): A thousand apologies, Lesbian Family readers, for the EPIC HIATUS we’ve all taken from posting here! The dozen or so folks who’ve written in with blogs to be added to the LF blog listings will see action soon! And thanks for continuing to check back for the past two and a half months!]

Like me, many of you current and future parents perusing yesterday’s New York Times will have sucked up the article “Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK)” with a mixture of fascination and dread. Laura M. Holson, the article’s author, writes that

Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cellphones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents.

Holson introduces us to a smattering of parent-kid combos and the ways in which their communication is either foiled or facilitated or both, thanks to the use of cellphones and text messaging. Phone company analyst types share their studies about how many kids will be using cellphones in the near future: 81% of Americans between the ages of 5 and 24.

We are also reminded that every new device we bring into our lives is a Trojan Horse of sorts. Or, if mixing metaphors is an irresistible pastime of yours, as it is mine, let’s say a Trojan Pandora’s Box. In this little device rolls, nestling itself innocently into pockets and purses, atop chests of drawers and desks and dining tables. Then once it’s well established, out pops the realization that it has changed how we communicate, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the less so. For me, the most unsettling images in the article were those of kids lost in device-mediated conversations to others in the midst of what I would have thought would have been sacrosanct family togetherness times, like eating meals.

I’m sure I go around believing in the concept of sacrosanct family togetherness time (or FTT) because of how young our kids are right now. (You down with FTT? Yeah, you know me!) See, we’re in that rare period in which our kids meet a vast majority of their emotional and social needs inside the immediate family. It’s exhausting, but it’s an amazing thing at the same time. Very little presses into their consciousnesses from the exterior of this tightly governed space — at the moment. These days, when the lil’ monkey talks about her friends at preschool, I know that the friendship she speaks of is a touch more imaginary than real. She describes the Big Dog at school — the one I like to call Canis Major (not her real name) — as her best friend there, but I’m not at all sure Canis would be able to pick our girlie out of a line-up.

(more…)

I really messed up as a parent this Christmas.

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?

[A version of this is cross-posted over at LesbianDad.]

I was writing an epic-length response to a great question someone asked on my blog, and realized that I had better give it a whole different lease on life as a post, the better to tempt more of you astute readers to add to my answer. So here was the question Sheri Bheri posed, in a comment on a previous post I’d done using our preschool intake form as a foil:

Do you have any advice for the other parents in a preschool, to make it easier on the children of lesbians?

In a nice turnabout, by “other” parents here, she means “hetero.” She’s asking from the standpoint of a supportive straight parent:

I want my daughter exposed to more diverse people than *I* was. Because I’ve found myself ‘handicapped’ later on in life, because I have a hard time knowing the right thing to say and do.

I’m going to answer her with that kind of reader in mind, and hope that all you all chime in with your own suggestions. Ideally we can not just benefit from one another’s experience, but have something we can pass along to friends and allies who ask what they can do.

(more…)

[Cross-posted over at LesbianDad.]

“Let’s play ‘Family,’” says the lil’ monkey this afternoon. How can I say no? Also, how can I not use it as yet another opportunity to massage the concept, yet again? In situ? Under the guise of her initiative?

“When you play ‘Family,’ who is it that’s in the family?” I ask as coyly as I can manage.

“There’s two baby brothers, and two baby sisters.”

“Yes,” I say, “go on.”

“And a Mommy, and a Daddy.”

“So not two Mommies, or two Daddies, or a Mama and a Baba?”

“No, a Mommy and a Daddy.” She’s cheery, and of sound conviction.
(more…)

Hello! Thanks to all who welcomed me in Liza’s post and greetings to our Lesbian Family readers. This will be in the way of an introductory post, we’ll get to the nitty gritty stuff in a week or two. I am very glad to be here and writing – first off though lets get one thing straight (ha), I am here to write for you and to write about what you want me to write. I have found in my vast procrastinatory surfing trips through the blogosphere that there are many, many fine quality parenting blogs and sites which offer information, advice, assvice, and general mouthing off by parents and non-parents about How to Raise Good Kids, How to Get Your Child to Sleep, Eat, Use the Potty and other subjects but I found very few that approach these issues with an eye to actual current child development research. The exception to this, unfortunately, is media type blogs or blogs that focus on media outlets and use press release type information. This is really too bad, because as we all probably know the media report about things they think will get them good ratings and/or whatever their corporate overlords order them to report about so sometimes the information presented is blown out of proportion, taken out of context or otherwise skewed. Please do not take this to include sites such as askmoxie or kellymom who present a great deal of research-based information along with anecdotal info and info from experienced parents. They are in a league of their own and shouldn’t be compared to media blogs. So, as an almost-parent and a specialist in child development I think there is room around for folks such as me to present research information for parents and other folks who care for children. I think that Lesbian Family is a great place to do this.

Alrighty, that said, who do I think I am? I live in the DC metro area. My partner and I have been together for six years. She works for Big Grassroots Queer Organization (not the one that owns it’s own multi-million dollar building in downtown DC but you know, that other one, the one that has been around for over 30 years) in fundraising. She walks the line between being “trans identified” and “gender-queer” and you’ll have to ask her what exactly that means and you might get a different answer on any given day. We have three fairly well-behaved but spoiled feline children. We had a very long trying to conceive process that culminated in 1.5 cycles of IVF and a pregnancy currently 21 weeks along. It is downright surreal after all we went through that there is now a baby girl thumping around in my belly. If you go to my personal blog and click on the fertilicoaster tag you will find all the details. We used a known donor who will be “special uncle” to our child(ren.) I am in a Phd program in Applied Developmental Psychology. This means that I am getting a research degree in psychology and human development with a focus on applied uses of that research and knowledge. I am not getting training to be a therapist or counselor or to do psychological testing. I am getting training in teaching and communicating research findings to policymakers, educators, administrators, and others who are interested in child development research. Most people with a degree like mine go into research either at a research consulting company or university. I intend to (eventually) do child advocacy work, policy work, or consulting. I finished all my classes last spring so now there is just that pesky dissertation to complete.

I have plenty to write about out of my own head, but I’d just love it if you would ask me questions. They can be related to stuff you are currently seeing in your own kids, stuff you are worried about for later, or about stuff you see reported on the news and wonder about or anything else related to human development. Supposedly I am qualified to teach all this stuff to undergrads, so test me!    

As my lovely wife and I get ready to “really” start trying to have a second child, we’ve been acknowledging our fears about it.

In a big, vague way, of course we worry about how we’re going to afford “everything.”

But in a more intimate way, we worry about things like whether we’ll like another child as much as we like Noah, whether we’ll have time for each other or ourselves again before 2015 (or later!?), how Noah will react, etc.

Surely we are not alone. What are you afraid of or concerned about, if you’re also working on adding to your family.

Moms (and Babas) of multiple children? How did you cope with these kinds of fears? How has reality been so far? Is there anything you recommend — either doing or steadfastly trying not to do?

It was always the same series of questions: how did you get pregnant?  Who is your donor?  What is the baby going to call you?

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?   

I have a draft post that I started, oh a couple of weeks ago, called “Ten Things I Have Learned in the First Week Home with My Son.” A mix of the tender and the humorous, the pretty and the very very stinky.

Except that one of the things on that list is ArtSweet’s first rule of baby: the minute you have time to even start to line up two words to make a sentence, someone - baby, cat, or partner - will need your attention immediately. I will put that post up eventually, hopefully within the scope of the first month and not the first year. But what’s on my mind tonight is a little more serious.

I’m sitting at the keyboard, nursing a pint of ice cream and a glass of white wine because the thought of hot food is revolting after an hour and a half of going up and down and over this shoulder and over that shoulder with a very hot and sticky baby who Did Not Want to Sleep even though he was very very tired.

I stuck it out, even when my arms ached, and I wanted to just put the baby down and let him cry until he cried himself hoarse or preferably to sleep. I was tempted to just call out on the baby monitor: “mama to mommy, come in mommy, please send back-up,” but I didn’t. I wanted to prove that I could do it, that I really was real mom material, since when I came home from work today, Pepito just glanced at me, turned back to Pili and launched his 100 megawatt five and a half tooth smile straight at her. Jealousy with a chaser of self-doubt. What am I doing wrong? Does he know I’m not legally his mom yet? Why doesn’t he love me the way he did yesterday? Mind you, the sharing of the baby has gotten easier since the high-pressure days of our trips to visit him: as Pili says, I think we’re both realizing there’s more than enough baby to go around.

But sometimes I still feel like we get stuck in power struggles over what we think the baby wants. He’s hot. He wants the fan. He’s constipated, that’s why he can’t sleep. Have you given him a bottle yet? Of course, I’ve given him a bottle. He threw it on the couch, spilling nasty smelling formula everywhere*, arched his back and started howling. Would you like to try?

And that’s when I wish we had roles to play. That we were a mom and dad, old-school-like. Where mother knows what’s right for baby and dad bumblingly follows along. I’d even take the dad role, if I could be happy or comfortable in it. But we’re a team with two leaders and no followers. And a very hot sticky baby who is finally, finally asleep. For now.

And let me forestall any “adam and eve, not adam and steve” bullshit. Having two moms who adore him? Who crash into each other like a pair of outfielders with their eyes on the ball to get to him when he cries? That’s just all good for this most of the time very happy baby.

*There’s no need for mechanical bulls or “breast is best” lectures - I’m convinced that making pregnant women smell a bottle of formula would triple breast feeding rates in this country. Especially a half-drunk, didn’t have time to dump it down the drain before I left for work, so it’s been fermenting in the hot kitchen all day bottle of formula.

Let me tell you, I find it quite odd how exciting the words “Honey! I’m home!” have become for me in the past year. As many of you know, I have been home full time with my son, and will be heading back to work and school at the end of April. Although I am aware how very fortunate I am to have been able to do so (thank you Canadian government!) it *really* has its ups and downs. And these days, as he has become harder to please, we are dealing with mostly downs.

Since our son was born, my partner and I have had some of our most heated arguments in the 6 or so years we’ve been together. And what, you may ask, have most of these arguments been about? Well, firstly, the dishes. And sometimes the laundry. Most often it is the bathroom, because no one likes the bathroom. We’ve become obsessed with blaming each other for the state of our home, and each one of us wants to be the domestic labour martyr.

So instead of cleaning the bathroom, I decided to do some research on how others are dividing up tasks in their queer households. As some of you may be aware, many theories abound when it comes to the division of labour in queer/gay/lesbian households. Most theorists proclaim that the division is much more equal than that of heterosexual households. They claim that those of us in same-sex relationships often hold anti-sexist/progressive/feminist beliefs that result in frank discussions about the division of labour, and then the dutiful equal divvying up of the work between the parties.
One theorist (Oerton, 1997) claimed that many of the studies written prior to her research did not take into account that gender and therefore inequality is still at play in same-sex relationships, and that assuming that lesbian and gay households are “gender free” (and also oppression free) is problematic. She asks, how does having children, and resulting parenting/co parenting arrangements, as well as income and race complicate the issue?

Since her article, a number of others have been written about the gay-by boom and its impact on household tasks. I have to say, having lived in our patriarchal world for my 31 years, I am not immune to the forces of sexism and the resulting gendered stereotypes. Even though I know better, I find myself frantically sweeping and dusting before my partner gets home, and I usually give her the “what for” when she leaves articles of clothing on the floor, or breakfast dishes in the sink that I discover upon waking up. In our house, I feel like I’m doing the lions share of the household tasks and the baby care. Yet, I don’t seem to see myself or my experiences reflected in all these academic studies.

So I wonder - what does the division of labour look like in your home? Has it changed since kids arrived? Did you or are you discussing this prior to having kids arrive?
*for those interested in some of these studies, let me know. I have copies of many of them that I can share.

(just a quick note: this post was not inspired by Art’s recent post. I hesitate to post this as I feel it covers similar ground, but I think there may be a few other angles to discuss.)

So tell me…

Are you, as a lesbian parent/queer parent and parent to be less invested in normative gender roles?

I ask this question as a few days ago, I was an invited speaker on a session about lesbians planning to have kids. My partner and I talked about our baby and our road through conception, pregnancy and now parenting.

As the last speaker was finishing up, she was asked if she was sad that she was parenting boys (she had 2). She said she wasn’t, and mentioned how many lesbians with sons feel guilty about not having daughters. She suggested that we should mourn the fact that we don’t have daughters and just be happy to raise our sons.

So then I said, “And hey, maybe you will raise a femme boy!”

After that comment the room got silent. Those with kids said, “Well..” and then trailed off. Folks fidgeted in their seats. An uncomfortable silence followed. And then we moved on.

In the comments on gender-specific clothing in Art’s post, some folks mentioned that they wouldn’t put a boy in pink. Some mentioned the fear of being judged as a lesbian parent and that wildly disobeying gender normative rules would make it seem that they were using children to push the “homosexual agenda”.

So, am I naive and ridiculous? Am I setting myself up for something when I insist on pushing that homosexual agenda and playing around with normative gender/sexuality? (And I’m not just talking about clothes here - I often let people call our son “she” and make no moves to correct them, or when folks say that he will have all the “ladies” I make sure to add “and all the guys as well!”).

Am I going to have to eat my clueless parenting words and prepare myself for the gender police to straighten me out (pun intended)? Or is there really a hope to queer his childhood? (and let me be clear, I will be fine if Dre decides to be ultra masculine and heterosexual, but I would at least want my child to have the option to feel comfortable presenting his gender and sexual identity any way he desires).

What do you all think? Are you, as a lesbian/queer parent/parent to be less invested in normative gender roles? Or are the forces of society just too great?

(ps - I’m not sure why I can’t get spaces between my paragraphs, I apologize for the nasty formatting).