As the Jewish holiday of Purim (Think Halloween crossed with Mardi Gras, with a little St. Patricks Day thrown in for good measure, but unique all on it’s own) passes us by, I’m left thinking a lot about religion, and how the decisions we make about it now will affect our family in the future. For a bit of background, I come from an interfaith family.  My mother is a Jew, and my father was Roman Catholic. Great combination, actually.  

We were raised as Jews, not because of the whole maternal lineage thing, but because my best friend went to Hebrew school in third grade and I just HAD to go too.  In essence, I “chose” that path for not only myself, but my brothers and sisters as well.  Had my best friend not been Jewish, we could have easily found ourselves going to CCD with the other Catholic kids, but I digress.

Even though we were raised Jewish, and went to Hebrew school twice a week from the time we were little, till we hit the “golden age” of 13 (I actually continued in my religious education for a while after that) and celebrated all the Jewish holidays with our synagogue and family, we also participated in the Catholic holidays that were most important to my father, namely, Christmas and Easter. And while I fondly remember the traditions we took part in when these holidays rolled around, we were not taught much of the history. We went to church with my father once a year, on Easter Sunday.  He went to a traditional Roman Catholic church and much of the service took place in Latin.  Mostly, we kept ourselves occupied by playing with the kneeling benches and making up stories about the “pictures” in the stained glass that surrounded the church. And when we got home, this mythical bunny had left us eggs to hunt in the back yard, and a basket full of jellybeans.  The day culminated with an egg-salad sandwich lunch prepared by my mom from the “bounty” collected in the morning.  In retrospect, it’s amazing we didn’t all get food poisoning from eating eggs that had been out of refrigeration for so long, but that’s not the point here.

The point is this. Now that he’s gone, I feel very….much like I didn’t know enough about why we did the things we did, or the history/tradition behind it. I don’t know much about Easter outside of the candy, or much about Christmas besides Santa, reindeer, and gifts.  And while I can go to a book and read, I won’t ever be able to learn about it from him, in his words.   The fear of not knowing “why” something is done often leads to things falling by the wayside, and the thought of losing these traditions in the future saddens me.

I wish that my parents could have given us more of an education about my dad’s faith – not that we would have chosen that path (and maybe we would, who knows. Of the three of us, all bar/bat mitzvahed when teens, I’m the only sibling who considers herself to be a practicing Jew) but we would have had more of a connected feeling to something that was a large part of who he was.

S and I have already decided to raise our children as Jews.  This was a very easy decision to come to for us, for a few reasons.  One  being that S, ( ½ Episcopal, ½ Roman Catholic) has never had a really strong connection to her faith, and especially not the organized part of it, and another being that the faction of my religion that I practice (reform Judaism) is very accepting and affirming of my (queer) family, and that’s really important to me/us. What I’m wondering most about is how we can incorporate the traditions of the other faiths in our pasts while continuing to affirm the Jewish identity of our child?  This may sound….I don’t know, trivial, but I can clearly remember many times when I was a kid being told that “Jews don’t do/celebrate/believe” THAT.  Of course, I’d just experienced THAT with my family at home.  My interfaith identity was never valued or taken into consideration amongst my Jewish peers or teachers, and there were many times that I felt lost.

I would like to keep our children from feeling this kind of confusion, while also instilling a strong Jewish identity. Any ideas on how to keep the kind loss I’ve felt from happening to my children? What are some of the things you’re doing in your families to affirm more than one faith?

I have been meaning to write a review of Peggy Drexler’s Raising Boys Without Men, but I never seem to have the time.  So here’s some thoughts on a somewhat tangentially related topic…  

In an ultimately futile attempt to distract myself from my most recent bout of adoption anxiety, I decided to go out and purchase the last few items we needed to bring with us on our upcoming visit trip.  My baby clothes rules are relatively simple – or so I thought.

1. Cannot cost more than the average weekly income in my son’s country of origin what I would spend on a t-shirt here. Sadly those amounts are equivalent. 
2. Cannot be emblazoned with advertising slogans – my kid is not a billboard for 0ld Navy or Baby G*p.
3. No branded characters (I’m sure I’ll flex on this one once he’s old enough to start asking for them, but for now, them’s the rules)
4. No extreme gender stereotypical imagery or language: “Future chick magnet?” “Football Star”? Monster trucks?

Ideals, which tend to be thrown out of the water by rule #1:

5. I’d like to know that a child or a grossly exploited worker didn’t make the clothes for my child.
6. It would be nice if said clothes were made from organic materials & natural fibers (ha!) & in an environmentally sensitive way.

I went to Marsha11s, 0ld Navy, T*rget, K-M*rt and the Sa1vation Army.  And it was surprisingly hard to find clothes that even satisfied the first four rules. Bright colors are nice. Why is everything blue, pink, pastel yellow, or mint green? Why must all the nice red shirts have monster trucks on them? Why is our animal vocabulary limited to puppies (marketed at boy children), dinosaurs (ditto), ducks (girl children), kittens (ditto), and giraffes (the most neutral I’ve seen)?

Higher-end baby stores seem to have less grossly gendered clothing, which makes me wonder whether there’s a relationship between social class and the desire for gender-neutral clothing.  Even so, my cousin, who works for a kid’s clothing line I can’t afford to buy from even at her wholesale discount, tells me that retailers tell her that they regularly get returns – “I’m sorry, but my husband didn’t want his son in this!”  Is there truly less demand among discount/big-box store shoppers for non-gendered clothing, or does the selection and set-up in these stores condition consumers to expect to buy gendered clothing? Is the physical layout of the store into the girl-infant section and boy-infant section consumer-driven or retailer-assumption driven?

Why is it so frightening for parents when the cashier in the supermarket can’t tell if your two month old is a boy or a girl? Is it the end of the world if someone says your son is beautiful, rather than handsome?  And yet, here’s what I wound up buying.

  Look at the cute little tiger feet!

  Make yourself at home, why doncha, kitty?

 Inoffensive stripes.

These two came as a set. I didn’t notice the writing on the second one until I got home.  It doesn’t make sense to me: leave the word “king” off and you’ve got a cute sleeper that could be worn by anyone.  Put “king” on there, and you reduce your potential market by 50%.  Or at least 25%, assuming that there are people who won’t buy blue for their girls even if it’s otherwise neutral. 

Nonetheless, my purchases are certainly dominated by the color blue, aren’t they? (Gives weak, sheepish grin.)  Believe me, though, when I say this is the best of a very sorry lot.

As part of a two-mom family, I think I’m a little less comfortable bending gender rules and dressing my son in pink than I might be if people weren’t likely to read that as using my child to push the infamous “homosexual agenda.”  I’m also more cautious for this upcoming visit trip – from what I’ve seen in pictures so far, gender-normative clothes are the rule here, and I’m less likely to push limits abroad than I am at home.   

How do you all handle the clothing conundrum?

This afternoon I spent three and half hours putting my son down for a nap.

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?

Ok, I admit it, I’m a geek. My favorite kind of “music” is NPR.

In moments like this morning, I know why. This morning, Morning Edition ran a Story Corps segment that made me cry in my car. While I was driving.

The interview was between a 14 year old girl and her mother. The mother, Sue Hyde, told the story about how hard it was to grow up in rural Illinois in a large nuclear family, knowing that she liked girls. At 19, Sue came out to her own mother, whose first reaction was to ask “what did I do wrong?”

I’m sure many of us can relate.

Several years later, Sue’s mother became gravely ill. Sue and her partner sat up with her the night before she died, and during one of her last moments of being awake and aware, Sue’s mother told her and her partner that she wanted them to be happy. (Listen to the story. I am NOT doing it justice.)

By this time in the interview, Sue is crying and telling her own daughter, Jesse, that she doesn’t want Jesse to have to wait so long for her blessing. And Jesse, in turn, assures her mom that she knows, and she is.

It was one of those moments that are almost indescribable – it was the universal story of how much we want our parents to love and approve of us, and the joy and relief that comes with getting that love and approval after uncertainty or even denial. To listen to it being shared through yet another generation was so sweet. I wish I had enough money to give those StoryCorps geniuses a million dollars to keep up the amazing work.

Possibly the most surprising thing about this interview is the fact that the word “lesbian” is never even uttered – perhaps especially remarkable since Sue is a professional organizer in our community. But this story is all about being a human being, a daughter, and a mother. And yet, the fact that Sue is a lesbian is critical to her human struggle, and clear in the context of the interview.

Please listen. Don’t read the essay, or do, but don’t stop there. The written version doesn’t begin to convey the touching, difficult, love and loss in the interview.

UPDATE: This is cross-posted over at SoVo!

Babytalk magazine is related to Parenting magazine, but oriented towards parents of babies. (I know you’re shocked.) In the current issue of Babytalk, there’s a survey: “Married Moms vs Unmarried Moms.” Smackdown at the playgroup!

There are so many things that trouble me about this concept that it’s hard to figure out where to begin my critique. But since this is a GLBT blog, I’ll start with how the survey addresses moms like me.

Technically, the magazine has 2 surveys, one for “married moms” and one for “unmarried moms.” They’re printed one on each side of the magazine page (and also available online as separate downloads from this page.

I originally thought that the survey completely ignored lesbian moms when I decided to write this, but I was wrong. That’s because I think of myself as more like a “married” mom than an “unmarried” one, although of course I am legally unmarried. But Question 18 for unmarried moms is, “Do you have a same-sex partner who co-parents with you?” Yes or No.

Why, yes I do! Well, ok Babytalk, I guess I’m unmarried. Let’s look at the rest of the “unmarried moms” survey. (The questions are in regular font, my answers and comments are in italics.)

Question 1: A child needs two parents. Yup, I agree.

Question 2: A child needs two parents who are married to each other. Um. Is this a trick question, since I’ve now been declared unmarried, and under the law everywhere except Massachusetts, I can’t get married? I would have checked “agree somewhat” but now I think I’m forced to “disagree.”

Question 3: Marriage is a sacred institution. Another trick question? I “somewhat agree” with that statement, but not in the “therefore no one but heterosexual couples planning to reproduce should be able to participate” sense of sacred. More in the “when you find the love of your life and commit to each other, that’s a sacred commitment” sense. But to my serious irritation, I think I have to check “disagree” here too.

Question 4: Marriage is just “a piece of paper.” In the immortal words of Whitney, “hell to the no!” It’s a piece of paper that comes with several hundred important legal rights and responsibilities and goddammit, I want that fucking piece of paper. I guess that’s “disagree.”

Question 5: I’m happy I’m not married. See my answer to Question 4. I’m furious that my marriage didn’t come with that piece of paper and that even silly surveys won’t recognize it, much less important institutions like the IRS. Again, “disagree.”

Question 6: I wish I were married. I wish you would recognize that I am married. But it feels very odd to check “agree” here.

Question 7: Many married moms are conventional and old-fashioned. Many? I guess so. Fewer and fewer over time, but I can’t disagree with this. What I do disagree with is the implication that only unmarried moms can be cool. Hell, I’m conventional and old-fashioned in a lot of ways. Certainly more than you think. Does that mean I “agree somewhat?”

Question 8: Many married moms have “settled.” I doubt it. Some, sure. Some people settle. “Disagree somewhat?”

Question 9: Married moms look down on me. Not the ones I know, at least not to my knowledge. “Disagree.”

Question 10: I feel discriminated against because I’m unmarried. Another “um” question. I feel discriminated against because I can’t get married. But I don’t feel like a single mother, and I don’t think I’ve ever been perceived as one. Where the hell does that fall on the options? Disagree somewhat???

Question 11: It’s much harder to be an unmarried mom than a married one. At last! A question where I have a clear opinion. I can’t imagine how single moms do this. (Be moms without losing their shit, not answer silly surveys.) AGREE!

Question 12: If you agreed or agreed somewhat to #11, why? (Pick up to three.)

• There’s no one to share childcare duties with. Or to check my grammar, apparently. Oh wait, we don’t know whether or not the survey author is an unmarried mom. But that is why I think it would be so damn hard. And it doesn’t apply to me.
• There’s no one to take care of/give affection to me. That would be hard too. Again, it doesn’t apply to me.
• It’s more difficult financially. Yup, that too. Again, not applicable.
• There are no in-laws to help out with childcare. Well, my un-laws live 800 miles away, but they are my son’s grandparents. Not sure how to answer this one.
• There’s no long-term stability. The first time I read this, my first impulse was “fuck you, babytalk.” I mean really, how rude. I think unmarried moms can provide stability, and I am 100% confident that my technically unmarried family has long-term stability.
• People look down on me. Well. I guess I have to go with this one. Particularly, it seems, people who write babytalk surveys. And right wing religious radicals.

Question 13: Sometimes it’s easier to be an unmarried mom than a married one. I admit, in the midst of stressful decisionmaking with my partner, I’ve had that fleeting thought. But I 99% disagree.

Question 14: If you agreed or agreed somewhat with #13, why? (Pick up to three.)

• Don’t have to fight with partner over best ways to raise the child.
• My child/children and I have developed such a strong bond; I don’t need a mate.
• Don’t have a marriage to work at in addition to raising a child.
• Saved money on a wedding.
• No in-laws to deal with.
• I’m freer to follow my own dreams.

Yeah, um, I still have to work out child raising issues with my partner. My child and I have a strong bond, but it in no way replaces my bond with my partner. I do still have to work at my marriage in addition to raising a child. My partner and I had a beautiful wedding – less expensive than average, but certainly enough that we don’t get this “benefit.” And I have in-laws. (And grammar enough that I’m not ending my sentence with a preposition. Again.) Freer? When you’re the sole support for a child? Yes in some sense, but no in others. Good thing I don’t have to answer this question.

Question 15: Do you consider yourself a single mom? (If yes, skip to question 19.) Um, absolutely not.

Question 16: Are you currently involved with the biological father of your child? No. We used an anonymous donor.

Question 17: Are you currently involved with someone other than the father of your child who co-parents with you? Yes. My partner, with whom I planned this child and to would be legally married if we could.

Question 18: Do you have a same-sex partner who co-parents with you? HALLELUJAH! This survey does recognize that moms like me exist! Sort of, anyway. answer, YES.

Question 19: Are you divorced? No.

Question 20: Are your own parents divorced? No. In fact, they hit 40 years of being married earlier this year. My partner’s parents have been married almost as long.

Question 21: Was your latest pregnancy planned? Planned, budgeted for, paid for through the nose, medically negotiated – about as planned as is humanly possible. Of course, my partner WHO IS ALSO AN “UNMARRIED MOM” has never been pregnant. If she fills out this survey, should she check yes, or no?

Question 22: How old are you? Oh good, another easy question. Check the box marked 30-39.

Question 23: I work: Yay! Another easy one. Check the box marked “full-time.”

Question 24: How many children do you have? One so far. We’re hoping for another one.

Question 25: May a Babytalk editor contact you for a short interview on this topic? Please! I promise to be friendly and polite on the phone. I’d be happy to talk with you about being a lesbian mom.

Question 26: Fill out the following so that we may enter your name for a $1000 US savings bond. Please fill out the survey including this part. How great would it be if a lesbian mom won?

Question 27: Comments (attach additional pages if you like): Dear Babytalk magazine: I’m sure that setting up a false “us vs. them” between married and unmarried moms gets people all up in arms and sells magazines. But I’m still sorry you did it. And I’m even more sorry that you don’t consider me married, and don’t even afford me the option of choosing how to consider myself.

You happen to have published this right in the midst of what is jokingly called “the gayby boom.” Lesbians all over the country are having babies, and both gay men and lesbians are out there adopting and otherwise working to have children and raise them. Many of us consider ourselves married, and some of us actually are legally married.

For the most part, we’re moms just like the rest of your readers. We’re sleep deprived, eating badly, worrying about our newborns’ sniffles, and fretting about our childrens’ development. But there are a few differences. We can’t legally marry anywhere in the US except for Massachusetts. In many cases, the “non-biological” parent cannot adopt or otherwise provide for legal protection of her relationship with her child.

I would love to see your magazine do an article about lesbian moms. If that doesn’t work, perhaps you could include a sidebar with the article this survey eventually generates.

I would be happy to discuss my experience as a lesbian biological mother, or if you are looking for other potential interviewees, to recommend others based on age of the child. For more information about me, check out my blog. For more on the topic in general, including links to dozens and dozens of lesbian family blogs, check out http://lesbianfamily.org/.

Someone suggested to me that I write this week on trying to have a sex life with my partner while raising a toddler. I think she thought this would be a hard thing to do. Not the writing about it, goodness knows I can write about sex as long as I have to, but the managing of said sex life with a toddler in the home.

I think toddlers get a bad rap. Oh yeah, sure, they’re into everything, and everything they’re into is dangerous. One moment you’re pulling them off the back of the couch as they’re about to fling themselves into a plate glass window, and the next minute they’re demonstrating a genetic link to mice as they squeeze more of their body than should be physically possible through the tiny crack allowed by the baby latch into the space under the kitchen sink to reach the caustic, skin-melting, cleaning chemicals of doom. And all this before you’ve even managed to eat the celery in your breakfast Bloody Mary. But they’re hell of a lot easier, in my opinion, than infants. You don’t have to carry them everywhere, you don’t have to feed them from breast or bottle every couple hours and, most importantly, you don’t have to get up with them 6 times in the night only to start your day at 6 AM.

So, yeah, there are a lot of things you can’t do with a toddler in the house (you can’t leave bras and shoes lying around, you can’t leave toilet paper unguarded, and you can’t leave large glasses of water sitting on the coffee table) but sex isn’t one of those things.

Now that we’re finally catching up on our sleep, and now that bed time for Julia is really bedtime (THANK THE GOOD LORD ABOVE!) Kristin and I are no longer forced to try and have sex in the snatched, golden, and all too few moments of time between us putting her down and her waking to realize that she has been abandoned. I don’t know about you, but if my lover is urging me “faster! faster!” I’m hoping that I’m on the giving end of things and that she’s really into it, and not that I’m on the receiving end and our super mommy ears just heard the ominous intake of breath that precedes a scream of infant outrage.

No, now that Julia’s a toddler, the whole night stretches before us like a starry coverlet of velvet possibility into which we eagerly roll ourselves and… most of the time, fall asleep. But we could be having sex, and that’s the important part. Also important to note: it’s only “most of the time” now and not all of the time, as it used to be not that many months ago.

I actually think this might be the easiest time for parents to have worry-free sex. The toddler’s in a crib and can’t get out unless we get her out. She can’t ask embarrassing questions, or repeat the equally embarrassing answers to whomever will listen to her. She can’t burst in on us, and she can’t know what those sounds are that are coming through the wall, the white noise machine, and a muffling hand.

But I could be wrong. What do you think? When did your sex life return, and at what ages did it get difficult again?

How do those of you who have two careers and babies/small children manage it?

This has been the subject of some recent heated discussion in the art-sweet/pili household and after trying to organize my thoughts on the issue into a coherent post far too many times, I’ve decided to wimp out throw the question out to our vast and extensive LesbianFamily audience and seek your wisdom.

I’ve also added some new links… go check out this week’s new (to me) blogs:

Amy and Melissa’s Baby Blog (TTC)

Bebe’s Cache (Expecting)

Other Motherhood (babies/nonbio)

Roll Playing with Kids (little kids)

In the past week, my son Roo has made it through exactly two nights without waking up soaking wet and howling.

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?

In all my fantasies of having a child, I always imagined having a girl. A feisty, spunky, worm-loving, mud-puddle-hopping, pink-disdaining, peace-loving, punk-rock kind of girl, but still, a girl. As Galloping Cats noted in a comment oh so many moons ago… “i think it’s easier to work on bending gender stereotypes for girls than for boys. i mean, it’s one thing to dress a girl in blue and give her trucks to play with… it’s another thing to dress a boy in pink and give him dolls to play with, when you don’t even believe in girly girlyness for girls!”

While we trying to conceive, the glimpses of family life that made my heart turn alternately to sweet pudding (that’s what I want!) and then to sour milk (why everyone but us?) were always girls. A friend’s daughter boasting about her karate prowess. A little girl and her dad playing catch. My niece climbing up on my lab to read a story. It didn’t seem to matter that I have friends with loving, nurturing sons, that I am friends with loving, nurturing men – who almost as eager to be honorary uncles as we are to be moms – even that my dad is one of the gentlest, warmest people I know. I still wanted a girl.

I figured I would deal with whatever nature gave us, but nature gave us an adoption situation where we had to specify boy or girl. And of course Pili and I didn’t agree. All of a sudden, we found ourselves rolling in stereotypes; the kind of stereotypes we progressive-liberal-lesbian types are supposed to be above (ha!). Boys are more fun; more active; less complicated – Girls are more nurturing, less violent, more verbal…

I was nervous about how I’d react to the kind of physicality that I’ve observed in many of the male children of my friends and in the children I’ve taught. Every tree branch becomes a sword. Bloody noses and bruises are the norm rather than the exception. It seems out of control to me, and it makes me nervous. Some of this discomfort I trace to the fact that I don’t have siblings [niece and nephew are the children of my first cousins] and didn’t grow up with lots of roughhousing, competition, and casual violence. Pili on the other hand, grew up surrounded by male cousins and is much more comfortable with that energy.

It was only once we decided to name GB after my grandfather that boyness began to seem less intimidating to me. Grandpa was a wonderful artist and a terrible curmudgeon, who only seemed to get used to the idea of saying “I love you” a few years before he died, but never failed to squeeze my hand and slip a rolled up bill into it before we left his house. Thank you, I would say diligently, and he would wink and say “Thank you? For what you are thanking me?” as my mother rolled her eyes and hustled me into my jacket.

When the agency coordinator called and said I have a referral for you, even though I knew it would be for a boy, part of me still hoped that she would announce that it was a girl. Or twins. Boy/girl twins. And then she told me GB’s name, given to him by his firstmom, and my heart did this funny little skippy thing. His birth-name contained names from both my family and Pili’s. And all of a sudden, he seemed like my child. My son.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped worrying (who me? never). Earlier this week, Pili and I were taking a walk with a good friend of ours. She was describing her daughter’s friendship with the little boy who lives across the street and I commented on how glad I was to hear that here was a little boy – unlike my nephew, which is another story into itself and is probably another big part of where my worries come from – who wasn’t into violent games. Oh no, she said, he’s teaching her to play good guys/bad guys and to shoot things. And so I worry.

One of the best things I’ve read this week comes from Shelley of But Wait There’s More, who writes:

D doesn’t have any toys whose main purpose is violence. He doesn’t own any guns. He knows that we hope that he remains a kind-hearted and good-spirited boy, and he’s known boys who seem mean-spirited. He understands that we are concerned about how he plays with toys, and that if they seem to be bringing out the worst in him, they might go away. And he spends virtually no time in retail space.

But we are conscious of the fact that he’s a boy with two moms who is going to be spending significant amounts of time over the next however many years living in Boyland. And we want him to feel like a native, not a foreigner. So he has a Starscream Transformer.

What will it take for me to become comfortable in Boyland?