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.

I’m back from BlogHer07 (by back, I mean in Milwaukee spending a week on vacation at Grandma and Grandpa’s) and I’m full of excitement and ideas for the blog. Also, the panel I was on was a smashing success! But FIRST, I want to welcome new visitors and point out a few things.

Welcome, BlogHers!

The blogrolls should be self-explanatory, over there in the righthand nav bar. If you’re looking for pregnant lesbian blogs, look under “expecting,” for lesbian foster parents, look under “foster,” etc.

If you would like to be listed as a Friend of the Family, please either leave a comment, or send an email to lesbianfamily (at) gmail (dot) com. The only thing we ask in return is that you put up a button on your blog (or a link in your blogroll if you don’t do buttons). Scroll down for the really cute Friend of the Family buttons.

If you’d like to be added to the Resource page, also either leave a comment or send an email. If you could add a short (1 sentence) description of your resource, that would be great. I may or may not leave it precisely intact, but it helps! I do anticipate reorganizing the resource page soon.

AND, feel free to join the LesbianFamily.org Flickr group. Pictures you send to the group will go into random rotation in the Family Album on the right. This is what a lesbian family looks like! (Please note, suggestive/erotic pictures will be removed. This is a family album.)

Look for more BlogHer posts both here and at LizaWasHere!

I’ve been thinking hard about the guest post a few days ago that talked about how the blogs listed here serve as role models for people trying to find their way through queer family making.  I agree with that whole heartedly as I, too, have used the blogs listed here to help guide me.

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.

As I’ve mentioned, that’s the title of the BlogHer panel I’m going to be on this Saturday.

It also ties quite closely to an essay I’m not done writing for a book on Mothering & Blogging, and with my thoughts about the fact that LesbianFamily.org is approaching it’s first birthday.

I could get all academic about things, but that’s not why they put me on the panel, plus all of your eyes would glaze over. So I won’t.

The main thrust of my thoughts on this subject, from my personal experience, are really the answer to the questions “Why did I decide to create this? What were my hopes and concerns? And how well has it worked?”

I created LesbianFamily.org because I wanted to make it easy for lesbian moms and lesbians thinking about becoming moms (or babas) to find other people who are in similar situations.

When I first got pregnant, I scoured Technorati and Google for pregnant lesbian blogs. You can imagine what kind of results turned up — not what I was looking for, I promise you. Eventually I found a few through infertility blogs — ironically enough. And through their blogrolls, a few more.

I also found Babes in Blogland, a work of love that made it easy for to find other bloggers with due dates near my own.

The founder and I struck up a friendship, and eventually we had a long discussion about the value and ethics of sorting mommybloggers by sexual orientation. More than one person giggled while imagining a conservative Christian mommyblogger recoiling in horror that she shared a due date with a lesbian. We even discussed whether making it easier to find lesbian family blogs might be dangerous or lead to an increase in harassment of those bloggers.

Ultimately, we both reached the conclusion that the value to the community was greater than the risk or the discomfort we felt with this kind of segregation. So I launched this site, and she added — among others — a category list of LGBT families.

It was important to me for this site to be as inclusive as possible, without losing focus as a resource for the lesbian community.

I created dozens of categories, and scoured the Internet looking for blogs to put in them, some unsuccessfully. I never found a parenting blog by someone who was out as Trans, either M2F or F2M.

Even more surprising to me, I found fewer than a tiny handful of parenting blogs by people of color who were NOT part of an interracial relationship. I don’t think I ever found more than 1 of a particular ethnic or cultural group. And I didn’t feel like it was especially useful to create a category of fewer than 3 blogs.

I had the intent of regularly updating that research, but I haven’t done it.

I did two other things to try to address inclusivity from the beginning at LesbianFamily.org. The first was to include a category of “Friends of the Family.” Anyone can be listed there, and we have beautiful buttons you can add to your blog.

I also created a Resources category, and made sure to include sites like Sayoni, a lesbian blog portal & forum for queer Asian women from all over the world, and the 2 Spirit Press Room, a GLBT Native media & cultural literacy project.

LesbianFamily.org may not always have the blogs someone is looking for, but I hope that people don’t click away feeling ignored or excluded. And we are ALWAYS happy to add more links!

The last thing that I did was well past the launch. In December 2006, I expanded LesbianFamily.org into a team effort. I recruited a few of my favorite bloggers, who I thought might do it, and asked them to join me.

By luck, that worked out to be a diverse crew, but not sufficiently representative of the bloggers using the site. I totally got called out on it, which was tough but so valuable as the criticism was spot on. So I added more, and for awhile, we had a very lively crew updating the site.

Sadly, it’s languishing again. I’m not sure what to do about that, exactly. The posts that appear are usually fabulous, and I don’t want to lose that. I’m hoping inspiration will strike while I’m at BlogHer, and the seed will be planted to take LesbianFamily.org to a whole new level.

Incidentally, your ideas and suggestions are more than welcome!

Many of you will have read Peggy Orenstein’s cover piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “Your Gamete, Myself.” For those who didn’t, or who just now linked to it and balked when you saw that it spans nine pages online, here’s a synopsis: Orenstein, an astute writer on matters feminist and maternal, looks at the medical and social evolution of egg donor conception. She interviews several families (mostly the mothers therein) who conceived their kids using donor eggs. She talks to doctors at fertility clinics, and weaves in anecdotal notes from her own journey to motherhood. Throughout, she explores the ethical and emotional ramifications (to parent and child) of donor egg conception. She muses about how, in ways both like and unlike sperm donor conception and adoption, donor egg conception blurs the “bright lines” that ordinary, “biogenetic” parenthood draws around parents’ “genetic, biological and social relationships to their children.” Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I have an answer, though you’ll have to wade through my own thicket of paragraphs to find out.

Those queer and queer-cognizant readers that do mosey through the entirety of Orenstein’s piece might find themselves nodding and murmuring in assent to this or that point, all the while waiting patiently for the moment when Orenstein would of course consider how queer family-making sheds a bright light from a fresh angle on the myriad emotional issues she’s examining. After all, we couldn’t be bigger boosters of alternative conception, both via egg- and sperm-donation. “Ah,” these readers might have said to themselves as they watched paragraph after paragraph slip by, “the sly dog! Orenstein’s holding her big guns ‘til the last section of the article!”

And many of these readers will have, like me, scratched their heads when they arrived at the end of the piece having never seen the word “lesbian” or “gay” in print. Well I have just one thing to say to that: lesbianlesbianlesbian!

Okay, maybe I have more than one thing to say.
[Read the rest of this post over at LesbianDad... ]

Reader, thinker, and real life friend Clare sent me (Liza) this message below, and I thought it would be a fabulous guest post here. In the interests of full disclosure, I have been close friends with Clare’s (straight) older sister since I was about 18 and full of radical organizing and world-changing ideas and Clare was about 7 and full of cuteness and love/admiration for her big sister.

From time to time there is a discussion that the blog sphere has created a good space for lesbian families, and queer people and allies in general, to connect to one another. Obviously, Lesbian Family, was born out of these connections. And, for those on the inside, this connection and safety of community is an end of itself.

However, I would like to talk about something else that Lesbian Family provides: role models. Some of you are probably not going to like to think about it this way, but role modeling and having queer role models is something I have thought a lot about lately. It is also something I was blessed to grow up with.

Growing up, even if in Wisconsin, I babysat in the early 90s for a lesbian family, my parents had partnered gay friends who they brought home, one of my sister’s best friends went on to start Lesbian Family, etc. Looking back, all of these experiences, especially the ones at an early age, shaped my view of being queer, of being out, of belonging. Over and over, however, I see that my experience may not have been the status quo—especially for bi/lesbian women of color or from other countries.

A couple years ago, I met an Asian woman who had been studying and living in middle America for 5 years. Although she was attracted to women, she told me that she never would consider a relationship because she couldn’t stand the thought of growing up and not having children. The idea that lesbian families around the world are having and raising children had never occurred to her, as she had never heard of it or seen it. After seeing Lesbian Family, and reading up a bit, her ideas changed.

Another friend from the southern hemisphere tells me that although she is queer and dates women, she can’t imagine seeing it back home. She can only imagine lesbian families in the middle/ upper class America or other western nation sense (she also admits that the image she still holds in her head is that of white America). Although she knows there must be queer people in her home country, she has never seen them nor can she imagine that they have a space in her society.

Back in America, a friend just last week told me two things that shocked me: 1) that she had never met a well adjusted, settled down, lesbian couple and 2) that there was no place in corporate America for out lesbians.

Over and over my mind returns to the idea of role models. If a person hasn’t seen it, how hard is it to imagine? If a person sees a solid lesbian couple with kids, how easy is it to see that path as viable? How important is it that these role models, these lesbian/queer/trans couples, look like us (economically, physically, racially, religiously, etc.)? And, how have role models or lack thereof influenced your struggles in creating a family?

One of my favorite bloggers outside of the Lesbian Family blogosphere is Isabel, of Hola, Isabel. By simple description, we might be utterly different — she’s a churchgoing west-coaster whose husband is building their second house from scratch! I only recently became a regular churchgoer, live in the south, and between Jill and me, we can pretty much build Ikea furniture. I started reading Isabel’s blog when we were both pregnant, and stayed for the good storytelling. Plus we just like each other, you know?

This week, Isabel wrote a series of posts on her experience and feelings about having a gay brother who (finally) came out to his family in his late 20s.

These posts were so interesting to me, because they tell the story of an emotionally difficult and draining coming out, from the perspective of a family that had long known that the brother in question was gay, and who weren’t particularly uncomfortable with the idea. Yet the gay son is still alienated from his family of origin. And they are alienated from him.

What I walk away from Isabel’s story with is how much homophobia hurts families.

It doesn’t just hurt the gay members of those families, and it doesn’t just hurt if the straight family members are homophobic. Fear of homophobia, expectation of homophobia, perception of homophobia even when there might be another explanation — all of those things are part of the air we breathe when we are living our lives, especially when we try to live them as out GLBT people.

What I imagine, reading between the lines of Isabel’s story, is a brother who spent a long time afraid of being rejected by his family. I imagine that he heard the relative non-reaction of his family as something like silent judgment, and I imagine that he pulled away from his family defensively, because that was the reaction he was listening for. I don’t KNOW any of that — her brother might just be a straight-up jerk, who happens to also be gay, and he might have skipped out on family weddings even if he were a zero on the Kinsey scale.

And of course, he might be a gay jerk who WAS interpreting his family’s “reaction” (or lack of same) in the most negative and homophobic possible light, regardless of their intent.

Our straight friends and families don’t magically know how to reassure us that their feelings towards us haven’t changed. They probably have no idea that we’d like that reassurance.

They also want to know that the core of who we are hasn’t changed — we’re still the human being we always were. How to share both the changes in our lives and the consistency is hard.

A lot of us go through a sort of second adolescence shortly after coming out, and much like actual teenagers, we may think that we’re Finally Being Who We Really Are, that may not be entirely true. That’s something else I imagine from Isabel’s story.

Fortunately, most of us calm down again after the novelty of feeling free to tell the truth about our romantic & sexual lives settles into the normalcy of dating and living life.

The question is, how do we keep the lines of communication open with our families during all that tumult? And how do we give them the benefit of the doubt and keep them “in the loop” without oversharing. Or how do we rebuild those relationships after our irrational exuberance calms down? How do we share our lives in all their complexity with our families, in spite of our fears?

I don’t think there’s “an answer” to that, but I think communication, in spite of fear and resistance, is at the core of whatever the answers are. At least if we want to continue those relationships.

Today, for what feels like the millionth time in the past 3 1/2 years, the Massachusetts legislature is voting on whether to send a referendum to the votes to let them decide whether same-gender marriage will continue to be legal.

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).

Eeek! What’s wrong with this picture? Right! No parents!

More on the the Mary n’ Heather baby news, along with the ACTUAL official White House photo of the proud kin, from Pam Spaulding at the Blend and her berth at Pandagon. The Family Pride Blog has a piece on it, along with ample community chit-chat. And Dana at Mombian provides a synopsis of media coverage, which runs from closeting to bumbling to — surprise! — factually accurate.

My only two cents on it today: May amor vincit omnia.

[Cross-posted over at LesbianDad.]

This makes me sick.

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…