Mine’s coming! I swear! I just have to juggle the childcare and other work stuff tomorrow! Hope the floodgates will stay open ’til up to midnight Pacific!

A great resource for the LGBT community. Thanks for organizing!

My wife (yes, we are one of the 18,000 in CA who can legally say that — how ridiculous is that?) went to LA this past weekend to play with some friends, leaving me and our 2.5 year old son and our 5.5 year old daughter to play with each other for three days.

When Kyler was an infant with colic, the thought of being alone with him for two hours terrified me. At almost-3, he is such a curious, funny, loving playful joy that I can hardly remember what that fear felt like. And Teah, our beautiful brilliant 5 year old — being around her is like watching the world being born. Everything is a source of amazement to her. Currently, she is really into telling jokes, and recounting what happened in her new-favorite Scooby Doo movie.

Over the weekend, we went to Teah’s Girl Scout troop meeting (a mostly LGBT family troop) and made fresh orange juice, visited my sister Lisa’s student art exhibit at the Urban Promise Academy, visited my sister Chris and her teenage sons, and went to a Giants game with our friend Cynthia, during which the kids sat still for approximately 15 minutes before wanting to run around. We quieted down a bit Sunday night by watching a nature show about this amazing place off the coast of South Africa where gannets and dolphins and sharks and whales come together to feast on sardines. In other words, it was a pretty typical weekend — full of family and fun and lots of time for the kids to play together and apart.

Kyler and I picked up Daph at the Oakland Airport with “That’s What I Like About You” blaring on the car stereo. Three days away and she looked cuter than ever. Ten years in, and I am continually shocked by how lucky I am to have found a love that is so capable and smart and kind and funny AND knock out gorgeous.

Underneath the details of everyday life in our little family is a new undercurrent of sorrow for me. My parents are in their 80s and are quickly approaching the point where they will no longer be able to live independently as they have for so long. My mother, in particular, is resisting change and offers of help. The push and pull with her — the closeness informed by listening to her in our daily calls, and the distance created by her refusal to accept help and my insistence that she needs some — illuminates The Gap We Do Not Discuss, the decade or so after I came out as a lesbian during which my mother and I barely talked. My mother and I love each other deeply. But with other siblings, she has an ease that is painfully lacking with me. Since Daph and I have had kids, she can find some common ground, and my willingness to come to NY defrosts things a bit. But in listening to her struggle, and in having to witness a huge and unwanted change in her ilfe, I feel a current growing in my heart — that we lost any time at all with each other. that we will never get that back. And that we will probably never totally cross the bridges that divide us again. I feel that loss keenly, as her daughter, and as the mother of children I hope I will be always able to accept unconditionally.

[My blog picked today to crash, so I am posting this here]

Our Non-traditional Traditional Family

How ironic it is that my family would be called “non-traditional”, when the truth is that we the embodiment of a typical middle class small-town family; except for the fact that our kids have two moms, we are so traditional that it is almost funny. Granted, we are more politically active than most families, but in my family that is a tradition in itself, handed down for three generations.

My wife is the most traditional woman I know–a fact that I tease her about endlessly. Like most moms these days, my wife has to work, but somehow she gets up with the kids and sees them off to school; helps with homework, teaches our son to play the guitar and teaches our daughter to sing, bakes cookies and tries in vain to get the kids to keep their rooms clean. (on more occasions than I can count, I have found myself trying desperately to stifle a laugh while she is reprimanding the kids because she has sounded exactly like my mother, right down to the inflection). To me, my wife is my soul mate and the light of my life; I know I am a better person, because of her. To our children, she is simply Mama and to my mother-in-law, she is a loving daughter.

Our children are wonderful, intelligent human beings; our babies blossoming into teenagers before our eyes, noticeably more mature with every passing day. Old enough now to speak up on social issues and animal welfare, but young enough not to be able to sleep without a good-night hug. Our mischievous son with his goofy sense of humor and our daughter with her acerbic wit and biting commentary, one foot in childhood and one foot in adolescence–one minute giving my mother-in-law great amusement by doing to us exactly what my wife did to her, the next minute giving our elderly neighbor a card for Mother’s Day, because they know her daughter passed away several years ago and they don’t want her to be sad. Wise beyond their years, yet young enough to be totally confident: Our daughter, wise enough to see a reference to “ex-gays” and declare that a person could no more be “ex-gay” than “ex-brown-eyed” because “you can’t change how you are born” and our son, who at the age of seven marched with PFLAG in our LGBT Pride parade, carrying a sign that was taller than he was, because “The sign was too heavy for the for the “grandma ladies to carry”.

This then is our “non-traditional” family. I would not have us any other way.