Greetings, Babble folk

Greetings folk coming to visit from Babble, and thank you Babble editors for naming this blog one of this year’s Top 50 Dad Blogs!

I  consider many of the other bloggers on that list friends and colleagues, and am honored to be recognized alongside them. Together I think this generation of writer dads, blogging their parenthood daily, is blowing the lid off the whole “fatherhood” thing. That’s going to be nothing but good news for both my kids, daughter and son.

If you’re new to this blog, here’s a primer: I’ve been writing it since 2006; my kids call me “Baba,” which is a diminutive or straight-up name for “father” in a ton of languages. I identify most comfortably as a parent (the elbow room!), less so as a mom, more so as a dad, socially at least. Legally speaking, only small bits and pieces of me are recognized a’tall. My partner gave birth to both our kids (a son now 5, a daughter now 8), and our donor chum is the ex-husband of one of my oldest friends. Our kids know him as family and, along with his own kids, know that he helped us be able to have them. He is their “special uncle,” his kids are their “special cousins.” Socially, it makes complete sense to us all.

A whistle-stop tour of useful posts, lesbian fatherhood-wise:

• Who’s the Daddy?  An early piece exploring the taxonometric differences between “dad,” “donor,” and  me.
• Subordination  A lament as the “also ran” parent. Thinking a dad or two might identify.
• Things I have in common with dads   Sometimes a list can be helpful.
• Baba, a name I call myself   How I came up with my moniker.

The Best of LD page lays out what I think have been the better examples of what I’ve been up to here, year by year; the Anima animus and Nomenclature & taxonomy categories collect posts ruminating on gender and roles.

Both online and in everyday life, I’m working, along with a ton of other folks, to stretch our understanding of what and who women and men can be, relative to our kids. The path I’ve walked, as a parent, is much more like those dads walk, insofar as I didn’t bear our kids (my partner did), nor do I suffer from feeling like I have to live up to (or down) any of the guff, the turf wars, the marketing crapola, the historical expectations, the you name it that attaches to the towering Godzilla “mother.”

Most LGBT folks simply can’t fall into proscribed gender roles in relationships without giving them some thought, and the gendered division of labor and emotional roles in parenting are no different. Thoughtful LGBT parents, side-by-side with profeminist straight men and women interested in “equally shared parenting,” can edge us a little further toward understanding the range of ways that masculinity and femininity figure into parenting.

My own hope is that all the qualities we think attach to “masculine” and “feminine”–as well as men’s femininity and women’s masculinity–get more and more space to be discovered and expressed.  I want this for me, and I want this for other women who identify a lot like I do. I want this for my men friends who are redefining parenthood and fatherhood, and for my women friends who are raising kids with hands-on parenting men. But most of all, I want this most for my each of my kids, daughter and son alike.