I ran into a friend today — Whitney, who with her homie Heather, is behind the Rookie Mom empire.  (Their blog & handbook are indispensable for not just rookie parents in search of ideas, but recidivist shut-ins like myself.) We were both grabbing some coffee before grocery shopping, our more portable (& not in preschool) youngins in tow.  She hepped me to the upcoming Bay Area pre-BlogHer conference meet-ups; we talked about our kids, our parenthoods, our bloggery.
I lamented that I hadn’t written a lot about the sweet details of family life lately. In fact, it feels like as soon as the contarned same-sex marriage battle heated up here, about a year ago, the sweet details of family life have become obscured by the fog of war. Â I’m lucky if I wave it out of the way often enough to get a good look at anything else, sometimes.Â
“I’d like to photograph the flowers outside the house,”  I told Whitney, about the direction this blog has taken, “but it feels like the house is on fire.”
As the narrator says so often in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, So it goes.
The best thing about any challenge is that it forges the potential for connection with others who have suffered the same or worse. Â Given the fact that neither of our kids is currently battling a terminal illness, and we are essentially comfortable, with a sense of adequate safety around us, I’m well aware of the voluminous challenges we could be facing and are not.
I’m not sure what I expected it would be like, to have kids in a family whose structure is in the cultural and social crosshairs, state recognition maybe years away, federal even further. I think I expected some parts of it to be hard. I don’t think I anticipated that the battle to make things right, around my kids, would so impinge upon my ability to appreciate time with them. After twenty years of being out in the world as a sexual/gender minority, I still had no idea what it would feel like to try to protect my own children from homophobia. Let’s just say, it has struck a helluva lot deeper than the homophobia directed at me. Â Â Robin McGeHee I am not, but when she speaks so movingly of wanting just to be able to ride her bike with her kids, or enjoy her community, I do hear her.
[I haven’t been able to log a proper entry for yesterday’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day,  but please do take a look at all the wonderful things people have written.]
Lovely, lovely photo.
I experience a similar problem going through this very contentious “divorce” process (when my ex and I were together, marriage wasn’t yet legal in MA). I’m busting my ass so hard trying to make sure my kids are protected and having a sane life, that the little details can get ignored in the battle.
Recently, my Beau and I made a promise to each other to pull back and pay more attention to daily wonders, even though the lawyer-filled mania continues apace. That means she went off for an hour before dinner yesterday to practice soccer with Owen and I sat with Seth to make Spanish study sheets so he can rock his Spanish final. We probably would have done those things, anyway, but this time we really paid attention instead of feeling like we were taking energy away from the main event. The boys are the main event. Period.
Hang in there and good luck!
ttf
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Now that I have Robin McGeHee’s face & speech at the MITM4E rally burned on the inside of my retinas, I feel like there’s yet one more (or rather at least three more) reasons we can’t get this whole civil equality battle done fast enough. She deserves to have the peace & quiet with her family, and I get the sneaking suspicion she’s not going to stop ’til the civil equality, to paraphrase ML King, “rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.â€
Meanwhile, it seems like even if a great many of us are multitasking parenthood and winning civil recognition for our families, our kids are doing juuuuust fine. At Mombian today: “Kids of Lesbians Less Likely to Have Mental Illness.” Very nice to hear that.