Baba familias

parenthood, Baba-style

Worth it

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Avenger poster framed, with kid pics pasted over it.
The poster above my desk at work: a Lesbian Avenger broadside from back in the day provides backdrop for kids’ drawing & pics. Need I say more?

This past weekend I had the opportunity, as I often do, to spread the good gospel about queer parenthood.  My job affords me the opportunity to do this on the clock (policy and communications person at an LGBTQ family support and advocacy non-profit: boom!).  But I’d do it for free any day of the week.

This past Saturday, however, I might have swung and missed on the coda of it all. So I am happy that the occasion of the 14th Annual (!) #LGBTQFamiliesDay affords me an opportunity–and the impetus; thank you Dana–to right this wrong.  Even if it means I have to break the stride I had going here as a so-slow-it’s-for-all-intents-and-purposes-suspended-in-amber blog. 

Two colleagues and I were at Filoli Historic House and Gardens for their first week of LGBTQ Pride programming–and, I might add, the first week of Pride programming at any site on the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Tag, Williamsburg, you’re next!

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What do do?

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dawn over cityscape
Dawn over Oakland, CA, January 2017.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s a new day, and way too many of us still feel super disoriented.  After “What the heck?!” or other synonyms for “heck,” we many of us are turning to “What to do?” Or just plain doing, in multiple directions, every day, with a nagging sense of disorientation. Herewith I offer the best answer I can muster under the circumstances, a post in two parts originally intended to be a two-parter, macro and micro. However I, like so many of us, rapidly was just felled by it all, and mustered a publishable Part 1: Macro.  A patient draft, Part 2: Micro, still festers in the drafts bin, biding time along with so many other imperfect and unfinished ditties.

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25 Things I Learned at Creating Change in Philly

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With thanks to comrade West Philly Mama.

2,316 words | 10 min. read

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hanks the combo of parent + full-time employed person + I’m no longer crazy enough to go without sleep, my processing speed is like that of one of those old putty-colored, 128k Macintoshes, circa the mid-1980s. So! The notes below are what I finally compiled from last weekend, i.e. the post-inaugural one, as opposed from this past weekend, i.e. the most recent one following our first week of the bull-in-the-china-shop  attempted coup d’état (and if you need any convincing on that score, read Yonatan Zunger in Medium, thank you Kelly Wickham Hurst).

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Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a grumpy night

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Thanks to the fortuitous location of the annual National LGBTQ Task Force Creating Change conference, I find myself in Philadelphia, birthplace of American democracy, on the day this struggling, noble experiment will take arguably its greatest body blow.

(Last night in a call to my kids I said that today democracy would be developing the biggest zit in its 240-year US history*, and my Know It All Brother-In-Law later quipped that such a statement was an insult to zits world-wide.)

Read moreFasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a grumpy night