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A stay home parent has her day–every week

20 Dec

I get one day a week where my partner, Elroi, manages the kids so I can write. I should rephrase that. I don’t get a day; I take a day. I have a part-time editing job that I do remotely Monday-Friday mornings, and I mind the children during the week while my partner brings home most of the Fakin’ Bacon with a full-time college professorship.

When our second child was born, Elroi completed a doctorate degree and was hired to teach at a college in  another state while I closed my business and planned our move all in the span of a month. Oh, and I became a stay home parent. After we settled into our new city, I struggled in my new role. I knew full-time parenthood to a baby and a toddler wouldn’t be easy but I didn’t expect it to be grueling, which it was, a lot.  All I wanted was a little time off to write or read, or you know, breathe without someone needing something from me. Eventually I realized that alone time wasn’t just going to happen to me. I had to make it happen. So I did. Last spring, I compared calendars with Elroi and we figured out one day each week when El can handle the kids while I do whatever I want.

I use my “mommy days” as we call them (which is weird. We should really call them non-mommy days, or something else entirely.) to write for this blog and to work on other writerly projects.  This fall, our boys, three and 19 months, also started going to preschool three half-days a week. These shorter chunks of me-time  usually go toward smaller tasks like paying bills, showering, returning emails, or obsessive editing of things I’ve already written. Of course, sometimes I lose all self-control and spend those few hours mincing around the Interwebs, or puttering through the house, blasting NPR.

Whatever I do, it’s incredible how revived I feel afterwards, how much more patient I am with my kids, and how much more fulfilled I feel about what I’m doing in life in general. Before I had this time to myself, not only was I not getting anywhere career-wise, but I really struggled with the stress, isolation and monotony of full-time, stay-at-home mothering.

Let me be clear: I adore my children. The love I feel for them is beyond anything I could have imagined, pre-babies. They’re funny and smart and full of personality. I get happy chills every single time one of them grabs my hand without me prompting or tackles me with a hug.

But they’re also mercurial beings who squabble and bite and throw tantrums and need me to manage their bodily functions. My oldest figured out how to let himself out of the house recently, and my youngest is a serial faceplanter. When my kids are awake and I’m in sole charge of their care, I’m in an unblinking, disaster-avoidance mode.

There are relatively calm moments when no one is near a water source or wielding a hitherto benign object–perhaps a rubber snake, a book, or a bouncy ball–that tiny hands can turn into a weapon. I relax a little when one forgets to take off his bike helmet after a neighborhood ride and plays in its head-injury-averting goodness for a while instead.

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Sometimes I’ll stumble on a scene so sublime–like my older son reading to the cat–that the weight of the previous wearisome hours lifts away, as if carried off by cartoon bluebirds. But mostly, about 75 percent of the time (down from 80 percent a year ago), when I’m alone with my children, I’m on Red (exhausting) Alert.

I know every full-time, stay-home parent does not experience this vocation the same way I do, that some have to use all of their spare time to work another job, and that many don’t have the luxury of a partner who could or would give them a whole day off. We’re very lucky that our jobs are both flexible and our income (barely) supports this set up. Elroi wasn’t exactly thrilled about my idea at first, though E recognized why I needed the time away and why it was the right thing to do in our quest for an egalitarian relationship.

I also felt tentative about taking time for myself for the same reason that many women hesitate to ask for what they need. But when I realized what I was doing, I became more determined to make my me-time dreams come true. And when they did, well, it turned out that my scheduled days off benefit all of us. Elroi gets more dedicated, quality time with the kids and better understands how much I do, and I’m an all around healthier person because of my non-parental pursuits and my mental alertness break. Plus, I use a lot of my time alone to work on building an income stream from my writing–which our family needs, and I very much want to provide.

All of that said, some of my favorite moments of the week come as my me-time shifts end. When I pick up my boys from preschool, I walk down a long carpeted hall, through pools of fluorescent light, to get to them. The chatter and squeals of children echo down the cement block walls to me. It always feels surreal, even nearly four years into parenthood, that I’m a mom there to pick up my two sweet-cheeked boys.

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I see my oldest son sitting against the wall, giggling with the classmate beside him. It’s so strange but wonderful to witness him having a social life separate from me. He sees me, jumps up, and runs to me, usually dropping a small trail of clothing items and art projects behind him. He hugs my leg and I stoop a bit to squeeze him with one arm as I turn to look into my younger son’s classroom. The scene replays, only clumsier. My youngest spots me, grins, comes stumbling, arms outstretched. I scoop him up over the half-door between us for a blissful baby hug before turning again to follow my oldest who is already on his way down the long hall and out the door to one of his favorite parts of preschool–the old, low-limbed magnolia tree.

There, with my youngest on my hip, I watch as my oldest climbs up, up , up, taking my heart and my anxiety level with him.

Continue reading →

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In Which We Are Lifted Up by the We Do Campaign

13 May

On May 10, my partner and I and our two sons, along with eight other couples and families, and a large crowd of supporters, walked solemnly through the streets of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to the Forsyth County government building which houses the Register of Deeds to apply for marriage licenses. We did it knowing that our applications would be denied–to protest unjust laws, to show plainly who is hurt when discriminatory laws are passed, and to call for full federal equality for LGBT people.

All photos are taken from the Campaign for Southern Equality’s FB page.

Campaign for Southern Equality organized this action as part of their We Do Campaign. Their ethical basis calls for “resisting persecuting systems by expressing the authentic self; and approaching those who oppose your rights with empathy.” In line with their empathetic philosophy, the campaign took great care to communicate their plans to local law enforcement and the folks at the Deeds office in the weeks leading up to the action. Four police officers on bicycles met us where we assembled and accompanied us on our walk, a development that delighted our three-year-old. “Look, Mom, there’s a POLICE OFFICER! There’s another ONE! And another ONE!” Between the police presence, the mystery fruit falling on a section of sidewalk behind Krankies Coffee, his first experience walking across train tracks, and the lollipop I plied him with once we got to the Deeds office, he was loving his first protest.

My partner and I had both worried about encountering counter-protesters, and how that might affect our children. CSE’s Director Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara and Campaign Manager Lindsey Simerly instructed all of us not to engage with them if they appeared but instead to focus our energy on supporting each other. I was confident that we could do this because straight women in wedding dresses, parents, siblings, and friends of applicants and clergy members in rainbow arm bands made up the majority of our  procession. We couples were the minority whom they were there to support. However, as we rounded a bend halfway through our walk, we saw a sizable crowd of people moving toward us on the same sidewalk. I held my breath as I squinted, searching for signs of their intentions. When I spotted “Legalize Gay” t-shirts among them, my partner and I both exhaled and grinned at each other as these additional supporters approached, some of whom turned out to be my partner’s students from Salem College.

All photos are taken from the Campaign for Southern Equality’s FB page.

The decision to involve our kids in this action was deliberate. They’re not in daycare and we don’t have regular babysitters yet so we would have declined to participate if we felt that they wouldn’t be safe throughout the action. But the We Do Campaign is predicated on peaceful, compassionate, loving resistance. Building our family as a same-sex couple in the South is itself a daily walk of peaceful, compassionate, loving resistance, and the main reason that we desire marriage equality is so that we can access the legal rights, responsibilities, and safeguards for our children that come with civil marriage. So heading off to the Deeds office that day was a natural detour for us on our way to the playground and beyond.

All photos are taken from the Campaign for Southern Equality’s FB page.

When we arrived outside the government building, we saw people staring down at us from the glass-walled floors above. Worried that some of them were not happy to see us and might signal that at any moment, I looked back to the warm faces around us as we circled for an interfaith prayer led by a minister in a rainbow arm band. “May love be our ethic. May love be our way,” he said, as our one-year-old began to fuss in his stroller and I fished in the basket underneath for his toy, sweating, and heart thumping in my chest. After the prayer, we and the other applicants headed into the building.

Inside, all was quiet. Our supporters remained outside watching through the glass while we rode up an escalator. On the second floor, our smaller group congregated outside of the Deeds office, separated by more glass from the counter where we would take our stand. Sober-looking government employees sat behind that counter. They were expecting us and knew that our demonstration was to be peaceful and kind. Still, I’m sure they were as nervous as us. Behind them, multiple photographers hovered, cameras obscuring their faces. We knew media might be present but we didn’t expect cameras to be aiming out at us from behind the counter, as well as stationed on all sides.

All photos are taken from the Campaign for Southern Equality’s FB page.

When I was younger, I liked to say that I didn’t need a piece of paper from the state to validate my relationship. Indeed, my relationship still doesn’t need anything beyond my partner’s and my commitment to be valid. But now that we’re older and especially because we have children, we do need all of the rights and protections that civil marriage offers to families. Opponents argue that we need only visit a lawyer to obtain these rights and protections. Well, we’ve visited a lawyer several times, and spent thousands of dollars doing it, something that many same-sex couples cannot afford, and while we achieved some protection by doing so, it’s not enough. We don’t have any of the over 1,100 federal rights and protections afforded to others through civil marriage, and we’ll only truly know the strength of our legal agreements when one of us dies, when it’s too late to fix any errors or weak points in our documents.

I knew what was going to happen when we approached that counter. I knew that my hands would shake as we presented our application and identifying documents, that one or both children would squirm and want to wander off as the clerk examined them, and I knew that it would be painful when she told us she could not grant us a marriage license. All of that happened. But I was not prepared for how acutely the moment of denial would sting. Grief poured through my body as I stood there, hugging our one-year-old baby, next to my partner who held our three-year-old while he enjoyed his lollipop.

Images from our life together flashed through my mind: that first night my partner and I talked until morning outside of an Atlanta gay bar, our wedding two years later, the births of both of our children, our celebration over moving to North Carolina for my partner’s new job, and many more moments of joy and hardship since that move, including the devastating loss on Amendment One just days before.

I had asked my partner to do the talking once we approached the counter because I knew that if I opened my mouth I would cry. But that surge of grief and cascade of memories of our life together compelled me to say something. The first thing that came to mind was, “We’ve been together for seven years, and married in our hearts for five. I hope that one day we can come back here and get issued the marriage license that we deserve.” Our one-year-old staged his own little protest by crying with me, and flailing too.  I don’t remember if the clerk responded, just that she seemed kind, and sorry.

We turned and walked out into the fold of the other couples who offered hugs and affirmation. As they prepared to enter the office one at a time after us, that rainbow-banded minister walked my partner and me and our boys down the escalator and back to the larger crowd of supporters outside who clapped and cheered as we emerged. The grief that had poured through me just moments before was  replaced with a flood of hope and gratitude. We joined the group and celebrated the others who came out after us. Each time the doors opened up and a couple walked out, a powerful, resounding cry of love and compassion went up through the air in downtown Winston-Salem.

Since last week’s vote on Amendment One, I’ve been fighting hard to stay positive and strong, to not let despair over our future here debilitate me, and to resist that human tendency to be consumed with anger toward the people who voted against our family. Friends and relatives and total strangers have made the fight a lot easier with a steady flow of encouraging messages, online and off. But it was that moment when we exited the government building as a family, having sought and been denied rights and protections afforded to our fellow North Carolinians, and a joyful crowd surrounded us with love, that’s when the struggle in my heart shifted. That’s when the healing began.

The We Do Campaign rolled through Wilson, Durham, Winston-Salem, Bakersville, Marshall, and Asheville last week. Asheboro and Charlotte are next.  In each city, some protesters have opted to participate in and be arrested for  peaceful sit-ins to further draw attention to the cause. If you cannot participate in these actions, please consider donating money or other resources to help the Campaign for Southern Equality cover legal fees and organize future actions.

If nothing else, like them on Facebook, share their mission, and spread the love.   

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More media links:

In which I cry, Izzy cries, and the crowd cheers.

In which we are interviewed by the local Fox news affiliate. I admit that I was highly suspicious of this reporter, solely because she was from Fox, but she was actually very nice, and her camera man looked deep into my eyes afterwards and wished us well.

In which the local newspaper misquotes me and says I have a daughter.

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Pro-amendment campaigners harassed my family at the polls.

5 May

On May 4th, my partner and I took our two boys with us to vote early against North Carolina’s Amendment One. We expected to peacefully fulfill our civic duty before my partner headed off to work and I figured out what to do all day with a sickly-but-energetic three-year-old and his ever-more-independent baby brother.

We were not prepared at all for the drama that we encountered as we approached the early voting location. A crowd of people stood along the path we needed to walk down to enter the building. It was clear these people were campaigning from their signs and the way that they all quietly stared at us as we made our way across the parking lot. I got the sense that the crowd was lying in wait, that as soon as we were close enough to pounce upon, we would be pounced.

My partner held our three-year-old’s hand as we walked and I hugged our one-year-old who was snug against me in a front carrier. Surely, these people wouldn’t be ugly to us in front of our children. My heart raced as I scanned for friendly faces or messages. I could see signs both for and against the amendment, as well as individual candidate paraphernalia. As we moved to within speaking distance, a woman feebly called out the name of her candidate, and asked if we would vote for him. We barely had time to respond before the rest of the group erupted with their messages.

I was so overcome with the cacophony and the pounding of my own blood in my ears that I didn’t catch a lot of what was being said. I did hear “Vote for marriage!” and my partner say something back like, “This is our family. We’re here to vote to protect our family.”

Two young men were there campaigning against the amendment, one of whom wore an anti-amendment homemade sandwich board. I smiled at him and managed to say, “Thank you for being here to support us.” The other anti-amendment campaigner called out to us over the mayhem in a sing-song tone to “Vote agaaainst this prejudicial amendmennnnnt!” His silly but kind expression of support helped to briefly becalm my racing heart. I pumped my fist in the air and replied, “That’s what we’re here for!”

Inside the polling location, the atmosphere was calm and quiet. Everyone we encountered was respectful and kind. One poll worker cooed over our youngest, and tickled his feet. We didn’t have to wait at all to vote and the whole process from start to finish took fewer than five minutes.

As we walked toward the exit, we could see the crowd again through the glass doors. The anti-amendment supporters argued with the pro-amendment campaigners. I felt an intense flush of gratitude that these young guys were willing to stand out in the hot sun, unwaveringly weathering the anger of our opponents, to fight for our family’s rights and the rights of many others like us.

I hoped we’d be left alone as we walked to our cars because no amount of shouting was going to change what we’d already done. But no, we re-entered the chaos as we exited the building. Again I thanked the young men for their presence. As we passed the crowd, a woman who looked to be the same age as my mother shouted after us, “Children are already suffering! VOTE FOR!” Her voice was shrill and angry, and she clearly meant to harm us with her words.

Unfortunately, in the moment, she succeeded. Tears pricked my eyes but I held it together until we got to our cars. Still within view of the crowd and the malevolent woman, my partner and I carefully put our children in their carseats, and then hugged before before driving off separately. As I drove away, my tears spilled out. My three-year-old asked where we were going and I replied that I didn’t know yet. He asked me why I was sad. I told him that the woman who shouted at us hurt my feelings. He told me she wasn’t very nice.

I told him he was right. I knew that the woman was wrong not only in how she spoke to us but she was wrong about what she said too. Our children are not suffering. One need only spend a day with us to realize that our children are thriving, happy, and well-loved. They’re fortunate to not only have two adoring parents but also an assortment of doting grandparents, aunts, and uncles. If that woman only knew us or any family with same-sex parents personally, I believe her heart would soften, and her mind would change.

In Georgia, where my partner and I voted regularly for the last ten years, people campaigning at voting locations must stand 150 feet from the entrance of the building. So even though we’d voted in controversial elections before, we’d always parked inside the buffer zone and never had to walk through a gauntlet of electioneers. In North Carolina, the buffer zone is much smaller, set by law to be a minimum of 25 feet to a maximum of 50 feet, varying by location.

This law has got to change. Voters should never have to walk through a gauntlet to get to the polls, especially when they’re voting on deeply personal issues. I plan to always bring my children with me when I vote so that they understand from an early age that voting is an important and meaningful part of adult life. They should not have to be exposed to the uncivil, oppressive harassment we experienced on May 4th.

As I drove home, I was disappointed in myself for not responding to that woman, for letting her get away with hurting us without consequence. What kind of example was I for my children? Have I really come this far in life to lose my voice now? So I turned the car around, heart hammering away again, and decided to confront her.

As we drove back toward the polling place, my mind scrambled to think of what to say. I thought about telling her she and her ilk were the only source of suffering in my children’s lives, or that no amendment or law would stop me or people like me from continuing to build families and that our children will rise up to overturn this backwards BS if it passes anyway. I was angry. I was shaking. I admit that I wanted to wound this woman verbally as she did me.

But I realized as I circled the parking lot that nothing I could say would affect her, and shouting out the window of my car while my children sat inside would only serve to drive up my blood pressure, bewilder my children, or worse, frighten them. Besides, yelling angrily at people different from me isn’t my thing. It doesn’t feel right to me.

I realized that I hadn’t lost my voice. I used it that morning to vote and I would use it again to share this experience on my blog and over Facebook too. So, with my heart ready to quit on me from the stress of the morning, I drove off again and in the spirit of nonviolent resistance, I bought my son an organic chocolate milk and me a green smoothie at the Starbucks drive-thru and started writing this post out in my head.

Our one-year-old, not suffering. (Notice our three-year old in the background, also not suffering. Duda, on the other hand, might be suffering a little.)

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Amendment One and My Family

8 Apr

On May 8th, my neighbors, my mom and sister and brother and aunts and grandma, my postal worker, my landlord, my local firefighters, the checkout people and the manager and the baker from the grocery store, the old drunk but friendly guy who walks up and down our street all day long, other parents at the playground, drivers beside and around me at any given stoplight, and many thousands of people I will never see or meet will have the opportunity to vote on the validity of my marriage.


On that day, the people of North Carolina will go to the polls to vote for or against amending the state constitution with this sentence:  “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.” Many will stay home because they don’t feel passionately one way or another, or they’ll be too busy with their valid marriages and recognized families to weigh in.

I’m not going to write about all of the consequences, unintended or not, of the amendment passing, including those for straight people and unmarried couples and their children, because to me it should be enough that it’s wrong for voters to literally deem thousands of same-sex couples’ relationships invalid. But if you’d like to read more about all of the amendment’s other harms, visit www.protectallncfamilies.org.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about us.

This is us.

My partner and I have been together for seven years. We have two kids, and moved to North Carolina from Georgia last year after my partner finished a doctorate degree and was offered a professor position at a local college. Even though we left good friends and a comfortable-for-our-family social climate behind in Atlanta, we were so thrilled to leave the big city for beautiful North Carolina where the majority of my extended family lives. We’re now an hour and a half away by car from my mom and aunt whom our boys adore. We love being able to take a Sunday drive to see them, and do it often. Having nearer-by, reliably loving babysitters is another added perk. You can imagine our dismay then, when only a month after we moved here, the North Carolina legislature voted to put Amendment One on the spring 2012 primary ballot.

Grant Leslie shares her gadgets.

On a typical day in our lives, the baby wakes up at seven. I blearily roll out of bed to change his diaper. On my way, I turn off the hall light that was on all night in case our older son made his way from his bedroom to ours. After diaper duty, I let the dogs outside, start the coffee, and fire up my computer while the baby chases the cat faster on his hands and knees than I can move on two legs before coffee. A few minutes later, our older son bounds out of our room and wants to “WATCH VIDEOS!” or “GO TO THE MUSEUM!” or “EAT 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 WAFFLES!” I cajole him into using the potty and putting on big kid underpants. My partner washes dishes from the night before while I make breakfast. After we eat, I check Facebook and email and focus for a little while on my part-time, work-from-home gig.

Mmm, yogurt.

After I finish up, my partner and I trade off the kids so we can each get ready for the day. One of us feeds the dogs. My partner leaves for work. The kids and I meet our playgroup at a local park. After a couple of hours of my older son charging around like an angry ram, incurring and inflicting countless boo-boos, while the baby (who insists on crawling on the ground) stuffs mulch and other inedibles in his mouth and I hang him upside down and do finger sweeps trying not to panic, we go home for lunch and naps. After naps, there might be painting or coloring or playing out back. My partner arrives home from work around 5:30, except for the very long days when I’m on my own until 9:30. On the short days, I cook while the boys jump on our bed with my partner. On the very, very long ones, I cook alone while my older son watches Sesame Street, the baby raids the cabinets and stalks the cat, and I drink a well-deserved glass of wine.

Playing out back.

Bedtime is complicated. Our older son has never been an easy sleeper. We’ve come a long way from his infant days of constant night time waking but he still needs help falling asleep. Currently, after coerced teeth-brushing and pajama wrangling, my partner or I read aloud to him in his big kid bed, and then hold his hand while reading quietly in the dark with a tiny book light until he falls asleep, at which point we creep out of his room, holding our breath, praying he’ll stay asleep. The baby has been an easier sleeper from the start, thank goodness, but lately with new teeth coming in, he takes a lot longer to settle. At some point, they’re both asleep and my partner and I collapse on the couch to report our day’s events to one another.  Some nights we’re too tired to do anything but lose ourselves together in DVR-ed Survivor or American Idol. (Or the Bachelor which is, oddly, my partner’s favorite show.)

On the weekends, our mornings are the same except that I sometimes attempt pancakes. Later, we go “exploring for bears”, grocery-shop, my partner mows the lawn, we do laundry, we tend to our growing garden as our older son digs for worms or turns over rocks looking for bugs while the baby rips at grass and sneaks some into his mouth, and my partner and I attempt meaningful conversation over the constant din of a shouting toddler and a screeching baby. Some days and weeks are hard and long, full of tantrums and sickness and bad news. Others are soft and light and seem to dreamily zoom past.

Exploring for bears.

We’re thinking about buying a house. It’s a buyer’s market, we hear, but as we drive around pondering our options, we worry about the usual stuff: What if we get into a loan we can’t afford? What if one of us loses our job? Will the house appreciate? We also worry about not only the education quality of the local schools  but whether our boys will feel safe and comfortable in them. Will they be bullied for having same-sex parents? We wonder if prospective neighbors will be dismayed to have a same-sex couple with children move in next door. What if we buy only to find that we’re not wanted in our own cul-de-sac? As we drive around, my heart skips and swells every time a I see a “Vote  Against Amendment One” yard sign, but deflates every time I spot a “Vote For.” The good news is that the former far outnumber the latter, at least inside the city limits of Winston-Salem.


Here’s what we hope and dream for our future: we want our boys to become kind, smart, and capable people. We want my partner’s professional career to continue to develop. I want a room of my own to pursue a Writer’s life, or at least to find a way to contribute to our family income with my writing. My partner supports this dream. I’d also like a third child. My partner is a little dubious on this desire, mainly because we don’t have the money to go there right now, and might never. I want chickens too and my partner is fine with that as long as we wait until our current herd of pets have passed on. Mostly, we just want to stay healthy, stick together, grow together, and support each other until the end of our days.

No matter how hard I squint, I cannot figure out what’s so threatening about this little life of ours. I believe in compassion and accepting people different from me so I have spent a lot of mental energy puzzling over the motivations of people who would vote to invalidate our family.  I understand those who object to us mainly do so on the basis of their religious beliefs. I affirm that these people are entitled to their religious beliefs but I do not understand why my fellow citizens’ religious beliefs dictate how our government classifies my marriage and family. Why does my neighbor get a say over who is eligible to be my valid life partner? Why do other people get to vote at all on my access to the same legal rights and privileges they’re free to enjoy without a referendum?

If you’re a North Carolina voter, I want you to know that when you vote on this issue, real people and sweet families will be on the receiving end of the button you push. My family will be glued to the TV screen on May 8th, anxiously watching the voting numbers roll in. At the end of the day, or when the tipping point is reached, we will either be crushed or buoyed by your choice. Choosing to not vote is as good as voting for the amendment.

And if you vote for the amendment, you’re not stopping North Carolina from legalizing gay marriage as the pro-amendment side would have you believe. Gay marriage is already illegal here.  No, a vote for this amendment is merely a public shaming of people like us. It’s a vote for heterosexual superiority. It’s a pep rally for the privileged against the already oppressed. It also has specific legal and healthcare-related consequences. The amendment bans all civil unions or domestic partnership recognition. We’re lucky that I receive healthcare benefits through my partner’s employer. We have to pay income tax on those benefits because we’re not–get this–legally married. But it’s unlikely that we’d lose them given my partner’s private employer’s equality-friendly track record. Many other fellow North Carolinians will not be so lucky, especially those receiving domestic partner benefits from municipalities like Carrboro. (For more information on the specific consequences of Amendment One for same-sex couples and others, please visit: www.protectallncfamilies.org.)

Playing at my partner's campus.

We’re also lucky that my partner was able to legally adopt both of our kids before we moved here. Those adoptions are binding across state lines but second parent adoption cannot be obtained by residents of North Carolina. For same-sex couples in North Carolina who have children where only one parent is the legal parent, this amendment could result in children being removed from a parent they’ve loved from birth if the only legal parent dies. It could mean employers refusing to extend benefits to children of non-legal parents. It could also absolve a non-legal parent from any support responsibility if a couple with children separates. This is not an exhaustive list. I implore you to visit www.protectallncfamilies.org for that.

If Amendment One passes, and I fear it will, for us there will be that initial gut punch, then tears, and then a burning rage at all of those people in our community who voted for it. This rage will slowly simmer down to a low boil on the back burner of our busy lives. I know this because we moved from Georgia where a similar amendment passed in 2004. Three years later, we stood before family and friends and had a beautiful wedding anyway. Georgia’s amendment and the federal Defense of Marriage Act restricted us from many rights and privileges enjoyed by straight married couples but no amendment or law could or will stop us from staying committed to each other and our little family.

Wedding toasts. Photo by Our Labor of Love.

Whether or not the people of my state judge our marriage to be invalid or unworthy of being recognized on May 8th,  on May 9th, we will wake up around seven. I’ll probably be tired and grumpy from nursing a teething baby through the night but I’ll make the coffee and get breakfast going anyway. Four days later, my partner and I will celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary. We might get to go on a date if my mom and aunt can drive over to babysit. That same month, our boys will turn three and one. The baby will likely be walking by then, and suddenly having two independently ambulatory kids will bring a host of new, more pressing problems to worry about.

Look out, world.

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From which this all flows.

7 Mar

Eight years ago, I was 24 and tattered, in the almost-end of a  three year noxious, helter-skelter relationship with a woman eleven years older than me. Too many months of her reckless chaos—of her drug binges and jobs lost and arrests and suicide threats and promises that I was her only, greatest, last hope for a happy life, and truest, deepest love always followed with accusations that I was really her very worst, sworn enemy, to blame for every one of her failings—broke me. My teenage anorexia came screaming back. Or maybe I went screaming back to it. It’s hard to say. Months of nothing but protein shakes and broccoli and hundreds, maybe thousands of miles of mill treaded, and I hyperventilated my way into a local eating disorder outpatient treatment program.  My therapist there listened compassionately to me detail the past and the present nightmare of my relationship, week after week after week.

One day, just before the hour was up, she said something like, “You know, you can come back here next week, and every week after that for the next six months and tell me the same things about how miserable you are with her, and what exasperating new thing she’s done now. Or you could go home and do something to change your life. You could come here next week with a new story to tell about yourself and your future.”

What she said was simple, and obvious, and my mind was completely blown.

I desperately wanted to tell a new story.

So, I embraced her challenge. I went home and I ended the relationship.

Portrait by my toddler.

And just like that, I released myself from the crazy-making cycle of manipulation and emotional abuse. I gave my girlfriend’s chaos back to her. I had my own mess to clean up of course and I could finally really do that once I stopped chasing her tornado. Thank goodness for all of that because, a few months later, I started dating the person I would marry, with whom I would create a family and the kind of calm(-ish), nourishing life that I had wanted all along. Of course it wasn’t easy, not the breakup nor the building and maintaining something new and healthy with someone else—those struggles could fill two books—but the lesson I learned was that I’m not responsible for anyone’s actions but my own. I have no control over the way people in my life behave, but I have total control over how I react and what I accept, and whether or not people are in my life at all.

The stretch of road I was driving when “embrace and release” bubbled up to the surface in my ceaselessly roiling mind back then was one that I had driven almost every day of my adult life in Atlanta, which also meant that every triumph and heartache and the messes in between had each been mulled to a pulp up and down it, sometimes many times over. “Embrace and release.” Each word seemed important on its own but also as part of two halves of a whole mantra. Applied to the imbroglio of my life, these words gave me a sense of order. They seemed to be a prescription or a raw sketch of what I had to do to get the life I wanted. I’m not a religious person but I do believe in the power of revelation and meditation. “Embrace and release” became my own little silent, powerful prayer to get me through and vault me out of that tumultuous period and others that have followed.

Portrait by my toddler.

To embrace is to first make a decision to open up to someone or something. Next, there’s the physical or emotional taking in of that someone or something. Then, the letting go. Without the letting go, an embrace turns toxic. It becomes a death grip or a codependency or a disorder.  But letting go isn’t easy, or it isn’t for me anyway. I tend to hang on to people, painful memories, negative feelings, and coping mechanisms long after they have ceased working for me or added to my life in any way. I need to remind myself to release. (Embrace aaaaaand release…. Ahem. I said, RELEASE!) Lately, I’ve gotten really good at choosing the right, healthy things and people to embrace. I still need a lot more work on the releasing part, hence the drop of the “and” in my blog title. Embrace release. Open up, let people in, let go. Again and again.

After years of yearning, I’m throwing open my arms and embracing my dream of being a writer. Every time I hit “post,” I’ve had to take deep yogic breaths and release the fear of failure that has kept me silent for so long. (Not that I don’t continue to hover over my posts, obsessively and tediously adding and deleting words and commas and whole paragraphs.) The support I’ve already received for my meager efforts here from family, friends, other writers, and perfect strangers has been overwhelming. It turns out that opening up and sharing honest, sometimes hard, old stories can lead to connections with people that actually feel really amazing, connections that can lead to all kinds of wonderful, new stories to tell.

Thank you all so much. My mind is once again completely, happily blown.

Portrait by my toddler.

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Secrets of a (Gay) Marriage

29 Feb

Photo by Our Labor of Love

I was in the first grade the first time I heard about divorce. My friend Heather’s parents were headed for it. Frowning, my mother explained what that meant. I remember hearing with wonder about how Heather’s parents would live in separate houses and she would go back and forth between them. My own parents were much more unhappy than Heather’s parents had ever seemed to me. Oh how I wished my parents would divorce!

Now I’m married (illegal as it may be) with kids. We have none of the fighting and philandering that defined my parent’s marriage but we’ve had our problems. Three months after our first baby was born, we came within inches of divorce. I recently shared this information with a friend who is struggling in his marriage, and he was stunned. Up to that moment, we had represented “shining beacons of trouble-free couplehood” to him. (His actual words.) Just hearing about how close we came to ending it all, and that we made it back from the abyss, made a big difference in his perspective on his own relationship.

In our culture, most weddings are stressful but joyous events where friends and relations gather to kick-off the marriage of two hopeful people. When all the cake is eaten and the last drunk, sweaty guest is pulled from the dance floor, the happy couple is wished well and sent forth. Alone. They might be given some vague instructions like “never go to bed angry” or “marriage takes work” but mostly well-wishers only smile and hug them and say “Good luck!” (while making mental predictions about how long this will last). Our wedding, gay as it may have been, was no different. For some people, this works out fine. They’ve either had good marriage role models or they’re magical creatures who’ve managed to intuit and enact healthy relationship models in the face of an omnipresent parade of nightmarish examples.

For others, things fall apart when they hit the first or second or fifth major bump in the relationship road. My partner and I had some issues from the beginning, mostly communication-related, that caused a poisonous build-up of resentment and slow erosion of trust over a five year time span. I’m an emotional, talk-it-to-death kind of person, given to blubbering. My partner is far more reserved, stoic nearly, given to holding it all in. You can imagine how well this worked for us. After bumbling through a difficult and expensive journey of trying to conceive, we were thrilled to welcome our first son. My partner was mired in a PhD program though and I had my own business that required me to work seven days a week. We were cranky, bewildered parent ships passing in the lonesome, desolate night for months.

That’s really not even the half of it but I’m not one to publish the particulars of our marriage meltdown on the internet. Suffice it to say that:

Things

fell

apart.

For me, the situation was made worse by this new, brilliant kind of love that I felt for our son. Whereas my love for my partner was entangled in and half-choked by our issues and past wrongs, my love for my son seemed to course visibly in the electric air between us, pure and robust and incomparable. Sure, he kept me awake night after night and repeatedly threw up into my hair, but my heart pounded, my brain shut up, and birds burst into song whenever I gazed at him. Which was a lot like how I felt when I first met my partner. Which made me wonder if it shouldn’t still be like that with my partner. And if it should be but wasn’t like that, then maybe we weren’t “meant for each other,” and I wasn’t about to do what my parents did by wasting my life and raising my kids in a doomed, miserable marriage!

No, thank you.

Unfortunately, we had that “shining beacons of trouble-free couplehood” reputation among a lot of our friends, partly because we were one of the first to get married in our social group, but also because we had both had public, terrifically bad relationships prior to meeting each other, so this time around we were careful to keep our (comparatively minor) conflicts private. Thus, we didn’t feel like we could reach out much to our friends because it was embarrassing to acknowledge that our mythic status was undeserved. Besides, involving friends has its own complications. They don’t always forgive and forget when you need them to. They feel uncomfortable or unwilling or uninterested in viewing your dirty laundry. They may have ulterior motives, even subconscious ones, for the advice that they give.

We felt additional pressure to appear publicly unbreakable because of our sexuality. We knew that people in our own families, as well as many more strangers, would be pleased to see us, a queer couple with a young baby, break up, as though our personal dissolution would somehow lend credence to their belief that same-sex relationships are unnatural and unhealthy and bad for children. It made me sick to give those people that satisfaction, even though I knew they’d be wrong about all of it. (When straight people divorce or co-exist miserably for decades, that has no bearing at all on the validity of heterosexuality or its effects on children.) I couldn’t quite articulate why I wanted so badly to have a wedding when we did, in a place where we’d receive no legal benefit.  It felt meaningful and natural and vaguely necessary for us, but also like a jubilant and glittery F-you to the anti-gay people in our lives, which I won’t lie, I enjoyed. But it took testing the bonds of marriage to understand what I must have had premonitory knowledge of somehow: the only thing holding us together in some of our darkest hours seemed to be a distant, misty memory of that magical day, and the awful specter of erasing it.

Photo by Our Labor of Love

Still, the recollection of our earnest promises couldn’t fix us. We needed professional help for that.

So we spent almost two years in couples counseling. Our insurance didn’t cover it but we were lucky enough to find someone who let us pay a sliding-scale fee of $35 per session. This was a significant strain on our finances because we needed a lot of work at first. Financial strain was one of our major stressors too, but we viewed therapy as a necessary investment in our future together, without which that future might cease to exist altogether. In other words, if our house had a big hole in the roof, we would have somehow found the money to fix it, rather than abandon the house outright or hope everything would be fine eventually, while rain poured on our bed and our belongings putrefied and returned to nature.

Therapy saved us.

We learned how to talk to one another about difficult subjects, how to repair damage when it’s done, and how to identify and then ask one another for what we need. (Why weren’t these topics covered in Home Economics? They seem far more useful than proper hand dishwashing technique.) We’re more content and healthier now than on our wedding day. The bliss of new motherhood for me gave way to something very similar to the seasoned, mature love I continue to have for my partner. I’m so glad we did not divorce. Still, we’re not trouble-free. If we’re shining beacons of anything, I want it to be as an example for our married or long-time partnered friends to seek help when they need it, before they reach that woeful, proverbial point of no return.

Of course, not everyone should stay together. There are a lot of circumstances that cannot be repaired and actions that can not be absolved. My parents finally divorced when I was seventeen after fooling most of their friends and relatives into thinking that they were shining beacons of trouble-free coupledom for nearly three decades, with happy-looking family photos and enthusiastic year-end wrap up letters sent at Christmastime. My mother’s life, at least, dramatically improved as a result of her divorce. But if you’ve “grown apart” or worry that you’ve “fallen out of love,” and you’re looking out at your comrades in wedding rings thinking that they’re so much more together, more in love, and happier than you, remember that you might just not know the half of it. One or two of them may even be able to refer you to their secret, heroic therapists.

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There’s More Than One Answer to These Questions or How I Learned to Stop Being Angry at my Sister for Being Anti-gay

25 Feb

It was dark and humid, and I was 18, driving my battered Honda civic through the orange glow of Atlanta streetlamps while my older sister explained how glorious it felt to be in love and about to be married from the passenger seat. I hadn’t planned to come out to her. Not then. But her face was all lit up as she talked. Her smile was wide and irrepressible just like mine lately, and I swelled with hope. I was in love too. Maybe we could forget our differences for a moment to frolic together in the hazy, crazy fog of love. I said, “But what if you felt all of those things, everything you’ve just described, but you felt it for someone of the same sex?” My sister’s smile fell. She turned to me, and in the ghostly halogen light of a grocery store parking lot, she said, “Is that how you feel?” I nodded. She replied, gravely, “The world has fallen and Satan has turned you.”

I don’t remember much after that except that we returned to my apartment and I retreated to the screened porch while she used my computer inside, probably to tell her fiancé that her maid of honor just revealed herself to be a godforsaken lesbian. To her credit, she didn’t revoke my wedding duties, not even after I (still in that crazy fog of love) let my girlfriend shave my head a few weeks before I was due to precede her down the aisle.

It’s been fourteen years since that summer. We’ve mostly lived in different states which made avoiding each other easy. Occasionally on family trips or during holiday visits, something would be said and one of us would blow. Ugly, angry tears would follow. Someone would storm out.  When I was 25, I fell in love again. This was it. My own wedding was finally on the horizon. It was time to deal with the situation between my sister and me once and for all. I wrote what I thought of as a dispassionate letter. In it, I told her she was judgmental and had a narrow worldview. I offered studies and statistics to refute all the things she thought she knew about gay people. I explained that she could either support me and stay in my life, or get out. Rereading it now, I see that’s it’s a bit of a manifesto. It couldn’t be more passionate. It’s a written caterwaul.

When she read the letter, she called me and left three tearful, distraught messages on my voicemail. I felt heartsick listening to them. But I also believed I was right and had done what I had to do. In a follow-up conversation, I asked her if she’d rather me be unhappy in a relationship with a man or happy with my partner. She chose the former. Two years later, I chose the latter and married my partner before family and friends. My sister did not attend. She sent flowers though.

Nothing really changed as a result of that letter. Instead, my sister and I gradually resumed our awkward, eggshell interactions at family functions. My partner and I started on our own little family. During my pregnancy, my sister shared with me over the phone that she had struggled with how she would explain our baby to her four children without “degrading” us. I was so angry and hurt by her word choice that I barely responded. She decided she would tell them that I was a single mother and that my partner was just a friend who would help me raise the child. From the tone of her voice, I could tell she thought this was a perfect solution. She wouldn’t have to tell her children we were abominations. Wasn’t that great? But, inadvertently, she had degraded us by pretending our relationship, our love, our life, and the family that we were building together weren’t just wrong; they didn’t even exist.

When I gave birth, my mother, aunt, brother, and sister drove to Atlanta to meet the baby. We all went to brunch for his first outing. Halfway through our meal, my son bobbed at my shoulder, mouth wide open like a baby bird. I panicked and asked aloud if I should retreat to the car to nurse him. My sister encouraged me to nurse him right there at the table. In the tenderest moment we have ever shared, she helped adjust a blanket over my chest while my son mewled underneath and I, awash in the strange out-of-body experience of first time public breastfeeding, avoided eye contact and fumbled with bra clips. That my conservative, fundamentalist Christian sister was the one shepherding me through (what shouldn’t be but is) a socially controversial act added a level of emotional vertigo that still brings tears to my eyes.

I wish I could say that moment begot more tender moments between us but parallel motherhood didn’t bring me and my sister together the way that I’m sure our mother prayed it would. Last summer, my partner got a job 90 miles from the North Carolina town where the rest of my family resides. We moved just a few months after I gave birth to another son. Being within a two hour drive of my mother and aunt, with whom I’m very close, has vastly improved our lives as parents of young children. Just having extra pairs of reliably loving hands nearby (relative to how far away we were before) has eased my mind on my toughest days as a stay home mom. We regularly strap the kids in the car for last minute trips to Granna’s house. But our increased and unpredictable presence has been challenging, albeit quietly so, for my sister. She and her family tend to avoid gatherings where the four of us will be in attendance, or they arrive and leave quickly. Their absence has been both a relief and an ache.

As my children get older, I feel the pressure mounting to find some kind of final resolution, some way to protect them from this madness. My oldest son frequently asks when he’ll see his cousins, whom he adores. I need answers for him. I need a plan for birthday parties and future holidays. I need to set some boundaries. And then, all at once, I got it. Perhaps it was a precise accumulation of nights passed soothing feverish babies, plus a handful of accidental toddler head butts to the nose, and another unsuccessful dodge of the changing table pee fountain for good measure and voila! Somewhere in my head a heretofore locked door swung open and understanding flooded in.

I need to let go.

Nearly all of my life I felt inferior to my sister. Growing up, she was the pretty, skinny, blond, straight-A, easy athlete, dream daughter. I was the freckled, thick-bodied, brown-haired, weird and not athletic, parent’s vexation. For a couple of glorious years in my mid-teens, my sister and I were not so opposite. I was finally thin (by way of an eating disorder) and felt more attractive (thank you, Covergirl Guide to Makeup with Christie Brinkley VHS). I found power in my other differences, and stopped seeing my sister as perfection incarnate. She was in college by then and I was in the middle of high school. We wrote cheerful letters back and forth, and sent care packages. When I was 16, we road-tripped together to see one of her favorite bands, the Indigo Girls, at an amphitheatre in Virginia. I remember being entranced as I watched Amy Ray aglow under the stage lights, stomping, and bawling into the microphone. Her aggressive guitar strums thrummed through my chest. She was so brazen, so tough, and so different than any woman I’d ever seen. I couldn’t stop thinking, “She is so…so amazing… so cool!” What I meant of course was that she was so hot. My sister and I danced and screamed and laughed together. Afterward, we blasted 1200 Curfews on the car stereo, high on the concert experience and our shared affinity, as we sailed out of the the parking lot and onto the highway home.

Two years later, we sat in that same car, not laughing. My sister was clearly no longer an Indigo Girls fan. (She never explained why or how she so quickly went from the kind of Christian who enjoys lesbian singer/songwriter music to the fundamental variety who condemns it, but I suspect it was her husband-to-be’s influence.) With my sister’s response that night, our original dynamic returned. I didn’t agree with what she said, but over the next few years, it seemed the evidence was on her side. She got married and had kids while I drank and wrote tortured poetry through three hellishly unhealthy relationships. When I saw the “God Hates Fags” protesters at Atlanta Pride each year, I imagined my sister and her family among them, glowering at me. But like my teenage transformation, once I found my partner and had my first child (and dealt with my unhealthy coping mechanisms), I began to feel the power balance returning. My sister the Christian no longer had the lock on marriage and family. I was doing both differently, queerly, and loving it. I could finally see that we are once again sharing an affinity. My sister and I dearly love our respective little families, and we are both fierce mama bears determined to protect our children and to bring them up safely and conscientiously in this chaotic time.

My little family’s existence and the way the rest of our family treats it as a non-issue threaten a huge foundational part of what my sister is trying to instill in her children. Which is just like how her beliefs and palpable avoidance of us threaten a huge foundational part of the kind of childhood I’m trying to build for my children. We’re both worrying about our kids being tainted or harmed simply by their exposure to the other’s values. Yet my sister and I were once kids who grew up in the same mildly religious house in the same manure-scented country town where we smashed the same berries on our faces for play makeup and endured the same wacky, revolving cast of visiting uncles and cousins and grandparents, and yes, once upon a time we even danced at the same Indigo Girls concert, but we veered off on wildly different tracks, and came to be the people we are today through complex constellations of experience, personality, influence by others, and chance. That’s a little terrifying to contemplate. But it’s also liberating, and it’s helping me release my white-knuckle grip on this whole situation.

My sister has expressed remorse for the way she reacted the night I came out to her so many moons ago. Given the chance for a do over, I think she’d form a more compassionate response now. She still believes that any romantic relationship outside of man/woman Christian marriage has dire spiritual consequences but she also believes that even my children, byproducts of an alleged unholy union, are part of her God’s plan. I don’t get how that works, nor do I understand why my sister feels so strongly about homosexuality in particular.  I also don’t know how I’ll explain all of this one day to my kids, should they ever ask. Lucky for all of us, I have many more moons to think before my boys start mulling such deep questions. I really want to be able to answer them honestly, without degrading her.

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