Think Pink
Katy's mother, Donna Koonce, wanted a baby girl.
The year was 1962. Donna and her husband, a small-town Texas football coach called Big Phil, had two strapping young sons. But Donna yearned for a soul mate, a confidante, a fashion plate. In a word, she wanted a daughter.
This was before the advent of routine prenatal ultrasounds, but Donna was undaunted by the lack of reliable information about the secondary sex characteristics of her fetus. A hardy optimist with a penchant for bullet bras and blond wiglets, Donna put her faith in the science of positive thinking. She taped a picture of a baby girl to the Frigidaire. She tied pink ribbons to lampshades and chairs, so she could see them as she dusted the end tables and vacuumed the dining room.
In order to enlist the help of the community, Donna threw a "Think Pink" shower. Her friends served pink cake and adorned Donna with a pink corsage. They brought pink presents. Hand-smocked dresses with tiny petticoats were laid in the dresser in the nursery, which was (of course) pink.
When the due date finally arrived, Donna had a bad case of pneumonia. She arrived in the delivery room heavily drugged. The family doctor, an unassuming sadist named Grundy Cooper, knew how badly Donna wanted a girl. "Oh, he looks real good, Donna," Grundy teased from behind the modesty curtain that bisected her upper and lower halves.
"Shut up, Grundy, she is not a boy," Donna growled.
After the final push, Donna shouted "Let me see her genitals! Let me see her genitals!" Grundy took his sweet time, holding the baby upside down, delivering the breath-inducing spank, and finally placing the tiny body on the scale where Donna could see. When the fluorescent lights reflected off the shiny steel cradle of the scale, Donna's drug and hormone-addled eyes noted two things: a vagina and a hazy white halo.
"She's an angel, Phillip," she said to her husband, who had been hastily summoned from the waiting room. "She's an angel."
***
Nine years later, my own parents were speeding toward the hospital in their purple Volkswagen beetle. Mom was breathing "hee, hee, hoo" as the contractions came closer together. She'd planned a natural birth, without drugs or modesty curtains; she very nearly had a natural birth without a hospital. By the time the car pulled up at the hospital, she was too far along to sit in a wheelchair. She had to waddle into the delivery room on her own. Nurses rushed my father into a gown so that he could fulfill his duties as labor coach.
Although my parents' milieu of Lamaze exercises and German cars may seem worlds away from Donna Koonce's East Texas, my mom and dad had at least one thing in common with Donna: a determination to shape their child's gender identity and expression. But while Katy's mother dreamed of birthing a tiny beauty queen, my parents aspired to raise the next Bella Abzug.
Instead of frilly dresses, my parents gave me a pink plaster plaque that said "Girls Can Do Anything!" They bade me goodnight with the affirmation, "You can grow up to be the First Woman President." And they bought me the Sunshine Family dolls as antidote to the bimboesque influence of Barbie.
Sunshine Family lived in a cardboard craft store, complete with spinning wheel and pottery kiln. Sunshine Mama (whose name was "Steffie") wore her baby in a pack on her back. She had a calico maxi-dress, and her bare feet were realistically flat. But Steffie's half-inch waist and candy floss hair were pure Mattel fantasy. In my imaginative play, her husband, Steve, worked the cash register, while she pricked her finger on the spinning wheel. Despite Steffie's hippie accessories, the horizon of her liberation was circumscribed by marriage and motherhood. My parents' good intentions were no match for the contradictions of pop culture.
Thus, although Free to Be You and Me was in heavy rotation on my plastic ladybug record player, I grew up convinced that marriage or the convent were my only possible destinies. By the time I was eight, I had already concluded that I was too brunette and substantial to inspire romance. I regret to say that I did not indulge in proto-lesbian fantasies about convent life, but rather viewed the nun's habit as a badge of failure, a kind of scarlet V for unwanted virginity. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series consoled me with the thought that a strong work ethic might make me worthy to be some man's wife. My solitary twin bed was the site of vivid fantasies about scrubbing his shirts on a tin washboard.
***
On one of our first dates, my future wife brought a tape of her family's home movies from the 60s and a joint. I think Katy guessed that my feminist consciousness was going to need expanding if we were to swap childhood stories in the way that new lovers do. She'd dated enough Women's Studies majors to guess that "the cultural construction of gender" would be my mantra, the magic words that were supposed to save me from the depressing determinism of biology as destiny and the one-size-fits-all essentialism of universal sisterhood.
Savvy as she was, she could hardly have anticipated the intensity of my views. I leaned fervently, incontrovertibly toward the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. If anyone spoke to me of gender as something innate or remotely natural, I did the intellectual equivalent of covering my ears and shouting "La,la, la, I can't hear you!"
In my heart, I believed that acknowledging a biological component to gender was a slippery slope that would land me right back in front of that washboard, scrubbing collars.
Now, in reel after reel, I discovered Katy at 2, 3, and 4--already miraculously masculine, already chaffing like a football player in frilly dresses, already looking dejected when she unwrapped yet another doll from underneath the Christmas tree.
Suddenly, the whole notion of nature vs. nurture ceased to make sense. Her pintsize Texan masculinity was culturally pitch-perfect--and a total violation of the prevailing gender system. It was incongruent with anatomy--and undeniably physical, emanating from every muscle and gesture.
The highlight of the home movie footage was the year when Katy appeared next to the Christmas tree in full Davy Crockett costume. Freed from the confines of fussy dresses, she sprawled on the floor next to a large, oblong package. A second later, the wrapping paper was off, and she was jumping up and down, triumphantly brandishing a new BB gun.
Having grown up with the peaceful Sunshine Family, I was hardly used to celebrating childhood gun ownership...and yet, I found myself strangely un-horrified. There was something undeniably liberating in her joy, something that forced me to reach beyond my usual knee-jerk reactions. Maybe it was the pot. Or maybe I was falling in love.
"Dude," I said, "this is blowing my mind."
The year was 1962. Donna and her husband, a small-town Texas football coach called Big Phil, had two strapping young sons. But Donna yearned for a soul mate, a confidante, a fashion plate. In a word, she wanted a daughter.
This was before the advent of routine prenatal ultrasounds, but Donna was undaunted by the lack of reliable information about the secondary sex characteristics of her fetus. A hardy optimist with a penchant for bullet bras and blond wiglets, Donna put her faith in the science of positive thinking. She taped a picture of a baby girl to the Frigidaire. She tied pink ribbons to lampshades and chairs, so she could see them as she dusted the end tables and vacuumed the dining room.
In order to enlist the help of the community, Donna threw a "Think Pink" shower. Her friends served pink cake and adorned Donna with a pink corsage. They brought pink presents. Hand-smocked dresses with tiny petticoats were laid in the dresser in the nursery, which was (of course) pink.
When the due date finally arrived, Donna had a bad case of pneumonia. She arrived in the delivery room heavily drugged. The family doctor, an unassuming sadist named Grundy Cooper, knew how badly Donna wanted a girl. "Oh, he looks real good, Donna," Grundy teased from behind the modesty curtain that bisected her upper and lower halves.
"Shut up, Grundy, she is not a boy," Donna growled.
After the final push, Donna shouted "Let me see her genitals! Let me see her genitals!" Grundy took his sweet time, holding the baby upside down, delivering the breath-inducing spank, and finally placing the tiny body on the scale where Donna could see. When the fluorescent lights reflected off the shiny steel cradle of the scale, Donna's drug and hormone-addled eyes noted two things: a vagina and a hazy white halo.
"She's an angel, Phillip," she said to her husband, who had been hastily summoned from the waiting room. "She's an angel."
***
Nine years later, my own parents were speeding toward the hospital in their purple Volkswagen beetle. Mom was breathing "hee, hee, hoo" as the contractions came closer together. She'd planned a natural birth, without drugs or modesty curtains; she very nearly had a natural birth without a hospital. By the time the car pulled up at the hospital, she was too far along to sit in a wheelchair. She had to waddle into the delivery room on her own. Nurses rushed my father into a gown so that he could fulfill his duties as labor coach.
Although my parents' milieu of Lamaze exercises and German cars may seem worlds away from Donna Koonce's East Texas, my mom and dad had at least one thing in common with Donna: a determination to shape their child's gender identity and expression. But while Katy's mother dreamed of birthing a tiny beauty queen, my parents aspired to raise the next Bella Abzug.
Instead of frilly dresses, my parents gave me a pink plaster plaque that said "Girls Can Do Anything!" They bade me goodnight with the affirmation, "You can grow up to be the First Woman President." And they bought me the Sunshine Family dolls as antidote to the bimboesque influence of Barbie.
Sunshine Family lived in a cardboard craft store, complete with spinning wheel and pottery kiln. Sunshine Mama (whose name was "Steffie") wore her baby in a pack on her back. She had a calico maxi-dress, and her bare feet were realistically flat. But Steffie's half-inch waist and candy floss hair were pure Mattel fantasy. In my imaginative play, her husband, Steve, worked the cash register, while she pricked her finger on the spinning wheel. Despite Steffie's hippie accessories, the horizon of her liberation was circumscribed by marriage and motherhood. My parents' good intentions were no match for the contradictions of pop culture.
Thus, although Free to Be You and Me was in heavy rotation on my plastic ladybug record player, I grew up convinced that marriage or the convent were my only possible destinies. By the time I was eight, I had already concluded that I was too brunette and substantial to inspire romance. I regret to say that I did not indulge in proto-lesbian fantasies about convent life, but rather viewed the nun's habit as a badge of failure, a kind of scarlet V for unwanted virginity. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series consoled me with the thought that a strong work ethic might make me worthy to be some man's wife. My solitary twin bed was the site of vivid fantasies about scrubbing his shirts on a tin washboard.
***
On one of our first dates, my future wife brought a tape of her family's home movies from the 60s and a joint. I think Katy guessed that my feminist consciousness was going to need expanding if we were to swap childhood stories in the way that new lovers do. She'd dated enough Women's Studies majors to guess that "the cultural construction of gender" would be my mantra, the magic words that were supposed to save me from the depressing determinism of biology as destiny and the one-size-fits-all essentialism of universal sisterhood.
Savvy as she was, she could hardly have anticipated the intensity of my views. I leaned fervently, incontrovertibly toward the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. If anyone spoke to me of gender as something innate or remotely natural, I did the intellectual equivalent of covering my ears and shouting "La,la, la, I can't hear you!"
In my heart, I believed that acknowledging a biological component to gender was a slippery slope that would land me right back in front of that washboard, scrubbing collars.
Now, in reel after reel, I discovered Katy at 2, 3, and 4--already miraculously masculine, already chaffing like a football player in frilly dresses, already looking dejected when she unwrapped yet another doll from underneath the Christmas tree.
Suddenly, the whole notion of nature vs. nurture ceased to make sense. Her pintsize Texan masculinity was culturally pitch-perfect--and a total violation of the prevailing gender system. It was incongruent with anatomy--and undeniably physical, emanating from every muscle and gesture.
The highlight of the home movie footage was the year when Katy appeared next to the Christmas tree in full Davy Crockett costume. Freed from the confines of fussy dresses, she sprawled on the floor next to a large, oblong package. A second later, the wrapping paper was off, and she was jumping up and down, triumphantly brandishing a new BB gun.
Having grown up with the peaceful Sunshine Family, I was hardly used to celebrating childhood gun ownership...and yet, I found myself strangely un-horrified. There was something undeniably liberating in her joy, something that forced me to reach beyond my usual knee-jerk reactions. Maybe it was the pot. Or maybe I was falling in love.
"Dude," I said, "this is blowing my mind."
Passing (Or Not) at the Pool
It feels like 95 degrees in the shade. We're standing in line at the municipal pool. The mom in front of us has three kids and a tattoo on her cleavage that says "Ivan" or "Juan," I can't tell which. My hand moves reflexively toward the "Katy" on my own arm. Before I can solve the mystery of Ivan/Juan, the woman moves on. Now it's our turn to pay the pasty teen behind the concrete counter.
Once inside, we walk past dilapidated metal bleachers and spread our towels under a giant oak tree. By this time in the summer, we know where to sit to avoid fire ants. This is our Sunday afternoon family ritual: I swim laps while Katy takes our six-year-old son, Waylon, to the recreational side of the pool to play with his neon orange Nerf football.
I always feel like I'm getting away with something. Why should I get to exercise in peace while my spouse does solo parenting duty? But, despite my qualms, I'm mostly superfluous to their fun. Childhood nearsightedness has left me with a permanent fear of flying objects. Katy, on the other hand, is the child of a football coach. She's serious about passing on her athletic heritage. Waylon can already send the football soaring in a slow, perfect spiral. Each week she expands his vocabulary to include moves like "stiff arm" and "stripping the ball."
I try to keep an eye on them from the lap lane. They're usually easy to spot, because Katy makes dramatic, splashy dives for the ball and then stages elaborate fumbles so that Waylon, his head bobbing a few inches above the water line, can intercept. Before each pass, she feints in seven different directions, her face a cartoon of shifting intentions.
Lots of parents use the pool as cheap day care. A fun, involved parent in the water is like an underwater kid magnet. It's not unusual to look up and see Katy running for the ball with two or three random kids clinging to her broad back, trying in vain to tackle her.
On this particular Sunday, I was just getting used to the rhythm of my breath in the water when a flash in the shallow end caught my eye. I had to stop, mid-lap, and remove my goggles for a better look.
All her life, before and after chest surgery, Katy has worn a t-shirt in the pool. In the water, the shirt gets loose and heavy, which makes it difficult to swim. Out of the water, the shirt gets cold and clingy, which makes it difficult to relax.
Now, some four years after her surgery, Katy had decided to take off her shirt. The flash was the blinding whiteness of her heretofore unexposed skin. It created a high-contrast canvas for the tattoo across her chest, an image of Siva Shakti, the father-mother deity who represents the transcendence of dualities.
When I saw her bare chest from across the pool, I felt a surge of happiness. I hoped she was feeling comfortable, physically and emotionally.
But, of course, taking off her shirt created a whole new set of conundrums. Once she had revealed her man-chest, she was de facto male at the pool. As a genderqueer dyke, she's used to funny looks and even belligerent bathroom confrontations, but now the women's changing room felt completely off-limits. And this isn't some swanky pool with a gender-neutral "family" restroom. She started changing in the car, even on days when she still wore her shirt in the water.
Last Sunday, the t-shirt was on. A sociable four-year-old named Dylan was watching Katy and Waylon play. Katy was throwing Waylon really high in the air. He shrieked with joy on the ascent and cried "again, Mommy, again," each time he came up for air.
Before long, Dylan sidled over and asked Katy to throw her up in the air too. Katy sent her to ask her mother, who was reading in the shade. Mom gave the thumbs up, doubtless relieved that someone else was entertaining her child.
Once Dylan had been tossed in the air a few times, Waylon got jealous and wanted to play catch instead. Dylan was too tiny to handle the football, so she turned her attention to the puzzle of Katy's gender.
"You look like a boy," she said, smiling.
"Yep," Katy said, smiling back at her.
"You look like a boy because of your hair...and because you have so many tattoos."
"Yeah, I do," Katy answered, still smiling.
"Mommy, Mommy, throw it to me," Waylon shouted. Katy threw it to him.
When I swam up and Waylon started calling me "Mom" too, Dylan looked like her head was going to explode. Still, she couldn't tear herself away. She kept swimming to the side and then swimming back and asking to be tossed in the air again. I checked to see if her mother was alarmed that she had attached herself like a barnacle to a tattooed and gender ambiguous personage, but mom appeared to be completely absorbed in her book.
Finally, after several rounds of "just one more time" in the air, it was time for us to leave. We said goodbye to Dylan and told her maybe we'd see her next weekend. Katy and Waylon headed to the car to change. I went to the women's changing room to rinse my hair in the shower.
Dylan followed me in, her mother close on her heels.
"I just want to see if she's a boy or a girl!" she shouted.
My immediate thought was thank god Katy's in the car. This is the kind of scene she dreads. My next thought was what's going to happen now? I was fascinated that Katy's illegibility had rendered me illegible as well.
Dylan's mother, looking mortified, scooped her up just as she reached the showers.
"Oh, she has nail polish, she's a girl," Dylan concluded.
I had to smile that my 34A bust is apparently not the most salient aspect of my gender presentation.
Later, I would realize the extent to which privilege was shielding me from fear and shame. I sometimes feel a bit queer in the changing room, but, as a gender-conforming cis woman, I still feel a sense of unconscious entitlement.
Perhaps because I felt safe, and because the whole interaction seemed curious rather than hostile, I wasn't quite ready to be read. As Dylan's mother dragged her reluctantly away, I couldn't help troubling the waters one more time.
"Boys can wear nail polish too!" I said, in my friendliest singsong voice.
Once inside, we walk past dilapidated metal bleachers and spread our towels under a giant oak tree. By this time in the summer, we know where to sit to avoid fire ants. This is our Sunday afternoon family ritual: I swim laps while Katy takes our six-year-old son, Waylon, to the recreational side of the pool to play with his neon orange Nerf football.
I always feel like I'm getting away with something. Why should I get to exercise in peace while my spouse does solo parenting duty? But, despite my qualms, I'm mostly superfluous to their fun. Childhood nearsightedness has left me with a permanent fear of flying objects. Katy, on the other hand, is the child of a football coach. She's serious about passing on her athletic heritage. Waylon can already send the football soaring in a slow, perfect spiral. Each week she expands his vocabulary to include moves like "stiff arm" and "stripping the ball."
I try to keep an eye on them from the lap lane. They're usually easy to spot, because Katy makes dramatic, splashy dives for the ball and then stages elaborate fumbles so that Waylon, his head bobbing a few inches above the water line, can intercept. Before each pass, she feints in seven different directions, her face a cartoon of shifting intentions.
Lots of parents use the pool as cheap day care. A fun, involved parent in the water is like an underwater kid magnet. It's not unusual to look up and see Katy running for the ball with two or three random kids clinging to her broad back, trying in vain to tackle her.
On this particular Sunday, I was just getting used to the rhythm of my breath in the water when a flash in the shallow end caught my eye. I had to stop, mid-lap, and remove my goggles for a better look.
All her life, before and after chest surgery, Katy has worn a t-shirt in the pool. In the water, the shirt gets loose and heavy, which makes it difficult to swim. Out of the water, the shirt gets cold and clingy, which makes it difficult to relax.
Now, some four years after her surgery, Katy had decided to take off her shirt. The flash was the blinding whiteness of her heretofore unexposed skin. It created a high-contrast canvas for the tattoo across her chest, an image of Siva Shakti, the father-mother deity who represents the transcendence of dualities.
When I saw her bare chest from across the pool, I felt a surge of happiness. I hoped she was feeling comfortable, physically and emotionally.
But, of course, taking off her shirt created a whole new set of conundrums. Once she had revealed her man-chest, she was de facto male at the pool. As a genderqueer dyke, she's used to funny looks and even belligerent bathroom confrontations, but now the women's changing room felt completely off-limits. And this isn't some swanky pool with a gender-neutral "family" restroom. She started changing in the car, even on days when she still wore her shirt in the water.
Last Sunday, the t-shirt was on. A sociable four-year-old named Dylan was watching Katy and Waylon play. Katy was throwing Waylon really high in the air. He shrieked with joy on the ascent and cried "again, Mommy, again," each time he came up for air.
Before long, Dylan sidled over and asked Katy to throw her up in the air too. Katy sent her to ask her mother, who was reading in the shade. Mom gave the thumbs up, doubtless relieved that someone else was entertaining her child.
Once Dylan had been tossed in the air a few times, Waylon got jealous and wanted to play catch instead. Dylan was too tiny to handle the football, so she turned her attention to the puzzle of Katy's gender.
"You look like a boy," she said, smiling.
"Yep," Katy said, smiling back at her.
"You look like a boy because of your hair...and because you have so many tattoos."
"Yeah, I do," Katy answered, still smiling.
"Mommy, Mommy, throw it to me," Waylon shouted. Katy threw it to him.
When I swam up and Waylon started calling me "Mom" too, Dylan looked like her head was going to explode. Still, she couldn't tear herself away. She kept swimming to the side and then swimming back and asking to be tossed in the air again. I checked to see if her mother was alarmed that she had attached herself like a barnacle to a tattooed and gender ambiguous personage, but mom appeared to be completely absorbed in her book.
Finally, after several rounds of "just one more time" in the air, it was time for us to leave. We said goodbye to Dylan and told her maybe we'd see her next weekend. Katy and Waylon headed to the car to change. I went to the women's changing room to rinse my hair in the shower.
Dylan followed me in, her mother close on her heels.
"I just want to see if she's a boy or a girl!" she shouted.
My immediate thought was thank god Katy's in the car. This is the kind of scene she dreads. My next thought was what's going to happen now? I was fascinated that Katy's illegibility had rendered me illegible as well.
Dylan's mother, looking mortified, scooped her up just as she reached the showers.
"Oh, she has nail polish, she's a girl," Dylan concluded.
I had to smile that my 34A bust is apparently not the most salient aspect of my gender presentation.
Later, I would realize the extent to which privilege was shielding me from fear and shame. I sometimes feel a bit queer in the changing room, but, as a gender-conforming cis woman, I still feel a sense of unconscious entitlement.
Perhaps because I felt safe, and because the whole interaction seemed curious rather than hostile, I wasn't quite ready to be read. As Dylan's mother dragged her reluctantly away, I couldn't help troubling the waters one more time.
"Boys can wear nail polish too!" I said, in my friendliest singsong voice.
Keep Parenting Queer
A while back, I attended a workshop for LGBT families. At lunch, the organizers asked parents to break into small groups and talk about "things that sustain us." My group was chewing its sandwiches in awkward silence, so I decided to plunge in: for me, one of the most sanity-preserving practices has been staying connected to my queer communities.
"You do that?" asked a gay dad in his late thirties. "How do you do that?"
His incredulity got me thinking. Chosen family and subcultural networks are two of the great blessings of being queer. For many LGBT folk, our queer communities have sustained us through better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health. So why is it that, after they have kids, so many people end up missing from the potluck and the film festival, the protest and the dance floor?
Is it exhaustion? Fear? Finances? Some kind of internalized oppression that says queer spaces are not kid spaces?
I have to admit, when Katy and I decided to have a baby, some of our friends were less than excited. They thought they weren't going to see us anymore. It felt like they were mourning just when we were celebrating, which was hard to take.
In spite of my friends' skepticism, I was determined not to disappear from their lives. It took me a long time to come out, and there was no way that I was going to trade my hard-won multi-generational queer subculture for a re-run of the nuclear family with two moms at the helm. It sounded boring, and it went against everything that I wanted to teach my son about community, engagement, and survival.
We've been parenting for six years now, and even our most dubious, anti-breeder friend has had to admit that things are turning out really different than she expected. These days, I feel closer and more connected to the people who really matter to me, but it's taken intention and effort to maintain those connections. With that in mind, I offer the following tips about what has worked for us:
1. Include your queer friends in your parenting. Dykes and fags love a good softball game, right? Well, recently we've found that they love a good t-ball game too. Our son, Waylon, has chosen "aunties" and "uncles" of various genders and orientations. They show up for his games, take him on adventures, and even babysit on occasion.
2. Include your kids in queer community events. Waylon is an old hand at rallies, vigils, and protests. (As long as he gets to make and hold his own sign, he's pretty happy.) He's been to conferences like Gender Odyssey (hooray for Gender Spectrum Kids Camp). He has attended innumerable concerts, festivals, and parades. Last year, at Houston Pride, people were so excited to see a gayby that they were just handing over their beads, glow sticks, and other swag. By the end of the parade, Waylon looked like 80's-era Madonna, completely weighted down with necklaces and bracelets. (Now, I know that some of you are worrying that parts of the parade might not be appropriate for young children. It's true: one year a bunch of purple-robed gay evangelicals who were marching in the Houston parade tossed Waylon a coozie with a picture of the crucifixion and the words "He Died For You." I thought that was a bit graphic.)
3. Have your friends over after the kids are in bed. Sometimes you need grown-up time with your friends. For the past five years, an evolving group of friends has come over on Sunday nights to watch L Word. It's not because we love the show (love to hate it, maybe), but because it gives us a chance to hang out and catch up with our friends without having to pay for a babysitter. Now that L Word is finally over, we're transitioning to a Sunday night salon/potluck with a different theme every week.
4. Get a sitter. This one takes a little planning and prioritizing, but it doesn't have to cost loads of money. We regularly trade with the parents of Waylon's friends for free babysitting. Waylon likes this system, because it means that he gets to have extra play dates and even the occasional sleepover. We like it because we get to know Waylon's friends and we get to go out without draining our bank account. We also factor babysitting costs into our budget. Paying a good babysitter is expensive, but I think of it like one of those cheesy Visa ads; Babysitter: $13/hour. Staying in touch with your queer community: priceless.
To be perfectly clear, my queer communities include people who are gay, bi, and straight, people who are gender non-conforming and people who are (mostly) gender conforming. What's queer about these networks of friends and chosen family is not necessarily the identities of the individuals. It's the commitment to forging new ways of being together. It's the creativity to look beyond the nuclear family and to find new ways of caring for each other. My friends have helped helped me survive illness, career change, political depression, bio-family drama, and the ups and downs of being a parent. Nurturing those networks is a skill I hope to pass on to my son.
The tips above have been helpful for me. I hope other parents will pass on what works for them.
Postscript: To see other parents' responses, check the original post at The Bilerico Project.
"You do that?" asked a gay dad in his late thirties. "How do you do that?"
His incredulity got me thinking. Chosen family and subcultural networks are two of the great blessings of being queer. For many LGBT folk, our queer communities have sustained us through better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health. So why is it that, after they have kids, so many people end up missing from the potluck and the film festival, the protest and the dance floor?
Is it exhaustion? Fear? Finances? Some kind of internalized oppression that says queer spaces are not kid spaces?
I have to admit, when Katy and I decided to have a baby, some of our friends were less than excited. They thought they weren't going to see us anymore. It felt like they were mourning just when we were celebrating, which was hard to take.
In spite of my friends' skepticism, I was determined not to disappear from their lives. It took me a long time to come out, and there was no way that I was going to trade my hard-won multi-generational queer subculture for a re-run of the nuclear family with two moms at the helm. It sounded boring, and it went against everything that I wanted to teach my son about community, engagement, and survival.
We've been parenting for six years now, and even our most dubious, anti-breeder friend has had to admit that things are turning out really different than she expected. These days, I feel closer and more connected to the people who really matter to me, but it's taken intention and effort to maintain those connections. With that in mind, I offer the following tips about what has worked for us:
1. Include your queer friends in your parenting. Dykes and fags love a good softball game, right? Well, recently we've found that they love a good t-ball game too. Our son, Waylon, has chosen "aunties" and "uncles" of various genders and orientations. They show up for his games, take him on adventures, and even babysit on occasion.
2. Include your kids in queer community events. Waylon is an old hand at rallies, vigils, and protests. (As long as he gets to make and hold his own sign, he's pretty happy.) He's been to conferences like Gender Odyssey (hooray for Gender Spectrum Kids Camp). He has attended innumerable concerts, festivals, and parades. Last year, at Houston Pride, people were so excited to see a gayby that they were just handing over their beads, glow sticks, and other swag. By the end of the parade, Waylon looked like 80's-era Madonna, completely weighted down with necklaces and bracelets. (Now, I know that some of you are worrying that parts of the parade might not be appropriate for young children. It's true: one year a bunch of purple-robed gay evangelicals who were marching in the Houston parade tossed Waylon a coozie with a picture of the crucifixion and the words "He Died For You." I thought that was a bit graphic.)
3. Have your friends over after the kids are in bed. Sometimes you need grown-up time with your friends. For the past five years, an evolving group of friends has come over on Sunday nights to watch L Word. It's not because we love the show (love to hate it, maybe), but because it gives us a chance to hang out and catch up with our friends without having to pay for a babysitter. Now that L Word is finally over, we're transitioning to a Sunday night salon/potluck with a different theme every week.
4. Get a sitter. This one takes a little planning and prioritizing, but it doesn't have to cost loads of money. We regularly trade with the parents of Waylon's friends for free babysitting. Waylon likes this system, because it means that he gets to have extra play dates and even the occasional sleepover. We like it because we get to know Waylon's friends and we get to go out without draining our bank account. We also factor babysitting costs into our budget. Paying a good babysitter is expensive, but I think of it like one of those cheesy Visa ads; Babysitter: $13/hour. Staying in touch with your queer community: priceless.
To be perfectly clear, my queer communities include people who are gay, bi, and straight, people who are gender non-conforming and people who are (mostly) gender conforming. What's queer about these networks of friends and chosen family is not necessarily the identities of the individuals. It's the commitment to forging new ways of being together. It's the creativity to look beyond the nuclear family and to find new ways of caring for each other. My friends have helped helped me survive illness, career change, political depression, bio-family drama, and the ups and downs of being a parent. Nurturing those networks is a skill I hope to pass on to my son.
The tips above have been helpful for me. I hope other parents will pass on what works for them.
Postscript: To see other parents' responses, check the original post at The Bilerico Project.
Genderqueer Mommy
Lately, when I've been blogging about my wife, Katy Koonce, it's been about her role as dynamic front man for the "silicone cock rock" band Butch County. 
Paige: Although people on the street tend to call you "sir," around our house, you're known as "mommy." Can you talk about your identity and how motherhood figures in?
Koonce: My identity is trans-genderqueer-butch-dyke-mommy. "Mommy" is the word I used as a kid to describe the person who could take all the pain away or support me when I needed it. To say "I want my mommy" meant "I want a kind of omnipotent force to swoop down and take care of this problem." So, when our son Waylon was born, I chose "Mommy" as a name because I loved the idea of being that force for someone in this crazy world of ours. When I found myself really attached to the idea of being someone's mom, I realized that my gender identity was--at least for this time--landing squarely in the middle and I really love it that way. I love to hear the word "mommy" and to be called "mom" sometimes. But that has no real bearing as to how I feel in my body. For I am often not at home there.
Paige: You had top surgery when our son was 18 months old. It strikes me that there are still so few resources for transgender parents, and especially few stories about parents who transform their bodies without the goal of full transition. Can you talk about what it was like to get chest surgery as a mom?
Koonce: Well, getting chest surgery was way more anti-climactic than I anticipated. Waylon did not look up and say, "Are you my mommy?" There were no marked changes in the amount of "sirs" I receive. My psychotherapy clients did not decompensate without the breasts; they seem to have stayed latched on to the metaphorical breast. The biggest change has been the absence of my private bathroom struggle with the mirror. Tight t-shirts are now my friends and my happiness with my physical presentation has by far made me a happier mommy.
Paige: What is it like being genderqueer in places like elementary school hallways or the t-ball field?
Koonce: Now we are getting into space that feels challenging. My extroverted, jovial personality, which earned me the title of Class Clown in high school, has served me well in uncomfortable situations. Before I was ever conscious of being an outsider, I was defending with humor. So, the elementary school and t-ball field are challenges that I meet in a counter-phobic way, by diving in to what seems least comfortable. I am the field trip chaperone for Waylon's class. I help coach his t-ball team. Waylon loves this. He seems to actually (so far anyway) love how I stand out from the crowd. Lately, he relishes in literally trying to expose my "soft under-belly," by pulling up my t-shirt in public, to see if I feel shame. He wants to know I stand strong in who I am even though I have shortcomings like everyone else. He needs reassurance that I/he can tolerate our self-perceived flaws and celebrate our differences. This is why, in a queer, gender diverse family, a trip to the ball park is really always a social experiment. My usual defense is to act like I belong and laugh a lot. The song in my head is from Dreamgirls, "You're gonna love me!" All in all I suppose it is challenging but pretty awesome.
Paige: But I think you're doing more than seeking acceptance. By being present and involved, you're actually transforming people's assumptions and expanding their gender vocabulary. Just to cite one funny example, I know Waylon's friends like to create genderqueer characters when they play video games now.
We've done a fair amount of LG family events and activism. What is it like to participate in those events where the paradigm is "same gender" parents?
Koonce: I really think I am blessed to feel comfortable as someone who transgresses or transcends gender. Other people might be freaking on me but they can't sway my feeling of belonging in these spaces.
Paige: Since Mother's Day was originally an activist holiday, will you say a little bit about your recent activism?
Koonce: Lately I am have been working with staff at local Austin inpatient mental health facilities to improve access and quality of care for trans people. And I just testified to the Texas legislature about adding gender identity and expression to the hate crimes act. Last but not least, I still use the women's restroom. Word!
Paige: Thanks for sharing from your personal experience. Happy Mother's Day, baby!
How Motherhood Earned Me a Free Sex Toy
When I was pregnant with my son, I heard a comedienne talking about the aftereffects of childbirth:
"I'm peeing all the time. I'm actually peeing right now," she said.
That will never happen to me, I told myself.
I was in denial--the kind of deep, pre-delivery denial that ensures the continuation of the species. This maternal defense mechanism sustained several calming delusions. I believed that my partner and I would take a pleasant walk during the early stages of labor. I believed that I would not beg for drugs when the contractions started. And I believed that my intimate geography would not be forever reconfigured into Frankenpuss.
Once my son was born, however, I had plenty of other things on my mind. The war in Iraq had just started. There was an anti-marriage amendment on the ballot in my state. Also, there was this new little person in my life, and his every coo and sigh was mesmerizing.
So it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I had a pee problem.
My first moment of reckoning was at a Le Tigre show. It was summer, and I was surrounded by a sea of sweaty dykes. When the band launched into my favorite song, I instinctively started pogoing up and down.
Much to my dismay, each percussive bounce produced a corresponding trickle. I became increasingly less enthusiastic, finally slowing my movement to a cautious, tight-legged swaying.
I wish I could think of peeing on myself as a punk rock statement, like the time Donita Sparks of L7 threw a used tampon from the stage--but, in truth, I don't have the rock-n-roll chops to pull it off.
My doctor prescribed Kegel exercises. I was dubious. My laundry pile was taller than my son. I was struggling to get to the gym twice a week to tone the muscles that actually show. How was I going to find time in my daily routine for three sets of Kegels?
A year later, at my annual exam, she asked, "How's the incontinence?"
Ouch. The "I" word. I knew it was time to get serious.
My doctor referred me to a specialist, who asked, "How many pads are you using per day?"
"You mean for my period?"
"No, for your incontinence." I guess a lot of women wait even longer than I did before they seek medical attention.
Although I wasn't at the point of needing pads, the specialist recommended something called a Colpexin Sphere to help me practice my Kegels with greater precision and effectiveness.
At first I was skeptical--the name sounded so clinical. Then I saw it. A hard plastic sphere with a little string attached. If you're familiar with the Babeland catalog, you might visually cross-reference "the Silver Bullet" (minus vibration) or the "Luna Beads."
Right there on the exam table, I had an epiphany. Strengthening my pubococcygeal muscle was not another chore to be added to my lengthy to-do list. Strengthening my pubococcygeal muscle was going to be... fun.
There are surely less convoluted and less medical routes to this realization. Babeland has a whole page devoted to Kegels and a whole selection of toys that make the Colpexin Sphere look downright plain.
But I got mine for free.
I don't have medical benefits at my job, so I have a no-frills private insurance plan. When the doctor said she'd submit the claim for the Colpexin Sphere, I thought "There's no way they're gonna pay for that."
But they did.
After a few months with my Colpexin Sphere, I no longer think of Kegel exercises as just another chore. In fact, it's remarkably easy to find the time to do them.
Now my problem is making it through all three sets...
Thomas Beatie Bedtime Story
The other night, my 5-year-old son, Waylon, was sitting on the toilet and reading Us Weekly. (Normally I would not confess that our home harbors such toxic tabloid sludge--much less that we expose our child to it--but since it is pivotal to my tale, I will just clarify that it is all my spouse's fault.)
"Mom!" Waylon shouted from the bathroom. "Come here! You gotta see this cute baby."
I marched into the bathroom, prepared to deliver my "stop stalling and get in bed" speech. Then my gaze met the baby in question. It was Thomas Beatie's daughter, Susan. She really is a cute baby.
Amazed that Waylon, a child with a trans parent, had somehow managed to pick out the only trans family in the whole magazine, I sat down on the side of the tub. "Look at her cheeks," Waylon cooed.
"Waylon," I said, "did you know that the daddy in that family was born with a woman's body and he had to change his body to match how he felt inside?"* My son studied the picture, raising the page to within a centimeter from his nose. I assured him that Thomas Beattie looks just like any other man, but Waylon persisted in his examination.
"Hmmm. Let me see....I think he looks--I think he looks French," pronounced Waylon, who is also the child of Francophile parents.
To say that transgender families are underrepresented in children's literature would be the understatement of the century. At our house, we create lots of stories with characters that mirror the diversity of the people whom Waylon knows and loves. But sometimes he still complains that the families in books are so different than ours. So I have to admit that--for one brief, bedtime moment--I was actually grateful for Us Weekly and the unexpected opportunity to show Waylon a family with a story like his own.
Queer Time: Girls in the Nose Reunion
Last week I attended a 60th birthday celebration for my friend Joanna Labow, percussionist and one of several singer/songwriters for the groundbreaking lesbian rock band Girls in the Nose, which reunited for the occasion. 
In her thought-provoking book In a Queer Time and Place, Judith Halberstam theorizes queerness as an alternative way of using time--one that departs from bourgeois heterosexual itineraries of reproduction and inheritance. One of the great attractions of queerness, Halberstam argues, is that it opens up "imaginative life schedules," which do not dictate that we abandon our youthful subcultures, take our place in the generational transmission of goods and morals, or devote ourselves to practices of longevity.
Check out this video: Come and Die
Girls in the Nose was founded in 1987 by Turner (featured in the video above) and Gretchen Phillips (of that other germinal lesbian rock band, 2 Nice Girls). The band describes their sound as "the B-52s meet Iggy Pop and sing about lesbian feminism," but this ain't the Iggy of "Lust for Life"--more like Funhouse, if you know what I mean: sexier, edgier. At their height they rocked Michigyn, Lesbapalooza, and the 1993 March on Washington, to name just a few venues.
To speak in terms of autobiographical time, Girls in the Nose's heyday was a little before my own (delayed) queer coming of age. The reunion show was the first chance I'd ever had to see them play live, and I felt so grateful for the creativity and indomitable spirit of dyke culture. Knowing these women has opened a treasure chest of "imaginative life schedules" that my bio family could never have bequeathed to me.
There was talk of a Girls in the Nose reunion tour at Joanna's party. In the expansive logic of queer time, there's no mandatory retirement age for lesbian rockers. Check them out on MySpace and let them know how much the world needs this version of what 60 looks and sounds like.
How Homophobia Hurts Everyone
Yesterday I spent the morning perched on a tiny plastic chair, observing my son Waylon's yoga class. Although I have studied yoga for years, kindergarten yoga was most enlightening. For instance, I learned that the lotus position can also be called "criss-cross applesauce." And kindergarten apparently presents an exception to the ancient injunction that yoga must be performed barefoot. (I suspect that convincing a group of five-year-olds to put their shoes back on would challenge the inner calm of even the most accomplished yogi.)
But the most fascinating lesson occurred when the class paired up for "buddy time."
The girls ran to their girlfriends with wide eyes and huge smiles. They hugged and swayed and held hands while they waited for the teacher to call out the next pose.
And the boys?
Same exact story. From the looks of joy on their faces, buddy time might have been Christmas morning. I watched as Waylon and his friend Charlie wrapped their arms around each other's waists. Between poses, Charlie rested his head on Waylon's shoulder.
I checked the other pairs of boys and found that they, too, were beaming and clinging to one another. Their happiness was infectious, but it also made my heart hurt. I took a deep breath and tried to stay in the moment, but I found myself already anticipating a future when this easy intimacy between boys would disappear.
Waylon is my first child, so I can't say exactly when it might happen--second grade? fourth? middle school?--but I fear that, far too soon, the majority of these boys will have internalized the implicit and explicit rules of our culture's version of masculinity. No more lounging with their head on their buddy's shoulder, no more looking deeply and directly into his eyes.
Watching their little bodies lean against each other in supported bridge pose, I grieved for all that they might lose: the sense of trust and openness, the comfort of a friend's touch. Girls have their own real and harrowing challenges in our culture, but I don't think they are expected to eschew intimacy with same-sex friends as a rite of passage.
As adults, we sometimes defend against the awfulness of this loss by telling ourselves that these gender differences are inevitable, natural, even biological. But I defy any observer of kindergarten yoga to tell me that boys do not have the capacity to develop close, nurturing friendships with other boys. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to acknowledge that it is cultural forces--namely sexism and heterosexism--that threaten to impoverish the emotional lives of our sons.
At the end of class, the instructor asked the kids if they remembered the intention that they had set at the beginning. "To be happy!" they called in chaotic harmony.
As I walked out the door, I wanted to collar every parent in that class and plead with them:
Don't teach your sons that boys can only touch when they are fighting or playing sports.
Don't teach them to hold themselves stiffly and keep their eyes to themselves.
Don't teach them by teasing and example.
Don't do it for their future friends and lovers.
Don't do it because you want them to be happy and because it diminishes the sources of comfort and support that are available to them in this hard and crazy world.
Teaching Kindergarteners About Gay Marriage (Nov 08)
I've been holding my tongue for a while now.
My son, Waylon, started kindergarten this past August. Until two weeks ago, his entire public school career had overlapped with the campaign against Prop 8. Although we live all the way across the country in Texas, we heard the rumors about focus groups in California: lesbian and gay families with children weren't testing well and were asked to keep a lower profile while more palatable spokespeople made the case for our marriages.
Now that we know how well that strategy worked, I can finally talk about my latest obsession: insinuating gay marriage into the kindergarten curriculum.
As adults, I think we tend to repress the trauma of the first day of kindergarten. When we dropped him off in the cafeteria for the first time, Waylon looked like a deer in the headlights. One of his classmates was crying so hard that his tears literally made a puddle on the polished institutional tile.
Watching our baby navigate a new place, new people, and a new routine was heart wrenching for us too. For the first week, my wife, Katy, and I stood in the hallway every morning until his class trooped by in their single file line. We blew last-minute kisses, wiped away our own tears, and exchanged hugs of solidarity with the other parents.
With all of these emotions swirling around, we had little time to think about how conspicuous we were--nor could we spare much thought for how to instruct Waylon and his classmates in the virtues of gay marriage.
Luckily, Waylon's first assignment was to create a "me" collage to introduce himself to the school. A demanding and opinionated artist, Waylon insisted on including a printout of his first ultrasound, when he was just a tiny bean in the womb, as well as a staged photo of himself standing next to the Obama sign in our front yard. He selected sandbox snapshots of his three best buddies, a formal portrait of our dogs, and two family photos: one from our annual outing to the Nutcracker and one from our vacation trip to the Space Needle.
Once this unapologetic propaganda for alternative lifestyles was adorning the halls, we didn't have to wait long for our next point of entry. The second unit in the kindergarten curriculum was "family." I'll admit that we felt some trepidation about this topic - who wouldn't, when conservative commentators are constantly reminding us that this embattled institution is the cornerstone of all civilization? Katy checked in with Waylon's teacher, who encouraged us to supplement the classroom's collection of family books. Being a bleeding-heart social worker, Katy went a little overboard; she donated books on adoptive families, interracial families, single parent families, and penguin families. How better to spread the gay agenda of inclusiveness?
Luckily, our careers as LGBT activists and intellectual elites also give us the flexibility to volunteer in Waylon's classroom. Katy's favorite gig is field trip helper, and mine is guest reader. Just the other day, I brought in notorious gay author Maurice Sendak's Chicken Soup with Rice. You should have seen all those five year olds, sitting in a circle and calling out the refrain of this unabashed paean to the love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name: a boy's passion for chicken soup.
But, to paraphrase George W. Bush, where's the accountability? How do I know that Waylon and his classmates are really learning about gay marriage? The answer is clearer than a standardized test. One fall evening, about six weeks into the semester, we were at the PTA's backyard concert. Katy and I were setting up our lawn chairs next to the soccer field when we were suddenly surrounded by a roving band of five-year-olds. "Waylon's Mom! Waylon's Mom!" they called indiscriminately. Their questions betrayed an unwholesome interest in our marriage:
"Where's Waylon?"
"Will you tie my shoe?"
"Can I have a dollar for a glow bracelet?"
"Where's Waylon?"
Finally, one extremely promising pupil clarified the homosexual subtext of the entire exchange. "I know Waylon has two moms," she said, matter-of-factly. "Because I have seen you both!"
Gay Marriage and the Slippery Slope
A few days ago, I was hanging out in the backyard with my son, Waylon, and his friend, Mike. I was watering the garden; they were molding playdoh into fantastic, multi-colored monsters.
"Mama," Waylon asked. "Do you like stripes?" Since my sartorial preference for striped shirts is a well-established fact, I didn't think twice before answering "uh-huh."
"Do you love stripes?"
"Yes."
"Then why don't you marry stripes!?" asked Waylon, in the triumphant voice of a little kid who has just mastered a classic playground rejoinder."Silly, I'm already married to Mommy."
"Well, why don't you divorce Mommy and marry stripes?" he teased.
"I don't want to marry stripes," I said good-naturedly.
At this point, Mike decided to enter the conversation.
"Why not? You're already gay," he reasoned.
Although the tone of our talk was light and absurd, I have to confess that I was a bit surprised at how easily a six-year-old was able to summon the classic slippery slope argument.
Luckily, my combined experience as a rhetoric teacher and an activist has prepared me to answer this particular logical fallacy.
"Just because I'm gay, that doesn't mean I think stripes would make a good partner," I said as I turned off the garden hose. "Stripes can't make dinner. They can't rub my feet. They can't even talk."
Buddhas, Brains, and Babies: Meditations on Parenting and Anger
Prologue
A few weeks ago, I went to a conference called “Buddhas and Brains” to hear Khen Rinpoche, the Abbott of the Tashi Lunpho monastery-in-exile. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Tashi Lunpho monastery plays an important role in the education of young Dalai Lamas, and Rinpoche concluded his talk with several charming stories about teaching mindfulness and compassion to children through gentle questioning. I left the conference on a cloud, full of new ideas about how mindfulness could inform my activism and my parenting. Katy and I held hands as we walked to the car. “Hon,” I said, putting my head on her shoulder, “let’s practice meditation tonight.”
Then we picked up Waylon from the babysitter.
In our absence, Waylon had secretly gained control of his Easter basket, hidden it in the laundry hamper, and consumed enough chocolate to kill a small dog.
Naively, we decided to take him out for pizza—vegetarian pizza, of course, because Rinpoche had just reminded us that even mosquitoes have the seeds of the Buddha inside them. We discussed this idea over our slices, even as chocolate and end-of-the-day fatigue were mixing inside of Waylon like a ticking time bomb.
To Waylon’s credit, he managed to hold it together through most of the meal, but he went into complete and total meltdown during dessert negotiations, which resulted in the kind of tantrum where one parent removes the child kicking and screaming from the restaurant while the other parent sheepishly settles the bill. This time it was my turn to pry Waylon’s fingers from the door of the pizza parlor and carry/drag him to the car.
When I finally got him in the car, I tried to meet his distress with compassion and attunement. “I know you’re disappointed that you couldn’t have that brownie,” I said, making what I hoped was a mirroring facial expression.
In response, Waylon unbuckled his seat belt and started trying to escape into the busy parking lot. Still breathing mindfully, still holding onto those seeds of the Buddha, I grabbed him and held him—gently but firmly—in my lap.
“Help! Help! Help!” he screamed, as though he was being abused in the backseat.
If you have ever tried to protect someone from harm only to have him react as if you are, in fact, torturing him, then perhaps you understand that this behavior did not exactly evoke compassion. In fact, at that moment I knew exactly how far from enlightenment I was, because my internal response to my son’s hysterical cries for help was something like “I’ll give you something to cry about.” Sadistic impulses flashed through me, and I could feel my jaw clenching.
This is the unconscious métier of four-year-old tantrums. They have an uncanny ability to stir up primitive, uncomfortable emotion.
“What’s going on?” Katy asked as she climbed in the car, clearly alarmed by Waylon’s shouts, which were audible across the parking lot. Together, the two of us were able to get him back in his car seat, and by the time we pulled into our driveway, we had all been able to take a few long, deep breaths…which sustained us until the next tantrum started, about three minutes after we got out of the car.
(To continue reading, scroll down or click here.)
A few weeks ago, I went to a conference called “Buddhas and Brains” to hear Khen Rinpoche, the Abbott of the Tashi Lunpho monastery-in-exile. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Tashi Lunpho monastery plays an important role in the education of young Dalai Lamas, and Rinpoche concluded his talk with several charming stories about teaching mindfulness and compassion to children through gentle questioning. I left the conference on a cloud, full of new ideas about how mindfulness could inform my activism and my parenting. Katy and I held hands as we walked to the car. “Hon,” I said, putting my head on her shoulder, “let’s practice meditation tonight.”
Then we picked up Waylon from the babysitter.
In our absence, Waylon had secretly gained control of his Easter basket, hidden it in the laundry hamper, and consumed enough chocolate to kill a small dog.
Naively, we decided to take him out for pizza—vegetarian pizza, of course, because Rinpoche had just reminded us that even mosquitoes have the seeds of the Buddha inside them. We discussed this idea over our slices, even as chocolate and end-of-the-day fatigue were mixing inside of Waylon like a ticking time bomb.
To Waylon’s credit, he managed to hold it together through most of the meal, but he went into complete and total meltdown during dessert negotiations, which resulted in the kind of tantrum where one parent removes the child kicking and screaming from the restaurant while the other parent sheepishly settles the bill. This time it was my turn to pry Waylon’s fingers from the door of the pizza parlor and carry/drag him to the car.
When I finally got him in the car, I tried to meet his distress with compassion and attunement. “I know you’re disappointed that you couldn’t have that brownie,” I said, making what I hoped was a mirroring facial expression.
In response, Waylon unbuckled his seat belt and started trying to escape into the busy parking lot. Still breathing mindfully, still holding onto those seeds of the Buddha, I grabbed him and held him—gently but firmly—in my lap.
“Help! Help! Help!” he screamed, as though he was being abused in the backseat.
If you have ever tried to protect someone from harm only to have him react as if you are, in fact, torturing him, then perhaps you understand that this behavior did not exactly evoke compassion. In fact, at that moment I knew exactly how far from enlightenment I was, because my internal response to my son’s hysterical cries for help was something like “I’ll give you something to cry about.” Sadistic impulses flashed through me, and I could feel my jaw clenching.
This is the unconscious métier of four-year-old tantrums. They have an uncanny ability to stir up primitive, uncomfortable emotion.
“What’s going on?” Katy asked as she climbed in the car, clearly alarmed by Waylon’s shouts, which were audible across the parking lot. Together, the two of us were able to get him back in his car seat, and by the time we pulled into our driveway, we had all been able to take a few long, deep breaths…which sustained us until the next tantrum started, about three minutes after we got out of the car.
(To continue reading, scroll down or click here.)
Buddhas, Brains, and Babies: Act I
Act I: The Unsuspecting Heroine Encounters Naked Aggression and is Unsettled by Her Own Reaction
Lately I’ve been writing about Waylon’s precocious, insightful moments. I knew it was time for a reality check when my friend Seth sent me a note saying “That child of yours is too sophisticated--does he want to meet me for happy hour?”
A few weeks ago, Waylon was in “time out” for hitting. At the end of time out, Katy or I usually sit down with him and talk about why he got punished. On this particular day, when I sat down on the floor for a chat, Waylon flung himself on my head and started pummeling me, crushing my glasses in the process.
To understand how this affected me, you must know that I have been nearsighted since childhood. My glasses are like a cyborg extension of myself—messing with them is something akin to pricking a bull in a bullfight. I was mad, and I couldn’t conceal it even if I had wanted to. When I finally pulled him off me, I tried to express myself in the words I have learned from Waylon’s preschool teachers: “I don’t like it when you do that. It hurts me and it makes me angry.”
“I don’t like it when you do that. It hurts me and it makes me angry.”
He was repeating me. I felt like one of those old-timey cartoon characters whose body suddenly morphs into a thermometer with the mercury rushing to the red bulb-y top like it’s going to explode.
“THAT IS TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE. YOU ARE REALLY IN TROUBLE, YOUNG MAN!”
Young man? What primitive recess of my brain did that come from? As if I wasn’t already channeling my mother, I suddenly become enraged that Waylon wasn’t looking at me.
“LOOK AT ME WHEN I AM TALKING TO YOU.”
Still looking away, Waylon opened his lips and let a stream of drool spill from his mouth and just hang there. For a preverbal gesture, it pushed me over the edge with amazing precision. At this point, I was standing up—no more pretense of being on the same level, no more empathy—and really yelling: “I AM SO ANGRY WITH YOU!”
I sentenced him to 4 more minutes of time out and retreated to my bedroom, where I proceeded to writhe on the bed with guilt. I know that Waylon needs to understand how his behavior affects other people, but my anger had gotten the best of me, and I felt like the least effective parent in the world. I just kept thinking about how he’s small and I’m big and my anger feels so intense.
And while I was worrying that my anger felt scary and overwhelming to Waylon, I realized that it definitely felt scary and overwhelming to me.
(To continue reading, scroll down or click here.)
Lately I’ve been writing about Waylon’s precocious, insightful moments. I knew it was time for a reality check when my friend Seth sent me a note saying “That child of yours is too sophisticated--does he want to meet me for happy hour?”
A few weeks ago, Waylon was in “time out” for hitting. At the end of time out, Katy or I usually sit down with him and talk about why he got punished. On this particular day, when I sat down on the floor for a chat, Waylon flung himself on my head and started pummeling me, crushing my glasses in the process.
To understand how this affected me, you must know that I have been nearsighted since childhood. My glasses are like a cyborg extension of myself—messing with them is something akin to pricking a bull in a bullfight. I was mad, and I couldn’t conceal it even if I had wanted to. When I finally pulled him off me, I tried to express myself in the words I have learned from Waylon’s preschool teachers: “I don’t like it when you do that. It hurts me and it makes me angry.”
“I don’t like it when you do that. It hurts me and it makes me angry.”
He was repeating me. I felt like one of those old-timey cartoon characters whose body suddenly morphs into a thermometer with the mercury rushing to the red bulb-y top like it’s going to explode.
“THAT IS TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE. YOU ARE REALLY IN TROUBLE, YOUNG MAN!”
Young man? What primitive recess of my brain did that come from? As if I wasn’t already channeling my mother, I suddenly become enraged that Waylon wasn’t looking at me.
“LOOK AT ME WHEN I AM TALKING TO YOU.”
Still looking away, Waylon opened his lips and let a stream of drool spill from his mouth and just hang there. For a preverbal gesture, it pushed me over the edge with amazing precision. At this point, I was standing up—no more pretense of being on the same level, no more empathy—and really yelling: “I AM SO ANGRY WITH YOU!”
I sentenced him to 4 more minutes of time out and retreated to my bedroom, where I proceeded to writhe on the bed with guilt. I know that Waylon needs to understand how his behavior affects other people, but my anger had gotten the best of me, and I felt like the least effective parent in the world. I just kept thinking about how he’s small and I’m big and my anger feels so intense.
And while I was worrying that my anger felt scary and overwhelming to Waylon, I realized that it definitely felt scary and overwhelming to me.
(To continue reading, scroll down or click here.)
Buddhas, Brains, and Babies: Act II
ACT II: Looking Back: a Personal History with Anger
In my experience, one of the most novel and bizarre challenges of being a parent is weathering the unregulated pintsize aggression (hitting, kicking, biting, etc.) that comes your way in the course of normal child development. Before Waylon came along, no one had ever thrown shoes at my head to express frustration. People did not resort to screaming in my face when I made an unpopular decision about cookies.
Even stranger and more difficult than being the target of raw aggression is facing your own aggression, which gets stirred up when you are hit or pinched or bitten by your little bundle of joy. And the only balancing act more difficult than that is somehow teaching your kids that anger is normal and necessary, even as you try to model the difference between harmful and healthy ways of expressing it.
I inherited very few roadmaps for this particular terrain. To say that my parents were uncomfortable with strong emotion would be the understatement of the century.
I can remember perhaps two times in my childhood when my parents verbally expressed anger or frustration with one another. Then, one Saturday afternoon when I was 11, my parents called a family meeting in the living room and dropped a bombshell: they were getting divorced. They unloaded the usual platitudes: we still really love each other, it’s not your fault, it’s natural to have lots of feelings about what’s happening. Then they informed us that we were going to the opera that night and we needed to wrap up this little convo in time to get dressed and get ready to leave. (Why the opera? This is a mystery that I have often pondered, because my parents were not opera aficionados. I suspect that they were afraid to be alone with our feelings and hoped that a formal outing would cue us to don masks of composure.)
I refused to give my parents the satisfaction of crying at the allotted emotional moment. I pulled myself up, with all of my pre-teen dignity, and retreated to my bedroom to reorganize. I sorted old toys into a pile for the Goodwill with ruthless efficiency, repeating “I will not let them see me cry” over and over in my head.
My sister Kristen, who was only eight, started crying and would not stop, but my parents somehow stuffed her into tights and a dress and loaded us all into the car. The crying abated long enough for us to get to our seats like some semblance of a happy family, but during the opera—which was long and boring for a small child—Kristen started to cry again. A hefty blonde soprano with a feather in her hair was singing an endless solo in a foreign language. She kept reaching her hand out for some unseen object. “She’s singing ‘birdseed, birdseed, birdseed,’” my mother whispered into Kristen’s ear, trying to cajole the tears away. It wasn’t that funny, but my mother kept repeating it, as if any moment, through the tears and the snot, my sister would break into a smile and everything would be okay.
After the night at the opera, it soon seemed that any window for expressing feelings about the divorce had passed. My mom—now a struggling graduate student with two kids—and dad—now a lonely bachelor who jogged on a mini-trampoline in front of the TV, suddenly seemed too pathetic and fragile to handle my anger.
I was dutifully toted to a few sessions with a family counselor, who explained that anger was one of the five stages of grief. I had the distinct the impression that I was being urged to move as swiftly as possible from anger to acceptance. I had already internalized the idea that the people I loved and needed could not handle my anger.
And so I lived a kind of double life. On the outside, I was a complacent daughter and student. But I was always irresistibly attracted to the angriest kid in the class. If there was a kid who was just visibly seething with resentment and aggression, I had to get close, to experience vicariously the thrill of his or her transgression. And while I dared not get angry on my own accord, I would become the most loyal and righteous defender of my rebel friend, the secret subcontractor for all of my unacceptable rage.
As you can imagine, this was a really winner strategy for picking a boyfriend back in my heterosexual days. (The seethers were mostly boys, though there were a few notable ladies as well (sigh).) But one of the best things about always cozying up to the angriest kids in school was that they introduced me to another channel for my unconscious rage: angry music! Whether it was Bauhaus or Sisters of Mercy, singing (or shouting) along to angry music allowed me to experience the delicious forbidden affect without actually claiming it as my own.
While I couldn’t directly give voice to my own anger and alienation, I would righteously defend the musical expression of a bunch of boys from Thatcher’s England or Reagan’s heartland. In fact, the first open conflict I remember winning with my mother was over a ragged cassette copy of The Violet Femmes’ first album, which she threatened to confiscate because of profanity. (If you know the words of the offending song, "Add it Up," you might guess that my mother's objection had as much to do with the song's grating lament: "day after day, I get angry...") I listened to that tape every morning as I walked to school through suburban Arizona alleys. It was like a lifeline, a secret conduit to a burning ember inside me.
I prevailed on my mother to let me keep the precious cassette by reminding her that I would soon be leaving for college, where she would no longer be able to control my musical choices. Little did I know that at college I would discover an even more righteous and guilt-free outlet for anger: angry politics.
I remember so clearly the first time I saw it, the little red handprint proclaiming “The government has blood on its hands!” In 1988, ACT-Up stickers were plastered on every door of every building at my university. I walked out of my Poli Sci class one day, and it was love at first sight. Ding! Ding! Ding! I could be mad at the government! At heterosexism! At entire systems of oppression! And not just slightly, politely mad, but passionately outraged! And this anger was so justified, so pure, that I could give myself over to it without jeopardizing the love of my teachers (some of whom were pasting the same little stickers on their office doors) or my friends, whom I idealized and feared to lose. I soon found that there was no shortage of causes that would allow me to use all of my A+ student skills while simultaneously keeping alive my vital connection to the anger that felt so unacceptable.
Later, when I became a college professor myself, I was always surprised that my students were mostly turned off by the little bits of angry literature, film, and music that I tried to nourish them with. What was wrong with these ungrateful baby birds, I wondered. Wasn’t angst a normal and even perhaps universal experience of adolescence? Whether it was Allen Ginsburg or Sadie Benning who they thought was “too angry,” I chalked it up to the ascendancy of neo-conservative politics and the discrediting of public dissent. Nowadays I wonder if some of their discomfort might have come from a more balanced relationship to their own feelings, which didn’t need to feed like a vampire on vicarious fury.
I don’t mean to trivialize outraged politics, in which I am still deeply invested. I only mean to suggest that, for me, political outrage—as necessary as it was and is—also served a deeply personal purpose of allowing me to give vent to the emotions that I had walled off in my private life. I will spare you the details of the ways in which this strategy did not work—if you’ve ever read a self-help book (The Dance of Anger, anyone?), I’m sure you can imagine the woeful narrative of self-destructive behavior, depression, and failed relationships. Suffice it to say that after 10 years and untold thousands of dollars to therapy, I have finally come to the point where I can—on a good day—notice, acknowledge, and express angry feelings directly. It’s still baby steps, and I’m still learning all the time from watching Waylon’s preschool teachers help toddlers learn to navigate conflict with simple phrases like “No!” and “Don’t do that, it hurts me and it makes me mad.”
For me, being a good parent has been the most powerful incentive to bring my own anger and aggression into the light. In the next section, I write about the new brain research and how its insights can help parents learn to deal with the past, navigate strong emotions, and be more tuned in to their children's needs and emotions.
(To continue reading, scroll down or click here.)
Buddhas, Brains, and Babies: Acts III and IV
Act III: Bringing the Past and the Present Together
Before Waylon was born, I went to see Daniel Siegel, one of the leading scholars of interdisciplinary neurobiology, give a talk about parenting. Siegel explained that unresolved traumatic experiences are more likely to be stored in our brains as disorganized, implicit memories that color our perception and experience without becoming part of our conscious awareness. As parents, when those leftover issues get triggered, we are more likely to “flip our lids” (a nod to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for reflection and self-regulation) than to respond in ways attuned to our children’s needs and feelings.
When I was a teenager, my mother warned me that everyone has a finite supply of brain cells. Once your brain reaches adulthood, it’s a downhill slide, and all you can do is try not to accelerate the process too much with drugs or alcohol or massive head injuries. When I went to “Buddhas and Brains,” I learned that this was not just a parental scare tactic; it was once the prevailing wisdom about the brain, but advances in brain imaging have brought the revelation that human beings can rebuild and strengthen neural pathways.
For all of us parents who have not led completely charmed lives, this is great news, because it means that it is possible to reshape our brains, to bring our unresolved issues into conscious awareness, and to avoid knee-jerk responses to our own children. Some of the best tools, apparently, are reflection and narration. In other words, telling stories about our experiences. At first I had trouble believing that telling stories could actually be key—it’s so rare that science seems to reinforce my own prejudices—but after reading Siegel and others, and performing my own experiments in parenting, I have come to feel that it may in fact be true.
When Waylon was about eighteen months old, we started brushing his teeth in a more formalized way, and I started flipping my lid.
Now, generally speaking, Katy and I adhere to a non-authoritarian philosophy of parenting. More than once this has caused the words “spoiled brat” to spill from the lips of a disapproving grandparent, but we have been committed to meeting Waylon where he’s at developmentally and not having unrealistic expectations for, say, quietness and stillness.
But when I was in charge of tooth-brushing, flexibility evaporated into a volley of increasingly loud commands: stand still, face me, look up at the sky, open your mouth, no, open your mouth WIDE, I told you to STAND STILL! Some toddlers might acquiesce when a grown-up is barking commands in their face, but not Waylon. He’d clamp his mouth shut or turn his head away, and tooth brushing frequently deteriorated into a shout-y stand off. When he finally told me “I don’t like it when you yell at me,” I knew it was time for Mama to bow out. Now brushing teeth is Mommy’s job, and when she’s not home I just observe. Waylon may not get every nook and cranny by himself, but I figure that his baby teeth only have to last him a few more years.
Why was tooth-brushing such a triggering event for me? The answer offers some insight into how unresolved issues get passed from generation to generation. My father had terrible teeth. They had tons of fillings and were crooked in the front, which was an enormous source of shame. He smiled with his lips over his teeth until he finally got braces, when he was 50. Dad was lovingly determined that our teeth would be different, so he took nightly dental hygiene upon himself. Not just when I was 2, 3, or 4, but when I was 9, 10, 11—all the way until my parents got divorced. He approached tooth brushing with a kind of manic excitement—this is going to be fun! Fun! Fun!—and by making it a game about chasing pink plaque on pink bicycles with pink flags. And it was kind of fun, but it was also kind of like having a hurricane in your mouth. At 6’2”, my dad towered over me. In his zeal, he used an inordinate amount of minty fresh Crest, which burned my mouth and made my eyes water. My most visceral memory of nightly brushing is the feeling of lather filling up my mouth and overflowing down my chin while I kept my jaw wide open, completely powerless.
As an adult, when I tried to brush the teeth of a squirmy, distracted toddler, these childhood feelings of disempowerment resurfaced and triggered a strong need to control Waylon’s unwieldy (but completely age appropriate) behavior. Because my own resistance to my dad’s regime had been squelched, I experienced any resistance from Waylon as threatening, out-of-control, and, to tell you the embarrassing truth—unfair. Some juvenile part of me felt like, “I didn’t get to resist or talk back, so why should you?”
I wish I could say that my dental hygiene issues dissipated immediately once I remembered these feelings and integrated them into a coherent narrative, but, alas, it’s not quite that neat. The most important thing that I gained was the ability to empathize with what it feels like to a child when an adult—regardless of his or her good intentions—handles you roughly. Although I still recuse myself from tooth brushing, I am much more careful to be gentle when I am pulling a shirt over Waylon’s head or rubbing sunscreen on his face, and to listen when he tells me how it feels.
Act IV: Resolution in the Present
So, to return to the day of the devastating drooling, Waylon was in time out for hitting, but I was the one feeling miserable in my room. I know that Waylon needs to understand the consequences of hitting, that he needs to learn to “use his words” to use the words of a parenting cliché. This sounds simple in theory, but some days Waylon is a little bundle of aggressive impulses. For Katy, who grew up roughhousing with her brothers, it’s hardly noticeable, like a little mosquito buzzing in her ear. For me, with my family background, it’s unsettling to be the target of naked aggression. But what’s even more disturbing is the aggression it stirs up inside of me. I get angry! With my son!
My wife the therapist has one word for me: “repair.”
“It’s not getting angry that’s the problem. He needs to understand how he’s affecting you. It’s lack of repair that causes problems, because he also needs to know that you can stay connected to him even when you’re angry.”
When Waylon finally got out of timeout, we spent some time talking about both of our reactions. Waylon apologized for jumping on my head, and I apologized for yelling. Later that night, when we were lying in his bed after story time, I told him again that I was sorry if my yelling and my angry face scared him.
While I was still feeling guilt, Waylon seemed to have moved on.
“That’s alright Mama. We made up together.”
Don't Make Pride Benign on Behalf of My Family
I live in Austin, Texas, where Pride tends to be a little more laid back than other cities. Let's face it, when it's 97 degrees outside with 30% humidity, your eye shadow will melt, your leather pants will feel like a personal sauna, and any outdoor festival is going to feel like an endurance test.
Nevertheless, as a dutifully proud mama, I've been bringing my son to Austin Gay Pride since he was six weeks old. It's where he coined his signature Pride chant, "Rock on, gays!"
This year, the organizers of Austin Gay Pride successfully advocated with the city to move the fest to a prime downtown location. National acts MeShell Ndegeocello and Pansy Division were set to headline. It seemed like Austin's Pride was really coming into its own. And then, in an Austin Chronicle article that still has local queers buzzing, one of the organizers characterized the new and improved Pride as a "benign, family-friendly" event.
Here's a longer excerpt from the article, which quotes Ceci Gratias of the Austin Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce:Our biggest issue is [that we have] minors watching the parade," said Gratias. "We don't really need to express ourselves so outrageously. And it's not out of acceptability but rather out of respect for the families watching."
Although I wasn't able to attend Austin's Pride this year (too busy gettin' hitched in California), I'm sure it was a lovely event in many ways. But as a queer parent, I feel the need to speak to the assumed dichotomy between "family friendly" and "sex positive." I believe that queer cultural values are among the most important things that I can bequeath to my son. At its best, queer culture can offer the rest of our society a lesson or two about valuing pleasure and eschewing shame.
While it hasn't happened yet, it is true that my son might someday see a thing or two at Pride that we need to talk about and contextualize. But the same is true of mainstream pop culture that he's exposed to every day.
Right now, Paramount and Lego are aggressively marketing the entire Indiana Jones saga--which is chock full of adult sexuality (it's pretty clear that that whip has multiple uses)--to preschool age kids. And I haven't heard a single straight parent at my son's school complaining. So I don't think we need to hold queer culture to a different, desexualized standard on their account.
I certainly hope that no one is making Pride more "tasteful" (another adjective from the organizers) on my son's account. After all, we're talking about a kid who thinks "Fart Mama fart in your face farty fart fart" is witty repartee. Assless chaps would probably make him laugh himself silly.
Marriage Equality and the Spirit of Tammy Faye (June 2008)
Yesterday my partner, Katy, and I were legally married by our friend Jay Bakker, the Pastor of Revolution NYC.
During the ceremony, Jay spoke of his late mother, Tammy Faye Messner, and how happy she would have been to see the day when gay and lesbian couples could legally wed in California. A remarkable straight advocate in his own right, Jay spoke of feeling Tammy Faye’s presence and her blessing on our work toward justice for LGBT Americans.
The ceremony happened in Orange County of all places, an area renowned for its conservatism. On a day when some fundamentalist Christians were protesting the Orange County courthouse in God’s name, it seemed fitting to remember Tammy Faye’s more compassionate version of evangelical faith. In a 2000 interview with The Advocate, she said, “my walk with God is very non judgmental. I love people just for who they are.”
Jay read his mom’s favorite scripture (Romans 8:18). He also read from the book of James: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds…”
Since he began speaking out as a gay-affirming pastor, Jay has faced his share of trials, including the loss of financial support for his church and the cancellation of many speaking engagements. But as one of the clergy leaders for the American Family Outing, he has demonstrated a deep and sincere identification with LGBT people who feel marginalized by the church.
Over the past six weeks, The American Family Outing has met with staff and families at six of the most influential mega-churches in the United States. (Our little wedding party was in the OC for a meeting with the staff of Saddleback Church.) One of the recurring threads of our conversations with many of the churches has been the idea that gay and lesbian people are “welcome” as long as they commit to celibacy.
When I look at my (lawfully wedded) wife and think of all of the joys and tribulations we’ve faced together—from the birth of our son to Katy’s heart attack, from changing diapers to changing careers—my heart aches for all of the LGBT people who are told that they must not only abjure sexual expression (no small part of our human experience), but also live without the intimacy, support, and companionship of a partner.
It’s a narrow and dehumanizing kind of love that says “you’re welcome here if you can give up what the rest of us cherish and celebrate everyday.”
Tammy Faye didn’t believe in that version of God’s love. And neither does her son. Jay says that being part of this historic moment is moving him to prep a new sermon on the Bible and LGBT justice.
Check him out on the Revolution NYC website.
A Lesbian Mom’s Lakewood Moment (May 2008)
Last Sunday, on Mother’s Day, my family and I were part of a group of LGBT families who visited Lakewood Church—the largest and fastest-growing mega-church in the nation. Located in Houston, Texas, and housed in a former basketball stadium, Lakewood Church is pastored by the Rev. Joel Osteen. If you’ve walked through an airport in the past six months, you’ve doubtless seen Rev. Osteen smiling at you from ubiquitous displays peddling his latest bestseller, Become a Better You.
Our visit was part of The American Family Outing, a six-week effort to promote dialogue between lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families and families at six of America’s most influential mega-churches. Conceived by Soulforce, The American Family Outing is rooted in the philosophy of nonviolent reconciliation. Each of the participating LGBT families have pledged to refrain from violence of the fist, tongue, and heart.
Before we even got to Lakewood, I knew this was going to be a personal challenge.
I wasn’t worried about the fist and tongue part—I’ve never been in a fistfight, and I can usually hold my tongue if I need to. But refraining from violence of the heart requires us to recognize and identify with our adversary’s common humanity. Nonviolence demands a radical openness to the other. What’s more, nonviolence demands a radical reflexivity about the limitations of our own perspective. In order to engage in true dialogue, we must remain open to the possibility that our adversary may have an insight into truth that we do not have.
In other words, I was supposed to believe that Lakewood could teach me something.
I hasten to point out that many of the American Family Outing participants share a huge swath of common cultural and religious ground with the average Lakewood family. But for me, stepping inside the Lakewood lobby was like stepping across an enormous cultural chasm. The purple curtains and the big hair are more familiar from Saturday Night Live parodies than from anything in my own personal experience.
I was raised Catholic, and my father had a particular penchant for pre-Vatican-II-style Latin mass. When I was growing up, going to church was less about being entertained or getting “fired up” than it was about endurance and mortification of the flesh. Not surprisingly, I spent most of my adult life unchurched. Ironically, it was fighting anti-gay legislation here in Texas that revived my interest in religion, because I kept meeting all these smart, loving, gay-affirming clergy in my activist life. They made me curious about how church might have changed since I was a kid.
But just because I now count myself among the community of churchgoers does not mean I felt an immediate affinity with Lakewood. At my church, we alternate masculine and feminine names for God. Our ancient projector barely works, so we don’t do multimedia. Everyone says their prayers out loud, and, on a good Sunday, almost everyone present has a chance to speak. Once a homeless man walked in off the street to thank God for LSD and marijuana, and no one raised an eyebrow. So I wasn’t quite prepared for the efficiency of Lakewood-style hospitality.
In retrospect, I think we were probably just experiencing the regular Lakewood greeting protocol, but when people started hailing me every 10 feet to wish me good morning or to say “God bless you,” I immediately felt like I was in trouble. As we waited for the other families to join us outside the Lakewood bookstore, I was sure we would be scolded—or worse, expelled—for some infraction of standing the wrong way or blocking the flow of traffic. It’s the kind of automatic reaction that I suspect many queer people have to mainstream religious institutions: the sense that they are not authorized or welcome. Ultimately, it’s a defensive reaction—not the ideal starting point for openness to the other.
Soon a cordial Lakewood ambassador appeared to guide our group of families to the seats that had been assigned to us. I was pleasantly surprised when we were seated near the front. As we prepared for the service to begin, I tried to unfold from my defensive posture and open my heart.
Then the praise music began. At Lakewood, the service begins with 40 minutes of very loud praise and worship music. Now, I heard many of my friends sincerely admiring the music, but I have to confess that contemporary Christian praise music ain’t my cup of tea. Still, I know that perspiration is the better part of inspiration, so I applied myself to clapping and singing in the hopes that I could share a moment with the 10,000 worshippers around me. It was easy, because the words were projected on 25-foot screens like the ultimate karaoke. When the lyrics said that “all are accepted” in Christ, I sang with particular gusto, imagining myself and my queer family a part of that “all.”
Somewhere toward the middle, the crowd began singing a song with the chorus “we are on the winning side.” Who was on the losing side, I wondered—Iraq? non-Christians? People like me? The loser was never specified, but suddenly my enthusiasm for singing waned. I was trying to remain genuinely open to a new culture, but this kind of “us against them” thinking seemed like precisely the kind of thinking that our presence was meant to subvert. I didn’t want to take it into my heart.
By the time Joel came out and praised the crowd for sounding like “victors, not victims,” I was beginning to lose hope. It wasn’t just that all the talk of victory seemed like a roadblock to reconciliation. I was losing hope that I was going to be able to find a sliver of common ground. I was losing faith that I was going to be able to share a meaningful and transformative moment. In spite of my commitment to nonviolence, I was beginning to doubt that Lakewood had something to teach me.
Then Victoria Osteen, Joel’s wife, came out and asked all of the Mothers to stand up.
Apparently Victoria preaches and teaches for 10 minutes every Sunday, but this being Mother’s Day, she had a special prayer for all of the moms. I stood up proudly next to my wife, Katy. Our five-year-old son, Waylon, was between us, holding both of our hands.
On my other side was my mother, Charlotte, and I reached over and put my arm around her waist. Most LGBT people feel lucky if their parents accept them, but my mom hasn’t just accepted me, she has taken on part of my struggle. She actually volunteered to be part of The American Family Outing without any prompting from me. As Victoria began to talk about the many sacrifices that mothers make for their families, I felt so grateful and loved.
Truth be told, my relationship with my mother has been rocky ever since we stopped wearing matching outfits, when I was in approximately seventh grade. The whole separation and individuation thing was never easy for us. I sometimes feel like the world’s oldest person with teen angst. But, as Victoria spoke about a Mother’s love, I thought about something my friend Gretchen said. After being estranged from her mother for years, she realized, “I like how I turned out.” She was happy with the person she grew up to be, and she knew that a big part of that was due to her mom. That was the seed of their reconciliation.
Victoria assured all of the moms in that huge crowd that they were good mothers. I scanned the rows of standing women, and I thought about how they might share my same hopes and fears about being a good enough Mom. Victoria talked about how moms can feel unappreciated, like no one sees their hard work, but she assured them that their efforts would be revealed in the love that their sons and daughters pass on to their own children. Standing there between my mom, my son, and my partner, I felt like a conduit for a love that is bigger than me. I was overwhelmed by what a powerful gift our parents give us when they foster the ability to give and receive love. It’s the foundation for all of our relationships.
Sometimes people speak about nonviolence as a philosophy rooted in love. I know that we would not be able to do this work if someone had not fostered that trust that we can be open, we can be vulnerable, and that—ultimately—we will be loved. I left the service with a new appreciation for how both of my parents prepared me to love my wife and son and to participate in this work of reconciliation.
In the end, I did learn something from Lakewood. I hope the families there learned something from us too.
To read a news account of the visit, go to: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/religion/5777857.html
To support the families of The American Family Outing, go to: www.soulforce.org
Our visit was part of The American Family Outing, a six-week effort to promote dialogue between lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families and families at six of America’s most influential mega-churches. Conceived by Soulforce, The American Family Outing is rooted in the philosophy of nonviolent reconciliation. Each of the participating LGBT families have pledged to refrain from violence of the fist, tongue, and heart.
Before we even got to Lakewood, I knew this was going to be a personal challenge.
I wasn’t worried about the fist and tongue part—I’ve never been in a fistfight, and I can usually hold my tongue if I need to. But refraining from violence of the heart requires us to recognize and identify with our adversary’s common humanity. Nonviolence demands a radical openness to the other. What’s more, nonviolence demands a radical reflexivity about the limitations of our own perspective. In order to engage in true dialogue, we must remain open to the possibility that our adversary may have an insight into truth that we do not have.
In other words, I was supposed to believe that Lakewood could teach me something.
I hasten to point out that many of the American Family Outing participants share a huge swath of common cultural and religious ground with the average Lakewood family. But for me, stepping inside the Lakewood lobby was like stepping across an enormous cultural chasm. The purple curtains and the big hair are more familiar from Saturday Night Live parodies than from anything in my own personal experience.
I was raised Catholic, and my father had a particular penchant for pre-Vatican-II-style Latin mass. When I was growing up, going to church was less about being entertained or getting “fired up” than it was about endurance and mortification of the flesh. Not surprisingly, I spent most of my adult life unchurched. Ironically, it was fighting anti-gay legislation here in Texas that revived my interest in religion, because I kept meeting all these smart, loving, gay-affirming clergy in my activist life. They made me curious about how church might have changed since I was a kid.
But just because I now count myself among the community of churchgoers does not mean I felt an immediate affinity with Lakewood. At my church, we alternate masculine and feminine names for God. Our ancient projector barely works, so we don’t do multimedia. Everyone says their prayers out loud, and, on a good Sunday, almost everyone present has a chance to speak. Once a homeless man walked in off the street to thank God for LSD and marijuana, and no one raised an eyebrow. So I wasn’t quite prepared for the efficiency of Lakewood-style hospitality.
In retrospect, I think we were probably just experiencing the regular Lakewood greeting protocol, but when people started hailing me every 10 feet to wish me good morning or to say “God bless you,” I immediately felt like I was in trouble. As we waited for the other families to join us outside the Lakewood bookstore, I was sure we would be scolded—or worse, expelled—for some infraction of standing the wrong way or blocking the flow of traffic. It’s the kind of automatic reaction that I suspect many queer people have to mainstream religious institutions: the sense that they are not authorized or welcome. Ultimately, it’s a defensive reaction—not the ideal starting point for openness to the other.
Soon a cordial Lakewood ambassador appeared to guide our group of families to the seats that had been assigned to us. I was pleasantly surprised when we were seated near the front. As we prepared for the service to begin, I tried to unfold from my defensive posture and open my heart.
Then the praise music began. At Lakewood, the service begins with 40 minutes of very loud praise and worship music. Now, I heard many of my friends sincerely admiring the music, but I have to confess that contemporary Christian praise music ain’t my cup of tea. Still, I know that perspiration is the better part of inspiration, so I applied myself to clapping and singing in the hopes that I could share a moment with the 10,000 worshippers around me. It was easy, because the words were projected on 25-foot screens like the ultimate karaoke. When the lyrics said that “all are accepted” in Christ, I sang with particular gusto, imagining myself and my queer family a part of that “all.”
Somewhere toward the middle, the crowd began singing a song with the chorus “we are on the winning side.” Who was on the losing side, I wondered—Iraq? non-Christians? People like me? The loser was never specified, but suddenly my enthusiasm for singing waned. I was trying to remain genuinely open to a new culture, but this kind of “us against them” thinking seemed like precisely the kind of thinking that our presence was meant to subvert. I didn’t want to take it into my heart.
By the time Joel came out and praised the crowd for sounding like “victors, not victims,” I was beginning to lose hope. It wasn’t just that all the talk of victory seemed like a roadblock to reconciliation. I was losing hope that I was going to be able to find a sliver of common ground. I was losing faith that I was going to be able to share a meaningful and transformative moment. In spite of my commitment to nonviolence, I was beginning to doubt that Lakewood had something to teach me.
Then Victoria Osteen, Joel’s wife, came out and asked all of the Mothers to stand up.
Apparently Victoria preaches and teaches for 10 minutes every Sunday, but this being Mother’s Day, she had a special prayer for all of the moms. I stood up proudly next to my wife, Katy. Our five-year-old son, Waylon, was between us, holding both of our hands.
On my other side was my mother, Charlotte, and I reached over and put my arm around her waist. Most LGBT people feel lucky if their parents accept them, but my mom hasn’t just accepted me, she has taken on part of my struggle. She actually volunteered to be part of The American Family Outing without any prompting from me. As Victoria began to talk about the many sacrifices that mothers make for their families, I felt so grateful and loved.
Truth be told, my relationship with my mother has been rocky ever since we stopped wearing matching outfits, when I was in approximately seventh grade. The whole separation and individuation thing was never easy for us. I sometimes feel like the world’s oldest person with teen angst. But, as Victoria spoke about a Mother’s love, I thought about something my friend Gretchen said. After being estranged from her mother for years, she realized, “I like how I turned out.” She was happy with the person she grew up to be, and she knew that a big part of that was due to her mom. That was the seed of their reconciliation.
Victoria assured all of the moms in that huge crowd that they were good mothers. I scanned the rows of standing women, and I thought about how they might share my same hopes and fears about being a good enough Mom. Victoria talked about how moms can feel unappreciated, like no one sees their hard work, but she assured them that their efforts would be revealed in the love that their sons and daughters pass on to their own children. Standing there between my mom, my son, and my partner, I felt like a conduit for a love that is bigger than me. I was overwhelmed by what a powerful gift our parents give us when they foster the ability to give and receive love. It’s the foundation for all of our relationships.
Sometimes people speak about nonviolence as a philosophy rooted in love. I know that we would not be able to do this work if someone had not fostered that trust that we can be open, we can be vulnerable, and that—ultimately—we will be loved. I left the service with a new appreciation for how both of my parents prepared me to love my wife and son and to participate in this work of reconciliation.
In the end, I did learn something from Lakewood. I hope the families there learned something from us too.
To read a news account of the visit, go to: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/religion/5777857.html
To support the families of The American Family Outing, go to: www.soulforce.org
Boygirls, Pill Bugs, and Cool Dudes
Last week was spring break, so I got to spend a lot of time gardening with my four-year-old son, Waylon. He was really excited to capture his first roly poly bug of the season. The poor creature had curled up into a little protective ball, and Waylon was about to shove it in his pocket, but then thought better of it (ahem) with a little parental prodding. He decided instead to free it in a pot where we had just planted a little green succulent called “Mother of Millions.”
“Mom, I put that roly poly in the plant, and he or she—or if it’s a girlboy or a boygirl—is going to dig in the dirt and make it soft.”
Waylon, you had me at “he or she.”
As a feminist parent, I have experienced few greater joys than hearing non-sexist language carefully applied to a pill bug. But although I would love to take credit for Waylon’s refusal to assume the gender of the pill bug, it’s really his own creative adaptation to his context, just as “girlboy” and “boygirl” are categories he created to describe the people around him.
Now, when I was in college, my Child Development professor taught that children begin to consolidate their concepts of gender identity around three years of age, and that the process is often marked by heightened rigidity about gender norms. So I thoroughly expected Waylon to become a little gender cop when he hit three. He did go through a phase when he wanted to categorize everyone. One of his favorite games was a toddler form of people watching, where he would look at people in the park or in the grocery store and yell out “boy!” or “girl!” And while I wanted to support Waylon in whatever developmental thing he was working through, this game could be extremely socially mortifying. I would estimate that he was “right” (in that his attributions matched the gender identities of passersby) about 75% of the time.
Luckily it didn’t take Waylon too long to come up against the inadequacy of his binary categories. Another of his favorite games around this time was to ask, over and over, “Mama, are you a girl?” For me it was easy to answer with a straightforward “yes,” but for Katy things were not so simple. Since he asked this question about ten times a day for at least a month, she had plenty of time to formulate a good answer. “I’m kind of a mix of girl and boy,” she’d say. “I’m a mommy, but I look more like a boy than Mama does.”
Contrary to what child development specialists might predict, Waylon did not skip a beat. Before long, he was asking “Mommy, are you a boygirl?” ten times a day, and Waylon’s four-coordinate gender axis (girl, boy, boygirl, girlboy) was born. It may not be exhaustive (what gender system could be), but it has more descriptive depth than a binary. The first time we really saw this system in action was when our friend Kelly came to visit from San Francisco when Waylon was three. Kelly is a trans-identified butchy queer with blonde, boyish looks. She has tattoos of ships on her arms and endless patience for playing Thomas the Train, so Waylon adores her. One morning Kelly and Katy were taking Waylon and his best friend, Flynn, to the playground. Katy was driving, Kelly was riding shotgun, and Waylon and Flynn were strapped in their car seats in the back. Flynn leaned over to his buddy and said, in an astonished three-year-old stage whisper, “Waylon, is that a boy or a girl?”
“Silly, that’s Kelly,” said Waylon. “She’s a boygirl.”
Around that same time, Time published an editorial in which James Dobson condemned Mary Cheney’s decision to have a baby with her partner. “Love alone is not enough to guarantee healthy growth and development,” Dobson opined. “The two most loving women in the world cannot provide a daddy for a little boy--any more than the two most loving men can be complete role models for a little girl.” This week, as I’ve been pondering Waylon and his pill bug, I’ve been also been contemplating what the four coordinate gender axis does to Dobson’s notion of a “complete” gender role model.
When I was growing up, I had a family, and a father, that at least resembled Dobson’s prescription, but I still grew up only knowing one version of masculinity—my dad’s verbally-fluent, academic, leg-crossing, middle class version of masculinity. I rarely saw my friends’ dads (the 1970s in suburban America were not that different from the 1950s in terms of paternal involvement, as far as I can tell), but when I did, I always thought they must be mad about something, because I was so unaccustomed to their predominantly silent, aggrieved, inexpressive ways. (I distinctly remember seeing my friend Amy’s dad, who had just come back from Vietnam, open the fridge and drink milk from the carton, and it was such a disturbing breach of known fatherly protocol that I almost had to run home.)
The fact is that there have always been multiple masculinities, multiple genders, and queer families probably have even better resources in terms of introducing their children to a range of genders and gender expressions. And, although Dobson might like people to believe it, we’re not raising our kids in a test tube—we have families and communities. For masculine role models, Waylon has his (now openly gay) grandpa, who takes him for rides in his Corvette and lets Waylon throw an endless supply of pebbles in his pool. He has “Uncle Brian,” his donor, an old working class rocker who found his calling as a social worker with mentally retarded people. Most importantly, he has Mommy, who created her own uniquely Texan brand of female masculinity from her cowboy big brothers and her football coach dad.
Our extended family “village” also includes the teachers at Waylon’s school, Habibi’s Hutch. I don’t know if it’s because childcare is so undervalued (and under-compensated) in our society, or if it’s the remnants of the 1980s daycare sexual abuse hysteria, but daycares with male directors and male teachers seem relatively rare. Habibis’ has both a male director and a gender balanced staff of committed teachers, many of whom have been teaching there for more than a decade. Waylon has loved all of his teachers, but the dudes have played a special role in his life.
When Waylon was first potty-trained, his lesbian mothers thought it would be great if he kept sitting down to pee for a long as possible, thus saving our bathroom floors from his errant stream for as long as possible. I’m pretty sure it was the male teachers at Habibis who intervened to save him from parentally-programmed dorkiness, and before long he could hit the bowl like a pro. Several months later, Waylon was peeing at home and I was sitting on the edge of the tub, talking to him. He stopped mid-stream, adjusted his pants a little further down, and resumed his pee. Then he turned to me and said, with casual confidence, “It’s called choking your balls.”
“What?!?”
“When your underwear goes up too high while you’re peeing. It’s called ‘choking your balls.’”
I would never have known.
As I write this post, I’m mourning the fact that this will be Waylon’s last spring at Habibi’s. He’ll start kindergarten in the fall, and then his preschool teacher, Mike Esparza, won’t be as much a part of our daily lives. Mike has taught at Habibi’s for fifteen years. He usually sports long hair, a moustache and goatee, tube socks, and black plastic glasses. He looks a bit like a Mexican Jad Fair, but more handsome and coordinated. He rides a BMX bike to work, and he regales the kids with tales of death-defying bike adventures, as well as yarns from his childhood with a rotating cast of characters like his friend “Fat Jason” and his “dumb uncle.” Mike tends to speak in aphorisms that get repeated like the sacred word around our house. I can always tell when I am about to get a dose of Mike wisdom, because of the reverential tones in Waylon’s voice before he enlightens me.
“Mom, if you’re looking for something, and you stop looking for it, then you’ll probably find it.”
“Mom, people who say ‘stupid’ a lot probably are stupid.”
“Mom, the headliner is usually the best one.”
Now, some of the male teachers at Habibi’s are really warm, fuzzy, nurturing guys. If Waylon is having trouble with the morning transition, then hands-down it is Andrew he wants to go to. Andrew hugs him and tells him, “I’m so glad you’re here,” in the sweetest, most sincere voice imaginable. Mike’s style of nurturing is different, but not indifferent. There’s a little more distance there, but it’s an interested distance, one that lets the kids have their own process and make their own discoveries. I appreciate it, because I want Waylon to grow up comfortable with lots of different styles of masculinity and lots of different versions of “role model.” I know Waylon appreciates it too. When I asked him to describe Mike, the usually loquacious Waylon would only say, “he’s cool.”
“Mom, I put that roly poly in the plant, and he or she—or if it’s a girlboy or a boygirl—is going to dig in the dirt and make it soft.”
Waylon, you had me at “he or she.”
As a feminist parent, I have experienced few greater joys than hearing non-sexist language carefully applied to a pill bug. But although I would love to take credit for Waylon’s refusal to assume the gender of the pill bug, it’s really his own creative adaptation to his context, just as “girlboy” and “boygirl” are categories he created to describe the people around him.
Now, when I was in college, my Child Development professor taught that children begin to consolidate their concepts of gender identity around three years of age, and that the process is often marked by heightened rigidity about gender norms. So I thoroughly expected Waylon to become a little gender cop when he hit three. He did go through a phase when he wanted to categorize everyone. One of his favorite games was a toddler form of people watching, where he would look at people in the park or in the grocery store and yell out “boy!” or “girl!” And while I wanted to support Waylon in whatever developmental thing he was working through, this game could be extremely socially mortifying. I would estimate that he was “right” (in that his attributions matched the gender identities of passersby) about 75% of the time.
Luckily it didn’t take Waylon too long to come up against the inadequacy of his binary categories. Another of his favorite games around this time was to ask, over and over, “Mama, are you a girl?” For me it was easy to answer with a straightforward “yes,” but for Katy things were not so simple. Since he asked this question about ten times a day for at least a month, she had plenty of time to formulate a good answer. “I’m kind of a mix of girl and boy,” she’d say. “I’m a mommy, but I look more like a boy than Mama does.”
Contrary to what child development specialists might predict, Waylon did not skip a beat. Before long, he was asking “Mommy, are you a boygirl?” ten times a day, and Waylon’s four-coordinate gender axis (girl, boy, boygirl, girlboy) was born. It may not be exhaustive (what gender system could be), but it has more descriptive depth than a binary. The first time we really saw this system in action was when our friend Kelly came to visit from San Francisco when Waylon was three. Kelly is a trans-identified butchy queer with blonde, boyish looks. She has tattoos of ships on her arms and endless patience for playing Thomas the Train, so Waylon adores her. One morning Kelly and Katy were taking Waylon and his best friend, Flynn, to the playground. Katy was driving, Kelly was riding shotgun, and Waylon and Flynn were strapped in their car seats in the back. Flynn leaned over to his buddy and said, in an astonished three-year-old stage whisper, “Waylon, is that a boy or a girl?”
“Silly, that’s Kelly,” said Waylon. “She’s a boygirl.”
Around that same time, Time published an editorial in which James Dobson condemned Mary Cheney’s decision to have a baby with her partner. “Love alone is not enough to guarantee healthy growth and development,” Dobson opined. “The two most loving women in the world cannot provide a daddy for a little boy--any more than the two most loving men can be complete role models for a little girl.” This week, as I’ve been pondering Waylon and his pill bug, I’ve been also been contemplating what the four coordinate gender axis does to Dobson’s notion of a “complete” gender role model.
When I was growing up, I had a family, and a father, that at least resembled Dobson’s prescription, but I still grew up only knowing one version of masculinity—my dad’s verbally-fluent, academic, leg-crossing, middle class version of masculinity. I rarely saw my friends’ dads (the 1970s in suburban America were not that different from the 1950s in terms of paternal involvement, as far as I can tell), but when I did, I always thought they must be mad about something, because I was so unaccustomed to their predominantly silent, aggrieved, inexpressive ways. (I distinctly remember seeing my friend Amy’s dad, who had just come back from Vietnam, open the fridge and drink milk from the carton, and it was such a disturbing breach of known fatherly protocol that I almost had to run home.)
The fact is that there have always been multiple masculinities, multiple genders, and queer families probably have even better resources in terms of introducing their children to a range of genders and gender expressions. And, although Dobson might like people to believe it, we’re not raising our kids in a test tube—we have families and communities. For masculine role models, Waylon has his (now openly gay) grandpa, who takes him for rides in his Corvette and lets Waylon throw an endless supply of pebbles in his pool. He has “Uncle Brian,” his donor, an old working class rocker who found his calling as a social worker with mentally retarded people. Most importantly, he has Mommy, who created her own uniquely Texan brand of female masculinity from her cowboy big brothers and her football coach dad.
Our extended family “village” also includes the teachers at Waylon’s school, Habibi’s Hutch. I don’t know if it’s because childcare is so undervalued (and under-compensated) in our society, or if it’s the remnants of the 1980s daycare sexual abuse hysteria, but daycares with male directors and male teachers seem relatively rare. Habibis’ has both a male director and a gender balanced staff of committed teachers, many of whom have been teaching there for more than a decade. Waylon has loved all of his teachers, but the dudes have played a special role in his life.
When Waylon was first potty-trained, his lesbian mothers thought it would be great if he kept sitting down to pee for a long as possible, thus saving our bathroom floors from his errant stream for as long as possible. I’m pretty sure it was the male teachers at Habibis who intervened to save him from parentally-programmed dorkiness, and before long he could hit the bowl like a pro. Several months later, Waylon was peeing at home and I was sitting on the edge of the tub, talking to him. He stopped mid-stream, adjusted his pants a little further down, and resumed his pee. Then he turned to me and said, with casual confidence, “It’s called choking your balls.”
“What?!?”
“When your underwear goes up too high while you’re peeing. It’s called ‘choking your balls.’”
I would never have known.
As I write this post, I’m mourning the fact that this will be Waylon’s last spring at Habibi’s. He’ll start kindergarten in the fall, and then his preschool teacher, Mike Esparza, won’t be as much a part of our daily lives. Mike has taught at Habibi’s for fifteen years. He usually sports long hair, a moustache and goatee, tube socks, and black plastic glasses. He looks a bit like a Mexican Jad Fair, but more handsome and coordinated. He rides a BMX bike to work, and he regales the kids with tales of death-defying bike adventures, as well as yarns from his childhood with a rotating cast of characters like his friend “Fat Jason” and his “dumb uncle.” Mike tends to speak in aphorisms that get repeated like the sacred word around our house. I can always tell when I am about to get a dose of Mike wisdom, because of the reverential tones in Waylon’s voice before he enlightens me.
“Mom, if you’re looking for something, and you stop looking for it, then you’ll probably find it.”
“Mom, people who say ‘stupid’ a lot probably are stupid.”
“Mom, the headliner is usually the best one.”
Now, some of the male teachers at Habibi’s are really warm, fuzzy, nurturing guys. If Waylon is having trouble with the morning transition, then hands-down it is Andrew he wants to go to. Andrew hugs him and tells him, “I’m so glad you’re here,” in the sweetest, most sincere voice imaginable. Mike’s style of nurturing is different, but not indifferent. There’s a little more distance there, but it’s an interested distance, one that lets the kids have their own process and make their own discoveries. I appreciate it, because I want Waylon to grow up comfortable with lots of different styles of masculinity and lots of different versions of “role model.” I know Waylon appreciates it too. When I asked him to describe Mike, the usually loquacious Waylon would only say, “he’s cool.”
Waylon, Jesus, Diarrhea
The following is an actual transcript of a conversation with my 4-year-old son, Waylon. I have to preface it by saying that Waylon had his first experience with diarrhea recently, and it was confusing and a little scary, so we’ve been processing.
Waylon: I have to poop right now, or else I'm gonna poop in my pants.
Paige: (getting up and heading for the bathroom) We don’t want that to happen.
Waylon: No.
Paige: But sometimes you can't help it, like when you have diarrhea. No one can help pooping in their pants if they have bad diarrhea.
Waylon: (from the toilet) Jesus could.
Paige: Hmmmmm. I don't know, he was supposed to be just a regular man.
Waylon: Well, if he could walk on water, why couldn't he stop diarrhea?
Yes.
It’s true.
We’ve been talking to Waylon about Jesus.
No one can be more shocked than myself, because it wasn’t part of my parenting plan. But then, two months before Waylon was born, George Bush launched the Iraq war. And then Katy, my wife, suffered a long and painful illness. Then I saw An Inconvenient Truth. And then, as if my mood was not apocalyptic enough, I read Dave Eggers’ What is the What, a re-telling of the experiences of the Sudanese lost boys.
Reading about the experiences of young children making their way, without parents, through treacherous terrain, hunger, thirst, loneliness, war and then years of uncertainty in refugee camps, I often felt like I was going to have a panic attack. Many times I had to take the luxury of closing the book and taking some deep breaths. Five years ago, that book might not have affected me in the same way, but now that I am a parent, the suffering of children is more real to me. It’s partly because I know Waylon’s complex thoughts, feelings, and needs, and partly because of the way that parenting has forced me to revisit the emotional landscapes of my own childhood.
As brilliant as I think Eggers’ book is, it didn’t help me understand what sustained Valentino Achak Deng or any of the other children who kept walking and living even as they watched their peers succumb to hunger, madness, and death. I couldn’t help wondering—rather self-indulgently, I’ll admit—if I had the inner resources to survive that kind of walk. And I couldn’t help imagining my baby walking that path alone and wondering if I could bequeath to him what he would need to survive.
When Waylon was eighteen months old, my wife Katy started chemotherapy for Hepatitis C. The drugs that were supposed to cure her made her sick. So sick that for a while she was like a feeble specter of her usual self, drifting in and out of agonizing pain. I wish I could tell you that this experience forced me to tap into heretofore unrealized wells of patience and compassion. Instead, my paranoid, self-protective brain switched into overdrive, frantically anticipating the ultimate blow by preparing for her death. It was like the fact that she was going to die was in the forefront of my brain at all times, so that I could be teaching a class or parking my car but in my mind I’d be flipping through a mental checklist that ranged from choosing the music for her funeral to selling the house.
In other words, I responded to crisis by becoming extremely morbid. Less Mother Teresa than Woody Allen. And once I was so chummy with the fact of Katy’s mortality, it was only a slight stretch to thinking about my own, and to imagining my son as an orphan, alone on a treacherous path. The Bush administration wasn’t helping my apocalyptic mood. Whether they were shunning the Kyoto accords or reviving the rhetoric of the Crusades, it all seemed like some kind of crazy plot to destroy the world that my child would inherit.
Eventually I found myself sitting in tiny Trinity United Methodist Church. That’s a whole story of its own. But basically I needed some framework for making meaning out of suffering and a space to tap into compassion. And I am kind of a community junkie. I loved the fact that people shared their prayers out loud. Free group therapy! But going to church still didn’t get me to Jesus, or to any kind of faith.
Although I was baptized into the Catholic church, and dutifully attended CCD, I left at 16 when my (probably gay) priest tried to explain away my concerns about the church’s stances on birth control and homosexuality as matters for local pastoral interpretation. I was a teenager with a teenager’s keen nose for hypocrisy. A couple of years later, I read On the Genealogy of Morals, and somehow Nietzsche’s sneering diagnosis of Judeo-Christian morality as a compensatory strategy of the weak got stuck in mind, in spite of my very different politics, and in spite of everything I later read about the Bible as a roadmap for liberation movements.
For most of my adult life I have felt like an outsider to faith. I remember asking my best friend from college, the product of a truly religious upbringing, what does it feel like to believe? How do you get there? In many ways I feel like I’m still struggling with those questions. My wife, who knows me better than anyone, was convinced that I could get there by reading. “That’s how you make sense of the world, you need to read about it.” (I should note here that Katy confected her own unique spirituality in her days as a speed addict, when she would wander into the public library and read whatever books she felt were calling her name.) So, around Christmas time last year I decided to start with Matthew and make my way through the New Testament. But almost immediately I got hung up on language. What was all of this talk about Dominion and the Kingdom? It seemed so masculine and imperialist. I read some of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s The First Christmas, and that helped. I tried re-telling the story of Jesus’ birth the way they do, as an anti-imperialist parable. Now Waylon associates King Herod with George Bush, but something about starting with Christmas still didn’t work for me. It’s too pat, too much a part of our mono-culture, and I just felt like I was joining some smug cultural enclave. (Waylon wasn't really helping, because he kept saying "it's Jesus's birthday!" in a sing-songy voice.)
My sister the sociologist told me about interviewing a woman who was narrating a moment when everything in her life changed. “What happened?” my sister asked. “Well, I met Jesus,” the woman replied, as if he had just walked right up to her in the supermarket. Reading has not helped me meet Jesus, at least not yet. I have begun to think that the intellectual route is not the way that I am going to get there. I am not even sure why I think that it is Jesus that I am going to meet, except that I have been listening to a lot of Mavis Staples. Usually when people talk about prayer, it feels like they are approaching the universe as a big piggy bank: you put some prayer in and you get the good stuff out. But when Mavis sings “Jesus is on the main line, tell him what you want,” it sounds like something I need to understand.
And then there’s Sunday school. To be quite honest, I ended up in church because there’s no Sunday school at the Buddhist Sangha around the corner from my house. I needed a place to make sense of suffering and get in touch with compassion, but I needed to bring Waylon along with me—for practical reasons, but also because, for all of my skepticism about church, it seemed like a place that might foster the elusive internal something that would help him navigate and survive this crazy world.
Surviving Sunday School has not been easy (for me). That first Easter, when the lovely blonde Director of Children’s Programs started passing out little plastic bottles of bubbles in the shape of crosses, I had to fight the urge to turn on the heel of my summer sandals and run. Luckily for me, our pastor, Sid, is the perfect antidote to mass market Christianity. Sid looks like an average, mild-mannered white guy in a Hawaiian shirt, but about 85% percent of his sermons are about darkness and doubt. I think of him as the goth Methodist. Sid gave an Easter sermon about how our culture tends to focus on the crucifixion as the promise of personal salvation and ignores the difficult, unpopular work that got Jesus crucified in the first place.
Ironically, Sid’s sermons about darkness and difficulty created just enough of a safe space that I could relax and begin to let in a tiny bit of the light. The first time I heard him announce that all were welcome to take communion, I started crying and couldn’t stop until the service was over. Having been raised Catholic, I thought of communion as something that you had to prepare for and earn. Yet there I was, sitting in the back row, full of doubt, having made no profession of faith and no confession, and I was welcome to partake. I didn’t even know how much I had internalized the feeling of unworthiness until the experience of radical hospitality overwhelmed me.
I spent last weekend in a room full of gay Christians who feel compelled by their faith to work for justice. The way these people talk about (and live) the presence of God in their lives seems so real and compelling, by the end of the weekend part of me really wanted to feel like one of them. I was beginning to understand what a conversion experience might feel like, because these people and our experience together felt so special. And at the same time I was acutely aware of how potentially exclusionary and Christian-centric this special club was. I kept thinking about the few people in the room who were explicitly not identified as Christians and how quickly and easily our group shifted into talking as if we all believed the same thing.
Jay Bakker was there. His church, Revolution NYC, puts up stickers that say “As Christians, we’re sorry for being self-righteous judgmental bastards.” Jay gave a beautiful sermon about Grace, and, miraculously, Waylon sat sweetly in my lap the whole time, helping me to soak it up without squirming. In the past, I couldn’t tolerate even reading about grace. Katy once tried to get me to read a book called There is Nothing Wrong with You, and I wanted to throw it across the room before I read the first 10 pages. For most of my life, my internal monologue was a laundry list of failures, vows to do better, and fears that people were going to find out just how imperfect and unlovable I was. In some ways, living through Katy’s illness cured me of all that, because I had to let it all hang out—and because I saw how she still loved me in spite of my empathic failures. Having Waylon has helped me too, because I now understand what it means to love someone unconditionally. Ultimately, I think it’s that sense of being loved unconditionally—by me, by Katy, by the Universe or Jesus or whatever we decide to call it—that will sustain him through the mundane and catastrophic.
Last week, Waylon was engaged in an art project of his own devising, which involved gluing a bunch of sequins to a cork that he found on the playground. As he was working at the kitchen table, I heard him singing a little song that went “God is inside of every thing, god is inside of everything, god is inside of everything!” It sounded a lot like the Ramones, but immediately I flashed back to elementary school when my sister went to vacation Bible school with a friend and came back singing cheery songs about beating the Devil.
“Who taught you that song? Did you learn that in Sunday school?” I said, trying not to jump his shit but expecting a treacly conspiracy.
“No one taught it to me. I taught it to myself.”
“Oh, okay. That’s good.”
“Mom,” he said, still gluing.
“Yes?”
“God is inside of this table.”
Waylon: I have to poop right now, or else I'm gonna poop in my pants.
Paige: (getting up and heading for the bathroom) We don’t want that to happen.
Waylon: No.
Paige: But sometimes you can't help it, like when you have diarrhea. No one can help pooping in their pants if they have bad diarrhea.
Waylon: (from the toilet) Jesus could.
Paige: Hmmmmm. I don't know, he was supposed to be just a regular man.
Waylon: Well, if he could walk on water, why couldn't he stop diarrhea?
Yes.
It’s true.
We’ve been talking to Waylon about Jesus.
No one can be more shocked than myself, because it wasn’t part of my parenting plan. But then, two months before Waylon was born, George Bush launched the Iraq war. And then Katy, my wife, suffered a long and painful illness. Then I saw An Inconvenient Truth. And then, as if my mood was not apocalyptic enough, I read Dave Eggers’ What is the What, a re-telling of the experiences of the Sudanese lost boys.
Reading about the experiences of young children making their way, without parents, through treacherous terrain, hunger, thirst, loneliness, war and then years of uncertainty in refugee camps, I often felt like I was going to have a panic attack. Many times I had to take the luxury of closing the book and taking some deep breaths. Five years ago, that book might not have affected me in the same way, but now that I am a parent, the suffering of children is more real to me. It’s partly because I know Waylon’s complex thoughts, feelings, and needs, and partly because of the way that parenting has forced me to revisit the emotional landscapes of my own childhood.
As brilliant as I think Eggers’ book is, it didn’t help me understand what sustained Valentino Achak Deng or any of the other children who kept walking and living even as they watched their peers succumb to hunger, madness, and death. I couldn’t help wondering—rather self-indulgently, I’ll admit—if I had the inner resources to survive that kind of walk. And I couldn’t help imagining my baby walking that path alone and wondering if I could bequeath to him what he would need to survive.
When Waylon was eighteen months old, my wife Katy started chemotherapy for Hepatitis C. The drugs that were supposed to cure her made her sick. So sick that for a while she was like a feeble specter of her usual self, drifting in and out of agonizing pain. I wish I could tell you that this experience forced me to tap into heretofore unrealized wells of patience and compassion. Instead, my paranoid, self-protective brain switched into overdrive, frantically anticipating the ultimate blow by preparing for her death. It was like the fact that she was going to die was in the forefront of my brain at all times, so that I could be teaching a class or parking my car but in my mind I’d be flipping through a mental checklist that ranged from choosing the music for her funeral to selling the house.
In other words, I responded to crisis by becoming extremely morbid. Less Mother Teresa than Woody Allen. And once I was so chummy with the fact of Katy’s mortality, it was only a slight stretch to thinking about my own, and to imagining my son as an orphan, alone on a treacherous path. The Bush administration wasn’t helping my apocalyptic mood. Whether they were shunning the Kyoto accords or reviving the rhetoric of the Crusades, it all seemed like some kind of crazy plot to destroy the world that my child would inherit.
Eventually I found myself sitting in tiny Trinity United Methodist Church. That’s a whole story of its own. But basically I needed some framework for making meaning out of suffering and a space to tap into compassion. And I am kind of a community junkie. I loved the fact that people shared their prayers out loud. Free group therapy! But going to church still didn’t get me to Jesus, or to any kind of faith.
Although I was baptized into the Catholic church, and dutifully attended CCD, I left at 16 when my (probably gay) priest tried to explain away my concerns about the church’s stances on birth control and homosexuality as matters for local pastoral interpretation. I was a teenager with a teenager’s keen nose for hypocrisy. A couple of years later, I read On the Genealogy of Morals, and somehow Nietzsche’s sneering diagnosis of Judeo-Christian morality as a compensatory strategy of the weak got stuck in mind, in spite of my very different politics, and in spite of everything I later read about the Bible as a roadmap for liberation movements.
For most of my adult life I have felt like an outsider to faith. I remember asking my best friend from college, the product of a truly religious upbringing, what does it feel like to believe? How do you get there? In many ways I feel like I’m still struggling with those questions. My wife, who knows me better than anyone, was convinced that I could get there by reading. “That’s how you make sense of the world, you need to read about it.” (I should note here that Katy confected her own unique spirituality in her days as a speed addict, when she would wander into the public library and read whatever books she felt were calling her name.) So, around Christmas time last year I decided to start with Matthew and make my way through the New Testament. But almost immediately I got hung up on language. What was all of this talk about Dominion and the Kingdom? It seemed so masculine and imperialist. I read some of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s The First Christmas, and that helped. I tried re-telling the story of Jesus’ birth the way they do, as an anti-imperialist parable. Now Waylon associates King Herod with George Bush, but something about starting with Christmas still didn’t work for me. It’s too pat, too much a part of our mono-culture, and I just felt like I was joining some smug cultural enclave. (Waylon wasn't really helping, because he kept saying "it's Jesus's birthday!" in a sing-songy voice.)
My sister the sociologist told me about interviewing a woman who was narrating a moment when everything in her life changed. “What happened?” my sister asked. “Well, I met Jesus,” the woman replied, as if he had just walked right up to her in the supermarket. Reading has not helped me meet Jesus, at least not yet. I have begun to think that the intellectual route is not the way that I am going to get there. I am not even sure why I think that it is Jesus that I am going to meet, except that I have been listening to a lot of Mavis Staples. Usually when people talk about prayer, it feels like they are approaching the universe as a big piggy bank: you put some prayer in and you get the good stuff out. But when Mavis sings “Jesus is on the main line, tell him what you want,” it sounds like something I need to understand.
And then there’s Sunday school. To be quite honest, I ended up in church because there’s no Sunday school at the Buddhist Sangha around the corner from my house. I needed a place to make sense of suffering and get in touch with compassion, but I needed to bring Waylon along with me—for practical reasons, but also because, for all of my skepticism about church, it seemed like a place that might foster the elusive internal something that would help him navigate and survive this crazy world.
Surviving Sunday School has not been easy (for me). That first Easter, when the lovely blonde Director of Children’s Programs started passing out little plastic bottles of bubbles in the shape of crosses, I had to fight the urge to turn on the heel of my summer sandals and run. Luckily for me, our pastor, Sid, is the perfect antidote to mass market Christianity. Sid looks like an average, mild-mannered white guy in a Hawaiian shirt, but about 85% percent of his sermons are about darkness and doubt. I think of him as the goth Methodist. Sid gave an Easter sermon about how our culture tends to focus on the crucifixion as the promise of personal salvation and ignores the difficult, unpopular work that got Jesus crucified in the first place.
Ironically, Sid’s sermons about darkness and difficulty created just enough of a safe space that I could relax and begin to let in a tiny bit of the light. The first time I heard him announce that all were welcome to take communion, I started crying and couldn’t stop until the service was over. Having been raised Catholic, I thought of communion as something that you had to prepare for and earn. Yet there I was, sitting in the back row, full of doubt, having made no profession of faith and no confession, and I was welcome to partake. I didn’t even know how much I had internalized the feeling of unworthiness until the experience of radical hospitality overwhelmed me.
I spent last weekend in a room full of gay Christians who feel compelled by their faith to work for justice. The way these people talk about (and live) the presence of God in their lives seems so real and compelling, by the end of the weekend part of me really wanted to feel like one of them. I was beginning to understand what a conversion experience might feel like, because these people and our experience together felt so special. And at the same time I was acutely aware of how potentially exclusionary and Christian-centric this special club was. I kept thinking about the few people in the room who were explicitly not identified as Christians and how quickly and easily our group shifted into talking as if we all believed the same thing.
Jay Bakker was there. His church, Revolution NYC, puts up stickers that say “As Christians, we’re sorry for being self-righteous judgmental bastards.” Jay gave a beautiful sermon about Grace, and, miraculously, Waylon sat sweetly in my lap the whole time, helping me to soak it up without squirming. In the past, I couldn’t tolerate even reading about grace. Katy once tried to get me to read a book called There is Nothing Wrong with You, and I wanted to throw it across the room before I read the first 10 pages. For most of my life, my internal monologue was a laundry list of failures, vows to do better, and fears that people were going to find out just how imperfect and unlovable I was. In some ways, living through Katy’s illness cured me of all that, because I had to let it all hang out—and because I saw how she still loved me in spite of my empathic failures. Having Waylon has helped me too, because I now understand what it means to love someone unconditionally. Ultimately, I think it’s that sense of being loved unconditionally—by me, by Katy, by the Universe or Jesus or whatever we decide to call it—that will sustain him through the mundane and catastrophic.
Last week, Waylon was engaged in an art project of his own devising, which involved gluing a bunch of sequins to a cork that he found on the playground. As he was working at the kitchen table, I heard him singing a little song that went “God is inside of every thing, god is inside of everything, god is inside of everything!” It sounded a lot like the Ramones, but immediately I flashed back to elementary school when my sister went to vacation Bible school with a friend and came back singing cheery songs about beating the Devil.
“Who taught you that song? Did you learn that in Sunday school?” I said, trying not to jump his shit but expecting a treacly conspiracy.
“No one taught it to me. I taught it to myself.”
“Oh, okay. That’s good.”
“Mom,” he said, still gluing.
“Yes?”
“God is inside of this table.”
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