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.

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.

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."

And then, just to make sure I had the last word on the subject, I tickled them both soundly and then sent them inside to wash their hands.

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.

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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.

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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.”

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.”

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.”