Waiting for Nat

How old is Nat?

...to the Typepad side:

The wait is over, welcome to Peter's Cross Station

p.s. there's more baby pictures over there

We're off to Chicago yet again (these will be Nat's fourth and fifth one-way trips to or from Chicago since her birth 15 days ago), for our day in court. Apparently, in Cook County, adoptive families go to court once, on the front end of adoption proceedings, and get the final papers in the mail six months later.

Our court date is tomorrow at noon, so we're staying over night in a 5-star (ie: room-service-providing) hotel across the street from the Daley Center.

Please keep us in your thoughts, prayers, meditations on the void, etc. The main thing we need is SLEEP.

We're off to Chicago yet again (these will be Nat's fourth and fifth one-way trips to or from Chicago since her birth 15 days ago), for our day in court. Apparently, in Cook County, adoptive families go to court once, on the front end of adoption proceedings, and get the final papers in the mail six months later.

Our court date is tomorrow at noon, so we're staying over night in a 5-star (ie: room-service-providing) hotel across the street from the Daley Center.

Please keep us in your thoughts, prayers, meditations on the void, etc. The main thing we need is SLEEP.

Yesterday's weigh-in reports that Nat is steadily gaining weight. I suppose that is truly a good thing, but given our love affair with slings, over here, I am appreciating her smallness. We are now at three slings and counting, plus a Bjorn handed down by our practice baby, Amaya's parents. Each has its own unique appeal, and we love them all.

Who knew that getting a baby would lead to such an onslaught of gifts? More than a wedding, more than Christmas when you were 8, more than that birthday party to which you invited the entire third grade! Every single day, packages arrive full of goodies. It's totally fun. I told my partner that we will never get gifts again. From here on out, everthing will go to the baby. But as she pointed out, we're pretty good at getting gifts for ourselves, and getting stuff for the baby is equally, even possibly more, fun anyway.

It's true. I got some gifts for myself just the other day. Remember the sad story of the Katherine Hepburn robe? The one thing I wished I had almost as soon as the baby came home was washable, yet pretty lingerie. That's my baby present to everyone from now on (well, not everyone but you know...). I went up to well-known-lingerie-all-made-in-the-seychelles-or-china-dot-com and got myself some pretty, cotton nighties in colors other than white. I can't wait 'til they arrive. My days of boxers and teeshirts dribbled with formula are numbered. Soon I will have gauzy cotton baby dolls dribbled with formula.

Motherhood need not reduce a femme to frumpiness girls!

In other totally boring and mundane news, we don't get much sleep around here anymore. It seems we got a baby bat or a baby owl or a baby something else totally nocturnal. I am a night person, so I take the pre-4am shift. But the post 4am shift is none too quiet, so that is a pretty restless time for me too. Once 8 or 9 am rolls around, I am wide awake and that's it. No more sleeping possible. I do believe my partner feels the same way about the other shift.

So we've been trying, for the past couple of days to teach Nat about day versus night. My partenr has added this information to her daily tutorial that includes things like "that's your hand. It's attached to your arm. That's your Mama Shannon. This is your crib. That is a door. That's the ceiling." For my part, I have introduced lighting, noise and activity contrasts (lots of them during daytime hours, few of them at night) in the hopes of getting the idea across more experientially.

Any estimates of how long it will be before she catches on and does the five-hours of deep sleep between 2 and 7am instead of between 2 and 7 pm?

Finally, watch this space for a forwarding address soon. Waiting for Nat is about to become something completely different.

Here are some randomly selected thoughts floating through my sleep-deprived brain.

Our friends Cris and Stephanie came to see Nat. They are waiting too, with the same agency, and we told them to get ready, because you never know...

Stephanie shared her new "five-second rule" of "assvice" as the blogosphere refers to it. The rule is "if you can think of it in 5 seconds, I can think of it in 5 seconds." Seems like the perfect come back to all the stupid comments people make when they hear about adoption, open adoption, transracial adoption, glbt adoption, etc. etc. etc...

Cris held the baby for 20 minutes or so, babbling to her about kayaks or something (it was all between the two of them) and fell hard and fast. Later, she congratulated us on our luck of having an "objectively, truly aesthetically pleasing baby." Now, it's not that I don't agree with the aesthetically pleasing part, but at that point, there was nothing objective about Cris's judgement.

*******************

One would think that an exhausted new mama, after feeding her baby to sleep in the rocker at 1:20 am would put that baby into the new Amby Baby Hammock which she loves to sleep in, and go the heck to bed.

But do I do this?

No. I sit and stare, transfixed by her into the wee smalls. By the time I finally decide to go to bed, it will be 15 minutes to her next bout of hunger.

I am a fool for love.

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I love the New Native sling a nice internet pal sent our way. Nat loves it too. Thanks in no small part to this, my kitchen is clean for the first time since last Friday.

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Last, but not least, here are some photos of my objectively beautiful daughter and my objectively hot paramour:

The Ofoto album works for me, so I'm guessing it's some kind of weird password thing. But here are some highlights. If THIS doesn't work, let me know and I will upload some to my own domain, but really, like I have time for that! Come on, Ofoto!

She's changing so fast, she doesn't even look like this anymore. Her birth-canal cone head is nice and round now and her face is less squished and swollen and she looks like herself now, instead of a generic baby. She lost her cord stump this morning while Uncle Sash was changing her. Any ideas what to do with it? I don't feel like I can just throw it away!

And, drumroll, please....
At the doctor yesterday, seems she weighed in at 6 lbs and 10 oz. That's up from Friday's discharge-low of 5 lbs, 5 oz.

I told you she was a genius!

Uncle Sasha sings to Nat:



Nat sings back:



Uncle Grant cradles Nat in huge hands:



Uncle David teaches Shannon a better swaddling technique:



Cousin Aviva rocks!



Auntie Kal is the softest so far:



Nat gets to know Cole-Mom:



Uncle Sasha introduces Gatsby to Nat:



We are family!

I think I got enough sleep in the car on the way home from Chicago today to write somewhat coherently. And I want to get it down before I forget a single thing.

Here's what happened to Mama Shannon and Mom Cole:

We got a phone call on Thursday afternoon. A birth mother had just been by the agency, having given birth two days before, and the social worker, Emily, thought we'd be a perfect match. We heard the briefest of descriptions of the baby and her health and were asked to make a decision within about two hours.

The first person we called was Dr. Wayne, Nat's godfather-to-be. He gave us all kinds of good questions to ask, since our brains had ceased functioning and our hearts had taken over. We were able to pass the questions on to Emily who talked to a nurse who had been caring for Nat at the hospital. The nurse gave all good answers to our questions. Then she added that Nat was a "sweet little pixie."

That pretty much sealed the deal. We said yes.

The birthmother was going to meet Emily again, Friday morning to sign relinquishment papers, so we went to bed not knowing for sure whether she would do it, or whether she would decide to take Nat home after all. But somehow, we both just had the feeling that she knew what she wanted and this was it. And somehow we had the feeling that this baby was destined to be Nat.

At 10:30 Friday morning, Emily called to say "you have a daughter!" The birthmother (whom I want to call "Rose" but that's not her real name) had signed, and the hospital had agreed to release the baby and could we please come to Chicago immediately with the placement fee in cash?

It took us an hour to get the placement fee in cash (Huzzah! USAA Federal Savings Bank for their customer service. We had planned to set aside an expected chunk of change NEXT month for this purpose, but God had other plans...) and then we hit the road.

Of course, it was the longest trip to Chicago we've ever made. AND we got stuck in traffic. But we got to the agency's front door at 4:30, looked at each other, kissed, and headed inside.

There was Emily with a little yellow blanket about the size of a coconut. We must have been lunging in her direction, because she said "no, no" and made us go sit at a big table. Then she put the bundle in my arms and pulled back the blanket, and we saw what you can see below, in the second photo. We got to have a few pictures, and then Emily handed us a stack of papers, which we signed in short order. The agency gave us a bag of new parent stuff from the hospital and off we went, back home again, by about 5pm.

Suddenly, we are parents.

Nat was all the rage at the restaurant where we stopped to eat and feed her and change her diaper in Kankakee. Everyone wanted to know why on earth we were carting around a three day-old baby in a public restaurant, so a lot of people heard our business. She was a star, though, and we didn't let anyone get too close.

The agency told us that the two main reasons they chose us for Rose's baby (she let them choose, but they listened carefully to her preferences) were that 1. we had lots of close friends who are African American and will be important in the baby's life and 2. we wanted an open adoption. So they scheduled a meeting for Monday morning (ie: another long round-trip to Chicago in two days!).

So last night we bundled her into the carseat/infant torture device yet again and headed to a hotel right around the corner from the agency. This morning we bundled her in a million blankets (it had to be snowing) and walked her over to the office to meet her birth mother.

And this is where I can say, "meanwhile this is what happened to Mama Rose..."

When Rose got pregnant with Nat, she decided not to tell anyone at all. She has three kids now, and lives with two other family members and she decided the house was too small and money too scarce to do right by all four of them, but she knew that her family would pressure her to bring the baby home, and insist that they could make it work.

That's because there is a lot of love in Rose's family and for her children.

So she hid the pregnancy for NINE months! She is pretty small, so we were amazed that she could do this, but when we saw her swallowed up in her winter parka, we supposed big sweatshirts on her could cover a lot. She finally told one very close family friend who she knew would support her decision, and that was who she called at 3am when her water broke on Tuesday morning. By the time he got to her house to pick her up and take her to the hospital, Nat was already born! She looked at her watch and it was 3:26, but the hospital said 3:40, because that's when they arrived at the emergency room.

So it happened for her even more suddenly than it happened for us.

The hospital was very understanding about the adoption (unlike other hospitals the agency has worked with, according to Emily). She told them she didn't want to hold the baby, and they respected her wish and when she was discharged, she went to look through the window. She told a social worker at the hospital what she wanted to do and that social worker called our agency. Within a few hours of leaving the hospital she met with Emily.

She told Emily she had no problem with same-sex couples or white parents, with the caveate about Black adults in the baby's life. When Emily asked if she was interested in contact with the adoptive family, Rose was shocked. She didn't know that was a possibility. When we saw the intake paperwork later, Emily had written "wants contact very much" and underlined it twice.

We wanted contact very much, too, so Emily decided to choose us, even though we were not really at the very top of the first page yet! We were surprised to hear that most adoptive parents don't want contact. But the agency told us that was the case, in spite of the fact that all their workshops focused on the benefits of open adoption. Friday morning, when Emily met with Rose, she told her all about us (she still didn't have our profile) and Rose was really comforted by what she heard of us and she later said it made signing much easier for her.

When we met her today, we were so thrilled. She is a beautiful woman and she brought us pictures of her beautiful children. She told us little stories about how smart her kids are. They are quick talkers and early readers and naturally talented at music and computer technology--in spite of living in poverty and having lousy school options.

Rose herself is one heck of an impressive person. She described herself as "nice, but can sometimes be stubborn or get an attitude." In other words, a perfect woman for this family! She has quite a bit of stubbornly obtained education and she said that while Math had been her best subject in school, reading was--and still is--her favorite thing to do. She and I have in common that our mothers chastized us for reading too much as children. When I told her my father had owned a bookstore, she said "oh that would have been heaven to me!"

Most impressive of all, she was stubborn enough to hide Nat for nine months in order to put Nat where she felt she'd be the safest. This morning, while getting dressed in the hotel room, it struck me how much that was like baby Moses getting carefully hidden and then floated out precariously, but hopefully on the river, with big sister Miriam watching nearby and getting her mother for his nurse when the princess found him.

In short, Rose is my hero!

She has a beloved, deceased gay uncle, who was her closest adult male relative when she was growing up. She said he was out to everyone in her family and there were lots of gay family friends, so it had never crossed her mind that there was anything wrong or bad about gay couples or gay parents. She was quite happy that Nat would have plenty of mothers. At one point, towards the end of our meeting, she said "I can't imagine her now, with anyone but you." And we can't imagine any birth mother but her.

It's definitely a match made in heaven. And we are thrilled that Nat seems to have her beautiful eyes.

Thanks to:

Emilie
Kerry
Lyndsay
Mary
Michelle
Sarah
Tish
Desiree
Abigail
Beth
Harmony
Courtney C.
Courtney M.
Lori
Kim
Laura
Carrie
Nathalia
Tracy M.
Annie
Tracy B.
Anna
Linzey
Nicole
Elizabeth
Kristen
Elana
Erica
Ruth
Heidi
Elizabeth A.
Jill
Stephanie


for writing their Congressional reps via the "protect Nat's family" link.

Nat is very little and could use all the protection she can get!

here is today's ofoto album. Let me know if you can't see it.

it features nat with many eager aunties, uncles and cousins--nevermind two ecstatic parents--including sasha, grant, david, kal and big cousin, aviva.

well, nat is a "good" eater and sleeper (i never thought it was fair to call babies "good" at basic functions--as if they might be "bad!") but she much prefers someone's arms rocking her to a flat, stationary solitary crib. so i was up until 4 am rocking and feeding, then cole took over until sasha arrived at 7 and we both got to sleep a couple of hours, shower, eat and (in my case) clean the kitchen! sasha is a very good auntie (or uncle) indeed. she rocked nat all morning, fed her and sang through her entire repetoire.

then, nat did that cool baby thing, where she was awake, with her eyes open, and all ready to learn something new. she did that for over an hour. today, she worked very hard on figuring out how to get her fingers into her mouth without poking herself in the eye. i am looking forward to her learning this, as she loses her pacifier a lot (she sleeps with her head turned sideways) and the ability to take care of her own sucking needs would give us both a little welcome autonomy. so i cheered her on. i think she'll have it down by tomorrow, since, as my mother pointed out, it is obvious that she's a genius.

5 pounds, 11 ounces, 18.5 inches
born 22 February, 3 am
home 25 February

Here we are in the agency office meeting Nat for the first time:




Here we are home again, after a long day:




This all happened very fast and we are in shock, but in a good way. We're head-over-heels in love with our fantabulous daughter. She does all the things babies are supposed to do--only she does them better. She's a full-term, healthy baby, but small, and only one of the outfits we have fits her--the preemie size we bought accidentally!

We will get to meet Nat's birthmother Monday morning. So far, we know she is a brave, strong woman who went through serious challenges to do what she thought was best for her child. But today we saw her picture, and she's beautiful, of course!

All your prayers and thoughts and hopes and candles and incense and "come on" songs and crossed digits did the trick.

We are on our way to Chicago to pick up our three day-old daughter, Natasha Marie.

More ASAP.

Just to be extra loud and clear. Everyone please know that I in no way disagree with Wanna Be Mom's sentiment, or am picking any bones with her. Her exact words just happened to be the ones that sent me down a certain thought-path.

In the comments on the Maya Keyes post below, Wanna Be Mom asks:

"Don't you just wish you could go upstairs and make a baby like your straight friends?"

It's a timely question, not only because of my pop-culture induced age-35-anxiety of late, but because the topic of general attitudes to adoption has been opened at The Naked Ovary and just because I do a lot of thinking about this anyway.

And my answer is actually, no, not really. Not exactly. Partly that's because even when I thought I was straight, I had the desire to adopt. I remember my ex-husband telling me he would never want to adopt and me thinking "ha! Maybe after our first bio-kid is school-aged I'll get him to come around to fostering and then to adopting from the foster system." Bad plan for marriage on so many levels, I know. But evidence of an interest in adoption that began for me after taking ecology in the 10th grade and deciding I didn't want to contribute to the overpopulation of the world. (Before you bio-parents jump on me for my bad ecological reasoning let me assure you it has become much more complex since my 16th year and I no longer think my adopted kid will have measurably less impact on the global environment than any bio-kid in the the first world.)

But I also say no, not really, not exactly, because I am an avid follower of several good infertility blogs and I have learned from them that no one should take fertility for granted. Very few people assume they won't be able to just "go upstairs and make a baby" until they've been upstairs for a few months and nothing has happened. It must be a shocking blow to the identity to move from presumptive fertile to not-so-fertile afterall. So part of me does not assume (age aside) that I could get pregnant that way anyway.

And that shift in my thinking about fertitility leads me to the "not exactly" part of my feelings about this. It's not so much that I wish I had the ease of bio-pregnancy straight people are mostly assumed to have (by themselves and others) it's that I wish that straight people would realize that their ease of bio-pregnancy is a privilege, not an entitlement. That's something I think infertiles can begin to realize when they hit that weird wall of suddenly feeling separate from the "rest" of the "normal" world. Coming to terms with infertility--especially after years of expectantly looking forward to pregnancy and parenthood--must feel a lot like coming out in adulthood after years of assuming that this heterosexual thing is going to work eventually. (Which is somewhat different from folks who came out, essentially when they were 5 and knew their whole lives.) It's a sudden loss of privilege that you never even viewed as privilege. So it feels more like a terribly unjust misreading of the world as to who you really are--just another person like anyone, who happened into a less common personal circumstance.

In this culture, we tend to get taught that whatever privileges we possess are "normal" and those who lack them are somehow defective. We might pity them, or we might think they deserve their fate, or we might cheer for their liberation and "equality" but there is something wrong or at least impaired about them, not something lucky or blessed or overly endowed about us. (Off this specific topic but in this general theoretical field, see Peggy McIntosh, of course.)

The whole marriage question is another issue that gets me trapped in a loop I don't really want to be in. In some countries, marriage is just not that big a deal on the "gay agenda" because those places take good enough care of their citizens that marriage is not necessary to provide the things it provides in the United States. Everybody is aware of the health insurance issue, for example. Here's another. I need a secure retirement. I can't get that from my partner without marriage and I plan to be a low-earner in the family as I will follow her jobs and be the primary caregiver. But while she can will me her contributions to her retirement savings, the employer contriutions would be yanked right back by the state upon her demise and I'd be taxed heavily for the half I did get. Without much savings of my own, this would create a big economic problem for me, especially if I happened to have custody of a minor child at the same time.

But in lots of countries, mothers get cash, let alone retirement security for raising kids. So marriage, per se, is less important. In this country, marriage is a privilege, and the financial and social and politcal and familial stability that are awarded through it are only awarded to people with the privilege to marry. Instead of viewing me as somehow disabled by my inability to marry, I guess I wish this country would see that marriage is an unfair, unearned privileged status through which are awarded privileges which look a lot to other cultures like basic human needs.

But I also get really annoyed--perhaps most annoyed--with arguments like the one I made above about retirement, when they are used to explain the need for marriage. I don't need marriage for retirement security. I just need retirement security. Marriage only provides that to people with plenty of privilege anyway. In our case, we are people who would have the privilege of living about 85% on one income and having an exceptionally available, at-home parent if we could only marry. But plenty of married people don't have that privilege, because they don't have jobs with that high income, or they don't have matching retirement contributions from employers anyway. Ditto health insurance. Back when I was a starving, sinlge grad student, I needed health care. The "right" to marry would not have obtained health care for me, absent a spouse who had it to share. That's true for married folks with healthcare-less jobs, for single people of any sexuality, for lots and lots of poor children and other Americans.

When white, middle-class (and higher) glbt folks go around claiming that not being able to marry is "just like" being Black before the Civil Rights Amendment, my blood boils. Not because you can't compare structural inequalities and discrimination. Not because history doesn't repeat itself or because I don't view our troubles as a civil rights issue, but because not enough of those middle class, white glbts have spent two seconds thinking of themselves as overprivileged in non-sexuality related ways. Because racism is not over, post-Civil Rights Amendment--it is just different, and it's not going to go away if we refuse to see it's there. And if we don't address what it's really about, then not only won't it go away, but the structures that keep it in place will keep the possibility of anti-gay discrimination in place too--whether we can ever marry or not.

This has gone far afield, but I guess Wanna Be Mom hit a nerve this week. Because I don't want to be able to do what privileged people get to do, necessarily. I just want everyone to come downstairs and get to know each other, face-to-face, human being-to-human being, and to really care about finding ways to defeat the common enemy who would dehumanize all of us.

As promised, I have added my new entrepreneurial aspiration to the links at right. If you scroll down far enough and squint hard enough, you'll see Lilysea Designs Unique and Custom Jewelry.

A few years ago, I discovered that I enjoyed going into those bohemian little bead stores in trendy parts of towns (many towns) and buying little beads (many little beads), which I then enjoyed sifting through my fingers while delightedly cackling "ha ha! You'll never lay your hands on my fortune Peg-Leg Jack, argh!"

But I wasn't sure what else to do with the little beads, since, much as I am attracted to their shiny colorfulness, I rarely wear jewelry. I made a little jewelry anyway and began unloading what I couldn't wear on my friends in the guise of "thoughtful homemade gifts" (wink wink) but otherwise just wistfully collecting pretty beads and little bits of silver things for putting near beads.

Recently, I made something kind of extra pretty, to wear when we go up to Montreal for our courthouse wedding (don't ask why this hasn't already happened. But feel free to flood the DC Superior Court with requests for proof of my divorce. Maybe an Amnesty International strategy will free the necessary documents. God knows following the instructions on the website EXACTLY will not get a useful response).

Here it is:



And someone who saw it said "wow, I bet you could sell stuff like that." And suddenly, I had an excuse to play with pretty little beads and bits of silver as much as I like without having to keep getting married over and over (not that that probably won't be the case anyway).

So I've been working on getting a nice little base of inventory and a nice little website (it's hand-coded, so be gentle) and figuring out how paypal works. I did all that, and then I began slowly working on getting up the nerve to actually tell people about it when I got my first order (before I officially "opened" the "store" mind you).

It was from my mother.

But a sale is a sale, right? So I decided it was time to broadcast news of my petit bouregios status to the world. Who knows, maybe if I actually make any money, I'll donate it to the ISO. But don't let that stop you from buying early and buying often.

Thanks to Linda, Krista, Stephanie and Joylyn for helping to protect Nat's family.

Much as I enjoy his work, I must take issue with Dan Savage.

It seems the closet lost yet another occupant this week in the person of Maya Keyes, daughter of Illinois carpet-bagger, Alan Keyes, most recently infamous in queer circles for calling Mary Cheney a "selfish hedonist" by virtue of her being a lesbian.

Dan says that though he assumes there is rejoicing across the land, "I can't enjoy this news about Maya Keyes as much as most gays and lesbians. As a parent, you see, I feel Alan Keyes's pain... I can empathize with their desire not to see their children grow up to be one of us because I live in mortal fear of my child growing up to be one of them."

Savage goes on to claim that "my better angels won't let me wish a gay child on anyone for fear of setting myself up for the gay-parent brand of cosmic retribution that Mr. Keyes brought down on his own head... One day some prominent gay or lesbian parent...is going to cringe in horror when Matt Drudge breaks the news that one of our children has become a born-again Christian Republican who condemns his parents for their 'selfish hedonism.'"

Savage suggests that instead of applauding the next queer kid to emerge from a conservative family, "we should all try to be gracious and not succumb to our baser instincts. Because one day it's going to be our turn."

I'm no advocate of gloating nastiness towards anyone. "Pray for those who curse you" and all. But Savage is confused if he thinks that coming out and converting to "born-again Christian republicanism" are somehow equivalent sides of the same coin.

Coming out is a process of finding and accepting and disclosing key and essential information about the self. It is a process of moving from darkness to light and from fear to courage. It is a moral good. It is an underlying core value in lgbt families. It shapes our ethics, is one of the virtues around which we build ultimate meaning.

Movement towards that virtue is something we have every right to applaud and celebrate. A person who chooses to go through that process in the face of the kind of hostility the Keyes have heaped upon their daughter (kicking her out, refusing to pay for her education) deserves to hear our applause, deserves to feel the warmth of our support.

Movement away from the virtue of "coming out" and (living out) is something we grieve, something of which we disapprove, something we discourage, and do not reward, which is only proper and makes sense in an ethical framework of honesty and acceptance.

In other words, Maya's coming out of the Keyes family is not morally equivalent to DJ converting to a right-wing religio-political ideology and turning on his dads. And in this battlefield of values, the last thing we need is some wishy-washy moral relativism suggesting Alan Keyes' pain is the same as ours when we are betrayed by those we love as Maya has been, for example.

My partner and I have very few expectations of our future child. We have hopes. We hope any number of things, mostly that our child will be healthy, happy and grow up in the strong light of love and support and self-esteem. Our only real expectation is that we will love this kid beyond reason. And because we will love this kid, and because we will value our kid as a person who is not just a little extension of us, we know that someday, our kid might well make decisions to be quite different from us. Hence we'll put "Natasha" or "Nathan" on the birth certificate, rather than "Nat" so that when our kid grows up, she or he can choose whatever name most properly fits. If Nat grows up to be a Republican investment banker, well, she can be "Natsha" and pass for someone who wasn't raised by radical pinko freaks.

But I think the chances of Nat becoming a "born-again Christian Republican"--at least in the contemptuous tone Savage means it--are slim. We will be raising our child with those values I listed above: honesty, courage, acceptance, movement towards light. Nat should feel our blessing to become whomever God had in mind when She thought Nat up. My guess is that those aren't the values with which the Keyes raised their daughter, and thus she doesn't find herself in their loving embrace, having stepped through fear into the great unknown of becoming that unique self made in the image of God.

Alan Keyes and Dan Savage may share a fear of their children growing up to become the Enemy. But there is a difference between an enemy that threatens the confines of your rigid, dark little family closet and an enemy that wishes to eliminate you and all your kind from the face of the earth.

Congratulations Maya.
Welcome to the family.
We love you.

We saw a wonderful play in Chicago for my birthday. Intimate Apparel tells the story of a Black woman who makes fancy undies for rich white ladies in turn of the century NYC. It was a lovely production, with fun sets and a fabulous lead actress and lots of scenes of women in lacey corsets (if you must know). Get thee to the Steppenwolf Theatre if you are within 200 miles of the vicinity and give it a look-see.

Monday morning, after a long night's sound sleep (we never sleep well in hotels), we awoke to the panicked call of one of Simon's mothers. It seems the regular nanny had come down with a nasty flu and emergency childcare was needed STAT. My partner was annoyed that she had to go to work and reluctantly kissed us both goodbye only after reflecting on the 15 waiting 20 year-olds who needed her as much, in their own way as an old-souled toddler with language skills well beyond his tender 2.5 years.

So it was just Simon and me for a couple of hours until his other mother finished her teaching for the day and could pick up where I left off. We went to the park, which is conveniently covered with wood chips, protecting us from mud puddles in spite of the rainy weekend we had here. It was very nice to play with a toddler. I know there is something genetically wrong with me, but toddlers and teenagers are my favorite kinds of young persons. Frankly, however, Simon is easy as toddlers go. When his mother left him with me, he looked kind of serious and asked if we could walk to her office and find her. I suggested the park instead and that was pretty much that. No tears, no tantrums; just resigned agreement to move on.

But the almost exciting thing that happened Monday was that while Simon's mother and I were persuading him to eat carrot sticks, rather than strangling my cat, the phone rang. My partner answered and ran into the dining room gesturing at the phone excitedly and mouthing "agency." I looked at Simon's mom, who raised her eyebrows, at which signal, I ran to the other phone extension.

They needed some dumb little piece of paperwork related to my partner's half of the file. It was such a disappointment. I hung up and returned to the carrot sticks and explained. Meanwhile my partner got the details from the agency and finished the call.

The weird thing about it is that the paperwork they needed was supposed to be in the homestudy we had sent to them in October. So why did they suddenly notice it was missing? All we can figure is that the agency wanted to do something significant with our profile, and was double-checking everything before doing this significant thing.

Hey, it may be a thin hope, but we cling to every straw these days. We are SO ready.

We are back from our festive weekend, but before I tell you anything else, I want to thank Laurie, Genevieve, Mary, Naomi, Erica, Donna and Susan for helping to protect Nat's family via our HRC link.

Additional thanks to...
Elsa, Lynne, Sarah, Kay, Lorena and Alicia.


Thanks also for encouraging email from Erica and for singing cats from Pearl and co.!

Mopsa brings us the news:

Kris Gillespie is running for State Senator in Texas.

So it looks like she used the show for PR.

Wow.

Waitress Dreams has a link to Gillespie's email if you'd like to contact her. I told someone this morning I'd rather put her on my prayer list than flame her, but now I see she's volunteered to be under public scrutiny so I will certainly send her a few choice scripture quotes with some suggestions for improving her public witness for Jesus.

You know, there are some doozies in the Hebrew Scriptures about how God hates interracial and transcultural marriage. Another part of the Bible we haven't heard much about since 1967.

My partner and I are kind of addicted to "Wife Swap" one of reality tv's latest attempts to sensationalize Middle America. I even looked up the forms for volunteering to be on the show (while my partner rolled her eyes in the other room, and humored me silently). I figured they needed a good example of a lesbian wife to really round out their concept. Alas, families on the show have to have kids, so it was not to be.

Never mind, happily the Wife Swap producers are way ahead of me! This week's show featured "the lesbians versus the Christians" in a drama that could rival any caged death-match of extreme wrestling.

The thing that bothered me the most about it was that structure of pitting the praying, "Christian" Texans against the dancing dykes of Arizona. I kept shouting at the t.v. that "lesbian" and "Christian" are not mutually exclusive: behold, I am the embodiment of their non-mutual exclusivity! But they asked the straight couple about their religious life extensively and didn't really even touch on this with the lesbians.

Well, trust The Advocate.com to have the scoop before the show even aired. I found this excellent interview with "Nicki" the lesbian left behind while her partner went to teach Jesus Dad to two-step with another man. She had to endure ten-days with a woman that the show portrayed as the demon vixen from hell Texas. Here's some of the untold back story:

Advocate: What sort of changes took place in your family after the show taped?

Nicki: Well [laughs] I mow the grass now. Of course the show was fixated on that. What you didn't see, what wasn't explained well, was that I do all the inside housework already. But I've stepped up and I do it sometimes. And we did learn a little more about how to understand one another.

Indeed, in spite of the fact that the voice-over in the show kept insisting that "Nicki wears the pants" in the lesbian household, Nicki was in fact, the femme half of a butch-femme couple and it was clear that they had a fairly typical butch-femme division of labor. Hey, if I had a yard, you better believe my partner would be mowing it. Not that all femmes would make this choice, of course, but in our case, the kitchen is my domain and my better half takes out the trash, which suits us just fine.

A: Did [your daughter] Elizabeth have any ideas about what religious people were like before this?

N: Yes and no. We're religious ourselves. We attend church every week, and my family is also very Christian. We're just not fundamentalists.

A: Oh, wow, see, because the episode never mentions that y'all go to church too.

N: No they didn't. But whatever. I know I go.

Man, I might not have yelled myself hoarse at the t.v. tonight if they had slipped that little fact in. Given the audacious display of "godliness" from the Texans, they do indeed care very much that America knows they go to church.

This is just the sort of "red/blue" false divide that drives me the craziest. It is ever so convenient for people like James Dobson (no link, sorry, you can look him up) to quote figures of regular church-going Americans to back up his claims to political privilege. But the mere fact of church attendance actually says nothing of a person's "moral values."

In fact, by my idea of biblical standards, that Texan family was sorely lacking. The wife waved her diamond ring at the camera, explaining to us that it was nine karats, and that because of all her material luxuries, she "loved being a Gillespie."

So how many African children lost limbs for those nine karats, I wonder?

And when the prophet Amos said:

Thus says the LORD:
For three transgressions of Israel,
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;*
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals
they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,
and push the afflicted out of the way...

Do you suppose he meant "but not the Gillespies! Their house is just so clean and their kids only watch PG-rated movies, how can I stay mad at them?"

(That's Amos 2: 6-7; but the whole thing is pretty good. I'm afraid the Iraq war would be a bit of a problem too, according to the biblical principals of Amos. How come the Republicans never talk about that part of the Bible, anyway? Oh wait! You know, Amos was a Jew maybe that's it! Synagogue-attenders are obviously not the "base" they are looking for.)

But seriously, folks, back to the Advocate:

A: Did Kris Gillespie ever inspire genuine fear in you?

N: No, I'm not afraid of people like her. Kris [Luffey], on the other hand, there were times when she was [afraid]. She and [Gillespie's husband] Brian had some arguments that didn't make the episode, and she also had to go to church with them. It was "Marriage Amendment Sunday, Call Your Senator Monday" day. So she had to sit through a gay-bashing sermon. And Brian signed an amendment petition in front of her at church. It was very emotional for her.

You know, funny story: when I first read that, I thought she meant it was some kind of marriage-enrichment Sunday for the congregation of the church to work on "amending" the problem spots in their own marriages! That would have been in keeping with the sort of thing I saw growing up in an Evangelical church tradition.

Silly me!

A: In the final moments of the show, did Kris Gillespie actually call you sexual predators?

N: She used those words. She used them from the beginning. She was concerned about her daughter--that my Kris was going to molest her...not that Kris was going to convert her daughter to lesbianism, but that she was literally going to molest her.


A: And while the episode shows you all talking about having learned something about yourselves during the filming, Gillespie announces very clearly and very plainly and in a very unpleasant tone, that you had "brought nothing to [her] table."

N: That really hurt Kris, and that was one of the other reasons she cried at the end. She went to their house and really tried to do some helpful things, buying art supplies for the daughter, giving the kids a little more freedom. [Gillespie] was just incredibly mean-spirited.

And now, why the title of the post?

The show ends with the Gillespie family holding hands around their dinner table, praying over the meal. Kris Gillespie tells God to remember the lesbian family she spent a week with and that "we wish them well."

Huck Finn said it best, folks.

Whatever prayers you say in front of the tv cameras, God knows the truth in your heart.




* The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Thanks to Kelly for helping to protect Nat's family!
Amending to add: Elaine, Emily and Rachel!

Settle down, kids, settle down!

(Just kidding, of course--keep it up!)

My birthday is Sunday, folks. 13 February 1970. That's right, I will be turning 35--the popular media's new expiration date for bio motherhood. Now that I've given it some thought, what formerly seemed an arbitrarily assigned Nat deadline in my subconscious--February--makes transparently freudian sense.

I am such a dupe.

I have been reassurred that in France, women are fertile until age 37, so I am hoping that having been forced to become fluent in (at least written) French to complete my PhD will buy my ovaries a little time.

(By the way, peers of mine: do you remember how, back in high school, they told us if we didn't have babies before we were 30 all of our kids would be freaks to rival the X-men? Now it's 35. Who decides these things? There must be a smoke-filled room somewhere in the secret feminist backlash headquarters.)

The only reason I worry is that while we are very happy to be adopting and would, in fact prefer adoption in the future, should Nat need siblings, is that we are also looking quite seriously into leaving the country in the next 2-3 years. And though the EU is gradually coming on board with the same-sex marriage thing, quite of few of the Eurpean places where our marriage would be valid make it difficult or outright impossible for queers to adopt. So although Nat will be ours forever the minute the adoption judge bangs the gavel, obtaining another adopted kiddo in the future could be problematic.

Hence, if Nat does seem to need a sibling, my uterus may be called to active duty after all.

Still, we are hoping that won't be necessary. Well, anyway, I'm hoping so. My partner has taken her uterus entirely out of the running anyway, so she is just a disinterested bystander either way.

All that is to say, I'll be away for the weekend celebrating the U.S. demise of my ova in Chicago, but I expect you all will have left many greetings upon my return.

Thanks to two different Jennifers!

to Heidi and Michelle for contacting their Congress members via our "Help Protect Nat's Family" link.

FIFTY people have now used our link to write representatives and otherwise do good on our behalf. I can't believe it. The HRC wanted me to spam my friends about our "action page" and I refused to do it. I never suspected fifty strangers would wander by this blog and be so kind. So I orignally had my goal at 10 or so. Then when 8 people used the link, I upped my goal to 15. I kept raising the goal by 5 (and now I've raised it to 60), but 50 deserves an extra big thank you to all of you. If nothing else, you make us feel supported by the vast unknown world "out there" which sends us far too many opposite messages.

So,

xoxoxoxoxoxox

from Nat's folks-to-be!

My partner woke me up about an hour earlier than usual this morning. As I was groggily wondering why, she announced,
"I called the adoption agency!"
We had said one of us would call sometime soon, as we're coming up on four months of waiting this week.

I asked her what they had to say.

It seems we are now quite near the very top of the "second page" (for more on what this doesn't mean, see this post). Additionally, they almost showed a prospective birth mother our profile, but then the birthmother in question decided she wasn't comfortable with a lesbian couple, so they withdrew ours.

In general agency news, they placed three babies last week, as the "slow down" of last month has "picked up." The woman at the agency told my partner the placements tend to happen in spurts and she thinks it's possible we'll get a baby "soon."

She almost immediately regretted saying something as concrete as "soon" and tried to sputter some kind of retraction, but my partner assured her we wouldn't hold her to it. I wouldn't say we're an overly emotionally vulnerable adopting couple. Maybe we're a three or four on a scale of one to 10. But we are as impatient as the next hopeful-parent couple, if our bouncing around excitedly this morning is any indication.

So, still not really news, but for no news, it felt like pretty good news at that.

For your paper-bound, parent-reading pleasure, catch this month's article "Body Language" in Nick Jr. Magazine, by my fellow writing group member, Jody.

**************

Thanks to Kimberly for using the "Help Protect Nat's Family" link to write her Congress members about Son of the FMA.

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New to the blogroll is Sara Skates. Sara and her partner have two kids, 7 and 4. Seems that Sara is one of those fabulous smarty-smart type women more people should be reading. She is also part of the glbt knitting cult. I really don't get you people and I hope to keep it that way. I have too many hobbies already. More on one of them, soon.

**************

Down at the bottom of the links at right, I have added a "crass commercialism" section. Many times, I have contemplated getting the google ads or some similar scheme promising to make me rich in the service of capitalism, but I have always resisted. However, while riches may not seduce me, free tea will. Adagio Tea is bribing folks to link them, thus heightening their google status, by giving away free tea and tea accessories as a reward. As a tea snob--I mean, afficianado--I am so all over that.

But then I thought hey, why not add my own little cottage industries too? I have long been contemplating adding a "Lilysea's Pithy Bumper Sticker of the Month" to this site. So, the first is courtesy of my father who coined it on 3 November of last year. Check it out. All proceeds from this month's sticker go to a commercial-free website I adore, Indie Bride: come for the wedding preparation, stay for the smart chicks.

As for the third item on the list, all will be revealed as soon as I get enough spare time to get things up and running.

Dear Secretary Spelling,

I am alarmed by a recent report by the Associated Press suggesting that as many as 30% of public high school students in the United States do not know what rights are protected in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, when shown a copy of the First Amendment, many students believe it "goes too far" in protecting the rights of free expression of U.S. citizens.

As a teacher with experience teaching American literature, history and culture in both public and private high schools as well as both public and private universities, I am afraid that I am not entirely surprised by this report. My college students often show up in my classroom with very little knowledge of either U.S. history or the important civic information needed by a responsible voter.

I would expect that as the secretary of education, you would consider it a first priority to assure that our public schools are producing responsible, actively engaged citizens. This has always been my goal as a teacher and my primary concern when determining what material I teach and how I teach it.

I am also sure that as an appointee of an administration that is constantly declaring its devotion to "freedom" and "liberty" that it would be your first priority to make sure our own children are not simply being recruited to risk their lives for their country--via the new military recruitment rules in the USA PATRIOT Act, for example--but are being educated to understand what it is about their country that so many of our heroes from the Constitution's authors to freedom bus riders have found to be worth dying for.

Given that your first public act as education secretary was to threaten the Public Broadcasting Corporation with withdrawal of government funds if it refused to censor its content (I refer, of course to the "Sugartime" episode of PBS Kids' "Postcards from Buster") I am not certain you yourself realize what is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Allow me to share it with you:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I hope that as a guardian of these sacred words, you will issue an immediate apology to the public to whom "public" broadcasting belongs, and redouble the efforts of your department to assure that no American leaves high school without a clear understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Sincerely,

Shannon

The Future of the First Amendment Report