Foolish Child #89: Child’s Play

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You Need Help: Should I Cut Off My Racist Dad?

Q:

My dad was bombarding me with right-wing, racist rhetoric all weekend via text message after he saw on Facebook that I was posting in support of Black Lives Matter. I told my dad that “politics” are off the table with me and tried to do an “agree to disagree” kind of thing. 

He ignored me and kept sending me “political” things, some of which I found to be vile. I put “political” in quotes because I know this isn’t a political issue — it’s an issue of morals — but when speaking to him, I referred to it as a political issue anyway. I know that was wrong. I told him for the good of the family I cannot discuss political issues with him. I want to fully acknowledge that the fact that I feel I have options here at all, I owe to white privilege.

He seems to have accepted that, but now that I’ve had time to process, I’m not sure that choosing to “agree to disagree” is something I can live with without feeling a lot of guilt. My family is part of the problem, but if I choose to just ignore this fact, do I become part of the problem too? I feel pretty certain that I can’t change his mind.

I love my family. I’m afraid that if I try to talk with my dad about all this, that he will say something so deplorable that I won’t be able to maintain the relationship. I also know that if there is a rift, I will be seeing my little siblings less. I have already been absent for so much of their lives because I have had to cut off this part of my family before to heal from childhood wounds they helped create. I don’t know what to do.

A:

When the people who raised us spout racist rhetoric, we want to look away, but when we “agree to disagree,” we’re ending a conversation that could have been generative. I’m answering the question under the assumption that you and your family are white. White people face a lifelong process of unlearning racism. When other white people refuse to do that work, we have to take responsibility for our own community.

You said you’ve previously distanced yourself from your family due to “childhood wounds.” If those wounds are mostly healed and your dad isn’t harming you personally, then it’s on you to maintain some version of the relationship and stay in conversation about racism.

In those conversations, you’ll probably see an ugly side of your dad. I know you love your dad, but you don’t have to like him. Learning more about his convictions might make you feel disappointed or embarrassed, but his racism isn’t affecting you directly. Continuing the dialogue will feel uncomfortable, but it will never feel as uncomfortable as being personally harmed by racism every day.

If you engage your dad in conversations about racial justice, you’re also setting an example for your younger siblings, who are currently being socialized into your dad’s way of thinking. If they watch you confront your dad, they’ll learn how to recognize ignorance, and if you speak to them directly and provide them with kid-friendly resources, they’ll grow up to be much better people.

Confronting your dad’s racism might feel hopeless, but people can and do change. I’ve seen this firsthand in my own family. Sometimes it takes a specific approach. Sometimes it just takes time. Overall, it’s easier to get through to the people who love us. Addressing racism within our own families is the least we can do as co-conspirators in the racial justice movement.

Autostraddle writer Abeni Jones recently published this comprehensive guide outlining ways in which white people and non-Black people of color can talk to our white friends and families about racism. Please read Abeni’s article! Then consider these approaches that have helped me talk to my own family:

Find what you agree on. Then find the contradictions.

If your dad is back in your life, I’m guessing he’s not a total monster. You probably agree on some basic moral principles, like “people deserve respect” and “everyone deserves to be treated fairly.” Establish those shared principles. Revisit them when your dad contradicts his own standards. Check out Abeni’s advice about building off your dad’s existing values.

Share your own ignorance.

I’m sure there was a time when you were less informed about racism than you are now. If you talk to your dad about where you started and how you evolved, he’ll have an easier time relating to you and might be more willing to listen.

Don’t interrupt.

Letting your dad complete his racist thoughts might feel senseless, but he needs to feel heard. If your dad feels invalidated, he’s more likely to shut down. Plus, you’ll have an easier time countering his arguments if you’ve actually seen them through. Remind your dad that you listened respectfully if he tries to interrupt your response.

Assume the best.

If you treat your dad like he’s hateful, he’ll probably feel too defensive to hear you. Speak to him like he already agrees with you — he just doesn’t have the right information.

Personalize it.

Your dad might not have any people of color in his life. It might be hard for him to understand racism when he can’t connect it to a specific person he cares about, but you can build a bridge. Share the experiences of your friends and coworkers of color. Tell him that you worry for their safety. Even if your dad can’t access compassion for strangers, he can probably empathize with his own kid.

For more anti-racist resources, check out this reading list and this history of Black liberation.

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You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

Raising Anti-Racist Kids: A Guide and Book List for White and Non-Black POC Parents

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual. We will be celebrating Pride as an uprising. This month, Autostraddle is focusing on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

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“I’m glad I don’t need to talk to him about it, though.”

I was picking my daughter up from a babysitter’s house. I don’t remember which police murder of a Black person it was that sparked the convo, but it was well over a year ago. I don’t remember who introduced the topic. I do remember that I mentioned how uncomfortable I am with the amount of pro-police messaging in children’s media, which took us down the path of how to talk to our kids about the police.

Our kids had both developed an interest in Paw Patrol, despite neither of us desiring our kids to watch it. My neighbor had a no screen time rule. I thought it was too much pro-police propaganda. My babysitter, whose kid played with my kid while she babysat, is a smart, politically progressive white woman. She and I agreed that it was false to teach all kids that the police would protect and help them, though our kids probably could assume that implicit bias would work in their favor. Her kid is white and mine is a light-skinned Asian.

She glanced at her kid and said, “I’m glad I don’t need to talk to him about it,” and what she meant is that she recognizes her own privilege to not have to have “The Talk” with her kid like she would if her kid was Black or brown. What she meant is that she didn’t know how to have that convo with a little kid whose limited police interactions have been friendly and relatively positive, that police don’t routinely patrol our neighborhood, that her husband isn’t frequently detained just for walking down the sidewalk in our city neighborhood. What she also meant is that she didn’t feel equipped to have the conversation or think it was her place to do so.

“I think we do need to talk to our kids,” I replied gently. “They need to know that it’s not OK to call the police on a Black person and that police can’t always be trusted.” She nodded and thought about it. It’s a conversation that white parents and Asian parents and all parents have to have as we raise the next generation or we’re never going to dismantle white supremacy. If allies to Black and brown people are serious about being anti-racist, we have to do more than chant “Black Lives Matter!” We have to start within, including within our own homes and families. Protecting our children from hard conversations about race is actively aiding and abetting white supremacy and we can’t afford to stay complicit for a second longer.

It can still be hard to know where to begin talking about race, police brutality, and Black Lives Matter, but it’s something we have to do. George Floyd’s daughter, Gianna, is six-years-old and she’s heard people in the streets chanting her daddy’s name. Whatever discomfort you and I may have about talking about this with our kids, we have to be better.

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Don’t Sugarcoat the Truth

Age-appropriate conversations don’t have to be vapid. Be age-appropriate, but not so vague that they don’t understand what you’re talking about. Kids know so much more than we think they do. All that my partner and I have been talking about lately are the protests, police, and the current state of the world. It’s a lot, especially in the middle of a global pandemic, for a child to pick up through osmosis, but I guarantee you that Remi overhears us. She’s picking up a lot of info about how we’re feeling and how the world is feeling.

Over lunch this past weekend, we watched the live stream of the rally in our city as a family. Remi was annoyed because she wanted to watch her shows and because she didn’t fully grasp what folks were talking about in the speeches, but we told her it was important. I asked her after we’d watched a few people speak, “How do you think these people are feeling?” She reflected for a few seconds.

“Sad,” she replied.
“Anything else?” I asked. She paused again.
“Angry!”
“Yes, honey, that’s right. They’re sad and angry. Do you know why?”

And we had an age-appropriate talk about how people are treated differently because of what they look like and the color of their skin. We told her a man had died because the police treated him unfairly and hurt him so much that he died. We talked about protests and what the people we were watching were doing. She took it all in the way a three-year-old does, and then finished her lunch and got down from the table to go play. It’s not the last time we’ll talk about it. Knowing Remi, she’ll pop up with more questions eventually. It’s certainly not the first or last time I’ve talked to her about the police treating people unfairly.

For older kids and teens, you can be even more direct. Remember that some well-meaning people think LGBTQ issues and identities are too “adult” to talk to kids about. Remember that Black kids are getting The Talk from a very young age and seeing people who look like them hurt and dead and talked about badly on the news. Your silence is a statement on how much you care about Black lives and your children are listening.

Help Them Hold Their Fear and Anger

Your kid may react in a lot of different ways. It’s possible they’ll be worried about their Black and brown friends and become very scared for them. They may become fearful of the police. Or they may become very angry at the injustice and not know how to deal with that anger. No matter how they react, we have to be there for them to process what they’re feeling.

I’ve seen many adults in my feed taking their kids to protests and rallies, of all ages, some for the first time. You could make protest signs together and hang them in your street-facing windows. You could help your kid raise money or donate together to bail funds, Black-owned and led organizations, and social justice organizations. You could write letters to elected officials together to advocate for defunding police in your municipal budget or taking other actions being led and demanded by Black organizers.

You can read more books about racism and becoming anti-racist together. You can talk about and work on understanding your white privilege and/or anti-Blackness together. You don’t have to have all the exact right answers yourself. You just need to take steps towards helping turn anger and fear into action. You’re modeling how to be an accomplice, a person who goes beyond performative allyship to fighting alongside the most marginalized in solidarity.

Confront Your Own Biases

If you are not Black, you’ve probably been taught to not talk about racism against Black people. If you’re Asian like me, you may have just learned to not talk about race at all. If you’re a non-Black POC, you may have grown up in a family or community where anti-Blackness was the prevailing attitude. If you’re white, you have a lifetime of not being forced to confront or think about race at all. These are all huge hurdles to get over, but you can get over them.

We have been taught a racist and whitewashed version of history ourselves. Our children will likely get that same education in their classroom now. We have to do the work of actively unlearning and getting real with our history and internalized racism and our deep implicit biases ourselves as we do the work with our kids.

Studies show that kids who grow up in families who talk about race are better equipped to speak up about racism and race-related issues as adults. I know that’s like 1+1=2, but a lot of people, white people in particular, still aren’t talking to their kids about race. It’s simple math. It’s time to get over yourself and get to work.

Make Anti-Racism Part of Your Parenting Philosophy

We especially need to talk about police brutality, race, and racism right now. Beyond today, anti-racism is something that needs to be a part of how we parent 24/7. Do a literal race audit of the tv shows, books, movies, and real-life spaces your kids are regularly exposed to.

Is there racial diversity? Other kinds of diversity? Who are the main characters, the ones your kid will most identify with, in the media they consume? Are they always white? Do they perpetuate stereotypes? Who is creating the “diverse” media in your home and community? Is it by people who share the identities of the characters?

What about the places you go? Your kid’s school or educational setting? Your neighborhood? Your favorite restaurants? Your typical grocery store? How often is your kid in white-dominant spaces? How often is your kid exposed to people, viewpoints, and communities outside of your own?

If you’re a POC, how does your family talk about Black people? Is anti-Blackness a part of your heritage? For white people, uh, anti-Blackness is a part of your heritage no matter how your family votes. What are you doing to talk about race and do you do it in front of your kid?

A lot of non-Black people want to know what to do right now and are frustrated with the answer to stay in our lane. There’s actually a lot of work to do in our lane, though, and this is the lasting, long-term work that goes beyond signing a petition or sharing a social media graphic. Undoing anti-Blackness and becoming anti-racist is invisible work. No one is going to pat you on the back. It’s the opposite of performative. It’s the hardest and most impactful work of all, pulling up racism at the root, the root that attaches your own feet to the rancid soil of white supremacy.

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Books for Little Kids

Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazzard
Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness written and illustrated by Anastasia Higginbotham (for white allies in particular)
The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson
Sit-in: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down by Andrea Davis Pinkney
Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters by Andrea Davis Pinkney
Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement by Carole Boston Weatherford
Rosa by Nikki Giovanni
Young Gifted and Black: Meet 52 Black Heroes from Past and Present by Jamia Wilson

Books for Older Kids

Resist: 35 Profiles of Ordinary People Who Rose Up Against Tyranny and Injustice by Veronica Chambers
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
Dear America: With the Might of Angels by Andrea Davis Pinkney
Hush by Jacqueline Woodson
Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice by Mahogany L. Browne
Step Into Your Power: 23 Lessons on How to Live Your Best Life by Jamia Wilson

Books for Parents

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Raising White Kids by Jennifer Harvey (for white allies in particular)
Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla Saad

We’re Stressed the F*ck Out: Practical Tips for Queer Parents in the Pandemic

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Stop Comparing Yourself to Others.

Feel Your Feelings and Let Your Kids Feel Theirs, Too.

Talk About the Pandemic.

Relax the Rules. Keep the Boundaries.

Make Working from Home, Work Better.

• Remember the pros of what you’re doing for your kids. You’re teaching them valuable independence skills by helping them learn to play on their own in a developmentally appropriate way. You’re making money that supports the essential needs of your family. You’re modeling set boundaries and valuing your time. You get to see them for hours every day and watch them grow more intimately than when they’re in school or daycare. You are doing your best.
• Take the advice that works for your family and leave the rest. There’s so much advice out there. Try some things. Take stock of what works and doesn’t. Take your own advice. No one is as much of an expert as you are on what works for you. You are doing your best.
• SCREEN TIME IS FINE. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics has relaxed their guidelines on screen time. When I started working from home full-time, I had to let Remi have a ton more screen time, pretty much during the entire work day. I was worried at first but honestly, it’s been fine. Great, even! She’s super smart. She impresses people with her huge vocabulary and knowledge of literally dozens of undersea creatures and that is very much because of her screen time. So, just know I’m on the extreme end of throwing caution to the wind. If you choose to limit screen time, which is very understandable, don’t feel bad if you need to hand your kid a phone or tablet so you can get through a meeting or work task. They’re going to be ok. You’re not going to ruin their brain. You are doing your best.

Make Time for Self-Care, for You and for Your Kids.

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Raising Baby T. Rex: Marsha Pizza Johnson and Queer Family Matters

When I decided to get knocked up, it was a big deal. If you’ve been reading this column since way back, you know why. Throughout my twenties and early thirties, I thought of myself as child-free by choice. Being a mom horrified me. Not because of the messes or the body horror or the actual being a mom part but because of the way moms are treated and represented. I saw lots of futures for myself, but not one that included “mommy life.”

Then, after a lot of thought, I made a different choice, a life-altering choice. I jokingly thank Waffle for giving me Remi, because even though I birthed her, I probably wouldn’t have any kids if I’d ended up with a partner also wanted to be child-free. Not having kids would have been a valid choice for me; I’m truly happy with the choice I ultimately made.

I did not, however, make it lightly. I had a lot of thinking and planning (and saving money) to do before I was ready to begin. That’s what separates folks whose body parts mush together to make babies from those of us whose body parts do not do that. It takes some time and thank goodness, in my case. I literally needed two full years to overprocess it and sort it out. It’s why I started my first blog, Queer Families Matter, because, as I wrote then on the “About Us” page, “We set out looking for info for queer people having kids. We found there just isn’t a lot out there.”

That personal blog was a starting point for me as a blogger and as a future writer. That was 2013. I got pregnant in 2015. I started writing for Autostraddle in 2014. Before I started writing here, I’d fully given up on myself pursuing writing as anything other than an occasional hobby. When I became a contributing writer for Autostraddle, I wanted to write about politics and race and sex, the things I was most comfortable with! I didn’t plan to merge my wandering parenting thoughts with my paid freelance gig in a meaningful way. I didn’t plan to become a legit mommy blogger. Then I made another life-altering choice and pitched live-blogging my pregnancy.

Here we are. It’s 2020. Remi will turn four this year. I turned 37 in January. Can you believe it?

Some days my life feels mundane and typical. Today is one of those days. I have a very successful sweatpants life, if you know what I mean. I don’t wear shoes every day! I drive an affordable and reliable Hyundai Elantra! I’m counting a room temperature Pop-Tart and spiked seltzer as a midnight snack right now as I write this column! The video monitor that’s set up next to my laptop occasionally crackles as Remi rolls around in her bed between sleep cycles. I’m basically one of those work-from-home moms on Wife Swap.

Then I peek into my world from the outside and feel shocked that this is where I ended up: a parent who writes about parenting, an Korean adoptee with a child from my own DNA, a writer who gets paid to write, a published author, a person who works in feminist media full-time, a professional queer feminist loudmouth who’s held 24 various jobs over my lifetime, a mom who gets actually teary when I think too hard about how much I love my child.

This is not the life I imagined 15 years ago. I’m so glad it’s where I am. I’m glad I got to be here with you all. It’s meant so much to me to share with you and to connect with other queer moms, dads, babas, and parents.

If you haven’t already guessed it, this is my last Baby T. Rex column. Baby T. Rex is the only consistent work I publish on Autostraddle these days. My OG blog, Queer Family Matters, still exists, but I stopped updating it when I started writing Countdown to Baby T. Rex and removed it from my writer bio years ago.

More than any of that, Remi’s getting older. We’re still at the stage where I think she won’t be too embarrassed by the column, in that I’m writing about her as a little, little kid and we were all little, silly kids once. However, she’s going to be old enough fairly soon that she’ll have a concept of what she wants to share publicly and privately. She’s on the cusp of learning shame. She’s going to realize the internet is not just for watching Pinkfong videos. I don’t want to take this blog too far or too late.

I recently read Darlena Cunha’s piece in The Washington Post about her reasons for quitting mommy blogging and she really resonated with me. Mommy blogging was hitting peak saturation about 10 years ago and now many of the kids of mommy bloggers are preteens and teens. Some mommy bloggers quit because of respecting their kid’s privacy as their kids got older and some quit when their kids demanded that they stop as embarrassed and overexposed preteens. I definitely feel that.

Cunha, however, adds another dimension to this convo. She ended her mommy blog because she doesn’t want to set the norm that sharing every detail about yourself for comments, shares, and clicks is a normal boundary for her kids. Like me, she isn’t as worried about privacy, per se, but about what it means to engage with “the blurred line between virtual and real” and making that blurred line the norm as kids are growing and developing. There’s a big difference between sharing photos on my personal social media accounts and writing a column for a website with 3.5 million views per month. I’ve decided to take a break on the latter.

As Dunha writes, “I did not quit mommy blogging to preserve their autonomy and grant them the privacy they deserve as independent human beings. They would give me their consent to continue in a heartbeat. Being public does not bother them at all. And that is why I quit. Not to preserve their privacy but to salvage their desire for such privacy so that as they become adults there is something there to preserve at all.”

I took a hiatus between Countdown to Baby T. Rex and Raising Baby T. Rex specifically because I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to share about Remi. Pre-birth, the column was 100% about me and my experience being a pregnant person. Raising Baby T. Rex steps back and forth over the line between my personal story and telling Remi’s stories. As she gets older, I want her to be able to tell her own stories and control her own narrative and set her own boundaries around digital privacy.

I don’t have regrets about writing about my parenting decisions and parenting life. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a birth story. As an adoptee who was abandoned anonymously, I don’t have and will probably never have a time or place or space of origin. I had to make up my own stories about my beginnings. I was told different stories about myself from adults, many that were likely untrue. Remi has a well-documented known origin and I’m glad I wrote it all down. I’m glad she has that here, in my words, with hundreds of affirming comments from ya’ll along the way. I’m glad I shared it so other queer people can see themselves just a little bit in the narrative of parenting. I feel proud of this work. This column is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written.

I also want Remi to be able to write and narrate her own life. I owe her that as someone who had to reclaim my story. While you’ll still see pics of our family on social media and such, this will be the last time I write about Remi on the wide internet.

Since I began writing about queer parenting, I have seen more parenting narratives that include trans and queer folx, queer parents of color, nonbinary parents, queer and trans parents of different socio-economic backgrounds. I welcome them. There’s still not nearly enough. I’m going to leave you with the final paragraph from the “About Us” page of Queer Family Matters. It’s still true. I’m still hungry for more.

“We appreciate the lesbian and gay trailblazers who came before us, but we also see what is missing from the queer parenting conversation. Queer parents want info and support that is inclusive of gender non-conforming folks, of trans parents, of families with one or more bisexual/pansexual parents, of people raising kids that don’t want to be ‘just like’ heterosexual families.

We want to talk about parenting and family-making at the place where family issues meet NOT ONLY sexual orientation, but also race, class, gender, and more. Ya’ know, queer family matters. Because queer families matter.”

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4 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Things I Definitely Said Out Loud This Month

• You’re my favorite sea otter.
• I’m sorry. I don’t know how to use the shark x-ray. (It was an Etch A Sketch)
• Oh, I see. That’s your pirate sister.

2. Your Mama By Any Other Name

Remi started calling me “mama” recently and I don’t know why, but it’s very cute the way she says it. Maybe that’s just me. I don’t know! I think it’s cute.

http://www.instagram.com/p/B8nBVyVhKLN/

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3. Parenting Things I Googled This Month

• best sleeping temperature for toddler with a cold
• snow day activities for toddlers
• tips disney cruise with a toddler
• three year old developmental leap
• growth spurt three years old

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4. Give The Children a History Lesson

http://www.instagram.com/p/B7_ZhMsB36m/

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Raising Baby T. Rex: How Being a Mom Changed My Mind About Abortion

The protestors outside of the Planned Parenthood office I worked at eventually started heckling me by name. I knew their names, too, the regular ones, at least. The ones who owned the so-called crisis pregnancy center in the plaza next to our office. The ones who shrieked at us as we went into the office to do our jobs. The ones who hurled emotionally abusive insults at patients, pleading with them to save their babies, calling them murderers and sinners as the patients ignored their pleas. It was a regular part of my day when I worked for a Planned Parenthood affiliate in my early-to-mid twenties.

I started to take pride in the ways these zealots obviously followed me and my work in our community. They started tailoring the insults to be about my queerness, specifically. They’d yell that I was a dyke and that I was going to hell for being gay as well as for being a murderer. Mostly, it didn’t matter too much to me. We had a large parking lot. They couldn’t get physically close.

There were times when I got scared, though, like when I stayed late into the evening and was the last one out and had to walk to my car alone. Or this one time after dark when I saw a small, bright red light shining towards the building from inside a black SUV that was pulled up right outside the door. It turned out to be a light from a handheld device and the guy parked against the curb was picking up our medical sharps. Still, I had a momentary thought that it could be a sniper rifle just waiting for a worker to come into view.

I was just an entry-level community organizer. I can’t imagine how our abortion doctor and medical staff felt. Or our CEO. If you’ve never worked in an abortion provider’s office, you might not know that they usually have bulletproof glass around the reception desks or that the mail is all pre-opened by an administrator wearing latex gloves (in case there are harmful powders or sinister items in the envelopes). If you have worked in an abortion provider’s office, you know these things are routine and eventually become quite normalized.

Ironically, the first time I had anti-abortion hate mail delivered specifically to me was during my first week at my new job, in a small office of the ACLU of NY. We were a tiny staff of two. We didn’t have bulletproof glass or a secure entry or a process for opening suspicious mail. It was fine. It was just a hateful note and some literature. I was suddenly aware, though, of how much I took all those security measures for granted.

It’s still a dangerous time, even more dangerous, I might argue, for patients, medical providers, staff, and activists working in the repro health, rights, and repro justice fields. That hasn’t changed. It may even be worse.

I realized on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade this year that it’s the first year since 2005 that I haven’t been working for an org that is actively engaged in repro rights work. I will always align myself with the repro justice movement, even when I was working within more repro rights-based organizations. (There’s a difference between repro rights and repro justice.) I definitely see my current job at Bitch Media as aligned with repro justice. However, my role there isn’t directly engaged in advocacy and for the first time I am not a part of the organized movement in my professional or personal life. That’s a big shift for me.

The second reflection that came to me on the Roe anniversary was that I am even more committed to abortion access as a mom and as an adoptee. As an adoptee, I always felt a little tension between the narrative that adoption was the “ethical choice” pushed by evangelicals and extremists. I was afraid to speak ill of being adopted. Obviously, it worked out for me! But the reality is that pregnancy and giving birth is not an easy peasy thing. Separating a newborn baby from the person who carried them and shared blood with them for ten months is not as easy as filling out adoption paperwork. I didn’t know how to articulate it until I had my own, very planned, costly, mostly easy pregnancy and childbirth.

Now I know. There’s an emotional impact that’s innate to pregnancy at every stage. There are reactions you don’t know you’re going to have and, whether you want it or not, a very real physical tethering between you and the little fetus alien t-rex zapping your nutrients and energy. Even if you can ignore or don’t have any maternal or parental attachment to your pregnancy, pregnancy does stuff to your body that’s just goddamn hard. It affects your ability to work and keep employment, in some cases. It affects your relationships with other adult humans. It affects how people see you and react to you. It makes you feel out of control of your own body and I can only imagine that it’s much worse if you didn’t feel that you were able to make the deeply personal decision to be pregnant on your own terms.

I was proudly pro-abortion before I was a mom. I’ve doubled down on that belief after becoming one. What once seemed common sense to me — people should be able to make their own decisions about health care, pregnancy, and parenting — has become even more radical. It is inhumane to deny a person the agency to make their own informed, stigma-free decisions about abortion, adoption, birth control, and parenting. I believe that with my whole soul.

The sidewalk protestor in my head is saying, “What if your mom had aborted you?” That’s a real thing they’ve yelled at me, ya’ll. As an adoptee, it always stung in a particularly abandonment-triggering way. Now, honestly, my answer would be:

“If I could go back and give my parent or parents the freedom to have an abortion if they wanted one, I would wholeheartedly want that for them. I was abandoned, left completely alone when I was just one-year-old, and I’m extremely lucky that my life is as rich and safe and full of love as it is. Adoptees experience real harm from being given up for adoption, even at a young age. Gestational parents experience real harm from being made to give their children up, particularly if they were led to believe that was their only choice. Being happy for my life and deeply loving my family is not the same as believing that my gestational parent should have been made to carry me to term. If my ‘mom had aborted [me],’ that would have been her decision and I wouldn’t be here to have an opinion about it and that truly is a-OK with me.”

When I look at Remi, I feel such joy and I know what it means to make a parenting decision completely on your own terms. I also think, “Wow, I never want to be pregnant or raise a newborn again.” I can make that decision. To have that option is a huge privilege, one I will always fight for every person to have.

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3 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Things I Definitely Said Outloud This Month

• I said no food in the bathroom.
• No way. You can not hide those in my crotch.
• Head-to-back: You can only pet the cat in one direction.
• Do you need to go in time out… or are you going to put your shirt on?

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2. Waffle’s Newest Snow Baby

Big surprise. Remi loves the snow! We’re officially past the age where we get excited about snow. We live in a four-season region of the Northeastern United States. Snow is pretty for a second and then you have to leave your house and it’s a lot less enjoyable.

As with anything, kids make snow more bearable because they love it so much. Every morning before school, Remi tries to get every last second of snow time before I make her get in our car.

http://www.instagram.com/p/B7JXoemhRqP/

She also “helps” us shovel the driveway and sidewalk and her new favorite thing is being buried under the snow (only when she has snow pants on). She even, somehow, got us to lie down in the snow, which is quite a thing because it is not 100% definite that either of us will be able to get back up.

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3. Baby T.’s First Chopsticks!

For Christmas, Remi got a pair of training chopsticks (with a rice spoon!) and she’s so happy using them! Whenever I’d use chopsticks, she wanted in on the action, but she could only wield one at a time and her technique was primarily stabbing.

http://www.instagram.com/p/B6ya36HB_Fx/

I’m happy to be starting her early. I learned how to use chopsticks from the back of a paper wrapper in a Chinese restaurant. I just finally got my own Korean chopsticks (with rice spoons!) this Christmas. I’m trying to level up my Korean culture. Baby steps!

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Raising Baby T. Rex: Happy Holigays Are Here Again

Happy Holigays! If you were celebrating this week, I hope it was lovely. If you didn’t have a holiday to celebrate this week, I hope you got some sweet free time back to yourself and some free sweet treats from holiday-celebratin’ friends with surplus baked goods.

This is the first holiday season that Remi is really fully aware of and super-duper stoked about what’s going on. This is not, as we had hoped it would be, the first year that Remi would look like she was enjoying seeing Santa at the pay-to-sit station at the mall. That said, she and Santa had this exchange while she was acting shy and overwhelmed.

Me, trying to gently nudge Remi towards Santa because there was a long-ass line and she suddenly decided she didn’t want any part of this experience after talking about it for days: “Remi, tell Santa what you want for Christmas!”

Remi, whispering to the floor so quietly that no one could hear her except me: “I want dragon eggs.”

Mall Santa, leaning towards Remi kindly and trying to get through the day honestly: “What do you want for Christmas? Do you want a doll?

Remi, whispering slightly louder but still inaudible to Santa: “I want dragon eggs.”

Me, trying to move this situation along: “She wants dragon eggs, Santa.”

So anyway, Santa brought her dragon eggs for her stocking and one very large and fancy How to Train Your Dragon play set that says on the actual box as a warning to adults that it will take two hours to put together. Two hours! This was obviously Waffle’s job because I don’t read instructions and like to just figure it out as I go, which often does not go well when dealing with Ikea-level toy construction projects.

Remi’s first Christmas, she was just under four months old and we didn’t get her any gifts. We let our families do the spoiling and took a picture of Remi with a stocking filled with toys she already owned. She truly didn’t care and couldn’t even sit up by herself, so we thought, why make it a big thing?

http://www.instagram.com/p/BObSbwXgNSt/

Remi’s second Christmas, she was just old enough to sort of open the wrapping paper and to understand getting new toys, but didn’t really grasp the concept of the holiday. We didn’t even get a tree in 2017 because we were afraid our extremely active one-year-old would topple it or make a mess of it. So we got a felt tree that you hang on the wall with little velcro-on felt decorations and Remi had a blast with that.

Remi’s third Christmas, she was two and had a lot of fun looking up at the lights on the Christmas tree from beneath the tree, playing with various singing hoilday decorations from Target, and opening presents. She loved watching the train around the tree at Waffle’s parents’ house and sort of understood the concept of present-giving-and-getting.

All three years past with Remi and for the decade as a childfree couple before that, Waffle and I split Christmas Eve and Christmas Day between our families. Our families live about two hours from us in opposite directions, so it was very convenient to do one family celebration, sleep in our own bed, and do the other family the next day. Even last year, while Remi was somewhat excited about Christmas, it didn’t seem worth it to do our own big thing on Christmas at our house. Remi was most interested in playing with new toys and seeing the grandparents.

This year, we spent all of Christmas Day at our own house, just the three of us. Remi is very aware of Christmas this year and was very excited for Santa to come. She had a hard time falling asleep—we watched on the monitor as she quietly tossed and turned—she was so anxious for Santa to come with her dragon eggs. Thank goodness for Remi’s holiday cheer. It saved our holiday season.

On the second weekend of December, Remi starting showing symptoms of a bad virus. Even though we all had our flu shots, she got a nasty flu. I’m so glad she had her shot because if this was the milder version, I don’t want to know what the more virulent version is like. Remi couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to eat, and was sick enough to stay home for a whole week of school.

Soon after, Waffle and I fell ill as well. At some point, I somehow developed hand, foot, and mouth disease?! No one else in the family had it, so I’m assuming I picked it up at the pediatrician’s office when I took Remi during walk-in hours. I’ve never ever had HFMD, ya’ll, and it was torture. It was so painful that I ended up going to urgent care where they diagnosed me and told me there was nothing to do but wait it out. I’m over the virus now, but the skin on my hands and feet are still recovering and the peeling is horrific. Waffle got sick to the point that he also went to urgent care and was diagnosed with pneumonia. PNEUMONIA.

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Ya’ll. It was a bad time in our house this month. We could barely function. With a week left until Christmas, we hadn’t finished shopping, didn’t have one single decoration up, and the house was blanketed wth accumulated mountains of laundry, stacks of dirty dishes, and literal trash. Just…trash that we tied up and couldn’t muster the energy to remove from the house. Had it been just Waffle and I without a small human, I think we probably would have thrown in the towel, called it, and decided to do better next year.

But we do have a small human who is amazing and enthralled with everything, so we rallied. We got a tree at the last minute and Remi encouraged us to put the lights on. We were going to leave it at the tree, but got in the spirit and ended up putting some little decorations out and tidying up the house. It’s a lot of little things. Window clings and door hangers and some tinsel on the tree. I didn’t break out the yards of garland or the elaborate holiday displays. We made it feel like Christmas, though, and what our decor lacks in complexity is compensated for by Remi’s delight in every minute detail.

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We tried to pack all the holiday fun into one week that we could. Remi helped me make cutout sugar cookies. Did I use a mix instead of baking from scratch? Sure did! Did Remi have a great time helping me roll out the dough and cutting out shapes? Heck yeah!

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Remi helped us hang candy canes on the tree in lieu of getting all the boxes of ornaments down from the attic; we added a light smattering of ornaments that were mixed into one of the boxes we did bring down. For the first time, Remi fully understood the concept of Santa Claus and was so excited to leave cookies and carrots (for the reindeer) out for him on one of her ocean-themed plates. We watched holiday specials of her favorite shows and, of course, the new How to Train Your Dragon: Homecoming holiday-themed special (several times).

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On Christmas, we had so much fun sneaking around putting Remi’s presents under the tree and planning a full day of family fun including frosting cookies, a big traditional holiday meal, hot cocoa and pajamas, and, of course, presents. Waffle and I even surprised each other with a few presents for each other, even though we both said we wouldn’t buy anything. Remi made the holidays so much more fun for us as a family. The way she lights up and finds joy in simple holiday surprises makes the joy linger for us, too. This year, Remi’s fourth Christmas, we started our own family traditions as a family of three. And Santa ate all the cookies!

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3 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Parenting Things I Googled This Month

• can toddler get hfmd without symptoms
• safe cough remedies for toddler
• honey cough at night toddler
• how to help toddler sleep with a cough
• natural cough suppresant toddler
• when to take toddler to doctor for flu

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2. The Doc Is In

http://www.instagram.com/p/B6b66c5BNDU/

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3. Happy Holigays!

May the gifts of the season bring you this much joy.
http://www.instagram.com/p/B6e6nS6BLSN/

Raising Baby T. Rex: You Can Always Have a Hug

As I begin this piece, I have been directed to, “Go to work!” by Remi who is wailing and crying, with the door closed, in the bathroom. How did we get here? I flushed the toilet when she wanted to flush the toilet.

Give me a second.

OK, I knocked on the door and was admitted entry. We talked about her feelings and I held her all squished up into herself like a little bean while she got the last sobs out. Then we got cleaned up, procured a snack, and sat together for a few minutes on the couch. All is well.

As much as I want to bark, “You have nothing to cry about, Remi!” at times like these, I also want to honor that the feelings she’s having are real. To her, they’re real. When I am not losing my patience, which I do more than I’d like to admit, I appreciate that she has not yet learned to smush down her feelings for other people’s comfort. At some point, Remi will learn how to pretend she doesn’t have feelings. She’ll learn to say it to herself, “You have nothing to cry about, Remi!” I don’t need to model it for her.

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My parents say I never cried. I was 17 months when I came to the U.S.A., well before the typical cut-off for emotional intensity for most kids. I’m sure I did cry and that their selective memories of me as a toddler privilege the moment of robust laughter more than the tears. That said, it does seem true that I cried far less than expected. When my younger sister arrived at 13 months old, she cried all the time. My parents were woefully unprepared.

I was abandoned before I was adopted. My birth family is unknown. My parents were sent photographs of the large purple burn marks on my right arm to be sure they still wanted to adopt me. I still have those scars; they’ve faded quite a bit. I believe that I cried less. As an adult, I’ve spent more time reflecting on why I cried less.

I may have been an absurdly emotionally well-adjusted child. I want that for my toddler self, truly. I wish that felt true in my heart.

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Remi felt very secure to go to other people from a young age. We left her for an overnight with a family member for the first time at eight weeks. We left her for multiple days with another family member when she was just over three months old. “She’s just like you!” my mom remarked, meaning she was happy to go to other people without a lot of fuss.

But as she got older, she got a little more upset when we’d leave her for a weekend or a few days. She still adjusted well, but she needed a little more time to say goodbye or would cry a bit when we left. When we left her at our babysitter’s house for the first time, she wouldn’t calm down. She cried for the first few weeks. Then, once she was more sure of her surroundings and the people caring for her, she started to love going there.

We’re lucky to live relatively close to our parents (within two hours) so Remi has spent a lot of time with them both with and without us. I used to travel every month for work and Waffle has a very inflexible schedule at his job, so she spent a lot of time at Gramma and Pa’s house. She still gets a little sad when we’ve been gone for a few days, but she feels comfortable in both of her grandparents’ houses and always runs right in when we arrive.

Babies begin to develop an emotional attachment to their primary caregivers around six months. (Harsh, but true.) Remi likes to do everything a bit early, so she started around four months. This bond is strongest between six months and two years.

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At 17 months, I would go to anyone and be all smiles, according to the stories I’ve been told. I just believe, now, that I wasn’t a magically happy baby, but that I dealt with my infant anxiety and distress in a different way. If you read about the original attachment style research by Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main in the 1970’s, my toddler behavior is the textbook anxious-avoidant insecure attachment style.

The study argued, essentially, that avoidant attachment develops in an infant when they experience neglect to the point that they come to anticipate that their needs will not be met no matter how much of a fuss they make. In response, they enter a sort of self-preservation mode that makes it seems as though nothing bothers them. They’re likely to not show distress if their caregiver leaves and to project behavior that helps them deflect from their actual desire for closeness.

Oof. It’s very me. Ask Waffle. Perhaps my, “I’ll go to anyone and have no emotional reaction about it and never cry even when it seems logical that I should cry,” attitude as a young toddler was a symptom of veiled distress, not a sign that I was left unharmed by my abandonment and adoption, as my parents had supposed and I wish felt true. It makes a lot of sense especially if I had a tumultuous family life in Korea. Even if I didn’t, the fact that I was separated at 17 months from my first home and my culture could have been enough.

To confirm their theories about avoidant attachment in infants, later studies on attachment theory measured infant heart rates which showed in at least one study that avoidant attachment style children, while not showing outward signs of distress, did experience a rise in heart rate correlated with their caregiver leaving. In other words, people like me are just really good at hiding how we feel.

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As Remi’s gotten older, I’d say she’s definitely very emotionally attached to us. Preschool was a harder transition than I’d expected. The teachers actually called me to come and get her on the second day of Pre-K because they thought Remi was very ill. She wouldn’t stop crying and fussing. I took her home and she was fine. She had a cold, so the runny nose and coughing surely made it look like she wasn’t well, but she was running around and laughing and very much herself once she got home.

The next day, we let her bring her lovey, Dino, to school with her teacher’s permission and I made us stretchy cord bracelets with three beads (representing Remi, Waffle, and me) to hold our kisses for her. I told her she had to stay at school and that I would be back to get her and she could keep our kisses with her all day in case she felt sad. We still kiss her bracelet every school day and she kisses ours. It took her a couple of weeks for her to settle in. She used to say, “Mommy! You came back!” every single day when I arrived for pick-up. She likes going to school now. She hugs her teachers goodbye and says, “Hello” to her classmates when she arrives. Today, she had the day off for the holiday and she told me she wants to go to school.

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I’m a fairly well-adjusted adult and I owe all of that to my parents who loved me with every bit of themselves and gave me every opportunity to bond and become more secure in myself and my home. Too many transracial adoptees have not fared as well as I did. According to one study, adoptees are four times as likely to commit suicide than non-adopted people. I have heard of a number of Korean adoptees in my own city, as recently as this year, many of them teens, who took their own life.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt suicidal. I’ve manifested my attachment issues in different ways. I’ve always had weird trust issues with loved ones. I’ve always kept my guard up even around my closest friends. In friendships, I often took on the role of the funny friend, the silly one, the best friend who will try to help you solve all your problems. I didn’t like to and still don’t like to focus on my own problems.

Even as I write this column, I mete out exactly what I want to share with y’all, always maintaining control of my narrative and also thinking about who might read it: my parents, my friends, strangers on the internet, future parents, Korean adoptees, who else? It may seem like I’m an open book, but I’m curating this content very carefully and, you may have noticed, often through the lens of humor or theoretical musings as I insert my story into a larger cultural narrative to try to keep the personal from becoming too specifically personal.

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Part of the decision to send Remi to early Pre-K at three-years-old is that I work from home and it was becoming stressful for her to play all day by herself at home with me. It’s a good skill to have as an only child, to be able to escape into your own imagination for a while. As she got older, though, she wanted and needed more engagement from me.

Ironically those early months, while exhausting as hell, are more predictable for a typical work day schedule. Yes, Remi wanted to eat every hour but I could also just breastfeed her while on a conference call and no one was the wiser. If she was tired, I could strap her to me in a baby wrap and bounce her to sleep while I checked email. It was much harder and also simpler when she was small and immobile.

As Remi rounded three years old this past September, I knew it was time to either send her to Pre-K or to daycare. There was a lot of TV Babysitter happening because developmentally a two-year-old and three-year-old can’t just play for hours by themselves without becoming frustrated. There were times when I hid in the kitchen to take a phone call with my boss while Remi searched the house for me. There were times when I couldn’t help her do something because I was on a video call and she’d lay on the floor scream-crying while I nodded politely to my colleagues with my microphone on mute.

I didn’t feel good about it and it was time for Remi to be engaged in play and learning and to know that her needs were going to be met by a caring adult consistently. I wanted to make sure her needs for social and behavioral engagement weren’t being ignored and especially not by me.

Remi’s smart. That is something we have in common. She’s highly emotionally intelligent, even at three and she has a mind like a goddamn sponge. I am constantly amazed at the amount of detail she processes and recalls. She’s become more aware of what it means when I’m working. She pouts when she wants to play and I have a deadline to meet. I’m not upset that I sometimes have to deny her when I’m working. I think it’s OK in moderation. I also have the type of job where I can pick up a play session or a park date in between meetings and I try to do that as much as possible.

I want Remi to know that I’m here for her while also cultivating her skills for independence. She loves to do things herself. She also still wants me to do things for her sometimes. Sometimes she tells me to, “Go away!” but just as soon she wants a hug. We tell her, “You can always have a hug,” even when she’s been bad because we always are here for her. A hug definitely doesn’t mean she’s off the hook, but we will never leave her alone in time-out for too long and we’ll be ready to comfort her until she’s ready to talk to us about what happened. Most times, she wants the hug.

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4 Queer Parenthing Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Making Memories on a New Schedule

Waffle’s schedule changed again, which means goodbye morning dates and hello seeing each other for dinner every weeknight for the first time in… over 12 years. We’ve been on opposite schedules for most of our relationship. So this is very different. It’s great for Remi, who was almost never awake at the same time as Waffle since she started school. We pushed her bedtime up which meant Waffle usually got home after she was in bed.

The very big downside is that Waffle has to get up for work at four in the morning, so he’s always exhausted by the time he gets home. The upside is that we get family time together, as a family. It’s still new and weird and exhausting in its own way. It’s nice to have everyone together for bedtime again.

Just before the schedule change, Waffle had a few scheduled days off from work. His warehouse makes employees take full weeks off for the bulk of their vacation time. We did our grown-up trip to NYC over the first weekend of his vacation and then he had a few days of staycation. I randomly and singlehandedly decided to take us on an impromptu family trip to Toronto to go to the big aquarium and zoo. If you’re not aware, one of Remi’s favorite things is the ocean and all ocean life. Another big fav is going to the zoo and there is a HUMONGOUS zoo in Toronto.

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Just by chance, our hotel room has floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the train tracks of the public metro. Trains are another favorite thing for Remi! It was a Remi dream vacation that lasted just over 24 hours. We really did it up with breakfast in bed and Remi and I got to share a bed, which was very sweet and not at all restful. She only fell off the bed once and she landed on her feet. Phew.

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Oh, and she took her nap in the wagon at the zoo. It was, like, 40 degrees so we bundled her up and I let her use my jacket as a pillow and she totally passed out and then we ended up doing this because we’re still assholes. Also, we wanted to see the zoo, too!

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2. Parenting Things I Google This Week

• • ringworm or rash
  • toddler cooking ideas
  • safe toddler nail polish

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3. Obviously You Were Wondering

The last Baby T. column was written right before Halloween and I know you want to know what Remi’s costume was! I present to you, a scaaaary bat!

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4. A Virgo At Horsey Play

This child is hilarious. She has lined up all the available horses in the barn, with water cups and additional water storage in the hay loft. I can’t wait until she’s old enough to be my executive assistant. I need this attention to detail in my life.

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Raising Baby T. Rex: What Lies Between Us

We both went to bed with tears in our eyes.

It was past Remi’s bedtime and Waffle and I were both home, something increasingly rare. We protect a little late-night time, whenever Waffle gets home, for catching up on the day, watching our TV shows, and mostly sitting on opposite sides of the living room playing games on our phones if we’re being really honest. It could be enough, but lately it had not been feeling like enough.

“Do you feel like we’re drifting apart?” I asked.

I paused.

“I do,” I said. “I worry we’re going to keep on this path.”

“I don’t feel as close to you anymore and I feel like I have to say something because if we don’t talk about it then one day we’ll wake up and find that we’re just really good friends who love each other, but aren’t in love with each other and I don’t want that to happen.”

I searched for signs of acknowledgment or shared concern.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said. We stared at each other with tears in our eyes. He got up and went upstairs alone. I didn’t follow.

Later, before bed, Waffle texted me from the bedroom. I’m sorry you feel that way. I love you.

The next day, we got up around 7:30 am to get Remi ready for Pre-K. Every morning, she climbs into our king size bed and cozies up in the middle. Sometimes she yells, “Open your eyes!” Some days she sings us a song. On the sweetest days, she snuggles up like the tiniest little spoon under the covers.

We all get cleaned up and dressed together. We drop Remi off at school together. With his recent schedule change, the time between 7:30 am and 9:00 am drop-off is the only time Waffle gets with Remi on weekdays.

After dropping Remi off at Pre-K, I cautiously broached the topic again. Not the best timing, I knew. Fall brings the worst of the sads for Waffle. Maybe that was part of it. Or maybe it wasn’t. It felt like things were starting to feel less intimate, that we only talked about our jobs and our toddler, and that we didn’t have much left to talk about when we finally found alone time. I suggested we take advantage of our newly free early morning hour and have a weekly standing morning date. He agreed.

I planned the first date, a 9 am trip to the public market, a place where we used to go regularly pre-Remi and hadn’t been to for years. The market has open-air fruit and veggie shopping, light crowds on weekdays, a call-back to simpler times in our relationship, and also fresh empanadas. We didn’t make any rules about how to conduct ourselves, but we both put down our phones for the entire date. We held hands while browsing for local produce and bought some concord grapes. Minus the bees who hang out near the Empanada Stop trying to get a taste of our breakfast empanadas, it was a really gentle, low-stakes, sweet date.

“This is nice,” he said. I squeezed his hand. We go on our morning date every week now. Sometimes to the market and one day when the weather was horrid, we instead drove out to a local farm seeking warm, fresh cider donuts.

This past weekend, Waffle and I did one of our epic whirlwind NYC adult-only trips. We don’t do them as frequently now that childcare is a factor, but when we do them, we don’t mess around. We went to two huge NYC Halloween parties with a Hitchcock theme (and executed some pretty excellent couples costumes, if I do say so myself).

http://www.instagram.com/p/B4FZi-whZhz/

http://www.instagram.com/p/B4K34OCBjky/

We also saw three new immersive plays. (One was not great, but the other two were excellent and one made us both sob uncontrollably.) Of course, we saw the one show we’ve seen a hundred times (literally). We had brunch with friends and scarfed tacos on Governors Island and snuck late-night snacks from the bodega near our hotel. We stayed in Chelsea like the tourists we are. We attempted to sleep in, however futile on a Pre-K sleep schedule internal clock. We dashed about all day and all night and crashed into our queen hotel bed exhausted in the wee hours of the morning each night.

On the last night, I finally succeeded in sleeping in and…missed my outgoing flight. We’d decided to split our return flights home. I went back on Monday to pick up Remi and take her home. Waffle stayed until Wednesday. On Tuesday, Waffle turned 38. Frankly, I can think of very few things that would please him as much as going to Sleep No More on his birthday. I left him alone on his birthday, by his and my choice, and I strangely felt more connected to him than ever.

On the day I missed my flight, I felt awful. Waffle’s parents were anticipating taking a half-day off of work and I was no way going to make it back until the early evening. Once I sorted out my flight change, we decided to get lunch near the hotel. We had an unexpected block of time to fill. After three days, four shows, and two parties, we had a million things to talk about. Over burgers, we chatted excitedly and took silly selfies before I had to leave for the airport. Right before I walked out of the hotel with my bags, I flopped onto the bed and we got into another philosophical discussion about one of the shows we saw. If I could have stayed longer, I would have.

“I really have to go!” I said. “I’ll see you at home.”

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4 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. You Can Stand Under My Bumbrella, Ella, Ella, Ella

Waffle got Remi an umbrella and she loves it. She used it for trick-or-treating in the rain this Halloween. She wants to use it whether or not it’s actually raining, though. Have you ever felt as pleased about modern conveniences as Remi is about her “bumbrella”?

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2. Parenting Things I’ve Googled This Week

1. how to help toddler learn to wipe potty training
2. ways to help three year old with separation anxiety
3. halloween songs for kids

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3. Progress at Pre-K

You may have inferred or read that Remi had some challenges adjusting to Pre-K. That said, she’s a kid who adapts and learns quickly. She’s still a little nervous about her full classroom in the morning (“Too many people!”), but she goes in willingly. She’s leaving her lovey, Dino, at home finally and has also started being more confident talking to new kids, in general. I still can’t believe she’s shy at school–it’s completely unlike her personality at home. It’s great to see her start to open up, though!

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4. On a Related Note

Remi and Jeter are getting closer and closer. For the most part, they hang out peacefully unless Remi gets loud or stomp-y and scares Jeter. I finally see a future where they’re more comfortable with each other all the time. Only took three years and anti-anxiety meds to get here, but I’m happy about it.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3xvUtOhoBz/

Raising Baby T. Rex: The Art of Having A Good Time

Remi is a dragon and I’m a dragon hunter. She’s a bird. She’s a race car. I’m a mommy shark and she’s a baby shark. Or maybe she’s a daddy shark and I’m the baby. “Shh, it’s ok, baby,” she coos as she pets my head. “Have your bottle!” she exclaims as she jams a plastic bottle in my face.

I play. Every day. Not nearly enough for Remi’s pleasure, frankly, because I also work and write and have meetings and make dinner and do housework and there is usually just an hour or two left in every day that’s exclusively for play. And that’s a blessing.

Remi’s whole day is about play, from wake-up to bedtime. Even at preschool, her “schoolwork” is mostly just to play. She already has a distaste for work because it takes me away from her, away from playing with her. “Don’t work, mom!” she demands when she sees me heading towards my computer, “Play with me!”

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I’m always running a to-do list through my head, scrolling and looping endlessly. I’m always behind or at least it feels like that. (I know. Maybe I’m right on time, where I’m supposed to be, exactly when and who and what I need right now, etc. etc.) When I have free time, I immediately think of what work or task I can fill it with. Then, instead of doing that task, I set it all up and… watch TV or play a game on my phone for hours until I’m too tired to do anything else. That guilt-binging of TV or games was the closest I got to self-care before I had a toddler.

I don’t know if you’d call our playtime self-care time because I’m very much at Remi’s command. She calls the shots. She decides when we’re done. She knows what I’m supposed to be playing with, for how long, and in what way. She even corrects me if I do it wrong!

I do know that I hadn’t taken the time to just doodle and color every day before I had a kid. I hadn’t taken the time to read books or sing songs. I still have that to-do list looping in my brain when I play with Remi, but I don’t have any of the guilt like I do when I’m Netflix binging. I’m bonding and teaching and creating important moments with Remi and it feels right to carve out time to do so.

I feel protective of my play time with Remi. It feels good to play with her. Sometimes it just feels good to play, period, like when I get caught up in a coloring session or an impromptu dance party. I don’t know when I forgot to prioritize play in my life, but it seems like an obvious gap now. When was the last time you did a silly dance? Or colored a picture? Or put together a puzzle? Hopefully, you’re doing these things better than I was. I wasn’t doing anything like that before Remi.

We play as a family more, too. We’re always heading to the park or the zoo or to visit a farm or go on day trips. I know some couples are really good at doing date-type things like that, but that’s never been Waffle and me. We get to do things together now that we never would have taken the time to do before we had a kid.

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Of course, apple-picking sounds kind of fun as a couple activity, but who has time?! We weren’t making enough money to do fun dates that cost money in our honeymoon stage (other than spending too much at the gay dive bar). We were much more into making tacos and watching The L Word on DVD in our “becoming grown-ups-ish” stage. Then we moved into the “no one closes the bathroom door anymore stage” and just never had the emotional energy between work and politics and life to prioritize paying a lot of money to pick apples you can buy at the store for less.

Enter: Remi. Apple picking with a three-year-old? ADORABLE! Petting at the two goats at the apple farm with Remi? WELL WORTH THE PRICE OF ADMISSION. Eating overpriced hot dogs for lunch at the farm stand? DELICIOUS AND INSTAGRAM-WORTHY!

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We have more fun now, more time set aside just for doing fun stuff. Waffle’s work schedule is opposite mine and intense AF, so we only have one day off together as a family. Pre-Remi, we used to spend that day running errands to the point of exhaustion and then crashing on the couch with take-out. Now, we often have elaborate fun-time plans or come up with silly plans on-the-spot like going to the local animal shelter to see the horses or dropping by the Museum of Play where we have a membership.

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Remi started preschool this month and we suddenly have a few hours in the morning where Waffle and I are awake and home at the same time. Because most of my colleagues are on Pacific Time, I often don’t start work until later morning on my time. So Waffle and I started reclaiming some fun adult time for ourselves. We have a standing public market and breakfast empanadas date once a week. Sometimes we do breakfast at a greasy spoon diner, just the two of us. Most weekdays, we go home after school drop-off and do our own things, but we actually get to do our own things! I’m usually working and/or writing. Today, Waffle made homemade concord grape jam from grapes we bought at the public market before he headed in to work.

Though I don’t know if it’s a direct correlation, I feel like Remi reintroduced play and intentionally fun activities into our life. I value my free time so much more now and look forward to leisure activities instead of trying to cram every minute of my alone time with a volatile mix of productivity + procrastination. Sometimes, I color or doodle by myself, just for fun.

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3 Queer Parenting Things I’m Current Overprocessing

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1. Please Vote

Should I make this it’s own semi-anonymous pretentious toddler art Instagram account?

https://www.instagram.com/p/B2sqY62hrlJ/

https://www.instagram.com/p/B1re39MhmNb/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxENBCghKmT/

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2. Parenting Things I Googled This Week

• three year old development
• temper tantrums three years old
• toddler diarrhea remedies
• steven universe kid shirt
• steven universe toddler appropriate episodes

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3. Here We Are in the Future

Completely unintentionally, I got Remi into Steven Universe: The Movie. I wanted to watch it on the night it premiered and figured it wasn’t too violent to be in the background while Remi played. Little did I know it was going to be a musical. Remi loves a good tune!

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Fast forward to a few weeks later and we’ve watched the movie at least a dozen times, listen to the soundtrack in the car, and Remi can sing along to most of the songs. Waffle has (incorrectly) never been into SU before, but much prefers Here We Are in the Future to Baby Shark in the car! Remi’s singalong are pretty cute, too!

Raising Baby T. Rex: My Mommy Style Profile

“You don’t need to buy a new wardrobe! You already dress like a mom!”

“Rude. I’m offended.”

“Your typical outfit is leggings as pants, long sweatshirts, and flat shoes.”

“I didn’t say you were wrong, just rude.”

When I was trying to imagine my fashion and presentation choices post-partum, I definitely imagined continuing down the path of favoring comfort over style. I already lived in stretchy dresses, soft open cardigans, opaque leggings, slip-on flats, drapey tunics, and oversized sweatshirts. In fact, those same clothes helped me reduce the amount of maternity clothing I had to buy. I was already kind of wearing maternity clothing before I got knocked up.

I don’t consider myself unfashionable, nor would I say I’m very fashion-forward. I’m open to taking fashion risks and don’t mind drawing attention to myself. How I’ve done fashion has changed over time.

Growing up in a rural area of western New York, I often felt out of place. I dealt with this like many queer teen girls do, by going through several complex relationships with fashion and what fashion represents. I had a tomboy phase when I was a pre-teen, all baggy tees and long shorts and shell jewelry. I changed school districts in middle school, from a rural school with a lot of farm kids to a school that had a reputation for being snobby. I changed my style, too, from Looney Tunes t-shirts from Wal*Mart to the latest junior’s department fast fashions from department stores at the mall. By the time I entered high school, I’d settled into a casual preppy look, all matching knit cardigan sets and Old Navy khakis and navy blue Tommy Hilfiger mini-dresses. It didn’t suit me so much as it helped me blend into the sea of white faces everywhere around me.

Between my junior and senior year, I went through a bit of self-discovery and started acting out in my fashion choices a little more, adopting more of the dELiA*s post-punk and skater-inspired looks like super wide-leg jeans with barely-there tank tops, brightly patterned mini-dresses, platform sneakers, stainless steel ball chokers, and hemp necklaces. I started taking college classes at the local state school through an accelerated college program for high school seniors and the more time I spent on-campus, the more I felt comfortable to wear “weird” clothes. There was the fuzzy leopard print coat (that I recently sold on Poshmark as “90’s vintage”), a black pleather jacket I wore over abstract patterned strappy dresses, and of course, cutting my always-long hair into a face-framing bob and box dying it various shared of red, blue-black, and purple.

By the time I got to college, I was full-on buying things just because they looked sexy or unusual. I got involved with the Women’s Center on campus and I looked like it, if that makes sense. I was just as often wearing unwashed literal boyfriend hoodies and wide-leg corduroy pants held together with safety pins and dollar store flip flops as I was wearing tiny lacey tops with funky skirts and lace-up combat boots.

Most of the time, I wore a bandana in my hair kerchief style to hold back my semi-dirty chin-length hair and I never wore a bra. I got really into cheap chandelier drop earrings that I wore one pair at-a-time 24/7 until the gems started to fall out. My friend from the Women’s Center who was also my predecessor as co-director said her first impression of me was, “Who’s that girl with her boobs out all the time?” Sounds right. I was making a statement in the era of “My Short Skirt” and my full-on coming out as both bisexual and a feminist.

Now, some version of that era of my life lives on in my ever-expanding message tee collection and deep v-neck dresses and oversized loungewear. But between college and now there was the era of Business Professional, the hustle time of my mid-to-late twenties, during which I almost exclusively bought clothing that could be worn to work in an office environment. Calvin Klein sheath dresses and suit jackets and pointy-toed heels.

When I got my first office job at the age of 22, I had to spend $300 I didn’t have on a cheap work wardrobe from T.J. Maxx because I only had one semi-professional look in my closet. By my late twenties, my entire wardrobe was my work wardrobe and I evaluated a potential new item on whether it could be styled to wear to work. Much like my preppy phase, this era of my fashion timeline was more about fitting in and getting respect as a younger Asian woman in the workplace and less about what called to me from the racks.

By the time my thirties arrived, I was moving away from suit jackets to comfy cardigans, from crisp pleated slacks to elastic waist glorified yoga pant slacks, more stretchy sheath dresses and less starchy ones, almost exclusively flat slip-on shoes and I was more and more likely to just throw a nice top layer over a tee and jeans for work.

As I got older, I gave less fucks about what others thought and I invested in my own comfort. I leaned into colorful scarves as the ultimate accessory to turn casual looks into work-ish ones. It was during this period that I got knocked up and that Waffle said I dressed “like a mom.”

Now, I’m a mom and I guess I dress like one, whatever that means. I prefer high-waisted stretchy jeans and, now that I work remotely every day, often work in joggers and a tee. I don’t even mess around with heels higher than two inches and I wear flats 99% of the time. I tend to reach for the same pair of earrings during the week for simplicity’s sake and because I got into the habit of minimalist jewelry when Remi’s grabby baby hands were still a threat.

That said, I feel more myself now than I ever have before. Shortly after I got pregnant, I got an undercut on one side that quickly spread to all around my scalp so I just have a little length on the top. I usually wear my hair pulled up on top of my head for comfort more than aesthetic reasons, so my hair looks short. (Shout out to the hairdresser who told me my face was too round for short hair for all of my adolescent years.) I don’t wear makeup every day and when I do, I wear bright and sometimes Crayola shades of lip stain and stretched wide cat eyes and shimmery purple and silver highlighter. I recently discovered the perfect hybrid of comfort and boobage that is Lane Bryant’s wireless push-up bra to wear under low-cut dresses and tops.

I don’t know if this is what a “mom” looks like to you, but unlike the heterosexist version of “mom fashion” that Waffle was jokingly referencing, I have my own definition of “mom style.” It’s comfort over nuisance, sexy for me and no one else, a blend of personal style and new trends, a little bit hard femme and a little bit would-be soccer mom, and lots of soft resting places for Remi’s face to bury into. It’s machine washable and/or inexpensive to replace. It’s bare arms and big bellies and lots of pockets.

One of my top three fears before having Remi was the fear of disappearing into the Cult of Mommy. I was so nervous that I’d be sucked down into heteronormativity and lose my sense of self in Lularoe and monogrammed plain white tees. That, like my preppy phase and my business casual phase, I’d feel pressured to fit in. What am I wearing right now, you ask? High-waisted jeggings, a wireless bra, a cream-colored tee that says “the future is furious” in red letters, no makeup, my everyday earrings, and my hair twisted up with a clip.

I wouldn’t say I’ve escaped the Cult of Mommy completely. I’ve defined it for myself.

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3 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. I’m Three!

Remi turned three this month. We invited family over for a little get-together which Waffle graciously took the lead on for planning purposes and, thusly, turned the little get-together into an all-out themed birthday party. The theme was How to Train Your Dragons and included a themed cake, themed plated and utensils, a banner and a tablecloth, paper masks, various on-theme presents, and, of course, enormous helium balloons.

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This is what happens when Waffle takes on a task. He goes all in and also expands it far beyond the bare minimum and then obsesses over the details of all the additional projects he takes on. That said, he crushed it!

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Remi had a really fun day with her four grandparents and three Aunts and her cousin.

Waffle also took care of the present shopping.

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I know straight women say this about their husbands whenever they do like the bare minimum of human decency, so I hesitate to write it, but I just really think Waffle is an amazing co-parent. The best part of queer parenting is the part where no one is performing gender roles out of obligation and everyone gets to parent to their strengths.

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2. Things I Googled This Week

• how to help toddler adjust to preschool
• how to help three year old with homesickness at school
• why is toddler suddenly afraid of the dark
• signs toddler sore throat
• child doesn’t want to stay at preschool

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3. Toddler Prep Kitchen Update

Scroll to the third page for some live cooking action! Let’s get this kid on Masterchef Junior!

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Raising Baby T. Rex: Mommies, Daddies, and Babies

The cold, hard reality is Remi’s exposed to gender and race and class everywhere. Some of it we have control over: the TV shows she watches, the books she reads, the stories we tell her and the language we use. Some of it we just don’t: the latent normalizing messages in the media she consumes, the stories and language she hears from others when she’s out of our care, the way the world just works in a racist, homophobic, transmisogynist, cissexist, classist world.

We decided early on to use the pronouns culturally assigned to her assigned sex at birth. That’s something we do have control over and a conscious choice we made. I’m not sure if it was the best decision objectively. It sends a message about the correlation of medically assigned sex and gender, whether we believe that or not. It makes cis people more comfortable, for sure. It wasn’t because “they” is hard to remember and use. (We didn’t find out or talk about the assigned sex before Remi’s birth and used “they” for all of that time.)

It’s because life is complex and, quite frankly, Waffle didn’t want to be doing even more Gender Education for Cis People on a daily basis with everyone who encounters Remi. He already doesn’t like drawing attention to it himself as a nonbinary boi who is also an extreme introvert. He’s happy for people to just categorize him however they want without having a whole convo about it. Remi is beginning pre-K next month. Waffle uses, by choice, his legal name on all paperwork and also goes by “Daddy” to Remi and he’s a little stressed over having that convo with Remi’s new school. Especially since we chose a private daycare (not a school-based program) for pre-K that we found out is housed in a church. Presbyterians are often cool with LGBTQ people, but you never know!

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One of the families in my queer fam network are two nonbinary parents who are raising a child with they/them pronouns and they shared with me that it actually makes it easier for all of them. In their experiences, cis people kind of get it more with a child than they do with adults, because they’re willing to accept that kids should decide their own gender. Their experience has been that it actually helps cis people understand gender more broadly to consider that a kid isn’t born with a gender.

There are no right or wrong answers in queer and trans parenting choices, just the decisions we make. Honestly, we’re all going to fuck up our kids in some way, at some point. That’s just being a complex human person parent! My opinion is that there are still so few of us that we have to make a lot of room for each other just to cobble together a bit of queer and trans parenting community. That said, I sometimes feel paranoid that maybe other queer people secretly judge us for using she/her pronouns for Remi, even as I’m also sure it was the right decision for us.

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Gender and race is truly everywhere and I think about that as queer Korean femme. There is not one television show in syndication for kids with a principally Asian cast. There are a few Asian characters on some of the shows, or, at least, characters coded as Asian without specific cultural references to any one ethnicity. That hasn’t changed much from when I was a little kid. We’re side characters or we don’t exist at all. I try to expose her to books about Korean families, but as an adoptee, the language including pronunciation of Korean words are even foreign to me. I have some Korean flashcards my parents passed down to me. I don’t know where they got them, but they don’t have any English on them, so I can’t do anything teachable with them until I learn Korean. I’ve held onto them anyway.

The Korean stuff is really hard for me to unpack, but I’m unpacking it, bit by bit, slowly. The biggest impediment is that I still feel like an imposter, a white-raised Korean who doesn’t know how to pass on a sense of cultural heritage because I haven’t quite grasped my own culture yet. I asked for a cookbook last Christmas with easy Korean recipes (Maangchi’s debut cookbook). I’ve read it cover-to-cover and haven’t yet attempted to make anything from it. Maybe Remi and I can do it together eventually.

The gender stuff is a little easier to unpack because I very innately understand what it means to be femme, for me. In some ways, it’s more fraught. Remi started figuring out gender from an early age, when she started calling masculine folks “daddy” and feminine folks “mommy.” She’d point to characters in books and assign them “mommy” and “daddy” genders, including fairly gender-neutral illustrations of dinosaurs. She’d often decide the bigger dinosaur was a “daddy.” I would ask her, “Why do you think that person is a daddy?” when she was too young to answer. “Daddy,” she’d reply. More emphatically, “DADDY!” I’d explain, though I wasn’t sure she was absorbing it, that you can’t know someone’s gender by looking at them.

Yet, on every tv show she watches, it is totally possible to guess someone’s gender (and sexual orientation) by looking at them. Now that she’s a little older, she’s able to communicate more and I’ve learned that gender is not as etched in stone in her mind yet as I was concerned it was. She still tends to divide her toys into family groups of mommy, daddy, and baby. That’s typical for her age and, frankly, imitates her family because we’re a queer mommy and daddy. That said, she is not hardcore into gender permanence and we still have many years and convos to unpack gender together.

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It doesn’t particularly help that one of her parents is masculine and one is feminine. Though I do femme in my own way, Remi still sees me performing femininity. She’s obsessed lately with my lipstick. “I like your lips!” she said when she first started verbalizing her awareness of my makeup. When I’m not wearing it, she sometimes says, “Mommy, where are your lips?!” or, “Mommy, put on makeup!” I’ve let her know that any person of any gender can wear makeup and I’ve shown her some pics of beautiful people across the range of gender wearing makeup. I also don’t wear makeup every day myself, so she often sees me without any makeup. I’m not necessarily encouraging her to take an interest in makeup, but I also don’t want to cross into the territory of punishing or denying access to femininity in the pursuit of neutral-ness. I had to laugh when she took some of her brightly colored blocks and started rubbing them on her face. “I put on my makeup!” she announced. I refuse to go as far as to buy her play makeup until she’s old enough to ask for it if she wants it, but that didn’t stop her imagination from coming up with a way to play with makeup.

For now, I try not to stress about it too much. I know there’s no one single thing I can do to prevent these stereotypes from creeping in at the edges, especially as I prepare to send her to a public pre-K program with lots of other kids whose parents may or may not have an awareness of systemic power and oppression. I think mostly good can come from mixing her in with kids from lots of different backgrounds and experiences in a public city school program. She’s only just almost been on this earth for three years and she’s already way ahead of where I was and where most kids were on these issues at her age, so maybe that means it’ll take her less time to unlearn and unpack them as she gets older and more aware. That’s what I’m holding out hope for, anyway.

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4 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. I Am a Chef Today

Lately, Remi has been wanting to help me make food, but there’s not too much she can help with, so I assign her to dumping things in a bowl, supervised hand-mixing, peeling oranges, and making salads a.k.a. ripping lettuce with her tiny adorable hands.

She takes it all very seriously.

http://www.instagram.com/p/B04dAI0BGLO/

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2. Remi and Her Dragons

The hottest new thing for Remi to obsess over is DRAGONS. Ever since she watched the third installment in the How to Train Your Dragon series on the way back from A-Camp, she’s been all about dragons.

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For her upcoming birthday, Waffle got her a very expensive Hatchimal baby Toothless dragon that “learns” and grows, which I’m pretty sure means it is either spying on us for the government or a Black Mirror situation. She’s going to love it. I’m slightly afraid of it.

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3. Sleep Transitions Suck

Remi has been hovering around one nap for a while. Then, she dropped it for a bit. Now she mostly takes a nap, but it’s really affecting her nighttime sleep. She’s never been a great sleeper, but she seems to be only sleeping eight hours at night, which is low for a toddler. On days she skips naps, she gets cranky and overtired by bedtime and still doesn’t sleep longer at night. On days she takes naps, she won’t go down until later in the afternoon and will often sleep for so long that we have to go wake her up or else she’s pushing a midnight bedtime. HAHA GREAT! It’s a weird time and she’s definitely right between one nap and no nap. She should be taking naps, though! She’s three! I can only imagine that pre-K is going to further mix everything up for her sleep schedule, too. I really hate sleep transitions and that is all. I just needed to whisper it into the void.

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4. Things I’ve Definitely Said Aloud This Month:

• Eww, don’t eat that. That’s trash!
• No, it’s not daytime. It’s nighttime. (The sun was up.)
• Big kids wear pants.
• That’s poop! Don’t touch it.
• That’s dirty! Don’t touch it.
• That’s not yours! Don’t touch it.

Raising Baby T. Rex: Goodbye Pull-Ups, Hello Three, Hello Love

Did you catch my A Chorus Line reference? It’s okay if you didn’t, but also, this is who I am and I won’t apologize for it. I’m channeling Remi more and more in my adult life because you know what, toddlers do not give one fuck and yet are also completely in tune with their emotions. They will say exactly what they want and express how they feel in-the-moment and that includes crying because they fiercely want and or don’t want to eat a french fry. They’d be horrible bosses; they’re great motivational speakers.

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Remi motivates me all the time, both to slow down and appreciate life and to not wait for a second longer to grow and invest in myself. Children change so fast. Remi’s growing opinions of the world, general attitude shifts, her movement toward independence, it feels like it’s happening so quickly. Just a few months ago I was lamenting about the seemingly impossible task of potty training. Now, we’re in cloth undies all day without accidents. How did that happen in a matter of months?

She went from speaking single words to four-word sentences seemingly overnight. Quite literally, she just started pulling out sentences one day. A few months later and now she talks in sentences all the time and we actually understand 90% of it. How was it just this past January that she couldn’t string words together coherently?

Waffle and I have been together in some iteration for over 14 years, married legally for seven years, and living in our current home for six years. We’ve changed so much. We’re always changing. But those changes are almost imperceptible month-to-month or even year-to-year. How often do we say, “Remember when we did THAT? Can you believe it was over a decade ago?” “Remember when THIS happened to us? Was that… really five years ago?” “OMG this song! How is it 20 years old?!”

Children speed up the pace of life. Three years would just sort of float by before Remi. Now, when we look at pics of her just a year ago, it feels like a lifetime ago. Waffle and I are the same. We’re wearing the same clothes, have the same hairstyles, have the same hobbies and interests, but Remi is quite literally a whole different version of herself physically, mentally, spiritually.

Simultaneously, children slow down the pace of life. On days when Remi, in her almost-three way, is annoying the heck out of me and Waffle is at work and I’m working and also mommying, it feels like bedtime will never come. On days when we’re having a wonderful time, I have to slow down to make space for Remi to explore her world at her pace. She’s not quiet, gentle, or slow, but she wants to take every experience in full 4D immersion, in all dimensions. So there’s no rushing past that flower outside the mall entrance, okay? That flower needs to be smelled, appreciated, aggressive—full-face smelling. And then we need to debrief it. “What did it smell like?” “What color is the flower?” “Do you think it’s pretty?” Okay, now we have to smell these other flowers and then maybe we can go in the mall to get that one thing you’re looking for and you kind of hate the mall and would really like to go finish this errand but we’re smelling all these flowers right now, so it will wait.

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When we were in the middle of potty training, it felt like an endless struggle, even though it was just a few months. About a month ago, we had a strong hunch that our super-smart kid had figured out that she could use her pull-ups like diapers if she just didn’t feel like going to the potty. We were lamenting that we might still be in pull-ups in months, maybe even years. It didn’t feel like she wasn’t ready to use the potty, though. She went easily when she did remember to use the potty and she had figured out how to do pee and poop in the potty by the first week. We were just in this pull-up limbo where she’d go in the potty if she wasn’t wearing anything on her bottom and would sometimes hold it for hours randomly, but then other times would definitely go in her pull-up and it seemed like she knew she was doing it.

People kept reminding us that kids do it when they’re ready and there’s no use rushing her, but I swear to you she was showing all signs of readiness before we started and continued to in the first couple days of training. It didn’t feel like we were too early or rushing her beyond her abilities. It felt like we were falling into unproductive bad patterns.

After one particularly harrowing day, we threatened to put her back in diapers, which I realize is not the parenting-of-the-year recommendation on potty training, but it’s what happened. Parenting is hard. Anyway, we threatened to put her in diapers if she was going to treat her pull-ups like diapers and then we put her in an actual diaper and she thought that was hilarious. “I’m baby! Wah! I need bottle!” Ugh. Total backfire.

So I pivoted and went in the complete other direction and that night, we went permanently into cloth undies. I told her I believed she was a big girl and she was ready to use the potty every time and I knew she could do it because she’s smart and good at going potty. We said, literally, “Bye-bye, pull-ups!” and moved them out of the bathroom and we were off. She had two, maybe three accidents over the next 24 hours. Flash forward three weeks later and she’s typically gone the whole day without accidents. This past weekend, we went to the zoo, the beach, ran errands, and ate out for brunch and she kept her undies dry all day. Now I’m looking forward to the day she can wipe her own bottom. Which will probably be within the next year but also feels like an eternity away.

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Three is just on the horizon. Remi’s birthday is September 1st. Three feels like a big milestone for her and for us. Can you believe I’ve been writing this column in some iteration for over three years already, starting when I was preggo with Remi? Now that little fetus is wearing big kid undies and speaking in whole sentences and building with Legos. What have you done with your life in the last three years? Because Remi’s learned to sit, stand, crawl, walk, run, hop, and skip. She’s just about 15% away from successfully completing an unassisted somersault.

I said to Waffle, when we started down this path two years before I actually got pregnant, that having a kid would be the most interesting project I’ve ever worked on. It has been. Remi is endlessly fascinating and growing right in front of me so quickly I have mommy whiplash. I don’t want her to slow down. I love the freedom that comes for both her and me as we pass every stage. I do want to enjoy every moment of it, as I have a feeling I’m going to blink and she’ll be a teenager.

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5 Queer Parenting things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Attempting Classic Family Fun

We took Remi to the local vintage drive-in movie theatre because it seemed like a toddler-friendly place. It was. But I forgot about how when you arrive late on the opening weekend of Toy Story 4, you’re def not going to get a good parking spot. I could see about half the screen and, also, because Remi also couldn’t see super well and is two and was more interested in singing songs and looking at the stars and jumping around barefoot on the sharp gravel rocks, I saw about 25% of the movie.

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Oh, we also got our wheels stuck in mud and a ton of people who were already parked just stared at us struggling until finally some person helped Waffle push us out. Anyway, I think we’re going to go again later in the summer and maybe try to get a spot closer to the front? It made for some cute pics and memories. I do love that I live in a place where I can drive just 25 minutes away to see a real drive-in movie, however logistically challenging.

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2. Billy the Betta Fish

It happened. We got Remi her first official pet that is hers. We have a rabbit and a cat and she likes them, but I don’t think she feels like they’re just for her the way Billy is. It was a very impromptu decision, which is on-brand for us and also a stupid way to bring a new pet into your life.

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Long story short, I’m obsessed with Billy, so named for Billy Porter, and his moss ball buddies MJ, Indya, and Angelica! I’ve already upgraded his tank to a bigger one, bought a fancy test kit for his water, special almond leaves to improve his health and water quality, various treats, and I may be a tad bit obsessively Googling betta health and wellness articles. Full disclosure, I literally just bought him more things this evening because I’m worried about him having a heater and the ideal ph in his tank.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BzOry09BviF/

Remi loves, “My fish!” and loves feeding him. He lives on my downstairs desk (my dining room set-up for when I can’t use my office) and we’re best friends. That’s all. This is also just how I am as a person.

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3. Things I’ve Definitely Said Aloud This Month:

• You have to wear pants to go outside.
• I don’t want your fingers in my nose.
• You can do it right now or I’m going to do it for you (repeat x100).
• Get your foot out of my shirt right now.
• Stop yelling. You’re scaring the bunny.

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4. Jeter Watch 2019

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5. Photography by Baby T: A Stream-of-Consciousness Burst Interrogation

Remi’s new fav thing is to ask to take pictures of things she’s interested in on our phones. It’s hilarious and also she takes these incredible photo bursts that are mostly blurry nothingness, but we can often pull a couple shots from the bursts that are actually really cool toddler art.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BxENBCghKmT/

http://www.instagram.com/p/BzrLI3yBgJH/

Raising Baby T. Rex: Airplanes, A-Camp and Abdominal Pain

^{feature image via Everyone’s Instagram Boyfriend, Rachel Kincaid}

I don’t do things small. I overthink everything and then go big. In other words, when I get in the pool, I prefer to jump in vs. take the stairs. When I take a bandage off, I prefer to hold a corner and yank it along with whatever skin and hair is attached to it vs. gingerly lift it millimeter-by-millimeter. I like to have a plan and then I want to just do it. So I made a plan to bring Remi to A-Camp this year. If Kristin and Marni, our fearless A-Camp leaders, say I can bring Remi, I’m going to fly us both to California, I decided.

I feel secondary anxiety for every parent I see traveling with kids in an airport. Good luck with that, I think when I see a parent coaxing a toddler along with their tiny suitcase or trying to appease a wiggly kiddo with a tablet. I definitely didn’t want to try it myself.

However, the desire to go back to A-Camp after a four year hiatus was too strong. When it came time to submit staff applications, I asked if it would be OK if I brought Remi. Of course, everyone thought that was a very good idea, mostly because they wanted to meet Remi and despite the fact that it maybe is not the kind of thing camp is set up for.

So for her very first time on an airplane trip, I chose to fly Remi and me, just the two of us, from Rochester, NY to Los Angeles with a layover in New York City. The total travel time was over ten hours each way, with the JFK to LAX flight alone clocking in at five-to-six hours in the air. I was increasingly uncertain about my decision as the days passed and the trip became more real. I prepared and packed as best I could and decided to do whatever I could to try to set myself up for success.

Things started off great with the JetBlue agent telling me I should have Remi’s birth certificate on me, which I did not have, no I did not. I checked TSA rules and TSA doesn’t need ID for minors traveling with parents/adults, but I guess JetBlue recommends it. So I sent Waffle, who was dropping us off and trying to have a chill 3:30 AM goodbye, speeding back to the house to get Remi’s birth certificate. Things were off to a brilliant and not-at-all-stressful start!

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Waffle was feeling a bit bummed out about missing Remi’s first flight. We’d been talking about airports and airplanes and she was really excited. I promised to take pictures. I also started updating the shared note that we’d been using as a packing list with brief live-time updates about the trip. I wanted Waffle to feel like he was with us. In fact, rather than narrate the trip, let me just share the notes I sent to Waffle.

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4:20 AM ET
Remi was on her best behavior for TSA screening, but insisted on taking her own bag through the zig-zag line, thus creating a traffic hold-up even at cheetah speed.

4:40 AM ET
When I lifted her up to look out the window at ROC terminal A, she finally saw the ✈️✈️✈️docked on the dimly lit tarmac and said, “Cooool!”

4:50 AM ET
She walked down the jet bridge by herself with her bag. Buckled herself into the seat across the aisle while I worked on getting the car seat installed. Willingly got into her car seat and was excited to be on the plane.

5:07 AM ET
Hated takeoff and screamed “I want to go home!” and burst into tears. 😰 Threw herself around in the car seat trying to get out so much that I opened the chest harness so she could have her arms. Gave her Dino once she settled down. Didn’t want to see the sky or have the window open. Seemed scared to be up high.

6:59 AM ET
Could not find applesauce at JFK, so got three of the Plum organics baby food pouches. We opened and taste tested all of them and she liked none of them. She did eat most of an 🍏and had a Chobani yogurt and a milk box.

8:10 AM ET
Convinced Remi to let me take her bag in exchange for holding her own ticket. She has not once sat in the car seat to ride around the airport. The strap has come in handy to attach her bag to the stroller cart when I can convince her to give it up. Two women have asked about the cart and where to get it so far.

8:29 AM ET
Car seat did not fit down the aisle in the bigger plane for some reason. Folks really do offer to help so that’s nice. A kind flight attendant carried it back to row 27 for us and another flight attendant stowed our cart in the back for us. (I ❤️you, 👩🏾‍✈️👨🏻‍✈️!) Remi is excited about the plane again. (Thank god!) Talked about takeoff being scary. We’ll see how it goes!

8:45 AM ET
Remi fell asleep right as we began to taxi. She slept through the announcements. Yet to be determined if she’ll stay 😴for takeoff or if her ears popping will wake her up.

9:26 AM ET
SHE DIDN’T WAKE UP! Success! I just scarfed a $10 ham sandwich and now I’m going to try to take a nap assuming she stays asleep. She’s out hard.

10:31 AM CT (11:30 AM ET)
Remi woke up, remembered where she was, and asked for her lollipop. We watched 30 minutes of Cars on the JetBlue screen and ate some 🍿. Then we read some books.

10:22 AM MT (12:22 AM ET)
Remi is tired of wearing her headphones. (She had them on for her nap, too.) We got the tablet out and played the Baby Shark matching game and the coloring game. “Glitter!”

10:52 AM MT (12:52 PM ET)
We’re doing great! Remi’s a gold star flyer! ⭐️⭐️⭐️ She’s starting to get restless and no activity that isn’t a screen can keep her attention for more than ten minutes. But we’ve got less than two hours to go. We can do it?

11:19 AM MT (1:19 PM ET)
We beat the slump with apple juice (a special treat!) and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World on the JetBlue screen. Remi keeps telling the 🐉s that they’re, “Good boys!” and has decided they’re all, “My dragons!” The warlords are, “My friends!” She does not understand the premise of the movie. 😂 She put her 🎧 back on herself because she was so into it, though. I synced up my screen with hers and am watching it with closed captioning on. The other winner to get us over the hump was my cup of complimentary ice, which I actually didn’t want but she is finding endlessly amusing. Update: She just did the Ice Bucket Challenge down her front. “Need towel!” 🙄

11:43 AM MT (1:43 PM ET)
I have broken the seal on the jelly beans. Less than an hour to go. One very restless toddler. We can do this! We can do this?

11:36 AM PT (2:36 PM ET)
Arrived! Early! So early that our gate is occupied. We’re very emotionally invested in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, so maybe it’s for the best. Remi is super concerned about the dragons who were captured by the bad guy. “Oh no! My dragons! Help them!”

11:56 AM PT (2:56 PM ET)
Remi got tired of sitting still and wanted to be unbuckled. Had a mini-meltdown 😭 about two minutes before we finally got the :ding: that we could unbuckle and get up. THANK LESBIAN JESUS. Luckily the person sitting in front of Remi whose seat she kept pushing on despite many stern talking to’s also has a two-year-old, so was well equipped to deal with Remi’s incessant chatter/yelling/singing and seat pushing. Honestly, I’m going to call this a success! 🏆

2:10 PM PT Remi made immediate friends with everyone on staff. She is convinced Austen is you. So there’s that. Make of it what you will. She’s currently playing with a bunch of adult staff while I use the bathroom. God bless. Next up, car rental.

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Then things started getting busy and I forgot to keep updating, but Waffle said he appreciated it and looked forward to the airplane updates all day while he was at work.

Final conclusion: Traveling alone with a toddler is super exhausting and stressful, but we did it! Honestly, Remi’s a great flyer and I would take her on a plane again in a heartbeat, especially if I had a second pair of adult hands with me and if the flight was a bit shorter and/or direct. That said, it was hard and I had to rely on a lot of help from strangers throughout the day. I hate, hate, hate asking for and receiving help, but people saw I was struggling and I would have been truly ridiculous not to take them up on the assistance.

I tried to pay it forward during the trip home when I saw another mom traveling alone with two kids who looked like she wanted to throw her kids in the trash. I mean, I get it. This poor parent was just trying to eat her salad and she was coming back from a trip to Hungary with a toddler and an infant. Good grief. I checked with her and then offered her older kid a seat next to Remi to watch the Netflix show Remi was enjoying on my laptop. They bonded nicely and Remi told the older girl, “I like your shirt!” Sometimes I’m wary of other moms when I’m traveling alone. I don’t always read as queer (to heterosexual people, at least) and I never know if I’m talking mommy stuff to a Trump supporter or a religious zealot, you know? But sometimes I just lean into the mommy-to-mommy connection and focus on our shared humanity.

Anyway, by the time we arrived at LAX, Remi was overtired and overstimulated. We visited with the A-Camp staff waiting for the shuttle in terminal 6 for a while to let Remi run out some energy. She made fast friends with everyone. I was driving us to camp because I wanted to get a nap in for Remi and, more importantly, I wanted a car on site all week in case we needed anything. I’m so glad I had a car!

Why? Because Remi got sick, the night before campers arrived, around midnight. I’d put Remi to bed and she went to sleep right away. I was sitting outside talking to Reniece and Carmen and heard Remi coughing and then crying on the travel baby monitor I brought along. I said goodnight and went upstairs a little bit later and Remi popped up in her pack-n-play. “Mommy?” I thought she might be confused about where she was, so I went to pick her up and that’s when I felt something wet on the carpet. I’ll spare you the details, but I turned on the light and had quite a mess to clean up. She got sick four more times over the course of the next hour, all over me and then all over every potential sleeping surface in our room. Never have I been more stressed about solo parenting a toddler. I couldn’t leave her alone in the room and I needed help. EVERYONE WAS ASLEEP. I eventually ended up waking up Mack and Marni and we were up until 3:00 AM. I’m so grateful that they came and helped. For the rest of the week, our room smelled weird.

Remi was sick for a couple of days but seemed to be over the major symptoms in about 24 hours. I thought it was food poisoning, but then I started feeling sick, too. Then I found out that two other staff were sick, both of whom had been playing with Remi during pre-camp. Then another staff person fell ill. Then another and another! It’s possible it was unrelated to Remi, but the symptoms were similar: utter despair and wishing-for-death for about ten hours followed by a period of quick recovery. It also happened mostly to people Remi had baby duck imprinted on or who helped take care of her at pre-camp. Remi even managed to take out Alex the night of the family band’s performance, three days after Alex gave Remi a drum “lesson” a.k.a. let Remi touch all her drumsticks and drums. I felt bad that Remi was Patient Zero.

Remi overall had a good time at A-Camp when she wasn’t ill and grumpy from being ill or from traveling cross-country. I don’t know if I’d do it again. I couldn’t help out as much as I wanted to as a staff member. Remi being sick meant I had to miss some of the workshops I was supposed to do. Accepting offers of more-than-fleeting childcare wasn’t really an option I felt super comfortable with once Remi was sick. (I’m glad for that, too, because she seemed totally better by the time she came home, but was apparently still contagious. Waffle suddenly and violently came down with the same sickness the day after Remi and I arrived home.)

I had a different time at camp with a toddler than I did the last time I went, childfree in 2015. I doubt I’ll attempt it again unless there’s planned childcare available, which maybe there could be at some point in the future. I did learn that lots of campers have little kids, as several came up to me to tell me about their kids since I had Remi. And more and more queer people are having kids. So maybe there will be a camp daycare or parent co-op babysitting situation in the future. But I think we’ll be sitting out for camp in 2020 and until Remi’s old enough to go somewhere else for a week, like to her own summer camp.

In summary, it was a good experiment and we made a lot of good memories and the pool was amazing and I don’t particularly want to do it again.

One thing that came out of the experience of A-Camp alone with a toddler (who is also sick) is that I had to not only accept help from others, but ask for it. Perhaps because I rarely ask for help or support for myself, I have never experienced so much support from my queer community. I often asked people to watch Remi for a few minutes so I could quickly run back to my room. Nobody batted an eye. Brittani basically did all the work making the bags for my cabin and delivering them to the rooms for me. I explicitly asked Brittani for help since my co-cabin person was working the accessibility shuttle from LAX the morning of camp. It was super uncomfortable for me, but I realized there was no way I could make all the nametags, stuff the bags, and bring them to the cabin on my own with a surly, still recovering two-year-old in tow.

Adrian took the lead on cabin camper stuff when I was stuck in the room with Remi. Al(aina) took over the Baby T. Rex Toddler Tea Party when it was clear we weren’t going to make it. (Then, Al delivered handmade get well cards from the tea party to our room!) Mack not only helped me take care of Remi, but gave Remi a little stuffed animal that she slept with while her lovey was in the wash. Marni helped me find new sheets at 2:00 AM in the morning. Rachel was gracious when I had to back out of the Bisexual Spa. Azul let me have the rest of their white vinegar to help lift the puke smell from the carpet in our room. Cameron, who was already recovering from Remi Fever, took over babysitting for the one workshop I actually made it to so that I could focus for 90 minutes on facilitating. Liz helped me work with the dining staff to be sure Remi had simple, digestible foods while her tummy was yucky. Everyone was there to help whenever I needed them and often without being asked.

In a weird way, even though I didn’t get to experience A-Camp in the traditionally transformative way, I got an even deeper peek into the ways that this community, most of which I engage in online, is both real and deeply caring. The radical values of putting family and community care first, of making space for each other to be ourselves, came through in a different way for me this year. I got to be a mom and everyone understood that I needed to occupy that space above all else. I also got to be a hot queer thirty-something woman with my boobs out and my best lipstick on and didn’t feel like those two parts of my identity had to live separately from each other. I was transformed by A-Camp in 2015, as a 30-something who had forgotten how to be kind to my body. I was transformed again by A-Camp in 2019, as an older 30-something who had made a home in my body for Remi and who needed radical, inclusive community more than I knew I would.

We don’t have to have it all. We can be messy and abundant together.

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4 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. A Whale of a Tale, A Tale of a Whale

Remi was so excited to go swimming! She had a new floatie with an “Orca!” on the front of it that supposedly helps little kids keep themselves upright in water. On the night before campers arrived, Molly opened the pool for staff for a little while. Remi was so excited to go in! I had a momentary lapse in good sense and let her walk right down the stairs herself, which resulted in her tipping forward in her swimmies and face planting in the water.

So I held her in her floaties for the rest of the time in the pool. We didn’t go swimming again until the last hour of open pool on the very last day of camp. She was too sick to go in the time between. She asked about the pool every day. It was the very first thing she wanted to see when we arrived. “Where the pool? Go swimming!”

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2. Things I Googled This Month

• food poisoning or stomach bug
• norovirus airplane
• two year old throwing up when to go to doctor
• swim diapers diarrhea
• how to remove vomit smell from carpet without steamer

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3. I Picked Up a Mom at the Farmer’s Market

I’ve officially crossed a parenting milestone off my list. I got another woman’s number at the farmer’s market. I then looked her up on Instagram to make sure she wasn’t someone I’d absolutely hate. Why? Because her kid is the same age as Remi within a month and they immediately hit it off and were running around chasing each other and rolling in the grass and pretending to be cows. Remi plays with other kids sometimes, but I’d never seen her bond so quickly and play so collaboratively with another kid her age. When we were trying to leave (and so was the other mom), Remi and the other kid took off running towards each other yelling, “My friend!” and embraced in a big hug. It was very cute. So I got her number—the other mom—and we’re going to meet up for a playdate. I can’t believe this is who I am now. Also, I need someone to make tinder for playdates. Does that already exist?

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4. Litte Face, BIG FACE!

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I started this game with Remi where we make “little face” and “big face” and she’s amazing at it. It’s based on a theatre warm-up I did in college. But Remi just likes making funny faces and making everyone else make them, too. It’s a great party trick! Also hilarious because she’ll call you the fuck out if you don’t make big face when she wants you to. She had a whole table doing “big face” at camp during pre-camp lunch and you better bet she pointed at Cee and yelled, “You do it!” when they were the only person not complying. Go ahead, show me your big faces! Remi will be pleased.

Raising Baby T. Rex: That All-Consuming Love

I can’t believe I’m about to type this. Past versions of myself in parallel timelines are appalled and confused. I didn’t know that I would ever feel this way, about any person, place, or thing, but it’s my truth now.

I didn’t understand unconditional love until I met Remi.

Not that I’m saying my love typically comes with specific conditions or that a mother’s love is unique. It’s more like my love, my deepest love, my love for my family, even, has always made it to a maximum point, but after that point, my human need for self-preservation comes first. This isn’t a negative way to view relationships with others. Self-preservation is important and having boundaries is healthy.

It’s just that I didn’t know that all-consuming love, that drunk in love, that crazy in love, with the pyrotechnics and the heavy downbeat. I’ve never experienced that with my romantic loves, even with Waffle. Yes, our love is real and there have been many times when we’ve experienced incandescent, fiery connection. But I have never wanted to give all of myself completely. I won’t. I didn’t know that I was capable of it.

Until I came to know Remi.

I told my mom recently that I understand love differently now, as a parent, and that I appreciate even more all the love she and my dad have held for my sister and me. There is no way I could love her the way I now recognize that she loves me. There’s no way that Remi will love me the way I love her.

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When Remi was little and couldn’t sit up yet, she loved to experience the textures of her world. I would sometimes lay her on a playmat in her diaper, put our softest baby blankets in the clothes dryer to heat them up, then float the blankets over her bare body and snuggle her up in the radiating heat. If you’ve ever put on your softest, most comfortable clothes right out of the dryer, it’s like that, but imagine you’re a tiny person and someone is so-gently covering every inch of your bare skin in that gently pulsing warmth.

That’s how I love her, that delicate trembling love, that sun-beam bright brilliant love, that lazy afternoon nap so cozy curled up under the blankets and waking refreshed love. I don’t think there’s an adequate word in the English language for the feeling. I love her more than anyone, including myself.

Today, Remi fell asleep in my arms for the first time in a long time. She usually sleeps in her room upstairs for her nap, but I was on a work call and didn’t get her up there in time, so she came over and wanted to be picked up. She watched my conference screen for a while and then put her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. I’d forgotten how good it felt to hold her, asleep, against my chest, with her arms wrapped around my shoulders. I forgot how right it felt and how it brought out this side of me that is completely in tune with her every movement.

I knew when she transitioned into R.E.M. sleep by the slight jerky movements of her fingers on my clavicle, how deeply she was sleeping by the pace and pitch of her breath. I remembered from when she was little the way she gets slightly sweaty when she sleeps soundly and the smell of her hair a couple of days out from the last shampoo. We slept like that for an hour and by the time I woke her from her cuddle nap, I felt calmer than I’d felt for days.

I didn’t know I was capable of loving someone on this level. I don’t think it only happens in parent-child relationships. I think, I guess some people must experience feelings like this in romantic relationships. I just never have. I would be sad to lose my loved ones, very sad, but I would survive it. I’d be utterly and completely devastated to lose Remi. I don’t know if I’d ever be OK again. I’m knocking on wood right now, hoping to protect her and my heart.

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If you’ve learned anything about me from reading my writing on Autostraddle, you know I hate being vulnerable. Being a parent has made me more vulnerable than I would ever choose to be. I can’t believe I love Remi this much.

On my second mother’s day last weekend, Remi and I had a low key day at home. “Happy Mother’s Day,” she wished me, loudly scream-shouting, when prompted. “Thank you, baby! I love you,” I replied, knowing she didn’t fully understand and not caring that she couldn’t.

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3 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Two Indoor Cats and One Outdoor Cat

I don’t know how two very indoor cats ended up with a demanding outdoor cat, but we sure did. It’s been rainy and chilly most of the week and Remi keeps looking out the windows forlornly, whining, “I wanna go outside! She’s constantly trying to negotiate for trips to the park or play in our backyard. I finally gave in today and set her upon our front porch despite the rainy drizzle and cold, wet everything.

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All she wants is to be in the outdoors, getting messy, splashing in puddles, and galloping free.

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2. Thing I Googled This Week

• rainy day fun toddler
• work at home parent ideas
• what age independent play over
• Rochester universal pre-k waiting list

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3. Shark Teeth in Different Shapes and Sizes

Remi’s favorite book at the moment is Goodnight Shark! by Adam Gamble and Mark Jasper. She wants to read it before bed and any other time, too. She has it mostly memorized and can remember the names of the different kind of sharks.

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On my most recent work trip, I was able to buy Remi three sharks teeth “in different shapes and sizes,” which is a line in Goodnight Shark. She was thrilled!

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I also got her this toy plane to help her get emotionally prepared for our big flight to A-Camp! Coming soon! Remi and I are so excited to see you! We’ll bring Goodnight Sharks to share if she’s still into it!

My Diné Child Will Hunt, Bead and Everything in Between

“You girls are the talk of the ice-fishing derby!”

I get that a lot. When we’re out hunting or fishing, my wife Suzanne and I are frequently the only women (much less queer women) present. In this case, we were a group of five queer and non-binary friends, competing in an ice-fishing derby in rural Colorado. People were understandably curious about us.

I’ve been surprising people this way since I was a little girl. Suzanne and I were both more likely to be found climbing a tree or digging in the dirt than playing with Barbies. I always went hunting with dad and my brothers. And I learned a lot of things on my own that they couldn’t teach me – things like menstruating in the woods.

I grew up to be the person I am, regardless of the gendered socialization imposed on me by the world. But sometimes I wonder if I missed out on some really important stuff.

One side of my family is Diné. I spent a lot of time with women in my family since I was blessed to have five generations of women alive at once – experiences my childhood peers did not understand. I learned so much from my mother and my grandma about what it means to be a woman. Navajo is a matriarchal culture and yet it’s also been colonized and influenced by patriarchy. Still, my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother, they all taught me that being a woman is important to our culture and to the generations that will come after me. I remember my Kinaaldá ceremony – a coming of age ceremony for young women who begin their flow. The ceremony is a multi-day ceremony, testing a young woman’s physical, emotional, and spiritual endurance. Being a Diné woman is the core of my identity, and those lessons from my grandmothers are some of the most valuable I’ve ever learned.

But the other side of my family, my dad’s side, is white. Irish, specifically. They have their own cultural traditions around connecting with nature through hunting and fishing. I insisted on learning from him, and he was eager to teach. He taught me how to bait a hook, how to gut an elk, and how to clean a fish. These are things Navajo girls are not traditionally taught. In fact, some would even look down on Navajo women being involved in these practices. For me, I believe every child should have a person in their life that takes the time to teach them valuable skills and how to respect wildlife – no matter their gender.

Suzanne and I are starting to think about making our own family one day. We’ve even begun building our own cradle board and beading little moccasins. When I imagine our little one, I want the world for them. I don’t want them shut up in a box of gendered expectations and limitations. I want all the richness of every cultural tradition in their background to be available to them, every opportunity available and every door open.

Growing up bi-racial, I found myself answering a lot of questions about my skin that other little kids didn’t have to answer. Am I white or am I Indian? For a long time, I often thought of myself as never being enough. I’m never white enough to be white and I’m never Indian enough to be Indian. But as I’ve gotten older and as I’ve found resources like the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People, I now recognize that I’m more than enough. My life is extraordinarily rich with identity and culture – and our baby’s life will be too! Being forced to choose one identity over another is a limitation I never want our kids to face. In our home, our kids never have to choose between performing “girl” or “boy” – they will have the full range of human emotion and experience available to them.

We’ve started to talk to our friends and family about it already. We’ve got to start early, because I never want to hear the words “that toy’s for boys!” uttered in my home, even if it’s not coming from me or Suzanne. Far more than biology, it’s the attitudes of the people in our lives that will shape our kiddo’s understanding of what it means to be who they are – boy or girl. And so far, our community has been very open to and supportive of us. Actually, the trickiest part has just been starting these conversations. How do people like us – people who don’t fit typical gender stereotypes – start a conversation about the harm of gender norms?

The most genuine place to start is to share our own experiences and that can be uncomfortable for everyone involved. People don’t always know how to react when I talk about the glares my gender non-conforming wife gets when she walks into public restrooms, or the misogynistic remarks from the guy across the counter when I buy my annual hunting license.

I recognize that we can’t protect our baby from a world that genders literally everything. There is a scientific consensus that says even the toys we give our kids to play with shape their development to an extreme degree. Kitchen sets promote language skills and cognitive sequencing. Legos and blocks build spatial skills needed for math and science. Dolls promote empathy and care-taking. Cars, planes, and plastic powertools encourage development in mechanics and problem-solving. Superheroes and sports gear promote physical health and activity. Every child needs a healthy balance of all of these skills. Sticking to blue toys or pink limits a child’s stimulation, experiential learning, and overall skill development. Gendered toys and gender norms actually harm the way children think.

Enforcing gender norms is a kind of violence. Men have shorter lifespans on average because of cultural expectations that drive people assigned male at birth to take physical risks and avoid doctors. People of all genders who defy the binary or transition genders have even lower life expectancies. Women and girls are pressured to harm themselves by unhealthy societal norms of body shaming.

If the kids we have one day are anything like us, there’s a good chance they will be gender non-conforming. I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure they get to grow up exactly as they are, following their passions and interests wherever they lead, without limitation. No matter their gender, I look forward to taking them to our family hunting spot and climbing an old pine tree that overlooks a valley of aspen that I know as well as I know myself – taking a pocket knife and helping them carve their name into our decades-old elk stand. And waiting for the birds to chirp, the squirrels to wake and the sounds of nature to fill the day.🌲

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edited by rachel.

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Raising Baby T. Rex: Having It All Is a Big, Heteronormative Lie

I started a new job this week. Monday was my first day. With the new gig comes a new schedule and a new office, which is my home! Yeah, I know! I get to work from home every day and it’s been amazing for work/life balance.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BwXbcgsBcLs

Most of my colleagues are on the West Coast, so their workday starts around mid-day for me, which also gives me the freedom of flexibility. Some days this week I worked regular hours, but other days I worked later in the evening and started later in the morning. That meant I could take a walk to the library with Remi and Waffle one morning. It meant I could take Remi to the park to play for a short period of time one afternoon. It meant having time to make and drink my coffee before diving into my email in the mornings.

I’m working on a more set schedule, but I think I plan to start a little later in the day going into the early evening and even work late at night at least a couple of times per week. It’s better to be working when everyone else is working on the West Coast and it gives me the mornings for my other work like writing for Autostraddle, managing book-related speaking gigs, morning coffee dates, grading papers for the class I teach, and maybe… maybe… maybe even finally putting together the proposal for my next book. It’s beyond what I can comprehend right now, but maybe I’ll even read a book or two for pleasure! My own pleasure! What an idea! The world is wide!

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Ultimately, it’s also been super frustrating for Remi having me home all the time. She understands that Waffle and I work. However, she doesn’t really understand that when I’m at home, I’m still working. She gets so discouraged that I can’t or, in her mind, won’t play with her when I’m sitting right here in the dining room. She’s great at playing by herself, but she’s beginning to want to play with other kids and people instead of just doing independent play. It’s even harder to say no to her when she comes over to my chair, grabs my sleeve or arm and says, “Mommy, want to play? Let’s go, Mommy! Take my hand!” I feel like the worst parent because as much as I say, “Mommy’s working, sweetie,” she doesn’t really understand that I’m not just ignoring her.

It hit peak guilt feelings when I was giving her a bath and she was playing with a little plastic walrus. She’s really into talking about families right now. So she was talking about the walrus’ family, who was not there (because the walrus is not part of a family set, it’s just the one walrus). “Where’s mommy?” she asked the walrus. “Mommy working,” she replied to herself in a forlorn tone. It broke me.

The other side of the coin is that it hasn’t been all cupcakes and rainbows working with a toddler running amok, either. As I’m getting to know my new colleagues, I’m also having Remi popping into the video meeting screen to say, “Hello,” which is the least distracting thing she does. Once this week, I had to deal with a potty training issue while on a video call. Another time, I had to say, “Hold that thought. My cat apparently puked on the floor and my kid is touching it right now. Just give me two minutes.” Not the ideal first impression at a new job in my own estimation.

http://www.instagram.com/p/Bv5eYbWhKsg/

Most of the staff work remotely, too, but most people seem to have school-age kids or a daycare situation or fur kids or no kids. Everyone has been so super chill about my mom stuff so far, but I always have this little shaking rattle of doubt in the back of my mind nagging me, “You’re being unprofessional!” “Everyone is judging you!” “You’re annoying them!” I didn’t mention in my interview that I’d have Remi at home with me and I didn’t hide it, either. I don’t think it’s a problem at all, as far as my employer is concerned. Regardless, the nagging internalized paranoia and fear around it still pops up when I have to hide from my kid in the kitchen to take an important phone call or interrupt a video call because Remi needs my urgent attention.

What I’ve learned is that parents and moms especially, even cool radical-minded queer moms, even boss-lady moms with lots of confidence in their own abilities, really can’t escape the “working mom” bullshit. It’s just there, in its messy brilliance. Brilliant because it keeps moms from overthrowing the patriarchy by emotionally tying them to the home and brilliant in that the tethers are there even when every possible accommodation is made (a co-parent, a flexible schedule, work-from-home benefits, a feminist employer) because the tethers are planted deep in the collective subconscious.

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I feel obligated to make it look easy breezy to work at home with a kid because I pressure myself to appear as though everything is under control. If I’m bringing Remi to a lobby day, for example, I can’t take on other roles at the lobby day, but I still try to pretend that I can. Even though that’s stressful and unpredictable AF. I feel obligated to act as though I can do it all. It doesn’t feel good.

In the LGBTQ college class I teach, we recently talked about the self-monitoring society driven by capitalism as it related to queer theory. Our self-monitoring society comes from the fear of always being surveilled and judged, always in danger of becoming a target for punishment. So we create ideal images of ourselves based on the values that capitalism promotes (heteronormativity, cisnormativity, class wealth, social status) and buy and squeeze into those versions of what success, happiness, and wealth look like.

The so-called “working mom” is just another piece of the self-monitoring society. In a heteronormative and cisnormative capitalist society, women are producers of babies a.k.a. future workers and baby-makers. If women are working, in some ways this is doubly good for capitalism because they make babies and they produce additional work and consume even more goods in their two spheres (home and work). But we have to keep women in this cishet world making and caring for their families even as they’re working or else the whole system fails. We aren’t producing workers and we aren’t consuming enough goods to uphold the status quo. It’s ridiculous that I’ve bought into this on some implicit, repressed level of my brain.

I’m tired of feeling constantly under my own self-inflicted assumed surveillance. Particularly because literally, no one is watching me. My new employer is explicitly feminist. I don’t think they care that I have a kid and sometimes that kid interrupts video calls. I also don’t think it’s fair for me to try to make it look simple. It’s not simple for me. It’s not simple for Remi. It’s not simple for other parents and other people who want to be parents. It’s a farce to keep trying to make it look simple. That’s how the self-monitoring society keeps replicating itself over and over.

I remember saying to a feminist mom, when I was first considering having kids, “You make it look so easy,” meaning having a little kid and navigating childcare and work and all of that. She said, “Thank you,” but it was a weird comment for me to make (I now realize). She probably wanted to say, “IT’S SUPER FUCKING HARD YOU HAVE NO IDEA THANK YOU VERY MUCH!”

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All that to say, it’s hard. It’s fine that it’s hard. It’s worth it that it’s hard. It’s messy and every day I’m tired, but also grateful that I get to spend another day with Remi, however dissatisfied she is with my work-from-home situation.

There are moments of immense joy, like taking a quick break to go to the playground while it’s still warm and bright out and watching Remi lay on the ground looking up at the sky with her eyes closed, feeling the resplendence of early spring sunshine on her skin. There are moments when I can take five minutes between meetings or work to play a round of “horsey” and “doctor.”

There are also moments when Remi laments to her toy walrus that, “Mommy’s working,” and it breaks my damn heart. There are also times when I have to find childcare so I do things that were relatively simple before like give a mid-day presentation or join an important meeting or attend an evening event. I look forward to the day Remi goes to preschool and I get some of my time fully back during the day. I cherish the days I have babysitting lined up so I can escape to my home office for a while.

I’m really lucky, y’all. I’m happy, too. Waffle says I seem extra happy since I’ve started my new job. I love the life that I’m building and I’m so privileged and lucky to be able to build it. I just don’t want to pretend that I’m “having it all” any more. I owe y’all more than that.

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4 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Try Again!

Something we initiated early in Remi’s toddlerhood is the concept of “try again,” which has truly served us well. Would recommend. Remi is a kid who wants to do everything by herself and has been that way pretty much as soon as she could articulate it through grunts and hand gestures. We’ve used “try again” as a way to encourage her to do it herself when she’s struggling (sometimes secretly helping sight unseen to Remi).

It has de-escalated many an almost-tantrum. Now she enthusiastically says, “Try again!” whenever she struggles with something. Sometimes she says, “Try again,” about things we really don’t want her to try again, like launching herself off of the window seat or banging her head on the wall. So I’d give it a 8/10, would recommend but could result in dangerous levels of confidence.

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2. Grown Up Time Is Special Time

I’m referencing a lyric from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, from the song “I Like to Be With My Family” in the subheading here. Did you get it? Probably not, unless you have a child, but just play along.

Waffle and I had a long-scheduled adults-only weekend a couple of weeks ago, during which we went through a theatre gauntlet in NYC. It was exactly Waffle’s kind of vacation. Overscheduled, cram-packed with fun, and we had a good time. For the record, my type of vacation includes laying around eating good food and not talking to anyone. I think this picture sums it up.

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We don’t do a weekly date night, but we do take time away occasionally and I think both we and Remi are better for it. This vacay was all about Waffle’s type of vacation because I get to travel alone for work fairly regularly, during which I can lay about and talk to no one to my heart’s content.

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3. Things I Googled This Week

• rochester preschool half day
• part-time day care rochester
• potty training reward ideas
• work from home with toddler
• toddler best age daycare

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4. Jeter + Remi Watch 2019

I know you’re all wondering about the cat. Obviously. So, well, I mean, it isn’t perfect, but this happened after a bath this week! For about five minutes, then Remi started jumping around and Jeter was outta there faster than you can say O-M-G-this-scary-thing-really-isn’t-leaving-is-it.

We need to refill his cativan prescription, so this was a fully unmedicated situation, which was pretty good. Maybe they’re be friends… in like 10 years if Jeter’s still alive.

Raising Baby T. Rex: Potty Training, Patience and Pride

What I’m here to write about is the very most essential thing that almost all of us have somehow learned to do; the thing that our Editor-in-Chief Riese hates and I love talking about. It’s poo and pee in the potty time.

Remi has been showing signs of potty readiness for, oh, I don’t know, like three months. We’ve been delaying and delaying for many reasons. We’ll wait until she can put her own pants on. Check. We’ll wait until she’s more verbal and better with directions. Check. We’ll wait until we have a long weekend to work on it. No check, but also, like, no potential weekend in sight in the near future. We’ll wait until she’s out of diapers. Check, kind of, but then we bought more diapers and now we have a lot of extra diapers.

What I’m saying is, we finally went all in on potty training and, well — it’s going well and is also the weirdest, funniest, most frustrating parenting thing I have yet done. Mainly, I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. The first day was a lot of trial and error. We started in earnest this past Sunday. Waffle was working most of the day, so Remi and I were home together just the two of us. Gee whiz, did I wish I had a second set of adult hands when I was scrubbing the floor around 11:30 AM wondering what I’d gotten myself into.

I didn’t necessarily have a set plan for how this would go so much as I did a ton of online reading to prepare and hoped my smart, self-motivated Virgo would figure it out quickly. I’d hoped we could get away without Pull-Ups because they’re essentially toddler diapers and they are, like diapers, expensive and wasteful. By mid-day, I’d instructed Waffle to grab some Pull-Ups on his way home. Ultimately, I was successful when I decided to throw my reservations and Remi’s pants to the wind. We just went bottomless for most of the day and, after two more accidents and a hurried pick-up of any stuffed animal or thing that could not survive being peed on, we were making progress. Remi consistently used the potty with my help for the rest of the day. HOORAY, mofos! I documented the day in my Insta story because, I dunno, why not? (No worries, no super gross stuff… mostly bathroom parties and deep potty training thoughts.)

Sadly, we don’t live in a world where one can just waggle around bare-assed all day every day. As much fun as we had running around the house in the buff, we would have to leave the house eventually. The next day we introduced the Pull-Ups and there was a little regression into forgetting and going in the training pants. To be fair, Pull-Ups feel like and sound like and essentially are diapers. (Don’t tell Remi. We told her they were big kid underwear.) That said, we made major progress on the potty and only had one total meltdown over having to wear the training pants. My child just wants to be free and, quite frankly, I don’t blame her. I still hate wearing underwear at 36.

Usually, poop training comes after pee training, but Remi had pretty much figured out both by Wednesday, day four of this whole event. Ultimately, it’s going well. Of course, now that we’re in a huge new developmental stage, her sleep is all screwed up and she’s getting more irritable at bedtime and waking more at night. We don’t know if it’s just an overtired thing or because she’s still in diapers at night and feels mad about that or if she’s becoming more aware of her body at night because of potty training or something else or all of the above! You figure one thing out; something else goes all wonky. That’s how it is with toddlers, I guess.

We’re figuring it out. Ironically, she’d just (very early) dropped her last nap, so we’re bringing back the nap to see if that helps with bedtime. It’s literally a social science experiment every day and we don’t have any control. That’s how it feels to me, anyway.

My very favorite thing about this stage, as much as I’ve dreaded it, is how truly joyful it is in between the moments of grossness. Remi is, obviously, just so proud of herself and overjoyed to gain a little more autonomy over her body and genuinely excited about leveling up as a big kid. I think bathroom stuff is probably one of the most shame-filled areas of our human world. We’re straight-up weirdos about it in our culture. We have literal political debates about bathrooms and whether trans and gender non-conforming people have the right to be in them despite the fact that we are primarily using them to do our private potty business. We make toilets places of shame, in every context.

Yet here we are, though, clapping and cheering for Remi for using her little potty. It’s a toddler party zone in our downstairs bathroom right now. I gave up early on and allowed an iPad in there to keep her on the potty for longer sits. We have two different potty options going, the hilariously miniature potty chair with real flushing sounds and the step stool with a seat that goes over the grown-up potty as a transitional option. We’ve got books and toys and, to be real with you, sometimes snacks in there. It’s a very joyful and silly place in our home right now. It’s stressful. It’s screwing up her sleep. It’s also kind of a lot of fun? She’s just so, so happy when she uses the potty like a “big kid.” I look at her doing her half-naked “I did it!” hop and wonder if I’ll be able to pinpoint the moment that body shame sets in, that she learns that her body is somehow both vulnerable and dangerous, that she stops appreciating all the good things her body does.

It’s also forced me to be very patient, with Remi and with myself. There is nothing more challenging than watching your kid go to the bathroom directly on your floor, on your floor, and having to react like it’s no big deal, very casual, totally not a thing just going to clean this up right here oopsie no problem no reason to have ongoing trauma that sets us back on potty training everyone is cool! On the other hand, I can’t imagine having to learn how to do this after going in a diaper for more than two years! It’d be like if someone told me to go to the bathroom right now, on my couch, with my pants on and expected me to be able to just do it. How super impressive that kids can learn this at all!

Most of all, I’m loving watching her grow up and grow more independent. At one point, I was thinking Remi would still be in diapers for A-Camp, but it’s clear we’re definitely going to be using the potty by then. I hope she’s figured out the big potty by June, mostly because I don’t want to pack the potty chair as a carry-on.

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5 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Femme Gender Feels

So y’all know we’re raising Remi without strong associations with gender norms. However, we did make the choice to use gender pronouns aligned with Remi’s assigned sex until she’s old enough to articulate a gender. We also don’t shy away from “pink aisle” toys completely. Gender expansive play doesn’t mean play that only privileges masculinity or that hold up complete androgyny as the gold standard, at least not in our definition of it.

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All that said, I’m really fascinated and also scared by the ways gender norms have creeped in at the edges of Remi’s development. As a queer femme, I love feminine things as a way to intentionally express my gender, but I also realize some of those things are or come off as very gender normative. For example, Remi has a fascination with my jewelry, so I made her a bunch of pony bead bracelets and necklaces. She notes my lipstick colors and my nail polish shades. She has started gravitating towards pink clothes as she’s begun dressing herself and having more opinions on her own fashion.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BuwbsNTBq4r/

I mean, she also gravitates towards sharks and dinosaurs and play power tools. Gender doesn’t really mean anything to her yet, but I can see the messages getting through anyway. I just really hope that whatever gender Remi is and whatever Remi’s gender expression is, that it’s purely hers and not influenced by dominant culture. I know it probably will be and this is probably at least one part my own internalized femmephobia popping up, but I sometimes wonder and worry about it all.

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2. Things I Googled This Month

• potty training sleep problems
• potty training poop next to the potty
• pull ups potty training
• average age potty training
• signs ready for potty training
• how to help two year old poop on the potty
• sleep regression potty training

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3. Under the Sea, the Ocean

Remi’s love of all things ocean has not slowed down. In fact, it’s intensified since we let her watch Octonauts, a cartoon about animal (mostly mammals for who knows why?) ocean explorers who go on missions and discover aquatic life all over the world. I don’t even know if this show is still on air, but there are four seasons of episodes on Netflix and we’ve watched all of them at least three or four times. It’s all she wants to watch! Screw Sesame Street. Forget Daniel Tiger. As far as Remi is concerned, there is no other show but Octonauts.

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We took Remi to a very small rescue aquarium just a couple hours away from our home. They had rescued sea lions and are the leading facility for blind seals! It was very fun and, despite the whole place being maybe a 10-minute walk in a big circle, we managed to spend three hours there. Mostly, Remi wanted to see the sea lions and the SHARKS. But they also had sting rays and puffer fish and sea horses and cleaner shrimp and lionfish and turtles and eels and all of Remi’s favorite slippery friends!

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4. Protecting Family Time

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Lately, Waffle only has one day off per week. I’m consistently working more than one job and am behind on at least one of them. I’ve also been traveling for public speaking a lot lately, revamping my website and online branding, making some big career choices. It’s been a lot for both of us. Whenever Waffle’s able to get a weekend day off that I’m also around for, we try to make that time meaningful. Even if we’re running errands, we do it together and build in some time for toddler fun.

I feel bad about how much we work. Sometimes I wonder if she’d be happier in day care with other kids her age.

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5. Touch Em Touch Em Touch Em

Sensory boxes are all the rage with the pre-K set these days. We no longer use this sensory bin because Remi accidentally knocked it off the table while playing with it releasing a catastrophic amount of bouncy, wet, slippery Orbeez water beads all over the house. HAHAHAHAHA OMG, it was fun. We’re still finding the damn things. I prefer the kinetic sand.

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A Tale of Two Mommies (Or Who Wore the Maternity Pants?)

When two women decide to have children, they draw straws to decide who conceives and gives birth. Or they try to guess a number between one and 100 that an objective party has silently chosen in their own mind. Or the woman who really wants to carry the baby volunteers to undergo the ten-month physical feat of endurance and strength. Or they take turns, a Hers & Hers-style pregnancy with each getting to experience the successive focus of pregnancy and motherhood.

I wouldn’t know. None of those ways describe how my wife and I decided who would bear the children and usher them, bloody and screaming into the world. It was a forgone conclusion that I would, because my wife was unable to conceive. It made even more sense for me to take the pregnancies since she had the steady, successful career. She had more education, more professional experience, and a knack for taking risks that paid out tenfold. Logically, financially, practically — it just made sense for me to shoulder the pregnancies and the requisite recovery times.

I quit my part-time job in a library and prepared. I made myself as healthy as I could for pregnancy while my wife made sure we had savings and health insurance. She went with me to the track where I ran early in the morning during the first and second trimester. She made late-night runs for the salsa I loved, she cooked me the eggs I craved daily, she happily ate the spaghetti and spinach that had become my favorite dinner. She came with me to all the appointments with the obstetrician, watched the ultrasounds in wonder, and shared the sonograms with her family and friends. When my lower back pain escalated during the final trimester, setting off sciatica, she found a prenatal massage therapist and made appointments for me. She subscribed to a “This Week in Pregnancy” calendar that let her know what size our little bean had grown to.

I enjoyed that first pregnancy. The physically strenuous nature of it, the research I could do that contributed to a healthier pregnancy, the attention I got for being the mother-to-be. Putting so much time and energy into keeping me and the baby healthy was very much an athletic pursuit for me. A scientific experiment to grow the healthiest baby I could, while being the healthiest mom on the planet. Competitive? No, why do you ask?

Throughout the months, I realized that my wife’s anticipation was different from my own. She was connecting to the pregnancy in unique ways. She stayed present, interested in the baby and the way the baby would fit into our lives. But she was more focused on when the baby would get here and became a third member of the family, instead of being my ride-along. That part — the post-labor part — felt hazy to me, distant, outside of my control. It wasn’t until the third trimester that it became clear: she felt left out of the pregnancy, and she was looking forward to being more involved as a mom.

She would have loved to carry our child. Would have met the body changes with joy. That she was physically barred from being pregnant did not make the situation easier. She hid it well. But now I understood why she looked forward to the birth with such clear-eyed intensity. I remained very much stuck in the theory of what mothering a newborn would be, preferring to leave childrearing in the theoretical realm. Instead, I focused on excelling at trimesters, prenatal exercise, and knowing all I could about going into labor.

As the oldest of nine children, my wife grew up tending and caring for her younger siblings. She knew the reality of having newborns and toddlers around. The mess, the odd sleeping hours, the constant needs of tiny humans. My youngest sister was born when I was five years old, and I had no recent experience in caring for babies and children. In fact, I frequently told interested parties that I didn’t like children very much, had not planned to have any before I met my wife. But I hastened to reassure them that I would definitely adore my own children. Of course I would. Right?

Once labor was done, baby boy swaddled, his eyes glistening and goopy from the medicine they smeared on his eyelids, I held him, happy to have the ordeal of birth over. I had survived the thing I feared, the test of physical strength that I had prepared for. Somehow, I hadn’t prepared for the exact moment I became the mother of a living child. I felt wrung out, stung by the episiotomy, swollen from IV fluids, tender all over, still unable to move from the dregs of the anesthetic in my spine. And now they handed me a living being that, horrifically, required everything.

I expected to feel the in-love, bonded-for-life feeling that other mothers had talked about. But all I felt was a terrible sensation of being off-kilter and the expectation to perform. My wife held our baby, and she had the lit-up face that I had expected to feel on myself. She held our baby boy and everything in her, the aura of her, bloomed. I struggled to rise to the occasion. She could not stop smiling, whispering, talking to him. When I held him, I didn’t know what to say. I had so much to learn, and I felt behind on day one.

In the coming days and weeks, my experience of motherhood was marked by struggle: struggle to learn to breastfeed, struggle to make enough milk, struggle to sleep, struggle to calm my anxiety, struggle to stop crying. I became mired in deep postpartum depression while trying to hide that I didn’t feel the way I was “supposed” to feel. Meanwhile, my wife sensed that I was overwhelmed and she carried the baby everywhere. If she was home, she was holding the baby.

She bought a sling and carried the tiny boy next to her body as she cleaned the house, cooked food, or did laundry. She sang, talked, and napped holding our child. She fed him supplemental bottles of formula when my milk supply refused to grow. She carried and held him now with all the devotion and love that I had imagined feeling in utero but now seemed distant, on the other side of thick glass. I knew how to use my physical strength and endurance to be successful; I had no idea how to be emotional and vulnerable, and motherhood required that of me.

I had been a super-star at pregnancy. So why was motherhood difficult? I couldn’t adjust to the deep sense of failure I felt at being a mother who could not hold her newborn without wanting to die. How could I be the one who carried and grew that child for all those months and not be up to the task of actually being a full-time mother? I hadn’t expected my wife to be the naturally maternal one, though I was deeply grateful.

The reason I hadn’t expected it is because, at the time, my wife had not yet come out as transgender.

We were a lesbian couple masquerading as a heterosexual couple when our children were conceived, carried, and born. Years later when the evidence of something being different for my wife and for us began mounting, when it had to be spoken out loud or break us all, I remembered the birth of our first child. I remembered all the times I had said with wonder and a little envy that she was more maternal than I was. We each nurtured our children in ways that the other one couldn’t, but our mothering came out in stunningly different but no less feminine ways.

Our children are beginning to be teenagers now. I’ve been asked many times over the last few years: “Who’s the mother?” I like to answer, “We both are.” If they press on, “Oh yeah, of course! But which of you carried them?” I know they mean which one of our genes did the kids get, who is the biological parent. I used to explain. I used to say, “We both are because my wife is trans so we have the phenomenal good fortune to have children that look like both of us.”
I’ve learned to be less forthcoming now, to let the mystery remain.

When someone says, “Which of you carried the babies?” My answer is, “We took turns carrying them.” 🎈

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edited by Heather.

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Raising Baby T. Rex: Club Fawn, No Naps, and Reclaiming Procreation

When I decided to carry Baby T. Rex, I entered this emerging world of LGBTQIA people choosing to have children. We’ve always been around, queer folks with kids, but this specific type of parenting choice — carrying a baby through a uterus-having person with partner(s) who can’t impregnate that partner “naturally” — hasn’t always been readily available. It’s still not affordable to many and it’s still not easy to get insurance to cover and it’s still available based on whether medical providers in your area work with LGBT families.

However, it’s becoming more readily available to those with a moderate level of income stability, whereas it was primarily available to families with a lot of privilege and access to medical advocacy in past generations of queer folks. In my personal friend circle alone, I know three people who had a queer baby through assisted reproductive tech around the same time we did. A couple of those folks are having a second kid right now.

Same-gender parents have been foster parents and adoptive parents for ages (where it’s not been outlawed or restricted, anyway) and continue to be more likely to adopt than straight parents. Of course, there are also tons of queer parents who have children through current or previous relationships where sex resulted in babies. I definitely don’t mean to erase these queer parents. That’s the thing.

As fertility treatments become more available to queer people with uteruses, I find myself becoming more uncomfortable with the increasingly heteronormative assumptions people make about the decision to parent this way. As what’s available to us begins to look more and more like what has historically been the Path to A Successful Life for Straight Folks (monogamy, marriage, making babies, house in the suburbs), it feels like we’re being forced into that same narrative.

What I mean is the ever-present and deeply normalized bias that a child who is genetically or gestationally related to you is, somehow, more legitimate. That adoption is the less preferable option or is somehow less of a true family bond than giving birth. (I’m adopted.) That having genetic material or something to imitate an ancestral link from both parents is the best way and that not having that is something of a loss. (We intentionally chose a donor who is not the same race as Waffle.) That not being biologically related to your child loosens your bond to them. (Waffle is not biologically related to Remi.)

That marriage and making kids is the ultimate goal in a way that feels sticky and old-fashioned and Capitalist and exactly what Queer Nation warned us about. (YIKES.)

That said, when the Queers Read This manifesto was passed out at Gay Pride in NYC in 1990, it felt impossible that queer people could procreate. It felt like heterosexuality had the stronghold on the ability to create families through biology. In the manifesto, they wrote: Quite simply, the structure of power in the Judeo-Christian world has made procreation its cornerstone. Families having children assures consumers for the nation’s products and a workforce to produce them, as well as a built-in family system to care for its ill, reducing the expense of public healthcare systems. All non-procreative behavior is considered a threat, from homosexuality to birth control to abortion as an option.

When those forebearers of what became Queer Nation wrote the manifesto, they weren’t thinking about a future in which queer resilience could include taking back procreation in a queer way. Queering baby making wasn’t even on the table. Queer people were creating families through kinship and birthing through art and culture and activism and fighting for their very survival. Damn. We’re still fighting for all of that today.

In the aftermath of marriage equality and in the era of LGBT family-making being a trending topic, I feel more and more pulled to reflect on parenting through my queer lens. What if creating our own families, through intimate kinship with each other as lovers and friends and now, in this era, through expanding our legal families, as well, is another way to fight back against the regime of the norm—against heteropatriarchy and cissexism and transmisogyny? Why do we have to be defined by heterosexual norms just because we finally have some access to the procreative power that was so often used to invalidate queer relationships and trans people’s actual bodies? What if our very queer procreation is a threat to the heterosexual nuclear traditional family and what if we embraced that as our weapon?

I want to embrace it. Sometimes the path to doing so feels murky and complicated by the reality of the world. I’m never more acutely aware of how being queer and a parent is different than when I’m surrounded by straight parents. I’ve cultivated a fairly insulated personal queer community and having a child thrust me into the world of Parents, of other adults with kids. Anytime I go to a family-friendly space, I’m literally surrounded by straight people. It’s full-immersion heterosexuality. Finding other queer and trans families with kids is not impossible in my city, but it’s difficult to make time to be with each other. We have to create that space and time intentionally.

More often, I find myself talking to and exchanging babysitting time with the families who live near us, my neighbors who are very nice and very kind and also very, very, very straight. These are progressive folks, nice and smart and informed people who listen to NPR and are very welcoming to Waffle and Remi and me. They’re also in straight relationships and with the privilege of being straight, completely unaware of the gendered BS they joke about and have accepted as fact. I also feel like I got to enter a different level of closeness with my existing friends who are heterosexual and who have kids. Some of the things we bond over are truly universal to parenting. (Hello, sleep regressions.) Some feel untrue to me, primarily broad assumptions about “how boys act” and “how girls act” that just don’t align with my observations of Remi’s behavior or of my understanding of gender.

When I feel pulled into the heteronormative parenting vacuum, I try to remind myself of my own power. I’ve done this queer analysis on myself already. I’ve embraced my own femininity and seemingly-but-not-actually heteronormative gender expression as my intentional femme armor. I’ve built and grown my queer community intentionally. I’ve busted through respectability politics to a truer version of myself who doesn’t take shit and builds on trust. I know that my very blood is queer, my sexual orientation is perpetually bi/pan/non-monosexual, and my self can’t be separated from who I am and how I love, ever, no matter who I’m dating or where I am or what my family looks like.

I take a deep breath.

My family is my queer community, my friends and my loves and the people who I’ve loved and lost along the way. My family is Remi and Waffle, too, and the life we’ve very intentionally built together. We are not imitating heterosexuality. We aren’t building our family based on blood or ethnicity or genetics or anything. I can hold that to be true while also valuing that Remi is my only known blood relative and that means something to me, personally, deeply. What it doesn’t mean is that my relationship to my mother is less valid or that Waffle’s relationship to Remi is less valid. What it does mean is that Remi won’t grow up as untethered to her ancestry as I did and that Remi will also know and feel that families are built on love above blood, as I do.

It also means that, as a queer family, we can’t disappear into the suburbs. We have to keep fighting for those who don’t have the freedom to make choices around parenting. We have an obligation to continue to be visible and outspoken. We have to continue to work to expand who has access to family-making choices, particularly for folks on the margins with less access to healthcare, less financial security, less freedom over their bodies, less ability to use or afford assisted reproductive technology, who are still unable to imagine a future where having children is a reachable possibility. We’ve gotta acknowledge that marriage and children are not the end goal for queer liberation, that dignity and survival are still very real and vital goals for many in our queer and trans communities, that having the house and the baby does not mean we’ve achieved equity. It means refusing to assimilate or hold up the straight, white hetero family as the ideal, to commit to changing those powerful institutions even and especially from the inside.

My queer parent friends, those in real life and those I’ve met through this very column and through Autostraddle: I want this for you. I want this for us. I know it’ll be imperfect. I’m grateful that we’re in it together.

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5 Queer Family Things I’m Currently Over-Processing

1. Nap Be Gone

Remi has been down to one nap in the afternoon for several months now. In the last few weeks, the nap has been pushed later and later and bedtime has been getting later, as well. We already put her to bed fairly late in the evening, but when norm started creeping up to midnight, which is honestly too late for Waffle and I to feel fully human, I decided to try something.

http://twitter.com/KaeLynRich/status/1097986009759973381

I took a gamble. I let Remi stay up without a nap. It was, honestly, fine. Kind of great, even. Remi had been fighting naps every day for the past month. I took her to work with me and she stayed awake the whole time, even on the car ride home. So I just let it ride out. Worst case scenario: There’d be a total meltdown if Remi became overtired. Best case? She’d go to bed earlier and hopefully be fine?

Remi was ready for bed around 9:15 instead of 11:45 and went right down and slept for 12 hours instead of 9 hours. I don’t want to completely give up the afternoon nap, but we’re transitioning to a “quiet time” for an hour in the afternoon, during which Remi can take a nap if she wants or play in her crib. But I don’t have to play the game of trying to get her to sleep when she isn’t tired.

The downside is that Waffle works late at night and may not be able to see her at bedtime if Remi’s schedule changes. We have a very cute family bedtime routine that ends with a group sing-along of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star that just won’t be the same without Waffle. But it may be worth it to have some time back to ourselves at night. We’ll see!

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2. When the Mommy is Away…

…the Waffles will play! I’ve been traveling for work a lot lately. Scratch that. I’m always traveling or running around a lot, so nothing’s new there. Now that Remi is firmly in the toddler stage of life, she and Waffle have a lot of fun when I’m away. Some might say TOO MUCH FUN.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Zack Waffle (@daddy_dino_waffle)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Zack Waffle (@daddy_dino_waffle)

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3. Blast Off

Remi is entertaining many possible future careers. Musician, horse farm owner (Is that what it’s called to own horses professionally?), doctor, baker, artist, socialite, explorer, paleontologist, and now… astronaut! To infinity and beyond!!!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Zack Waffle (@daddy_dino_waffle)

The world is truly her oyster, ya’ll.

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4. Camp Fawn is Coming

When I was very pregnant and also very sad to be missing A-Camp in 2016, Rory and I had this chat about my feels and also came up with a vision for Club Fawn, the baby disco version of Klub Deer.

Rory sent me this very cute card in the mail shortly after.

This year, at A-Camp XI, I’m finally making a return, with Remi by my side. I’m very excited to be with old and new friends and to share it all with Baby T. Rex! I’ve already spent a very long time reading every possible article on flying with a toddler and looking into many options for restraining a two-year-old in an airplane seat and it’s kind of a stressful thing to do a six-hour flight for the very first time flying with a kid, and to do it as one adult, but I’m excited! I can do this, right? Right?

More importantly, will we see you at Club Fawn?

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5. I’m Fine

Just leaving you with this gem from my week. Hope your week was swell!

http://twitter.com/KaeLynRich/status/1098933310133276674