Scouts’ Honor

These days, I spend one night a week in the basement of a local church, watching six boys in blue uniform shirts and yellow neckerchiefs. I stand, hand over my heart, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, watching my sons pause their kinetic energy briefly to salute the flag. Somehow, I am a Boy Scout Mom.

When the ultrasound midway through my second pregnancy confirmed my woo-woo hunch that both little people inside me appeared to be boys, I felt like I’d just learned I was going to visit a country where I’d never been before. My firstborn, daughter, had never been a particularly girly-girl, her one princess dress was blue not pink. So we already had the wooden trains, some trucks, and an array of plastic farmyard animals, appropriate for young farmers of any gender. I was used to a highly physical child, an early climber, fearless adventurer with trees and cats, the kind of toddler who, upon meeting a new potential playmate would knock the kid down; if they got up, she’d play with them, if they cried, she’d walk away. I thought I was ready for boys.

I looked forward to raising sons in the same sort of (relatively) gender-bias-free household I’d begun for my daughter. Despite what your Happy Meal tells you, there aren’t ‘boy toys’ and ‘girl toys’, there are just kid toys that you either enjoy or don’t enjoy. I figured that without an everyday household structure that differentiated boy behaviors and girl behaviors, I had a shot. The boys loved the play kitchen we gave them for their second birthday, although I was surprised by how many times I walked into the room to find the little purple telephone being used as a weapon (”pow-pow!”).

As they got older, and their other parent, X, left us and transitioned F to M, I’m sure our family’s discussion of boys and girls was a little different than most preschoolers’ families.

“Is Nigel a boy cat or a girl cat?” “He’s a boy cat.” “How do you know?” “Well, under all his fuzzy, he has a penis, like you do.” “But X doesn’t have a penis and he’s a boy now… you told me he’s a boy because he says he’s a boy. What if Nigel says he’s a girl cat?” Sighhhhh. Five-year-olds don’t like ambiguity. It was an interesting time.

Back when my daughter was born, I had declared No Barbies, and over the years had filled her toybox with various stuffed animals and funky soft dolls. But still the Barbies appeared, from grandparents, uncles, and especially at birthdays from her friends, ensuring her fall from innocence into a world of tiny clothes, shoes, and accessories. In the same way, my sons’ friends introduced them to a world of uniforms and weapons, as well as the idea that some things were Boy Toys, from the World of Men.

When they came home declaring that RED and BLUE were Boy Colors, their sister shot them a glare and pointed out her red shirt and blue jacket. When the dress-up clothes box got separated into one pile of hard hats, firefighter hats, and neckties, and another pile of princess dresses, high heels, and silk kimonos, I made an effort to remind all the kids playing over that it was okay to wear whatever looked like fun. My house was a place where anyone could wear a Darth Vader helmet and a Cinderella dress together. As the parent in charge of soccer trophies one Fall, I selected ones without little boy or girl figurines on them just in case there were girls who didn’t like to be reminded that their soccer skills required a pony-tail. Really, I tried.

But slowly, my kids moved more into the world, and the world crept in in odd ways. Television shows I didn’t mind at all were bookended by commercials that deeply reinforced the World of Girls and the World of Boys.

Through happenstance or temperament, my daughter moved in an existence filled with Pokemon and plastic animals. Her grandmother’s indulgence in American Girl dolls came with storybooks full of adventure and resilience. Even Girl Scouting reinforced a message of empowered self-sufficiency - camping, photography, world-awareness (okay, okay, and sewing and cooking). And the Girl Scouting organization is surprisingly inclusive, its policies written to strive for common character among personal difference. I didn’t even consider that by being a Girl Scout Mom, I’d put myself on a slippery slope to someplace I’d sworn I’d never go.

The Boy Scouts as an institution have planted their flag square on the mountain of homophobia and intolerance. They’ve spent millions of dollars to defend their right to be there, and lost millions of dollars more in support from organizations who won’t endorse their positions. Their requirement that Scouts be “morally straight” has stripped years of accomplishment and recognition from young men who later acknowledge their male lovers. It means no matter how much I love my sons, I cannot be a den leader like some of the other moms. The requirement of a belief in God would now remove my late grandfather from an organization he loved, having spent years as a Scoutmaster, leading his son and many other young men on the path to Eagle Scout. That day when the ultrasound threw us into guyville, we sat for hours and debated the circumcision decision. We were wholly united and adamant: No Boy Scouts.

What I hadn’t counted on was the day one of my sons came running out after school, yelling “Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease can I be a Cub Scout?”

Maybe for him it was an opportunity for that sense of belonging. Maybe it was the promise of events and camping. Maybe it was the spiffy uniform (this). I told him I would consider it. That night I sat and, as the Grinch would say, puzzled until my puzzler was sore. I talked with his classmate’s mom who would be the den leader, a woman who I knew and liked. She understood what the issue was, and tried to reassure me that at the local level the institutional policies had little effect on the great experience of Boy Scouting. In the end, I came to a conclusion that it’s about my son’s life, not mine, and that until I see evidence that he is being taught intolerance, we’d give it a try. At meetings, he looks sharp in his uniform. I always feel vaguely unclean.

Once his brother discovered there were snacks at the meetings, he joined up too, and I’ve watched them rise from Bobcat to Tiger to Wolf. I’ve sewed badges on shirts, and proved to them that moms can build the little wooden Pinewood Derby cars just fine. I accompanied them to Boy Scout daycamp last summer, and we all learned to shoot bb guns together (!). This is about them, not me.

It’s still awkward, though, at area-wide events with families we don’t know, when one of the other parents asks if their dad was a Boy Scout. I launch into the history of Boy Scouting on my side of the family, while inwardly wry that until my sons were four, their dad wasn’t even a boy, let alone a Boy Scout.

Beyond the registration fees, I do not give money to an organization that requires its members to be ‘morally straight’. I question my own cognitive dissonance, and bristle at the implication that I am not good enough. I’m hopeful that in a year or two they’ll move on to some other activity, guitar lessons or some sport, so my two-activity-per-kid policy lets this experience pass out of my world as fluidly as it appeared.

If not, as they get older they’re going to hear from me about the organization and its policies. They’ll have to set their own moral compass. For now, I stand, reciting, hoping someday my children get to live in a world where “liberty and justice for all” is true.

Written by Darby Blue

How do you deal with sending your kids to organizations whose policies you don’t support, such as religious organizations or even, sometimes, Grandma’s house? How do you raise kids to appreciate tolerance when intolerance is taught in so many organizations?

For those of you without children, you likely face the same issues for yourself, such as in the workplace. How do try to live your beliefs when it can be so difficult?

Please join the discussion for this topic on our forums!

When Worlds Collide

A strange thing is happening over on Facebook. As the sons and daughters of some of my high school friends are reaching high school age themselves (!), suddenly their parents are showing up on FB. And while it’s great to see them, it’s presenting an interesting cross-pollination of the neat compartments of queer mommy life.

For a while, it was all neat and tidy. Queer friends online, mommy friends offline or e-mail only. That kept things nicely compartmentalized, so I could plan play-overs in a totally separate world from checking out a friend’s erotic art-photography or reading critical analysis and comparative theory of vaginas over on the boards. As someone who is a tad bit paranoid by nature, I’ve been something of a lurker in those discussions, but you know, I’ve shown ya’ my legs and all.

I got my first inkling, however, that things were changing, tectonics in motion, the day earlier this year when my eleven-year-old called from the kids’ computer in the kitchen, “Did you know that if you Google *** (my Significant Other’s first/last name) you don’t get anything relevant at ALL?”

This is like suddenly the needle on the seismic event monitor of my life starting to bounce like a superball. Shit. What might be out there? I’m pretty Googlesafe, but what about her? Or my other friends who hang out here at my house all the time? I know, I know, we’ve all dealt with the ‘what happens if my mom Googles me’ question forever. But there are some people quite dear to me, whose lives (when they’re not playing videogames with my kids in my basement) aren’t rated G. Or PG. Or PG-13.

As the weeks went by after those first tremors, the aftershocks continued, for this was the year my daughter and her friends enveloped themselves in the interwebs, cruising YouTube for Fruits Basket vids; Google-chatting about endangered animals, Twilight, and who’s crushed out on whom; sending brightly colored e-mails splattered with emoticons. I try to be a responsible mom, monitor as best I can, and have some small advantage that I’ve conducted friendships via IM and e-mail, and can counsel appropriately that sometimes the medium is lacking. By being the Parent Over Shoulder I’ve also discovered that she and her friends have a larger vocabulary of cuss words than I thought, and are all finally learning to touch type with some speed. She’s still too young for Facebook or MySpace, but I know that’s coming. And Google? She’s dangerous with Google. So it’s only a matter of time.

See, over on FB, somehow I friended a couple of my best buds from high school. I don’t have my full name on my FB (see note above about paranoid), so I’m not easily searchable. But either they found me or I found them, and it’s been great to have them back in my life. These were my closest circle for some important times, who happened to be online types, so we added each other in. Then, some of my other high school friends appeared. And then my brother found me.

This means I now sit in the middle of a FB friends list with my bro and his wife’s Mormon family on one side, and my queer erotic-arts and porn producing friends on the other. And my high-school-friends’ Mason buddies circling. Is it any wonder I keep telling my daughter, no, no FB until you’re fourteen?

Then it hit me one afternoon… if I’m on my brother’s friends list, then my mom can find me. And if she can find me she can find my friends… she can find you, Queerky, she can find you! And oh boy, if my mom can find you, that means your mom can find you too! And I sat there (in an almost Dr. Seussian way… too many bedtime readings of The Cat In The Hat), and thought… what does your mom think when she’s reading you talk about your cunt? When she’s reading about those life changing moments? When she’s looking at the pictures you took of the guy at the doctor’s office’s boner? What does she think of my legs? (No really, what does she think of my legs…?)

And circling back to the beginning… what do your kids think? Those of you with five-year-olds have a while to ponder this one, but those of you with older kids or pre-teens are facing it square on.

I belong to a book site too, one of those places where you log what you’re reading and have read, and can see your friends’ books as well. I was recruited there by my kid, and have her and a few of her friends on my friends list. But I have some of my grown up friends there too. Some who occasionally read rather grown up books. And whose settings aren’t locked down tight, their lists are public, their lives not guarded and girded against inappropriate onlookers.

I pondered this one as well. I don’t really have a problem with my eleven-year-old reading through my friends’ booklists and finding books like Exhibitionism for the Shy or The Ethical Slut. Well, maybe a little, but not enough to shut them down. However, because her friends link to her and to me, I found myself reluctant to take responsibility for putting those titles in front of someone else’s kid. Thus I created a second me. Now I have me and me lite. I feel like new Coke.

But when I stopped to think about it, I’d just done the kind of thing I wouldn’t want my kid to do, sneaking around, hiding parts of me that are real to try to look better in someone else’s eyes. So I sat her down and we talked, and I explained my reasoning, and that I get to parent my kids but not other people’s. She nodded and agreed, and I’m sure made the mental note, ‘oh, so you can make a second name and just not tell everyone, cool!’ And I went back to pondering the Facebook conundrum: tattoo artists and teeball mommies…can they all just get along? And what will they think of you?

Written by Darby Blue

Because I said so!

Do as I say, not as I do. Whoever first said it, I’m sure she was somebody’s mother. Sometimes it seems like one of the primary tenets of parenting survival. Other times, it stinks of double standards, hypocrisy, and the head-in-the-quicksand approach to parenting - the “if I just assume my children’s lives aren’t as complex as mine, this will all be easier” route. Sometimes it is a reasonable solution. Stretching an allowance to cover new Pokemon cards and a candy bar is not the same as budgeting a mortgage, utilities, and putting groceries on the table. But what am I really saying when I deny my daughter the extra dollar she needs, give the lecture on not spending money you don’t have, and then whip out the plastic at the checkout? Where’s that line?

“No biting!” I admonish my son, reminding him sharply that I have no tolerance for animals or children that bite. Then I catch my significant other smirking quietly while reading the Sunday comics, and my mind flashes to the deep bruise on soft flesh barely covered by her t-shirt. No biting without consent is what I really mean, I tell myself, but I’m not going to sit here and try to explain the particulars of consent to my six-year-old. I’m big on consent as a concept with my kids, having reinforced a consistent no-means-no message ever since they could comprehend. As a parent, though, one has to stick with the “pain is bad” message, even as the irony oozes around the edges.

Parenting is about setting boundaries, creating safe space, and protecting our young. From the cupboard latches and padded corners of the toddler’s world to the curfews and over-the-shoulder computer monitoring of older kids, we remain ever vigilant against the bad, scary forces of evil out there in the world. So many things could go wrong. The implication is constant: to be a Good Parent you’d better anticipate all of the things that could go wrong. An entire industry of products and services has developed to help you. Childproofing services, Net-nanny software, home drug testing kits, and cell phones for children with GPS tracking built in. And the list goes on: movie and video game ratings, car seats and even car seat inspection stations. None of us want to be the parent on the six o’clock news. ‘NEVER LEAVE CHILD UNATTENDED’ said the sticker on the car seat I brought my tiny baby home from the hospital in. Never? I remember thinking… Never?!

Safe space is easy to define as a new parent, when one is talking about baby gates and padding sharp corners. It gets harder, and slopes rapidly toward the hypocrite’s quicksand, as they get older and safe space becomes a discussion about behaviors, choices, and associations. These days, the four horsemen of adolescence’s apocalypse are alcohol, drugs, sex, and the horrors of the Internet. You can lose a kid to any of these, or more importantly, a kid can lose him or herself. As a parent, somehow creating a safe path through those influences is as clear an imperative as locking up the cleaning products and putting away the matches was just a few years earlier. The question then becomes, what exactly is safe?

One of the things I delighted in most about coming out (besides getting to have sex with the ladies, of course), was the feeling of being freed from all the expectations of being ‘normal’. I had hopped off the prix fixe menu of life (boyfriend, fiancee, husband, motherhood, etc.), and could choose my route a la carte. Or, as I once explained, I was already a fuck up, so what did it matter if I got another tattoo. But here in Mommyland, I’m ever alert that the route I consider my ‘normal’ may be outside other people’s safe space. Occasionally, I wonder whether it is even outside my own safe space.

Sometimes I look around at my assorted friends and associates and among us we read like a laundry list of parental hazard warnings: Use of alcohol, sometimes to excess? Check. Recreational drug use? Check. Casual sex? Check. Forming relationships with strangers on the Internet? Check. I know, I know… so far it sounds like fun, right? And it goes on! Non-traditional relationships? Check. Pornography? Check (both making it and looking at it). Body mods and funky hair colors? Check. It goes on.

So where exactly will I find that safe space I, as a responsible parent, must create for my kids? How do I create it without treading into the do-as-I-say quicksand? I can’t pretend that the scary things out there don’t exist, because I know that for lots of folks, I’m one of them. Try explaining that to your kid sometime.

Actually, I find I explain a lot. I explain about the different choices people make. I teach about treating people decently and requiring that others do the same of you. I periodically throw in the preachy moral lesson about non-equivocal things like drinking and driving. And bike helmets. In general, I try to remember that the farther my head is in the sand, the sooner my kids will write me off as stupid.

At times, I do catch myself wishing for nice, normal paths through life for them, and then just as quickly remember how badly I chafed at “normal”. Still, who am I to deny them normal if it is where they truly fit into the world? While my observation has been that children of queer parents have a sort of heightened awareness of their own individuality, I suppose it is entirely possible I’ll have kids who never question their sexuality. They could grow up, get married, move to the suburbs and vote Republican. At that point all my lessons on tolerance and agreeing to disagree will really come home to roost.

So, “Model the behavior you wish to see in your child” is the modern parenting mantra that rings in my head as I harangue them about dishes left in the playroom while hurriedly clearing five days of coffee cups off my desk. I know full well that actions speak louder than words, but consistent follow through, she’s a bitch. The follow through becomes more important though as the reliance on baby-proofing declines. When a discussion with one of my boys about how anything covered by a bathing suit is personal space and other people are NOT allowed to touch you there was countered by a challenge from him, “Then how come She (my S.O.) touches you on the booty all the time?” I both laughed and cringed. Mostly though, I liked it that he felt he could call me on my shit.

We’re still in the thick of modeling behavior and setting boundaries, but I know that not far down the road, they’ll be on their own; having to set their own limits and define their own safe space. Then my job as a parent will be to back off, and cross my fingers that, while they may not do it the way I would, and it can’t be the pain- and worry-free existence that I as their mom might wish for them, they’ll find their way through. I’d really be a hypocrite if I didn’t.

Written by Darby Blue

Don’t Scare the Mommies

Identity. It is a fundamental human construct. It’s interesting to watch my kids move from the puppy dog-level questions of “Who are you?” and “What’s that?” to the infinitely more complex question of “Who am I?” But unlike being able to name “ducky!” and “kitty!” for them, “Who am I?” is a question they’ll have to struggle lifelong to answer for themselves. Sometimes I can barely answer it for myself.

“Mom,” says the apron I wear in the kitchen when I’m cooking something particularly spattery or messy. A number of very thoughtful writers have explored what happens to individual identity when one makes the jump into parenthood. In my quest to understand this process, I read lots of them. Having done the coming out thing previous to parenthood, the process of transition, of crossing over, was at least a little familiar. That is, if the total unknown can ever be described as familiar, and whoever gave you directions was a little drunk, and then it snowed so the whole place looks different anyway.

But I’m not the only one who has seen the similarities between these processes. Meg Wolitzer’s essay in a book on new motherhood describes that period of indoctrination into motherhood with a story about a friend of hers, who (yes I’m going to quote it for you, shush): “had realized she was a lesbian, and partook of everything gay or lesbian-related she could find. She joined groups, she marched for miles, she stuffed envelopes, and she had lots and lots of sex with women. Then, after a while, she didn’t need to remind herself she was a lesbian so often, and even when she wasn’t reminding herself, the title stuck.” We stalk, capture, and eventually inhabit these new identities, until it’s no longer that we are them, we are just us.

Neat and tidy. I have a baby, I become a parent, I am Mom. Great. But wait… am I still a lesbian? I look up at Wolitzer’s list and notice marching for miles, stuffing envelopes, and having lots and lots of sex with women doesn’t seem to have much to do with breastfeeding and diapers and which sippy cup doesn’t leak. Even now that I’m out of those years, the list also doesn’t have much to do with making school lunches, arranging playovers, and being the homework bitch. Sometimes these identities don’t play nicely together at all. Sometimes the juxtaposition is awkward. Unfortunately, it is identity we’re talking about, and stifling any part of it, especially a hard-fought-for queerness, will only work for so long.

Some lesbian mothers, usually happily coupled ones, settle graciously within motherhood. Both the earth mothers and the overachievers delightedly trade their cats for offspring with opposable thumbs. Others of us feel each identity grate on the other like cogs that just don’t mesh. I found myself pondering recently while driving carpool that I know a number of queer mommies with pierced nips. Well, I do! Then I realized I cannot imagine any of the straight mommies I know even contemplating such a thing. I know it’s just as likely they have blindfolds and riding crops in their closets, and yet, that still falls so much more clearly into queer identity than motherhood. Although the blindfold comes in handy for the birthday party Pin the Tail on the Donkey games!

Thus I juggle these two equally legitimate but sometimes quarrelsome facets of my own queer mommyhood. I’m the one who is always on edge when reading at the local x-rated open mic, alert in case one of the school mommies stops into the women’s bookstore for a book on sensitive parenting. I’m the one debating whether wearing that stylish skirt would tip me into anyone’s femme column. This queer parenting thing constantly requires one to work for balance between Somewhat Hip Dyke and Responsible Mommy, elbowing new spaces into both roles. The compromises show up in odd places.

For a number of years now, since I’ve worn my hair cut short again, I’ve implored my stylist with one simple warning: cut it as short as you want, but please, don’t scare the mommies — because of course it’s one thing to be a little edgy, to be (whispered) gay, to wear boots instead of sneakers and button-flys instead of track pants. But you don’t want to scare the other mommies. The tricky thing about motherhood is that your identity is no longer just about you. If you scare the mommies, your children don’t have playovers anymore. Even if they have friends at school, their social sphere does not extend outside school hours.

My eldest attended a Catholic school in suburban Chicago for three of her tender years. I scared the mommies a lot. We had ended up there after a couple of bad preschool experiences with a very challenging little person. The school was very good to her, absence of playovers excepted. It was very bad for me. I was not managing much balance in those days, and turned my identity inside out trying not to scare the mommies. Long hair. Nail polish. Skorts! But to no avail. I’ll never forget the time one of the other Girl Scout mommies pulled her daughter out of the restroom as I walked in with mine, saying, “No, no! I don’t want you in there while she’s in there.”

Now we’re in a relatively welcoming environment, and even though I’m somewhat more a one-mommy family than a two-mommy family, it’s amazing to me to find two-mommy kids on our Tee Ball teams, or families at the PTA meetings. I know most of this world doesn’t have that luxury. Still, we definitely have that see-how-tolerant-I-am minority status in some ways. You find us on the periphery, worker bees, but not part of the mommies and daddies social scene. My kids have friends; they even get to have their friends sleep over without anyone balking at their exposure to The Gay. The balance, while not perfect, is much more livable. But I decided to put my identity dichotomy on the line recently when I conducted a small social experiment.

The school’s annual Sock Hop is a dress-up affair. Boys in white t-shirts and rolled up jeans, girls in poodle skirts and pony tails. There’s the occasional girl in white shirt and jeans, though I’ve never seen a boy there in a poodle skirt. Hmm. My hair has been growing unchecked all winter, partly from procrastination and partly for warmth. I’ve kept it mostly tucked under caps and hats. I don’t like the way it looks as it creeps mullety down the back of my neck. For the occasion, however, I blew it all fluffy dry, tied a flowery scarf round my head, put on scarlet lipstick and wore an old pair of ballet flats with my cardigan and jeans. I wasn’t ten feet inside the door when the compliments started. I was grabbed. And gushed over. And told how amazing I looked. The mommies kibitzed that I must grow it out. One of the dads told me he didn’t even recognize me. That’s because I didn’t look like me, I looked like one of them! And I am. That apron, it still says, “Mom”.

But I’m getting my hair cut next week.

Written by Darby Blue

I was impregnated by a woman in lime-green stretch pants

I was talking with my son this morning about the kids’ movie, Enchanted. He said he didn’t want to see it because a woman dies in the movie. He continued by describing a scene from a commercial where the princess bites into an apple and then falls down, appearing to be dead. I looked at him and reminded him that it’s like Snow White, and she’s not actually dead. “Snow Who?” he said. Which just reminded me that sometimes you’ve got to know the back story, the history (or, excuse me, I’m over 40, herstory), for things to make sense. Sometimes you have to begin at the beginning.

For lots of people the story is one we all know by heart: “When a man and a woman love each other very much…” - cue the sound of a tape screeching to a halt. This doesn’t work so well when you’ve been impregnated in a doctor’s office by a woman in lime-green stretch pants. I know that some lesbians had their children with men they loved very much. But this story never began there. It began in a mall food court, with one of those questions you ask when you’re kindasortaseriously dating someone: “Do you think you’d ever want to have kids?” Beware; this is always a trick question.

Fast-forward some years, past bobbling other people’s cute babies on my knees, past smiling at the headstrong little girls at the park (karma got me on that one eventually), to sitting in the lavender painted living room of this month’s host couple for Rainbow Families. Going to a Rainbow Families meeting without a child in tow is effectively the same thing as going with a six-foot-tall neon sign that says, “Oh! Tell Me Your Birth Story!” It’s an excuse to spend a frozen Midwest Sunday afternoon watching children hit each other (so cutely!) with toys, and nibble vegetarian casseroles. But it’s also information overload, listening to each couple’s route through the treacherous course of baby making. These courses can be divided into four stages: 1. The Quest For The Missing Ingredient 2. Timing is Everything 3. Is There Enough Ice Cream? and 4. Ouch.

Before you start on this path, while you’re sitting in that lavender living room, you’re not fully aware of the subtle mommy-jockeying that’s going on, the game of parental pole-position inherent in the oh-so polite debate over known vs. unknown sperm (there, I said it) donors, medicalized birthing vs. natural birthing, breastfeeding vs. bottle feeding, co-sleeping vs. cry it out, cloth vs. disposable, pacifier vs. thumb, working vs. staying home, siblings vs. only children, Snugli vs. sling, Melissa vs. Indigo Girls (hey, this was over ten years ago!), Star Wars vs. Star Trek. Without an actual child, one is merely a spectator in these contests. Any opinions voiced, while serving to defuse the escalation, result in a stare and a dismissing, “Mmhmm.” You don’t know anything yet.

But oh boy, you’re going to learn. To drive a car, you have to take a course, and complete a written and practical exam. To adopt a puppy, you have to show proof of residence, show current I.D., and often provide personal references. To have a baby, you have to be in the presence of sperm during the right 40 or so hours each month. No reference checks. No written exams. There are books, of course, but parenting books are like trying to draw a snowflake: each book is written about a specific kid or set of kids that the author has experienced. My snowflake might not look at all like their snowflake. As I sit munching tofu puffs, awash in a sea of information (children’s catalog modeling to start a college fund?), blissfully ignorant of the realities, Rainbow Parenting begins.

I could drag you through the process, debating color blindness vs. a family history of alcoholism, grousing about paying for sperm when there’s so much of it out there for free, having more blood drawn than a phlebotomist-in-training’s best friend, the months of sperm but no baby, and then the month, finally, when Aunt Flo failed to show up bearing her red flag. There is nothing like that two minutes suspended in time, knowing that behind the bathroom door is a stick you peed on that will tell you your future. Really, if the pregnancy test people were being honest about it, little blue letters would show up reading, “Life as you know it is over.”

Fast-forward some eleven years or so later, through many re-runs of diaper changing, adventures in breastfeeding, bed rest while pregnant with twins, so many episodes of diaper changing that it becomes laughable (conference call with the headset on mute, me on the floor changing two diapers?). But it’s all that baby stuff that it takes to get from a little blue line on the stick to someone who can actually, occasionally say “Thank you, Mom.” You get all the tedium of repetitive action, but also all the little snuggly people with fuzzy heads, and the wonder of their discoveries. Babymommyhood was a good chapter to experience, but like college or my 20s, I’m glad it was finite. We had a party at my house the day all my children finally completed the two steps necessary to graduate into big kidhood: take care of your own self in the bathroom, and buckle your own seatbelt.

This past holiday season I was definitely onto the next phase in parenting. I was treated to endless rounds of “Jingle bells, Batman smells” and discovered one of my sons had interpreted the lyrics of that old Christmas favorite as, “Deck the halls with bras of holly!” He has no idea what a ‘bough’ is, but a bra is what his sister doesn’t want him to see in the laundry. My eldest and I agreed we’re both scared of growing up, and that I’ll stick by her as she grows up if she’ll stick by me as I grow old. We began at the beginning, but I promise, this part has more humor value.

I’ll leave you with a description of the final page in my son’s pre-holiday-break journal that he brought home from school. At top is a detailed picture of the moon, with green highlighter lines coming out of it toward a man labeled, “Ceanta,” who is standing on a sleigh pulled by a red-nosed reindeer. Both man and reindeer are saying “PE.You,” as are people’s voices coming out of two houses below. The caption reads: “The moon is foorting. Ceanta dasint like it. But the moon will not stop.”

Too bad I had sent my Christmas cards already. Watch out for the moon.

Written by Darby Blue