Do we ever outgrow our desire to have “one big happy family”? When I was a kid, we always had really big Thanksgiving celebrations—loud, crowded dinners where aunts and uncles and distant cousins five-times removed would eat too much and tell dirty jokes that went right over my head. I loved the noise and the […]
Women in the kitchen. Men watching football. Even a family with lesbian moms isn’t immune to a traditional division of holiday labor. It’s Thanksgiving 2012 a couple hours north of San Francisco, and it’s cold enough outside to see your breath. In my car, I have both the heat and radio blasting as I wind […]
We do real harm when we refer to girls as bad asses for making certain decisions, because the subtly-whispered subtext is, “You’re not supposed to be doing that. Girls don’t do that.” When enrollment suddenly and drastically dropped at my son’s preschool (long story), his class of 10 kids shrank to four: him, and three […]
The most important question you could ask a new mom is how she’s doing. How she’s really doing. One of the most common things to emerge after I recently started to speak more openly about my struggle with severe postpartum mental illness (postpartum psychosis) was the amount of people who told me that they had […]
This originally appeared on Mommy Man: Adventures Of A Gay Superdad. Republished here with permission. One of the more neglected purposes of my blog is to share information (and dispel myths) about makin’ gaybies. I want to educate people about my family—and at the same time help prospective parents, gay or straight, who might be […]
My brain says we’re done, but my ovaries are going, “You sure about that?” My husband and I always knew we wanted two kids—no more, no less, just two kids. Two kids that would always have each other; two kids that we could afford to feed and clothe and educate and take to gym class; […]
This originally appeared on Disgrace Under Pressure. Republished here with permission. Years ago I saw the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours. In one scene, a severely depressed mother leaves her son with a neighbor, uncertain whether or not she will return for him. The little boy senses his mother’s desperation, and before he […]
Robin Silbergleid’s kids don’t have a daddy or even a biological father. They have a donor. And that’s exactly how she wanted it. On the night I checked into the hospital to deliver my daughter, the nurse asked me who the father was. A sperm donor, I said. Aren’t they all, she kidded, what’s his […]
