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The Gay Genealogist: Creating a Modern Family Tree

Veronica Rhodes — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:00:00 EST

Filed under: Adoption, Gay Parenting, Opinions

As hobbies go, genealogical research is not exactly on par with snowboarding -- it ranks right up there with stamp collecting in its total lack of "cool" factor. Does anything really say "geek" more than an obsession with family trees?

But that's me -- genealogy freak (and geek). Even as a kid, I was fascinated by charts that showed relationships and family lineage and my great sea of cousins and second cousins, most of whom I would never meet.

I was obsessed with the grandparents who'd come from Ireland as very young adults (some still teenagers), never to see their own parents again. I felt their loss as my own, in that my family history seemed to begin with their immigration. Somewhere between Ireland and New York I found a hard line of mystery: I knew nothing of my great-grandparents, and I felt cut off from my own ancestry.

As an adult, my obsession became more intense -- and more professional -- as hand-drawn trees were replaced by a full binder of documents culled from my research. Real, primary sources replaced family lore, and the Internet made a new wealth of documents available to me. I now have copies of Ellis Island ship manifests, U.S. and Irish census forms, draft registration cards, marriage certificates and all sorts of other material that have helped me create life stories for ancestors I've never met.

Looking at any of those documents, I can't help but think of the young immigrants, brides and grooms and prospective soldiers who filled them out. Did their nervous hands shake a little as they signed their names, or did they dash off their signatures with the rash confidence of youth? One thing I'm pretty sure of is that they weren't thinking about me, the 21st century genealogical researcher. I'm sure they never imagined someone using a laptop in 2011 to look at those signatures, tracing a family's path back to 1920s New York tenements and 1880s Irish farms.

But I spend a lot of time thinking about that 22nd century researcher who may someday be looking for me. As I've signed my official documents -- New York City domestic partnership agreement, New York State second-parent adoption forms, California wedding license, name change form -- I can't help but think about how being gay complicates things.

Will my searching descendants think to look in California for my marriage license, when I lived in New York at the time? Will they be looking for a 2008 document at all, when we'd been together since 1993, bought our house in 1999, and started our family in 2004? Will they have that "aha!" moment when they realize same-sex marriage was (briefly) legal in California that summer, when it still wasn't sanctioned in New York?

I also recognize what an odd hobby this is for any adoptive parent. After all, I've created my little clan based on the absolute belief that your family is what you say it is, not what biology mandates for you. How do I reconcile that with my obsession with finding my own biological lineage?

As a child, I was fascinated by my dad's mother. He'd only been 12 years old when she died, so he had a limited number of childhood stories that included her. Since I was only 17 when he died, I never got the chance to press him for more memories of his mother. I felt a real affinity to her, since I had her name, but she was always the mystery grandmother to me. What was she like? Did I have her hair, her eyes, her sense of humor? It frustrated me that I could never know those answers.

My kids often ask about their own grandparents, none of whom they'll ever really know. Both Em* and I had lost our dads before we became parents, and Em's mother died just a few years ago. Ann* will remember her, vaguely, but Mary* probably won't. My own mother is lost in the fog of Alzheimer's, so she is also "gone" to her grandchildren. But are any of these even the "right" grandparents to talk about with our girls?

In the largest sense, of course, they are. They made Em and me who we are today, and, like all parents, we want to tell our kids stories from our own childhoods -- and the kids want to hear them. They want to know what we were like as little girls, what we wore, what games we played, what tricks we played on our moms, what kinds of things got us into hot water. Those tales are filled with stories of our parents and grandparents, and our kids eat them up.

But our girls also ask about their birth parents, and those questions are just as important, although they're different. Where did my blond hair come from? How tall will I be? Why do I have brown eyes? We can't answer all of them as completely as we'd like, since we just don't know. (We tried an international birth parent search for both girls, but came up empty.)

I can trace my family's trademark ski nose back three generations -- I've actually seen it on Irish cousins -- but I can't tell my daughter where she got her cute little button nose. That hurts me now, and I'm pretty sure it will hurt her later.

We're at least a year away from the inevitable family tree project at school, but I'm thinking about it already. I know it will be a tough one. I don't think there's a good model for an adopted child in a gay family. We've read articles about how to help, like creating a fluffy family "shrub" showing the complicated bunch we are instead of the traditional straight-line tree with roots and branches. That's one approach, I guess, but I know I would have found it unsatisfying as the geeky kid I was. I drew my tree to help me understand where I came from, and find my place in the family -- will a shrub do the same for my kids?

I worry that my children will come to see their adoption by American parents as the same mysterious hard line I found with my grandparents' immigration. Will they end up feeling like pioneers, first-generation Americans with no connection to the country and lineage they left behind? Or will they embrace Em's and my family trees as their own, and find satisfaction in knowing their place in their adoptive family?

I hope they come to understand that they have two separate trees, one born of biology and the other from love, now forever entwined. I hope they learn to appreciate both for what they have to offer, and I hope they someday have the tools to find out more about their own biology if they want to. Just as the Internet opened up vast treasures that weren't available to me as a child, maybe someday another new technology, undreamed of today, will help them find the genetic histories that are currently out of their reach.

Or maybe I'll get lucky and they'll both just take up snowboarding instead.

*All names have been changed to protect my family's privacy

Veronica Rhodes writes about gay parenting under this pen name; read her blog on RedRoom. She and David Valdes Greenwood alternate weeks writing the Family Gaytriarchs. Look for them on ParentDish every Wednesday.

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Picture Daze: How Too Much Comes to Mean Nothing

Veronica Rhodes — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:00:00 EST

Filed under: Gay Parenting, Opinions

I think it was the dance recital portrait offer that put me over the edge. For a mere $70, a photographer would take a picture of my 5-year-old in her tap costume, providing makeup and styling services along with the snap of the shutter.

Total number of prints included in the package: zero. The photographer would provide a CD of the images, and we could either print them ourselves or negotiate print prices.

I decided to pass. Understand that this is monumental -- I never pass up the opportunity to take or order pictures of my kids. But this year, especially, photos have come to represent everything Americans have done wrong in the last half-century. I've come to the conclusion that, in our age of plenty, we've devalued everything.

Here's the background: Last November, we got the usual notice of picture day at school. I always used to love picture day -- I would think hard about what my kids would wear, and I'd get up early to do their hair, eagerly anticipating the arrival of the prints to see how history would record them that year.

But a couple of years ago, we started getting picture day fliers in the spring, too. Now we'd have twice-yearly chances to record our children's progress through the school year. And, of course, it immediately doubles the school's photographic fund-raising opportunities.

My kids play soccer in the fall, so we also have picture day for sports portraits -- individual and team. It's baseball in the spring, meaning individual and team photos then, too. Packages come with 5x7s and wallets, with offers for trading cards, magnets, bookmarks, mouse pads and coffee mugs, all emblazoned with their smiling faces.

I can't say no to picture day -- how can you tell your child you don't want her photo? And I used to find it hard to say no when they wanted a magnet or trading card with their stats on it.

But that's four photos a year of each child, assuming we just get two school pictures and their two sport photos. Our older daughter also made her First Communion this year, which meant a photo in her finery to enclose with thank you notes. But seriously, what do you actually do with four or five 5x7 portraits of your child in a year? Not to mention all those wallets -- does anyone, in any family, love their nieces, nephews and grandchildren enough to welcome nine new wallet-sized images of them a year?

So, when I received the flier from dancing school, I lost it. The fact that the fee did not even include prints (which you might think would be a blessed relief) was the final straw.

I think I flipped because it's such a symptom of our excesses. I probably have 50 or so total pictures of my childhood, including all those years of annual school portraits, and they're really precious to me. I've been a parent for seven years now, and I would guess I have about 10,000 photos of my kids. But I suspect those photos won't mean much to them. I know the magnets and bookmarks don't, because I'm more likely to find them under a bed, or on the floor, than saved carefully in an album.

It's no-brainer: The more you have of everything, the less you value anything.

It's not just photos. I clearly remember the handful of special toys I loved as a child, because they were just a handful. In just seven years, my two kids have already received more toys than my family of four did in our collective childhoods. In fact, they probably have more "stuff" than our whole block did 40 years ago.

It keeps coming, too, even after we decided to be more discriminating parents and stop the deluge. Stuff rains down on our kids from all directions, not just from us. A visit to the dentist earns a token to put in a machine that spits out a small toy. The woman who cuts their hair lets them pick a toy as a reward for sitting still. Invite 10 or 12 kids to their birthday parties and they get 10 or 12 new toys. They even get gifts for other kids' birthdays, which now seem to require "goodie bags" for all. We refer to those goodies as "LPCs," or "little pieces of crap."

We try to imagine the resources consumed to create these LPCs -- the design, manufacturing, shipment from a third-world nation, delivery to a retailer -- for the nanosecond of use they get before they're discarded. Sometimes I think they should just start a landfill right next to the factory, and skip the middlemen entirely. Because a kid who gets a new LPC every other day learns that they have no value at all.

What I don't understand is why they still want these trinkets. Wouldn't you think at some point even a child would groan at the prospect of another little paper-parachute soldier, or a pair of clacking plastic hands? But, instead, their appetite for these items only increases -- they're the nonfood equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, where each sip or bite just fuels the desire for the next.

So, effective immediately, my kids are on the "stuff" equivalent of the South Beach Diet -- no more. In a weird twist of fate, just as I came to this conclusion, my camera took a nose dive off the desk and went to its final reward. I guess I'm starting on South Beach, too.

*All names have been changed to protect my family's privacy

Veronica Rhodes writes about gay parenting under this pen name; read her blog on RedRoom. She and David Valdes Greenwood alternate weeks writing the Family Gaytriarchs. Look for them on ParentDish every Wednesday.

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Dress Blues: Gay Moms Learn a Lesson On Gender Norms

Veronica Rhodes — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:00:00 EST

Filed under: Gay Parenting

"You have got to support me on this one," Em* told me in no uncertain terms. "She has to wear the dress."

Em doesn't put her foot down very often, so when she tells me something is important to her, I listen. Problem was, my other easy-going girl was putting her foot down, as well.

"Mom, you've got to tell them," Ann* begged tearfully during one of our bedtime talks. "You've got to tell them I can't wear a dress."

So there I was, between a rock and a hard place, with the line drawn in the sand. Over a dress, of all things.

Of course, this wasn't just any dress. This was THE dress, one of the dresses a girl is supposed to fantasize about, one that would take its place in the pantheon of dream dresses, along with the Sweet Sixteen dress, the prom dress and the Big Kahuna of dresses, the wedding gown. This was the First Communion dress, the first of a girl's Big Fancy Dresses.

And Ann was having none of it.

This was a kid who hadn't worn a dress since she was 5 years old -- and even that was a negotiated dress, for her moms' wedding. Her well-established disdain for anything frilly was certainly fine with us -- Em and I are not the lipstick variety of lesbian, and you're more likely to find us in jeans or khakis than skirts or dresses. If Ann were more comfortable in pants, who cared?

But sometimes a dress is not just a dress. We've known for a couple of years now that Ann's no-frill clothing choices are a part of something bigger than just her wardrobe. There was no sudden shock -- it was more of a growing awareness -- that there was something different about her.

In pretend games with her sister or with her friends, we could hear Ann choosing a male persona for herself ("I'm the dad" or "I'm the big brother"). When we played the game of Life, Ann chose a little blue stick figure, not a pink one, to represent her.

Ann plays Little League baseball, where she's always the only girl on her team, but she disdains the very concept of girls' softball. She quit gymnastics rather than accede to the coach's demand that she stop running and vaulting and tumbling with the boys' group, and instead take her place with the girls on the balance beam -- in a leotard and tights.

We haven't shopped in the girls' department for two or three years now; the three-piece suit I once agreed to buy her for dress-up has turned into a full-blown boy's wardrobe. Ann wears her hair chin length, in a vague style that could pass for either a boy's long cut or a girl's short one. With her unisex hair and boy's clothes, she's routinely mistaken for a boy -- and she likes it.

We've negotiated every step of the way: Yes to the boy's parka, no to the buzz cut. Yes to wearing the suit to Easter dinner, no to wearing it to the school play. We're in uncharted waters here, and we're doing the best we can to avoid the rocks under the surface.

One family member opined that it was psychological, that Ann was trying to fill in for the man who was missing in our lives. A friend and neighbor -- a smart guy, a Ph.D -- saw her in her suit and wisecracked, "You guys are starting her a little early, don't you think?"

Both comments stung, and badly, although I know they're both wrong. This is who Ann is, it's not about Em and me, or about a "missing" man. And I love my child, no matter who she is. Of course, I worry about other kids teasing her, but I don't particularly care one way or the other what clothes she wears, or how she wears her hair. Except ...

Except that every time she'd put on a suit, I felt myself wanting to explain it to people. Nobody ever asked about it, and Ann didn't bring it up, so why did I always need to mention it? I told myself I was giving people permission to ask about it, to make it clear that we broad-minded moms had no problem with this. But was this mom protesting too much? Was I falling victim to what lots of other parents have worried about -- that something I'd done is "making" Ann this way?

I think I wanted it to be clear that my being gay doesn't have anything to do with what's going on here -- this is about Ann. I know from the very depths of my soul that this child is who she is, and that Em and I are not driving her to be something she isn't. So why did I care what people thought?

I never thought I'd have sympathy for Angelina Jolie, but I do. I really feel for the public criticism she's taken for letting her child be her own person. I feel for any moms as they confront public pressure against their kids, even as they must do whatever they can to help their children emerge into a fully realized adulthood.

I'd spent so much time thinking about what was going on with Ann, it was time to confront what was going on with me. I certainly wasn't nursing any grief over the loss of some fantasy girl-child. I hadn't spent my life dreaming of dressing up my baby girl like the dolls of my own childhood. I absolutely believed what I told Ann, that there were lots of ways to be a girl and that I loved her no matter what kind of girl she was. So why did this bother me so much? Was it possible I was projecting my own insecurities onto Ann?

Here's what I concluded: It's much easier now than it was 20 years ago to be gay, but easier doesn't mean easy. There's awkwardness and embarrassment and, yes, sometimes even pain. We gay folk listen to the radio and read those online comments, you know. We hear and see how some people talk about us. We know they're ignorant and unworthy of our attention, but, I assure you, it still hurts. And if those goons can still hurt me, can still prick at my own sense of self-worth, what will they do to this beautiful child of mine?

To be a parent is to love another human being so much that you can hardly stand it. The thought of anyone hurting my girl is simply unbearable. But being gay has taught me that failure to conform to social expectations is a surefire way to bring on scorn, and I know what may be in store for Ann. She'll march to her own beat, and the world just might make her pay for that.

I know my job is to help her build the confidence she'll need to withstand the pressure to conform. The world will always want her to get on the balance beam, to play girls' softball instead of Little League, and to say yes to the dress. I so want her to withstand it, because the only thing more painful than the thought of anyone hurting her is the thought of anyone making her change. She's fabulous just the way she is.

If "the boy thing" turns out to be a passing phase, I'll be right there beside her as she changes and grows. I'd be delighted to help her pick out her prom dress (although I can't offer much in terms of fashion sense). But I want her changes to come from within, not from any outside pressure to conform. And if she doesn't change, if she continues down her gender-noncompliant path, well, that's OK, too. I can help her choose a tux if that's what she wants.

So, we worked out a compromise for the Communion, with the help of the director of religious education. Say what you want about the Catholic Church (and I've said a few things, myself), but we could not have scripted this woman a better answer if we'd written it ourselves.

"This is about a sacrament," she said, "not about clothes. Be respectful of the setting, but let her wear what she wants."

I'm not about to convert back or anything, but I'll be forever grateful to our little island of progressive Catholicism.

Ann took her place in the girls' line for the ceremony, wearing white pants and a little white tank top covered by a short white girls' bolero jacket, with a simple headband topping it all off. For her party, she changed into her dress shirt, bow tie and suit jacket the first minute she could. She looked adorable in both outfits and nobody fainted, the church walls did not collapse. If the neighbors (or our families) talked about it behind our backs, well, at least Ann didn't hear it.

After it was all over, Ann and I had another one of our bedtime talks. I reminded her that for more than a year those talks had been difficult, sometimes teary. They always seemed to be negotiations about her hair, her clothes or The Dress. But ever since we settled the Communion question, bedtime had been less stressed. These days, we mostly talked about baseball or Pokémon or our upcoming trip to the beach to celebrate the end of school. Did that mean everything was better now?

She nodded happily and snuggled down next to me. "I'm fine, Mom," she said.

And nobody knows that better than I do.

*All names have been changed to protect my family's privacy

Veronica Rhodes writes about gay parenting under this pen name; read her blog on RedRoom. She and David Valdes Greenwood alternate weeks writing the Family Gaytriarchs. Look for them on ParentDish every Wednesday.

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Oh, Behave: The Word 'Gay' Does Not Equal 'Stupid'

Veronica Rhodes — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:00:00 EST

Filed under: Gay Parenting

I thought my nephew was a linguistic genius when he said he was "being have." His mother had admonished him about something, and she'd told him to "behave." His indignant response was, "I am being have."

Genius, I thought. Be good, be quiet, behave -- they all sound exactly the same to 4-year-old ears. I am being good, I am being quiet, I am being have. The boy's destined to be a linguist, I thought.

I soon discovered John's error was a childhood classic, not a sign of genius. Generations of children have made the same leap of grammatical construction, because it's so completely logical. Language may not be logical, but the people who use it can be.

But I did think my daughter Mary* was really on to something new recently, when she referred to competing against her sister in a Wii game as "versing." Progressing through a series of screen options, you see Mario vs. Luigi, Red Team vs. Blue Team, etc. Not being big consumers of legal documents, video games are how kids get exposed to "versus." And it's easy to hear how, to a child, "Mario vs. Luigi" could be understood as Mario doing this new verb, "versing," to his sidekick.

So, in our house, Mary's excited reports -- "I was versing Ann at tennis, and I won!" -- seemed like an inside joke to us. We even used it ourselves, the way some families continue to intentionally mispronounce a name that a toddler once mangled.

But then we were handed Mary's pee-wee baseball schedule for the year, and there it was: The chart had columns for date, time, field location, snack parent and, yes, the last column was headed "versing" and contained the name of the team we would play in that game.

It sent me straight to Google, where I discovered this oddball verb has been around for quite a few years. Its derivation is -- I was right! -- the "versus" construction in video games and sports, so it makes sense that the 30-something baseball dad who made up the pee-wee schedule would use it so naturally.

Now, the reason I find this so interesting is that words really matter to me. Stumbling across a new word, or uncovering a new meaning, is genuinely something I find exciting. When my nutritionally deprived, vitamin D-deficient daughter finally started to walk, I watched those little matchstick legs wobbling under her and suddenly understood what it really meant to be "rickety." Moments like that truly delight my language-loving soul (even as that particular one broke my adoptive mom heart).

On the other hand, people who use "that's so gay" or "that's retarded" as a generic insult really get under my skin. In conversation one day with someone on this very subject, I said I was deeply offended when I hear "gay" as a replacement for "stupid" or "lame." My companion laughed at my own use of the word "lame" to mean "stupid," and I had a moment of revelation (and contrition) about what it means to be lame.

If I had a child (or parent, or horse) with a bum leg, maybe I'd have been more sensitive to that one. But the point is, words matter most when you use them thoughtlessly. I shouldn't need an example of actual lameness in my own family to know better than to co-opt the term to use as an insult.

My own sister once defended herself for allowing the use of the word "fag" in her home, saying it didn't mean "gay," it meant "nerdy." Ahh, I thought, so if you just skip the middleman it's OK. It's not necessarily that fag equals gay, and gay equals nerdy. It's just that to be a fag is to be nerdy. It's not about us gay people at all. Oh, yes, that makes it fine.

There are people on both sides of this argument -- there are those who object to using "gay" to mean "stupid" and who understand why using "Geronimo" as the battle cry for capturing Osama bin Laden might have offended some people. And there are those who find this approach to an evolving language to be ridiculous, overly sensitive and inflexible.

You can guess where I stand on this one: Words matter. When you use certain words to describe me, and then turn around and use those same words thoughtlessly, carelessly, to mean something else, then, yes, I take that personally. And when I use an expression thoughtlessly and am called on it, I learn. I respect language, and I assure you I don't use "lame" to mean "stupid" anymore.

In the same vein, there are die-hard traditionalists who decry the use of "versing" as being a harbinger of the death of the English language. Others applaud its evolution as being proof of the life of English. I'm not sure yet where I stand on this one -- it doesn't make my skin crawl the way "liase" does as a verb, but it seems so ... unnecessary. The Mets are versing the Braves this weekend? Why not just say the Mets are playing the Braves? Why invent a new usage where none is needed?

I guess it goes without saying that the opposing sides will no doubt continue to verse each other in these debates. I just hope everyone remembers to behave, and to keep the discourse civil.

*All names have been changed to protect my family's privacy

Veronica Rhodes writes about gay parenting under this pen name; read her blog on RedRoom. She and David Valdes Greenwood alternate weeks writing the Family Gaytriarchs. Look for them on ParentDish every Wednesday. Want to get the latest ParentDish news and advice? Sign up for our newsletter!

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Parenting On Demand: How Do You Tell the Difference Between a Child's Wants and Needs?

Veronica Rhodes — Wed, 25 May 2011 11:00:00 EST

Filed under: Gay Parenting, Opinions

I'm hungry. Can I have some pancakes? Will you help me go to the bathroom? Can I have a playdate after school today? I want to watch "Scooby-Doo" on TV later. Can you please come downstairs and make me breakfast now? I'm hungry!

This is within the first 45 seconds of Mary's* waking up in the morning. I suspect she spends her 10 hours of sleep each night coming up with her list of demands for the following day.

I need some water. Can you get me a tissue? Can I have cookies for snack today? Can we go out to dinner tonight? Can I watch TV after school? Could I ride my bike to school? I need more syrup. Can I have some more pancakes, please?

She's not even through breakfast yet.

I think of how Em* and I spent five years preparing for parenthood, how we read and talked and processed and listened and learned. We discussed the various ways we might form a family, what kind of parents we'd be, what issues we might face raising children who'd spent their early months in an orphanage.

My hands are sticky, can you clean them? Can you help me brush my teeth? I don't want you to comb my hair, I want to do it myself. I want to wear my baseball jacket, not my raincoat. I don't want to ride my bike -- can we drive to school? For my birthday, can we go to Chuck E. Cheese's?

We attended a six-week-long discussion group for lesbians considering motherhood. We went to seminars on adoptive parenting and listened to lectures on the medical and emotional issues faced by children adopted internationally. We learned that a child who hadn't experienced love in her first year might not know how to accept it from her adoptive parents, and talked about how we'd deal with that.

So when our first child, Ann*, came home to us, we were ready. We charged into Early Intervention to help her overcome her developmental delays. We researched feeding techniques to help her catch up on the growth charts. We were delighted that she was a veritable love sponge -- this child had no problem accepting affection and soaked it up as fast as we could deliver it.

Can I watch TV now? How come Ann is getting a play date but I'm not? Could I play Wii? I don't want to pick up the toys. Can I have ice cream? When I'm 10, can I have a TV in my room? Can we go to Build-a-Bear this Saturday? Can you snuggle me?

I had always known that I wanted more than one child, and I was ready to start the paperwork for No. 2 before the ink was dry on Ann's immigration papers. Em wasn't so sure, so we agreed to wait until Ann had been home a year before we made the decision.

Over the course of that year, Ann thrived -- she grew, gained weight and began to walk and talk. We had a great kid, and we were doing a great job. Everybody told us so, and we believed it. Ann was doing so well, and was such a sunny, easygoing child, that we had the hubris to think we were pretty awesome parents. So we began the paper chase again, and spent a year assembling the dossier we needed for baby No. 2.

And then came Mary.

I don't want fish for dinner, I want chicken nuggets. Can I have a napkin? Can you pour me some seltzer, please? Can I have a treat? Can I watch TV after dinner? When it's Halloween, can I be a Power Ranger? Can I be excused?

From the first meeting it was clear she was the exact opposite of Ann. In coloring, body type, everything, they were completely different. But Mary seemed like a happy, placid baby who would be the perfect second child and fit right in to our family.

The placid part lasted a few weeks, before Mary seemed to realize her world had changed and she had some control over her life now. For months before she could talk she could make her demands known. They were myriad -- and constant.

She wanted to be picked up, she wanted to be put down. She wanted to eat, she wanted to play. She wanted to go for a walk, she wanted out of the car seat. She wanted a new diaper, but she did not want anyone to change her.

She wore us out with her wants, and we realized our awesome parenting had a lot more to do with how easy Ann had been, not so much about our own imagined awesomeness.

I remembered something I'd read or heard from somebody along the way -- I don't know who or where, who could remember anything anymore? -- that your job as a parent, simply put, is to meet your child's needs. You don't have to give them everything they want, but you do need to give them everything they need. The tricky part is knowing the difference.

Let me tell you, that is some trick, and, in five years, it hasn't gotten much easier. With every demand Mary makes, we over-think it -- does she just want more pancakes, or does she need them as proof that we'll always provide for her? Does she want to go to Build-a-Bear because she likes it, or is it because Ann went there and Mary needs to know she'll get her equal share?

I want a bath, not a shower. Can I have the ducky towel, not the fish towel? Can you help me brush my teeth? Can you read me a book?

I find myself in an ongoing defensive posture against the demands, ready to be Judge Judy at a moment's notice: Was that a want or a need? She's 5-and-a-half years old, do I really have to pick her up and carry her when we're in line at the bank? Is she just being whiny and cranky because she's tired, or is she feeling anxious about something and in need of a little reassurance?

Is either one of those reason enough to pick her up for a quick cuddle, even though I'm tired and cranky, myself, and she's been at it all day and I really need for her to just stand still for another two minutes and then we'll be out of here? I love to snuggle her, but doesn't she need to learn to wait, to keep herself occupied and well-behaved for a bit -- isn't that a skill she needs to practice?

Can I have some water? I want to wear my Scooby-Doo pajamas. Can you read me another story? Can I sleep in your bed tonight? Can I have a playdate tomorrow?

I guess I won't know until she's all grown up and can tell me exactly how I failed her -- as she no doubt will -- whether I was too hard on her, or not hard enough. If she doesn't learn to delay gratification, to wait, to be still, will it be my fault because I didn't set my expectations high enough for her to develop the maturity and independence she'll need?

Or, if she grows up with an adopted child's tiny seed of doubt about where she belongs, about whether or not she's really loved, will it be my fault for not picking her up in the bank or taking her to Chuck E. Cheese's?

If we go to Chuck E. Cheese's, can I have a drink? And no, this paragraph is not supposed to be in italics.

*All names have been changed to protect my family's privacy

Veronica Rhodes writes about gay parenting under this pen name; read her blog on RedRoom. She and David Valdes Greenwood alternate weeks writing the Family Gaytriarchs. Look for them on ParentDish every Wednesday.

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Teaching Moments: Mystery Moms and the 'Interrupting Chicken'

Veronica Rhodes — Wed, 11 May 2011 13:00:00 EST

Filed under: Adoption, Gay Parenting, Opinions

"The Interrupting Chicken" by David Ezra Stein

For most of this past year, I had a very intense, life-consuming job that cost me a lot of the smaller moments in my children's lives. I still tried to be home for dinner (even if it meant the kids had a delayed bedtime) and I tried hard not to spend too many weekend hours catching up on work I hadn't finished during the week.

But the little "extras" -- the bake sales, the class trips -- were not to be. Until now, that is. A new, less insane job has freed up more hours in my week and made me available for some of those moments.

That's why I really wanted to be a "mystery reader" in my 5-year-old's kindergarten class this month. Every Friday, someone shows up at school to read a story to the class -- it could be a mom or dad, an older sibling, anyone special to one of the students. It's a 10-minute appearance that the kids look forward to all week, as they wonder who this week's mystery reader will be.

The teacher, of course, spends a fair amount of time arranging these appearances, so it's no mystery to her who's coming in. Em* had put herself on the schedule for a Friday in April, and had told the teacher that I was hoping to do it, but that she'd appear in my place if I couldn't make it.

Then, one night Em was reading Mary* a book called "Interrupting Chicken," in which a papa chicken tries hard to read a bedtime story to his little girl, who repeatedly breaks in to put her own ending on the tales.

It occurred to me that it might be fun for us to be a mystery reader duet, with one of us reading the part of the little interrupting chicken. We practiced reading upside down (how do kindergarten teachers do that?) and alternating lines, so we were ready to perform when we knocked on the door of the classroom.

We could hear the teacher wonder aloud "Who's our mystery reader today?" as she opened the door, then exclaim in mock surprise that there were two of us.

Turns out, the surprise was on us. As bad as I'd felt about not having gotten to know Mary's classmates this year, I hadn't thought about how they hadn't gotten to know me, either. Or about me, even.

So, as we were taking our seats in front of the reading rug, we could hear the conversation going on in back. "Who's that other lady?" "That's my other mom," Mary was explaining. "You have two moms?" "Do you have a dad?" "Which one is your real mom?"

Mary answered that last one perfectly: "They're both real." But the questions continued: "But which one did you come out of?"

Now, Em has never been entirely comfortable answering unexpected questions like these, and I could see she wasn't thrilled with the way things were going.

"That's for another day," she said, and the teacher quickly jumped in to add "Yes, children, let's start our story!"

But I was, after all, the interrupting chicken. And if there's one thing I've realized about having kids, it's that you should answer their questions as they arise. Take the opportunity to explain something in a way they can understand, and they're satisfied (at least for a little while). Don't leave them wondering, and on this topic, especially, don't make them think there's something to hide.

So, I said, "Well, I think we can answer those questions before we read our story." (I could sense the murderous twitch of Em's hands even without turning my head.) In about 30 seconds flat, I explained that Mary had been born in Russia, just like her older sister, and that they'd come to America as babies to join us, and that's how we became a family. And that was that -- asked and answered, and we went on to read our story aloud. Mary was thrilled, the children went back to their tables, and the mystery readers left the building.

Our post-mortem lasted a little longer than story time had. Em's take on it was that Mary's adoption story is hers to tell or not tell, and that by talking about it we'd intruded on her privacy. What if Mary doesn't want her classmates to know she was adopted? We can't unring this bell -- the information is out there now, like it or not.

I disagreed (obviously). There are details of both our children's adoption stories that we have not shared with anyone, not even aunts and uncles -- those particulars do belong to them, I think, and they can decide someday whom to tell, and how much. But the fact that they were adopted? To me, that needs to be out there, to be matter-of-fact, to be simple.

And, come on, now, we're both women -- people will want to know how we came to have a child, since we're clearly missing an ingredient for creating one. Why make a mystery out of it?

Em and I will continue to disagree on this one, I'm sure. If she gets questions when she's alone she'll handle them her own way (which may mean dodging them). But when the interrupting chicken is on hand, you can be sure I'll take advantage of the teaching moments and squawk away. Which is why Em just might find herself feeling a little nostalgic for my previous job, after all.

As for me, I can't wait for the next bake sale.

*All names have been changed to protect my family's privacy

Veronica Rhodes writes about gay parenting under this pen name; read her blog on RedRoom. She and David Valdes Greenwood alternate weeks writing the Family Gaytriarchs. Look for them on ParentDish every Wednesday.

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Women's Work: Divvying Up the Chores in an All-Girl Household

Veronica Rhodes — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:30:00 EST

Filed under: Gay Parenting, Opinions

The little girl tilted her head to one side and thought a minute.

"You do?" she asked.

"Nope," I replied. "Em does."

The girl shook her head sadly -- she wasn't very good at this game at all.

It had started a few minutes earlier, when our young neighbor stopped by to watch me pulling weeds in the garden. Joanie* was about 8 years old, and had known us since she was a toddler, when Em* and I had moved in two doors down from her family.

Funny thing about toddlers -- whatever their normal is, is normal. So, for years it hadn't struck her as strange at all that two ladies lived in that corner house, instead of a man and a woman.

But now that she was in second grade, she clearly knew we were different from other neighbors, and you could almost watch her little mental gears turning. Many times, when she stopped by to chat (and this kid was quite the chatter), the subject of two women sharing a house would come up. Today's topic: Who did what? Who did the laundry? Who killed the bugs? Who cooked?

Joanie probably wasn't conscious of it, but she was clearly trying to figure out which of us was the "man" and which was the "woman" based on what jobs we did in the house. Even though she knew we were both women, she just had to fit us into gender roles somehow.

If we lived together and ran a home together, surely we divvied up the chores the way her own parents did, the way couples did on every sitcom she saw on TV, the way she expected everyone to. And, from that, she'd be able to figure out which of us was which. But I was confounding her.

Em did the cooking in our house, but she also killed the bugs. I mowed the lawn, but I also did the laundry. Neither of us changed the oil in the car -- yuck! -- there are service stations for that. So this whole line of questioning was going nowhere for this kid, although I was rather enjoying it myself.

In our house, gender couldn't play any role in our chores. We had developed a very egalitarian system in which each of us did the chores we actually enjoyed (or disliked less), and it all worked just fine.

And then something funny happened: Em got laid off. It wasn't so funny at the time, of course -- we had two small children, and our finances were still in recovery from a couple of years' worth of staggering adoption expenses.

We'd spent our first 10 years together as DINKS, a double-income, no-kids couple with discretionary income that supported a very nice lifestyle; then we'd had a couple of years as two overstressed, time-strapped, guilt-ridden working parents paying an expensive nanny to take our place during the day.

Now, we faced a fork in the road, and we decided to use the layoff as an opportunity for Em to become a stay-at-home mom by day and grad student at night as she prepared for a career change.

We knew that decision would affect our budget -- but the restaurants we couldn't afford to patronize any more were no fun with kids in tow, anyway. And, it turned out, we liked our little family beach vacations just as much as we'd loved our European cycling trips. My income was enough to support us nicely -- not lavishly, but we didn't want for anything. (Not having to pay a nanny helped a lot.)

It also turns out that it's nice, and I mean really nice, to have an adult in the house all the time. Even with two active children, our lives calmed down tremendously. No longer were our weekends crammed with errands and chores we had no time for during the work week. No longer did we turn down party invitations so we could do the grocery shopping, get to the dry cleaners and mow the lawn. We actually had something of a life.

But here's what we didn't expect: Splitting up into breadwinner and stay-at-home mom also split our chores up along frighteningly predictable gender lines. The reason we didn't have to run all those errands on Saturday was because Em was doing them during the week.

The grocery shopping that we used to do together was now done while I worked, the fridge miraculously restocked each week with no effort from me at all. Phone calls to the cable company, the summer camps, the dentist -- all taken care of without my having to squeeze them in between meetings at the office.

I even ceded the laundry, since Em could get it done during the week instead of having it consume my Saturdays. (I'm still smarting from that one ... I had a system for the laundry!)

All I have to do is go to work every day -- and I've been doing that practically my whole life, so there's no great sacrifice there -- and I come home every night to a home-cooked meal, with food in the fridge and clean laundry in the dressers. It's kind of a beautiful thing.

It's also a very weird thing for me. Here I am, a woman, playing the Rob Petrie role -- working all day and coming home to Laura every night for my dinner. Em and the kids have developed a separate life -- playdates with kids I don't know, hours spent without me in playgrounds and in our own backyard, creating routines and memories that I'm not a part of at all.

I know it's good for the kids to have a mom who can be there for special events during the school day, but I'm never the mom who gets to do that. I'm pretty much ... the dad.

Joanie's now in high school, but if she were to stop by again today with her questions, she'd get much more predictable answers than I gave her when she was 8.

There are a lot of up-sides to this arrangement, not the least of which is that, to our girls at least, there are no gender roles at home. They may see Em doing some chores and me doing others, but they still see women doing it all. Women in our house not only cook and do laundry, they also kill bugs, shovel snow, take out trash, unclog overflowing toilets, hang holiday lights, earn a living and everything else that needs to be done in a family.

There's no such thing as women's work in our house -- it's all just work.

Our girls help with small chores now, and, when they're bigger, they'll get their share of large tasks. Maybe someday they'll find themselves married or partnered with someone who'll kill the bugs for them, take out the trash, cook or do the laundry. Who knows, maybe even change the oil.

I think they'll be better prepared for adult life, with all the many jobs they'll need to do in a day, than young Joanie will be. After a lifetime of our teaching them they can do anything, I hope they don't sit around waiting for a guy to come running with the plunger when the water's rising.

A girl can find herself in a mess of trouble that way.

*All names have been changed to protect my family's privacy

Veronica Rhodes writes about gay parenting under this pen name; read her blog on RedRoom. She and David Valdes Greenwood alternate weeks writing the Family Gaytriarchs. Look for them on ParentDish every Wednesday.

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Out In Left Field

Veronica Rhodes — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 12:00:00 EST

Filed under: Gay Parenting, Activities: Big Kids

Baseball season is here, and, like millions of parents nationwide, I have Little League anxiety this week. But unlike most parents, my angst comes with a gay twist.

This is our fourth year of Little League -- and the fourth consecutive year Ann* is the only girl on the team. It's the first year on the field with Mary*, who's starting her rookie (aka Pee-Wee) year after three seasons of watching Ann play.

Being the parents of the only girl on the team, we'd probably stand out a bit, anyway. Being the two moms with the only girl on the team, we stand out just a little bit more. So, after the first practice, we don't really need to introduce ourselves.

Now, I'm not terribly sociable by nature -- I'm perfectly friendly, mind you, but I tend not to seek out conversation with strangers. Given a choice, I'd rather spend the hour waiting out a dancing class or baseball practice with my nose in the Kindle. But when it comes to my kids, I have no choice -- I have to overcome my wallflower inclinations and chat up the other parents.

The first conversation is pretty easy. Watching the kids taking their turns during practice, you only have to say to ask, "Which one is yours?" to get things started. And I've gotten pretty good at keeping that first conversation going. How long has he been playing? He's got such a good swing. Things like that.

All I have to say is, mine is the girl. That's good for a few more minutes of how she's always been the only girl on the team, and, no, she doesn't mind it a bit, and, yes, she really has a good arm.

When appropriate, I try to work in a reference to the Other Mom, figuring I may as well get it over with early, so we don't surprise anyone later. If we're alternating practices, it usually comes up at the second one. (You're the mom? There was some other woman here last week. I thought that was the mom.)

So, by the third practice, there's no doubt in anyone's mind who we are. Unfortunately, I have no idea who they are. You see, all these little boys look kind of alike to me -- they're all major league cute, and, at this age, they're still not jaded. They don't have to play it cool. Their excitement at playing ball still shines through, and it's so wonderfully innocent and heartwarming that I get a little teary-eyed just watching them.

But, seriously, I can't tell them apart. So, how do I start a conversation with a mom I talked to at last week's practice, when I can't use my "which one is yours" opener? She told me who he was, just last week. Now, was that Jimmy, or one of the Matthews or Tommy?

At every practice, though, and every game, I screw up my courage and talk to someone -- because I don't want to be the one who's standoffish, who's not friendly, who's not part of the team. I'm not giving anyone the slightest reason not to like us or our daughter. We bring snacks, we volunteer to help out, we make sure we're on time to practices and games. We're going to be the Perfect Baseball Family -- even if we are the two moms with the only girl on the team.

I don't say this to Ann, but I know she's going to have to be better than average to be part of the team. To be accepted, she can't strike out or let the grounders get by her too often. Little League Baseball rules say girls can play, but that doesn't mean anyone really wants them there. So she's going to have to prove her value to the team every week. Like it or not, she'll be held to a slightly higher standard than her boy teammates.

Everyone in our league has been completely nice and supportive of Ann, and I have no complaints at all at how she's been treated. But I can see that baseball is not about girls. They're an afterthought -- tolerated, certainly; accepted, mostly; welcomed, sometimes. But always outside the mainstream, always a little different. Not really the focus of the game. A little bit like being gay, actually.

So, we'll do absolutely everything we can to help her -- from working on her fielding between practices to bringing the best treats when we're the Snack Family to, yes, talking to other parents and trying to tell one cute little boy from another.

And, when Mary starts her baseball career this week, we'll gear up our best social skills for her, too. Because for our kids, we know we need to step up to the plate -- and we do.

*All names have been changed to protect my family's privacy.

Veronica Rhodes and David Valdes Greenwood alternate weeks writing the Family Gaytriarchs. Look for them on ParentDish every Wednesday.

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Coming Out Again and Again

Veronica Rhodes — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:00:00 EST

Filed under: Gay Parenting, Opinions

To be gay is to have a coming out story -- that day when we finally confided in a friend, confessed to a crush, told the family or found ourselves accidentally outed on Facebook.

Together, these transitional moments moved us from life before to life after, and they deliver us to our new identities -- as members of a despised minority. Hooray!

But unlike other outcasts, we have our secret weapon called "passing." I don't wear man-style clothing or sport a butch buzz cut, so I'm contentedly, anonymously gay when I want to be. I can ride safely on a subway car filled with homophobes any time I want, assuming I don't wear my "Nobody knows I'm a lesbian" T-shirt.

And, for 10 years after I came out, I had the choice of revealing myself or not, as I saw fit. My family and friends knew I was gay, as did most of my coworkers and my closest neighbors. But to the dry cleaner, the crossing guard, the guy at the corner store who sold me milk at midnight, I was just another customer -- no personal details needed, thank you very much.

And then I became a mom.

The minute Em* and I started walking around the neighborhood pushing a stroller, we may as well have had that T-shirt slogan tattooed on our foreheads. At first, there were the double-takes and the cautious questions -- they were actually kind of funny to me (less so to Em, who found them excruciating).

You could practically see the thought bubbles over people's heads: Just where did that baby come from? Whose is it? Are those two women, um, you know?

And we were determinedly matter-of-fact about it. The baby had been born in Russia, and we had recently adopted her. Yes, together.

But that was nothing compared to what followed in the next few years. Once we had Ann*, and then Mary*, there was no more passing -- we were and are out every day. Every stinking day, like it or not, we are out.

We've outed ourselves to potential baby-sitters, to the pediatrician, to the preschool. We've done it in words ("Ann and Mary have two moms") and in deed (as we crossed out the "father" line on emergency contact sheets and Little League registration forms and wrote in "mother" again). We helped one elderly neighbor figure it out ("Are you the mom?" "Yes, I'm the mom." "I thought that other lady was the mom?" "We're both the moms." Pause. "Ohhhhhhhhhh ...")

Sometimes it's easy, and, if I'm in the right mood, it can even be fun. The dry cleaner was fun, to me at least, when he assumed Em (who is younger than I am) was our daughters' grandmother. I got less of a kick out of the mom at the schoolyard who visibly blanched when I introduced myself as Ann's other mom.

Some outings are really hard from the get-go, but surprise us on the other side. After a decade of solo membership in our local church, Em had to walk into the parish office to make arrangements for Ann's baptism, which just may have been the bravest thing she's ever done.

A few weeks later, we went to church together with our 18-month-old baby and 50 of our closest friends, along with half-a-dozen straight couples and their newborns. To our joy, the church was open to naming two lesbians as the parents on the baptismal certificate, but declined to include our choice of godmother because she's a Quaker. We do live in funny times.

We couldn't have "passed" that day in church, but we've had our opportunities and we deliberately don't take them. We know this is for our girls' sake -- if we act embarrassed or ashamed of our family, what message do we give them?

Only if we are matter-of-fact about our family structure will we convey our pride in who we are, absent any labels anyone puts on us. So, we make damned sure everyone knows: the school principal, the baseball coach, everyone. Even the lady in front of us at the checkout line who made a rude comment about Ellen DeGeneres's wedding photo on the cover of a tabloid -- she knows now, too (whoever she was). If I let my kids hear her kind of bigoted remark go unchallenged, what am I telling them about our family?

But, still, I cringed a little inside at that incident. Couldn't I just buy the dang groceries without having to do this again? "I think it's great," I said with a smile I hope she didn't know was forced. "My family is gay, too." I scored points for visibility, and for family pride, but they didn't come easy.

And, so, we out ourselves, or our kids out us, every day. Some days we do it proudly, others we wish maybe, just this once, we could pull the covers back up and not have to say it again. But we know we're doing the right thing.

One recent morning, when a scheduling problem had me doing the school drop-off rather than running for my early train, my kindergartner dragged me up the steps announcing to everyone that this mommy is taking me to school today because my regular mommy is busy. I've never felt quite so regular as I did at that moment.

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Gay Parenting: Out of the Closet and In Again

Veronica Rhodes — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:00:00 EST

Filed under: Adoption, Gay Parenting, Opinions

I was delighted when ParentDish asked me to be the mom half of this new column on gay parenting -- reveling at the thought of how mainstream we "alternative" families have become. In fact, the same week I agreed to write the column, I read an article in a national parenting magazine by a gay mom that was all about just how ordinary we are these days -- and she was writing under her real name.

Are we really, finally, completely unremarkable?

Well ... not exactly. The woman who wrote the article lives with her family in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, New York, which is a kind of Lesbian Central. My partner, Em*, and I used to live there; every time you leave your house, you could easily get the impression that you're no big deal at all.

But elsewhere in the country and the world (elsewhere in New York, even) we remain surprisingly, stubbornly alternative.

When Em and I decided to move out of Park Slope and buy a house -- an actual house, with a yard and a sidewalk and a driveway -- we were more than a little nervous. We picked a neighborhood that seemed mixed enough that we'd mix right in. Our (gay) real estate agent pointed out other homes in the area owned by gay couples.

Still, we wondered: How would the neighbors respond to us? Would we feel like interlopers, oddballs or even targets?

We've been none of those, thankfully, but there's no denying that we had to consider it as a factor in our home buying. Straight home buyers have lots of real estate angst -- school districts, property taxes, commuting times and even their ethnic fit. It felt lousy that we had to add "gay-accepting" to our house hunt.

When we decided to become parents we went through a similar questioning: Was it fair to kids to expose them to possible ridicule or bullying? Would we have the strength to be out all the time, everywhere, every day? Would our kids end up resenting us? What about down the line -- how would we deal with our future in-laws? (Hey, we've seen "La Cage.")

We don't know yet about the in-law problem, since our oldest is in second grade. We don't know yet about what high school will bring, or what will happen in the dreaded middle-school years.

What we know now is that we live in a wonderful neighborhood, with first-class folks living all around us, who welcomed us warmly when we moved in (one actually brought us a Bundt cake) and later welcomed our two little girls, Ann* and Mary*. Our kids haven't been mocked or bullied or ostracized. Rather, they have pals and play dates and parties like all the other kids, and so far they seem completely well adjusted and in no way damaged by being a part of a two-mom family.

So why the asterisks, you might ask, and why the pen name? I live in a gay-friendly neighborhood, my kids go to a gay-friendly school and our lives are completely mainstream. So why not be totally out there and write this column under my real name as well as the real names of my partner and children?

What's the big deal?

Well, here's the big deal: We're not there yet. There are still some people out there who don't approve of me or my family. Not that we need their approval, or care (much) if we don't have it. But in these scary, polarized times, one disapproving nut can ruin your life. What parent would risk that? I could write completely openly as a white parent, an Irish-American parent, an older parent or an adoptive parent, and not worry about someone gunning for me or my family.

But a gay parent? I have a reason to worry. Just look at the news; bullying gay folks seems to be a national pastime.

I have the added fear that comes with our having adopted our girls internationally. The foreign government that approved the proceedings does not allow gay couples to adopt. It's more of a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. However, an unmarried woman could adopt, no questions asked.

So Em checked off the box marked "unmarried" and went through the adoption process without mentioning me. But I realize that, if those overseas bureaucrats had known the truth, our girls would not be ours today, and there's always that little fear in me that the foreign authorities might someday learn the truth.

I dare not fill in the "and then what?" part of that scenario.

I was telling a friend, another adoptive mom, about this new column and my decision to use a pen name, and I told her of my fear.

She looked at me as if I were crazy and asked, "And what, you think they'd take them back? They didn't want them in the first place. There are thousands more just like them and they sure don't want yours back."

I know she's right, of course. But my straight friend doesn't know what the terror of being found out feels like. Because no matter how remote the possibility of "and then what?" coming true, it's a risk I wouldn't dream of taking. I want my kids. Period.

I'm pretty sure I'll never run for office, be nominated for the Supreme Court or otherwise stick my neck out onto the public chopping block, and sadly, that includes writing under my own name as it relates to gay parenting. You'll get to know a lot about me, Em, and the girls in this column, but sadly, not our names. I can only hope that things will be different when they become moms.

*All names have been changed to protect my family's privacy.

Veronica Rhodes and David Valdes Greenwood alternate weeks writing the Family Gaytriarchs. Look for them on ParentDish every Wednesday.

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