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copyright Beren deMotier July 5, 2006
Hallway Pride Without Prejudice
The fifth grade girl moving
the table along the hall to the cafeteria was petite, blonde and
soft spoken. She was one of those girls I’d heard referred to,
but didn’t know; she and my daughter somehow never getting into
the same class over the last six years. All I knew was that she
was one of the few girls even slighter and more blonde than our
own fifth grader (a pole climbing diplomat who spends her days
fighting stereotypes, confronting sexual harassment in the
classroom, and hanging with her posse of “unconventional”
girls).
I was volunteering in the
school we’d been involved with for nine years, a liberal bubble
swimming with open minded parents, embracing teachers and a
school secretary that practically broadcast the news of my wife
and my brief legal marriage two years ago.
The girl stopped moving the
table and paused beside me.
“You’re Anna’s
mom aren’t you?”
“I am,” I told
her, surprised that she knew me.
Then she said,
“I have two moms, too.”
Her friend, who was moving
the lunch table with her, then launched into a comprehensive bio
of the girl’s two moms – their names, occupations and
approximate age. And I thought, “How is it I didn’t know there
was another fifth grader with gay parents?”
When I
mentioned the exchange to our daughter on the way home, she
said, “Oh, yeah” casually, and that she’d heard the girl had two
moms. It had never occurred to her that we might be interested,
or that they needed to chum up in a “strength in numbers”
coalition.
A few years back, I
interviewed the then Vice Principal for an article about tweens
with same-sex parents. He insisted that no one gave it a
moment’s thought these days; for a kid to have two moms or two
dads was no big deal. I found it hard to believe.
Sixteen years ago, when we
decided to have our first, it was such a big deal. My spouse
and I were sure our son would be the only kid in school with
same-sex parents. I told strangers “he has two moms” when asked
about my husband, easing them into the L-word. Sometimes they
got it; sometimes I think they imaged a network of step-mothers
or possibly polygamy. New acquaintances, faced with both of us,
would say, “Oh… oh… OH!” as the meaning of “two moms” broke
through the clouds of confusion. And the parents at our oldest
son’s first preschool were so determined to show their
open-mindedness that they paraded the names of all their gay
neighbors and distant relatives as proof of their Liberal views.
We came out as parents at
the dawn of the gayby boom, the first lesbians to be out during
childbirth at Providence Hospital in Seattle. Fear of losing
custody to the state or a snatch and grab attempt by
disapproving relatives was still part of our reality (and we
have the thousands of dollars in legal paperwork to prove it).
Now a non-biological co-parent’s rights are established from
birth in Washington State (where we were the ninth gay couple to
have a co-parent adoption in 1992), with or without legal
adoption by the non-biological parent.
Back then, we made
assumptions about the ways our kids would stand out: the
anti-establishment hair cuts, the political T-shirts, the
toenail polish and Pride beads for boys. But the reality is
that most of the kids of same-sex parents we’ve known could be
models for an idyllic mainstream; they’re athletically involved,
but not obsessive, dress like peers, but aren’t big consumers,
manage to be enmeshed in dance, music, art, theatre, journalism
and church, yet somehow not overscheduled and stressed.
One of our kids’ teachers
once told us she thought the best parents she’d known were gay
parents. Could it be true?
The girl in the hall was
poised, polite, fashionably dressed but age-appropriate (no
belly button baring, straps wider than a piece of pasta), with
gossamer long hair and the posture only dance lessons could
provide. It would be easy in this culture to stereotype her,
and our daughter, as helpless, frail, soon-to-be cheerleaders or
hip-hugging hotties, but it would be a mistake.
She was
confident enough to speak to a complete stranger about her
family, and so open about her life that her friend could recite
an oral history of her moms without breaking a sweat. No one
has seemingly labeled her “the daughter of lezzies”, judging her
on a “lifestyle” she was born into, or I’d have heard it on the
grapevine for sure. She’s just a girl at school, as different
from our daughter as she is the same. No big deal. It’s what we
hoped for when we dared to have our kids.
copyright April 18, 2006 Beren deMotier
Mother Confessor
It
has happened often enough now, that my wife pokes her head out
of her home office and raises her eyebrows if I get an
unexpected visit from a fellow mom at our daughter’s elementary
school. She can barely wait until the woman has gone, to ask
with bated breath, “So, has she fallen in love with a woman?”
I
have a new and unexpected role in mid-life: lesbian mother
confessor.
Apparently I’m the go-to gal for straight women who have
suddenly been hit by a truck of the female species, and want to
share the happy news with someone who will understand.
The first time this happened, I was innocently going about my
morning, scrambling to get life under control while our one year
old wrought havoc with every step, and the doorbell rung. When
it swung open to reveal Millicent* (not her real name), a mom
we’d known for years, and on the verge of tears, my heart froze;
was it cancer? Were her kids all right? Was she another in the
line of women who’ve suddenly become unmarried when their kids
were half-grown?
No, she told me through her tears, happy ones she insisted,
she’d been hit by a truck named Rachel* (ditto), and wanted me
to be the first to know. So I smiled, nodded, and listened for
the next two hours, while our home schooled teenage son
valiantly took charge of the toddler and put his work on hold,
instinctively getting that it was important I be available to
this woman who showed up on our doorstep unannounced.
As a vocal proponent of legal same-sex marriage, it is an odd
place to be when someone married tells me about their
orientational about-face. The religious right might think I
keep a handy set of pamphlets with me at all times on “So you’ve
decided to become a lesbian”, complete with illustrations, but
I’m more likely to ask how the kids are doing with all the
changes, and whether it is more an issue with the marriage, than
a love for the new person, that is spurring discontent.
And then it happened again.
One could suggest that I ask for it, being both out as a lesbian
mom and as threatening these days as a warm slice of wheat
bread, but I wondered if this was going to be a continuing trend
during the public school years.
Not that Sophie* (you know), confessee number two, was as
squeaky clean as the first one. She had a proudly advertised
naughty streak, though when I tried to break the ice with
allusions to my own nasty past, the fact that her jaw dropped
and she doubted my verisimilitude didn’t add to the warmth on my
side of the conversation.
I
definitely need an image overhaul.
However, she wasted no time before telling me about her
desire for a same-sex relationship, and I had to hustle her
upstairs to talk before the conversation got x-rated with the
aforementioned teenage son in the next room; a boy famous for
his hearing and word perfect recall. I listened, made
sympathetic noises, but still found myself the family values
advocate, bringing up marriage, family, the sacred and legal
bonds we make. Those were dispensed with rapidly, and the irony
was sickening.
The good and bad thing is that they weren’t confessing their
penchant for me; good because I’m kind of married (legal or
not), and bad because no one in recent memory has decided they
can’t live without me, or even written me a love note on the
sly. I have become a middle-aged mother figure who will
understand.
My wife thinks it’s because they imagine I was like them
once, an ostensibly straight woman who was hit by lightening one
day when the right woman walked through the door; a completely
false impression since I was actively searching doorways and
looking for lightening long before I ran into Jennifer* (damn
right her real name), the androgynous athlete who pulled me
completely out of the closet at nineteen. My wife fits the
description better (I got to be the lightening!), but the
straight moms consider her some kind of husband-surrogate,
become silent when she enters the room, and fluff their goods.
She also shared my new role in life with two straight friends
of hers, who apparently got wicked gleams in their eyes, and
threatened to show up on my doorstep, announcing their
intentions of leaving their husbands for one another.
If they show up, I’ll have my pamphlets ready, and a few
choice words, but if another mother shows up in love with a
woman, my son will whisk off the preschooler, I’ll pour two cups
of coffee, and open up the confessional. It’s the least I can
do to help a woman hit by lightening, and a truck named
Rachel.
copyright
April 12, 2006 Beren deMotier
Volunteer
Hours Overdue, with Interest
Despite being, for the past fourteen years, a happy housewife
(all right, a moody housewife), I haven’t exactly been a model
one. Oh, I’ve changed fifteen thousand diapers, nursed for over
four of those years and given birth without painkillers three
times (what was I thinking?), so I’ve more than done my share of
“barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen”.
My
wife got a lot of sick pleasure describing me that way at the
time.
What I’ve been is a lousy volunteer.
It’s not like I haven’t been at the school day in and day out
for the last ten years; I picked up, delivered, and walked
offspring to class daily, scraping my girl off with a spatula
until fourth grade so I could go home. What I didn’t do was
stay.
I
tried. In my overcompensating early years as a lesbian mother I
wanted to be perfect. I helped at class parties, usually,
handing out cupcakes and napkins at light speed. I graded a few
math papers for awhile, photocopied a little, and hung kid art
on the walls, but only when I couldn’t stand the guilt any
longer and was beginning to feel like I had a big “L” on my
forehead when I walked my kid to class.
I’ve chaperoned a few field trips
over the years; the sternwheeler ride with the sociopathic child
who raced at top speed all over the boat while I was responsible
for his safety and therefore required to race at top speed in
pursuit, the art museum trip where the refrain of “don’t touch
the art” became a mantra, and that first zoo trip, with
twenty-five kindergarteners and twenty-three volunteer parents,
all happily enjoying the day while I tried to stop two boys from
torturing the peacock.
Recently I came back from a three day trip to a cold dessert
with the fifth graders to study bones, predators and prey, and
the cute redhead counselor who charmed the pants off students,
staff and volunteers alike. I can’t have been the only one not
sure whether I wanted to ask her for a date or adopt her.
Still, the bar is set high among working and stay-at-home moms
alike these days, mothers so well-coiffed, so coordinated in
Title Nine sweatsuits and expensive footwear, and my sad lack of
time well spent at the school, rather than gossiping on the
playground, was haunting me.
So
when I was struck by a lightning bolt of an idea during a
writing weekend at a former school decorated to the gills with
art, I made the unprecedented step of sticking my neck out,
proposing the idea to the Principal and volunteering to see the
idea through. Must have been the Paxil talking.
Not that it was a big idea really; just an exhibit of donated
art hung in the halls, then sold at a silent auction; but it’s a
new thing for our school. The school foundation does an auction
already; an incredible, awe inspiring, “how many dollars did you
say they raised?” auction that scares me to death and I have
never attended, or volunteered for in any way. People dress up,
people drink, people pay twelve hundred dollars for a coffee
table decorated by fourth graders. All of these things are
intimidating to me, Paxil or no Paxil.
But I can do art on the walls. After all, the art professor who
sneered at my portfolio twenty years ago when I thought of an
MFA did suggest I might go into arts administration… I have the
skills: beg for art from professional and amateur artists alike
(and beg others to do so as well), hang art on the wall with a
happy-go-lucky attitude toward symmetry, beg a wonderful,
talented, designer mom to make labels, beg lovely, talented,
capable moms to help at the auction, pray the art sells, and
retire from volunteering with a few dollars raised to help arts
education at our school and my debt repaid in full.
Or
so I wish.
Next year, I will have one in high school, one in middle school,
and one in a co-op preschool. My volunteering days have only
just begun. After ten years in public school (and four in co-op
preschools) I should have learned to get over my fear of
involvement, my insecure anxiety around the other mothers (who
seem to be brain surgeons or environmental lawyers when they’re
not running non-profits out of their homes), and my urge to run
away screaming when someone mentions the word “committee”.
The one thing I did learn is that
schools need parent involvement, even the involvement of
insecure parents who don’t attend PTA meetings out of social
anxiety, or parents who work sixty hours a week and can only
spare an hour a month (one hour is better than none) and that
sharing our talents with our kids is all to the good. I’m a
jaded eighties girl who lost the belief that one person can make
a difference in college, but twenty years later, an elementary
school has taught me I was wrong.
copyright March 9, 2006 Beren deMotier
Read, Hold, Talk
In a hospital across town, my
wife’s cousin and his bride are nuzzling their newborn baby,
drinking in his pheromone laden scent and locking eyes in an
unspoken understanding, “Our child will never act like that.”
By now, our loud, upset and
nap-deprived three year old (who inspired their mutual pledge) is
asleep in his bed, grateful for the warm glass of milk, the
fistful of fish crackers and the chance to crash after going
through the trauma of being taken to a hospital to see a newborn
baby at naptime, having unknowingly cemented his reputation as
Conan the Barbarian.
It is hard being three, and
how quickly people forget. He has to live with siblings who are
remembered by others as Mahatma Ghandi and Mother Theresa, wonder
children who never fussed, never cried, and did long division at
four, reputations they don’t deserve any more than their powerful
baby brother’s (though our daughter was perfection itself as long
as I didn’t mind having her permanently attached to my hip and
never left her sight).
Luckily, the new dad and mom
are realists, and won’t be too shocked by the time their baby does
indeed act like our little Barbarian during some occasion when
they were hoping for angelic behavior – a wedding, a funeral,
visiting a newborn cousin.
Maybe it was good that I was
wrestling with Conan in the hallway, trying to keep him from
running screaming down the maternity ward, instead of gazing at a
newborn and feeling my milk let down. I’ve put my womb to bed
after three kids for a much deserved rest, and it doesn’t need to
be reawakened by the heady musk of a newborn. Chasing our
youngest also kept me from the opt-made mistake of offering sage
advice; while mostly what one learns as a parent is how much you
don’t know, it is tempting to share the bits of knowledge
painfully bought.
But no, they don’t need or
want advice; they want to rub their faces against their baby boy’s
fuzzy head, examine his miraculous parts, exclaim over his first
bowel movement, and think, “It doesn’t get better than this.”
We have babies arriving all
over the family tree. If I could give advice, if anyone having a
baby really wanted advice, it wouldn’t be about disposable versus
cloth, nursing versus bottle, stay-at-home versus daycare. We’ve
made our choices, good or bad, and those parents have to make
theirs. I can safely assume that these babies will be fed,
clothed, housed and loved extravagantly.
There are only
three things that I feel so fanatically about that I want to shout
them from the rooftops:
Read to your
baby from day one, and keep books available. A good vocabulary
aids communication, and therefore success not just in school, but
in interaction with friends, with co-workers, with people they
wouldn’t naturally get along with. Plus, there’s nothing like
hunkering down with a warm child and a good book. Wouldn’t you
rather your toddler was quoting picture books than television
dialogue?
Hold your baby
until your arms ache and you have biceps of steel. Learn to do
everything one handed! Hold your toddler, carry your preschooler,
and they will move with confidence, and innately know that you
will always be there for them, to carry them over rough times.
Talk to your
baby. Despite recent studies suggesting “baby talk” is
beneficial, resist talking down to a baby and he will understand
language far before he can speak, absorbing social and linguistic
nuances, and growing brain cells faster than you can change
diapers. Chat at the changing table, chat in the grocery store,
chat while you walk down the street holding hands -- it beats
talking to yourself and having people wonder if you’re
schizophrenic or talking on one of those “hands free” phones –
soon he’ll be chatting back.
While I’m always happy to
discuss the virtues and sins of schools, foods, pediatricians, and
gym equipment, these new parents will do that with their peers,
who will be up on the latest gear, parenting trends and medical
studies. The new grandparents will spoil the kids and remind the
parents that they don’t have to be perfect, the children will test
their patience, and their co-workers will tempt them to join the
“my baby is smarter than your baby” competition that no one has
ever won. My wife and I will just send good thoughts and picture
books, show them how to use a sling if we get the chance, and tend
to our own little herd, taking every opportunity to read, hold and
talk to our little Barbarian, whose mild mannered alter ego may go
unsung, but is there inside him just the same, just like his
saintly siblings before him.
copyright March 4, 2006 Beren deMotier
A Nice Rest
and a Pelvic Exam
I had
a nice break from the two year old yesterday; a sunny drive, a
brisk walk up some stairs, and the chance to lie down for awhile.
Of course, I was having a pelvic ultrasound during my repose, but
that doesn’t take away from the fact that I was lying down without
someone on my chest, my hand getting pulled, or projectiles
(blocks? action figures? sippy cups?) whizzing past my skull.
Right after I got home, a friend was telling me about her weekend
at a spa in Tacoma and how rested she felt, and all I could think
was “who needs a spa when you can have a doctor visit alone?”
It
was a sure sign of how deeply imbedded I am in the trenches of
motherhood that when I was having a different ultrasound a month
ago I thought, hey, if it turns out I need gall bladder surgery,
I’ll be in the hospital for a whole couple of days! Woo hoo, time
off.
It’s
not only that I’m rushing from sun-up to sun-down, and that the
mini-van has become my second home, home office, and art studio,
but that time alone is at a premium. No one mentions before
becoming a parent that you’ll never go to the bathroom alone
again. Or that the moment you try to take a shower, the toddler
will decide that it’s time to try his hand at cutting his own hair
or rewiring the computer. My wife, bless her, by virtue of having
a job to show up to, and meetings to attend, is exempt from crisis
status. When the preteen is having a bad day, she moans to me.
When the teenager needs to be fed, STAT! he comes to me. When the
toddler needs a. milk, b. his diaper changed, c. to stare at my
nipples, he just shows up, in whatever condition I’m in.
Which
is why I get up at five o’clock in the morning to get a little
work done.
Clearly we could do things different, I could be out of the house
like most moms, and the moody preteen could mope alone, the
teenager fend for himself and the toddler go without his own
personal peep show. But mostly I love it, and claustrophobia and
the occasional urge to break a leg in order to get time alone is a
small price to pay for the spontaneous kisses and opportunities to
interact that come my way.
Like
for most women, doctor visits used to give me anxiety and stress
for days. These days medical things don’t usually make the cut
for the anxiety inventory. Now I am stressed only if the drive
there includes a freeway, or I have a non-sick child in tow;
keeping the small one away from the millions of teeming bacteria
covering every surface while waiting for an older child to get a
check-up is misery. And keeping the older child from not whipping
the toddler into an anxiety-induced embolism when it is his
appointment for shots, isn’t such a good time either.
Naturally, I’d be a nervous wreck if there was anything seriously
wrong with me, though “seriously wrong” adapts with age. I used
to rewrite my will if a doctor said a mole looked “funny”, and the
benign tissue mass cut out of my right breast in my twenties
caused ridiculous dismay. Now gall bladder surgery seems none too
serious; my wife had hers out without too much wear and tear, and
her uterus, too, while she was on the table. A little asthma, a
little anxiety, a mole removal or two, big deal, though we all
seem to get more afraid of the big “C” as time goes on.
So when the doctor called with the
results of the ultrasound and news of unidentified objects in my
female parts (“the mystery of the right ovary” -- sounds like a
Nancy Drew book), it was with some effort (and a call to one of
our ever-ready medical expert friends) that I calmed myself down
enough to expect the best instead of anticipating the worst.
They’ll pop my hood in a few weeks for a
recheck (and another opportunity to recline in peace), root around
a bit more to find out what is bothering me, and hopefully call me
good.
Apparently, women my age are full of
unidentified objects, who knew?
Which
will leave me wondering when I can next get that medical office
mental health getaway; I’m due for a mammogram soon, which while a
stand-up procedure, is still virtually guaranteed child-free,
giving blood takes a good hour, and as a last resort, there is
always the dentist.
copyright Feb.1, 2006 Beren deMotier
The Irony is…
The newspaper was full of
editorials today about James Frey and his fictionalized memoir
A Million
Little Pieces;
how the book buying public doesn’t care that memoirs are really
novels, that authors are often not even who they say they are --
the cross-dressing, truck-stop rent boy is really a middle-class
writing couple, the Native American memoirist is really a
non-Native American writer of gay porn; and how Frey’s book is
still selling like hot cakes. The irony is that I just got a
rejection phone call (definitely a step up from a letter, but
still a rejection) from an agent who said my writing was charming,
sexy, appealing and fun… but that nothing dreadful happened in my
memoir. She said that she (and I) would have a much easier
time selling it if I was an alcoholic single mother.
I didn’t know that I could just lie about that!
Apparently there are no points for honesty in the memoir biz, only
for suffering and discrimination, but only if that discrimination
involves sex, drugs or violence; being denied one’s civil rights
is not enough if one is comfortably middle class and a functional
family. My wife, when I told her that my book about our
March 3rd,
2004 same-sex marriage was again rejected, and on what grounds,
responded, “well, just rewrite the ending and have me killed by a
hate crime, that should sell.”
Ummm, talk about bad karma. And then she suggested an
alternate ending; that I could die of cancer. I knocked wood
and thought about the unidentified object in my right ovary and
didn’t think it funny (and would be hard to sell as truth while I
was on the book tour).
When I pity-partied to our friend Lisa about my rejection, she
responded that finally they [heterosexuals] were getting what we’d
been telling them all these years, “we’re really boring, everyday
people, just like you, now give us our damn rights”, but that it
was a bummer about my book, though she was really glad I wasn’t a
single, alcoholic mother.
To be fair, the agent said that too. She’s a nice person,
just realistic about the state of publishing today.
Ironically again, I have two such stories up my sleeves -- not the
single, alcoholic mother story -- but tales of drugs and daring,
death and dismay, but I wanted to tell the celebratory story
first, the story that while not having a happy ending (I refuse to
be happy about having our marriage being declared legally void and
never having existed) portrays a life I feel lucky to have, and
have worked hard to keep from being a trauma drama tell-all.
We hope our kids will have to go to therapy for their happy
childhoods; their over-protective mothers denying them a
free-wheeling lack of supervision, their ability to do their own
homework and for not being able to talk television with their
peers, because they never watched it.
But the James Frey affair reveals that I, too, could have been
telling a whale of a tale, and probably not gotten caught, or that
if I was, people might not care. Would it make better
reading to spice it up with violence, sex and abject misery?
Does every memoir have to be about things better forgotten?
Happily, I don’t have the option of fibbing. Perhaps James
Frey doesn’t have kids, friends who shared his experiences, or an
agenda to promote. I have all three involved in my
not-quite-tragic-enough tale; our three kids were there for our
wedding, our celebration, our sorrow at the vote that struck
marriage off the list of possibilities in Oregon, and awaited with
us the legal decision that annulled our marriage. Our
friends shared the experience, the joys, the sorrow, and lying
would only embolden those opposed to our civil rights to push
harder to keep us disenfranchised.
Admittedly, creative non-fiction and memoir is never literal,
objective truth; we all have an angle, a personal perspective, our
own personal truth or “spin”. Erma Bombeck wrote about the
suburbs with style, but it wouldn’t have been as funny if she
hadn’t stretched the truth. Memory plays tricks on us, and
we may not even know when we are tailoring the tale. But to
purposefully bend and break a story to add sex, violence and other
sales potential is something I constitutionally cannot (I have a
tattle-tale compulsion) and will not do.
That’s what fiction is for.
copyright Jan. 19, 2006
And He’s
Off
It
is birthday weekend at our house. There are relatives scattered
throughout our home: two cousins in our daughter’s room, another behind
the stairs, Grandpa in our son’s room, and Grandma free-ranging to fit her
nocturnal needs. Coming down to write at my traditional five o’clock is
courting danger- at any turn a tousled head could pop up and say, “Is it
time to get up?” with bright eyes and a bushy tail.
Please God, no, I would think, but have to smile.
Actually, the birthday boy did just that routine when I tried to creep out
of bed this morning, waking none of the four other human beings in our
room: the two year old lying at the end of the bed, the ten year old on
the other side, my wife in the toddler’s bed (to better evade the kicks)
and our fourteen year old to-be on the floor. It felt like the room was
littered with land mines.
So
when our teenage son whispered out of the darkness, “What time is it?” I
wasn’t terribly surprised.
To read the entire article, click on And He's
Off
copyright
December 8, 2005
Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly (and
Barbed Wire)
Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries –
long the mantra of the self-help generation, it has become my battle cry
this year since mid-November. We not only decked the halls with boughs
of holly, we’re adding barbed wire for good measure.
Only figuratively of course – my
fourteen year old would use it to create medieval-style weapons, the two
year old would repeatedly injure himself in an effort to scale it like a
baby gate (he considers any restraining device a challenge), and our ten
year old might find it so appealing she’d go Goth. And after all, it’s
not there to police our nuclear family; me, my wife, and our three kids
are cool, and generally not at war with one another.
It’s the relatives we want to keep at
bay during the holiday season.
To read entire article, click on
Deck the Halls
Copyright Beren deMotier
November 22, 2005
Turkey Anxiety
"Now that the end of
November is nigh, turkey anxiety has me in its talons, and won’t let me go.
For years, I have
been the designated turkey chef in our family. Not that I came into the
relationship with any special skills in this area – we were pretty equal in our
lack of domesticity. My wife because she had a mommy who took care of all that,
me because I had one pan; I cooked in it, and ate out of it, and turkeys didn’t
fit the pan or my bare-bones budget.
I came into
the turkey chef role primarily because I do most of the “wet work”. You know,
the gross stuff, and opening up a raw turkey, pulling out the neck and innards,
and getting it ready to cook when it looks like something that should be
decently buried, definitely falls under the “gross” category. After changing
approximately fifteen thousand dirty diapers over the last several years,
handling cold, raw flesh doesn’t bother me, and one body cavity is as good as
another when it comes to dead birds. I’ve become a natural for this job."
To read the entire article, click on TURKEY
ANXIETY
copyright
Nov. 6, 2005 Beren deMotier
Penthouse?
"It sounds like a bad joke: two lesbian photographers went to
a Penthouse photo shoot and all they shot was beefcake…
But there is no punch-line. And it really
happened.
It started with an e-mail.
One of the things I have learned after nearly
nineteen years of “domestic bliss” is that it is good to be flexible and
supportive whenever possible. For my loved one to have adventures,
outings and friendships that I don’t necessarily participate in is
essential for her well-being (which is essential for ours as a couple).
Joined at the hip is bad, very bad. So when my wife got an e-mail from
a photographer friend a couple of weeks back that read, “Do you want to
go to Yosemite for a Penthouse shoot?” and forwarded it on to me, with
a, “What do you think?” I quickly answered, “You should go.”
And then I thought, “Penthouse?”"
To read the entire article, click on
Penthouse?
copyright
October 24,2005 Beren deMotier
Nanowrimo Who?
"I should be
sewing costumes while eating mini-Snickers this October morning, my
machine humming away on a bolt of fake-fur, micro-fleece or maybe naugahyde, but no, I’m at my computer, procrastinating away my tiny bit
of writing time before the kids awake, because I’m scared. Our three
children are costume-ready this year; two of them making their own (one
vampire, one D & D warrior), and the youngest wearing a leftover costume
from his older brother. He says he’s being a dinosaur.
We have
three or four dino suits hanging around, might as well use them.
So I am
without other justifiable distractions from the literary project looming
ahead of me. Something far scarier than a haunted house, another sequel
in the Halloween movie series or the challenges of sewing a
costume in the likeness of a Japanese anime character; like thousands of
other individuals across the world, I am going to write a novel in
November."
To read entire article, click on Nanowrimo
Who?
copyright Oct. 17, 2005 Beren deMotier
No More Mrs.
Nice Gay
"Right before my
forty-first birthday, I cut my long, curly, positively pre-Raphaelite hair
short. Two weeks later, I got a tattoo on top of my right wrist, my first in
almost twenty years. Then, I dug out my Doc Marten’s, started wearing my retro
reading glasses and my wife wondered aloud if she’d be given the boot next week.
As if she could get
rid of me that easily!
It’s not just that I
was in serious need of a make-over (it’s been a long time since the eighties),
or that I was looking for a way to hide my growing gray, or that nobody’s gaydar
was going to find me in a million years with my previous sense of style, all of
which partially apply. Mostly, I’m pissed off and tired of being Mrs. Nice Gay,
that sweet, unthreatening lesbian with the nice kids, the white mini-van and
overdone lipstick."
To read the entire article, please click on
No More Mrs. Nice Gay
copyright Oct. 8, 2005 Beren deMotier
At What Price
Equality?
"The morning that
Canada legalized same-sex marriage on a national level, we (me, the wife, the
three kids), were lounging in a hotel room in our pajamas, with the curtains
open to Stanley Park. It was the first day of our three week Canadian vacation
and the irony was not lost on us; we, who’d received our license refund only
months before, the State of Oregon flinging our marriage back at us with a
“void” stamped in ink, were suddenly within the borders of a nation who welcomed
us as worthy.
Yet we hadn’t
any intention of taking them up on the option."
To read the entire
article, please click on At What Price
Equality
copyright June 29,
2005
The Poky Little
Penis
"My wife spends at
least one evening a month with her female buddies at work, bonding over their
male-dominated industry, their struggle to find time to exercise in a life spent
belly up to a keyboard, and just talking about Stuff. They even went to Vegas
for the weekend recently, and ended up gambling very little, and eating lots.
My spouse is the only
lesbian of the group, and one of two moms, the other two being married with no
kids. They have become increasingly comfortable with my spouse over the last
year or so; she is a casual, salt of the earth gal, but definitely a big ol’
dyke. Only slowly have they entered the realm of “questions they might not want
to hear the answer to,” though they still play it pretty safe; if she has a
seamy past, they don’t want to know about it."
To read the entire article, please click on
The Poky Little Penis
copyright May 9, 2005 Beren deMotier
More than Just
a Check in the Mail
It speaks
volumes when the government won’t even take your money; a check arrived in the
mail yesterday from Multnomah County, a sixty dollar refund of our marriage
license fee paid a year ago on March third, and held in fiscal limbo until Li v.
State of Oregon decided the three thousand same-sex marriages from that time are
null and void, resulting in our fee being spat back at us with a tersely worded
explanation that comes down to “you lost” without so much as a “we regret to
inform you.”
To read the entire article, please click on
More Than Just a Check in the Mail
copyright March 10, 2005 Beren deMotier
Lucy, I’m
Home!!
"It is a wonder that
my wife ever has the nerve to leave town. Not because it takes “some nerve” to
leave a spouse alone for more than eight hours with three kids, twenty pets, and
all the maintenance that implies. But because it must take nerves of steel to
walk out that door knowing anything could happen, and probably will, during her
absence.
My spouse doesn’t
travel a lot, but she gets away from time to time; for work, for professional
education, for a weekend with friends from work. It used to be, when the two
older kids were small, that she went away for a week every October. Inevitably,
major events would occur while she was away; the baby would take her first
steps, the plumbing would back up, the new preschool teacher would turn out to
be a messenger from hell (thus requiring therapy and/or non-stop cuddles for our
little girl, and the need for a new preschool to attend). Actually, both older
kids have suddenly changed schools while my wife was away (crises come to a head
at the worse times), and it seems to me we made the decision to home school our
teenager while she was at a business meeting in California.
Thank heavens for
email."
To read the entire article, click
on the following: Lucy, I'm Home
Buster Baxter
Goes to Vermont
copyright
Feb. 15, 2005 Beren deMotier
"I always thought that
Sesame Street would have the first gay people on it, of any television for
children. I grew up with Sesame Street. I watched the first episodes on
avocado green shag carpeting in my parents’ sunken Los Angeles living room, fell
in love with that pre-Tom Hanks “Everyman” Kermit the Frog, and still own the
fuzzy and blue Grover puppet I got for Christmas in 1971. I do a mean Grover
impression, which comes in handy more than you’d imagine when you have three
kids. Sesame Street was the first show to have inner city kids, black kids,
Hispanic kids, and a puppet with HIV. It seemed inevitable that one day a
lesbian couple would move onto the street, or some nice gay men would buy Mr.
Hooper’s store and start serving mochaccinos (as well as over-sized cookies) to
Cookie Monster on his daily visit.
But it was Buster
Baxter, the happy-go-lucky, child-of-divorced-parents rabbit co-star of the
popular “Arthur” cartoon show, and now star of his own “Postcards from Buster”,
who introduced lesbians to children’s television. Except that sadly, very few
children got to see it, since before the episode about Buster visiting Vermont
(where civil unions are legal and couples with two moms not uncommon) could air,
under pressure from new Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, PBS pulled the
show from national distribution."
To read the entire article, click
on the following: Buster Baxter
Goes to Vermont
