greater than

Well, I did it. I put an Obama sticker on my car.

It's not as if I don't want Obama to be the next President. It's just that I'm reluctant to get my hopes up about his getting elected. The fact that people are wowed by McCain's choice of Palin makes me feel the way I did in 1980, standing in the livingroom of my dorm with everyone watching the election returns for Reagan. I just couldn't believe it at the time. Couldn't people see that this guy was an idiot? What was wrong with America?

So when the Palin surge happened, I looked at the Obama sticker sitting on the hall table and felt like I probably should use it. I don't think I've ever put a political sticker on my car. Even if I want a candidate to win, I don't usually identify with any of them enough to want to have them become a permanent part of my self-presentation on the road. They are all straight, all male (except for Hillary), and all againt same-sex marriage (including Hillary). Most of them say what they think America wants to hear, including pandering to Christian conservatives in a way that makes me want to throw up (Hillary most certainly did this). I view elections more as damage control than any expression of MY ideals or MY politics.

Indeed, the only sticker on my car is an HRC "equals" sign I've modified to look like the mathematical symbol for "greater than." As my friend Danny pointed out when HRC first started using the gold parallel lines on a blue field to signify what is supposed to be the political goal of all LGBTQ people, why settle for equality when you can transform the world?

As a tribute to Danny's ability to dream big, I put my "greater than" symbol on the car, hoping that it would make me dream big, too. And today--inexplicably, perhaps-- I decided maybe we could dream big with Obama. Why not? I don't actually believe he's going to change things all that much, but I'm going to pretend that he is, and that universal health care, federal recognition of same-sex families, the end of the war in Iraq, and major investment in alternative energy is really going to happen in the next four years.

In the meantime, I'm trying to get my class I'm teaching to have political discussions without getting angry, polarized, and disrespectful of each other's views. I'm teaching an LGBT history and political change class, and in my efforts to get them engaged, I think I've loosed a whirlwind. We did some reading from Eric Marcus's Making Gay History, and we watched the Four-part PBS/Channel 4 series from the early 90s called A Question of Equality. I think Isaac Julien either made it all or helped on it a lot, because it is definitely hip and decidedly not from the usual white, middle-class point-of-view that gay history usually gets told from. Julian interviewed the drag queens and gays and lesbians of color who took part in the pre- and post-Stonewall LGBT movement to paint a sensitive portrait of the dynamic relationship between coalition and difference in LGBTQ political organizations. I taped the series when I was in grad school because I thought it would be great for an LGBT studies class, and I used to teach it a lot. When GF started teaching LGBT content she used it. It got so popular that her school tranferred it to DVD, though the copy is a little washed out. In my class, as it is usually, students were really engaged with the reading and the film, but the discussion got heated at one point, with a couple of white, privileged women's studies students berating the class for not understanding standpoint theory and their own privilege. Sigh. At one point a couple of students turned on an ROTC student and asked him to defend his position on--I don't know--the war? Conservatism? I'm not sure where they were going, except that at one point there had been an intelligent evaluation of the vulnerability of radical political groups to splinter over differences. Then, suddenly, the class was splintering over differences.

I was just about to intervene in the discussion when another student made a joke about the ROTC guy speaking for all military personnel, which was a sensitive way of defusing things, I thought, and of being sarcastic about the women's studies students singling him out. Also, he seemed eager to defend his point of view, and actually argued that the class shouldn't assume everyone shared the same political beliefs, class background, or moral philosophy, which was I thought a great thing to point out.

I'm making it sound a bit chaotic, which it really wasn't, because I was making them address the issues brought up in the reading and the film, and afterwards I thought it had been really performative of exactly the kinds of differences that we were studying. Then a student with a pierced lip buttonholed me afterwards and said she was shocked, shocked! by the fact that the class had called out the ROTC guy. I explained to her that I thought the other students had defused it, and that he seemed happy to have the opportunity to explain his point of view--to which they listened--and how all in all I thought it had been a successful class, if harrowing. The student also claimed to have seen other students text messaging during the film, and even chewing tobacco. I just looked at her. While I try to make sure the class is never disruptive, I really can't monitor people very well when we are watching a movie IN THE DARK. And I laughed to myself about the tobacco. Really? Is this where student rebellion is at these days--sneaking dip during class?

Seriously, I forgot that teaching can drive you batshit crazy sometimes. And that students expect you to be their mother, or the mother of everyone else. And that they are supercilious even thought they have pierced lips. And that many of them are perfectly comfortable telling you you aren't doing your job of making them feel comfortable. And you can feel bad, because on the one hand, you want them to have a real discussion, without having be watered down and censored so that it feels fake, but you also realize that they could use a good lesson in rhetorical (and other) accommodation, and be reminded that a classroom is not, in fact, the same as a political organization. But this is exactly the reason some people love teaching women's and gender studies classes, and others won't touch 'em with a 10-foot pole.

I found this truly disturbing, because Pierced Lip and I obviously had totally different experiences of the class. I also felt disrespected, because when I passed her in the hall again, in an empty building at 9 o'clock at night, she wouldn't look at me, but instead busily texted someone on her phone. Weird.

This week, Bayard Rustin! We'll see how they do with that. I haven't taught a GWS course in so long, I forgot how heated people get, and how it can make you long for the impersonality of literature.

GF puts it differently. She says it's just hard to care, and it always surprises--and annoys--us that they do. She is being funny, of course, but there is some truth in what she says.

GF is off getting her tenure file together in a coffeeshop. Little pixie baby is asleep in her swing. After exhausting all possible remedies, including food, diaper change, mobile-watching, lying on a play mat, swinging and swaying in my arms, and singing songs, I finally settled her down in front of the Michigan State football game, and she quieted down, watched it with some interest for a few minutes, and fell asleep. I think maybe she's really just a middle-aged man trapped in the body of a baby.

Which is way better and less dangerous than being a baby trapped in the body of a middle-aged man. SInce McCain is acting a lot like that these days, I'm going to try to care about politics just long enough to get a grownup in the White House. And maybe watch a little college ball with Maude.

a little night music

Even before Maude was born, we knew we would have to think harder about music. Margo, Darling began regularly playing Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos in the car, and at night would beg me to sing a song to her rising abdomen. I felt silly singing to a stomach, but I tried to rack my brain for something lullaby-ish that might entertain the little fetus trapped in the dark down there. When she was born singing came more easily, especially since I quickly ran out of things to say to her when she was crying in my lap, too tired and worked up to sleep. Singing is the natural response to a crying baby. It allows you to soothe yourself while soothing her. It allows you to pick a mood and insist on it.

"There's no hysteria here," a song can say. "Nobody is at their wit's end in THIS house, oh no! THIS house is a palace of mellowness." Say it, know it, be it. Eventually it feels true.

As Maude sobbed in my arms and I bounced up and down on the exercise ball trying to soothe her, I would remember the songs I listened to as a child. My father had a big console stereo when I was little, the kind with polished wood sides and a top that lifted to reveal a turntable and radio inside. It lit up inside when it was on, and there was a little oval panel that also lit up to reveal the words "Stereophonic Sound." The radio had a slide dial and warm yellow numbers. The speakers were covered with a woven wicker-type material.

My sister and I loved to sit on the floor with our heads pressed back against the speakers, letting the sound wash over us. I think one of our heads dented the wicker material in a moment of enthusiasm, because I remember a dent in the front. We probably got spanked for the dent, because it was my father's prize possession, but it is equally possible he shrugged it off. Parents are inconsistent like that.

There was a lot of unhappiness, at least back then, so the stereo stands out for me as one of my happier childhood memories. My father played the Kingston Trio; Judy Collins; Mitch Miller; Big Band music; the Weavers; and Peter, Paul and Mary. He played Tony Bennett and Harry Belafonte. He loved early Beatles. He loved Patsy Cline. He loved Bread, the Mamas and the Papas, The Fifth Dimension.

My father was a moody man when we were little. My parents were high school sweethearts who had broken up when my father was in college and my mother in nursing school. He gave another girl his fraternity pin, but my mother still loved him. When she had to have a lower spinal fusion at 20 she waited in for him to come visit her in the hospital, where she lay trapped for weeks in a full body cast. Day after day she waited, but he never came. When she left the hospital she hopped a plane to Atlanta, where her father lived, met a handsome man in a bar, and married him on my father's birthday. She had two children with him before she realized he couldn't hold down a job.

My father's mother told him about my mother's divorce, and the two little girls she had. My mother and my grandmother had kept in touch. I am sure my mother told my grandmother that she had never stopped loving my father, which was true. My grandmother understood misfortune, having survived a tough childhood where she had been given away by her own father, who kept her brother but sent her out to work for any family that would take her in. My grandmother told my father to go get my mother and the two little girls that should have been his. He did.

Which is how my sister and I ended up with our little heads pressed against his stereo speakers, listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary and the Fifth Dimension day after day. At first my father thought that parenting meant beating us with a leather belt for every infraction. I remember having to come up with stories about bruises and handprints on my body for doctors during routine checkups or hospital visits. Later, when more children were born, he began to like us better, and he gave up the belt, and then gave up hitting us altogether. The years passed. We all grew up. I think he grew up more than any of us, grew into a kinder and more generous person over time. In the house of my childhood, all four of us and my parents and our dogs and cats, and horses in the barn, made what I like to call a tumbledy house, a house of noise and mess and lovely disorder and raucous dinnertime fellowship. I remember there was music in our house every night, filling in the cracks and seams between all of us like caulking, creating a reservoir of shared family life that took us all through the next decade together, and then, out into the world.

Eventually my father and I became friends. I borrowed his Tony Bennett and Harry Belafonte records and made tapes to listen to in my car on the drive home from college, and then, graduate school. He would growl at me if records went missing, but only half-heartedly, and if I had them in my possession, he told me to keep them as long as I liked. And when I played them, wherever I was living at the time, in whatever stage of my life, I recreated the raucous tumbledy house I missed, and celebrated my distance from it. The music of my childhood let me miss my family and feel free and separate from them at the same time. it let me revisit a feeling, feel comfortable with ambivalence, and make peace, ultimately, with all the bad things about growing up I couldn't change, and with all the good things I wouldn't trade for anyone else's life.

Before Maude was born I thought about how I would explain my parental relationship to her. I thought I could tell her that my father, the one whose last name I have, is not genetically related to me. I thought about how it may have mattered to me once, but never would now. I thought about how with my mother gone all of us try to see each other at least once a year, and nobody ever cares or seems to remember what degrees of blood kinship are or are not present for any of us. I thought about what a shared life is, what makes family, what it means to be a parent, or a daughter.

And so when Maude was born I sat night after night on the exercise ball, looking for songs that would soother her, and I found the ones from my childhood. I started with "500 miles," then went back to Peter, Paul and Mary for the songs I knew but could not remember. And then I found "Stewball."

"Stewball," of course, is a mournful song about betting everything on the wrong horse and regretting it. In fact, if you go back and listen to Peter, Paul, and Mary, most of their songs and the songs they cover are fairly sad: "Cruel War," "Lemon Tree," "500 Miles," "Leaving on a Jet Plane," and even--especially!--"Puff, the Magic Dragon," are songs about separation, loss, displacement, and disappointment. Did I know this when I sang them as a child? Did something in my sad little heart vibrate with the yearning, mournful minor found in that music? Or did I just think they were beautiful? Are those feelings all mixed together anyway, the beauty, the sadness, the yearning, and bittersweet memory?

Maude loves "Stewball". I can try several different songs, but "Stewball" always makes her happy. Sometimes I play it on my computer, through iTunes, and we slow dance together in the pink light of the nursery, Maude in my arms, her soft sticky cheek pressed against my face, both of us swaying softly to the guitars and vocal harmonies. I think about the heartache and the love and the yearning for safety and fellowship that is so much a part of the ideology of family, and I think about the sweet sad nostalgia I feel for a time when all of us were together under one roof, crowded and cross and driving each other crazy, but together, listening to the same music floating from room to room, humming the same songs. Surviving, fighting, changing, forgiving each other. And I tell Maude that I love her, and that I will probably disappoint her and drive her crazy, but I will try my best to give her a good life, and she is my family, now, for better or worse.

And I feel like our house, our little cramped apartment, is mellow, and calm, and grounded, and cheerful, and full of life and lots of love and all the good things that can be in a place where there is hope and the desire for happiness, and people who try to be their best selves, and love each other as best they can. Which is a lot.

Maude has two

We are incredibly lucky to live in a state that allows second-parent adoption. This means that I can adopt Maude and become a legal parent, and have my name appear on her birth certificate, just as her biological mother is also a legal parent, with her name on the birth certificate.

When GF and I visited the lawyer before Maude was born, she told us that our state, and especially our city, seemed to be moving towards near-total acceptance of LGBT families. With the caution of one who has seen the political winds change many times, our lawyer stressed that this progress was not something we could absolutely count on forever, and that it was possible for states to roll back such adoptions and leave the status of non-bio parents up for grabs. But she told us how a conservative judge she routinely works with decided on his own that it was unfair to require a social worker to visit the homes of LGBT parents when no such visit was required of heterosexual parents. Her eyes twinkling, she said she never would have imagined that this particular judge would make such a decision, but that she had learned in her many years of practice to be surprised by human fairness.

She also told us that what we were doing was important. While we might think of our adoption as merely a personal or family decision, it was in her mind a political act to insist on the parenting rights of non-bio LGBT partners, and she applauded us for choosing to be out, proud, and legal. Finally, as a last act of personal and professional generosity, she waived half her fee when she found out I was a law student. And told me not to tell anyone she had done so.

Before Maude was born I liked to address her by name whenever possible, throwing my voice at wherever my vague sense of location imagined her to be. A thump that moved GF's belly or made it jump might be a leg, or a fist, if only I could figure out her position. I remember rubbing a hard, solid little rectangle that would float up against the roof of skin still sheltering her, somewhere above GF's bellybutton, and I thought it had to be her butt. Now that I hold her in the crook of my elbow with one hand against that hard little triangle, I know I was right. "Hey little Maude," I would croon to her. "Hey Maudie Maude." In my mind she was already, always, inevitably my daughter because I had called her, planned for her, bought sperm, strategized with GF which donors to choose and why, and called her by name, for all the long months leading up to her birth. Even now I look at her and I see my grandmother's smile, and the shadow of my own baby smile, and my sister's dark hair, and my mother's fierce eyes, and it is hard to remember that she is not actually biologically related to me. But she is mine.

She is mine when I feed her in the blue lavalamp glow of 3 a.m., and she looks at me with those bottomless eyes. She is mine when she hunches against me, trying to burp, or sleep, and rests her awkward big head wearily on my shoulder, my chest. She is mine when she snuggles against me in the morning, as one or the other of us brings her into the bed in hopes that all of us can catch just a half hour or an hour more of sleep, and little baby sighs mark her deep breathing. She is mine when she snores, and when she suffers, as all babies suffer. She is mine every time I sing her a song and her eyes close, and her head sags, and she lets me carry her past the stony gates of sleep to the rest she longs for.

Under the law, unless you live in one of those enlightened states that recognize de facto parenting (and there aren't many), a lesbian non-bio mom has no custody or visitation rights. I would have no right to guard Maude, or speak for her, or advocate as her parent, without a second-parent adoption. Now that I have one, I can access her medical records, enroll her in school, take her to the doctor, travel across state lines, and do whatever else it is that parents routinely do for the biological and adopted children they love.

All summer I read custody cases where biological mothers tried to deny visitation to lesbian ex-partners, and I answered calls from anguished parents trying desperately to see the children that they had raised from infancy, who had been taken away from them by biological moms trying to move on after a break-up. Most of these lesbian moms were heartbroken, and more worried about the children than about themselves. Most of them didn't have a leg to stand on, either.

A ballot initiative prohibiting unmarried couples living together from adoption and foster care just cleared in Arkansas. Senator McCain has stated that he doesn't believe in gay adoption, and Utah bans adoptions by unmarried cohabiting adults. These initiative just keep getting introduced every year, despite the fact that every state needs more adoptive and foster families to take in children, not fewer.

On Maude's adoption day she wore a pink sweater hand-knitted for her by an old-timey lesbian activist colleague of GF's. The sweater came with a matching pink wool blanket. She also wore a beautiful little white dress and socks made to look like little black mary jane shoes. We went into the Daley Center and waited in the family room with GF's sister and a few friends who had taken off work. One of the friends had made her the gift of a college fund. Another had turned over the invoice to me for a freelancing project she actually had done herself, and had thus paid for the entire adoption.

At one point an official leaned over the counter and tapped the sleeping baby with official papers, thus serving process telling Maude that she was required to appear in court. She never even woke up.

GF and I stood before the judge and he asked us our names and occupations. He asked our friends if we would be good parents. He admired the baby. I was nervous because I had just signed a paper stipulating that we were of good moral character, and financially able to raise a child. GF and I had looked at each other, mouthing the words "lie" and "lie" as we waited for the judge. The court seemed to treat these words as mere formalities, but I wondered at their presence in the documents. What would happen if they were ever activated? What in the world was good moral character? Does anyone have enough money to raise children these days, really?

It was a lot like being married by a JP, or at least what I imagine it would be like to be married by a JP. It was jocular but bureaucratic, stately but mundane, a little like a wedding and a lot like getting a driver's license. Sometimes it was bizarre, as when the incredibly crusty bailiff took my fingerprints and warned me, with a straight face drained of all amusement, that now that I was in the system, I had better wear gloves if I wanted to take up a life of crime. He also lost all cognition trying to take down my vital stats. "Hair . . .color?" He asked, clearly flailing in deep waters far beyond his meager social abilities. "Brown?" I queried back, unable to say for sure. Brown under all that blonde, perhaps. Or perhaps the truth of my hair was simply what it appeared to be, or what I said it was. I should have said blonde.

There are many ways that the law can make LGBT people feel like liars, like imposters. It tells you that you cannot marry in the eyes of the federal government, even though you may feel married and act married and need the benefits of marriage for your lover and your children. In many states--Michigan is one--it can tell you your children are not yours if you are a non-bio LGBT parent. In many states it will not recognize that you have changed your gender to fit the truth of your life.

When the law recognizes you, on the other hand, it can make you feel coherent and validated. The other day it told me I was a parent, with responsibilities and rights over the daughter I had helped plan, conceive, and care for. Our lawyer said as much when she took pains to emphasize the language to me of the temporary custody order granting me parental rights until the final adoption went through. In Daley Plaza there is a Picasso sculpture that soars heavenwards, a kind of beast with its legs on the pavement, wearing its strange mask, with mandolin wings and a harp for a heart, towering over pedestrians in the crisp morning. I stood in its shadow and I felt my spirits rise. I think I will always remember how tall I felt that day after our adoption, standing in the sun, still unbelieving, next to my stroller, my partner, and my little, my most beloved and cherished new daughter.

Mine.

maude's ocean

She cries, and the sound stabs the night. It is time for a night feeding, and one or both of us rushes to soothe her. Sometimes she wakes up in pain, from gas in her still-developing digestive system, and her cry is angry, desperate. Sometimes she is hungry, and her cry is clear and hard. When she is uncomfortable from a diaper, she whimpers restlessly. When she is lonely and wants to be picked up, she wails in short little bursts.

I know some people are driven crazy by the constant cries of newborns, but right now, Maude's cries just fill me with pity and tenderness. Why, why, little one? Why so much sadness for just a meal, or a diaper? I toss her a little, up and down in the way she likes, to startle her out of her jag. I say her name over and over. It often works, and she stops crying and gazes long at me with her dark, expressive eyes. She doesn't want to have to cry, any more than we want to have to listen to it. It's a terrible job she's been given, and her mute look tells me there are no hard feelings, just limited means of communication.

Yesterday she grew angrier and more desperate, waiting for food that was a little long in coming, and when I kissed her eyes I tasted salt. "She cries real tears," I reported to GF, and she told me it was a kind of baby milestone. Crying real salt tears means you are growing up.

In the night I change her one-handed, holding a bottle in her mouth while trying to wipe her clean and fasten a new diaper. I wrap her and sing her songs--mill songs, mining songs, slave songs, Christmas carols. If she likes a song she grows still and listens with her whole being. Her face locks into one expression and her eyes grow dark and far away, yet rapt. Maude loves music, and strains even now to recognize songs she knows.

She has a "sleep sheep" that plays white noise for her--rain, a stream, the ocean. The sheep is a traveling model, one with velcro straps to fasten to a bassinette or a stroller on the go. When she has eaten and been changed, she is rocked and bundled, and we sing her songs, and eventually, carefully lower her to her bed, where we turn on the sleep sheep. The ocean crashes over her head and her feet in the little bed, the ebb and flow of the waves hissing back and forth in a round hollow echo in the darkness. I wonder if the ocean is for her, or for us, imaginary waves breaking on the shores of our rental bedroom, in a city far from the sea.

We are from the coasts, one of us from each side, meeting in the middle of the country. Sometimes I think of the nineteen-seventies country childhood I had, with fields of tall summer grass hot with the sun and tall sticky pines trees to play in, roll in, climb, smell, and dream by, and I could weep for Maude and her programmed urban future. Will she ever know a summer week in York Beach, Maine, running from the icy salt waves on the barren coastline that was my childhood ocean? Will we take her to swim in the hippie swimming hole that is a bend in the river in Sandwich, New Hampshire? Will she know what crickets sound like? And horses--what if she is horse crazy and I, unlike my parents, don't have an acre of field to fence in for a 4H horse for her to buy with her babysitting money?

The sleep sheep blows a dream of oceans into her ear, and I remember what it was to choke on Wordsworth when I tried to explain him to a class of Florida freshman ten long years ago. Then it was homesickness for New England that made my eyes tear up when I tried to explain what he meant by:
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Now I think it is also some sense of calm trust, some sense of knowing the way the world works, and feeling the interconnectedness of all things, that Wordsworth's speaker misses when he speaks longingly of the ocean. How far I feel from the ocean sometimes, here in the middle of the country, far from the coasts, far from home. Deep in the middle of life, it seems like a long way back to the beaches of childhood, to quiet contemplation and a peace beyond words, to the origin of things that is the ocean.

In the quiet night, though, my child cries and I hold her and comfort her, and it makes me feel oddly calm. She is simple right now, and her simplicity makes me simple too. All that matters is food, and sleep, and comfort, and trust in the arms that are there to hold you through the dark hours. The sleep sheep sings its salty ocean song, breathing the waves of my childhood, and maybe hers, in the early hours of morning. I like the sleep sheep, for all its artifice. It is a bird that sings of Byzantium. Maude is my immortal sea, and I am the waves of her ocean, patient, rocking her body until she trusts her eyes to close. It is still night, and Maude, the sheep, and I rock together to the sound of waves.

she is born

At 6:30 a.m. on Friday I woke to GF chirping something unintelligible from the bathroom. The fans were going in our bedroom and all I could hear was something about "water." I got up and went in. She was sitting on the toilet smiling. "My water broke!" she said. I said something lame like "oh wow!"

My first thought was coffee, because I'm a selfish caffeine addict. Her first thought was to call the hospital. They wanted her in immediately.

This wasn't the way we'd planned it.

I don't know what exactly I thought would happen, but I left work on Thursday fully expecting to go back the next day. My desk was a sea of paper punctuated by half-empty diet coke bottles. I know due dates are approximate, but I think I really believed the old wives' tale that first babies are late. I think I thought we'd spend the weekend at the beach.

When the hospital told us to come in, my heart sank. I was excited, but I also knew that labor lasted for hours, and the standard advice in all the birth books is to wait as long as possible at home, relaxing, before heading to the micromanaged zone of Labor and Delivery. Still, when the bag of waters breaks, the risk of infection increases, so off we went. It was a sunny day, there were no contractions as yet, and we had time for showers and coffee and bagels.

We arrived at the hospital and the valet took our keys. It still felt like we were pretending. Did someone else have to park our car, really? GF wasn't in labor. She could walk just fine. There was no emergency. No police escort was needed.

By nine we were checked in and I began calling and texting the news. Some of our friends got so excited they called in sick to work and camped out at a nearby house, watching movies together and making plans. We thought we'd have a baby by nightfall.

As the morning passed, though, there were still no contractions, so the nurses started GF on pitocin to get things going. By early afternoon her contractions were strong enough that she asked for the epidural, and by late afternoon she was dilated four centimeters. The doctor came in to visit and see how things were going. She had switched shifts with the other ob-gyn when she heard GF was in labor. I love this doctor. When I first heard about her--that she could be brusque, that she was a good labor coach, that she kept her patients from tearing during delivery, that she was an older lesbian with a partner and kids--I just knew she would be our doctor. "That's her," I told GF. Now she teased us and laughed when I told her the hospital was like a casino because it was impossible to know what time it was or how long you'd been there once you were in one of these delivery rooms. She told us she'd see us soon. We agreed.

That's when things began to slow down.

As the anaesthesiologist explained the epidural process to her, GF peppered him with questions. Should she walk? Would her legs go numb? Could she lie down flat? And last, what if the medicine ran out before she had the baby?

The anaesthesiologist chuckled. "This lasts eight hours," he told her. "You'll have a baby before this runs out."

That was at three o'clock in the afternoon. At seven there had been little change, and I phoned the friends who had skipped work to tell them the baby might be later coming than we had supposed. At nine there was still no change, and the doctor upped the pitocin. At two in the morning, GF was finally dilated to eight centimeters.

Great! We thought. Only two more to go!

At this point the epidural had begun to wear off. GF was all for letting it end so she could feel the contractions and visualize her body opening up. The doctor reminded her that she still had two or three hours to go before she got to ten centimeters, and that when she got there she would have some hard pushing to do. We decided to get some sleep, GF started the epidural again, and we turned the lights off in the room.

At 5 a.m. the nurses woke us and the doctor told us to get ready to push. I woke up out of my chair, washed my face, and realized I hadn't eaten anything for twelve hours. The nurses brought me a turkey loaf sandwich on wheat bread. I remember GF putting a little mayo on the bread, squeezed from out of one of those little packets. She was naked from the waist down, propped up in the bed, fixing my sandwich. Even better, she started to push, and in between contractions, I ate my sandwich.

The contractions started coming fast. I could see them coming on the monitor by the bed, the numbers rising and falling with each peak and ebb. When the numbers began to go up, I would grab one of GF's legs with my right arm, put my left arm around her head, and she would pull into a crunch position and push as hard as she could to the count of ten. Then she would lean back, take a deep breath, and crunch again for another ten, and another. Each contraction had three sets of ten crunch-pushes. We did this for two and a half hours.

At 7:50 a.m. the doctor felt for the head and muttered something about it being too big. GF mentioned that our donor was 6 feet one, and I thought the doctor was going to explode. "Six one! Six one!" she spluttered. "A woman your size has no business with a six-one donor!" GF whispered that they didn't really let many short men donate sperm, which is true, and the doctor shook her head. "I want you to give one last big push," she ordered. "And I want this one to be the biggest, hardest, most productive one yet."

Now, GF is a strong little woman, and she wanted to please the doctor, and she had been pushing so hard and with so much effort her face was red and her legs shaking. But still she pushed with all her being, pushed so hard she groaned, pushed as if by pushing this one last time she could finally turn the tide and bring this baby down.

The doctor felt again. It was no good. the head was still too high. "The baby's head is getting a cone shape," she told us. "The back of the head is trying to get down the birth canal, but the major bones of the head still have to come through. I'm comfortable using forceps in situations like this, but I'm not comfortable doing it here." GF and I didn't even have to confer; we looked at each other without a word and she told the doctor a caesarian was fine with her. I felt my throat tighten and my eyes sting, not because I was committed to a vaginal birth, but because it seemed like so much to put GF through abdominal surgery after twenty four-hours of labor. Plus operations are scary. Plus I've seen too many ERs and Grey's Anatomys featuring dead delivering moms not to think anything could go terribly wrong at any moment no matter how routine the procedure.

I kissed her goodbye and they brought me blue paper scrubs to put on. When I got to the operating room I saw GF, strapped down in a crucified position with her head sticking out of a tall blue tent. Her teeth were chattering uncontrollably from the anaesthesia. She looked more tired than I've ever seen her look.

I took a seat by her head and waited. I heard the doctor discussing the incision with a resident, then I heard her call my name. "Stand up!" she said. "Come see your daughter be born!"

I ran around the tent just in time to see GF's stomach looking like a Thanksgiving turkey, and then a flailing baby with an impossibly thick white umbilical cord pulled out like stuffing and hoisted over the table, dark red and covered with what looked to be a thin layer of goat cheese. The nurses brought her to a table and started to dry her off. I touched her and called her name, and she stopped crying and cocked one dark eye at me. The other one wouldn't quite open, but the more they dried her the wider it got. Two dark black eyes looked me over from under a thick dark head of hair. She pursed her lips. "Hello Maudie," I whispered softly. "She's responding to your voice," the nurses told me. They gave me scissors to trim her tough little garden hose of an umbilical cord, then wrapped her up tight and handed her to me. I brought her over to GF to kiss.

GF gamely kissed the baby, and then went back to throwing up into a pink plastic container. Nurses and doctors offered their congratulations and I thanked them. Our doctor came towards me, her eyes merry over her surgical mask. "Well congratulations!" she said, reaching out her hand. I opened my arms to hug her. She bent towards me, and I gave her a big kiss on the cheek of gratitude and relief. She chuckled.

SInce then every day with Maude is new and strange. When she cries we've twirled her in the night, sung her songs, made up rap poems about who loves babies (Everyone loves babies), and looked deep and long into her dark, otherworldly eyes. Sometimes she looks back at me, and I see that she's come from a far place to be with us, and I fall in love. The three of us move in the house now through the long afternoons and cool evenings, all of us just looking at each other, over and over. And life feels perfect.

my hero

I'm not sure why I never read David Copperfield. Blame professors eager to shake up the Victorian canon. Sure, I knew the hackneyed first chapter title "I am born," and dutifully laughed alongside teachers who made fun of a narrator first person-izing his own birth. But David Copperfield was another generation's "Dickens novel," as Hamlet was another generation's "Shakespeare play." My Shakespeare was Lear, over and over, and my Dickensian narrator was Pip, over and over. At some point public opinion shifted to Great Expectations as THE Dickens to teach, probably because it is shorter, no doubt because Miss Havisham provides such a Sexual Revolution-era cautionary fable about the down side of letting your girl parts get too melancholic and cobwebby. Imagine my delight, then, to first encounter, in my mid-forties, the mannered yet modest cadences of young Copperfield, left alone in the world without parents, property, or prospects. Pennyless but for the unconditional love of his good nurse Peggoty and the gift of his own generous and self-improving heart.

I think I love him for his optimism. While the serialization of the novel means there are too many quirky-yet-heartwarming moments for my taste (the characterization and verbal tic equivalent of Disney's rolly-poly animals and birds with long lashes), there are enough brutal patriarchs and brutalized women that I appreciate David's faith that things will--must--get better. I thought when I opened the pages of the novel and began reading during my morning commute that I would sink into the rhythms of Victorian London, forgetting the sway and squeal of the train, the smell of the bodies of my fellow passengers, how tired and unready for the day I often feel. Instead the present and the past tumble together, and I am riding in a carriage through the dark passages of my own life, following the thread of a voice whose story leads ever upwards into a place of arrival, like the escalator I ride every day up, up from underground into the wide white bustle of the urban morning. I wonder, as David does, whether I will be the hero of my own life, even now, every day in the story where I find myself. And I can't help hoping, as I hear that wonderful narrative voice turning and rolling in my head, word piled on word, confident of a reader out there who can hear and be delighted by it still, that I will be.

waiting game

Midsummer blooms like a tigerlily, and with it come the longest afternoons of the year. Our livingroom is cool, our windows caressed by bright and dark leaf shadows. Outside a lawnmower drones like an insect, and the UPS man buzzes the front door. Today our diaper bags arrive. Mine is a green messenger bag with purple flames. Hers is a Chinese red with orange flowers. The cats eye them with interest, as new scratching pads.

We are waiting, waiting for the Little Nipper. Margo's belly is huge, jutting out in front of her at a right angle. Now it sails before her, its fleshy prow impossible to minimize. Even the largest maternity top makes it look as if she is wearing a tablecloth, because the the distance between the bottom of the shirt and her body is so great. Yesterday she ran away from the neighbor across the street whose garage we rent, because he is an old man, and Margo doesn't feel like answering questions about being pregnant. Last night I laid a fork on her belly at the top of it, where it plateaus, and she asked me tartly whether I was trying to be funny.

Sometimes she wants soft serve at 9pm. Sometimes I come home and she is in tears. This afternoon I found her happily working on her book, lying on the couch, her shirt pulled up to expose a vast, undulating dome. Her torso is a crystal ball inverted, its clouds and shadows pushing from within. We sit and gaze at it, resting our hands on its sides, asking the baby in there our ouija questions.

When I am at work she text messages me her ideas about labor and delivery. Today she asked whether I thought "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" would be a good distraction movie. I thought it was an inspired choice. In the movie the childless academic couple who terrorize new faculty after a late-night party by drinking themselves to viciousness and playing Hump the Host refer to their imaginary son as the Little Nipper. I sometimes think we decided to have a baby so as not to become this older academic couple, drinking too much, nagging each other, creating bitterly destructive parodies of heteronormativity in order to re-animate the dying embers of our relationship. Other times I think we just wanted something more simple and joyous than work in our lives, because children make you remember feeling hopeful.

For now, we wait. The air is cool as the early evening comes in. I type at the keyboard, wondering when the baby will come, and how it will change our lives. I think about the drowsiness of middle age, and the peace we know now, and the clamor and noise and activity that our lives will take on soon. The cats crouch at my elbows, eager to be fed. Margo dozes on the couch, her head drooping on the pillow, dreaming of grace.

Friends don't let friends seek this

Here's another one for the archive that made us laugh today:

The parties decided that Karen would bear the child, because Carol suffers from hypertension. Karen obtained sperm from a friend, which Carol inseminated into Karen. Despite four cycles of insemination, Karen did not become pregnant. And, because Carol did not like the idea of involving a third person in the conception of the parties' child, they did not again seek sperm from a friend.

legal style

I work all day in a public interest law office specializing in LGBT issues. Right now we are compiling a 50-state database of custody cases relevant to LGBT parenting and adoption issues. Reading these, it becomes immediately apparent how awkward is the juxtaposition of legal comportment, reserve, and dignity with sex and the language of sexuality. The following are my favorites of today, for your enjoyment. They are quoted verbatim from actual cases:


Silas and Beale had known each other for about one year and they had engaged in sexual intercourse approximately nine months before C. was born. Theirs was a dating relationship.

Appellant and respondent are women who were partners in a personal relationship from 1993 to 1997. In 1996, they paid a friend, Marcus B., $1,000 to impregnate respondent. He did so.

With technological advances, same-sex couples as well as heterosexual couples who were previously unable to conceive children can now plan the conception of a child with increasing ease.

"The moving parties use "alternative," rather than "artificial," insemination to describe the process by which Vivian Ryan was conceived. Alternative insemination is a simple procedure using a squirting device (e.g. a syringe without a needle) to introduce semen into a woman's vaginal canal for the purpose of achieving pregnancy.... [T]he phrase is considered less offensive and more descriptive than the more common phrase "artificial insemination," which often connotes a sinister unnaturalness in religious contexts."


Plaintiff argues the circuit court erred in dismissing count I of his complaint for intentional infliction of emotional distress. He claims defendant's conduct was "extreme and outrageous," when she lied about being unable to engage in intercourse or to conceive due to her menses and agreed to prevent conception of children prior to marriage, but then intentionally engaged in oral sex so she could harvest his semen to artificially inseminate herself.

I just want to say here that I love this use of "harvest."

addendum

I meant to say in that last post that part of what I am struck by every day is the beauty of routines. Routines at their best can anchor us and at their worst make us feel chained to sensation, sustenance, and brute welfare. I wonder if you have a routine you love, or hate. When i was in high school i used to ride the bus to school everyday for an hour each way. i had horses to feed, so I had to get up at 5:30 or 6 every morning to feed them, eat, dress, pack, and start walking the half mile to the bus by 6:40 or 6:45. The bus came at 7:10, so usually i ran, clarinet or saxaphone in hand, down the dirt road that smelled of winter, or spring mud, or moldy fall leaves. The sun often rose as i walked, in a rosy glow over the horse field. Every morning I ran, and cursed the dawn and the earliness an the far distance. but in my heart I loved it--loved the routine of the world I shared, and the morning.

In a recent conversation I had with an acquaintance who works in a law firm downtown, he complained to me about his routine. he told me he had done it for five years--gone down to the Loop every day, and had his Starbucks. But that's what woking in the Loop is, I thought. It's going down, and drinking a Starbucks (or Diet Coke). He confessed he felt trapped by the money he was making, but I think something else trapped him, though I wasn't sure what.

I wonder if you love the routine you have, or hate it, and whether it frees your mind, or anchors you, or binds you, or sets you free to drift in the rhythms of the world.

to work

I've never worked a 9 to 5 job before. This summer, for 10 weeks, I get up early and lurch off to the train, always late, to try to make it to work before 930. It takes me 18 minutes to walk to the train--an unusually long walk to public transportation, but then that's where I happen to live right now. I don't mind the walk--I could take a bus to the train but I enjoy the mornings in this weather--but I'm usually running late, and I usually end up running, sort of, in my sandals and office casual clothes. Running and puffing gets me there in closer to 15 minutes. I don't run, really--more like a run-walk shuffle glide. Even that sounds more graceful than it is. I arrive at the train stop with a glistening forehead. I swipe my card and take the stairs in twos, trying to shave just one more minute.

I stand on the platform and the wind cools my skin. The morning sun is warm, but not yet hot. Other passengers space themselves on the platform. The boards under our feet rumble as the train approaches us.

I look at my phone when the train comes to estimate when I'll get downtown. The doors open and I push into a free seat, sitting closest to the window. The seats are contoured, with a raised lip that divides them. I am a wide person with big shoulders that feel smashed against the cool metal of the train wall. Still, the cool metal feels nice against my shirt. I take out whichever book I'm into this week and read.

Sometimes someone will come through the car, asking for money. A couple of days a go a wild-eyed woman screaming expletives in a rapid narrative stream came through the car yelling at people to give her money. Everyone who could looked down to stay out of her way. She ranted and raged, then eventually moved on. Today a well-spoken man came through politely inquiring whether anyone had spare change. Some people gave him money, which I haven't seen happen often. Apparently if you ask nicely, people are more receptive.

The train clatters along the elevated tracks, then dives underground into dark, urine-smelling tunnels as it nears the center of the city. I am no longer confused when I get off at my stop; now i know which way to turn and which escalator to take to my street. The first escalator leads to a station with ticket machines and gates. There is a Dunkin' Doughnuts stand there, and every morning I think about going to it. But I go on to the second escalator, which rises up from the darkness towards a glass canopy on the street, and the morning breaks open upon my head as I emerge in the center of town. I think about Eliot's Unreal City, but this doesn't feel menacing, or sad, to me. Just busy, and scheduled.

There is a newspaper man on the corner named John I say hello to every morning. He always asks me how I am. John has an ex-wife and three children living in another state, and he says he'll go be with them some day if he can get his ex-wife to take him back.

The morning doorman in my building is quirky. I try to catch his eye and greet him, but sometimes he just pointedly stares, or looks away, or pretends to be doing something else. Sometimes he responds to my good morning with a good morning of his own. You never can tell what he will do, and I steel myself when i enter the building. I'm always relieved if he is busy. The other interns at my job say he treats them the same way.

My elevator goes to the tenth floor. I step off down a hall of windowless doors, like the corridor in the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. Our offices are at the end of the hall. I go in, sit down at my desk, which faces a wall in the middle of the room, and say hello to the person who sits next to me. He and I are the only people in the entire office without a cubicle or a semblance of privacy, but we don't mind. I check my email, log onto Westlaw, and spend the next 7 1/2 hours looking up cases, reading them, and entering them into a database or annotating them for a project. It is extremely boring work, but at least it's gay. If I was looking up, say, contracts or something, I can't imagine how i would survive.

Some days we have meetings. One morning a week I work at the Help Desk, taking calls from people with problems looking for information.

We are expected to stay till 5 every day, including Fridays. Technically we have an hour for lunch, but only the paid staff take an hour. We generally bring something back and eat at our desks, even though we aren't getting paid. It's not as if it is relaxing to sit in a crowded Subway or Chipolte alone anyway.

At 4:55 I run to the bathroom, bring the key back, pack up my stuff, and get on the elevator. i get on the train before it gets crowded, so I usually have a seat, but I always have to make room for someone, and end up smashed against the wall for the 35-minute ride back.

Sometimes I go to the gym when i get back, but that means not getting home until 730 or 830. I can run on the beach a little in the evening while it is still cool outside. It feels nice to see the sun, even for the last minutes of the day.

At work we have interesting discussions about advancing the cause of gay marriage, or gay custody, or employment anti-discrimination, and all of that is really important and really interesting. Mostly, though, it's a routine. When I get on the train, I open my book for 30 minutes of narrative, and for a while I am not on the train at all, but somewhere else, in a realm of dreams, and stories, and plots that turn on hidden motivations, and characters with unknown powers that will eventually emerge. When the train gets near my stop I blink, sometimes dazed, and can't remember where I am, just for a minute, before the afternoon falls gently on my head again, and I feel the time of day and the time of my life, and the sensation of something carrying me in its arms to a place I don't yet know.

a shared purpose

Finals can be the best time of the year. Winter finals have always been gratifying, giving the sense of having earned the holidays. Spring finals are more poignant. You say goodbye to a year, and often to a span of years spent somewhere that changed you. There is the ceremony of leaving, and the centuries-old regalia, a graceful nod to the ideals of academic community. It was the magic of finals and the end of the academic year that made me want to be an academic in the first place--the sense of shared purpose, the seriousness of the endeavor, the feeling late past midnight of looking out my window over a campus with so many lights burning still. The shedding of anti-intellectualism for a week of frenzied thought. The groan of real striving out there in the darkness.

The distance between my dreams and fantasies of academic life and its realities became fittingly embodied in the distance between my undergraduate experience of the hushed labor of finals at an elite college and the realities of teaching overburdened students at urban commuter schools. I only just now realized that all my jobs were at urban commuter schools, with students working full-time jobs, raising families, and struggling to pay tuition. I always assigned final papers, which usually weren't very good. Penultimate papers were usually the best work in all my classes, not the last-minute, one-draft wonders shoved under my office door at 4:49 the afternoon they were due. Poor students! They didn't have the economic luxury of finals week. Like many economic luxuries--and I know this identifies me as a Modernist or an Aesthete or probably, an Obamanian Elitist--this one is worth having and savoring, and I give thanks that I get to be reminded of this forgotten pleasure of youth (at great cost to my student loan bill). People who leave school and never come back forget this feeling, though there is something in their voices that remembers when they search for words to describe the satisfaction of their experience there. They think they are remembering being young, but I think what they are remembering is becoming.

Law school is hard. Law school at 45 is harder. I can't look forward to a summer of free time for reading and research after finals, though I will have an interesting job working in LGBT public interest law. I don't know whether to be happy the semester is ending or sad that my time for thinking and writing is flying by. But I do cherish this chance to savor the monastic pleasure of finals, the intense satisfaction of an aching back spent in a chair for twelve hours straight, the last sentence of a paper or final exam that you feel you've done a good job writing.

I write this on the night before the night before my last exam. Tomorrow night will be too taken up with last-minute rehearsing and the honest attempt to sleep. Then an 8:30 a.m. income tax final, then back here to pack for the drive home. Then up late finishing 2/3 left on another take-home due at 4:30 on friday, then the weekend spent on a paper due Monday. Both these last can be emailed. And so I say goodbye to my second year of law school.

It was much better than I thought it would be. Working on a journal was a social experience as well as good training in research and citation. Most of the students around me forget that I am old enough to be their mother. Maybe because I don't look anything like their mothers? I feel as if I know a lot of people. I have more than 90 Facebook friends. I am on Facebook, for crying out loud.

I learned how to write a law note. I took some unusual classes. I got my first piece of legal writing accepted to a journal. I won a 2K prize for the best paper on an LGBT topic. 2K--enough to pay for the second-parent adoption of my soon-to-be-daughter. I got my name announced twice in the law bulletin last week, once for the writing prize and once for a public interest summer scholarship I won.

We got pregnant.

It would be easy to discount my victories. After all, isn't it shooting goldfish in a bowl for a published academic to compete for prizes with grad students? Many of my friends have tenure, or are getting it. Others have more adult milestones, like kids in college, and second homes, and third books. I don't even have a first home. But I think it is good for the soul to accept one's victories as genuine, and take them as seriously as, say, the first semester law school grades that put me at the bottom of the class. Because it's the endeavor, the shared sense of purpose, the striving, the hard work where you know you actually brought creativity and all-night doggedness together and did what you had to do, that is so satisfying. You did something you had to do, but you made it your thing. And you tried to do work that was important, that would have some usefulness in the world.

So goodbye, 2L year. The stars of 1L have faded. The gunners, the CALI winners (top of the class in each course), the top GPAers with lucrative Summer Associateships and several years of corporate slavery mapped out before them, all have dropped away, and you are left in your room, in the dimness, with madrigals playing on your computer and work left to do, and the cold smell of a spring night coming in the window, in the glorious last days of finals week. And you, you are old, but you don't feel it now, because the summer stretches out before you, and your new life stretches out before you, scary, unknown, but becoming clearer to you with each sentence you write, and the hum of the world is out there, and you are part of it, typing, typing away towards the dawn you know now is certain to come. Because it is.

It's a

beautiful, beautiful girl. See margo, darling for details.

after the snow

sun, appreciation, and the hope that this time, the diva of winter has taken her last curtain call.

stop and smell the eclipse

Here's what the eclipse last week looked like from the middle of the country. I take a night class on Wednesdays and a friend asked me if I wanted to go to a nearby small college where they had telescopes set up in the middle of a field. I pretended to consider it, then turned him down. There was no way. Our class ended at 8pm. The best viewing was supposed to happen between 9 and 10. I had three whole classes to read for the next day, plus my law note draft was due the day after, plus the public interest group was having a bake sale the next day and had twice requested my banana bread. There was no way I was going to get everything done even if I dashed to the store and immediately home. Sorry.

I wasn't happy about this, but it was the way it would have to be. I love all things astronomical. I have a Night Sky widget on my desktop so I can see what the current constellations are facing any direction. When I was younger I was obsessed with the rings of Saturn and doodled them constantly.

We left class at 8pm and I walked out to my car. It was very cold. The kind of cold where you immediately feel how deeply cold the pavement is through the soles of your shoes. I looked up. The sky was glittery and clear. The eclipse was just taking the first little bite out of the moon.

My heart failed a little when I saw that. How could I not go watch it? I consoled myself with the thought that I could slip out my door while the bread was baking and check up on the progress of it as it slowly moved across the moon.

Driving to the grocery store I had a thought. What if we had the time wrong, and the best time to view it was not at 9, but now? What if the time had been Eastern time, not Central time? I called my friend and left a message relaying my theory. If he called me back, maybe I would meet him out there. If not, oh well.

Half-way through the supermarket he called me. He said the time was correctly adjusted for Central viewing, but why didn't I just swing by his house and pick him up?

Reader, I did. We drove in the dark out to the little college, on twisty back roads that filled me with panic. What if we couldn't find it, and missed the eclipse, and I STILL didn't get home till 10pm?

We found the signs for the college, drove along even more twisty dark roads, stopped and asked several students where the astronomy building was, parked, and trotted through the darkness towards a small huddle of people gathered around variously-shaped telescopes.

The scene had the air of an ancient ritual. There weren't very many people. A few older couples, some children, some hippie-looking students, an astronomy geek in a jester's hat. Four or five squat cylinders situated in a semicircle. People moving quietly from one eyepiece to the next, murmuring softly. Clouds of breath in the frosty air.

Overhead the moon turned dark red as a shadow crept across its pockmarked face.

I tried to take a picture with my phone, but the moon just looked like a faraway light. Then I held it up to an eyepiece on the off chance I could somehow take advantage of the magnification. I watched the dark screen of my phone as I turned, turned, and then suddenly, a flicker. I snapped it. And there it was--my first good picture of an astronomical event. I didn't care if I sat there all night. I felt giddy. I text messaged GF first, then the rest of my friends so far away from that field at that moment. "Look outside!" I told them. Then I sent my picture.

In another telescope you could see Saturn. Not the giant planet of NASA photos, but the tiniest glimmering jewel in the middle of the scope. White-hot and silvery, with the tiniest, most perfect rings.

My friends started texting me back. "Cool Picture!" "Awesome!" "We're watching it right now!"

I stood under the moon, smiling a huge smile. Overhead, the belly of the moon grew dark, but my soul was light. I felt all the people I loved, no matter how far away they were, calmly circling around me, like lazy swimmers.

Rodney wins the day

There are so many things I have wanted to tell you about. I wanted to tell you about the discussion class where I try not to ease my eyes out of their sockets and slip them back in again for mere entertainment (since there is no vodka to be had), and I feel as if I am being waterboarded by bad, bad teaching. The kind where the teacher says he wants to sit there until people start talking, and then when they do, he dismisses those people who haven't magically come up with what he wanted them to say instead, and the whole thing becomes either a macho demonstration by the boy students who come up with the "right answer" or a feminine coy subservience butt-licking act by women who come up with the "right" answer, or both. That kind.

I wanted to tell you about the amazing experience I am having in a critical race feminism class, taught by the sweetest, kindest, youngest woman who refuses to be cynical about the classroom, or race, or feminism, or even the law, and who is entirely comfortable insisting that everyone sitting around the circle--yes, the circle--define what feminism means to them. And talk about what it means to be in law school, and choose aspects of your identity while discarding others.

I want to tell you what it is like to listen to the heart of a growing baby every day when I am home, and GF calls me into the hallway, which for some reason is where she likes to stand when she tries to find the heartbeat, and she puts the headphones on my head to listen to the fetal monitor she bought, as she slides it around her growing belly until we find the elusive whoosh-whoosh! of a tiny heart beating under water.

But somehow what I end up finally writing about here is the strange, painful, joyous accretion of identity that is academic identity, the kind you try to leave behind like the snake in the garden, or the burning sword, but that comes back to find you and rain bread on your head when you least expect it. The kind that hurts to think about, but won't let you go, like a bad girlfriend sending you money. Well, enough with the analogies.

So tonight there were elections on the law journal. At first I didn't want to run for anything, since I'm too busy even to blog now, with who knows what to expect once a baby comes this summer (GF's sister has advised us to prepare for the birth by setting the alarm to ring every two hours so we can wake up and fight on a regular basis). I looked at all the positions, considered running for nothing in order to do as little work as possible next year, and then one caught my eye.

Notes Editor. This is where you grade all the competition entries for people trying to write on the journals during the aptly-named write-on period, and then you shepherd a group of students through the note-writing process during their 2L year (currently I am doing a fantastic job NOT writing my note, which is due this week). It means big batches of papers that must be sorted through and evaluated. It means separating the good writing from the bad. Later, it means helping students find topics, organize information, and build arguments into publishable law notes that make a contribution to contemporary legal thinking.

In short, is a lot like being a teacher. I decided to run for this position. Something about it felt familiar, like the smoky smell in a wool blanket that reminds you of wood fires in fireplaces from longago winters. That kind of smell draws you in because you are looking for it before you find it. There were only three of us signed up for three positions, and I thought that was a sweet and kind of perfectly amateurish scenario where everyone who participated got a ribbon. I even briefly thought about crossing my name off if other people wanted to sign up.

At some point it became clear that everyone running had to give a speech and try to convince the other journal members to vote for them, like a high school election. At some point, that is to say, it became competitive. Then tonight, as the first candidates began presenting, left the room, and the Editorial Board began telling everyone how each candidate behaved in cite check, or how each was doing on their note, or if each was the kind of personality that was best suited for the job, I began to panic. I thought about erasing my name from the board. Really, I had no idea how I did in cite check. I knew I lost track of some rules sometimes, like the footnote forms that always required parenthetical explanation, or the correct use of supra., or why our Board didn't like "Id"ing statutes, even though the Bluebook said it was ok (Id.is the legal abbreviation form for "same source as the last quote" or what used to be ibid., I guess). I thought, as I often do, about the ridiculous image of Rodney Dangerfield in the ads for the "Back to School" movies, clad in doctoral robes made ridiculous by the contrast between the gravity of what they signify and the silly chutzpah of his expression as he waves his diploma in the air. Does he know he is ridiculous? I wonder. I think he does. I think his buffoonery is the bravest, most dignified thing he can do in the face of it all--the ageism, the classism, the professionalism that justifies all sorts of predation.

I left my name up on the blackboard and turned over and over in my mind the word "qualifications." I am qualified to be a Note Editor even if I suck at cite check because I like to proofread, I began. I like student papers. I am a kind reader, a helpful reader. I am not a dick. I can deal with large volumes of papers and I can pick out the good idea and help people with their writing.

My old identity crept up on me. I DO like grading papers, I thought, with a pang. I can pretend I don't care anymore but I do. I love making writing better. My own. Other people's. Student writing. Peer review.

As I thought about it it all came back in a rush. The peer-reviewed manuscript, thrown out into the tumultuous publishing sea to wash up on my desk. The page proofs of an article you think you know by heart because it is yours, yet which look so much smarter, so much more careful and polished, when you proudly survey them for the last time. The student writer who suddenly, inexplicably, GETS transitions, or thesis statements, or--Heaven bless us--genuine supporting arguments. All that writing, and the pleasure of it, and the smell of fresh paper and the pride of something carefully crafted or well-taught.

I missed it. And it would never come back to me again, but I might, for a brief time, wallow a bit in the pleasure of writing, and thinking, and striving for something careful, and well-made. So I left my name up.

They elected me, of course. They asked me about my qualifications, and I told them, and they asked with some incredulity why I was running for something I was so obviously overqualified for. I warned them of the danger of thinking they were qualified, let alone overqualified, for anything in the daily humiliation that is law school, and mentioned my interest in damage control vis-a-vis that daily humiliation, and I thought they would die laughing. I had 'em in the palm of my hand. They asked a few more questions about getting along with people, and being helpful, and strategies for helping students come up with topics for law notes, and then it was over, and I left the stage. Apparently while I was out of the room one of my old students, who is a year ahead of me in law school, said fond things about my teaching. For a minute, it was like I WAS a teacher again. I had taught them something about kindness to other writers in my description of how to help people find topics. We had begun an interesting discussion about the relationship between bad writing and good ideas, and whether you can have both those things, or their opposite, in a paper. About the intelligence of grammar and style. About, I think, humility. And all the things life throws a person sometimes. When I came back all the people in the row behind me wanted to ask me questions. Everyone I looked at was smiling. I felt silly, giddy, relieved. Known. Finally, they knew who I was. Or so it seemed to me for a few minutes at the end of the evening.

And so I am drawn once more to grading papers, and to teaching, and to the ways helping people with their writing helps you think about your own. I look forward to stacks of papers coming in, and the deadlines of publication, and the communal project of bringing ideas out of the muck into the light of day, and to the craft of making. Tonight I am struck more than ever by the realization that no exile is necessarily forever, and that the very angel that drives you away from your dearest grove has the unnerving habit of coming back for you just when you have gotten used to your neighborhood, to remind you that what you care most deeply about is not a job, or a place, or a stage in your life, but a workshop in your heart, an experiment in being with other people and their ideas that is always--and this is startling to you--ready to be built anywhere again, at any time, at any season of your life.

new year's wish

The old year ends, and tonight we try to remember what we have liked about this year. I celebrate that I am now half way through law school. I am happy that the embryo we are hatching is now officially a fetus. New Hampshire, a bastion of right-wing Republicans when I was growing up there, adopted same-sex civil unions. New Jersey rolled back the death penalty. MLA came to town, and while I feared it would bum me out, the reality of it was much more festive, with houseguests who ventured downtown in the morning and came back in the evening overstimulated and full of gossip. GF and I, aided in no small part by the toll the writer's strike took on our television time, began to read novels at night, staying up till all hours sometimes just to follow a thrilling plot.

Lots of other things happened this year, but pleasure reading is one of the things that is making us really, really happy right now. Pleasure reading makes me hyper-aware that I am swimming in narrative all the time. I have thought more than once that much of the psychic well-being I have felt since starting law school--despite its horrors, including the recognition that my creative, daydreamy personality is ill-suited to the sternly disciplined pursuit of law--has everything to do with being caught up in a narrative of becoming. This, I think, is why so many of us stay in school so long, and even go back. This, too, is why teaching for years and years can grind us down, as it becomes clear we are no longer part of that river of transformation coursing around us. In my last job, I felt like a boat that had run aground. In law school, I am surrounded by people--mostly young people--in the midst of fashioning their own stories. Everything is in front of them. They stand, as their hokey graduation speeches remind them, at the beginning of their journey. Even older students like me feel the infectious optimism of this structure. Though we may have already started their lives, or had whole other lives before this moment, we feel a breathless hopefulness at the destruction of the old predictable routine and the possibility that new and different paths might deposit us on strange doorsteps.

This morning the paper argued that John and Elizabeth Edwards took up politics when their son died in a car crash because they needed to focus on something greater than themselves, and they wanted a way of affecting more than a few lives at a time. This is probably true, but I think taking up politics was also the beginning of a new story for them, and they desperately needed to have new stories at that moment in their lives. It was telling, too, that at the same time they decided to start a completely new professional story, they also decided to have more children, not to mention renewing their vows. They wanted to get back in the boat and sail off once more with a whole saga in front of them, like Tennyson's Ulysses. And in spite of the cynicism around them (and inside them as well), and even despite a terrible diagnosis of cancer, they are caught up in optimism.

I was miserable in graduate school when I was on the job market, and the biggest reason was that because it was so hard to get an academic job, year after year went by without anything happening. Four years, actually. The story of me was stalled. My life felt like it had no trajectory. I just kept writing my dissertation and waiting, waiting for another year and another job list, living in a place where I knew I couldn't put down roots. I remember one winter night, my then girlfriend and I were driving to Macy's to buy silverware because we were so damned bored we couldn't think of anything else to do, and we found an injured cat sitting on the side of the road. That cat ended up infesting two separate houses with the worst fleas you ever saw, but at the time, the whole thing, including the vet bills, seemed wonderful, because something had actually happened.

When I found out this year that GF really wanted to go through with getting pregnant I began to sense what it would be like to have a new story. Courtship and marriage and pregnancy are freighted elements of narrative generation, of course, because they function as intelligible markers of the ways people make new stories in their lives (even if it's the same old story). The point is, it feels new to you, when it's your life, because it hasn't happened to you before. I think this is one of the reasons parents want their grown children to reproduce. Feminists used to point out the irony of marriage as the beginning of the story for women, when for so many it felt like the end; ditto for children. I suppose domestic privacy helped cause this, as adventures in the home replaced adventures in the world for women stuck raising the kids. Maybe the world has changed, but that silence seems to be broken. While people have always talked about marriage and children, they seem to be doing a more interesting and critical job of it these days, so it doesn't feel like the end of the story, but the beginning of a whole new bunch of stories. It could be that they feel more comfortable talking about conception, childbirth, and the work of maintaining intimate relationships because this is part of a conservative moment, and this is what we are all supposed to talk about instead of politics. Maybe I am not only part of a conservative moment, but conservative in many ways. But it feels important, somehow, not because it has replaced politics but because it is going to go on anyway somewhere and we might as well think hard about it and figure out whether it is part of our lives. Non-normative people's lives as well as more normative lives. If a non-normative person makes a life that has elements that are similar to normative people's lives, is that normative? Can it ever be?

Yesterday I finished reading Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, which I had tried to read once a long time ago then put down. This time I found myself relishing not only her various tributes to Bleak House, Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, and Tom Jones, but delighting in the new story she makes those stories tell: namely, the story of sexual passion and emotional loyalty between women that may be a possibility in those other books but never gets realized. She takes the pieces of those stories and puts them together in a way that is anything but conventional. I felt pleasure not only in reading that particular story, and the way she rewrites other stories I love, but in my own sense I have when reading her that I am swimming in her swimming. I feel like she is doing something marvelous for lesbians with that book. As she rewrites these stories, she rewrites our rewriting of all the stories around us into our narratives, with plots often fashioned by others, perhaps, and borrowed by us as our own. Feeling alive depends on this sense of fashioning, and she captures it beautifully, but she also shows the tension of belonging and apartness that is part of so many queer novels.

So I look into the new year wondering how my life will be changed by this time next year. I wonder if I will have a child, a job, a sense of the future. All I know is that everything is up in the air, and that is the best thing. Hooray for plots and counterplots, twists and allusions, citations and doublings and triplings of all kinds! If we are lucky, all of our lives will feel like stories we are taking in new directions, and the new year will be filled with the sense that anything at all that can happen, might.

7 random things tag

Margo tagged me for this, an even though I should be studying for my Evidence final tomorrow, I'll do it. I'll do it BECAUSE I should be studying for my evidence final tomorrow. Apologies if I have told you some or all of these things before.

Here are 7 random things about me:

1. I have really big feet. They are long and thin and flat, fanning out from my narrow heels and small, weak ankles. I am not a tall person--only 5'6"--but I have size 10-10 1/2 feet. Size 10 men's, that is. That's, like, a 12 in women's shoes, which by the time they get to that size are no longer for women-born women. I once contributed an article having to do with sexuality to a book on shoes, and pointed out in my author bio that I had to buy pumps at stores frequented by transvestites, models, or both. The editor of the collection thought this was hilarious--perhaps because my rather stocky ("husky," as my mom used to tactfully put it) embodiment would never conjure either of these two figures to mind.

2. I have almost no food dislikes. I'll happily consume almost anything. This includes liver, hot peppers, wasabi, anchovies, sashimi, ceviche, snails, mussels, herring. Anything. I like my red meat and fish raw or nearly raw. I adore vegetables and salads--huge salads. The one exception is crackers in milk. When we were small and my mother was working nights as a nurse, my stepfather sometimes put saltines in milk and gave it to us. Apparently he was fed this as a child and thought we would like it, poor man. However, I used to view this "meal" as yet another sign of his sadistic nature, and to this day the thought of faintly salty crackers dissolving in a bowl of cold milk fills me with impotent rage.

3. TV drives me crazy, but this has less to do I think with a critique of its intellectual content than it does with the autonomy issues that arise in the context of family viewing. GF loves TV. I prefer movies. I often watch TV with her, though, and like it. She often accedes to our movie dates with friends. Still, we have an uneasy truce.

TV today is good--brilliant, even. There are shows--lots of shows--I watch regularly. Heroes, Battlestar, Kid Nation, Project Runway--the good and the bad together. But when that thing goes on in your house, you are supposed to drop what you are doing in your life until the commercial break, when you are allowed to talk, get up, get food or drinks, pee. If you leave the scene during the show, the people watching it--and we often have friends come over to watch TV-- feel as if you are not being properly communal. I hate that.

I used to have to watch TV with my mother, and that's probably where some of my resentment comes in. If she was watching "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" or "China Beach" alone, look out--she'd lasso you to come sit with her, at least until the next commercial break. She just wanted company, but as a teenager, I wanted to do my own thing. Of course you don't turn down a request like that, but I remember feeling sullen. Of course, now I'd give anything just to sit beside her for an hour, watching M.A.S.H.. I wonder how she would feel about the sluttiness of Grey's Anatomy.

4. I'm a completely unfashionable person with a keen appreciation for fashion and hair--especially hair. A college girlfriend taught me how to cut hair, and usually I follow hair trends with keen interest, even briefly considering beauty school after I didn't get tenure. Flat feet, weak ankles, and a fondness for cargo pants made me rethink standing on my feet all day trying to look hip while touching the heads of strangers, but I reserve the right to drop my ridiculous intellectual pretenses at any time and just "do" hair.

5. I can teach animals how to do things. I grew up as a rural Four-H kid with horses, and I have owned several dogs, so training animals is second nature. At a dinner party not long ago I taught a friend's dog to "shake" for table scraps, much to their pride and consternation. Apparently he is still hard at it.

6. I am freakishly strong and my sister is too. An ex once characterized us as The Strongest Women Alive. We are both bruisers, like the big clumsy sisters in the Mary Poppins books. I can lift enough weight in a gym to make men stare, and I have seen my sister carry her gigantic six-year-old up and down New Hampshire's White Mountains in a backpack while hardly breaking a sweat.

7. I can draw. When I was a kid I used to draw self-portraits, and if I can get someone to sit for me I can usually draw them pretty well. I seldom take the time for this any more, which is too bad, since it is deeply pleasurable. I painted a nude of GF in oils which I hung in the livingroom, prompting her to ask why when I got inspired did her ass end up on the wall. This is a great question but the painting is still hanging in there. I look at it sometimes when we are watching TV.

And now, back to Evidence.

Which leads me to a final random fact, this one about Evidence, for those of you not in the law loop. Remember all those TV shows with courtroom scenes where lawyers would jump up and say, "Objection! Hearsay!" I used to think that they meant, "Oh, someone is just saying that! They can't prove it!" Which makes me wonder about all the "law" things we see on TV and in the movies that are never defined for us. I think there are a lot of them, and I think it's a little scary that we THINK we know what they are about, but don't. Which is to say, I'm really glad I'm going to law school, even though it it often hellish, because now I get to find out what the heck is really going on. I feel this a lot when I read the newspaper and I understand the point of a story about the death penalty, say, or felony murder.

Random Evidence Fact: Hearsay is an out of court statement offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted. We don't like hearsay because we can't evaluate the truth or falseness of a statement made out of court. We want the person who made it to say it in court, and be cross-examined about it. Which is not to say we don't let in hearsay--in fact there are a lot of hearsay exceptions that are allowed in, such as emotional responses("Oh my God! He drove right into that tree!"). But for the most part we are suspicious of it.

File that away for your next episode of Boston Legal.

what rough beast[s]

I've wanted to write, but there was so much news I couldn't. When news is about someone else's body, they have the right to control when it comes out. However, sInce the body belongs to GF but she is finally blogging about it, I'm giving myself the green light.

The first time something sparked, it was a magical week. An old friend came to town and dragged GF and I out to a party in GF's old neighborhood. Inside the house were various couples; one older, childless couple really into wines; one couple with a young child; the guy whose house it was, who had two mischievous girls and a pretty wife who looked a little like Tori Amos; and us. I liked this last family a lot--he was a mechanic who had bought a house cheaply and slowly refinished his way to the top floor, and she had a mellow, earth-mother way of letting children crawl up and down her body while she sat or stood, calmly talking. We sat around all night, sprawled on the floor in the living room, drinking wine and eating pizza. Sometimes we talked about children; Tori Amos wanted more, she said, because once you start having them you just want more. GF and I wanted to get to the first part of that equation of desire: we were due to get inseminated for the first time the next morning. The old friend sat in a chair all night, drinking wine and smiling benignly down at us all. The full fat harvest moon floated low in the sky, the dusky orange of sweet potatoes and cream.

Two weeks later we were pregnant. Day after day GF ran to the bathroom to pee on the sticks of various pregnancy tests. She carefully lay them on the window sill, one under the other in rows, each marked with the number of days past ovulation. "11 dpo" showed nearly white, with the strong test line and just the faintest ghostly shadow next to it, flickering in and out of focus like a wish. "Is it positive?" I remember asking, sure I was imagining the second line, or tilting the stick under the light wrong to show the x-rays of its chemical composition and give myself the illusion of a companion line.

"There's no such thing as a false positive," she told me. "If it's negative, it's really solid white." Then she took a stick out to show me the smooth plastic of an all-white untested stick. It was true, then. We really were pregnant.

Another stick followed, and then another. Each day the line grew darker, moving towards us in the white mist. Pink lines. We stared at them, unbelieving. Then, believing. But as suddenly as something sparked, it flickered out, and by the end of the week, the HCG numbers were falling. GF was devastated. It had seemed too easy, then great good fortune, then--though we had only just started--tragic.

When we saw some of the people from that night again a few weeks later, at a pumpkin-carving party, we found out that it had been magical, indeed. Tori Amos was pregnant, her wish for a third child answered in the shadows of that harvest moon. GF counted the weeks she would have been pregnant and sighed. I carved a pumpkin for her at the party from a picture we found on the internet of Grendel shambling out of the slimy depths. GF picked it because she said it reminded her of her theory of writing, where you work and feel anguish and then, just at the brink of despair, you begin to see the first outlines of the beast emerging from the muck. She handed it to me, her eyes shining, and told me she had walked by this house, with its carved pumpkins all in a row, when she used to live in this neighborhood, and had wanted so badly to get invited to this party some day. I gazed at the picture with some trepidation. "It looks complicated," I said. She said, "You can do anything."

So I carved it, half-closing my eyes so I could imagine it on the curved surface of the pumpkin. We won two bottles of wine, so we took them home and left the pumpkin, gleaming in the darkness, on the porch of the lady who had thrown the party. We bought a different bottle of wine called Sinister Hand with a scary picture of a severed arm on it and next day we split it between us, for luck.

Medicine overmanaged our second try; Clomid and hormone shots and multiple eggs yielded nothing. GF ovulated on the weekend, so the second insemination was on a Saturday. The weekend nurse wouldn't look at me or talk to me even when I tried to address her, clearly freaked out by lesbians, or me. She was in such a hurry, in fact, that GF didn't even know when the catheter went in, which seemed more than a little disturbing. The up side, however, is that in her hurry to perform her drive-by insemination, nurse Rachit left behind the vial from the sperm sample, with the birthday of our donor typed on it: 1/1/1965. We had known his age before, guessing that he might be gay, donating into his forties. We chose him for this, and for his piano skills, and because he liked purple and could do long division at five. The Cinderella slipper she dropped in her homophobic haste gave us the added charming detail that he was born on the New Year, with all its promise of hope, smack in the middle of a decade where all good things seemed possible.

We smuggled the vial home, but there were no plastic sticks on the sill that month. GF shrugged, a little worried but not freaked out.

This month fell on the week. GF timed her own surge and went in to inseminate by herself, since I was in school. That night I drove home and we went in together the next morning. Two very nice women did the procedure, chatting and laughing with us. Afterwards one brought in pictures of her son. "This one's going to work," she told us. "I'm crossing my fingers for you both." Back in the house GF asked for a blessing. "A what?" I said. "Say something," she told me.

I put my hands on her abdomen and closed my eyes. I thought about my friend who can't father children because he is HIV-positive, but who was so excited when we told him we were trying that he wanted to buy sperm. I thought about my other friend who wanted children but never had the time in her life and her job for it. I thought about my friend who discovered total joy when her sister had a baby. I thought about my sister, who finally had the baby she always wanted at 39. I thought about GF, wanting children all her life but never having it be the right time, the right job, the right person. I thought about me, so sure I would have children when the time was right, watching that certainty pass away when I lost my job. And now, in a last wild chance, with no money and no certainty, we fling ourselves towards something we can't see, knowing that we have to make it real. GF is going to give herself over, and put her body through all this nonsense, and suffer pills and suppositories and morning sickness and childbirth. I'm going to run next to her the whole way. "Come to us," I told something hovering nearby. "We are waiting for you. There's a circle of people here, and they're all waiting, and they didn't know they were waiting until they thought of you." GF said she felt a jolt in her heart.

So now the windowsill is littered with white plastic sticks. "11dpo"; "12dpo"; "13dpo"; "14dpo" and so on. She only did one a day but the pile on the windowsill made me have a fantasy of pushing in the bathroom door only to find it unyielding, with thousands of white sticks spilling through the cracks out into the hall.

GF's HCG numbers soar, double, double again. On the sill the sticks show the history of lines growing stronger by the day and more solid. We pat GF's stomach and call it Mrs. Dalloway. We thought about "the little nipper," which is what the toxic couple call their imaginary son in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," but Mrs. Dalloway seems more cheerful. When she or he is born, if they are born, we may say "For there she was," even if it is a boy, but for now we are trying to wrap our heads around his or her coming, peering into the future cautiously, but eagerly, the way a person squints at a figure they think they know as it walks towards them in bright light.