Fertile Ground #9

INSIDE

FROM THE TRENCHES
Soil Chart by Stacey Greenberg
A Midwife’s Birth Story by Vanessa Ross

THE REAL DIRT
Thoughts on My Village by Laura Moulton
Life in Two Columns by Ashley Harper
Tightrope by Jackie Regales
A Former WAHM Speaks Out by Andria Brown

FERTILIZER
Sex Toys and Threesomes by Stacey Greenberg
The Sacred Figment by Siobhan Nassalong
The Many Faces of The Toddler by Erica Carter
Toddler’s Day Off by Stacey Greenberg

IN THE FIELD
Take It Back by Marnie Thorp
Hello and Goodbye by Rhonda Baker
Transplantation by Tajh’ Short

RUTS INTO FURROWS
Kindling by Stacey Greenberg
Miles of Love by Vanessa Ross

Soil Chart

Soil Chart
Stacey Greenberg


After the election, I realized that I’m completely out of touch with mainstream America. But I think that is a good thing. Even though I live in a “red state,” my neighborhood is decidedly blue, and I can see the country in shades of purple. So I’m keeping my head up, and I hope you will too.

This is the third year of our unwanted holiday tradition—everyone (except me) gets sick on Xmas and I play nurse/waitress until New Year’s. But I am happy to report that everyone is happy and healthy now, and I was still able to finish the zine between fetching soup, calling the doctor, changing diapers, and doing laundry.

Jiro is exactly the age that Satchel was when I started doing this zine. I can’t believe it has been two years. I have to say that I am quite impressed with the way my children as well as my little writing project are turning out. Satchel is keeping us all entertained with his desire to dress like a superhero at all times. This usually involves wearing a cape, his Dorothy shoes, and his Elvis belt. Jiro has just started crawling. He moves from room to room, laughing with glee at his new mobility. I have been busy writing up a storm. My “Dirty Looks” essay was in the Fall “Hip Mama” magazine and I have been asked to be a columnist at PhilosophicalMother.com. In addition to being superdad, Warren has expanded his role and become super sperm donor. By the end of this issue you will probably know more about it than you ever wanted! We are happy to have a new potato in our lives—Miles Mackie Ross, as well as his awesome mommies. This issue is packed with lots of good stuff, including several different essays on the different ways that people create family. I hope you like it.

Best wishes for a peaceful, fertile new year!

Thoughts on My Village

Thoughts on My Village by Laura Moulton
Illustration by Muriel Green

It takes a village to raise a child. So the saying goes. In my case, the village showed up as soon as I became pregnant, and it's hung around ever since. Family, my students, old ladies, the neighborhood can collector, and the occasional odd bird in the grocery store. All characters from my village. They stepped forward bearing gifts, patting my belly, clucking at its size. They gave me fresh vegetables, and bottles of vitamins, tiny baby blankets. And they gave advice. Unsolicited and occasionally unwelcome advice.

Advice on Pain:

"Get the epidural", said Rosario, one of my Mexican students. "The epidural is your friend," she said. "I'm a nurse. I know."

"Not true," said Tomoko, from Japan. "All you need is breathing," and she clasped her delicate white hands together over her belly and said "Like this: Hee Hee whoooo, Hee Hee whoooo."

Once a week I drove to the correctional facility outside Portland. The women prisoners in my writing class had their own advice. Deborah said, "When you feel the pains start to come on, eat a bag of those little Hershey bars. That's all you need." But Star said, "Chocolate's fine, but you also need a bar to hang from and a towel to chew on." I paled, and they must have seen my face. "It's no worse than a big trip to the toilet," Deborah said. "That's bullshit, " said O'Nesha. "Everyone knows it's like a train wreck through your privates." And thus began an argument about the true nature of labor pain.

Art, who has sickle cell anemia and collects bottles and cans in our neighborhood, admired my belly, and told me to keep my feet up, to take it easy. He warned my husband that during labor I would place terrible curses upon him, and that he should avoid getting too near me, as I would break the bones in his hand, squeezing.

Advice on the Sex of the Baby:

Another student, Gerardo, is an obstetrician in Mexico, but works at Carl's Junior here in the States. After class he often asked me questions -- how I was feeling, and was the baby kicking? I asked if he could tell the sex of the baby by the way I was carrying it. He studied my belly for a minute and then said, "In my village, if a woman's abdomen is bonita, is nice, we say she's having a girl. If it is so-so, ugly" (here he turned his hand side to side) "then we say it's boy. In your case ... "Maybe boy."

People had plenty of theories: If you carry it high, it's a girl. If you look "ugly" during your pregnancy, it's a girl, because girls steal your beauty. If your belly sticks out in a point, it's a boy. When I asked my high school students what they thought, boy or girl, Ryan from the Philippines said "Depends on your elbow" and I said "My elbow?" and looked at one. "It's a boy," Ryan said, "because you looked at your right elbow first."

Unhelpful Advice:

"You're strong," Gerardo said. "I think you should be able to do it." He showed me pictures of himself in green scrubs, delivering babies in Mexico. Photos of blood-covered babies, corkscrew umbilical cords, his front covered in slickness. I gripped the corner of my desk, and said "Thank you very much."

A woman straight out of a Flannery O'Connor short story limped up to me in a line at a Safeway, and planted her hands on my stomach. "When's it due?" she said, through a gap where her front teeth should have been. Her hair stood up in the back, as though she'd just climbed out of bed.

"A few days ago." I shifted away from her slightly.

"They gonna induce if it don't go?" she asked.

"It'll go.," I said, grimly. It's going to come in the next few days."
Then she rubbed my belly and observed that I wasn't all that big. Maybe it'd be another month. She cackled and limped away. I fled the store feeling like she'd placed a hex on me.

My husband and I went for a walk to a nearby park. A woman in a purple sweat suit trotted after us, and hollered "scuze me" (and I thought, Ah hell, because we'd been hit up for hand-outs so often the past days -- and so close to Christmas. I thought that being "great with child" should make me exempt from panhandlers). But the woman said she had a gift, that she could look at a pregnant woman and predict the sex of the baby, when it would be born, its weight and height, and so on.
"Okay," I said. "Shoot."

She put her hands on my giant stomach. "It's a boy, definitely. He'll be about 8 pounds..and 19 inches." She cocked her head. "I'd say you're about 8 months along."
What she didn't know was that I was five days overdue by then, feeling big as a house, and very cross about it. She didn't know that I'd go more than a week past my due date before I birthed my 9-pound baby boy.

There, in the park, with her hand on my stomach, she said "What a special thing, having a baby." We said yes. It was true.

And then she asked, "Could you kind folks spare some change?"

Life in Two Columns

Life in Two Columns by Ashley Harper
Photo by Marlinee Iverson


It was good and bad, as all days are. The weather was unseasonably gorgeous, high summer and more than bearable. In Memphis, even October is warm and humid. As a child I went trick or treating in a bathing suit and red galoshes two years in a row– I was Wonder Woman. We never expect the heat to break in August down here, but today the morning glories were full, the ferns brilliant even in plain sun. The sky was blue with fast moving clouds that covered the sun for shady moments.

This morning on the bank of the Mississippi my daughter scrambled over stones in search of fossils, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets tucked under one arm. Shortly afterwards we went to retrieve her little brother from his orientation at school, and ran into a friend picking up his own son. “You know Bob was kinda low this morning, not very enthusiastic to be here, but I think Gus really buoyed his spirits.” I had been anxious about Gus going into kindergarten, so I was proud that he could be a positive influence in the classroom. The morning had been good.

Then the kids began to file out of the door, Gus ahead, pushing roughly past some smaller child to say, “Today was so BORING! They just TALK, TALK, TALK!” He was near tears and red-faced in his effort to not cry. I smiled at my friend, “Tell me again, what were you saying about Gus?” He laughed, “See you tomorrow.” This wasn’t so good.

At the park later, the kids were swinging, reaching hands out to each other and then pumping themselves towards the oak trees, like they were friends! Gus yelled, “We’re taking this to the next level!” A Spy-Kids reference I think. They giggled, I sighed, it was all, as they say, good. Then Gus let go and his swing started to twist a bit. He fell straight backward – still swinging pretty high, but managed to stay on the seat by doing that maneuver with the thighs where you spread your legs out and the friction between the chains and the legs keeps you in an upside-down-land-on-your-head pose. You’ve seen this done at the circus by trained trapeze artists. I fortunately caught him up before his arm – which was dragging along the ground at a horribly unnatural angle – broke. He was okay, and my daughter was laughing behind her hand. Gus was half-laughing, and then I guffawed. I mean, he did look pretty damn funny. So he just up and socked me in the stomach. Well, aside from knocking my breath away, it really pissed me off, so I gave him a swat on the butt.

I know, I know, Never hit a child in anger, though if you hit them when you’re not angry, that’s not really fair is it? No, but I’m not a spanker, in general. Really. So he looked at me as if I had just insulted his mother or slapped him with a glove, as indignant a look as a five-year-old can muster. Then he broke off across the park at a sturdy march; his sister, the mother hen, in close pursuit. I grabbed our stuff and went to the car, muttering beneath my breath as other moms turned and gazed. I threw everything in the car and spun to fetch the kids, when I realized they were now on the opposite side of the street, as in, they crossed it alone. All of this, as you surely know, was bad.

After the situation was resolved, not really to anyone’s satisfaction, I saw another mom I know and her five-year-old daughter. So, we spoke for a long time and the kids made a quasi-clubhouse on the playground set. My friend reassured me and we traded war stories – she had related the whole story of JAWS while on a car-trip – only to turn around to two wide-eyed goose-pimpled girls, terrified in the back seat. Not so bad, but it made me laugh. Then another mother I know came up with her brood of three; she was hollow-eyed with lack of sleep, begging me to tell her that it got easier with older kids. All this made me feel good.

At the grocery store, my son’s threats of dumping out the coffee bean bins – which, mind you, he has done- was bad. Playing Uno with my daughter while her brother slept off his rage, was good. But it was bad when he then wobbled semi-conscious into the bathroom in the middle of the night and stuck the Dr. Bronner’s hand pump soap in his mouth, but it was funny as hell, so it was good too. (I don’t know who says you can brush your teeth with that stuff, but it ain’t so.)

And couldn’t we divide our days as such? All of them? In two columns, the good and the bad. Though like the soap incident in the middle of the night, I bet, and even hope, that most of the things on our lists, would merge.

Tightrope

Tightrope
Jackie Regales

Now that it’s over, I try to think back and pick out what was the hardest part about living without health insurance for over a year. I had to tell all of our doctors that our “status” had “changed,” and ask them if it was okay for us to pay out-of-pocket. I had to watch my twin daughters, who were toddlers, carefully, trying to decide what was just a cold or a rash and what would merit a doctor’s visit. I remember having trouble sleeping when I was in the hospital for appendicitis, so worried about how much all this was costing us. I remember the sympathy and pity on the face of the surgeon who told us he would not charge us for the appendectomy, as he tried to ignore the moans of the woman sharing my room. She was on dialysis, waiting for a kidney transplant, black, homeless and on methadone. I wondered what his reaction would have been if it had been her on the operating table. Getting waves of bills after the surgery, trying to ask relatives for money, and considering putting it all on credit cards and carrying that load for years to come was very difficult.

The worst part was living in constant uncertainty. I was slightly frightened everyday that today would be the day one of us broke a leg, one of us came down with something serious, the day that my child or my partner had an accident that would snap the tightrope we were walking on. We were like thousands of families, just barely making it from paycheck to paycheck, lucky to have good health and the chance of things being better once my partner got a full-time job.

But then, maybe the worst part was the sense of failure that I felt. One of a mother’s most basic duties is to keep her children safe, but I had no safety net for my daughters. If an emergency had come up, I would have had to scramble to protect them, to heal them and make them healthy again. I failed at being middle-class, at being the kind of person I was supposed to grow up to be. My parents were solid middle-class types, each in steady professions, neither ever unemployed once. They were both working for the same employers that had hired them thirty years before. I had grown up in a stable home, even though my mother was a single parent. I had a college degree—in fact, two of them, and so did my husband. We were not supposed to be this poor, and we were not supposed to be living in this kind of limbo. We were supposed to be working towards upward mobility, moving into the suburbs, giving our children better than what we had, sending them to good school and propelling them towards college. Instead, we were borrowing money from our parents, I was waiting tables and teaching at night, and we were both hoping desperately that some time soon, our luck would change.

My husband and I were under a lot of strain, and we often took it out on each other, although we tried not to do it in front of our girls. We lived with my mother-in-law for a time, asked our parents for money, accumulated credit card debt, and hoped for the best. We tried to buckle down and ride out the storm as best we could, and eventually, my husband got a job, and we got insurance.

The most important thing I learned was just how lucky we really are. I read once that Gloria Steinem said that every woman in America was one man away from welfare, and now I see the cold reality behind the sentence. Without our parents, we would have been on public assistance. Without our education, we would not have had the optimism to think that someday our situation would improve. If we had not grown up middle-class, we would not have been able to become middle-class ourselves. This sounds blatantly obvious, and I cringe even as I write it, to see how naïve and how sheltered I was. I never thought of myself that way, because I did grow up with a single mother, and I was the kid in school who had generic sneakers, who lived in a smaller house in a poorer neighborhood. Most of my friends had always had more money than me, so I lost sight of how truly lucky and privileged I was. The experience of my husband being unemployed changed the way I think about class, about parenthood, and about our society.

When I hear official rhetoric about a family of four in America, I know they are talking about me. My family makes $37,000 a year, or at least we did last year, and hope to this year, and that is coincidentally the median income for the average family of four in America. That number is only enough for us because we have significant family support, good educations and excellent credit. How do people survive who don’t have those assets? My friends and I ask that of each other, those of us who hover around that line and are still doing okay.

My family now pays $480 a month for HMO health care and I feel lucky to have it, because at least now we would be safe from catastrophes. The restaurant I used to work for offered me the chance to opt in to their excellent health care, for the bargain price of $900 per month for my family. These are not statistics for me. These are the concrete facts that make up my reality. The importance of affordable health care is not a platform issue, a piece of campaign rhetoric, or a concept that has disappeared now that the election is over.

When I sit in the doctor’s office, I look at the faces around me and wonder, how much is this costing each of us? Who here worried and stayed up at night, anxious about how to pay for today? How many of us have never known any different? How many of us simply woke up, felt a tickle in our throat or an ache in our joints and thought, “Hmmm, I’ll make an appointment later today, and get this taken care of?” What price do our children pay when they go without dentist visits, eye exams, pediatrician visits? How much longer will we let this go on, in what is supposed to be the greatest country in the world?

Someday, I hope that my family will have better, more affordable health care than we have. Someday, I hope we all will.

A Former WAHM Speaks Out

A Former WAHM Speaks Out
Andria Brown

I thought I had it all figured out - which, as any parent knows, is the first step on the path to certain childrearing disaster. When I decided to get pregnant, I was working from my home in Memphis and telecommuting to an office in Chicago where I'd worked in-person before getting married and moving to the confederacy. It was, quite simply, the best job ever. I was actually using my English degree in a corporate setting, plus I had great relationships with my co-workers, most of whom didn't even resent the fact that I was attending meetings in my pajamas. The Chicago paycheck on a Memphis cost of living was a nice perk, too. I loved telecommuting; it helped me realize that it wasn't office jobs that I despised so much, but the actual office. Given my own environment and my own schedule, I was perfectly happy to sit at a desk and crank out whatever needed cranking. And what could be a better scenario for a new mother? I looked forward to taking my eight weeks of maternity leave, but I knew that my transition back into working would be so much easier than it is for most breastfeeding, co-sleeping mothers. I didn't have to worry about pumping. I could take a mid-day nap if we'd had a rough night. I could get complicated tasks done in the evenings when my husband was home. It was perfect.

You can see where this is heading, can't you? Too bad I couldn't. I was completely taken by surprise when I got a call from my boss - my mentor and mother-figure, the woman who had hired me on the spot after a 20-minute interview - telling me that my job had been eliminated. Our company was growing, which apparently meant that a bunch of people needed to get fired, including me and, eventually, almost all of the Chicago office. I could hear my boss's voice cracking as she told me the news, but I kept quiet, wanting to avoid the sound of my own breakdown echoed over the speakerphone in our HR rep's office. I tried to pay attention as they gave me the details of my severance, but it was hard to listen over the panicked chanting in the back of my head: "Whatnowwhatnowwhatnowwhatnow?"

The job market wasn't great by anyone's definition, let alone someone trying to job hunt with an infant in tow. Not to mention that I didn't have a single piece of professional clothing left in my post-partum wardrobe. The good news was, I would continue getting paid for nearly five more months. That seemed like a lifetime, considering how exhausting the last (and first) four months of mothering had been. I figured I could defer my anxiety for a few weeks, get over the sting of being fired for the first time, and then start exploring my options.

Once I got through the sucky, self-pitying part, being laid off actually started to seem like a great opportunity. Now I had a chance to do all those things I'd always wanted to try: actively pursuing freelance writing assignments, working on a book, developing my web design business. I even put together a to-do list that included designing cool baby clothes and hitting open mic night at the local comedy club.

Everything was open to me, and I had the financial freedom to venture down new paths. It was liberating, exciting, and ultimately, totally unrealistic. Because of course, what I forgot to factor into my grand plans was the full-time job of parenting and its pull on my time, energy and enthusiasm for the unknown.

My last twenty weeks of regular paychecks sped by in a blur of playgroups, zoo trips and lunches with dad. Before you could say "under-developed query," my exploration phase was finished and none of my projects had moved from to-do to got-done. This fact alone would have depressed me if I hadn't been so worried about what to do next. I needed a job. And I needed to be home with my baby. If I'd planned on going back to an office, I would have made some different parenting choices from the start - like not waiting until she was three months old to give my daughter a bottle she would never take - but as it was, we were set up for a full-time, at-home parent. I had sent out resumes throughout my severance period and had even been asked to interview a few times, but whenever I mentioned that I was interested in working from home, I got a sympathetic but unwavering reply: we're just not able to manage that right now.

There are stay-at-home moms and there are work-outside-the-home moms and there are work-at-home moms. I didn't feel like I fit any of those categories. I was an unemployed-at-home mom. I wasn't jobless by choice, and each day that passed made me more frantic about finding a source of income. But how much income could I even expect to find? I sat down and figured out the costs of childcare, gas, wardrobe, lunches out - everything I could think of that would reduce my take-home pay. By the time I got through adding it up, I realized that there was very little chance of me finding a job that would bring in more than it was taking out, assuming an MBA didn't magically grow out of my body some night. It was a pretty depressing observation, but also somewhat freeing. If working a regular 9-to-5 job wouldn't bring in significantly more money than staying at home, then what was the point of having one? If I could find a way to employ myself, anything that I could take in would be pure profit, relatively speaking.

And thus began the hustle. I'm not especially crafty and I don't have any revolutionary ideas in the realm of cloth diapering, so that erased some of the typical work-at-home options. I've never been much of a networker, but I began to realize that my friends were my best work leads. I've taken on web work for upstart companies, booked gigs for musician friends, and was fortuitously introduced to a local editor interested in my hippie parenting stories. Twenty-five years after my mother left Mary Kay behind, I became an independent consultant for The Body Shop at Home (who needs body butter? anyone?). It all seems a bit ironic, really - I went to college to avoid scrambling for work and juggling multiple jobs, and now I'm taking on three, four and five different tasks at once ... just to afford my monthly student loan payment.

Even with all those hats in the air, though, I'm still not bringing in much in the way of salary. We did some budget adjusting, and then some re-adjusting, and we've made things work, but it's still hard to accept that my financial contribution isn't anywhere near the level it had been. And as many women who've left full-time jobs discover, mothering's rewards are far less tangible (and frequent) than the validation provided by career competence. I miss the money for sure, but more than that, I miss feeling like an equal partner in our family's economic well-being, and I definitely miss getting regular phone calls telling me that I'm doing a good job (not to mention the lunches out with actual grown-ups).

I'd like this to be the part where I say that seeing my daughter grow and learn and become a gorgeous and capable human being makes up for all of that, and while it does provide a large amount of solace, I'd be lying if I said I was fully content with my role of full-time, at-home, still-attempting-to-work parent. I feel like I could be significantly more successful at any one of my 37 jobs if I had the ability to concentrate and follow-through on higher-level tasks, but as it is, I'm flailing to keep up the minimum required effort for any given project. By the time I've wrapped up a full day of toddler-chasing, it's hard to get motivated by large, vague goals with non-existent deadlines, especially when the only time to face them down is 11:30 at night.

Because I've always been a little thick, I've decided that the best solution to this issue is starting my own company. My theory is that consolidation will help me gain focus and enable me to tie down my various skills into one presentable package. Or maybe I just got really excited about thinking up a company name and couldn't wait to use it. I forget exactly how it all happened; I'm really tired, you know?

Regardless, my desire for career legitimacy has led me here, and my desire for personal legitimacy may just be high enough to make it work. (How's that for a mission statement?) I never expected to be a business owner, but I never foresaw how strongly I would be pulled by both my child and my craving for professional interaction. And fancy lunches.

Sex Toys and Threesomes

Sex Toys and Threesomes
Stacey Greenberg

Gone are the days of truly casual sex. As the parents of a 2 ½ year old and a ½ year old, my husband and I have found that it is getting harder and harder to get it on. We must actually plan for sex. (Or be prepared to drop everything the moment opportunity knocks.)

After our first son was born, Warren and I had a long standing date on Friday afternoons. We’d leave work a bit early and take advantage of the small window of time before we had to pick up our son from daycare. After several months of this, naturally, I got pregnant. Friday afternoons soon became one of the few times I could sneak in an uninterrupted nap. Sorry honey!

Having two kids meant two different childcare providers on opposite sides of town. Afternoons were out, so we moved to lunch breaks. My husband, who was once opposed to “nooners” on the grounds that it made going back to work very difficult, decided he’d take what he could get. Somewhere along the way, though, these illicit meetings morphed into the Flylady’s fantasy rather than ours. I invariably ended up emptying the dishwasher or folding laundry while Warren vacuumed.

Two kids, two jobs, two dogs, two cars, and a house are a lot to keep up with. We don’t have time to think, much less have sex. One friend in a similar situation has started emailing Steve from “Blues Clues” and another actually admitted to pleasuring herself to the “Wiggles.” We do what we have to do.

About a year ago, my husband started seeing another man—Jon Stewart. Four nights a week around ten o’clock, after the kids were in bed, Warren would disappear. These meetings were short, about thirty minutes and he was always in such a good mood afterwards that I didn’t care. In fact, I started going along. This guy was great—so funny and smart. He got us thinking about politics and got us excited about the future. Seeing him helped us connect as Warren and Stacey, not just Mommy and Daddy. It reignited the spark that made us remember why we became parents in the first place. We needed that.

I proudly tell people that Jon Stewart is my boyfriend. (And Warren’s too.) But things haven’t been the same since Bush "won" the election. It was like building up to a big sneeze and then not sneezing. Or finding out that the sea monkeys are really brine. We felt a little let down. The honeymoon was over. So, I decided to dust off the sex toys.

Lately we’ve been playing the penis game. The game involves hiding a very life-like plastic penis procured at my bachelorette party (almost 6 years ago!) somewhere that the other person will find it. Preferably in public or in front of other people. It started one day when I found it buried in the junk drawer and put it under Warren’s pillow as a joke. He said nothing, but the next morning I found it in my shoe. And so on. The game lost its appeal when our oldest son was about nine months old—he immediately put the penis in his mouth upon finding it in my husband’s lunchbox. Playing the game again, with the added challenge of preventing the kids from finding the penis, has been great. Maybe not as great as hot sex, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I was really excited upon finding the penis lurking in my breastpump the other day.

Our kids won’t always be as young and as needy as they are now and my husband and I won’t always be as busy and tired as we are now. My best friend, who just recently quit breastfeeding her second child, promises me that my sexual revolution is just around the corner. Until then, the plastic penis gives me hope. It reminds me that I am really lucky to have a great husband. And one of these days, my husband will actually get lucky.

I promise.

Since writing this I have found the penis in my box of Cheezits, in my glove compartment, and in the very last present I opened in front of my entire family on Christmas Eve.

The Sacred Figment

The Sacred Figment
Siobhan Nassalong

Before the Little Ninjas karate class starts, my son, Daniel, and his five-year-old fellow ninjas are comparing gummy gaps in their smiles—another notch in the Big Boy Belt, the coveted Lost Tooth. "I think this one is a little loose...." say the little ninjas in their matching white suits and bare feet, running their tongues over their gum lines with fierce concentration. Miss Esse, the instructor, has perfected the art of feigning interest and excitement with the same intensity she brings to leading the little ninja army through kicks, jumps and "Hi-yaa!"'s. And then she says, "Are you going to get something from the Tooth Fariy?" I breathe a quiet sigh of disappointment, shooting my eyes over to Daniel to check his reaction. We've been over this a million times in his short life, but I'm still nervous. He seeks me out in the crowd of observing Karate-Mommies, smiles and shakes his head "No".

Much to the chagrin of family members and despite popular parenting trends, I have taught my son that there is no such thing as a Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause or an Easter Bunny.

My fellow Karate-Mommies say nothing, maybe they didn't notice, or feel that they don't know me well enough to voice their horror at the selfish deprivation of my child's youth. My friends and family have not been so polite. I understand their position. These things are tradition, we grew up with Santa, how can we take that away from our children? Special events are rendered meaningless and dull when you take away the Magic of the Sacred Figment.

Flashback to 1982. Ronald Reagan is president, my dad is driving a black 1972 Buick like a two door yacht, I'm sporting the original Strawberry Shortcake on my sneakers, and an Iraqi kid, Abdullah, starts another fight with a classmate, and this time...it's about Santa. Abdullah says that his dad says that Santa doesn't exist and it's just our parents leaving us presents. My six-year-old heart drops—Blasphemy! So I tell this little punk that the reason he doesn't get anything is because he's Bad. Abdullah just laughs at me, pulling a comb out of his back pocket, and smoothes his curly hair-like the Fonz. However, the unprecedented level of confidence displayed in this six-year-old left enough of a grain of doubt in my mind that I needed to take the matter up with a trusted elder: my fourteen-year-old neighbor. My query was answered when she took me aside, placed her hands on my shoulders and told me a story of a little girl who didn’t believe in Santa.

This little girl thought that her parents (!) were leaving the presents for her and using the whole Santa thing as blackmail for her to obey their rules. So the little girl stayed up on Christmas Eve, waiting until she heard a noise in the living room. She crept downstairs in her slippers and nightgown, ready to out her parents in a surprise ambush-but lo and behold, there stood a fat old man digging in a brown sack and extracting exactly the My Little Pony Dream Castle for which she had been begging her parents!

"Santa you DO exist!" she yelled in giddy astonishment. Well, Santa was so shocked to see this little girl jump out at him that he practically had a coronary, then got angry, put the castle back in the bag and went right back up the chimney, leaving nothing for the little girl. The girl never received Christmas presents again!

Well now that means business.

I had proof from a credible source that not only does Santa exist, but he is serious about not being seen, and he apparently has a heart condition. I was a true believer, now more than before, I was a born-again Santa-ite.

As the years went by I lost faith in the Tooth Fairy when she forgot to leave money under my pillow. When my parents found out, they offered to write me a check. Then the Easter Bunny followed suit when I celebrated Easter in Florida and the rabbit had the pest-related foresight to leave the basket in the fridge.(I didn't buy his concern for ant-infestation). But I always held a torch for Santa.
I don't know how old I was when I finally gave up on Santa, but it was OLD. By then I had learned some very powerful life lessons:

1. Having faith in something you can't see never pans out, including but not limited to: Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Hanukah Harry, witches, monsters, angels, Jesus, George Washington and God.

2. Parents, adults and other role models will blatantly make up the most fantastic lies to get kids to comply.

What makes these figments so sacred? What are we achieving by perpetuating these myth? Why do these kinds of questions make people so uncomfortable? Santa sets a precedent for the rest of your life that you will be lied to, that ignorance is bliss, and that growing up will result in disappointment.

I want my kids to know that I will always tell them the truth. A bond should exist between people that there will be no lies, no matter what the harsh truth is, and I want to teach by example that my kids are worthy of respect and not to be lied to. They, hopefully, in return, will offer me that same respect.

Now do I expect my children to always tell me the truth? No. Do I think that when they are sixteen and come home at 2am and I ask where the hell they've been they'll start telling an ass-saving lie-then stop mid-sentence, say, "Wait, mom never lied to us about Santa, I must tell the truth!" then feel all warm and fuzzy and spill the whole story about the kegger and the house party and the cops and the tattoo? No, not really, but how can I ever expect them to at least consider it when I've taught them that we lie to people to make them happy?

But what is left of Xmas without Santa? What is the loss of a tooth with out the Tooth Fairy? What is Easter without the Bunny?

Well, isn't Easter a Christian holy time in remembrance of their Son of God, Jesus, dying on the cross for their sins (including lying) and his subsequent resurrection from death? Most of the traditions practiced at Easter are ancient European celebrations of Spring, which falls right around the same time. Rebirth represented by bunnies and eggs. I don't know when the bunny started hiding the eggs, or if finding the eggs somehow represents Jesus coming out of the Cave, or if there were decorated hard-boiled eggs at the Last Supper, or maybe rabbit stew. Maybe "Hide the eggs and find them before they rot" was an old Jewish game from Jesus' time—this was 2000 years ago and there was no cable.

What about the Tooth Fairy? Traditionally, losing a tooth would be considered a step towards adulthood. To the Ancients this was a part of the initiation rite, the elders would take said tooth, place it directly under the pillow of the head of the tooth lossee who had to prove his/her bravery by sleeping through the night under direct threat of a small winged humanoid that would enter the room and remove the tooth from under the child's head. The reward for this act was usually about a quarter.

I won't even go there with Santa. (Look for my multi-volumed series to be released called "No, Virginia, there is no Santa Clause", in which I question lining up our children to pay homage to the all-knowing, all-seeing Jesus-Zeus-God figure on the throne in our favorite place of worship, the mall, hoping that they will be kindly judged and compensated for their good acts in merchandise.)

The reason I am somewhat sarcastically poking fun at what are very important traditions to many people in the west, is to show how strange and irrelevant they may seem from another perspective. I want to show how these sacred figments actually detract from the true meaning of our experiences. Holidays do have actual purposes, be it religious devotion-Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Wiccan or what have you, reunion with loved ones, special family gatherings, breaks from labor, or just a time to pause and reflect on the changing times and passing of the seasons. I have heard that Christmas is an antidote to Seasonal Affective Disorder and there's nothing wrong with that.

Now don't go home and announce that there will be no more Christmas (and if you do, don't mention my name!). This manifesto is a call to the sensible among us to look at the sacred figment from another perspective and re-evaluate the way we go through the motions, and to remember the true personal meanings of our celebrations. But if you do decide to drop the bomb, go easy, although inevitable, to some kids this is like a death. To others, it is a relief not to have to play along in order to win the booty. (How much of this is really for US anyway?)

Proceed thoughtfully and celebrate meaningfully.

The Many Faces of the Toddler

The Many Faces of the Toddler
Erica Carter

Toddler’s Day Off

Toddler’s Day Off
Stacey Greenberg

As a working mom of two, one of my biggest fantasies is to have the house all to myself for an entire day. My “to do” list would include lots of lazing about with a sprinkling of cleaning for good measure. I like to amuse myself by wondering what my almost three-year-old would do if he had the house all to himself for a day...

· Sleep late. (Since this would never happen with a warm body somewhere in the house to jump on bright and early.)

· Get dressed. (What is usually a traumatic and frustrating experience due to lack of sleep, is now a gleeful scene out of “What Not to Wear.” First things first: pull entire wardrobe out of cabinet and dump on the floor. Second: put on several combinations of shirts and pants before deciding to wear as many clothes at once as possible. Confidently parade in front of full-length mirror decked out in fleece pants with plaid shorts on top, a tie-dyed shirt, Elmo sweatshirt, sparkly red Wizard of Oz shoes, and ski cap.)

· Eat. (Cheetos and candy! A dream breakfast come true since there’s no one to get in the way of him and the secret stash. I can see him carefully pushing his Kinderzeat up to the cabinets, deftly mounting the counter, standing on his sparkly red tippy toes and swiftly pushing the basket of forbidden foods onto the Mexican tile. Then he’d bravely dismount into the pile and eat his breakfast piñata style.)

· Watch TV. (This child has no use for remote controls. He likes to be hands-on. He’d no doubt open the “off limits” drawer in the entertainment center and systematically try to shove each and every video and DVD we own into one of the players. If unsuccessful, he’d flip channels until Elmo, wild animals, kung-fu, or anything animated appeared. As a last resort, he’d amuse himself by opening and closing the DVD player and/or repeatedly turning the TV on and off.)

· Play. (Planes, trains, and automobiles…lions and tigers and bears oh my! The floor would be covered with all of the toys that I so carefully tuck away in bins, boxes, and baskets each night. Not one to limit himself to conventional toys, he’d pull all the pillows and cushions off of the sofa, throw them on top, and dance like he was on TRL.)

· Nap. (Ok, rest. Adding a layer of blankets to the video/toy/pillow pile and burying himself inside could potentially result in some much needed “down time.”)

· Play. (Invigorated by his seven minute snooze, he’d head for higher ground. He’d roll around with the dogs until excess fur covered his clothes and served as the perfect compliment to his chocolate, Cheeto, and drool stained face. To further “entertain” his accidental audience, he’d ride his tricycle in circles around the dining room table and over the dog bed. Put on roller skates. Repeat.)

· Read. (To catch his breath he’d likely pull a book off of one of his shelves and carefully examine it. He might get a little excited and accidentally tear a page. The sweet sound of torn paper would get him really excited. The dining room chairs would give him a boost to uncover, and ferociously rip out, all of the pop-up books on the “off limits” shelves. I’m going to pretend that my extensive book collection would sit quietly and not draw attention to itself.)

· Clean kitchen. (“Mommy likes it when I help clean!” He’d smile to himself as he pushed the Kinderzeat through the pile of empty bags and wrappers up to the sink, turned on the water, and “boy-handled” the spraygun. There would be a few moments of genuinely trying to rinse whatever dishes happened to be in the sink while he inadvertently squirted all of the surfaces in a five foot perimeter. Finally, he’d attack himself with the gun while laughing hysterically.)

· Check email. (Still dripping wet, he’d climb into the office chair and frantically bang the keyboard buttons. He might briefly wonder what the sizzling noise is.)

· Make calls. (He’d grow bored once the computer’s error message stopped beeping and start pushing numbers on the phone. If I’m lucky, he’d carry on long-winded, one-sided conversation with a very nice person in town, rather than, say, Scotland.)

· Eat. (The ice cream is easily accessible thanks to the “freezer on bottom” design of the Kenmore.)

· Sleep. (Content after a day of junk food and destruction, my boy would curl up in bed and fall asleep in record time since, like a tree silently falling in a forest, there’d be no one to take note. Although I imagine he’d wake up with a start around 3:00 am and think, “I forgot the crayons!”)

Take It Back

Take It Back
Marnie Thorp

Most of the night was spent in quiet darkness, broken by the occasional dream of feathers and fractals, gun battles and flight.

But then, this morning, clear as day, either just before or just after the alarm went off, maybe in between the flickerings of consciousness roused by the strains of mùm that wake me every morning, I dreamt about her father.

Why now? I blame Bonnie, who yesterday asked about him, and since she didn’t know the story, and I feel compelled, always, to recount it in excruciating detail, got that yarn spun way out for her. She even said, now you’re going to get all upset again. Nah, I said, I’m so well and over it. Mmhm.

And we’re driving along the highway in the desert, heading North in that beautiful white convertible. The car is real. Have you seen Before Night Falls? That convertible. It’s wide open spaces, like the blankness in Nevada before Black Rock. The bluest sky, the red dry earth. That part is less real.

I press my lips to his throat, kiss him, then bite. Inhaling his good rich cinnamon and sweat smell. My teeth on his earlobe, and his surprised laugh ends in a low groan. My hand is on his thigh, then tugs up his t-shirt, palm on his stomach, he’s driving still, the landscape blurring by as in a film. I hike the waistband of his trousers down on the side nearest me, exposing that perfect hip bone. I bend my head and kiss and bite that, too. I know what he’s thinking, he’s hard, but I laugh and sit up again.

We cross the U.S. border, entirely uneventfully. No border crossing, no guards, no markings even, just a dusty road into a town. And I say, We have to stop. We have to stop every so often, so I can run into road side truckstops and collect kitsch. Because I’ve never been here before, in these States, and I wonder suddenly, Which States? Where are we? Where are we going? The dream lapse, which I love, where the fantasy spools out before the flesh world thinking can catch up. Up from Mexico, where are we headed? And what’s on the border, what? “Texas?!” I holler, “We’re in Texas!” And the plates on a passing car confirm it.

And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, why did we come across the border so easily? Why didn’t anyone corner us and ask for his visa? People get killed on that border, all the time. I turn to look at him and he catches my thought; he shrugs.

We’re out of the car and walking in the dusty street, and into a store shadowed despite the bright day. Hammered silver, delicate silks with gossamer lace, turquoise, lapis, dust and more dust. I’m fingering frail dresses saying, This one, for the girl, don’t you think? He’s speaking to the shop owner, in Spanish. He laughs. I ask him to find out the prices for me.

Then the shop-keep rouses, slow, heavy, and comes around from the back of the store. She’s a woman, not a man as I’d thought, and she’s holding up five or six pendants. Cheap, dime-store, costume jewellery. None of it is to my taste. I think this, these exact words, and am ready to say them, when she speaks to me in French, the jumbled Mexican Quebecois Frenglish of the dueña of that place we stayed at in Pie de la Cuesta. Somehow I extricate myself without buying and I follow his back out of the store.

It’s all so good, the sun, the dust, the easy time at the border, and home, we’re going home, and the girl is waiting, and I can’t wait to see her and I say, to his back, I love you so much. And it’s wrong. Even as the words leave my lips. I feel it, it’s real, I love him and it’s wrong.

And I try to rewind the dream, to undo it, retreat, shimmy back to the moment just before, but it doesn’t work and I wake. And the last thing I want to be is awake, more struggling with the day.

I’m spent and I’m angry and I want to live forever in that moment when I’m following his back out the door, the moment just before.

Hello and Goodbye

Hello and Goodbye
Rhonda Baker
From “Zuzu and the Baby Catcher”, Issue 6

Back in issue one I talked about the son I gave birth to in March of 1984. Actually I only talked about the birth; I didn’t really talk about my son. It’s time to tell the story.

Placing my son for adoption was not my first choice upon discovery of my pregnancy. I was sixteen; it was the summer before my senior year. I was going to graduate and head off to NYC to become a fashion designer. Pregnancy was NOT part of the plan. I scheduled an abortion, but through a long chain of unpleasant events, it did not come to pass. Thus I found myself as described in ZBC #1, a pregnant high school senior.

I made a deal with God: I would have this baby and give it up, but only as long as it was a boy. Boys were foreign to me, and I certainly couldn’t raise a boy without a father. So, God very kindly agreed that I would give up a son, and that someday I would be the happy mama of a daughter or two. The Cath-olic priest my mother worked for stepped in and arranged the adoption with a couple he knew in Louisiana. (He had also ‘arranged’ the mess-up of the abortion appointment, which I wouldn’t find out for years.) The couple he knew lived next door to his niece, and he’d actually met them, so it wasn’t like my baby would be going to complete strangers. I’d maybe even get news of him now and again. It was settled.

The birth was dreadful – well, the LABOR was dreadful – I was in awe of the actual birth, which I witnessed in the mirror above my spread-eagled body. My body gave birth, and they cleaned him up and handed him to me. I was wheeled out of the delivery room with my black-haired, black-eyed, gorgeous baby boy tucked in one arm, and my teddy bear (the only stand-in for the father that the hospital would allow) in the other. I must have looked like such a baby myself. Back then, moms stayed in the hospital for three days, even after a normal delivery… and I intended to make use of every moment to be with my son. Jonathan, my son.

I knew he was not mine – my heart and soul knew that keeping him would be the wrong wrong wrong thing to do, and I knew I would not waver. But my son…he was so beautiful – his eyes so dark, promising to be chocolate brown, and thick black hair, olive skin. He was magical – staring so intently about him, never crying, just seeking answers everywhere. He was familiar – I could see my nose, my mouth, my chin in that tiny face. I fell in love, as every new mother is programmed to do – but even as I knew he was not mine, my heart was tearing, shredding. “And a sword shall pierce her heart,” says one version of the bible about Mary’s agony. I knew that agony.

I held him as much as I could, fed him a bottle while my breasts ached to nurse him. There was no such thing as ‘rooming in’, and only one designated person could hold him or be in the room while he was there. Had I been a little braver, a little wiser, I’d have broken those rules all over the place… what were they gonna do, take him away? But I followed the rules – so only my mom and I held him. If anyone came to visit I had to bring him back to the nursery. As you can imagine I hated all visitors, robbers of my time with my baby.

The days passed in a blur. Getting yelled at by Nazi Nurse who found me asleep with Jonathan. Lying alone with a heat lamp between my legs as my episiotomy itched and stung. Getting reprimanded for pushing the help button in the bathroom when I thought I was going to pass out. Wondering over and over again how I could reconcile my longing for my baby and my lack of longing for motherhood. My daddy showing up to visit after ignoring me the entire pregnancy, then weeping with pride and sorrow in my room. Sitting with my son on my lap as I wept and wrote the final pages of a letter to him. A letter that started as a 16-year-old’s foolish pen pal meanderings and ended in utter despair, begging forgiveness, praying for understanding. Weeping.

On our last day we borrowed the priest’s 35mm camera and took pictures. They are all taken in natural light – they show a lovely alert baby boy and a sad young girl who is already showing her lifelong mask of grief. The last picture was taken a few moments before 4pm that day. At 4pm the circuit clerk was coming with papers, relinquishment papers. At 4pm my time was up.

At 3:59pm I kissed my son’s impossibly soft feet, nuzzled him, inhaling his sweet newborn scent, stroked his hair and put him in his bassinet. Slowly I wheeled him to the nursery, my heart pounding and empty. Marching to a death knell, a nightmare of tile and fluorescent light and sore body and agonizing slow steps. My mom was beside me but I don’t remember it. I just remember feeling terribly, finally, alone.

I knocked on the nursery door, and asked the nursed who answered to please put him right by the window so I could look at him as long as I could. I pushed him through that door, and as it closed a wail of pure grief rose from my soul. I cried as a child cries, as a mother cries. The anguish ripped through me, devoured me, and I let it. I’ll never forget the startled faces of the excited new mamas and daddies, their reveries so rudely and bewilderingly interrupted by a distraught teenager. I turned my eyes to my son as my mother held me up. We wept together, but after a moment she could not bear it and moved away. I stood there, my eyes locked on my baby, memorizing his face. At that moment he stirred and for the first time since he was born, I saw him cry. We cried together, my son and I, as if he felt it, too; we were being torn apart, and I was doing the tearing. We cried.

At 5pm, I was still standing there. My mother paced the halls, fuming at the circuit clerk, coming to stand with me, pacing again. I was not about to budge – I was taking every second I could get. My eyes did not leave his face. I waited. Like the condemned wait for death – part of me dying already. I thought… I still had time… I could be holding him. I thought…if I touch him again, I’ll never let him go. I thought… I will not wreck both our lives… I will wreck only my own. I realized that all I could do was to stand there, and stare, and weep, and wait.

At something like 6pm, the man showed up, no apologies, no clue. By then my tears had stopped and I was holding the fragile strands of my soul together by sheer will power. I had to be alone in the room when I signed the papers, so no one could say I was influenced in any way. My mother hugged me before leaving, whispering, “Its okay if you change her mind…” which only strengthened my resolve. I signed the damn papers, the word ‘irrevocable’ standing out neon bright. I hated the word, hated that man, hated the people who were taking my baby. Loving my baby, tears scalding my cheeks, barely breathing, I signed the damn papers.

At that moment, I became a new person. I became a birthmother.

I was wheeled out of the hospital empty handed, empty bellied. I was leaving behind my only child. He would remain there for two more days, until Louisiana law took effect and I signed yet another set of papers that gave him to his new parents. For two days he would belong to no one, have no one. The thought of this nearly killed me. I went home to lie in bed and sob. My poor little sisters, so young at the time, did not know what to do. I slept in my mom’s bed, comforted for a few moments at a time before the grief would wash over me anew.

I found out what they named him – Tyler – and I flew into a rage. Their act of naming him meant he really really was gone. Grief became my best friend who never left my side. The only way to survive it was to embrace it.

I never got counseling – I just went back to my life as much as I could. Everything was tainted. Nothing seemed as worthwhile as it did before. Elsa Klensch, a fashion reporter with a show on TV called “Style” made her observation that “Yellow is SO important this season,” and I realized that Elsa had no idea what was important. Yellow was certainly not it. Fashion was not it. I didn’t know what to do, thrust so into a sobering adult world of real loss. I didn’t know where to go. I was lost. But I survived.

The years passed. His birthday was the worst… a day to cry, bake a cake, take the day off work, and remember. Mother’s Day sucked. I was an unrecognizable mother. I cannot begin to describe the many phases and faces my grief took on. It was my crutch, my shield, my excuse, and, in very bad times, my reason to keep living.
I kept meeting adoptees, dating adoptees. I learned to accept the grim reality that while female adoptees nearly always search for their birthmothers, male adoptees rarely do. I knew that it would be a long wait until I could contact him with any hope of acceptance. I settled in to wait.

I turned thirty in 1996, and that same year my sister had a baby, the first grandchild since my son. At the time I was a live-in nanny and my eyes were opened to the reality of parenting. These things inspired me to write a letter to Tyler’s adoptive mother, thanking her, and asking her very humbly to let me know how he was doing. I knew from the priest and from my attorney that his parents had been very reluctant to have any information about me – despite it being an open adoption they were not interested in an exchange of information. They had seemed very protective and afraid, as if they wanted me to simply not exist. I knew I had to tread carefully, and my letter was a loving and humble request. I sent it to my attorney, who then forwarded it to the adopted mother’s attorney. I waited. I heard nothing.

Later that year I got access to the internet – still a rather new media for the masses. Of course I did an internet search on his name… and up came his name on a role-playing game site! He was online! He played computer games! He wasn’t a baby anymore; he was a kid. A smart kid. He wasn’t some stupid drug user like his father, he was a computer boy. The years had suddenly leaped by. There he was. Wow.
I was excited. I was scared. I had information now – an address and phone number that I couldn’t do a damn thing with. Nor was I about to. But having that information was powerful. He was alive. He was out there. And someday, when I thought he was ready… I would reach out. Someday.

November, 2003. A few weeks past my 37th birthday, mama to 2 ½ year old Zuzu and heavily pregnant with Josie, I sat down at my computer and did my yearly internet search for my son. The same old stuff came up… and something new. A poetry site. A page of his poetry. My heart stopped. I still was not going to contact him… he’s too young, I thought. But then I found a poem that made me weep with sorrow – he believed he was the product of a rape! I could not let him continue to believe that. I could not.

Two days later, my son and I made contact. “What took you so long?” he asked.
I will say this. For nearly twenty years, there was a hole in my soul – as if I was missing part of a lung. Every time I thought of him it was an incomplete breath. But now, when I think of him, I can breathe. My soul is full, my spirit at peace. My child is with me.

Transplantation

Transplantation
Tajh’ Short (Picture by Andrea Smith)



I feel as though I have been transplanted into somebody else’s rose garden. This is my house; I bought it a few years ago. I was single at the time, and found one big enough to work out of. The entire back half of the house serves as my clinic, but otherwise the house was empty. It didn’t stay empty for long though, just eight months after moving in I managed to fall in love with a man name David, and with him came two beautiful little girls. Well, not quite, he actually moved in alone. The girls came along every other weekend setting me up for an emotional cycle that I wasn’t at all ready for.

At first I considered the girls to be occasional visitors. I made them as comfortable as possible, planned child-friendly activities, and forged a friendship with them. It didn’t occur to me to consider this situation to be a parental one, but it ended up that way. What can I say, I managed to fall head over heels in love with them, and all of a sudden, I didn’t recognize my life anymore. For two weeks at a time, life was normal. I am self-employed, so I would work part-time while continuing my journey through academia. But then every other Friday would show up, and I would start get a little antsy. Children are coming, I need to make room for them to play, I need to plan activities that they will enjoy, and I need to wait and wait and wait for them to arrive.

I no longer work on the Fridays the girls arrive. It’s just too much, being a caregiver to my clients and shifting from a childless life into a family all in one day, it’s just too much. I go through some anxiety before they arrive. Do they still like me? Am I stepping on either of the parents’ toes? Am I making choices that are in their best interest? And then they get here, and I am overcome with joy. They climb into my lap and tell me about their week at school. They show me homework assignments with stickers on them. They ask me questions regarding things they are curious about. We talk about boys and friendships and each time they come, we grow a little closer. But then they leave, a process which takes close to seven hours to complete.

When David and his first wife divorced, they lived here in Iowa City. She moved on into a new relationship immediately and moved the girls to the other side of the State. On Fridays, the girls are brought here by their mother, and on Sundays, it’s our turn to do the driving—324 miles of driving—round trip. When you factor in bathroom breaks you are talking about six to seven hours of time and the children hate it, we hate it too. In addition to the long drive, there are emotions to be factored in. In my life as it is now, my greatest joys come from the girls being here, but with all of the driving, we only have about two days of waking time together per month. As chaotic and busy as every other Friday is, every other Sunday is down right dreadful. On a few occasions, after dropping the girls off David and I have been so distraught that we have had to pull off of the road to shed the tears that always seem to come.

It’s a vicious cycle and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. The girls do not have a close connection to their mother, so they are turning to me for the maternal support that they need to be healthy and strong. Each weekend that they are here, they cling to me and cry. They beg me to visit them more often, ask me to come to their school activities, to meet their friends, to go to their dance recitals. Some things we can get to, but due to the distance, the weekday events are usually out of the question. It’s just too far, and our time together is just too short. More and more of our weekends are spent on the couch with a girl clinging to each arm. They need the closeness, they need to be held and reassured and listened to. They need advice, and questions answered, and to know that no matter what, someone is there for them, even if that someone is 162 miles away. The cycle is unending, and letting them go after each visit is physically painful for me. Nobody in their right mind would sign up for this lifestyle, would they?

Well, I did. Three months ago, David and I got married. It was a simple ceremony in our family room; I did all of the cooking. The girls were our only attendants. Both were flower girls and both were ring bearers. Katie was my ‘girl of honor’ and Jenna was the ‘best girl’. This gave them bragging rights on the playground “I got to be everything in my daddy’s wedding!”

Even though a wedding is traditionally considered to be a union between two people, this wasn’t the case here. For us, the wedding was about forging a family. Becoming a stepmother is something that I have taken very seriously and something that has only brought me closer to the girls. After swearing vows to David, I took a moment to swear vows to the girls as well. I stepped away from David and took each girl by the hand. I looked them each in the eye and told them that my life has been forever changed just by knowing them. That I have fallen in love with them, and that our wedding wouldn’t be complete unless I made the kind of promises to them that I had made to their father.

I Tajh’ take you Katherine and Jenna to be my stepdaughters
From this day forth
I promise to be there for you
I will always make time for you
For whatever it is in life that you may need
I will always provide for you to the best of my ability
As your stepmother
I will lead, guide, love, and cherish you
Regardless of the choices you may make
The love I have for you now
Will only grow stronger

I then presented each girl with a gold ring with a heart on it. The ring was sized for an adult, to demonstrate that this is a commitment that is going to last their lifetime. To compensate for their little fingers, I put the rings on a golden chain, and after swearing the vows to the girls, I put the necklace around each of their necks. I slid the ring onto their right ring fingers and told them that the heart on the rings represents the place in my heart that is forever dedicated to them.

Shortly after the ceremony, the girls sought me out for extra hugs and comfort. They were touched by what was said during the ceremony. We hadn’t told them ahead of time that a portion of the ceremony would be about them, as children I didn’t want them to feel obligated to say or do anything in return. We talked about how we are a real family now, and I was asked if it would be ok if they called me MamaTajh’ and finally I wept. I had managed to keep my eyes dry up until that point, but being referred to as a maternal figure burst my heart open in an new way.

So here I am, transplanted into somebody else’s rose garden. According to tradition, families are planned, planted, and nurtured from the start. But that isn’t the case here, nor is it the case for many families out there. My husband and another woman planned, planted and nurtured this garden, then the garden was torn in half, the roses were moved elsewhere, and my husband came to me with little buds in need of love. I don’t believe that the sun and the rain woke up one morning knowing how to make a garden grow, but they have learned, and so too will I. Our family isn’t structured in the way that families have traditionally been structured, but we are a family, a long distance family, but a family nonetheless. I may not have planted these seeds, but I am here to watch them grow, to nourish and to protect these flowers until one day they are ready to go off and create gardens of their own.

Kindling

Kindling
Stacey Greenberg

Impulsively I say, “Well you can have some of Warren’s sperm if you want.”
I’m in Zinnie’s for the first time since getting pregnant, having a drink with some good friends who have come to see the baby and take me out on the town. It is dark and smoky despite it barely being past 8:00pm. We’ve all been here many times, though not lately, and never this early.

Vanessa has a small diamond ring on her finger. She and Liz have decided to become life partners. They want to start a family, she says. Liz’s brother is going to be their donor, a fairly common arrangement among modern day lesbians. Now that I’m a mom, I want everyone to be a mom, but especially Vanessa. Everyone thinks I’m kidding but I’m not.

I knew Vanessa in college, but we got to be good friends after I returned from the Peace Corps and she returned from doing a Fullbright in Honduras. We hung out in bars—once with Jane Evershed, read Starhawk books, had important discussions, went to Lilith Fair, and forged a friendship that easily survived the drama of everyday life. The outing of my secret college fling with her future husband, her moving to San Francisco to become a midwife, her coming out of the closet, and her eventual divorce only brought us closer together.

Vanessa is of the old soul variety—the instant you meet her, you know she is special. She is wise beyond her years, a good listener, and easy to talk to. Vanessa introduced me to homebirth in America. She didn’t laugh when I said I was going use cloth diapers. (Or even when I decided to stop using cloth diapers.) She was instrumental in my decision not to circumcise my Jewish son. She showed me how to make a belly cast and showered me with a Mother Blessing ceremony when I was pregnant.

When Satchel was three months old, we went to California to visit Warren’s family. We also went to visit Vanessa and Liz. They had a cute little house in the hills of Petaluma surrounded by vegetable and flower gardens. Vanessa made us a yummy vegetarian dinner while Warren and Liz played basketball. We went to the ocean, the ice cream store, and the second-hand shop. We stayed up late talking and enjoyed each other’s company. It was clear to Warren and I that they shared a deep love for each other and that we shared similar parenting philosophies.

A few months later, Liz’s brother changed his mind. I offered up Warren’s sperm again, all kidding aside. Of all my friends, Vanessa was the one person I was sure that Warren would gladly donate his sperm to. I knew that Vanessa was someone that we would always be close to and that this would only make us closer. I had visions of all of us vacationing together, or her child(ren) spending summers with us, Satchel going off to visit his cool aunties in San Francisco when he was older, etc.

I wasn’t completely naïve about it though. I could certainly see how the situation could get sticky. Like what if Vanessa’s child was somehow bigger, brighter, or better than our own? Would I constantly compare myself to her? Would Warren? And really, it wasn’t just about me. How would the child feel about his/her auspicious beginnings? What if s/he was less than thrilled with the situation? What if Liz and Vanessa moved to Alaska? Or broke up? Or worse…then what?

When we talked about the future, all four of us hoped for the best. We wanted everything to be out in the open. While Warren wasn’t going to be the traditional “dad” and I wasn’t going to be the traditional “stepmom,” we certainly planned on being something. We would just have to wait and see what that looked like exactly. We agreed to take things as they came and to always keep the lines of communication open. What other choice did we have?

Over a year passed between our actual offer and our actual discussion of the particulars. Warren and I agreed to give up all parental rights and Vanessa and Liz agreed to assume full financial responsibility for the baby. We also agreed that an eventual sibling was part of the deal. Although I felt a bit like Glenn Close’s character in The Big Chill, Warren and Vanessa didn’t plan on actually having sex. Since Liz and Vanessa live in California and we live in Memphis, our plan was to use “Overnight Male,” a packaging system that preserves sperm in a special buffer for up to 48 hours, when the time was right.

In January 2004, I was six months pregnant with my second child. I left work a bit early and in the window of time before we would have to pick up Satchel, Warren and I made a wish for Vanessa and Liz to have a baby. We carefully mixed it with the special buffer and rushed it to the local Mailboxes, Etc. The package arrived safely, and the insemination went smoothly. I was so excited; I just knew it had worked. I didn’t know how I was going to keep myself from calling everyday and asking, “Are you pregnant yet? Are you pregnant yet?”

Warren, Satchel, and I went to visit friends in DC for Valentine’s Day weekend. On Saturday, I had an excited message from Vanessa on my cell phone. She and Liz had just gotten married! I didn’t get a chance to actually talk to her until a few days later. Although ecstatic about being legally married, Vanessa was a bit depressed.
As a midwife with unlimited access to pregnancy tests, she was sad to report that they all had registered only one pink line. She said her boobs hurt and she was sure she’d get her period any day. Skeptical, I asked if she was sure, but she was.
Four days later, and still no period, Vanessa tested one more time. This time it was positive. It did work after all! I think we were all in shock. But in a good way. Twelve weeks passed, and ripe with my own child, I started telling friends about Vanessa. [Insert joke about Warren’s prowess here.]

It was really fun having Vanessa pregnant. She had delivered over 200 babies, but had never experienced morning sickness, first trimester exhaustion, or that feeling of having a secret when your growing belly is still invisible to the world at large. As she entered her second trimester, I gave birth to my second baby—another boy. I was stunned as I had completely convinced myself, despite having no real evidence, that it was a girl. It only took a minute or two for me to fall completely in love with this new little guy, but for the next few weeks I struggled with how I might feel if Vanessa had a girl. Would I feel cheated? Would I secretly resent Warren for giving her girl sperm? I decided to just assume that she would have a girl so I could start working through my feelings. I even offered to let Vanessa use my girl name.

Vanessa came to visit twice during my maternity leave. As she held baby Jiro, I could see her trying to imagine what her baby might look like. Meanwhile I tried to picture her big and round, since she was barely showing. My best friend, Marlinee, and I performed the “ring test” on her and consulted the Chinese calendar—both predicted it would be a girl. I held my breath.

The summer and the beginning of fall passed in a blur as Warren left for a twelve week dig and I was home alone with both boys. I’d occasionally get an email like, “Do I really need a diaper bag?” or “How many cloth diapers should I buy?” We played a lot of phone tag, chatting on occasion. I continued to offer name suggestions and she continued to rebuke them. With each care package I sent, I’d write a little note, “What about Lyric? Flax? Are you sure you don’t like Piper?”

Things were moving rapidly yet slowly. It was September before I knew it and Liz sent us an amazing picture of Vanessa in a tank top at a peace rally. Her tiny, perfectly round belly was painted with the words, “Baby sez no war.” I immediately burst into tears. She looked absolutely radiant. Warren and I laughed at how different she looked from me—she was the fit, yoga mama while I was more of the voluptuous earth mama. She was at 35 weeks. It literally could be any day.

On a Friday a couple of weeks later as I was getting ready to go to lunch, my office phone rang. “Hey, it’s Vanessa. [Long pause.] I think I’m in labor.” She was planning to have the baby at home, like I had done, and was having some nasty back labor, like I had. It was absolutely surreal to be on my end of the conversation, as she had always been one of the first people I called both times that I was in labor. I asked if she had any last minute predictions on the sex (she was still leaning towards totally not knowing) and I told her that I loved her and to have fun. I also promised to try not to call too much.

I immediately called Warren and, as usual, could only answer about five of his twenty questions. We were both really excited, but knew from experience that it would likely be the next day when the baby was born. I went home and stood in my power spot (the place in my bedroom where I had given birth to both Satchel and Jiro) and said a little prayer for Vanessa and the baby.

I talked to Liz a few hours later and got a progress report. All systems were go and Vanessa was doing great. She called back around midnight to report that things were still going well and that Vanessa was trying to rest. Somehow I went to sleep that night, but my mind was in California. I woke up at 8am and desperately wanted to call, but refrained. At noon I couldn’t take it anymore. This time Jenna, Vanessa’s friend who was also a midwife, answered the phone. A sure sign that things were getting close. Warren and I tried to stay calm. By 5pm I decided to check in again. Jenna answered. “So,” I asked, “How’s everything going?” She told me to hang on and Vanessa got on the phone, “It’s a boy!” she said.

A boy! How wonderful. I was relieved in a very profound way. A boy felt familiar, right. I genuinely felt happy for them.

By naptime the next day, I had an email titled, “Look who’s here.” When I saw the pictures, I was overcome. He looked a lot like Satchel did when he was born. He was beautiful. I wanted to hold him and sniff his head. I called Warren in and he was similarly smitten. “He looks like Satchel,” he said. We both stared in silence at the screen until Satchel came prancing in. “It’s Jiro!” he exclaimed as usual whenever he saw a picture of a baby. I called Vanessa and Liz and told them that I was in love.

Seeing the baby’s picture was a lot more emotional than I expected. I had intense baby lust. Jiro suddenly seemed huge. I wanted Vanessa’s baby to be snuggled up next to me. He looked so familiar, I wanted him to be mine. I had a huge lump in my chest. I felt a little lost. There were no sign posts. There wasn’t anyone to tell me, “Your feelings are totally normal.”

I wanted to tell everyone that the baby was here, but there didn't seem to be a vocabulary for describing our relationships adequately. I found myself doing an elaborate set up, “You know my friend Vanessa? Well she just had a baby and Warren was the donor…” Then people inevitably asked, “He was the donor? What do you think of that?” I proudly responded that it was my idea, but I wanted a word that encapsulated that. I wanted credit for my role in bringing this beautiful boy to life.

Even the relationships that had names seemed strange. We alternated between telling Satchel and Jiro that they had a new baby half brother/a new baby cousin. It sounded kind of weird when Warren explained further, “I’m the daddy, and you are the son. Vanessa’s baby is also my son.” Technically this was all true, but would these terms constantly need to be qualified? Satchel seemed to be taking it all in stride. “I’m not the sun,” he said. “I’m a cloud!”

As I try to make sense of everything, I have been having some great conversations with Liz. Each day I am learning more and more about her—easily seeing why Vanessa has chosen to spend her life with her. I am amazed by her thoughtfulness and her compassion. Also, I have loved being able to give Vanessa advice on breastfeeding, co-sleeping, etc. I feel like the wise one now. I hope that I can continue to be a source of information and support for her always and that our parenting experiences will only deepen our friendship.

I like that we are entering unchartered territory. It feels exciting. Important.

Miles of Love

Miles of Love
Vanessa Ross

When I was younger, I never thought much about having children. I assumed I would do so one day, in the usual fashion. It never occurred to me that I would have what is now called an “alternative family”, probably because the only types of families I knew were the married and divorced parents varieties (mine being the latter). The first time I encountered a family with same-sex parents was in the Quaker meeting I attended in Memphis in my early 20s. In that oasis of acceptance in the midst of the conservative Memphis desert, their family was treated no differently than the others. Yet I remember remarking to my then-husband that while I liked this family and thought the women were great parents, the situation felt unnatural to me; I couldn’t get around that fact the “natural” way babies come into the world is via the union of a man and a woman. While true in a sense, my attitude at the time now seems to me a bit of internalized homophobia, something most lesbians and gays deal with and often recognize in our pre-coming-out mentalities. When I came out a few years later, one of the deepest realizations I had was that for me, being with women came much more naturally than being with men, and aligning my life with that fact created a sense of “rightness” I’d never experienced as a straight woman.

Living in San Francisco and getting to know more “alternative” families made the idea of same-sex parenting less and less strange to me. When I met and fell in love with my wife Liz, it became even clearer to me that regardless of their sexes, when two people love each other and want to spend their lives together, expanding that love by having children is the most natural thing in the world. The first night we met, we talked about babies, never daring to imagine we’d have one together. I am a midwife, and Liz was baby-crazy at the time, so of course it came up. As our relationship grew and developed, and we made a commitment to each other, having children was always something we intended to do. I knew that I wanted to conceive and bear a child myself; Liz was unsure if she did and was also interested in adopting someday. Nearly three years later, with neither of us getting any younger, we decided I would get pregnant first, and then we would decide about how to have the second one later.

We both felt strongly that we wanted to conceive using a known donor, as we assumed our child(ren) one day would want to know who their biological father was. While it sounded easier in a way to select sperm from an anonymous donor through a sperm bank and never have to worry about our children “belonging” to anyone but us, we suspected that like most adopted children, our children might feel a need to see and know the person from whom their other half came. We did not want to deny our future children this knowledge, and so we considered our options.

Our first choice was a common one among lesbians: the brother of the nonbio. mom; in our case, Liz’s brother Dan. Initially Dan was very moved by the idea and agreed to the proposal. However, upon meeting some resistance from Liz’s mother and reconsidering his comfort level with this unorthodox family structure (i.e., being the child’s bio. father and uncle; Liz being the child’s mother and bio. aunt), he changed his mind. Liz and I were of course very disappointed. We had loved the idea of our child being biologically connected to both of us and the potential of seeing a resemblance to both of us in our child. But we also appreciated Dan’s honesty and the seriousness with which he approached the matter. Mutual biological connection was not as important to us as finding the right situation and relationship for us as parents with our donor.

Each of us had a male friend in our lives who we considered as potential donors, but neither felt like great choices for different reasons. We started perusing a few sperm banks online that had donors who agreed to reveal their identities after the child was born, but that felt a little dicey to us as well. We wanted our kids to know who their biological father was, but we also felt it important that he be someone we would want to know. Selecting sperm online did not seem to meet our need to ensure we would like the donor himself and feel good about our children potentially having some kind of relationship with him one day.

One day, my good friend Stacey called us up and on behalf of her husband Warren, offered us his sperm. I was blown away. All of my friends were very engaged in creating their own families, and I never considered asking any of them for their husbands’ sperm. Warren and I were not extremely close, but I knew him to be a kind, intelligent, incredibly creative, and politically aware guy, the type of man we would want our children to know. He is also not bad looking and in good health, and I knew who he’d been sleeping with, so we didn’t have to worry about STDs. After several conversations between Liz and me and Warren and Stacey, as well as other friends from whom we solicited advice, Liz and I decided that it felt right. We knew that we would always want our families to be connected anyway, and Warren being our donor would make us extended family in a more official way. We also felt that no matter what challenges this new relatedness might bring, we would be able to communicate with one another and negotiate uncharted terrain as we came to it.

Almost a year later, we were ready. After researching our options for insemination, we opted for the long-distance DIY method. This plan entailed Warren sending us his sperm sample mixed with a nutritive medium that would keep it alive during its cross-country FedEx journey to us, courtesy of “Overnight Male”, the kit developed by the University of Illinois just for that purpose. The trick was that we then had to separate the sperm from the medium before inseminating, which required a rinsing and spinning procedure in a centrifuge generally only found in fertility clinics and sperm banks. Luckily, however, my research had brought me in contact with Leland, the director of the Rainbow Flag Sperm Bank, who upon hearing that I was a nurse midwife/nurse practitioner said, “Oh you can do this yourself; it’s not rocket science!” He agreed to teach me the whole process and sent me to the website of the medical supply company, where for the price of one round of insemination, I could purchase my very own variable speed centrifuge. Even better, I found a barely used one on Ebay for almost half that price, and Leland sold me most of the other necessary supplies.

Because of the concentrated nature of the sample after being rinsed and spun, the acidic climate of the vagina was too perilous for these sperm to traverse, and they would need to be directly deposited in my uterus via intrauterine insemination. This procedure entailed an operator savvy with speculums and finding the cervix, and while I myself was such a provider, doing my own insemination would be a logistical nightmare, if not impossibility. As fate would have it, I had trained my partner Liz in the art of speculum exams several months prior when I had an abnormal Pap that she helped me treat naturopathically. So with a brief orientation on the new equipment and sterile technique, she was ready to roll.

All of this might seem like a lot of trouble to some people, but we wanted our technology-enabled conception to also feel intimate and loving, and we knew that could only happen in the privacy of our own home. We also assumed that we would have to make several attempts before getting pregnant and feared the cost would be astronomical if we went through the official channels. Grabbing a cross-country flight when I was ovulating also seemed impractical and expensive, so this plan was best for us.

So by January 2004 we were mentally, emotionally, physically, and logistically as prepared as one can be for conceiving a child. The Overnight Male kits had arrived in Memphis, we had discussed the probable days of ovulation based on my cycle history and schooled Stacey and Warren on when they should or shouldn’t have sex around that time in order to ensure the freshest and most plentiful sperm possible, and we had the FedEx drop-off points and schedule in hand. Now we were just waiting for that egg to pop out, as evidenced by a positive ovulation predictor test. Unfortunately, my prediction was that I would ovulate on a Sunday, the one-day FedEx did not pick-up or deliver packages, except for a small fortune. So we decided to err on the side of an early insemination, as fresh sperm can survive for up to 5 days in the uterus and tubes. After an overnight flight, we knew they wouldn’t last quite that long, but we hoped they’d last a couple of days at least until the egg arrived on the scene. Given that Stacey and Warren had gotten pregnant every time they thought about it with no planning whatsoever, we were banking on him having some super-sperm.

So we went ahead and scheduled for Thursday and Saturday inseminations, trusting that my calculations were accurate. But both days, my morning pee test came up with not-quite-fertile-yet results, indicating that my cycle was running longer than usual. Liz and I were disheartened that all our effort now seemed poorly timed, but told ourselves that it would be good practice anyway. We peeked at a drop of squirming sperm under a mini-microscope I’d bought for fertility purposes, and told the sperm we hoped they’d had a nice flight and how happy we were they survived the journey. We rinsed and spun and rinsed and spun the sperm again per the instructions, drew them up into the tiny catheter that would safely deposit them in my womb, and then had a moment of silence to center ourselves and give the little guys a moment to recover from all that spinning. We lit candles around our room, put on a Tuck and Patti CD, and shared a last look into each other’s eyes full of the enormous importance of what we were about to do.

And then my cervix wasn’t open. I mean it was shut so tight Liz could barely insert the catheter a centimeter into the external opening, another sign our timing was a bit off. Luckily, another midwife friend who does inseminations had told us that if this happened, to deposit the sperm slowly into the fertile mucus coming from the cervix so that they could swim up it into the uterus. So that’s what we did, hoping they would eek their way through.

On Monday morning my ovulation test turned positive, and we prayed that some of those little dudes would hold out for the next 24-36 hours until the egg emerged. But 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 days later, my pregnancy tests were negative. Remember, I’m a midwife and had access to the tests at work, so I took them compulsively until the two-week mark when it should have been definitive. Then I resigned myself to not being pregnant, and Liz and I started looking at the calendar for our next attempt.

We were very disappointed, but life distracted us from being too down that weekend by throwing the San Francisco gay marriage extravaganza our way. We got married on Monday and had a one-day honeymoon on Tuesday, and were so high on our excitement about the whole thing that we had no time to be sad about not being pregnant. Back at work on Wednesday, my mind couldn’t help but go back there, what with pregnant bellies everywhere I looked. I was now on day 37 of my cycle, and still no period. I attributed this to excess scrutiny and stress around the whole thing and wondered how I would ever get pregnant this way. On several trips to the bathroom, I looked up at the pregnancy tests and resisted reaching up for one, but finally I couldn’t hold back. I told myself that I just needed to see that negative result one more time so I could let it go, and then my body would get back on track.

As I watched, the test line appeared immediately, and then nothing. I waited a couple of minutes and was about to throw the thing away when I saw a second line slowly materialize in the test window. I didn’t trust my eyes because it was so faint, but my coworker and friend Amy took one look at it and confirmed, “It’s positive!” I locked myself in the exam room and called Liz right away. She wasn’t so happy about me taking the test without her, but was thrilled to hear the news. I went home, and we did another test together so she could see the truth for herself. And there we were - married and pregnant in the same week, and in total disbelief about the whole beautiful thing.

As I sit here typing listening to my 10-week-old son Miles cooing at Liz in the other room, I am still in disbelief and wonder if it will ever end. To think that part of this amazing little boy came in a FedEx box is a little too much for even my brain to comprehend. He is such a gift, and I hope one day he understands how much love brought him into this world and how lucky he is to have not only two mommies, but fairy godparents who helped make our wish for him come true.