Check out my personal essay in the Country Kid-City Kid issue of Babble.
I have been Strollerderbying much less of late, given my preoccupation with the novel and a couple of other freelance things, but I am hoping to put some more long-form essays out there in the future.
Really brilliant piece. I'm so glad I came across it. It's so good - reaffirming, hopeful - to know there are such lovely families out there making the most of real life. xo
Posted by: Sarah | 09 September 2009 at 12:44 PM
Well, once more our lives seem to have some common elements.
My partner and I have just come to the realization that raising our multiracial adopted daughter (of two gay dads) in rural PA is just not going to cut it. As beautiful as our home in the mountains is, as wonderful as it is to have a 2000 sq foot organic garden that we cook and can from each weekend, there is just no one who "looks" like us around. We'll be closing on a lovely condo in Shaker Square in Cleveland, an urban neighborhood in an excellent school district that is racially and economically mixed.
For us, this means being together again as I work weekly on Long Island leaving my partner in PA to handle our daughter and homestead. By considerably scaling down, we will barely need to find much work and we can again be a family. For the first two and a half years of our daughter's life, we did everything together and the last year of weekly absences has been too much for me to handle. When we were going through the adoption processes, we promised ourselves not to emulate the "absent dad" syndromes we both had had, and we found it time to live up to that promise to ourselves.
Hard to transition from a place that we transformed over the last ten years, but the mourning needs to be done and then the move needs to take place.
Thanks for sharing of your lives and hearts.
Posted by: AJW | 10 September 2009 at 05:31 PM