Peter's Cross Station

Behave!

I blogged about this at Strollerderby and I mentioned it on Facebook, but I have more to say about it.

These lesbians and lesbian exes and ex-lesbians and what-have-you are getting me down today.  The story is: Once upon a time two women fell in love and got together in Seattle.  There they settled down, feathered a nest and each gave birth to a baby, each of whom was adopted, in turn by the nonbiological second mom.  Happy-happy, joy-joy.

Then the family moved to Florida and all hell broke loose.  Moms split up, agreeing to coparent amicably, until Mom A falls in love with a fundamentalist Christian man, gets engaged, repudiates her lesbo history and refuses to let Mom B have any more visitation with Mom A's bio child.

Mom B sues for custody (of her nonbio, but fully legally adopted child) and the court overturns the adoption (made in another state, mind you) on the grounds that Florida doesn't grant adoption to gay people.  Mom B appeals and the appeals court rules in her favor, saying Florida, whether it grants gay adoptions or not, must recognize adoptions made in other states under the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Now, Mom A has appealed to the Florida Supreme Court (no word on whether they are taking the case yet).

Here are some points:

1.  If Florida upholds its right to willy-nilly reverse adoptions made in other states, um, whoa, Bessie!  What does that mean for any adoptive family, not just queer ones?  You may think that you are safe because Florida doesn't ban you from adopting at the moment, but this kind of precedent sure opens a can of worms to allow Florida to decide it doesn't like you either and will dissolve your relationship to your child while on vacation at Disney.  Florida, by all accounts is Crazy State.  You never know what it's going to do next.

2.  Mom A is a jerk, obviously.  But not just because she is keeping her bio kid from its (don't know the genders here) second mom.  She is, one must assume, also repudiating her own parenthood of Mom B's bio kid, in spite of having adopted the kid legally in Washington.  Now that's major jerkness, right there.

3.  We need federal laws governing this stuff, not state ones.  I know that's a long shot, but if states are going to go ignoring the full faith and credit clause, and if the U.S. Congress is going to support them in that with laws like the DOMA, which allows marriages to be dissolved when crossing state lines (also in glaring contradiction to full faith and credit, among other things), then states need to simmer down and let the feds take over family law in these broad areas of marriage and adoption.  You can't just dissolve legal familial bonds when a family arrives in your state.  That is dangerous on a zillion levels.  Certainly, most clearly in the case of a child whose parent can just renounce her responsibility to provide for and nurture that child as a parent who took on these responsibilities legally--and for life--in another state.

4.  I have been reading all this adoption stuff (new books from conference) about the various ways that a loss as devastating as an entire family will mess with the developmental tasks at every stage of a child's life.  Whether adopted at birth or after five years of foster care, kids still sustain a loss at the outset of adoption that adds challenges to growing up healthy, happy and whole.  It can be done of course, I'm not suggesting otherwise.  I'm simply saying that it adds challenges and makes life more difficult.  Why any parent in her right mind would create this situation for a child by taking that child from a (perfectly healthy, non-abusive) second parent is beyond me.  Why orchestrate a loss for your child when you could have prevented it?

I know, people are nutso when they break up.  Ex-gay fundie converts even more so, I am sure.  Much as I wish it were not true, lesbians are just normal human beings like everyone else and no better behaved in a breakup than straight, legally married people who might just as readily swipe the kids if it were so easily done, given no legal protection for the ex's relationship with them.

And because lesbians (and gay men and you know, everyone) are human, we need laws to protect our children when breakups happen.  I know some people pull off voluntary coparenting with integrity.  But some don't.  And some really, really don't.  So we need a blanket of second-parent adoption that covers all children and protects their connections to their parents.

In fact, I think de facto parents should have legal standing, whether adoptive or not.  They should have automatic rights to visitation unless a court decides it is not in the child's best interest.  Overall, I am tired of this stuff being put under the heading of "gay rights" because it is really about children's rights.  Kids don't get to choose who their parents are.  Like it or not, queers have been having children from time immemorial and will continue to do so.  Protect those kids not by prohibiting them from having legal ties to their parents, but by mandating their parents support them and give them access to all other parents, whether they are born again or not.

Really, what kid would Jesus abandon?

Same-sex marriage would help--if the moms had married in this particular case--by providing same-sex divorce and thus putting the visitation and custody stuff in the hands of a court.  But plenty of straight people don't bother/have their reasons not to marry the second parent of their child (biological and otherwise--look at Brangelina), so marriage really isn't the issue here.  The issue is kids' rights to their parents--as defined by the kids.  Children will develop connections to people whether the adults in their lives necessarily want them to or not.  Step-parents, boyfriends, grandmothers who babysit every day--kids will define their primary caregivers in ways we might not.  Those relationships deserve at least a glance by a court before being severed at the whim of one legal parent.

Meanwhile, this case is simple enough--the adoption was actually legal.  Mom A needs to present her bio kid for visitation with Mom B and cut a check for her share of Mom B's bio kid's support.  Case closed.

In the court of Shannon...

People Are So Weird

Need to vent a little here in personal space.  So I wrote this thing (you might have seen it) at Strollerderby about questioning the appropriateness of pirates as a theme of children's play.  Mainly, it was supposed to be kind of funny, like "huh, yeah, never thought about it, but how DO you explain a plank to a 3-year old?"  (I told my kids their Little People Pirate Ship plank was a diving board.)

Anyhow, now a few commenters are convinced my children are micro-managed and having their creativity and learning opportunities cramped debilitatingly.

It really never ceases to amaze me how much assumption people can load onto the smallest pieces of information.  In another recent post, a woman said she was terribly worried about the children of anyone claiming to love their spouse more than said children and accused such people of having a sick "codependent" relationship.  You know, just in general.  Without knowing anything more than a silly comment on a blog about "love" which can interpreted in about a thousand different ways by a thousand different people.

For the record, my kids own about 300 books, buckets of blocks, a basket full of dress-up clothes (some girlie, some decidedly NOT girlie), baskets of dolls and stuffed animals, tea sets and play food, cars, trucks (and yes, even a pirate ship), a dollhouse and tons of furniture and dollhouse people, a miniature piano that has two and a half octaves of real keys, several drums and bells and other rhythm instruments, a real ukulele, blankets they use to build forts, a closet full of art supplies, more balls than I can count, scooters, tricycles, and yes, even videos (gasp!).  Plus more free-play time than any kids their age I know.

I hardly think I'm cramping their style by thinking twice about certain toys or books or videos. I mean, ALL parents choose what they let their kids play with to at least some extent, right?  (If they don't what's up with that?) My kids are still too little for peer influences, so I'm not exactly fighting them over their true passions.  They don't even know pirates exist (in spite of the Little People).  They don't miss them any more than they miss Hannah Montana, whom I sincerely hope they never discover (yeah, yeah, wishful thinking, I know).

Sheesh.

Blog Reader Appreciation Day

 Happy Blog Reader Appreciation Day!

I hardly deserve a single remaining reader, as negligent as I've been of this blog since I started the Strollerderby gig.  And don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the job and the chance to make some money doing something I kind of do anyway, but I do miss the self-selecting nature of personal blog readers here at Peter's Cross Station.

Thanks too, for being so supportive of my work over there.  I truly appreciate it.

As both an appreciative gesture for readers and a pay-it-forward gesture based on having received gifts and hand-me-downs from readers, I'd like to give some stuff away.

I have three Foogo sippy cups that my kids have outgrown.  They are a little faded around the edges, but really, they are quite durable and should last twenty more years.  Mostly.  Selina chewed up the spouts, so you'll have to get some replacements for those, which you can get here.  So it isn't like a bright and shiny new thing, but given that these cups are $15 new and last forever, it's not a terrible deal.  If you'd like to be in a drawing to receive them, leave a comment below noting so, and I'll do a random draw and send them to the winner.

If you don't need or want any sippy cups, leave a comment below and note that you'd like $40 of credit at my jewelry site and I'll do a separate random draw for that.

You can be in both drawings if you like, but if the same person happens to win both, I'll redraw so two different people will get something.

Sorry I can't give everybody a car.  But really, I do truly appreciate you!

A Conversation Worth Having

When I was in high school and college I was subject to a gazillion courses in bioethics.  At the time, IVF was newish, egg donation was mostly theoretical, right-to-die folks were just starting to get noisy, the human genome was only just beginning to be mapped, etc.  I spent countless hours in discussions with far more conservative peers, arguing mostly for a great deal of freedom for the uses of new medical technologies and research (including research using human embryos).

So imagine my surprise when my recent post at Strollerderby about a new for-profit offering at a fertility clinic, allowing parents to use PGD to determine a child's hair and eye color, was met with a big shrug.  Most commenters seemed to feel that hey, it's a free market.  And of course, IVF being a massive undertaking--only done by the medically in need, at great pain and suffering and expense--this procedure isn't going to be sought by many and thus will have very little impact on society.

Well of course.  This procedure.  At this moment.  But that doesn't mean we should just accept it and move on.  The fact that huge expense goes into developing something so--frankly--stupid as hair and eye color selection and it is offered in a free market to medical consumers is a travesty in my opinion.  No it won't impact the gene pool (which fact plenty of people don't seem to understand and is another problem with the lack of discussion) and no, banning it won't automatically cause money to spent elsewhere.

But unlike Barack Obama, I'm a socialist--at least about a great many things.  And it seems more than obvious to me that a free market approach to medicine has failed miserably in the United States.  It's time to pull in the reins on the race to the ethical bottom (octuplets, anyone?) and the excessive gap between rich and poor people's access to medicine.  Taking a good look at high-cost fertility treatment that forces people to mortgage their homes for a 5% shot at having a baby seems reasonable to me, when we re-evaluate how our society allocates spending.

And I am not talking about banning fertility treatment.  It seems like in some corners, if you say "regulate" and "fertility treatment" anywhere within 100 words of each other, people jump to assume they will no longer be allowed to do those high-end procedures.  I am hardly suggesting that.  In fact, I think that any public health coverage should include fertility treatment--including IVF, including PGD when medically called for--which is considerably more than most private insurance plans do for us now.  But if we are going to provide fertility coverage to everyone, we are going to need to make the expenses reasonable.  Why not include in any new health plan, caps on pricing for treatments and drugs like many countries have now?  Why not put a maximum on the profit a doctor can make with this stuff?  How could regulating that kind of thing not help infertile people who need the treatment?

Look, I'm not interested in ever getting pregnant myself.  But I'm happy to pony up some percentage of my tax money so that you folks who are interested and need help with it can get that help even if you aren't rich, without going into monumental debt.  But I'm not paying so some fool doctor in LA can line his pockets with cash from people who know no better than to think it's a good idea to custom order a baby by looks.  And I'd like to see the incentives to a doctor to offer that sort of thing drastically reduced--by, for example, making it illegal to charge anything extra for that kind of service.  That would also reduce the R&D incentives to go finding those genes in the first place.  The market is not a force of nature.  Plenty of people outside the United States know this.  It is time U.S. Americans realized it and started taking some responsibility for where the market goes next.

Let's focus on curing cancer, not filling the prep schools of tomorrow with customized kids.

Shannon On Suleman: Round Two

Again, at Strollerderby.

Books on African American History for Kids

I am doing a little book reviewing for Strollerderby for Black History Month.  Some of these are books I've mentioned before on this blog, but a couple are new.  I'll keep you posted when I publish part two with elementary-level books.

From Babble

This is not as deep and thoughtful an issue or discussion, but my latest post at Strollerderby is adoption-related, in case anyone is interested.  And Body Mass Index, which, interestingly enough, also came up at Dawn's recently.

Online At Last

I think this year's sentence will be "The family moved twice in three months and five days after the second move, hosted 17 people for Thanksgiving at which Shannon roasted 17 stuffed Cornish hens."  But I never decide until the year is completely over.  Because you never know, we could adopt triplets before Christmas.

Probably not, though.

The hens were a hit, and really, it was as stress-free as these things can realistically be.  I made a little flow chart of the work involved in the meal and did everything ahead of time one step at a time over about 72 hours so that all I really had to do was pop the birds in the oven and braise the greens an hour before sit-down and we were good to go.  I also had a couple of willing and charming sous-chefs along the way.  No one makes a better sommelier than a gay godfather and we had two on hand.  Unfortunately, Mama Fern had to work, but we're having a private do-over with her this Sunday.

The new place is fantabulous.  Really.  Words fall pathetically short of describing my joy at being here.  Perfect location, perfect space, perfect neighbors, just plain lovely.  The master bedroom is obscenely huge, so I have a plan for adding a fourth bedroom, should those triplets arrive on the doorstep.

Yes, I can't shake the idea that I want more babies, even as the babies I have are becoming more and more overwhelming in their demands.  I suppose it comes of Selina being 18 months old this Saturday and not really my baby anymore.  At this point in Nat's life, we had been on the waiting list for number two for six months or so already.  And this time, our foster license has expired and our home study is returning to dust.  I guess we're done unless Rose or Fern needs us again or until Selina is a good bit older and we start looking into toddler adoption.  There's a big part of me that wants 3, or 4 or 5 kids.  Other parts of me shake me, while screaming "have you lost your tiny mind???" and slap me to snap out of it.

You can't always get (everything) you want.  Because there are also things I want that sort of require having fewer than three children--like some modicum of personal freedom before I'm fifty.  Plus, I love this place we just moved to, as I have said, and there may be room for one more, but even that would be a squeeze.  There's certainly not room for more than one more and I don't want to move again until Cole retires.

Meanwhile, Selina calls her Pooh Bear, "Bear Pooh."  Or "Bear, Pooh."  Or "Bear: Pooh."  I'm not sure which it is, but it so cute it makes me break out in hives.

Cole has been going hither and yon to teach on the prairie and return to us for long weekends (though more recently she was here for the long holiday) and it is going pretty well.  I have 5 days per week of afternoon baby sitting split between two marvelous sitters, both more or less overqualified to baby sit, but happy to do it nonetheless.  One is C and one is J.  C, among other accomplishments has Head Start teaching experience and an MSW, J has no degrees, but a year's nannying experience for a baby and a half-dozen younger siblings he was often responsible for.  His life's aspiration is to be a SAHD and I have to say it would suit him perfectly.

I have been working in cafes which can be okay, as long as I don't end up spending whatever meager amount I've mede in three hours on tea and scones, which can be a challenge.  I may work at home a bit more when the wireless is up and running, but over the winter the kids will be staying at home more for baby sitting and Nat is not of a mind to leave me alone if she knows I am in the building, so I will probably continue my hunt for the perfect Internet cafe as the weather worsens over the next few months.  I tried a new place this week and it is a great candidate--cheap, laid-back, free wireless with no password required, not too busy so if I sit there for hours I don't feel like I'm taking the space of a paying customer.  The only problem is that on my first (and so far, only) visit there, I set the toaster on fire.  It was a toast-it-yourself bagel operation and the butter that dripped from my bagel was the camel's last straw in the bottom of a crumb-filled toaster oven and the flames leapt wildly.  I unplugged the thing and called the sole worker's attention to it.  She left some customers hanging at the counter, came over, opened the oven door and started blowing at the fire, which of course, only made it burn stronger.  "Close the door and it'll burn itself out" I shouted, "but there's air in there!" she shouted back, as the smoke alarm began to wail.  "Now there is" I thought to myself, as the flames finally slowed and stopped.

"Ah, there" said the cafe employee-of-all-work, "do you want a new bagel?"  But it was just charred slightly on one side, so I said no thanks and went back to work.

I bet you ten dollars they have A) not replaced that toaster and B) not even cleaned that toaster and I'm afraid to go back, because I don't like raw bagels!

See you all at Strollerderby.

Long Time no Write

Sorry to be so quiet over here!

News Round Up:

- We close on the new place, Friday and the movers come as soon as we get the key. Everybody is very excited. I told Nat she'd get her own (well, shared with Selina) bathroom in our new house and she said, "with soap?!" I told her, sure, she could have soap in her bathroom. Since then she's been telling people that in her new house, she will have soap. make of that what you will.

- A visit from my BFF and her nursing toddler made a HUGE impression on Nat. Now she carries her little stuffed dog around under her shirt, telling anyone who'll listen that she's feeding the dog milk from her body, which comes out of her nipples.

- Many human reproduction conversations before and following the nursing mom visit. We've been fleshing out a few more details of Nat's (and Selina's) birth and adoption stories. I picked up a copy of It's Not the Stork and brought it home for her. She read the cover thusly:

Nat: It's not the st--st--what's that?
Shannon: "stork" it's this white bird (pointing to picture on the cover)
Nat: Stork. A book about girls, boys, babies, b--b--babies?
Shannon: "bodies" see the o and the d? "bodies."
Nat: bodies. families, and friends

The thing is, I don't really ask Nat to read much, so I don't quite keep up with exactly what she can read and so every time she reads something like that, I get all shocked and impressed. Mostly, she'd still prefer to be read to, to recite a book from memory (a big favorite she knows perfectly by heart is The Gruffalo) or to pretend to read, by telling a story while turning pages. So I let her do whatever she wants in the reading department, seeing as I'd estimate that she is reading roughly at a mid-year kindergarten level at age 3.5 with no particular "pushing."

As for the contents of the book, so far the thing that interests her most is the picture of a little girl pulling another little girl's hair. She's very concerned about the whole scenario. Why did she pull her hair? Why did she say "yeow!?" Why did she say sorry? No doubt this is right out of a growing big sister psyche.

- Selina is blossoming intellectually herself. She is just as interested in letters as Nat was at her age. Nat reads books to Selina now and then and that makes more of an impression than anything else ever could. Selina is still Nat's biggest fan.

Selin'a hair is now officially as long as Nat's. Her curls are looser and softer. In four poofs it's comically adorable. Not sure what we'll end up doing with it in the long-run. I think I'm just going to have to comb it every day when she's older. Right now she HATES a comb touching her head under any and all circumstances. She tosses her head violently side-to-side, Snoopy-dance-style and screams at the top of her lungs if she just sees the comb in my hand. I have found that four braids will last about three days without looking horrible, so I've mostly been doing that to minimize hair styling time.

- Speaking of hair, here's a short answer to recent requests for tips on styling toddler/preschooler hair:

With Nat, she has become more and more willing to sit and let me work on her hair as she has gotten older. When she was Selina's age, I used to do her hair on the run, following her around as she tried to run away from me. I often made parts while walking and bending over her little head. They weren't perfect, but they were adequate. These days (since she was about 2 and a half) I plop her in her high chair (buckled in!) let her choose a video and sometimes a snack and get to work. She is usually reasonably cooperative for about 45 minutes. It usually takes about one hour to an hour and a half to get finished. When she causes me too much trouble--complaining, jerking er head around or whatever--I turn off the video, leave her view and ask her to let me know when she's ready to finish. When she's ready, I turn the video back on and get back to work.

This gets the job done and Nat's hair styles tend to last between 7-12 days, so we don't have to revisit it daily.

When we finish hair, I make a big, gushing deal out of how gorgeous it is and we visit the mirror together to admire it. Nat likes to put butterfly clips and things in her hair, and that helps encourage and bribe her during the process, but she also pulls the butterflies out and fiddles with them until they break, so I actually don't let her put them in very often.

When Nat was little, many Black mothers, grandmothers, aunties and baby sitters told me to do her hair while she was asleep. If you want to, go for it! I didn't want to waste precious nap time doing hair! But considering how much more violently Selina objects to hair care, I suppose there are kids out there whose hair just wouldn't get done any other way. And it does have to get done. That's non-negotiable. That's another aspect of teaching my kids to put up with it--the idea that it just has to be done, like we have to put on our seat belts in the car.

- Why I like white male baby sitters:

I like white male baby sitters, because there are no white males in our immediate family (though we've got uncles and grandfathers and all that) and I love that what my girls are learning about the species is that it is a species of caregiving, nurturing, child-centered kindness. That's not really the dominant idea of what white men are. But it's what I want my girls-and the women they grow into--to expect from the white men they meet in life. I want them to be shocked and horrified when they encounter anything less and to hold those people accountable to humane expectations.

- How Strollerderby is going:

It's going pretty well. Its nice to have this job, because it's an all new type of writing for me to learn and an all new audience (well, a mixed audience, some new, some I'm used to) to learn to write to. It's a good exercise in maintaining my own voice in different kinds of contexts. Here's what I think might interest my readers here the most lately:

The Trouble with Safe Haven Laws: Some Thoughts for National Adoption Month

As always, see my bio page for my most recent writing.

Again with the trolls...

So ya'll, I breached this topic over at Strollerderby and you might wanna head over and check out some of the comments about how it's hateful to be upset that Prop 8 passed, or to protest about it.