BY CHERYL DUMESNIL

I’ve stomped into the kitchen to tell my wife Tracie this: “Guess what I just found out? One of the requirements for chaperoning B-man’s overnight field trip is that you have to own a car that can seat four children. How is that fair? Just because I choose not to drive a gas-guzzling SUV I can’t chaperone the trip? I mean… ”

But before I can list all the reasons that I would be an awesome chaperone, and how they are totally missing out on my chaperoning awesomeness because of their ridiculous policy, T cuts me off: “Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

I slam the brakes on my monologue, squealing to a stop at a conversation crossroads we’ve come to many times in our thirteen-year relationship.

I would call this junction “Tracie’s Utter Disregard for my Feelings.”

Tracie would probably call it “Derailing Cheryl’s Neuroses-Fueled Diatribe.”

Whatever.

At this intersection, I have several options:

1) Get sarcastic: “Guess who skipped the ‘Compassionate Listening’ chapter in the Lesbian Relationship Playbook?”

2) Formulate a therapist-approved ‘I statement,’ like “I hate it when you do that.”

3) Pick up the shattered pieces of the conversation and continue: “Anyway, as I was saying . . . ”

Of course, option three begs the question, “What was I saying?” which brings me to the option proven least likely to drive us into an argument:

4) Pause and reflect.

As I was saying: I’m pissed that I’ve been disqualified as a chaperone for our eight-year-old son’s first overnight field trip.

And, yes, I realize that “I’m pissed” is a thin cover for “I’m scared.” As in: I am terrified by the thought of sending our first born on a 150-mile road trip with his class, during which he will 1) ride in the car of a parent with a questionable driving record (not really—the school administration checks these things out first), 2) take a treacherous pontoon boat cruise through an ocean inlet teeming with testosterone-amped, territorial harbor seals (also not true—I’ve been on this cruise before; it’s perfectly safe), 3) spend the night in a hotel room filled with strangers (a.k.a. classmates and parents he’s known for three years), 4) hike barefoot in a bacteria-filled marshland swarming with flesh-sucking leeches (except he’ll be wearing shoes, they won’t go in the water, and nope, no leeches), and 5) if we’re lucky, he’ll return to his school, traumatized by the fact that neither of his mothers had been there to tend to his every need for a full 36 hours. If. We. Are. Lucky.

And, as usual, once these thoughts have washed through the spin cycle of my brain, I find myself pissed about something else: Tracie is (sort of) right. I mean, the tone of her statement sucked big (we will talk about this later), but the content was annoyingly accurate: instead of continuing to draft my editorial for the Soapbox Herald, I need to un-bunch the fear behind it.

Being of the genus parentus overprotectus, subtype sapphic variety, I’ve met this fear a least half a zillion times. Like the vast majority of PO/SVs, I worked hard to become a parent. Not just the meticulous fertility charting, the needle-in-haystack search for the perfect donor, and the near-obsessive (okay, yes, totally, completely, and mind-fryingly obsessive) insemination planning, but also the three miscarriages I suffered before our two beloved children came along.

Once those kiddos finally, seemingly miraculously arrived, I had an overwhelming urge to fit them with helmets, safety goggles, and padded, fire-proof coveralls, then tether them to my body using a wire that, if in anyway compromised, would trigger an ear-splitting alarm, just to be sure that I didn’t, you know, lose them somewhere.

For me, each “letting go” step of parenthood has been fraught with a certain, well, PANIC!

Case in point: our eldest child’s first day of school. Not unlike my peers gathered on the school yard, I shed a few tears as B-man crossed the threshold into his classroom. Unlike most of my peers, I then walked to my car, slumped over the steering wheel, and sobbed for a full half hour. I proceeded to reenact this scene for about ten days, during which period the tears were not confined merely to drop-off time. My eyes welled up multiple times throughout B-man’s five-hour-and-twenty-minute school day, always accompanied by this thought: I worked so hard to get him here; how can I possibly let him go?

When I mentioned this phenomenon to my therapist (yes, rest assured, I had one), she suggested that given my history of pregnancy loss, those inevitable letting go moments would be hard for me.

Ya think?

In the years since, I have learned not to trust the PANIC! response, but instead to read it as a sign that this mom needs to be gentle with herself and fair to her children as they move through their character-building rites of passage, like a first overnight field trip.

It would not be fair to B-man for me to insist that he needs me on that trip. He doesn’t. He will be well cared-for by his teachers and the carefully-selected (gas guzzling, SUV-driving) parent chaperones whom I have come to know, trust, and love. I can rest assured that B-man is perfectly capable of advocating for himself when he needs to, and experience has taught me that coping with discomfort helps him build his confidence.

In other words, as anxiety-inducing as it can be, I know that my letting go allows my kids to grow.

In fact, if I can get these panties out of their bunch in time, maybe I can send B-man off with a smile and a wave, expressing my enthusiasm for all he’s going to learn. Who knows? Maybe I can even wait until the SUV pulls away, before I slump over my steering wheel and sob.

Follow Cheryl on Twitter @lovesong4babyx and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LoveSongforBabyX

Poet, writer, activist and educator, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood.” She spends her free time jumping on a trampoline and telling potty jokes, because the sound of her kids’ laughter makes her really, really happy.

The post Confessions of an overprotective lesbian parent first appeared on Lesbian.com.

K-bird and B-man

BY CHERYL DUMESNIL
Lesbian.com

“Ex-fart-me!” my six-year-old son K-bird crows, after ripping a loud one at the dinner table.

I pound my head into my open palms, an only slightly exaggerated gesture for the level of defeat I feel every day, as I attack the Sisyphean task of teaching my two kids “good manners.”

“Dude,” I say, “not while we’re eating. Ever.” Amongst my ever-diminishing rules for politeness, this one holds firm: no potty talk at the table. Period.

“Why?” K-bird asks, for the fifty millionth time.

“Because I lose my appetite when people do gross stuff at the table.” This is true — I have what one might call a ‘suggestible stomach.’ Talk about puking for long enough, I’ll likely need to hurl. “And,” I add, “because it’s bad manners.”

“But it’s funny,” K-bird insists.

“Sometimes,” I say. “But not at the table.”

Across from us B-man, my eight-year-old son, listens to our conversation with a sly smile skewing his face. I’ve noticed my boys doing this lately — one jumps into the fray with me, while the other sits back to see what will happen.

B-man, whom I have dubbed “the boy from planet alphabet,” loves anything having to do with words. Letters, definitions, idioms, rhymes, homonyms, synonyms, slang — all of it fascinates him. Lately he’s taken a special interest in “bad words.” Thanks to a kid in his second grade class, he knows the F word. Thanks to my reaction to a recent kitchen-flooding dishwasher malfunction, he knows the S word. Thanks to his precocious reading skills and uncanny ability to enter my office stealthily and peek at my computer screen when I’m lost in thought, he knows I use “bad words” when I write.

Crap.

Like that.

Not to mention that last summer when my kids hijacked my car stereo and started force feeding me near-lethal doses of pop music, I survived my quadrillionth exposure to the song “Payphone” by changing every other word to “butt,” “fart,” “booger,” or “diarrhea.”

In the backseat, the guys laughed themselves into side-aching, hiccupping, red-faced oblivion.

Since then “Potty Song” has become my go-to game, unfailingly effective for distracting antsy kids when we’re stuck in traffic.

So I can’t exactly tell my guys that certain words are unusable. (Except the word “turd” — I hate that word.) But I do want them to understand that words have power.

For instance, a little potty talk, carefully crafted and expertly delivered, has the power to make your buddy snort milk out his or her nose. Too much potty talk, however, has the power to get you blacklisted on the play date circuit. So, you know, consider that before you open your mouth at your friend’s house.

What’s important to me is not that my kiddos become perfect little gentlemen (whatever that means), but that they learn to think before they speak. Potty talk is the perfect training ground for honing this frighteningly uncommon skill.

Hence the second rule that holds firm in my never-ending quest to instill at least some manners in my children: if you want to make a potty joke, you have to ask first.

This second rule gets followed about as often as the first one. But at least I keep trying, right?

Now if you will excuse me, please, I must return to pushing this heavy fuckin’ boulder up that goddamned hill.

Poet, writer, activist, and educator, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood.” She spends her free time jumping on a trampoline and telling potty jokes, because the sound of her kids’ laughter makes her really, really happy.

The post Sorry for potty talkin’ first appeared on Lesbian.com.

On a weekend away in the mountains, my wife Tracie, my friend LaDonna, and I were sitting in the kitchen, quietly eating breakfast, when LaDonna’s seventeen-year-old nephew, seemingly out of nowhere, bounded into the room like a gazelle leaping a ten-foot fence. LaDonna gasped and slapped her hand to her heart, while Tracie and I continued sipping our coffee as though nothing had happened.

I looked up at LaDonna.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “He’s always startling me.” The nephew had been staying with LaDonna and her wife Gabby for the past few months, and along the way LaDonna had been telling me what it’s like to have a teenaged boy in the house: the quantities of food consumed, the loud music, the hours and hours spent on computer games, the general bigness of it all.

“That?” I asked.

Tracie chuckled.

“That’s just boy stuff,” I said.

Tracie nodded.

“Really?” LaDonna asked.

“Did you notice that we didn’t even blink when he did that?” I asked.

“Maybe you’re just not used to it,” Tracie suggested.

Prior to their nephew’s arrival, LaDonna and Gabby had raised LaDonna’s daughter, who now lives on her own. They have no precedent for living with boyness. Tracie and I, on the other hand, are raising two sons, currently ages six and eight. And while they are nowhere near their teen years, our kids’ bigness and their boyness get bigger and boy-er every day.

Before I became a mom of two boys, I whole-heartedly rejected the notion that boys and girls are inherently different. After observing my children amongst their peers, however, I cannot deny that most (not all) boys operate differently than most (not all) girls.

Some typical aspects of boyness I have learned to live with, like the exuberant physical energy, the loudness, the potty talk, the obsession with certain body parts. Other typical aspects I refuse to accept, namely the utter lack of self-awareness and the baffling tendency toward aggression.

For Tracie and me, a pervasive question looms under our parenthood: How can we make space for our boys to express their boyness while helping them become emotionally savvy, peaceful men?

Yeah, I have no idea either, but I think our youngest son might have turned me on to something while we were baking Christmas cookies the other day.

As a surprise for the boys, I had added to our cookie cutter collection a set of three “Ninjabread Men,” gingerbread man figures shaped into martial arts stances. I bought them because our kids have been taking martial arts classes for the past two years, and I wanted to reinforce their extracurricular activity with, well, with sugar.

But as the six-year-old and I were laying the cut dough onto the baking sheet, I flashed on this potential scene: my two boys using our baked-with-love cookies to act out a Jackie-Chan-caliber death scene. You know: “Fa-la-la-la-laaaaaaaaah. Cough. Cough. Wheeeeeeeeze . . . ” Not exactly the brand of holiday joy I was hoping to inspire that particular Saturday morning.

So I pointed to the ninjas on the tray, performing their flying kicks over the Christmas trees and the stars and the candy canes, and I said, “See these guys?”

“Yeah,” my kiddo confirmed.

“They’re the helpers.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “They help keep the peace.”

“Right,” I said. “So what should we call them?”

Little guy thought for a minute then said, “They’re the Peace Helpers.”

“I like that,” I said.

And I do. A lot.

So for the past few days, we’ve been talking about Peace Helpers — who they are, what they do, and how they do it. We’ve talked about Peace Helpers we know — adults and kids who have helped us feel confident, powerful, and safe. We’ve talked about how we can be Peace Helpers ourselves, by understanding our own feelings, by expressing ourselves in ways that don’t hurt others, by taking responsibility for our actions, by standing up for others and by helping others feel good about themselves. And we’ve talked about how being a Peace Helper doesn’t mean you’re a perfect person (after all, even Mommy and Mama lose their cool sometimes). Being a Peace Helper means that, even though you make mistakes sometimes, most of the time you’re trying to do the right thing.

I’m not sure how far the Peace Helpers idea will take us on the road to raising self-aware, emotionally responsible adults. But it’s a start.

Meanwhile, I’m pleased to report that when the inevitable cookie battle erupted at the kitchen table, those Ninjabread Men aka Peace Helpers used their powers to save the world.

You’re welcome.

Poet, writer, activist, and educator, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood.” She spends her free time jumping on a trampoline and telling potty jokes, because the sound of her kids’ laughter makes her really, really happy.

The post The ninjabread men and the peace helpers first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Waiting for the Supreme Court of the United States to issue a decision on California’s Proposition 8 can feel like waiting for your alcoholic ex-girlfriend, who also happens to be a pathological liar, to pay back the money she borrowed from you so she could rent a truck to move her crap out of your basement. She can say she’s going to pay you back, but you’ve heard it all before.

Okay, I’ve never actually had an alcoholic, pathological liar ex-girlfriend, and I don’t have a basement, but let’s just say that one of my Netflix sub-categories could be “romantic tragedy with a codependent twist.” So I’ve seen a lot of love-gone-wrong movies, and I’ve spent the past four years watching Prop 8 wind its way through the court system. Let me tell you, the parallels are uncanny.

First, you don’t hear from the court for months. Then, when they resurface, you find out about it from a third party. Gossip circles form, analyzing what exactly the court will do when they finally speak to you. Rumors fly about a particular event where you might actually run into each other, and though at first you don’t believe the rumors, so many people who really know the court well swear that this event is the real deal. So you soften your defenses a little and note the date on your calendar.

Because the rumors persist, before you know it, though you swore you would never do this again, you start to believe them. You dust off your “Love Is Love” demonstration sign, you move the champagne from the garage to the fridge; you charge the camera batteries, just in case. And despite the committee of inner voices chattering about your naiveté and all those past disappointments, you let hope spread her wings.

And then: nothing. The court stands you up. Again. You feel like an idiot. Or at least I do.

I can’t believe I bought into that whole “on November 30th, the Supreme Court of the United States will decide what to do about Proposition 8” thing. From what I read on Facebook, it looks like hoards of other hopeful folks bought into it too. Again. Damn it.

Now, instead of unleashing my traditional diatribe on the inhumanity of the legal system, and before I get caught up in the inevitable next round of “big news coming soon” hype, I want to take a moment here to write a note to my future self, a sort of “break glass in case of emergency” list of truths to remember when the next wave of “coming soon” excitement swells. (I saw this in a love-gone-wrong movie once. It seemed to work.) Here goes:

Truth #1: No one knows what will happen.

Truth #2: No one knows when it will happen.

Truth #3: The human brain hates not knowing, so it will work overtime to fill the information void.

Truth #4: The myriad SCOTUS / Prop 8 analyses fluttering into your inbox and popping up on your favorite websites are a byproduct of Truth #3.

Truth #5: Waiting sucks.

Truth #6: What is going to happen at SCOTUS is going to happen, whether you obsess over it or not.

Truth #7: You don’t have to wait.

Truth #8: No, Truth #7 does not mean that I have some SCOTUS insider information that I can share with you right now.

Truth #9: What I mean by Truth #7 is this: instead of getting distracted by thoughts about the future (a.k.a. “waiting”), you can shift your attention to the present moment.

Truth #10: While you have been typing this list, your six-year-old son has been climbing on your lap, hugging you, massaging your shoulders, and “blessing your heart” with a piece of rose quartz.

Truth #11: More often than not, the present moment is rad like that: all it wants is your full attention, and in return it gives you abundant love.

Truth #12: Reveling in the present moment is way better than waiting for your alcoholic, pathological liar ex-girlfriend to repay her debt, or for the United States Supreme Court to restore your rights.

Truth #13: If you’re still reading this, go back to Truths #7-12.

Poet, writer, activist, and educator, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood.” She spends her free time jumping on a trampoline and telling potty jokes, because the sound of her kids’ laughter makes her really, really happy.

The post The truth about waiting first appeared on Lesbian.com.

This morning I woke to the kind of burning tension in my neck that signals a migraine on the horizon. Crap. I have three defenses against migraines: Go back to sleep, down four ibuprofen tablets or drink a glass of wine. It’s 7:30 a.m, and in an hour my friend will be dropping off his two kids for a day-long play date with my two kids, so going back to sleep is not an option. I don’t really want to add “remember when Mom drank wine for breakfast?” to my sons’ list of childhood reminiscences, so the chardonnay’s out, too. In the end I get out of bed and swallow the magic orange pills, hoping that their chemicals will reach my brain before the migraine kicks in.

When I emerge from the sleepy cave of my bedroom into the kitchen, my family’s morning activities are in full swing: coffee pot gurgling, children arguing about who gets to watch what video, emergency requests for toast and Cheerios stat.

Over the course of the next half-hour, I snap at my 8-year-old son, B-man, for “talking back” (one of the things I swore I’d never say); I warn my 6-year-old son, K-Bird, that “today is a do-it-the-first-time-I-ask day”; and it is suggested to me, via a knowing glance from my wife, Tracie, that this is not just a migraine-on-the-horizon day but a PMS day. Double crap.

What I need: a quiet day of few demands. What I will have: Lord. Of. The. Flies.

I mean, yes, the four kids I will be hanging out with today are quirky, creative, adventurous, fun boys who truly adore each other. Alternatively, they could be described as a loud, mayhem-inducing gang who leave a tornado-worthy path of chaos in their wake. Taken individually, these children are charming, thoughtful, reasonable people, but their blended chemistry sometimes fritzes their wiring, and as a group they require constant (ideally patient) reminders to follow the most basic house rules, as well as regular (ideally peaceful) mediation to assure that their innumerable power struggles don’t escalate into World War III.

On my best day I enjoy the challenge. This is not my best day.

“Why don’t you take a few deep breaths?” Tracie asks in the tone of a cop coaxing a jumper off a ledge. “I’ll handle things out here. You go take a shower before I leave for work.”

She’s right. I disappear into our bathroom for a long, hot shower and an internal coaching session.

These coaching sessions usually consist of me running through a list of tried-and-true catchphrases that restore peace to my frazzled-mom brain. On regular days phrases like “a little chaos is a good thing” and “at least it’s happy noise” have the desired calming effect, but on this PMS-migraine, one-two-punch day I call out the big guns: “It might have been otherwise.”

Years ago I lifted this line from Jane Kenyon’s poem “Otherwise.” In it she describes a series of everyday moments, like “I got out of bed / on two strong legs” and “I ate / cereal, sweet / milk, ripe, flawless / peach,” and she follows each of these descriptions with, “It might have been otherwise.” A poem of deep appreciation, “Otherwise” reminds readers to count even their smallest blessings.

On days like today, when being the parent my kids need requires instantaneous personal growth, that one line reminds me that there was a time when I questioned whether I’d ever get to be a parent at all.

You see, for Tracie and me, parenthood was hard-won, not only because of the hoops your average lesbian has to jump through in order to conceive but because I suffered three early miscarriages before our B-man was born. In fact, I was so shell-shocked by those losses, so uncertain that I would ever get to experience a full-term pregnancy, birth and breast-feeding connection (three experiences I coveted with bone-deep longing), that when B-man finally arrived, I spent the first several weeks of his life staring into his eyes, saying, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

No matter that, for the first 10 months, he woke me once an hour to nurse: “It might have been otherwise.” No matter that it took two years for him to learn how to sleep through the night: “It might have been otherwise.” No matter that a month later K-bird was born, starting the sleep deprivation cycle all over again: “It might have been otherwise.”

No matter the situation, those five simple words can move me from aggravation to accommodation in one swift push. So today, when the crazy boys’ wild energy erupts, as it often does, into a spontaneous dance party, I will join them, headache be damned. And when their backyard antics crescendo, for the umpteenth time, into battle cries of “no fair” and “you cheated” and “did not” and “did too,” as I reach for the (ever more elusive) patience I will need to play referee, I will pause and take a long look at those healthy, thriving kiddos out there, their beet-red faces full of passion, indignance and fury, and I will remind myself, “It might have been otherwise.”

Poet, writer, activist, and educator, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood.” She spends her free time jumping on a trampoline and telling potty jokes, because the sound of her kids’ laughter makes her really, really happy.

The post On parenting, patience and PMS first appeared on Lesbian.com.

“Hey look,” I say, pointing to the HRC sticker on the bumper of the red Toyota Camry driving in the lane next to us, “there’s a gay car.”

In our two-mom family’s suburban hometown, spotting a gay car is not exactly a daily event. So when I see one, I point it out to the kids, as a way of reminding them that, despite the fact that we appear to be the only queer family at their elementary school, we’re not out here alone.

B-man, my second grader, and K-bird, my kindergartener, sit rod-straight in their car seats and peer out the window to spot the symbol.

“What’s gay?” K-bird asks.

What?! “Where’ve you been for the past five years?” sarcastic-me wants to know. We’ve gone over this like a thousand times.

But sarcastic-me is not allowed to speak to my kids. So mom-me intervenes, “Remember? Gay people are people who love someone of the same gender. Like a boy who loves a boy or a girl who loves a girl.”

“Oh yeaaaah,” K-bird says, as if rediscovering a long lost fact from his earlier years.

Big brother helps out, “You know, like Mommy and Mama love each other, so they’re called ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian.’”

“Right,” says K-bird to his brother, “and I’m gay because I love you.”

Ummmm …

Welcome to the world of parenting as improv, in which your pint-sized scene partner tosses you a line, and you scroll, high-speed, through a list of possible responses. In this case:

1. Laugh out loud. (Rarely a good idea.)
2. Make an Ernie and Bert joke. (No matter how thoroughly my Irish ancestry predisposes me to drop a perfect one-liner, this is also rarely a good idea.)
3. Stall. (Helpful, but not a final solution.)
4. Employ the “Yes, and …” tactic. (Works well in improv and parenting.)

This time I go for option number four: “Yes, you do love your brother very much. And that’s a different kind of love.”

Crap. The minute the words fall out of my mouth, I know I’ve set myself up for the next question:

“What do you mean?”

I cannot tell you how many times, in any given week, I end up in exactly this place: stuck between a grown-up concept and a kid who wants an explanation he can understand.

I mean, how do you explain the difference between family love and romantic love to a kindergartener? Aren’t they kind of too young to get it? Or is that just the ghost of my repressed Catholic past coming back to haunt me? Maybe there’s a parenting book about this somewhere? But these improv moments don’t allow time for research, and those books tend not to be written from a homo-inclusive perspective, if you know what I mean.

To further complicate things, when these big questions come up, I want to answer in a truthful way that both satisfies the kid’s quest for information and leaves room for him to develop his own ideas, all while speaking in non-scarring, child-appropriate language.

So, you know, how do you do that?

“Well, there are different kinds of love,” I begin, “like the way you guys love each other is called sibling love, and the way I love you guys is parent love, and the way I love your mama is called romantic love.”

I wait a beat, and there it is again, “What do you mean?”

Here’s where I hit the real trouble zone. All the possible responses I can think of sound both ridiculous and reductive, like I’m some updated version of a 1950s dad chucking his son on the chin, saying, Well, son, when a man and a man love each other …

So instead of concocting some lame ass speech that K-bird can ridicule me for when he’s a teenager, I go for the truth: “I don’t really know how to explain romantic love to you in a way that you can understand.”

And then I go for the stall: “I don’t think we really know yet if you’re gay or straight. If you end up falling in love with men, you’ll be gay, and if you end up falling in love with women, you’ll be straight, and if you end up falling in love with men and women, you’ll be bisexual. But no matter what, the most important thing is that you feel loved.”

To be honest, I can’t say that was a satisfying answer for either one of us, and someday teenage K-bird could well ridicule me for having said it, but if he does, I’ll remind him what he said back:

“Well, Mommy, I know I’m straight. Because I’m in love with you.”

Poet, writer, activist, and educator, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood.” She spends her free time jumping on a trampoline and telling potty jokes, because the sound of her kids’ laughter makes her really, really happy.

The post Parenting as improv first appeared on Lesbian.com.

All throughout the month of October, I was looking for it: the way autumn’s golden sunlight gilds everything from the morning dew on blades of grass, to the chain link fence around the elementary school, to the brown leaves falling out of the neighbor’s oak tree, riding the breeze like a flock of otherworldly butterflies.

Unfailingly, each year, this gold light arrives, lifting whatever caul has spread itself over my creativity, whatever veil has grayed my mood, putting me totally in love with the world I live in. In this autumn light, as in poetry, even the ugly stuff somehow reveals its hidden beauty. And though I write poems all year round, nothing charges up the urge to make metaphor, to claw through the past looking for gems, to rivet together a group of seemingly disparate images, to build a whole world out of words, like that autumn light does.

Unfailingly, each year, I walk through autumn feeling blessed — this is, after all, the season of my children’s births, the season of harvest, of giving thanks, of flame-bright endings that drag in their wake the exquisite new beginnings.

Unfailingly, each year, this gold light turns me into a relentless appreciator, calling out to anyone who will listen — the clerk in the grocery store, the parent waiting beside me on the playground for our kids to be released from school, the stranger walking past my house as I clean up the Halloween decorations: “Will you look at this light?”

But this year, October seemed different somehow. As the days grew shorter and my mornings began in darkness, I sipped my coffee, ate my toast, scuttled the kids through their getting ready for school routines, all the while stealing glances at the window. As we rode our bikes to school, the sun yet to peek over the horizon, I felt myself begging: Please, gold today. Please, the gold.

No gold. No light that paints the world in new textures, revealing extra dimensions both outside and within. Just the regular, dusty silver that arrived in summer and seemed hell bent on overstaying its welcome. Each morning, I felt like Dorothy, waking after the tornado to find Glinda, the yellow brick road, the ruby slippers all rendered in the same flat grays as Kansas.

Where the hell was my light?

I sat at my writing desk, staring out the window into my front yard where autumn once played a song I transcribed onto my computer screen, “In Praise of Falling,” which became the title poem for my first book of poetry. I sat at my writing desk, remembering how last autumn’s light spawned an “Ode to October” that seemed to channel effortlessly through my body onto the page as I scribbled it down, in my car, in a grocery store parking lot. I sat at my writing desk, wondering what had happened to my autumn inspiration? Wondering if something was wrong inside of me? Maybe the light was out there, but I couldn’t see it? Maybe this season was a wash?

Then this morning I opened my eyes at 5:30, starkly awake, a side effect of the weekend’s fall back from daylight savings time to standard time. Already the sky outside our uncovered window was riding its spectrum from black to light gray. But I didn’t notice that yet. My mind was hooked on thoughts about tomorrow’s election. Hooked on the images I’d seen of the hours-long voting lines in Ohio and Florida. Please stay, I silently begged the voters. Cast your vote. We need you. Hooked on the ever shifting blues and reds on Huffington Post’s electoral vote map. Hooked on the ifs and maybes held in the hearts of every lesbian and gay want-to-be bride and groom in Minnesota, Maine, Washington, and Maryland. Hooked on the nest of bees buzzing in my own belly when I imagined watching the election results tomorrow night with my wife and kids. Then, finally, hooked on the only thing I know how to do when fear starts its dance in my psyche: breathe.

So breathe I did, until the bees released their buzzing. And breathe I did, until I felt the calm settle in. And breathe I did, until I remembered that what I must focus on right now is not a dreaded future, not even a hopeful visualization of a second Obama inauguration or a first ballot-box win for marriage equality, but this moment. Right here. Right now.

And guess what showed up in that moment, rising over the eastern hills, spilling across my valley? Welcome, gold light of autumn. Thank you for arriving just in time to remind me that no matter what happens at the polls tomorrow, I will always find beauty. This is the artist’s booby prize, a life-sustaining truth: no matter what junk life piles on my doorstep, I can always use it to make poetry. And this is a note to my post-election self: no matter what you are feeling right now, step outside, absorb that light, and start writing.

Poet, writer, activist, and educator, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood.” She spends her free time jumping on a trampoline and telling potty jokes, because the sound of her kids’ laughter makes her really, really happy.

The post Note to my post-election self: There’s always poetry first appeared on Lesbian.com.

My wife Tracie and I have been playing “Suburban Lesbian Poster Family” since our oldest son was kickin’ it in utero. If you go to Wikipedia, type “lesbian” in the search box, and scroll down to the “families and politics” section, you will see him riding down Market Street in my belly, as if I were some kind of parade float.

Illegally married during San Francisco’s Winter of Love 2004 and lawfully wed in 2008 (when same-sex marriage was legal in California, before it wasn’t again), Tracie and I (and now our children) wave our “No H8” flags often. But I have a confession to make. The rally cry of the marriage equality movement: “We’re just like everyone else!” It doesn’t fit for me.

I mean, yes, just like all the other parents inhabiting all the ranch-style homes on our tree-lined street, Tracie and I want our kids to be safe, healthy, responsible and self-loving. Like many parents, we struggle to balance our family and work responsibilities while also nurturing our marriage and individual selves. Our neighbors meet us on this common ground, and they treat us just like any other family on the block.

As much as I appreciate this level of acceptance (and I do, I truly do), I’d like to add a few caveats:

We’re just like any other family, except we’re bringing up baby on the front lines of a cultural war. LGBT families are inherently political. When we get married, it’s political. When we cross the word “father” off the pediatrician’s intake form and write in the word “mother,” it’s political. When we show up at the local taqueria, we’re not just another family looking for cheap eats — we are one of those families the conservative politicos are hissing about. Wherever we go, my family is, de facto, representing the Great American Lesbofam. We’re civil rights activists, even when all we’re asking for is a black bean burrito with no cheese.

We’re just like any other family, except some people are really scared of us. Like so scared that their fear shows up as hate. Like so scared that they think we should be rounded up behind an electric fence and left to die (thank you, Pastor Charles Worley). So scared that they think our very presence will somehow degrade their marriages, poison their kids’ minds, and lead to our country’s ultimate demise. So scared that the decision to count same-sex couples in the 2010 U.S. Census caused major political upheaval in Washington D.C. Just counting us. Go figure.

We’re just like any other family, except we’re raising children on top of the ever-shifting fault line of LGBT rights. We never know, from day to day, state to state, country to country, if our bonds to each other are legal. And while I feel relatively comfortable in our friendly neighborhood, in our (aside from that Prop 8 debacle) progressive state of California, my family’s vulnerability becomes glaringly apparent when we travel, wandering into uncertain social waters and foreign legal territory. So, when preparing for a family vacation, on this mom’s list of things-to-do, next to “install carseats” and “pack snacks,” you’ll find “research rights.”

This is only a partial list of caveats. LGBT family members, I’d love to hear yours.

In the marriage equality movement, we often talk about “changing the hearts and minds” of those who oppose LGBT rights. We create this change by telling personal stories that highlight our common humanity, stories that could lead your average (read: heterosexual) Joe or Josephine to concede, “Wow, her story about falling in love with her wife sounds just like my story about falling in love with my spouse.”

Great step in the right direction. But “just like” is not the end point. We need folks to understand how our lives are different, too. We need to let them know what we’re up against, day-to-day, in this battle for equality. And we need to ask the people who have opened their hearts and minds to take the next step, to get active, joining us in the fight.

Poet, writer, activist, and educator, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood.” She spends her free time jumping on a trampoline and telling potty jokes, because the sound of her kids’ laughter makes her really, really happy.

The post We’re just like any other family, except … first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Like so many LGBT parents, my wife Tracie and I are raising our kids in the cross-hairs of a cultural war. Our oldest son, B-Man, was conceived on the day that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom officiated the wedding of long-time lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, sparking an international marriage equality firestorm. Our youngest son, K-bird, was barely taller than his homemade “Support Our Family” sign when he stood on a street corner in our San Francisco Bay Area suburb, shouting “Vote no on Prop 8!” Though we have always made it clear to our kiddos that their participation in political activities is optional, these dudes unfailingly opt in.

As a result, in my life as a parent, politics have been a constant companion, like a cat performing figure-eights between my feet as I scramble around the kitchen, trying to put dinner on the table. So you might think I’d know something about talking to kids about politics. After all, in my sons’ short lives, I have fielded countless questions like “Why would people vote yes on Prop 8?” and “If Prop 8 is unfair, why did it win?” And sure, I’ve figured out some basic ground rules for these sorts of conversations:

1) Tell the truth in kid-friendly language.

Okay, so I’ve figured out one ground rule. But ultimately in this, as in all things parenting, I’m really just making it up as I go along.

So the other day, when my now eight-year-old son, B-man, asked me, with a barely detectable tremor in his voice, “Mommy, what will happen if Romney wins?” Per usual, I had no idea what to say.

I did, however, have some idea what not to say, like for instance, the first words that popped into my head: All hell will break loose. Nope. No good. Keep looking.

Here’s what I do know about my kids: When they are asking questions about change, no matter if they’re asking what it will be like at that vacation house we rented for a week, or what it will be like if a gay-hater who courted the Tea Party to become the republican presidential nominee becomes president, what they’re really asking is this: Am I going to be safe?

When contemplating a Romney (forgive the parenthetical statement here, but I can’t stand to type these two words next to each other) presidency, at least from an adult perspective, “Am I going to be safe?” is a complex question. Will we be safe if this guy takes over international relations? Will we be safe if he’s our frontrunner on domestic social issues? Will we be safe if he employs the exact economic tactics that created this country’s current financial mess? Hmm …

But from a kid perspective “Am I safe?” means stuff like, “Will you and Mama still be here to make my oatmeal in the morning?” Or “Will we still have oatmeal?” Or “Will we still be allowed to be a family?”

So I answer the question this way: I look deep into my kiddo’s ocean blue eyes and say, “If Romney wins,” I can hardly utter the words, “nothing in our house will change.”

And even as I’m saying it, I realize this is not so much a true statement as it is a vow to my child.

In truth, if, you know, that thing were to happen, lots would change. Women, immigrants, LGBT folks, the nation’s economically challenged, the middle class, and citizens who would be impacted by any potential foreign policy fall-out (read: all of us) would face anxiety-producing uncertainties. But no matter what’s happening in our country or in my own psyche, I need to make sure that any anxiety I might feel does not trickle down to my children. No matter who lives in the White House, I will muster the kind of constancy, confidence, optimism, and family pride that builds a solid foundation for children.

But at the same time that I make that vow of constancy, I want to make sure that my kiddo knows that it really does matter who wins the presidency. “Pffft, no big deal” is a lie. And I don’t want to lie to my kid.

So I feed my brain’s adult data on the candidates into the kid-language translator, and it comes out this way:

“Different politicians think differently about how our government should make and spend money. They think differently about how our government should support people who need help. They think differently about how our country should communicate with other countries. They think differently about who should have what rights.”

“Yeah,” B-man chimes in, speaking like the pint-sized civil rights warrior he is, “like Romney would have voted yes on Prop 8.”

“Right,” I say. “And the w

ay President Obama thinks very closely matches the way I think and the way Mama thinks. So we’re voting for him.”

“And the way Romney thinks doesn’t match.”

Cheryl Dumesnil and family

“Right,” I say. “And if Obama is no longer our president, things in our government and our country will change. But in this house, we are a family, and we love each other, and we are sticking together, and no matter who is president, that will never change.”

Poet, writer, activist, and educator, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood.” She spends her free time jumping on a trampoline and telling potty jokes, because the sound of her kids’ laughter makes her really, really happy.

The post How to talk to kids about politics first appeared on Lesbian.com.