Got birth certificates for both of my sons this week. Yay!
However, on one, I am listed as “Mother.”
Andrew Sullivan Confuses Cowardice and Bravery
If you follow gay political news, you can’t have missed the story of the very short tenure of Richard Grenell as a spokesman for the Romney campaign. In brief — Romney announces gay spokesman, right-wing goes nuts, liberals go “hey look at all the hateful things this guy has said in public!”, new gay spokesman says literally nothing (on any topic!) for two weeks, new gay spokesman resigns.
Today, Andrew Sullivan writes about how hard it is to be a gay Republican:
It’s sometimes hard to explain to outsiders what level of principle is required to withstand the personal cost of being an out gay Republican. I’ve only ever been a gay conservative (never a Republican), and back in the 1990s, it was brutal living in the gay world and challenging liberal assumptions. I cannot imagine the social isolation of Grenell in Los Angeles today, doing what he did.
And his reward for such loyalty, sincerity and pugnacity? Vilification.
“Loyalty, sincerity, and pugnacity?” Really?
Sullivan, and most gay conservatives and/or Republicans, seem confused by the distinction between gay people and society as a whole. For example, although most gay people identify as liberal or as Democrats, our society is fairly evenly split. So while a gay Republican might feel ostracized by other gay people, they can take some comfort in knowing that about half of the country shares their political views.
But it’s the anti-gay (and usually anti-woman) views of these gay conservatives that is the most troubling. Grenell, for example, liked to tweet about how Rachel Maddow should wear a necklace, or how Callista Gingrich needs to learn her place.
These are not brave things to say. They are cowardly things to say. When you say that a lesbian woman looks like a man, you’re really saying, “I am insecure about my own gender presentation, and people who are closer to the middle of the spectrum than the ends make me feel even less secure about myself.” Talking about how much more manly you are than another gay man doesn’t make you brave. It makes you a sad, scared person who still struggles with his own internalized homophobia and lashes out at other gay men in order to feel better.
Maybe someday there will be a gay conservative who legitimately thinks that liberal financial policies are destructive, makes fact-based arguments, and fights within his own party for the dignity of all LGBT people. A person who makes a distinction between political policy and allowing people the right to live their own lives. That (still fictional!) person could be called loyal, sincere, and pugnacious.
The person Andrew Sullivan is describing? He’s just another anti-gay, anti-woman man who tries to hide his own insecurity by ingratiating himself to people who hate him.
Scratching the Surface
The scratches on the back of my hands have been driving me crazy. Maybe it’s because I look like I lost a fight with a cat. Maybe it’s because one of them — right hand, sideways, just below middle knuckle — zings whenever I stick my hand in the pocket of my jeans to grab my cellphone. Maybe it’s because I’m sure people will notice them, and I don’t particularly want to explain to casual acquaintances how I got them.
They come from my four-year-old son.
It’s becoming harder and harder, as he gets bigger and stronger, to restrain him in a way that keeps him safe and prevents him from hurting me when he’s raging. It’s become nearly impossible to keep his brother safe from scratches, since he can go from happily playing to screaming and raging with no provocation.
If I thought, for even a moment, that he could somehow work through his anger and fear by scratching me, I’d let him. It would be an easy choice, to let him transfer his pain to me instead. Any parent would do it, I imagine. But that’s not one of the choices.
We’re working with a new therapist. She thinks that PTSD best fits his symptoms, and certainly fits his history. We had previously assumed we were looking at symptoms of attachment disorder. Though neither diagnosis really changes his treatment, it does change the way I think about it.
I think of attachment disorder as something that happens to children when they aren’t given the love they need during early development. I see myself sitting in a lecture hall, during my undergraduate years, taking Developmental Psychology. We learned about attachment. I see myself sitting in our pre-adoption MAPP class — I think it stands for something incomprehensible like Massachusetts Approach to Partnerships in Parenting, whatever that means — learning about attachment disorder. It’s something I knew to expect.
But when I think of PTSD, I think of soldiers coming home from war. It’s hard to translate that image to my son. He has, however, experienced a very literal battlefield. He was taken from his mother, ostensibly for his safety, and placed in a foster home where he was brutally assaulted.
I’m almost never angry at my sons’ mother. Her own life is very much like my sons’, except she stayed in foster care until she was eighteen. I don’t know how anyone could expect her to be able to give a child the care that it needs. Despite all her failings as a parent, though, she loved her sons. My older son remembers his mother fondly. He has happy memories of things they did together, and he knows that she loved him.
My younger son has none of that. He barely remembers his mother, and only from supervised visits in a sterile playroom at the offices of the Department of Children and Families. If he remembers anything, he remembers the battlefield of a foster home and a daycare that allowed him to be assaulted.
And it makes me so fucking angry.
And that’s what I see when I look at the back of my hands now.
Don’t Do It, Luke! Don’t Go To The Darkside!
For Andrew’s sixth birthday, I told him that we can start watching the Star Wars movies. My husband and I began with a nerdy conversation about viewing order, did a little research, found someone who has spent a lot more time thinking about this than we have, and then went with our original plan: we’ll watch them in the order they were released. Original trilogy followed by new trilogy.
I don’t think Jordan, at four, is ready to watch the movies yet, so it can be challenging to find good times to watch them with Andrew. But in the month since his birthday, we’ve managed to watch A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.
While watching The Empire Strikes Back, I wasn’t entirely sure that Andrew was following the plot. I’d ask questions, offer explanations, but I just wasn’t sure. Until we got to the “Luke, I am your father” scene.
“It can’t be true!” Andrew yelled, more to Luke Skywalker than to me. “Don’t believe him, Luke, he’s not really your dad! He’s trying to trick you!”
Andrew continued his advice to Luke throughout the scene. “Don’t go to the dark side, Luke! Think about what Yoda taught you! Don’t listen to Darth Vader!”
When the credits rolled, Andrew turned to me and said, “Did you know that would happen? I couldn’t believe it! We watched Darth Vader in two movies, and I had no idea he was really Luke’s father! That must make Luke so mad!”
What really makes me laugh is that I never considered the possibility that Andrew would be surprised. That Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father seems like such a fundamental fact to me, it never crossed my mind that Andrew wouldn’t know. But of course he didn’t!
His reaction was priceless, and something that I’ll never forget. I knew watching Star Wars with my kid would be cool, but I didn’t realize how cool it would be.
So … Who’s The Woman?
I thought it was a joke.
All this time, and I thought the idea of someone asking which member of a male couple is the woman was just a joke. Or, if not a joke, something said just for the purpose of being offensive. Something that only the most bigotty of bigotty nitwits would ever say.
I think I was wrong.
I don’t remember what the conversation was about, but I was talking with my best friend, probably about our kids and how hers had done something cute while mine had scratched each other to bleeding again. (It’s a good guess, because it’s frequent.) The topic turned to parenting styles or something, and she asked the following:
“So, just out of curiosity … how often do people ask you which one of you is the mommy?”
I laughed, and said, “Never! No one has ever asked me that question.”
“Really?”
“Of course, really. It’s like a joke, a variation on ‘Who’s the woman?’”
We talked a little bit about the idea of “who’s the woman?” and how it’s a question that speaks to this fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. There’s no woman in my relationship with Austin. That’s … kind of the point.
“Oh, good,” my friend said, “that’s exactly how I answer the question about which of you is the mommy. I laugh and say, ‘No. There are two dads.’”
I casually said that I thought that was an excellent answer, but there was kind of a pit in my stomch as I realized …
“Wait. Someone asked you whether one of us is the mommy?”
“Mark, people ask me that all the time.”
I asked her who asks her that question, but then I stopped her. We both agreed that I am probably happier if I don’t know. It’s not my own friends, she assured me. But it’s friends of friends. People I see casually, some of whom I’ve been acquainted with for years.
I slowly come to the realization that I tend to put myself in a bubble. I’m usually friendly, but I’m cold and aloof when I think someone is a moron. I don’t make friends with people who require some sort of “living in modern America” education in order to be my friend. If I find out that you vote Republican, chances are that I quietly unfriend you on facebook. Ditto if you post about defunding Planned Parenthood or how vaccines probably cause autism.
I used to be more of a … steward of the gays, I guess. At the end of my freshman year of college, my roommate asked, very seriously, if we could talk. He sat me down and told me, basically, that I had changed his worldview. He got a little choked up and said that he was sorry if he’d ever been an asshole to gay people. I remember telling him that he’d never been an asshole to me, so if he needed to apologize to anyone, I wasn’t it.
That may have been the most dramatic example, but it was something that was repeated many times in my college experience. People used to tell me that I had changed their opinion.
For a while, I just assumed that it was a college thing. Something that happens during those exploratory, decide-who-you-are years. And maybe it is.
Or maybe I just used to be nicer.
Unexpected Surprises
I think I’ve tweeted some bits and pieces of this, but it deserves a post of its own. The last two weeks have been pretty crazy.
Two weeks ago, I was trying to make sure we had everything we needed in order to go to Disney World. I’m not one of those ahead-of-the-curve parents. I’m one of those oh-crap-we-need-milk-you-can-have-juice-with-supper-tonight parents.
And then my husband was awake all night because he didn’t feel well. By the time morning came around, he felt unwell enough that he tried to get in to see a doctor on a Sunday morning. And by the time he had managed to get an appointment, he decided he’d should probably just head to the emergency room instead.
I have to say, I was not particularly sympathetic. We had gone out to dinner the night before, and I had raised my eyebrows when he ordered a platter of fried clams, onion rings, and fries. “We’re not twenty anymore,” I reminded him.
So I was pretty sure that my husband had just driven himself to the emergency room for indigestion. (I did offer to take him! He preferred to drive himself rather than wait for my parents to come and watch the boys.)
A few hours later, they were still doing tests. And then rather quickly, they decided his gall bladder needed to come out. I was driving down the highway when he called and said, “They’re ready to take me into surgery. Is that ok with you?”
The surgery went well, and there were no complications. The next day, he had a fever, and the surgeon wanted to keep him in the hospital to make sure he wasn’t developing an infection. He spent three more days in the hospital, but thankfully there was no infection, and he was soon back home and resting comfortably.
He came home from the hospital a few hours before we were scheduled to go to Disney World. While he was in the hospital, I sat the kids down and told them we were going to have to delay our trip until after Christmas.
I was expecting a calamity. My five-year-old cries over everything.
“The yellow cup is in the dishwasher, you’ll have to use the blue cup.” Sobs.
“You wore the Spiderman underpants yesterday. Today, you can choose between Batman and Green Lantern.” Sobs.
This made me pretty sure that when I told him the trip to Disney, for which he’d been faithfully counting down the days every morning, was delayed, we’d have A Situation on our hands.
“That makes sense, Daddy. If Daddy Austin doesn’t feel good, he wouldn’t be able to have fun. We should go to Disney World when the whole family can have fun.”
What’s that on the floor? Oh, it’s my jaw.
We’re getting back into the swing of things now. Austin is probably returning to work this week, and he’s mostly resumed normal activities.
And no need to worry about Andrew’s newfound maturity. He cried about the available cereal choices at breakfast this morning.
Ten Years Ago
Ten years ago today, I was 23. I was working as an assistant manager at the Huntington Theatre Company’s box office in Boston. I was living in Medford with a roommate. I hadn’t met my husband yet, and I was spending a lot of time trying to revive a relationship with a guy who just wasn’t that into me.
That Tuesday morning, I was lounging in bed. I didn’t need to be at work until one o’clock that afternoon, so I was taking it easy. It was a beautiful day, and I opened all the windows, made myself a cup of tea, and got back into bed to watch some tv.
I sat in bed, stunned, while the Today show shifted from its normal coverage to the breaking story of an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center. Shocking, and tragic, but obviously just a freak accident, I told myself. And then there was the second plane.
So I got out of bed and tried to find someone, anyone, to confirm for me that I wasn’t hallucinating. My roommate was already at work, so I went to the phone and tried to call my best friend. Couldn’t connect. Tried to call my mother. That didn’t connect, either.
I heard footsteps, and realized that my upstairs neighbors were getting ready for work. So I went out to the front steps of our two-family house and knocked on their door, barefoot, in a t-shirt and some plaid pajama pants. My neighbor answered the door and asked if I was all right.
“Are you watching tv?” I asked.
She wasn’t.
“You need to turn on your tv,” I said.
So we went up to her living room, and turned on the tv. Over the next couple of minutes, her roommates, who had been getting ready for work, abandoned their routines and joined us on the couch. The four of us sat there, saying almost nothing, for hours.
Eventually, my call phone rang. It was my coworker, asking if I could still come in to work. The performance was cancelled, and we’d need to call all the ticketholders to let them know, and she didn’t want to make the rest of the staff come in if just the managers could do it.
I got ready for work and decided to drive in, not knowing if the trains were even running. Driving south on I-93 into Boston, I had never seen so few cars. The lower deck, which would usually be backed up even midday, was practically empty. I listened to WBUR, the local NPR station, on my way in. It’s strange to listen to the radio when they have no idea what to say.
I got to work, which was mostly deserted. The other managers and I tried to call our ticketholders, but it was an exercise in futility. The phones refused to connect nine times out of ten. Eventually, we decided that people would figure out on their own not to come to the theatre.
My coworker and I decided to grab some lunch. Standing outside, just a few blocks from the Prudential, the fighter jets kept circling. It was like watching a movie. We stood in the middle of the normally busy road and looked up at the planes.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” my coworker asked. “I’m pretty sure it’s making me feel worse.”
The day passed very slowly, and the staff began to leave. The general manager and I stayed around until the performance was supposed to begin, just in case anyone came and didn’t know. I don’t think anyone came.
My Sink Runneth Over
Almost every day, I walk into my bathroom and become convinced — absolutely, utterly convinced! — that the cold water faucet on the sink is leaking. The counter is covered with water, and it’s centered on the cold faucet. So I get some paper towels and wipe down the whole counter. Then I test. I turn the water on and off. I lean on the faucet. I try to replicate the flooding.
Nothing.
I cannot figure out how my son does it.
Riding in Cars with Turtles
I originally posted this on my Destructoid blog, in response to a community call for posts on handhelds:
It’s the summer of 1990. I’ve just finished the sixth grade, just turned twelve, and there’s one thing that I want: a Gameboy. But my parents are not sold on the idea. Not at all.
“Please?” I begged. “Think how much more fun vacations will be. I won’t complain about having to spend all day in the car if I have a Gameboy.” (Note from the future: I am now 33, own every handheld game I want, and my husband and children can attest that I am not any more pleasant to spend all day with in a car. So I guess my parents were smart not to fall for that argument.)
A compromise was reached. Well, not really a compromise. I still wanted a Gameboy, but my parents got me a handheld LCD Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game before we went on vacation. Victory?
If you’ve never had the pleasure of playing a handheld LCD game, I will try to explain the experience. Maybe you’ve set the time on a digital watch? Yeah, it’s basically like that. But instead of cycling through the hours and minutes, the hours and minutes drag on while you try to make an inanimate, 2D, black and white Ninja Turtle hit Shredder’s little foot-shaped robots. Or jump over them or something. I don’t remember.
The Ninja Turtles game was fun for about ten minutes. After that, it was mostly just frustrating. It was hard to get the timing right, and took forever to play through to the end and save April. So I still complained about spending all day in the car, and I believed that if I could just be playing Super Mario Land, life would be perfect.
Now it’s twenty-one years later, and I find myself in a similar position to the one my parents were in. My older son, who is five, wants a handheld. And we’ve compromised. He is the proud owner of a Leapfrog Leapster 2, on which he can play games like Batman: Strength in Numbers (SPOILER: The numbers from which Batman gains strength are ones like four plus two.) and Star Wars: Jedi Reading. My gamer soul dies a little bit when he plays these games. They’re not games, really. As a parent though, I feel like at least he’s learning something.
There aren’t many good video games that are appropriate for a five-year-old, though. We’ve played through LEGO Batman and LEGO Star Wars on the 360. I tried Viva Pinata, but it’s still too slowly paced for him.
When the time is right, I will let him play lots of video games. Good ones. Someday, I will try to convince him to play Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV. And he will probably roll his eyes at the ancient games his dad loved. I really look forward to a time when he’s old enough to play an MMO with me. (Or whatever we’re playing instead of MMOs in another decade.)
But I won’t make him ride in cars with turtles.
Gaming Wishlist
The next 12 months are going to be really big ones for gaming. Especially for MMOs.
Star Wars: The Old Republic
If you had asked me a month ago what upcoming game I am the most excited about, I would have answered without hesitation: “SW:TOR!” (And I would have tried to pronounce the acronym! Swoetor? Swetor? Swutor? Your guess is as good as mine.)
But Bioware has managed to dampen my excitement on the title. They’ve decided to be schizophrenic about gay people again. (This is an ongoing theme with Bioware. Mass Effect 1? Yay, lesbians! Dragon Age? Yay, Bioware loves the gays! Mass Effect 2? Gay people don’t exist, and, um, the idea of a gay male Shepard makes Bioware uncomfortable somehow. They’re fine with any other moral choice on the spectrum, but guys kissing guys is just too much. Dragon Age 2? They love us again! Mass Effect 3? That stuff we said about how Shepard just can’t be gay because it doesn’t fit our worldview? We were kidding! We love the gays!)
So during Gamescom, one of the SW:TOR developers was incredibly dismissive when asked about same-sex romances in the game. He just shrugged and went, “Nope.” The idea of romances in an MMO isn’t one that I’m sold on, but if you’re going to include them, you need to include everyone. If you want me to connect to my character in an MMO and potentially play that character every day for years, you need to let me decide who that character is. Don’t tell me that my character can’t be gay. (And really don’t tell me that my character can be gay as long as he decides to be celibate while everyone else is out there participating in relationships.)
Guild Wars 2
I’ve spent about two hours playing the original Guild Wars. It just doesn’t do anything for me. Maybe I should give it more of a try, though, because Guild Wars 2 is looking great. They’re trying to do away with the tank-healer-dps system, which would be amazing if they could do it and still make compelling gameplay. Waiting 30 minutes for a tank is not any fun (I’m looking at you, World of Warcraft and Rift.) and removing those roles would go a long way toward making spontaneous groups viable and quick.
Diablo 3
I know, it’s not an MMO, but it’s an O, at least. And it serves a lot of the same purpose — playing a character while grouping with friends. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a beta invite.
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
My biggest gripe with the last two Elder Scrolls games has been that everyone is ridiculously ugly. But it looks like Bethesda has finally figure out how to make people that look like people, because Skyrim looks gorgeous. Breathtaking visuals, and hopefully the kind of depth and replay we’ve come to expect from an Elder Scrolls game.
Mass Effect 3
I’m frustrated with Bioware over the SW:TOR thing, but Mass Effect is easily the most compelling single-player game I’ve played in the last decade. I’ve played through the first game probably ten times, and it really never gets old. I can’t wait to see how the series draws to a close.
Currently, World of Warcraft has been losing my attention. I’ve been spending a bunch of time in Rift lately (and I hit level 50 this week!) but I don’t know if it has a lot of long-term potential for me. The gameplay is fun, but the art drives me crazy, especially the clothes. (If I wanted to look like a farmer, I’d play Farmville.)
