BLOGGING FOR LGBT FAMILIES DAY

this last month has been huge. i've been saying it's epic, because that's how it feels- like it went on forever, with tremendous perils, glorious victories, twists and turns and betrayals and joy. in one week, i celebrated my first mothers' day, had a law school calamity, recovered from the law school calamity, turned 29, got constitutional protection, and graduated from law school. in one month, i completed all my final exams, kept the household together while the life duet was laid flat with a back injury, and found a place to live in a new city. and, like ginger rogers dancing backwards, i did it all with a baby pretty constantly dangling from one breast. i'm incredibly proud of myself. not just for doing all those things, but for doing myself one better and learning, quick-style, to be proud to identify when i need help and to ask for it without shame. i got a card recently depicting a tiny person standing on top of a mountain with the caption "holy crap,you did it." and that's how this month has felt- like getting to the top of a mountain.

and now, a coming-out story:
a year ago this month, the life duet and i got hitched. we did it in hawaii because at the time, sf required couples to provide male and female birth certificates, and for various states' rights reasons, we have a female and a female. hawaii only required drivers' licenses, and in that case we look straight. i was really ambivalent about doing it- my parents split up when i was 19, deep in the heart of my cranky feminist era, and so being not-married was a pretty major brick in the structure of my self-esteem. all in all, we did it for the health insurance. while we were lucky, and the little man was gestated and born with few to no medical issues, we didn't know that going in. having health care - good health care - was non-negotiable. despite that, i felt, and still feel, like i was forced by the marriage/insurance continuum into hosing my community, and i made a promise to myself that i would do what i could with the benefits i got to bring my community along with me as much as i could. i didn't realize i'd have the ability to see a real difference so soon. many queers (though certainly not all) feel like right now they've made real progress to reaching the top of a mountain- not only are we constitutionally guaranteed the right to marriage, we're also a suspect class, meaning that any law that curtails our rights as queers is presumptively invalid unless there's a damn good reason for it. that's huge. before getting knocked up, i don't think i realized what a raw deal i would have gotten if we hadn't gotten married. we would have had less of everything- less health insurance, less economic stimulus... just less. of course there's an electoral movement afoot to keep the lesses with less and the mores with more- there always will be. but just like marriage opened up a huge number of benefits to me and my partner and kid, a victory over that electoral movement will open up a path for other places to believe their own victories are possible. there's a tipping point here, and i think if we keep leaning on it, all these stupid bigoted legal roadblocks will come tumbling down and eventually i won't feel like i got by on a technicality. we'll all be there together.

having a kid means that i get to ask for a lot of things i couldn't before, on behalf of the kid. so for my kid's sake, and the sake of other queerspawn kids like him who need shit like health insurance (and parents with health insurance) and economic stimulus packages, i'm putting out a call to the universe: help us. i'm gonna give a chunk of change to the folks fighting the marriage ban, because that's what i've got right now. but there's phonebanking and signature-getting and letter-to-the-editor-writing and all kinds of shit. oh, and blogging. there will always be blogging.