I'm on strike today. For 24 hours I will not eat anything, just drink water, in order to protest the discrimination I face as a lesbian in the state of Michigan. It's part of Hungry 4 Equality and I'm the Day 26 striker out of 100. I'm camped out in the front window of Affirmations. It's all very red light district. If you want you can watch me live, which is pretty creepy, actually.
What does this have to do with being a mom? Well, Stacy and Gavin may come visit me later today, for one. But most importantly, I am not considered a mom at all by the state of Michigan. As far as they're concerned, I am a single woman who lives with another single woman and that other woman's child. I have no legal protections as a parent because I am not legally a parent. Michigan doesn't allow or recognize marriage between two women nor does Michigan allow second-parent adoption, which would allow Gavin to have two legal parents and all of the protections that come with that. Should something happen to Stacy Gavin would not automatically stay with me or anything. We'd have to rely on a judge to recognize our parenting agreement (a legal document we had drawn up with a lawyer), and said judge doesn't have to do that. We have a will and everything, but that is not at all the same, not even close, to a legally recognized relationship.
So, yeah, I'm doing this for my son and my wife and my life, really. How much impact or effect it will have, I don't know. But raising any awareness is a good thing.
Hunger related things: "Hunger Strike" by Temple of the Dog, "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran, The Hunger (that movie where Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve are, like, lesbian vampires or something), The Hunger Games, Hungry Hungry Hippos (my sister, Laura, swallowed a marble from that game when we were kids). It's lunch time. I'm hungry.
I just got back from Chicago. Gavin, Stacy, and I went on a road trip adventure to see Krystal & Nate & Henry & Lucy, Amanda & Dave, Carolyn & Chris & Brenden & Grayson, and Carol and Ina (Stacy's aunt and grandmother). It was an action packed week. We learned that Gavin is a most excellent travel companion who can sleep in just about any bed anywhere. He was very good in the car and had only a couple of meltdowns the whole trip.
Krystal's kids are pretty much in love with Stacy. She played Big Bad Wolf with them for hours. Basically you just reenact the story of the Three Little Pigs using your imagination and alternate who is the wolf and who is the pig. It involves a lot of running and hiding. It's something Gavin wants to do basically all of the time and something I want to do rarely, which causes some conflict. Stacy is the go-to mom for that kind of stuff. I'm more into things like, "Hey, let's line up your Hotwheel cars in color order" or "let's read books."
Gavin is still not potty trained, but he's making some impressive steps forward. He pooped on the potty at Amanda's house when we first got there, which is something he did at my dad's house a week earlier. He liked Amanda's bathroom because it is upstairs and Gavin, not having stairs in our oh-so-modest home, is very interested in this. He always wants to go upstairs at his Grandma Kathy's house, for example. Well, he declared, "I'm old enough to go upstairs by myself" and he did just that and used the potty all by himself, too. Granted it was all pee, but still. He asked Stacy for assistance (and yes, "assistance" is the word he used) with buttoning his pants. That's it. He'll get there soon enough.
Thankfully the place he's going to preschool (a Spanish-immersion Montessori school) doesn't require that he be potty trained like most preschools do. Otherwise I'd be panicking right now. It's such an arbitrary rule and I know that so many parents, and as a result kids, get super stressed about potty training right about now, which isn't at all helpful for anyone involved. I'm a believer that this isn't something you can force a kid to do. Not unless you want him to have major issues later on that he only shares with his therapist.
Yes, absolutely, a few diapers cost more and are less hassle than a few months or years with a therapist.
ReplyDelete