not you

It is funny and relevant how much being a parent brings to the surface my personal insecurities while simultaneously triggering the need to be reflective about the person I am becoming.

Let me make sure to be clear that I believe we are always becoming.  I do not believe in ultimate enlightenment or reaching your highest potential.  See, I see us all as flawed and failing.  Simultaneously, I see us as working towards perfection and being better and becoming fuller more robust and whole beings.  I see humans as living in a constant state of flux.  We may think we have one aspect of ourselves all figured out and then that bad or hard little thing may come bite us right on the bottom.

Our demons bare razor teeth even when we think them defeated.  Our angels leave our sides and then come pirouetting back to us in soft pink tutus and glossy drips of rain. 

I believe that without the junk and the struggles, we would be shallow creatures floating just above boring.

And this long introduction gets me to the place where I tell my few, dedicated readers that I am an insecure, constantly wrestling with demons, falling and then rising again parent. 

Over the nearly last year, I have been in a battle with my own dueling wills (and my dear little willa).  I have a hard time with the “not you” syndrome that daily delivers resistance and words of denial from my child’s mouth to my fragile, never-to-be-enlightened ears. 

I suck at being consistently denied by my daughter, even though her brain is very new and my brain is older and supposedly more mature.

Here’s the short version of what has been up.  Since March or February of 2013, Willa has been incredibly clingy with her biological mother, kk.  She has gone through severe phases of denying me and demanding her other mother.  Sometimes I can easily blow off her denials and thrive in empathic concern with her, and at other times, I take her denials and refusals so personally that I want to flee to a dirty motel in the desert and drink copious amounts of bourbon while listening to Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash and reading my trashy lesbian romance novels until I pass out in the sand and the stars take me away to oblivion. 

Ya, ya.  A little dramatic. 

But, I have had these moments when I totally get how someone flees his or her family.  If I did not have my own insecurities, this shit would never boil up into all of this over-the-top fatalistic thinking.  But, being a non-bio parent (with no legal rights or recognition...*see below) and parenting with a bio parent who has very real biological connectivity to the other human in our house, produces some deeply difficult moments. 

Up until last month, kk breast-fed Willa.  I am glad that they had this beautiful time of mother and child bonding.  I mean it.  However, this form of bonding is incredibly exclusive, and I do think it added to the development of willa’s fierce resistance to me being able to be more of a partner in parenting.  In addition, as a queer who lives in a state that does not recognize me as a legal parent (*after flying under the radar and patiently persisting for over two.five years, I was able to legally adopt Willa, but that long journey is a large piece of the emotional damage I am writing about in this post.  I am happy to share privately with folks what went on with us finessing a legal adoption in a private message), I have experienced layers of quiet and internalized trauma that I am only just recognizing as having psychological and physical ramifications.  Homophobia and heterosexism ravage real harm on people. I have known this, and I get this now more than I ever did before because I have felt the harm to my psyche in these last few years in real concrete ways.

I have very huge historical experiences of harsh homophobia coming from some of the people closest to me in my life and yet now in reflecting on the inequity perpetrated by the state (the state that I am usually so ready to say fuck you to), I am realizing the inter-personal devastation that inequity may trigger. 

This parenting thing really raises this shit up to the surface. 

Through all of this, “Not you, mama nonnie, not you,”  kk has asked me to read parenting articles and parenting books and parenting drivel and I have resisted her insistent requests.  I have resisted because I am stubborn and I do not relate to most parenting writing out there.  I am not a bio-dad or an adoptive straight father.  I am not a straight dude or straight step-parent.  I was not an adoptive, non-bio parent until very recently.  [And, I hold fast to the idea that I never should have had to go through an adoption process to be legally recognized as willa’s second parent.] 

I am this floater.  I am an interloper.  I am a third wheel.  I am a parent defining my own path as I go along.  I did not come into this after reaching consensus with my beloved for jointly adopting a kid through an agency/organization (though, that would be an amazing and perfectly workable method for getting to parenting—though in this ass backwards state only one of us could adopt a kid.  Same dilemma different scenario).

I came into this after much study, deliberation, thought, reflection, conversation, and seeking with my beloved.  We decided to have K work to conceive a kid.  I aided throughout.  I joke that my spit mingled with the sperm, and willa has my stubborn streak to prove it.  I have been with willa always, from the get go.  My name should have been on her birth certificate from the day she came tumbling out onto our sheets.

I do not need the state to recognize me, but when the words out of my daughter’s mouth reflect the rhetoric of state policies and laws (not you, not you, not you), the damage is amplified in a turn of the screw, a shove of the blade, a kick to the shin. 

Yes, Willa’s kick to my shin as she tells me to get away from her echoes a little more loudly in my head cause the state and some very prominent, vocal leaders are saying the same thing while kicking my shins with hateful rhetoric.

And, yes, things are changing.  In addition, I am surrounded by fierce love.  I am loved in this journey beyond measure by so many good, strong people.  And the state is not meant to love anyone or anything.  It is a beast among beasts hungry for control.  I get all of that.  However, I have been trying to sort out why, some of the time, I react so badly to Willa’s normal (according to so many parenting sources) toddler rejection behavior.  And, the more I search, the more I directly relate my reactions to the layers of internalized homophobia and insecurities that ride side car to all of my own internalized oppression. 

I know I am not less than.  I know I am totally capable of co-parenting well, but institutional hate and oppression are strong forces and these forces can impale people with a distinct set of hurts that in turn keep us, at times, wallowing in dangerous cycles of sadness, nihilism, and violence.   Of course, I also am resilient and contrary.  I am willing and able to rise above these circumstances.   But, all of this has given me pause and the need to reflect and reframe in order to survive these times.

All of my sadness at the “not you, mamas” coming from my daughter’s mouth is not just some immature reaction to her toddler self.  I think my sadness is directly connected to the line of hate from individuals and the state that lead to excluding whole groups of people from participating in social structures that do—whether I want them to or not—add meaning and recognition to our lives.  And, you all have heard me rant against marriage and talk long and hard about love being the goal, not state methods leading to more social control.  But god dammit when it comes to this kid, when it comes to thinking through the fact that the state could have impeded on my rights to continue to parent should my partner have died or decided she was done with me, then I get all this deep, weird residue that leads to me being so reactionary to my daughter’s resistance. 

Strange and hard stuff. 

And now to overcoming it. 

I can do that.