t-rex Archives

Raising Baby T. Rex: How Being a Mom Changed My Mind About Abortion

The protestors outside of the Planned Parenthood office I worked at eventually started heckling me by name. I knew their names, too, the regular ones, at least. The ones who owned the so-called crisis pregnancy center in the plaza next to our office. The ones who shrieked at us as we went into the office to do our jobs. The ones who hurled emotionally abusive insults at patients, pleading with them to save their babies, calling them murderers and sinners as the patients ignored their pleas. It was a regular part of my day when I worked for a Planned Parenthood affiliate in my early-to-mid twenties.

I started to take pride in the ways these zealots obviously followed me and my work in our community. They started tailoring the insults to be about my queerness, specifically. They’d yell that I was a dyke and that I was going to hell for being gay as well as for being a murderer. Mostly, it didn’t matter too much to me. We had a large parking lot. They couldn’t get physically close.

There were times when I got scared, though, like when I stayed late into the evening and was the last one out and had to walk to my car alone. Or this one time after dark when I saw a small, bright red light shining towards the building from inside a black SUV that was pulled up right outside the door. It turned out to be a light from a handheld device and the guy parked against the curb was picking up our medical sharps. Still, I had a momentary thought that it could be a sniper rifle just waiting for a worker to come into view.

I was just an entry-level community organizer. I can’t imagine how our abortion doctor and medical staff felt. Or our CEO. If you’ve never worked in an abortion provider’s office, you might not know that they usually have bulletproof glass around the reception desks or that the mail is all pre-opened by an administrator wearing latex gloves (in case there are harmful powders or sinister items in the envelopes). If you have worked in an abortion provider’s office, you know these things are routine and eventually become quite normalized.

Ironically, the first time I had anti-abortion hate mail delivered specifically to me was during my first week at my new job, in a small office of the ACLU of NY. We were a tiny staff of two. We didn’t have bulletproof glass or a secure entry or a process for opening suspicious mail. It was fine. It was just a hateful note and some literature. I was suddenly aware, though, of how much I took all those security measures for granted.

It’s still a dangerous time, even more dangerous, I might argue, for patients, medical providers, staff, and activists working in the repro health, rights, and repro justice fields. That hasn’t changed. It may even be worse.

I realized on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade this year that it’s the first year since 2005 that I haven’t been working for an org that is actively engaged in repro rights work. I will always align myself with the repro justice movement, even when I was working within more repro rights-based organizations. (There’s a difference between repro rights and repro justice.) I definitely see my current job at Bitch Media as aligned with repro justice. However, my role there isn’t directly engaged in advocacy and for the first time I am not a part of the organized movement in my professional or personal life. That’s a big shift for me.

The second reflection that came to me on the Roe anniversary was that I am even more committed to abortion access as a mom and as an adoptee. As an adoptee, I always felt a little tension between the narrative that adoption was the “ethical choice” pushed by evangelicals and extremists. I was afraid to speak ill of being adopted. Obviously, it worked out for me! But the reality is that pregnancy and giving birth is not an easy peasy thing. Separating a newborn baby from the person who carried them and shared blood with them for ten months is not as easy as filling out adoption paperwork. I didn’t know how to articulate it until I had my own, very planned, costly, mostly easy pregnancy and childbirth.

Now I know. There’s an emotional impact that’s innate to pregnancy at every stage. There are reactions you don’t know you’re going to have and, whether you want it or not, a very real physical tethering between you and the little fetus alien t-rex zapping your nutrients and energy. Even if you can ignore or don’t have any maternal or parental attachment to your pregnancy, pregnancy does stuff to your body that’s just goddamn hard. It affects your ability to work and keep employment, in some cases. It affects your relationships with other adult humans. It affects how people see you and react to you. It makes you feel out of control of your own body and I can only imagine that it’s much worse if you didn’t feel that you were able to make the deeply personal decision to be pregnant on your own terms.

I was proudly pro-abortion before I was a mom. I’ve doubled down on that belief after becoming one. What once seemed common sense to me — people should be able to make their own decisions about health care, pregnancy, and parenting — has become even more radical. It is inhumane to deny a person the agency to make their own informed, stigma-free decisions about abortion, adoption, birth control, and parenting. I believe that with my whole soul.

The sidewalk protestor in my head is saying, “What if your mom had aborted you?” That’s a real thing they’ve yelled at me, ya’ll. As an adoptee, it always stung in a particularly abandonment-triggering way. Now, honestly, my answer would be:

“If I could go back and give my parent or parents the freedom to have an abortion if they wanted one, I would wholeheartedly want that for them. I was abandoned, left completely alone when I was just one-year-old, and I’m extremely lucky that my life is as rich and safe and full of love as it is. Adoptees experience real harm from being given up for adoption, even at a young age. Gestational parents experience real harm from being made to give their children up, particularly if they were led to believe that was their only choice. Being happy for my life and deeply loving my family is not the same as believing that my gestational parent should have been made to carry me to term. If my ‘mom had aborted [me],’ that would have been her decision and I wouldn’t be here to have an opinion about it and that truly is a-OK with me.”

When I look at Remi, I feel such joy and I know what it means to make a parenting decision completely on your own terms. I also think, “Wow, I never want to be pregnant or raise a newborn again.” I can make that decision. To have that option is a huge privilege, one I will always fight for every person to have.

3 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Things I Definitely Said Outloud This Month

I said no food in the bathroom.
No way. You can not hide those in my crotch.
Head-to-back: You can only pet the cat in one direction.
Do you need to go in time out… or are you going to put your shirt on?

2. Waffle’s Newest Snow Baby

Big surprise. Remi loves the snow! We’re officially past the age where we get excited about snow. We live in a four-season region of the Northeastern United States. Snow is pretty for a second and then you have to leave your house and it’s a lot less enjoyable.

As with anything, kids make snow more bearable because they love it so much. Every morning before school, Remi tries to get every last second of snow time before I make her get in our car.

http://www.instagram.com/p/B7JXoemhRqP/

She also “helps” us shovel the driveway and sidewalk and her new favorite thing is being buried under the snow (only when she has snow pants on). She even, somehow, got us to lie down in the snow, which is quite a thing because it is not 100% definite that either of us will be able to get back up.

3. Baby T.’s First Chopsticks!

For Christmas, Remi got a pair of training chopsticks (with a rice spoon!) and she’s so happy using them! Whenever I’d use chopsticks, she wanted in on the action, but she could only wield one at a time and her technique was primarily stabbing.

http://www.instagram.com/p/B6ya36HB_Fx/

I’m happy to be starting her early. I learned how to use chopsticks from the back of a paper wrapper in a Chinese restaurant. I just finally got my own Korean chopsticks (with rice spoons!) this Christmas. I’m trying to level up my Korean culture. Baby steps!

Raising Baby T. Rex: Happy Holigays Are Here Again

Happy Holigays! If you were celebrating this week, I hope it was lovely. If you didn’t have a holiday to celebrate this week, I hope you got some sweet free time back to yourself and some free sweet treats from holiday-celebratin’ friends with surplus baked goods.

This is the first holiday season that Remi is really fully aware of and super-duper stoked about what’s going on. This is not, as we had hoped it would be, the first year that Remi would look like she was enjoying seeing Santa at the pay-to-sit station at the mall. That said, she and Santa had this exchange while she was acting shy and overwhelmed.

Me, trying to gently nudge Remi towards Santa because there was a long-ass line and she suddenly decided she didn’t want any part of this experience after talking about it for days: “Remi, tell Santa what you want for Christmas!”

Remi, whispering to the floor so quietly that no one could hear her except me: “I want dragon eggs.”

Mall Santa, leaning towards Remi kindly and trying to get through the day honestly: “What do you want for Christmas? Do you want a doll?

Remi, whispering slightly louder but still inaudible to Santa: “I want dragon eggs.”

Me, trying to move this situation along: “She wants dragon eggs, Santa.”

So anyway, Santa brought her dragon eggs for her stocking and one very large and fancy How to Train Your Dragon play set that says on the actual box as a warning to adults that it will take two hours to put together. Two hours! This was obviously Waffle’s job because I don’t read instructions and like to just figure it out as I go, which often does not go well when dealing with Ikea-level toy construction projects.

The back of the box literally has a warning that prophesizes that this set takes two adult hours to assemble. YIKES.

Remi’s first Christmas, she was just under four months old and we didn’t get her any gifts. We let our families do the spoiling and took a picture of Remi with a stocking filled with toys she already owned. She truly didn’t care and couldn’t even sit up by herself, so we thought, why make it a big thing?

http://www.instagram.com/p/BObSbwXgNSt/

Remi’s second Christmas, she was just old enough to sort of open the wrapping paper and to understand getting new toys, but didn’t really grasp the concept of the holiday. We didn’t even get a tree in 2017 because we were afraid our extremely active one-year-old would topple it or make a mess of it. So we got a felt tree that you hang on the wall with little velcro-on felt decorations and Remi had a blast with that.

Remi’s third Christmas, she was two and had a lot of fun looking up at the lights on the Christmas tree from beneath the tree, playing with various singing hoilday decorations from Target, and opening presents. She loved watching the train around the tree at Waffle’s parents’ house and sort of understood the concept of present-giving-and-getting.

All three years past with Remi and for the decade as a childfree couple before that, Waffle and I split Christmas Eve and Christmas Day between our families. Our families live about two hours from us in opposite directions, so it was very convenient to do one family celebration, sleep in our own bed, and do the other family the next day. Even last year, while Remi was somewhat excited about Christmas, it didn’t seem worth it to do our own big thing on Christmas at our house. Remi was most interested in playing with new toys and seeing the grandparents.

This year, we spent all of Christmas Day at our own house, just the three of us. Remi is very aware of Christmas this year and was very excited for Santa to come. She had a hard time falling asleep—we watched on the monitor as she quietly tossed and turned—she was so anxious for Santa to come with her dragon eggs. Thank goodness for Remi’s holiday cheer. It saved our holiday season.

On the second weekend of December, Remi starting showing symptoms of a bad virus. Even though we all had our flu shots, she got a nasty flu. I’m so glad she had her shot because if this was the milder version, I don’t want to know what the more virulent version is like. Remi couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to eat, and was sick enough to stay home for a whole week of school.

Soon after, Waffle and I fell ill as well. At some point, I somehow developed hand, foot, and mouth disease?! No one else in the family had it, so I’m assuming I picked it up at the pediatrician’s office when I took Remi during walk-in hours. I’ve never ever had HFMD, ya’ll, and it was torture. It was so painful that I ended up going to urgent care where they diagnosed me and told me there was nothing to do but wait it out. I’m over the virus now, but the skin on my hands and feet are still recovering and the peeling is horrific. Waffle got sick to the point that he also went to urgent care and was diagnosed with pneumonia. PNEUMONIA.

Ya’ll. It was a bad time in our house this month. We could barely function. With a week left until Christmas, we hadn’t finished shopping, didn’t have one single decoration up, and the house was blanketed wth accumulated mountains of laundry, stacks of dirty dishes, and literal trash. Just…trash that we tied up and couldn’t muster the energy to remove from the house. Had it been just Waffle and I without a small human, I think we probably would have thrown in the towel, called it, and decided to do better next year.

But we do have a small human who is amazing and enthralled with everything, so we rallied. We got a tree at the last minute and Remi encouraged us to put the lights on. We were going to leave it at the tree, but got in the spirit and ended up putting some little decorations out and tidying up the house. It’s a lot of little things. Window clings and door hangers and some tinsel on the tree. I didn’t break out the yards of garland or the elaborate holiday displays. We made it feel like Christmas, though, and what our decor lacks in complexity is compensated for by Remi’s delight in every minute detail.

We tried to pack all the holiday fun into one week that we could. Remi helped me make cutout sugar cookies. Did I use a mix instead of baking from scratch? Sure did! Did Remi have a great time helping me roll out the dough and cutting out shapes? Heck yeah!

Remi helped us hang candy canes on the tree in lieu of getting all the boxes of ornaments down from the attic; we added a light smattering of ornaments that were mixed into one of the boxes we did bring down. For the first time, Remi fully understood the concept of Santa Claus and was so excited to leave cookies and carrots (for the reindeer) out for him on one of her ocean-themed plates. We watched holiday specials of her favorite shows and, of course, the new How to Train Your Dragon: Homecoming holiday-themed special (several times).

On Christmas, we had so much fun sneaking around putting Remi’s presents under the tree and planning a full day of family fun including frosting cookies, a big traditional holiday meal, hot cocoa and pajamas, and, of course, presents. Waffle and I even surprised each other with a few presents for each other, even though we both said we wouldn’t buy anything. Remi made the holidays so much more fun for us as a family. The way she lights up and finds joy in simple holiday surprises makes the joy linger for us, too. This year, Remi’s fourth Christmas, we started our own family traditions as a family of three. And Santa ate all the cookies!

3 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Parenting Things I Googled This Month

can toddler get hfmd without symptoms
safe cough remedies for toddler
honey cough at night toddler
how to help toddler sleep with a cough
natural cough suppresant toddler
when to take toddler to doctor for flu

2. The Doc Is In

http://www.instagram.com/p/B6b66c5BNDU/

3. Happy Holigays!

May the gifts of the season bring you this much joy.
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Raising Baby T. Rex: You Can Always Have a Hug

As I begin this piece, I have been directed to, “Go to work!” by Remi who is wailing and crying, with the door closed, in the bathroom. How did we get here? I flushed the toilet when she wanted to flush the toilet.

Give me a second.

OK, I knocked on the door and was admitted entry. We talked about her feelings and I held her all squished up into herself like a little bean while she got the last sobs out. Then we got cleaned up, procured a snack, and sat together for a few minutes on the couch. All is well.

As much as I want to bark, “You have nothing to cry about, Remi!” at times like these, I also want to honor that the feelings she’s having are real. To her, they’re real. When I am not losing my patience, which I do more than I’d like to admit, I appreciate that she has not yet learned to smush down her feelings for other people’s comfort. At some point, Remi will learn how to pretend she doesn’t have feelings. She’ll learn to say it to herself, “You have nothing to cry about, Remi!” I don’t need to model it for her.

My parents say I never cried. I was 17 months when I came to the U.S.A., well before the typical cut-off for emotional intensity for most kids. I’m sure I did cry and that their selective memories of me as a toddler privilege the moment of robust laughter more than the tears. That said, it does seem true that I cried far less than expected. When my younger sister arrived at 13 months old, she cried all the time. My parents were woefully unprepared.

I was abandoned before I was adopted. My birth family is unknown. My parents were sent photographs of the large purple burn marks on my right arm to be sure they still wanted to adopt me. I still have those scars; they’ve faded quite a bit. I believe that I cried less. As an adult, I’ve spent more time reflecting on why I cried less.

I may have been an absurdly emotionally well-adjusted child. I want that for my toddler self, truly. I wish that felt true in my heart.

Remi felt very secure to go to other people from a young age. We left her for an overnight with a family member for the first time at eight weeks. We left her for multiple days with another family member when she was just over three months old. “She’s just like you!” my mom remarked, meaning she was happy to go to other people without a lot of fuss.

But as she got older, she got a little more upset when we’d leave her for a weekend or a few days. She still adjusted well, but she needed a little more time to say goodbye or would cry a bit when we left. When we left her at our babysitter’s house for the first time, she wouldn’t calm down. She cried for the first few weeks. Then, once she was more sure of her surroundings and the people caring for her, she started to love going there.

We’re lucky to live relatively close to our parents (within two hours) so Remi has spent a lot of time with them both with and without us. I used to travel every month for work and Waffle has a very inflexible schedule at his job, so she spent a lot of time at Gramma and Pa’s house. She still gets a little sad when we’ve been gone for a few days, but she feels comfortable in both of her grandparents’ houses and always runs right in when we arrive.

Babies begin to develop an emotional attachment to their primary caregivers around six months. (Harsh, but true.) Remi likes to do everything a bit early, so she started around four months. This bond is strongest between six months and two years.

At 17 months, I would go to anyone and be all smiles, according to the stories I’ve been told. I just believe, now, that I wasn’t a magically happy baby, but that I dealt with my infant anxiety and distress in a different way. If you read about the original attachment style research by Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main in the 1970’s, my toddler behavior is the textbook anxious-avoidant insecure attachment style.

The study argued, essentially, that avoidant attachment develops in an infant when they experience neglect to the point that they come to anticipate that their needs will not be met no matter how much of a fuss they make. In response, they enter a sort of self-preservation mode that makes it seems as though nothing bothers them. They’re likely to not show distress if their caregiver leaves and to project behavior that helps them deflect from their actual desire for closeness.

Oof. It’s very me. Ask Waffle. Perhaps my, “I’ll go to anyone and have no emotional reaction about it and never cry even when it seems logical that I should cry,” attitude as a young toddler was a symptom of veiled distress, not a sign that I was left unharmed by my abandonment and adoption, as my parents had supposed and I wish felt true. It makes a lot of sense especially if I had a tumultuous family life in Korea. Even if I didn’t, the fact that I was separated at 17 months from my first home and my culture could have been enough.

To confirm their theories about avoidant attachment in infants, later studies on attachment theory measured infant heart rates which showed in at least one study that avoidant attachment style children, while not showing outward signs of distress, did experience a rise in heart rate correlated with their caregiver leaving. In other words, people like me are just really good at hiding how we feel.

As Remi’s gotten older, I’d say she’s definitely very emotionally attached to us. Preschool was a harder transition than I’d expected. The teachers actually called me to come and get her on the second day of Pre-K because they thought Remi was very ill. She wouldn’t stop crying and fussing. I took her home and she was fine. She had a cold, so the runny nose and coughing surely made it look like she wasn’t well, but she was running around and laughing and very much herself once she got home.

The next day, we let her bring her lovey, Dino, to school with her teacher’s permission and I made us stretchy cord bracelets with three beads (representing Remi, Waffle, and me) to hold our kisses for her. I told her she had to stay at school and that I would be back to get her and she could keep our kisses with her all day in case she felt sad. We still kiss her bracelet every school day and she kisses ours. It took her a couple of weeks for her to settle in. She used to say, “Mommy! You came back!” every single day when I arrived for pick-up. She likes going to school now. She hugs her teachers goodbye and says, “Hello” to her classmates when she arrives. Today, she had the day off for the holiday and she told me she wants to go to school.

I’m a fairly well-adjusted adult and I owe all of that to my parents who loved me with every bit of themselves and gave me every opportunity to bond and become more secure in myself and my home. Too many transracial adoptees have not fared as well as I did. According to one study, adoptees are four times as likely to commit suicide than non-adopted people. I have heard of a number of Korean adoptees in my own city, as recently as this year, many of them teens, who took their own life.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt suicidal. I’ve manifested my attachment issues in different ways. I’ve always had weird trust issues with loved ones. I’ve always kept my guard up even around my closest friends. In friendships, I often took on the role of the funny friend, the silly one, the best friend who will try to help you solve all your problems. I didn’t like to and still don’t like to focus on my own problems.

Even as I write this column, I mete out exactly what I want to share with y’all, always maintaining control of my narrative and also thinking about who might read it: my parents, my friends, strangers on the internet, future parents, Korean adoptees, who else? It may seem like I’m an open book, but I’m curating this content very carefully and, you may have noticed, often through the lens of humor or theoretical musings as I insert my story into a larger cultural narrative to try to keep the personal from becoming too specifically personal.

Part of the decision to send Remi to early Pre-K at three-years-old is that I work from home and it was becoming stressful for her to play all day by herself at home with me. It’s a good skill to have as an only child, to be able to escape into your own imagination for a while. As she got older, though, she wanted and needed more engagement from me.

Ironically those early months, while exhausting as hell, are more predictable for a typical work day schedule. Yes, Remi wanted to eat every hour but I could also just breastfeed her while on a conference call and no one was the wiser. If she was tired, I could strap her to me in a baby wrap and bounce her to sleep while I checked email. It was much harder and also simpler when she was small and immobile.

As Remi rounded three years old this past September, I knew it was time to either send her to Pre-K or to daycare. There was a lot of TV Babysitter happening because developmentally a two-year-old and three-year-old can’t just play for hours by themselves without becoming frustrated. There were times when I hid in the kitchen to take a phone call with my boss while Remi searched the house for me. There were times when I couldn’t help her do something because I was on a video call and she’d lay on the floor scream-crying while I nodded politely to my colleagues with my microphone on mute.

I didn’t feel good about it and it was time for Remi to be engaged in play and learning and to know that her needs were going to be met by a caring adult consistently. I wanted to make sure her needs for social and behavioral engagement weren’t being ignored and especially not by me.

Remi’s smart. That is something we have in common. She’s highly emotionally intelligent, even at three and she has a mind like a goddamn sponge. I am constantly amazed at the amount of detail she processes and recalls. She’s become more aware of what it means when I’m working. She pouts when she wants to play and I have a deadline to meet. I’m not upset that I sometimes have to deny her when I’m working. I think it’s OK in moderation. I also have the type of job where I can pick up a play session or a park date in between meetings and I try to do that as much as possible.

I want Remi to know that I’m here for her while also cultivating her skills for independence. She loves to do things herself. She also still wants me to do things for her sometimes. Sometimes she tells me to, “Go away!” but just as soon she wants a hug. We tell her, “You can always have a hug,” even when she’s been bad because we always are here for her. A hug definitely doesn’t mean she’s off the hook, but we will never leave her alone in time-out for too long and we’ll be ready to comfort her until she’s ready to talk to us about what happened. Most times, she wants the hug.

4 Queer Parenthing Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Making Memories on a New Schedule

Waffle’s schedule changed again, which means goodbye morning dates and hello seeing each other for dinner every weeknight for the first time in… over 12 years. We’ve been on opposite schedules for most of our relationship. So this is very different. It’s great for Remi, who was almost never awake at the same time as Waffle since she started school. We pushed her bedtime up which meant Waffle usually got home after she was in bed.

The very big downside is that Waffle has to get up for work at four in the morning, so he’s always exhausted by the time he gets home. The upside is that we get family time together, as a family. It’s still new and weird and exhausting in its own way. It’s nice to have everyone together for bedtime again.

Just before the schedule change, Waffle had a few scheduled days off from work. His warehouse makes employees take full weeks off for the bulk of their vacation time. We did our grown-up trip to NYC over the first weekend of his vacation and then he had a few days of staycation. I randomly and singlehandedly decided to take us on an impromptu family trip to Toronto to go to the big aquarium and zoo. If you’re not aware, one of Remi’s favorite things is the ocean and all ocean life. Another big fav is going to the zoo and there is a HUMONGOUS zoo in Toronto.

Just by chance, our hotel room has floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the train tracks of the public metro. Trains are another favorite thing for Remi! It was a Remi dream vacation that lasted just over 24 hours. We really did it up with breakfast in bed and Remi and I got to share a bed, which was very sweet and not at all restful. She only fell off the bed once and she landed on her feet. Phew.

Oh, and she took her nap in the wagon at the zoo. It was, like, 40 degrees so we bundled her up and I let her use my jacket as a pillow and she totally passed out and then we ended up doing this because we’re still assholes. Also, we wanted to see the zoo, too!

2. Parenting Things I Google This Week

- ringworm or rash
- toddler cooking ideas
- safe toddler nail polish

3. Obviously You Were Wondering

The last Baby T. column was written right before Halloween and I know you want to know what Remi’s costume was! I present to you, a scaaaary bat!

4. A Virgo At Horsey Play

This child is hilarious. She has lined up all the available horses in the barn, with water cups and additional water storage in the hay loft. I can’t wait until she’s old enough to be my executive assistant. I need this attention to detail in my life.

Raising Baby T. Rex: What Lies Between Us

We both went to bed with tears in our eyes.

It was past Remi’s bedtime and Waffle and I were both home, something increasingly rare. We protect a little late-night time, whenever Waffle gets home, for catching up on the day, watching our TV shows, and mostly sitting on opposite sides of the living room playing games on our phones if we’re being really honest. It could be enough, but lately it had not been feeling like enough.

“Do you feel like we’re drifting apart?” I asked.

I paused.

“I do,” I said. “I worry we’re going to keep on this path.”

“I don’t feel as close to you anymore and I feel like I have to say something because if we don’t talk about it then one day we’ll wake up and find that we’re just really good friends who love each other, but aren’t in love with each other and I don’t want that to happen.”

I searched for signs of acknowledgment or shared concern.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said. We stared at each other with tears in our eyes. He got up and went upstairs alone. I didn’t follow.

Later, before bed, Waffle texted me from the bedroom. I’m sorry you feel that way. I love you.

The next day, we got up around 7:30 am to get Remi ready for Pre-K. Every morning, she climbs into our king size bed and cozies up in the middle. Sometimes she yells, “Open your eyes!” Some days she sings us a song. On the sweetest days, she snuggles up like the tiniest little spoon under the covers.

We all get cleaned up and dressed together. We drop Remi off at school together. With his recent schedule change, the time between 7:30 am and 9:00 am drop-off is the only time Waffle gets with Remi on weekdays.

After dropping Remi off at Pre-K, I cautiously broached the topic again. Not the best timing, I knew. Fall brings the worst of the sads for Waffle. Maybe that was part of it. Or maybe it wasn’t. It felt like things were starting to feel less intimate, that we only talked about our jobs and our toddler, and that we didn’t have much left to talk about when we finally found alone time. I suggested we take advantage of our newly free early morning hour and have a weekly standing morning date. He agreed.

I planned the first date, a 9 am trip to the public market, a place where we used to go regularly pre-Remi and hadn’t been to for years. The market has open-air fruit and veggie shopping, light crowds on weekdays, a call-back to simpler times in our relationship, and also fresh empanadas. We didn’t make any rules about how to conduct ourselves, but we both put down our phones for the entire date. We held hands while browsing for local produce and bought some concord grapes. Minus the bees who hang out near the Empanada Stop trying to get a taste of our breakfast empanadas, it was a really gentle, low-stakes, sweet date.

“This is nice,” he said. I squeezed his hand. We go on our morning date every week now. Sometimes to the market and one day when the weather was horrid, we instead drove out to a local farm seeking warm, fresh cider donuts.

This past weekend, Waffle and I did one of our epic whirlwind NYC adult-only trips. We don’t do them as frequently now that childcare is a factor, but when we do them, we don’t mess around. We went to two huge NYC Halloween parties with a Hitchcock theme (and executed some pretty excellent couples costumes, if I do say so myself).

http://www.instagram.com/p/B4FZi-whZhz/

http://www.instagram.com/p/B4K34OCBjky/

We also saw three new immersive plays. (One was not great, but the other two were excellent and one made us both sob uncontrollably.) Of course, we saw the one show we’ve seen a hundred times (literally). We had brunch with friends and scarfed tacos on Governors Island and snuck late-night snacks from the bodega near our hotel. We stayed in Chelsea like the tourists we are. We attempted to sleep in, however futile on a Pre-K sleep schedule internal clock. We dashed about all day and all night and crashed into our queen hotel bed exhausted in the wee hours of the morning each night.

On the last night, I finally succeeded in sleeping in and…missed my outgoing flight. We’d decided to split our return flights home. I went back on Monday to pick up Remi and take her home. Waffle stayed until Wednesday. On Tuesday, Waffle turned 38. Frankly, I can think of very few things that would please him as much as going to Sleep No More on his birthday. I left him alone on his birthday, by his and my choice, and I strangely felt more connected to him than ever.

On the day I missed my flight, I felt awful. Waffle’s parents were anticipating taking a half-day off of work and I was no way going to make it back until the early evening. Once I sorted out my flight change, we decided to get lunch near the hotel. We had an unexpected block of time to fill. After three days, four shows, and two parties, we had a million things to talk about. Over burgers, we chatted excitedly and took silly selfies before I had to leave for the airport. Right before I walked out of the hotel with my bags, I flopped onto the bed and we got into another philosophical discussion about one of the shows we saw. If I could have stayed longer, I would have.

“I really have to go!” I said. “I’ll see you at home.”

4 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. You Can Stand Under My Bumbrella, Ella, Ella, Ella

Waffle got Remi an umbrella and she loves it. She used it for trick-or-treating in the rain this Halloween. She wants to use it whether or not it’s actually raining, though. Have you ever felt as pleased about modern conveniences as Remi is about her “bumbrella”?

2. Parenting Things I’ve Googled This Week

how to help toddler learn to wipe potty training
ways to help three year old with separation anxiety
halloween songs for kids

3. Progress at Pre-K

You may have inferred or read that Remi had some challenges adjusting to Pre-K. That said, she’s a kid who adapts and learns quickly. She’s still a little nervous about her full classroom in the morning (“Too many people!”), but she goes in willingly. She’s leaving her lovey, Dino, at home finally and has also started being more confident talking to new kids, in general. I still can’t believe she’s shy at school–it’s completely unlike her personality at home. It’s great to see her start to open up, though!

4. On a Related Note

Remi and Jeter are getting closer and closer. For the most part, they hang out peacefully unless Remi gets loud or stomp-y and scares Jeter. I finally see a future where they’re more comfortable with each other all the time. Only took three years and anti-anxiety meds to get here, but I’m happy about it.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3xvUtOhoBz/

Raising Baby T. Rex: The Art of Having A Good Time

Remi is a dragon and I’m a dragon hunter. She’s a bird. She’s a race car. I’m a mommy shark and she’s a baby shark. Or maybe she’s a daddy shark and I’m the baby. “Shh, it’s ok, baby,” she coos as she pets my head. “Have your bottle!” she exclaims as she jams a plastic bottle in my face.

I play. Every day. Not nearly enough for Remi’s pleasure, frankly, because I also work and write and have meetings and make dinner and do housework and there is usually just an hour or two left in every day that’s exclusively for play. And that’s a blessing.

Remi’s whole day is about play, from wake-up to bedtime. Even at preschool, her “schoolwork” is mostly just to play. She already has a distaste for work because it takes me away from her, away from playing with her. “Don’t work, mom!” she demands when she sees me heading towards my computer, “Play with me!”

I’m always running a to-do list through my head, scrolling and looping endlessly. I’m always behind or at least it feels like that. (I know. Maybe I’m right on time, where I’m supposed to be, exactly when and who and what I need right now, etc. etc.) When I have free time, I immediately think of what work or task I can fill it with. Then, instead of doing that task, I set it all up and… watch TV or play a game on my phone for hours until I’m too tired to do anything else. That guilt-binging of TV or games was the closest I got to self-care before I had a toddler.

I don’t know if you’d call our playtime self-care time because I’m very much at Remi’s command. She calls the shots. She decides when we’re done. She knows what I’m supposed to be playing with, for how long, and in what way. She even corrects me if I do it wrong!

I do know that I hadn’t taken the time to just doodle and color every day before I had a kid. I hadn’t taken the time to read books or sing songs. I still have that to-do list looping in my brain when I play with Remi, but I don’t have any of the guilt like I do when I’m Netflix binging. I’m bonding and teaching and creating important moments with Remi and it feels right to carve out time to do so.

I feel protective of my play time with Remi. It feels good to play with her. Sometimes it just feels good to play, period, like when I get caught up in a coloring session or an impromptu dance party. I don’t know when I forgot to prioritize play in my life, but it seems like an obvious gap now. When was the last time you did a silly dance? Or colored a picture? Or put together a puzzle? Hopefully, you’re doing these things better than I was. I wasn’t doing anything like that before Remi.

We play as a family more, too. We’re always heading to the park or the zoo or to visit a farm or go on day trips. I know some couples are really good at doing date-type things like that, but that’s never been Waffle and me. We get to do things together now that we never would have taken the time to do before we had a kid.

Of course, apple-picking sounds kind of fun as a couple activity, but who has time?! We weren’t making enough money to do fun dates that cost money in our honeymoon stage (other than spending too much at the gay dive bar). We were much more into making tacos and watching The L Word on DVD in our “becoming grown-ups-ish” stage. Then we moved into the “no one closes the bathroom door anymore stage” and just never had the emotional energy between work and politics and life to prioritize paying a lot of money to pick apples you can buy at the store for less.

Enter: Remi. Apple picking with a three-year-old? ADORABLE! Petting at the two goats at the apple farm with Remi? WELL WORTH THE PRICE OF ADMISSION. Eating overpriced hot dogs for lunch at the farm stand? DELICIOUS AND INSTAGRAM-WORTHY!

We have more fun now, more time set aside just for doing fun stuff. Waffle’s work schedule is opposite mine and intense AF, so we only have one day off together as a family. Pre-Remi, we used to spend that day running errands to the point of exhaustion and then crashing on the couch with take-out. Now, we often have elaborate fun-time plans or come up with silly plans on-the-spot like going to the local animal shelter to see the horses or dropping by the Museum of Play where we have a membership.

Remi started preschool this month and we suddenly have a few hours in the morning where Waffle and I are awake and home at the same time. Because most of my colleagues are on Pacific Time, I often don’t start work until later morning on my time. So Waffle and I started reclaiming some fun adult time for ourselves. We have a standing public market and breakfast empanadas date once a week. Sometimes we do breakfast at a greasy spoon diner, just the two of us. Most weekdays, we go home after school drop-off and do our own things, but we actually get to do our own things! I’m usually working and/or writing. Today, Waffle made homemade concord grape jam from grapes we bought at the public market before he headed in to work.

Though I don’t know if it’s a direct correlation, I feel like Remi reintroduced play and intentionally fun activities into our life. I value my free time so much more now and look forward to leisure activities instead of trying to cram every minute of my alone time with a volatile mix of productivity + procrastination. Sometimes, I color or doodle by myself, just for fun.

3 Queer Parenting Things I’m Current Overprocessing

1. Please Vote

Should I make this it’s own semi-anonymous pretentious toddler art Instagram account?

https://www.instagram.com/p/B2sqY62hrlJ/

https://www.instagram.com/p/B1re39MhmNb/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxENBCghKmT/

2. Parenting Things I Googled This Week

three year old development
temper tantrums three years old
toddler diarrhea remedies
steven universe kid shirt
steven universe toddler appropriate episodes

3. Here We Are in the Future

Completely unintentionally, I got Remi into Steven Universe: The Movie. I wanted to watch it on the night it premiered and figured it wasn’t too violent to be in the background while Remi played. Little did I know it was going to be a musical. Remi loves a good tune!

Fast forward to a few weeks later and we’ve watched the movie at least a dozen times, listen to the soundtrack in the car, and Remi can sing along to most of the songs. Waffle has (incorrectly) never been into SU before, but much prefers Here We Are in the Future to Baby Shark in the car! Remi’s singalong are pretty cute, too!

Raising Baby T. Rex: My Mommy Style Profile

“You don’t need to buy a new wardrobe! You already dress like a mom!”

“Rude. I’m offended.”

“Your typical outfit is leggings as pants, long sweatshirts, and flat shoes.”

“I didn’t say you were wrong, just rude.”

When I was trying to imagine my fashion and presentation choices post-partum, I definitely imagined continuing down the path of favoring comfort over style. I already lived in stretchy dresses, soft open cardigans, opaque leggings, slip-on flats, drapey tunics, and oversized sweatshirts. In fact, those same clothes helped me reduce the amount of maternity clothing I had to buy. I was already kind of wearing maternity clothing before I got knocked up.

I don’t consider myself unfashionable, nor would I say I’m very fashion-forward. I’m open to taking fashion risks and don’t mind drawing attention to myself. How I’ve done fashion has changed over time.

Growing up in a rural area of western New York, I often felt out of place. I dealt with this like many queer teen girls do, by going through several complex relationships with fashion and what fashion represents. I had a tomboy phase when I was a pre-teen, all baggy tees and long shorts and shell jewelry. I changed school districts in middle school, from a rural school with a lot of farm kids to a school that had a reputation for being snobby. I changed my style, too, from Looney Tunes t-shirts from Wal*Mart to the latest junior’s department fast fashions from department stores at the mall. By the time I entered high school, I’d settled into a casual preppy look, all matching knit cardigan sets and Old Navy khakis and navy blue Tommy Hilfiger mini-dresses. It didn’t suit me so much as it helped me blend into the sea of white faces everywhere around me.

Between my junior and senior year, I went through a bit of self-discovery and started acting out in my fashion choices a little more, adopting more of the dELiA*s post-punk and skater-inspired looks like super wide-leg jeans with barely-there tank tops, brightly patterned mini-dresses, platform sneakers, stainless steel ball chokers, and hemp necklaces. I started taking college classes at the local state school through an accelerated college program for high school seniors and the more time I spent on-campus, the more I felt comfortable to wear “weird” clothes. There was the fuzzy leopard print coat (that I recently sold on Poshmark as “90’s vintage”), a black pleather jacket I wore over abstract patterned strappy dresses, and of course, cutting my always-long hair into a face-framing bob and box dying it various shared of red, blue-black, and purple.

By the time I got to college, I was full-on buying things just because they looked sexy or unusual. I got involved with the Women’s Center on campus and I looked like it, if that makes sense. I was just as often wearing unwashed literal boyfriend hoodies and wide-leg corduroy pants held together with safety pins and dollar store flip flops as I was wearing tiny lacey tops with funky skirts and lace-up combat boots.

Most of the time, I wore a bandana in my hair kerchief style to hold back my semi-dirty chin-length hair and I never wore a bra. I got really into cheap chandelier drop earrings that I wore one pair at-a-time 24/7 until the gems started to fall out. My friend from the Women’s Center who was also my predecessor as co-director said her first impression of me was, “Who’s that girl with her boobs out all the time?” Sounds right. I was making a statement in the era of “My Short Skirt” and my full-on coming out as both bisexual and a feminist.

Now, some version of that era of my life lives on in my ever-expanding message tee collection and deep v-neck dresses and oversized loungewear. But between college and now there was the era of Business Professional, the hustle time of my mid-to-late twenties, during which I almost exclusively bought clothing that could be worn to work in an office environment. Calvin Klein sheath dresses and suit jackets and pointy-toed heels.

When I got my first office job at the age of 22, I had to spend $300 I didn’t have on a cheap work wardrobe from T.J. Maxx because I only had one semi-professional look in my closet. By my late twenties, my entire wardrobe was my work wardrobe and I evaluated a potential new item on whether it could be styled to wear to work. Much like my preppy phase, this era of my fashion timeline was more about fitting in and getting respect as a younger Asian woman in the workplace and less about what called to me from the racks.

By the time my thirties arrived, I was moving away from suit jackets to comfy cardigans, from crisp pleated slacks to elastic waist glorified yoga pant slacks, more stretchy sheath dresses and less starchy ones, almost exclusively flat slip-on shoes and I was more and more likely to just throw a nice top layer over a tee and jeans for work.

As I got older, I gave less fucks about what others thought and I invested in my own comfort. I leaned into colorful scarves as the ultimate accessory to turn casual looks into work-ish ones. It was during this period that I got knocked up and that Waffle said I dressed “like a mom.”

Now, I’m a mom and I guess I dress like one, whatever that means. I prefer high-waisted stretchy jeans and, now that I work remotely every day, often work in joggers and a tee. I don’t even mess around with heels higher than two inches and I wear flats 99% of the time. I tend to reach for the same pair of earrings during the week for simplicity’s sake and because I got into the habit of minimalist jewelry when Remi’s grabby baby hands were still a threat.

That said, I feel more myself now than I ever have before. Shortly after I got pregnant, I got an undercut on one side that quickly spread to all around my scalp so I just have a little length on the top. I usually wear my hair pulled up on top of my head for comfort more than aesthetic reasons, so my hair looks short. (Shout out to the hairdresser who told me my face was too round for short hair for all of my adolescent years.) I don’t wear makeup every day and when I do, I wear bright and sometimes Crayola shades of lip stain and stretched wide cat eyes and shimmery purple and silver highlighter. I recently discovered the perfect hybrid of comfort and boobage that is Lane Bryant’s wireless push-up bra to wear under low-cut dresses and tops.

I don’t know if this is what a “mom” looks like to you, but unlike the heterosexist version of “mom fashion” that Waffle was jokingly referencing, I have my own definition of “mom style.” It’s comfort over nuisance, sexy for me and no one else, a blend of personal style and new trends, a little bit hard femme and a little bit would-be soccer mom, and lots of soft resting places for Remi’s face to bury into. It’s machine washable and/or inexpensive to replace. It’s bare arms and big bellies and lots of pockets.

Photo be Erica Jae

One of my top three fears before having Remi was the fear of disappearing into the Cult of Mommy. I was so nervous that I’d be sucked down into heteronormativity and lose my sense of self in Lularoe and monogrammed plain white tees. That, like my preppy phase and my business casual phase, I’d feel pressured to fit in. What am I wearing right now, you ask? High-waisted jeggings, a wireless bra, a cream-colored tee that says “the future is furious” in red letters, no makeup, my everyday earrings, and my hair twisted up with a clip.

I wouldn’t say I’ve escaped the Cult of Mommy completely. I’ve defined it for myself.

3 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. I’m Three!

Remi turned three this month. We invited family over for a little get-together which Waffle graciously took the lead on for planning purposes and, thusly, turned the little get-together into an all-out themed birthday party. The theme was How to Train Your Dragons and included a themed cake, themed plated and utensils, a banner and a tablecloth, paper masks, various on-theme presents, and, of course, enormous helium balloons.

This is what happens when Waffle takes on a task. He goes all in and also expands it far beyond the bare minimum and then obsesses over the details of all the additional projects he takes on. That said, he crushed it!

Remi had a really fun day with her four grandparents and three Aunts and her cousin.

Waffle also took care of the present shopping.

I know straight women say this about their husbands whenever they do like the bare minimum of human decency, so I hesitate to write it, but I just really think Waffle is an amazing co-parent. The best part of queer parenting is the part where no one is performing gender roles out of obligation and everyone gets to parent to their strengths.

2. Things I Googled This Week

how to help toddler adjust to preschool
how to help three year old with homesickness at school
why is toddler suddenly afraid of the dark
signs toddler sore throat
child doesn’t want to stay at preschool

3. Toddler Prep Kitchen Update

Scroll to the third page for some live cooking action! Let’s get this kid on Masterchef Junior!

Raising Baby T. Rex: Mommies, Daddies, and Babies

The cold, hard reality is Remi’s exposed to gender and race and class everywhere. Some of it we have control over: the TV shows she watches, the books she reads, the stories we tell her and the language we use. Some of it we just don’t: the latent normalizing messages in the media she consumes, the stories and language she hears from others when she’s out of our care, the way the world just works in a racist, homophobic, transmisogynist, cissexist, classist world.

We decided early on to use the pronouns culturally assigned to her assigned sex at birth. That’s something we do have control over and a conscious choice we made. I’m not sure if it was the best decision objectively. It sends a message about the correlation of medically assigned sex and gender, whether we believe that or not. It makes cis people more comfortable, for sure. It wasn’t because “they” is hard to remember and use. (We didn’t find out or talk about the assigned sex before Remi’s birth and used “they” for all of that time.)

It’s because life is complex and, quite frankly, Waffle didn’t want to be doing even more Gender Education for Cis People on a daily basis with everyone who encounters Remi. He already doesn’t like drawing attention to it himself as a nonbinary boi who is also an extreme introvert. He’s happy for people to just categorize him however they want without having a whole convo about it. Remi is beginning pre-K next month. Waffle uses, by choice, his legal name on all paperwork and also goes by “Daddy” to Remi and he’s a little stressed over having that convo with Remi’s new school. Especially since we chose a private daycare (not a school-based program) for pre-K that we found out is housed in a church. Presbyterians are often cool with LGBTQ people, but you never know!

One of the families in my queer fam network are two nonbinary parents who are raising a child with they/them pronouns and they shared with me that it actually makes it easier for all of them. In their experiences, cis people kind of get it more with a child than they do with adults, because they’re willing to accept that kids should decide their own gender. Their experience has been that it actually helps cis people understand gender more broadly to consider that a kid isn’t born with a gender.

There are no right or wrong answers in queer and trans parenting choices, just the decisions we make. Honestly, we’re all going to fuck up our kids in some way, at some point. That’s just being a complex human person parent! My opinion is that there are still so few of us that we have to make a lot of room for each other just to cobble together a bit of queer and trans parenting community. That said, I sometimes feel paranoid that maybe other queer people secretly judge us for using she/her pronouns for Remi, even as I’m also sure it was the right decision for us.

Gender and race is truly everywhere and I think about that as queer Korean femme. There is not one television show in syndication for kids with a principally Asian cast. There are a few Asian characters on some of the shows, or, at least, characters coded as Asian without specific cultural references to any one ethnicity. That hasn’t changed much from when I was a little kid. We’re side characters or we don’t exist at all. I try to expose her to books about Korean families, but as an adoptee, the language including pronunciation of Korean words are even foreign to me. I have some Korean flashcards my parents passed down to me. I don’t know where they got them, but they don’t have any English on them, so I can’t do anything teachable with them until I learn Korean. I’ve held onto them anyway.

The Korean stuff is really hard for me to unpack, but I’m unpacking it, bit by bit, slowly. The biggest impediment is that I still feel like an imposter, a white-raised Korean who doesn’t know how to pass on a sense of cultural heritage because I haven’t quite grasped my own culture yet. I asked for a cookbook last Christmas with easy Korean recipes (Maangchi’s debut cookbook). I’ve read it cover-to-cover and haven’t yet attempted to make anything from it. Maybe Remi and I can do it together eventually.

The gender stuff is a little easier to unpack because I very innately understand what it means to be femme, for me. In some ways, it’s more fraught. Remi started figuring out gender from an early age, when she started calling masculine folks “daddy” and feminine folks “mommy.” She’d point to characters in books and assign them “mommy” and “daddy” genders, including fairly gender-neutral illustrations of dinosaurs. She’d often decide the bigger dinosaur was a “daddy.” I would ask her, “Why do you think that person is a daddy?” when she was too young to answer. “Daddy,” she’d reply. More emphatically, “DADDY!” I’d explain, though I wasn’t sure she was absorbing it, that you can’t know someone’s gender by looking at them.

Yet, on every tv show she watches, it is totally possible to guess someone’s gender (and sexual orientation) by looking at them. Now that she’s a little older, she’s able to communicate more and I’ve learned that gender is not as etched in stone in her mind yet as I was concerned it was. She still tends to divide her toys into family groups of mommy, daddy, and baby. That’s typical for her age and, frankly, imitates her family because we’re a queer mommy and daddy. That said, she is not hardcore into gender permanence and we still have many years and convos to unpack gender together.

It doesn’t particularly help that one of her parents is masculine and one is feminine. Though I do femme in my own way, Remi still sees me performing femininity. She’s obsessed lately with my lipstick. “I like your lips!” she said when she first started verbalizing her awareness of my makeup. When I’m not wearing it, she sometimes says, “Mommy, where are your lips?!” or, “Mommy, put on makeup!” I’ve let her know that any person of any gender can wear makeup and I’ve shown her some pics of beautiful people across the range of gender wearing makeup. I also don’t wear makeup every day myself, so she often sees me without any makeup. I’m not necessarily encouraging her to take an interest in makeup, but I also don’t want to cross into the territory of punishing or denying access to femininity in the pursuit of neutral-ness. I had to laugh when she took some of her brightly colored blocks and started rubbing them on her face. “I put on my makeup!” she announced. I refuse to go as far as to buy her play makeup until she’s old enough to ask for it if she wants it, but that didn’t stop her imagination from coming up with a way to play with makeup.

For now, I try not to stress about it too much. I know there’s no one single thing I can do to prevent these stereotypes from creeping in at the edges, especially as I prepare to send her to a public pre-K program with lots of other kids whose parents may or may not have an awareness of systemic power and oppression. I think mostly good can come from mixing her in with kids from lots of different backgrounds and experiences in a public city school program. She’s only just almost been on this earth for three years and she’s already way ahead of where I was and where most kids were on these issues at her age, so maybe that means it’ll take her less time to unlearn and unpack them as she gets older and more aware. That’s what I’m holding out hope for, anyway.

4 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. I Am a Chef Today

Lately, Remi has been wanting to help me make food, but there’s not too much she can help with, so I assign her to dumping things in a bowl, supervised hand-mixing, peeling oranges, and making salads a.k.a. ripping lettuce with her tiny adorable hands.

She takes it all very seriously.

http://www.instagram.com/p/B04dAI0BGLO/

2. Remi and Her Dragons

The hottest new thing for Remi to obsess over is DRAGONS. Ever since she watched the third installment in the How to Train Your Dragon series on the way back from A-Camp, she’s been all about dragons.

For her upcoming birthday, Waffle got her a very expensive Hatchimal baby Toothless dragon that “learns” and grows, which I’m pretty sure means it is either spying on us for the government or a Black Mirror situation. She’s going to love it. I’m slightly afraid of it.

3. Sleep Transitions Suck

Remi has been hovering around one nap for a while. Then, she dropped it for a bit. Now she mostly takes a nap, but it’s really affecting her nighttime sleep. She’s never been a great sleeper, but she seems to be only sleeping eight hours at night, which is low for a toddler. On days she skips naps, she gets cranky and overtired by bedtime and still doesn’t sleep longer at night. On days she takes naps, she won’t go down until later in the afternoon and will often sleep for so long that we have to go wake her up or else she’s pushing a midnight bedtime. HAHA GREAT! It’s a weird time and she’s definitely right between one nap and no nap. She should be taking naps, though! She’s three! I can only imagine that pre-K is going to further mix everything up for her sleep schedule, too. I really hate sleep transitions and that is all. I just needed to whisper it into the void.

4. Things I’ve Definitely Said Aloud This Month:

Eww, don’t eat that. That’s trash!
No, it’s not daytime. It’s nighttime. (The sun was up.)
Big kids wear pants.
That’s poop! Don’t touch it.
That’s dirty! Don’t touch it.
That’s not yours! Don’t touch it.

Raising Baby T. Rex: Goodbye Pull-Ups, Hello Three, Hello Love

Did you catch my A Chorus Line reference? It’s okay if you didn’t, but also, this is who I am and I won’t apologize for it. I’m channeling Remi more and more in my adult life because you know what, toddlers do not give one fuck and yet are also completely in tune with their emotions. They will say exactly what they want and express how they feel in-the-moment and that includes crying because they fiercely want and or don’t want to eat a french fry. They’d be horrible bosses; they’re great motivational speakers.

Remi motivates me all the time, both to slow down and appreciate life and to not wait for a second longer to grow and invest in myself. Children change so fast. Remi’s growing opinions of the world, general attitude shifts, her movement toward independence, it feels like it’s happening so quickly. Just a few months ago I was lamenting about the seemingly impossible task of potty training. Now, we’re in cloth undies all day without accidents. How did that happen in a matter of months?

She went from speaking single words to four-word sentences seemingly overnight. Quite literally, she just started pulling out sentences one day. A few months later and now she talks in sentences all the time and we actually understand 90% of it. How was it just this past January that she couldn’t string words together coherently?

Waffle and I have been together in some iteration for over 14 years, married legally for seven years, and living in our current home for six years. We’ve changed so much. We’re always changing. But those changes are almost imperceptible month-to-month or even year-to-year. How often do we say, “Remember when we did THAT? Can you believe it was over a decade ago?” “Remember when THIS happened to us? Was that… really five years ago?” “OMG this song! How is it 20 years old?!”

Children speed up the pace of life. Three years would just sort of float by before Remi. Now, when we look at pics of her just a year ago, it feels like a lifetime ago. Waffle and I are the same. We’re wearing the same clothes, have the same hairstyles, have the same hobbies and interests, but Remi is quite literally a whole different version of herself physically, mentally, spiritually.

Simultaneously, children slow down the pace of life. On days when Remi, in her almost-three way, is annoying the heck out of me and Waffle is at work and I’m working and also mommying, it feels like bedtime will never come. On days when we’re having a wonderful time, I have to slow down to make space for Remi to explore her world at her pace. She’s not quiet, gentle, or slow, but she wants to take every experience in full 4D immersion, in all dimensions. So there’s no rushing past that flower outside the mall entrance, okay? That flower needs to be smelled, appreciated, aggressive—full-face smelling. And then we need to debrief it. “What did it smell like?” “What color is the flower?” “Do you think it’s pretty?” Okay, now we have to smell these other flowers and then maybe we can go in the mall to get that one thing you’re looking for and you kind of hate the mall and would really like to go finish this errand but we’re smelling all these flowers right now, so it will wait.

When we were in the middle of potty training, it felt like an endless struggle, even though it was just a few months. About a month ago, we had a strong hunch that our super-smart kid had figured out that she could use her pull-ups like diapers if she just didn’t feel like going to the potty. We were lamenting that we might still be in pull-ups in months, maybe even years. It didn’t feel like she wasn’t ready to use the potty, though. She went easily when she did remember to use the potty and she had figured out how to do pee and poop in the potty by the first week. We were just in this pull-up limbo where she’d go in the potty if she wasn’t wearing anything on her bottom and would sometimes hold it for hours randomly, but then other times would definitely go in her pull-up and it seemed like she knew she was doing it.

People kept reminding us that kids do it when they’re ready and there’s no use rushing her, but I swear to you she was showing all signs of readiness before we started and continued to in the first couple days of training. It didn’t feel like we were too early or rushing her beyond her abilities. It felt like we were falling into unproductive bad patterns.

After one particularly harrowing day, we threatened to put her back in diapers, which I realize is not the parenting-of-the-year recommendation on potty training, but it’s what happened. Parenting is hard. Anyway, we threatened to put her in diapers if she was going to treat her pull-ups like diapers and then we put her in an actual diaper and she thought that was hilarious. “I’m baby! Wah! I need bottle!” Ugh. Total backfire.

So I pivoted and went in the complete other direction and that night, we went permanently into cloth undies. I told her I believed she was a big girl and she was ready to use the potty every time and I knew she could do it because she’s smart and good at going potty. We said, literally, “Bye-bye, pull-ups!” and moved them out of the bathroom and we were off. She had two, maybe three accidents over the next 24 hours. Flash forward three weeks later and she’s typically gone the whole day without accidents. This past weekend, we went to the zoo, the beach, ran errands, and ate out for brunch and she kept her undies dry all day. Now I’m looking forward to the day she can wipe her own bottom. Which will probably be within the next year but also feels like an eternity away.

Three is just on the horizon. Remi’s birthday is September 1st. Three feels like a big milestone for her and for us. Can you believe I’ve been writing this column in some iteration for over three years already, starting when I was preggo with Remi? Now that little fetus is wearing big kid undies and speaking in whole sentences and building with Legos. What have you done with your life in the last three years? Because Remi’s learned to sit, stand, crawl, walk, run, hop, and skip. She’s just about 15% away from successfully completing an unassisted somersault.

I said to Waffle, when we started down this path two years before I actually got pregnant, that having a kid would be the most interesting project I’ve ever worked on. It has been. Remi is endlessly fascinating and growing right in front of me so quickly I have mommy whiplash. I don’t want her to slow down. I love the freedom that comes for both her and me as we pass every stage. I do want to enjoy every moment of it, as I have a feeling I’m going to blink and she’ll be a teenager.

5 Queer Parenting things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Attempting Classic Family Fun

We took Remi to the local vintage drive-in movie theatre because it seemed like a toddler-friendly place. It was. But I forgot about how when you arrive late on the opening weekend of Toy Story 4, you’re def not going to get a good parking spot. I could see about half the screen and, also, because Remi also couldn’t see super well and is two and was more interested in singing songs and looking at the stars and jumping around barefoot on the sharp gravel rocks, I saw about 25% of the movie.

Oh, we also got our wheels stuck in mud and a ton of people who were already parked just stared at us struggling until finally some person helped Waffle push us out. Anyway, I think we’re going to go again later in the summer and maybe try to get a spot closer to the front? It made for some cute pics and memories. I do love that I live in a place where I can drive just 25 minutes away to see a real drive-in movie, however logistically challenging.

2. Billy the Betta Fish

It happened. We got Remi her first official pet that is hers. We have a rabbit and a cat and she likes them, but I don’t think she feels like they’re just for her the way Billy is. It was a very impromptu decision, which is on-brand for us and also a stupid way to bring a new pet into your life.

Long story short, I’m obsessed with Billy, so named for Billy Porter, and his moss ball buddies MJ, Indya, and Angelica! I’ve already upgraded his tank to a bigger one, bought a fancy test kit for his water, special almond leaves to improve his health and water quality, various treats, and I may be a tad bit obsessively Googling betta health and wellness articles. Full disclosure, I literally just bought him more things this evening because I’m worried about him having a heater and the ideal ph in his tank.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BzOry09BviF/

Remi loves, “My fish!” and loves feeding him. He lives on my downstairs desk (my dining room set-up for when I can’t use my office) and we’re best friends. That’s all. This is also just how I am as a person.

3. Things I’ve Definitely Said Aloud This Month:

You have to wear pants to go outside.
I don’t want your fingers in my nose.
You can do it right now or I’m going to do it for you (repeat x100).
Get your foot out of my shirt right now.
Stop yelling. You’re scaring the bunny.

4. Jeter Watch 2019

5. Photography by Baby T: A Stream-of-Consciousness Burst Interrogation

Remi’s new fav thing is to ask to take pictures of things she’s interested in on our phones. It’s hilarious and also she takes these incredible photo bursts that are mostly blurry nothingness, but we can often pull a couple shots from the bursts that are actually really cool toddler art.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BxENBCghKmT/

http://www.instagram.com/p/BzrLI3yBgJH/

Raising Baby T. Rex: Airplanes, A-Camp and Abdominal Pain

^{feature image via Everyone’s Instagram Boyfriend, Rachel Kincaid}

I don’t do things small. I overthink everything and then go big. In other words, when I get in the pool, I prefer to jump in vs. take the stairs. When I take a bandage off, I prefer to hold a corner and yank it along with whatever skin and hair is attached to it vs. gingerly lift it millimeter-by-millimeter. I like to have a plan and then I want to just do it. So I made a plan to bring Remi to A-Camp this year. If Kristin and Marni, our fearless A-Camp leaders, say I can bring Remi, I’m going to fly us both to California, I decided.

I feel secondary anxiety for every parent I see traveling with kids in an airport. Good luck with that, I think when I see a parent coaxing a toddler along with their tiny suitcase or trying to appease a wiggly kiddo with a tablet. I definitely didn’t want to try it myself.

However, the desire to go back to A-Camp after a four year hiatus was too strong. When it came time to submit staff applications, I asked if it would be OK if I brought Remi. Of course, everyone thought that was a very good idea, mostly because they wanted to meet Remi and despite the fact that it maybe is not the kind of thing camp is set up for.

So for her very first time on an airplane trip, I chose to fly Remi and me, just the two of us, from Rochester, NY to Los Angeles with a layover in New York City. The total travel time was over ten hours each way, with the JFK to LAX flight alone clocking in at five-to-six hours in the air. I was increasingly uncertain about my decision as the days passed and the trip became more real. I prepared and packed as best I could and decided to do whatever I could to try to set myself up for success.

Things started off great with the JetBlue agent telling me I should have Remi’s birth certificate on me, which I did not have, no I did not. I checked TSA rules and TSA doesn’t need ID for minors traveling with parents/adults, but I guess JetBlue recommends it. So I sent Waffle, who was dropping us off and trying to have a chill 3:30 AM goodbye, speeding back to the house to get Remi’s birth certificate. Things were off to a brilliant and not-at-all-stressful start!

Waffle was feeling a bit bummed out about missing Remi’s first flight. We’d been talking about airports and airplanes and she was really excited. I promised to take pictures. I also started updating the shared note that we’d been using as a packing list with brief live-time updates about the trip. I wanted Waffle to feel like he was with us. In fact, rather than narrate the trip, let me just share the notes I sent to Waffle.

4:20 AM ET
Remi was on her best behavior for TSA screening, but insisted on taking her own bag through the zig-zag line, thus creating a traffic hold-up even at cheetah speed.

4:40 AM ET
When I lifted her up to look out the window at ROC terminal A, she finally saw the ✈️✈️✈️docked on the dimly lit tarmac and said, “Cooool!”

4:50 AM ET
She walked down the jet bridge by herself with her bag. Buckled herself into the seat across the aisle while I worked on getting the car seat installed. Willingly got into her car seat and was excited to be on the plane.

5:07 AM ET
Hated takeoff and screamed “I want to go home!” and burst into tears. 😰 Threw herself around in the car seat trying to get out so much that I opened the chest harness so she could have her arms. Gave her Dino once she settled down. Didn’t want to see the sky or have the window open. Seemed scared to be up high.

6:59 AM ET
Could not find applesauce at JFK, so got three of the Plum organics baby food pouches. We opened and taste tested all of them and she liked none of them. She did eat most of an 🍏and had a Chobani yogurt and a milk box.

8:10 AM ET
Convinced Remi to let me take her bag in exchange for holding her own ticket. She has not once sat in the car seat to ride around the airport. The strap has come in handy to attach her bag to the stroller cart when I can convince her to give it up. Two women have asked about the cart and where to get it so far.

8:29 AM ET
Car seat did not fit down the aisle in the bigger plane for some reason. Folks really do offer to help so that’s nice. A kind flight attendant carried it back to row 27 for us and another flight attendant stowed our cart in the back for us. (I ❤️you, 👩🏾‍✈️👨🏻‍✈️!) Remi is excited about the plane again. (Thank god!) Talked about takeoff being scary. We’ll see how it goes!

8:45 AM ET
Remi fell asleep right as we began to taxi. She slept through the announcements. Yet to be determined if she’ll stay 😴for takeoff or if her ears popping will wake her up.

9:26 AM ET
SHE DIDN’T WAKE UP! Success! I just scarfed a $10 ham sandwich and now I’m going to try to take a nap assuming she stays asleep. She’s out hard.

10:31 AM CT (11:30 AM ET)
Remi woke up, remembered where she was, and asked for her lollipop. We watched 30 minutes of Cars on the JetBlue screen and ate some 🍿. Then we read some books.

10:22 AM MT (12:22 AM ET)
Remi is tired of wearing her headphones. (She had them on for her nap, too.) We got the tablet out and played the Baby Shark matching game and the coloring game. “Glitter!”

10:52 AM MT (12:52 PM ET)
We’re doing great! Remi’s a gold star flyer! ⭐️⭐️⭐️ She’s starting to get restless and no activity that isn’t a screen can keep her attention for more than ten minutes. But we’ve got less than two hours to go. We can do it?

11:19 AM MT (1:19 PM ET)
We beat the slump with apple juice (a special treat!) and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World on the JetBlue screen. Remi keeps telling the 🐉s that they’re, “Good boys!” and has decided they’re all, “My dragons!” The warlords are, “My friends!” She does not understand the premise of the movie. 😂 She put her 🎧 back on herself because she was so into it, though. I synced up my screen with hers and am watching it with closed captioning on. The other winner to get us over the hump was my cup of complimentary ice, which I actually didn’t want but she is finding endlessly amusing. Update: She just did the Ice Bucket Challenge down her front. “Need towel!” 🙄

11:43 AM MT (1:43 PM ET)
I have broken the seal on the jelly beans. Less than an hour to go. One very restless toddler. We can do this! We can do this?

11:36 AM PT (2:36 PM ET)
Arrived! Early! So early that our gate is occupied. We’re very emotionally invested in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, so maybe it’s for the best. Remi is super concerned about the dragons who were captured by the bad guy. “Oh no! My dragons! Help them!”

11:56 AM PT (2:56 PM ET)
Remi got tired of sitting still and wanted to be unbuckled. Had a mini-meltdown 😭 about two minutes before we finally got the :ding: that we could unbuckle and get up. THANK LESBIAN JESUS. Luckily the person sitting in front of Remi whose seat she kept pushing on despite many stern talking to’s also has a two-year-old, so was well equipped to deal with Remi’s incessant chatter/yelling/singing and seat pushing. Honestly, I’m going to call this a success! 🏆

2:10 PM PT Remi made immediate friends with everyone on staff. She is convinced Austen is you. So there’s that. Make of it what you will. She’s currently playing with a bunch of adult staff while I use the bathroom. God bless. Next up, car rental.

Then things started getting busy and I forgot to keep updating, but Waffle said he appreciated it and looked forward to the airplane updates all day while he was at work.

Final conclusion: Traveling alone with a toddler is super exhausting and stressful, but we did it! Honestly, Remi’s a great flyer and I would take her on a plane again in a heartbeat, especially if I had a second pair of adult hands with me and if the flight was a bit shorter and/or direct. That said, it was hard and I had to rely on a lot of help from strangers throughout the day. I hate, hate, hate asking for and receiving help, but people saw I was struggling and I would have been truly ridiculous not to take them up on the assistance.

I tried to pay it forward during the trip home when I saw another mom traveling alone with two kids who looked like she wanted to throw her kids in the trash. I mean, I get it. This poor parent was just trying to eat her salad and she was coming back from a trip to Hungary with a toddler and an infant. Good grief. I checked with her and then offered her older kid a seat next to Remi to watch the Netflix show Remi was enjoying on my laptop. They bonded nicely and Remi told the older girl, “I like your shirt!” Sometimes I’m wary of other moms when I’m traveling alone. I don’t always read as queer (to heterosexual people, at least) and I never know if I’m talking mommy stuff to a Trump supporter or a religious zealot, you know? But sometimes I just lean into the mommy-to-mommy connection and focus on our shared humanity.

Anyway, by the time we arrived at LAX, Remi was overtired and overstimulated. We visited with the A-Camp staff waiting for the shuttle in terminal 6 for a while to let Remi run out some energy. She made fast friends with everyone. I was driving us to camp because I wanted to get a nap in for Remi and, more importantly, I wanted a car on site all week in case we needed anything. I’m so glad I had a car!

Why? Because Remi got sick, the night before campers arrived, around midnight. I’d put Remi to bed and she went to sleep right away. I was sitting outside talking to Reniece and Carmen and heard Remi coughing and then crying on the travel baby monitor I brought along. I said goodnight and went upstairs a little bit later and Remi popped up in her pack-n-play. “Mommy?” I thought she might be confused about where she was, so I went to pick her up and that’s when I felt something wet on the carpet. I’ll spare you the details, but I turned on the light and had quite a mess to clean up. She got sick four more times over the course of the next hour, all over me and then all over every potential sleeping surface in our room. Never have I been more stressed about solo parenting a toddler. I couldn’t leave her alone in the room and I needed help. EVERYONE WAS ASLEEP. I eventually ended up waking up Mack and Marni and we were up until 3:00 AM. I’m so grateful that they came and helped. For the rest of the week, our room smelled weird.

Remi was sick for a couple of days but seemed to be over the major symptoms in about 24 hours. I thought it was food poisoning, but then I started feeling sick, too. Then I found out that two other staff were sick, both of whom had been playing with Remi during pre-camp. Then another staff person fell ill. Then another and another! It’s possible it was unrelated to Remi, but the symptoms were similar: utter despair and wishing-for-death for about ten hours followed by a period of quick recovery. It also happened mostly to people Remi had baby duck imprinted on or who helped take care of her at pre-camp. Remi even managed to take out Alex the night of the family band’s performance, three days after Alex gave Remi a drum “lesson” a.k.a. let Remi touch all her drumsticks and drums. I felt bad that Remi was Patient Zero.

Remi overall had a good time at A-Camp when she wasn’t ill and grumpy from being ill or from traveling cross-country. I don’t know if I’d do it again. I couldn’t help out as much as I wanted to as a staff member. Remi being sick meant I had to miss some of the workshops I was supposed to do. Accepting offers of more-than-fleeting childcare wasn’t really an option I felt super comfortable with once Remi was sick. (I’m glad for that, too, because she seemed totally better by the time she came home, but was apparently still contagious. Waffle suddenly and violently came down with the same sickness the day after Remi and I arrived home.)

I had a different time at camp with a toddler than I did the last time I went, childfree in 2015. I doubt I’ll attempt it again unless there’s planned childcare available, which maybe there could be at some point in the future. I did learn that lots of campers have little kids, as several came up to me to tell me about their kids since I had Remi. And more and more queer people are having kids. So maybe there will be a camp daycare or parent co-op babysitting situation in the future. But I think we’ll be sitting out for camp in 2020 and until Remi’s old enough to go somewhere else for a week, like to her own summer camp.

In summary, it was a good experiment and we made a lot of good memories and the pool was amazing and I don’t particularly want to do it again.

One thing that came out of the experience of A-Camp alone with a toddler (who is also sick) is that I had to not only accept help from others, but ask for it. Perhaps because I rarely ask for help or support for myself, I have never experienced so much support from my queer community. I often asked people to watch Remi for a few minutes so I could quickly run back to my room. Nobody batted an eye. Brittani basically did all the work making the bags for my cabin and delivering them to the rooms for me. I explicitly asked Brittani for help since my co-cabin person was working the accessibility shuttle from LAX the morning of camp. It was super uncomfortable for me, but I realized there was no way I could make all the nametags, stuff the bags, and bring them to the cabin on my own with a surly, still recovering two-year-old in tow.

Adrian took the lead on cabin camper stuff when I was stuck in the room with Remi. Al(aina) took over the Baby T. Rex Toddler Tea Party when it was clear we weren’t going to make it. (Then, Al delivered handmade get well cards from the tea party to our room!) Mack not only helped me take care of Remi, but gave Remi a little stuffed animal that she slept with while her lovey was in the wash. Marni helped me find new sheets at 2:00 AM in the morning. Rachel was gracious when I had to back out of the Bisexual Spa. Azul let me have the rest of their white vinegar to help lift the puke smell from the carpet in our room. Cameron, who was already recovering from Remi Fever, took over babysitting for the one workshop I actually made it to so that I could focus for 90 minutes on facilitating. Liz helped me work with the dining staff to be sure Remi had simple, digestible foods while her tummy was yucky. Everyone was there to help whenever I needed them and often without being asked.

In a weird way, even though I didn’t get to experience A-Camp in the traditionally transformative way, I got an even deeper peek into the ways that this community, most of which I engage in online, is both real and deeply caring. The radical values of putting family and community care first, of making space for each other to be ourselves, came through in a different way for me this year. I got to be a mom and everyone understood that I needed to occupy that space above all else. I also got to be a hot queer thirty-something woman with my boobs out and my best lipstick on and didn’t feel like those two parts of my identity had to live separately from each other. I was transformed by A-Camp in 2015, as a 30-something who had forgotten how to be kind to my body. I was transformed again by A-Camp in 2019, as an older 30-something who had made a home in my body for Remi and who needed radical, inclusive community more than I knew I would.

We don’t have to have it all. We can be messy and abundant together.

4 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. A Whale of a Tale, A Tale of a Whale

Remi was so excited to go swimming! She had a new floatie with an “Orca!” on the front of it that supposedly helps little kids keep themselves upright in water. On the night before campers arrived, Molly opened the pool for staff for a little while. Remi was so excited to go in! I had a momentary lapse in good sense and let her walk right down the stairs herself, which resulted in her tipping forward in her swimmies and face planting in the water.

So I held her in her floaties for the rest of the time in the pool. We didn’t go swimming again until the last hour of open pool on the very last day of camp. She was too sick to go in the time between. She asked about the pool every day. It was the very first thing she wanted to see when we arrived. “Where the pool? Go swimming!”

2. Things I Googled This Month

food poisoning or stomach bug
norovirus airplane
two year old throwing up when to go to doctor
swim diapers diarrhea
how to remove vomit smell from carpet without steamer

3. I Picked Up a Mom at the Farmer’s Market

I’ve officially crossed a parenting milestone off my list. I got another woman’s number at the farmer’s market. I then looked her up on Instagram to make sure she wasn’t someone I’d absolutely hate. Why? Because her kid is the same age as Remi within a month and they immediately hit it off and were running around chasing each other and rolling in the grass and pretending to be cows. Remi plays with other kids sometimes, but I’d never seen her bond so quickly and play so collaboratively with another kid her age. When we were trying to leave (and so was the other mom), Remi and the other kid took off running towards each other yelling, “My friend!” and embraced in a big hug. It was very cute. So I got her number—the other mom—and we’re going to meet up for a playdate. I can’t believe this is who I am now. Also, I need someone to make tinder for playdates. Does that already exist?

4. Litte Face, BIG FACE!

I started this game with Remi where we make “little face” and “big face” and she’s amazing at it. It’s based on a theatre warm-up I did in college. But Remi just likes making funny faces and making everyone else make them, too. It’s a great party trick! Also hilarious because she’ll call you the fuck out if you don’t make big face when she wants you to. She had a whole table doing “big face” at camp during pre-camp lunch and you better bet she pointed at Cee and yelled, “You do it!” when they were the only person not complying. Go ahead, show me your big faces! Remi will be pleased.

Raising Baby T. Rex: That All-Consuming Love

I can’t believe I’m about to type this. Past versions of myself in parallel timelines are appalled and confused. I didn’t know that I would ever feel this way, about any person, place, or thing, but it’s my truth now.

I didn’t understand unconditional love until I met Remi.

Not that I’m saying my love typically comes with specific conditions or that a mother’s love is unique. It’s more like my love, my deepest love, my love for my family, even, has always made it to a maximum point, but after that point, my human need for self-preservation comes first. This isn’t a negative way to view relationships with others. Self-preservation is important and having boundaries is healthy.

It’s just that I didn’t know that all-consuming love, that drunk in love, that crazy in love, with the pyrotechnics and the heavy downbeat. I’ve never experienced that with my romantic loves, even with Waffle. Yes, our love is real and there have been many times when we’ve experienced incandescent, fiery connection. But I have never wanted to give all of myself completely. I won’t. I didn’t know that I was capable of it.

Until I came to know Remi.

I told my mom recently that I understand love differently now, as a parent, and that I appreciate even more all the love she and my dad have held for my sister and me. There is no way I could love her the way I now recognize that she loves me. There’s no way that Remi will love me the way I love her.

When Remi was little and couldn’t sit up yet, she loved to experience the textures of her world. I would sometimes lay her on a playmat in her diaper, put our softest baby blankets in the clothes dryer to heat them up, then float the blankets over her bare body and snuggle her up in the radiating heat. If you’ve ever put on your softest, most comfortable clothes right out of the dryer, it’s like that, but imagine you’re a tiny person and someone is so-gently covering every inch of your bare skin in that gently pulsing warmth.

That’s how I love her, that delicate trembling love, that sun-beam bright brilliant love, that lazy afternoon nap so cozy curled up under the blankets and waking refreshed love. I don’t think there’s an adequate word in the English language for the feeling. I love her more than anyone, including myself.

Today, Remi fell asleep in my arms for the first time in a long time. She usually sleeps in her room upstairs for her nap, but I was on a work call and didn’t get her up there in time, so she came over and wanted to be picked up. She watched my conference screen for a while and then put her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. I’d forgotten how good it felt to hold her, asleep, against my chest, with her arms wrapped around my shoulders. I forgot how right it felt and how it brought out this side of me that is completely in tune with her every movement.

I knew when she transitioned into R.E.M. sleep by the slight jerky movements of her fingers on my clavicle, how deeply she was sleeping by the pace and pitch of her breath. I remembered from when she was little the way she gets slightly sweaty when she sleeps soundly and the smell of her hair a couple of days out from the last shampoo. We slept like that for an hour and by the time I woke her from her cuddle nap, I felt calmer than I’d felt for days.

I didn’t know I was capable of loving someone on this level. I don’t think it only happens in parent-child relationships. I think, I guess some people must experience feelings like this in romantic relationships. I just never have. I would be sad to lose my loved ones, very sad, but I would survive it. I’d be utterly and completely devastated to lose Remi. I don’t know if I’d ever be OK again. I’m knocking on wood right now, hoping to protect her and my heart.

If you’ve learned anything about me from reading my writing on Autostraddle, you know I hate being vulnerable. Being a parent has made me more vulnerable than I would ever choose to be. I can’t believe I love Remi this much.

On my second mother’s day last weekend, Remi and I had a low key day at home. “Happy Mother’s Day,” she wished me, loudly scream-shouting, when prompted. “Thank you, baby! I love you,” I replied, knowing she didn’t fully understand and not caring that she couldn’t.

3 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Two Indoor Cats and One Outdoor Cat

I don’t know how two very indoor cats ended up with a demanding outdoor cat, but we sure did. It’s been rainy and chilly most of the week and Remi keeps looking out the windows forlornly, whining, “I wanna go outside! She’s constantly trying to negotiate for trips to the park or play in our backyard. I finally gave in today and set her upon our front porch despite the rainy drizzle and cold, wet everything.

All she wants is to be in the outdoors, getting messy, splashing in puddles, and galloping free.

2. Thing I Googled This Week

rainy day fun toddler
work at home parent ideas
what age independent play over
Rochester universal pre-k waiting list

3. Shark Teeth in Different Shapes and Sizes

Remi’s favorite book at the moment is Goodnight Shark! by Adam Gamble and Mark Jasper. She wants to read it before bed and any other time, too. She has it mostly memorized and can remember the names of the different kind of sharks.

On my most recent work trip, I was able to buy Remi three sharks teeth “in different shapes and sizes,” which is a line in Goodnight Shark. She was thrilled!

I also got her this toy plane to help her get emotionally prepared for our big flight to A-Camp! Coming soon! Remi and I are so excited to see you! We’ll bring Goodnight Sharks to share if she’s still into it!

Raising Baby T. Rex: Having It All Is a Big, Heteronormative Lie

I started a new job this week. Monday was my first day. With the new gig comes a new schedule and a new office, which is my home! Yeah, I know! I get to work from home every day and it’s been amazing for work/life balance.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BwXbcgsBcLs

Most of my colleagues are on the West Coast, so their workday starts around mid-day for me, which also gives me the freedom of flexibility. Some days this week I worked regular hours, but other days I worked later in the evening and started later in the morning. That meant I could take a walk to the library with Remi and Waffle one morning. It meant I could take Remi to the park to play for a short period of time one afternoon. It meant having time to make and drink my coffee before diving into my email in the mornings.

I’m working on a more set schedule, but I think I plan to start a little later in the day going into the early evening and even work late at night at least a couple of times per week. It’s better to be working when everyone else is working on the West Coast and it gives me the mornings for my other work like writing for Autostraddle, managing book-related speaking gigs, morning coffee dates, grading papers for the class I teach, and maybe… maybe… maybe even finally putting together the proposal for my next book. It’s beyond what I can comprehend right now, but maybe I’ll even read a book or two for pleasure! My own pleasure! What an idea! The world is wide!

Ultimately, it’s also been super frustrating for Remi having me home all the time. She understands that Waffle and I work. However, she doesn’t really understand that when I’m at home, I’m still working. She gets so discouraged that I can’t or, in her mind, won’t play with her when I’m sitting right here in the dining room. She’s great at playing by herself, but she’s beginning to want to play with other kids and people instead of just doing independent play. It’s even harder to say no to her when she comes over to my chair, grabs my sleeve or arm and says, “Mommy, want to play? Let’s go, Mommy! Take my hand!” I feel like the worst parent because as much as I say, “Mommy’s working, sweetie,” she doesn’t really understand that I’m not just ignoring her.

It hit peak guilt feelings when I was giving her a bath and she was playing with a little plastic walrus. She’s really into talking about families right now. So she was talking about the walrus’ family, who was not there (because the walrus is not part of a family set, it’s just the one walrus). “Where’s mommy?” she asked the walrus. “Mommy working,” she replied to herself in a forlorn tone. It broke me.

The other side of the coin is that it hasn’t been all cupcakes and rainbows working with a toddler running amok, either. As I’m getting to know my new colleagues, I’m also having Remi popping into the video meeting screen to say, “Hello,” which is the least distracting thing she does. Once this week, I had to deal with a potty training issue while on a video call. Another time, I had to say, “Hold that thought. My cat apparently puked on the floor and my kid is touching it right now. Just give me two minutes.” Not the ideal first impression at a new job in my own estimation.

http://www.instagram.com/p/Bv5eYbWhKsg/

Most of the staff work remotely, too, but most people seem to have school-age kids or a daycare situation or fur kids or no kids. Everyone has been so super chill about my mom stuff so far, but I always have this little shaking rattle of doubt in the back of my mind nagging me, “You’re being unprofessional!” “Everyone is judging you!” “You’re annoying them!” I didn’t mention in my interview that I’d have Remi at home with me and I didn’t hide it, either. I don’t think it’s a problem at all, as far as my employer is concerned. Regardless, the nagging internalized paranoia and fear around it still pops up when I have to hide from my kid in the kitchen to take an important phone call or interrupt a video call because Remi needs my urgent attention.

What I’ve learned is that parents and moms especially, even cool radical-minded queer moms, even boss-lady moms with lots of confidence in their own abilities, really can’t escape the “working mom” bullshit. It’s just there, in its messy brilliance. Brilliant because it keeps moms from overthrowing the patriarchy by emotionally tying them to the home and brilliant in that the tethers are there even when every possible accommodation is made (a co-parent, a flexible schedule, work-from-home benefits, a feminist employer) because the tethers are planted deep in the collective subconscious.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BwCKOklBDZm/

I feel obligated to make it look easy breezy to work at home with a kid because I pressure myself to appear as though everything is under control. If I’m bringing Remi to a lobby day, for example, I can’t take on other roles at the lobby day, but I still try to pretend that I can. Even though that’s stressful and unpredictable AF. I feel obligated to act as though I can do it all. It doesn’t feel good.

In the LGBTQ college class I teach, we recently talked about the self-monitoring society driven by capitalism as it related to queer theory. Our self-monitoring society comes from the fear of always being surveilled and judged, always in danger of becoming a target for punishment. So we create ideal images of ourselves based on the values that capitalism promotes (heteronormativity, cisnormativity, class wealth, social status) and buy and squeeze into those versions of what success, happiness, and wealth look like.

The so-called “working mom” is just another piece of the self-monitoring society. In a heteronormative and cisnormative capitalist society, women are producers of babies a.k.a. future workers and baby-makers. If women are working, in some ways this is doubly good for capitalism because they make babies and they produce additional work and consume even more goods in their two spheres (home and work). But we have to keep women in this cishet world making and caring for their families even as they’re working or else the whole system fails. We aren’t producing workers and we aren’t consuming enough goods to uphold the status quo. It’s ridiculous that I’ve bought into this on some implicit, repressed level of my brain.

I’m tired of feeling constantly under my own self-inflicted assumed surveillance. Particularly because literally, no one is watching me. My new employer is explicitly feminist. I don’t think they care that I have a kid and sometimes that kid interrupts video calls. I also don’t think it’s fair for me to try to make it look simple. It’s not simple for me. It’s not simple for Remi. It’s not simple for other parents and other people who want to be parents. It’s a farce to keep trying to make it look simple. That’s how the self-monitoring society keeps replicating itself over and over.

I remember saying to a feminist mom, when I was first considering having kids, “You make it look so easy,” meaning having a little kid and navigating childcare and work and all of that. She said, “Thank you,” but it was a weird comment for me to make (I now realize). She probably wanted to say, “IT’S SUPER FUCKING HARD YOU HAVE NO IDEA THANK YOU VERY MUCH!”

http://www.instagram.com/p/BwP1I2Eh01n/

All that to say, it’s hard. It’s fine that it’s hard. It’s worth it that it’s hard. It’s messy and every day I’m tired, but also grateful that I get to spend another day with Remi, however dissatisfied she is with my work-from-home situation.

There are moments of immense joy, like taking a quick break to go to the playground while it’s still warm and bright out and watching Remi lay on the ground looking up at the sky with her eyes closed, feeling the resplendence of early spring sunshine on her skin. There are moments when I can take five minutes between meetings or work to play a round of “horsey” and “doctor.”

There are also moments when Remi laments to her toy walrus that, “Mommy’s working,” and it breaks my damn heart. There are also times when I have to find childcare so I do things that were relatively simple before like give a mid-day presentation or join an important meeting or attend an evening event. I look forward to the day Remi goes to preschool and I get some of my time fully back during the day. I cherish the days I have babysitting lined up so I can escape to my home office for a while.

I’m really lucky, y’all. I’m happy, too. Waffle says I seem extra happy since I’ve started my new job. I love the life that I’m building and I’m so privileged and lucky to be able to build it. I just don’t want to pretend that I’m “having it all” any more. I owe y’all more than that.

4 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Try Again!

Something we initiated early in Remi’s toddlerhood is the concept of “try again,” which has truly served us well. Would recommend. Remi is a kid who wants to do everything by herself and has been that way pretty much as soon as she could articulate it through grunts and hand gestures. We’ve used “try again” as a way to encourage her to do it herself when she’s struggling (sometimes secretly helping sight unseen to Remi).

It has de-escalated many an almost-tantrum. Now she enthusiastically says, “Try again!” whenever she struggles with something. Sometimes she says, “Try again,” about things we really don’t want her to try again, like launching herself off of the window seat or banging her head on the wall. So I’d give it a 8/10, would recommend but could result in dangerous levels of confidence.

2. Grown Up Time Is Special Time

I’m referencing a lyric from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, from the song “I Like to Be With My Family” in the subheading here. Did you get it? Probably not, unless you have a child, but just play along.

Waffle and I had a long-scheduled adults-only weekend a couple of weeks ago, during which we went through a theatre gauntlet in NYC. It was exactly Waffle’s kind of vacation. Overscheduled, cram-packed with fun, and we had a good time. For the record, my type of vacation includes laying around eating good food and not talking to anyone. I think this picture sums it up.

We don’t do a weekly date night, but we do take time away occasionally and I think both we and Remi are better for it. This vacay was all about Waffle’s type of vacation because I get to travel alone for work fairly regularly, during which I can lay about and talk to no one to my heart’s content.

3. Things I Googled This Week

rochester preschool half day
part-time day care rochester
potty training reward ideas
work from home with toddler
toddler best age daycare

4. Jeter + Remi Watch 2019

I know you’re all wondering about the cat. Obviously. So, well, I mean, it isn’t perfect, but this happened after a bath this week! For about five minutes, then Remi started jumping around and Jeter was outta there faster than you can say O-M-G-this-scary-thing-really-isn’t-leaving-is-it.

We need to refill his cativan prescription, so this was a fully unmedicated situation, which was pretty good. Maybe they’re be friends… in like 10 years if Jeter’s still alive.

Raising Baby T. Rex: Potty Training, Patience and Pride

What I’m here to write about is the very most essential thing that almost all of us have somehow learned to do; the thing that our Editor-in-Chief Riese hates and I love talking about. It’s poo and pee in the potty time.

Remi has been showing signs of potty readiness for, oh, I don’t know, like three months. We’ve been delaying and delaying for many reasons. We’ll wait until she can put her own pants on. Check. We’ll wait until she’s more verbal and better with directions. Check. We’ll wait until we have a long weekend to work on it. No check, but also, like, no potential weekend in sight in the near future. We’ll wait until she’s out of diapers. Check, kind of, but then we bought more diapers and now we have a lot of extra diapers.

What I’m saying is, we finally went all in on potty training and, well — it’s going well and is also the weirdest, funniest, most frustrating parenting thing I have yet done. Mainly, I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. The first day was a lot of trial and error. We started in earnest this past Sunday. Waffle was working most of the day, so Remi and I were home together just the two of us. Gee whiz, did I wish I had a second set of adult hands when I was scrubbing the floor around 11:30 AM wondering what I’d gotten myself into.

I didn’t necessarily have a set plan for how this would go so much as I did a ton of online reading to prepare and hoped my smart, self-motivated Virgo would figure it out quickly. I’d hoped we could get away without Pull-Ups because they’re essentially toddler diapers and they are, like diapers, expensive and wasteful. By mid-day, I’d instructed Waffle to grab some Pull-Ups on his way home. Ultimately, I was successful when I decided to throw my reservations and Remi’s pants to the wind. We just went bottomless for most of the day and, after two more accidents and a hurried pick-up of any stuffed animal or thing that could not survive being peed on, we were making progress. Remi consistently used the potty with my help for the rest of the day. HOORAY, mofos! I documented the day in my Insta story because, I dunno, why not? (No worries, no super gross stuff… mostly bathroom parties and deep potty training thoughts.)

Sadly, we don’t live in a world where one can just waggle around bare-assed all day every day. As much fun as we had running around the house in the buff, we would have to leave the house eventually. The next day we introduced the Pull-Ups and there was a little regression into forgetting and going in the training pants. To be fair, Pull-Ups feel like and sound like and essentially are diapers. (Don’t tell Remi. We told her they were big kid underwear.) That said, we made major progress on the potty and only had one total meltdown over having to wear the training pants. My child just wants to be free and, quite frankly, I don’t blame her. I still hate wearing underwear at 36.

Usually, poop training comes after pee training, but Remi had pretty much figured out both by Wednesday, day four of this whole event. Ultimately, it’s going well. Of course, now that we’re in a huge new developmental stage, her sleep is all screwed up and she’s getting more irritable at bedtime and waking more at night. We don’t know if it’s just an overtired thing or because she’s still in diapers at night and feels mad about that or if she’s becoming more aware of her body at night because of potty training or something else or all of the above! You figure one thing out; something else goes all wonky. That’s how it is with toddlers, I guess.

We’re figuring it out. Ironically, she’d just (very early) dropped her last nap, so we’re bringing back the nap to see if that helps with bedtime. It’s literally a social science experiment every day and we don’t have any control. That’s how it feels to me, anyway.

My very favorite thing about this stage, as much as I’ve dreaded it, is how truly joyful it is in between the moments of grossness. Remi is, obviously, just so proud of herself and overjoyed to gain a little more autonomy over her body and genuinely excited about leveling up as a big kid. I think bathroom stuff is probably one of the most shame-filled areas of our human world. We’re straight-up weirdos about it in our culture. We have literal political debates about bathrooms and whether trans and gender non-conforming people have the right to be in them despite the fact that we are primarily using them to do our private potty business. We make toilets places of shame, in every context.

Yet here we are, though, clapping and cheering for Remi for using her little potty. It’s a toddler party zone in our downstairs bathroom right now. I gave up early on and allowed an iPad in there to keep her on the potty for longer sits. We have two different potty options going, the hilariously miniature potty chair with real flushing sounds and the step stool with a seat that goes over the grown-up potty as a transitional option. We’ve got books and toys and, to be real with you, sometimes snacks in there. It’s a very joyful and silly place in our home right now. It’s stressful. It’s screwing up her sleep. It’s also kind of a lot of fun? She’s just so, so happy when she uses the potty like a “big kid.” I look at her doing her half-naked “I did it!” hop and wonder if I’ll be able to pinpoint the moment that body shame sets in, that she learns that her body is somehow both vulnerable and dangerous, that she stops appreciating all the good things her body does.

There’s a party over here now.

It’s also forced me to be very patient, with Remi and with myself. There is nothing more challenging than watching your kid go to the bathroom directly on your floor, on your floor, and having to react like it’s no big deal, very casual, totally not a thing just going to clean this up right here oopsie no problem no reason to have ongoing trauma that sets us back on potty training everyone is cool! On the other hand, I can’t imagine having to learn how to do this after going in a diaper for more than two years! It’d be like if someone told me to go to the bathroom right now, on my couch, with my pants on and expected me to be able to just do it. How super impressive that kids can learn this at all!

Most of all, I’m loving watching her grow up and grow more independent. At one point, I was thinking Remi would still be in diapers for A-Camp, but it’s clear we’re definitely going to be using the potty by then. I hope she’s figured out the big potty by June, mostly because I don’t want to pack the potty chair as a carry-on.

5 Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Femme Gender Feels

So y’all know we’re raising Remi without strong associations with gender norms. However, we did make the choice to use gender pronouns aligned with Remi’s assigned sex until she’s old enough to articulate a gender. We also don’t shy away from “pink aisle” toys completely. Gender expansive play doesn’t mean play that only privileges masculinity or that hold up complete androgyny as the gold standard, at least not in our definition of it.

All that said, I’m really fascinated and also scared by the ways gender norms have creeped in at the edges of Remi’s development. As a queer femme, I love feminine things as a way to intentionally express my gender, but I also realize some of those things are or come off as very gender normative. For example, Remi has a fascination with my jewelry, so I made her a bunch of pony bead bracelets and necklaces. She notes my lipstick colors and my nail polish shades. She has started gravitating towards pink clothes as she’s begun dressing herself and having more opinions on her own fashion.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BuwbsNTBq4r/

I mean, she also gravitates towards sharks and dinosaurs and play power tools. Gender doesn’t really mean anything to her yet, but I can see the messages getting through anyway. I just really hope that whatever gender Remi is and whatever Remi’s gender expression is, that it’s purely hers and not influenced by dominant culture. I know it probably will be and this is probably at least one part my own internalized femmephobia popping up, but I sometimes wonder and worry about it all.

2. Things I Googled This Month

potty training sleep problems
potty training poop next to the potty
pull ups potty training
average age potty training
signs ready for potty training
how to help two year old poop on the potty
sleep regression potty training

3. Under the Sea, the Ocean

Remi’s love of all things ocean has not slowed down. In fact, it’s intensified since we let her watch Octonauts, a cartoon about animal (mostly mammals for who knows why?) ocean explorers who go on missions and discover aquatic life all over the world. I don’t even know if this show is still on air, but there are four seasons of episodes on Netflix and we’ve watched all of them at least three or four times. It’s all she wants to watch! Screw Sesame Street. Forget Daniel Tiger. As far as Remi is concerned, there is no other show but Octonauts.

We took Remi to a very small rescue aquarium just a couple hours away from our home. They had rescued sea lions and are the leading facility for blind seals! It was very fun and, despite the whole place being maybe a 10-minute walk in a big circle, we managed to spend three hours there. Mostly, Remi wanted to see the sea lions and the SHARKS. But they also had sting rays and puffer fish and sea horses and cleaner shrimp and lionfish and turtles and eels and all of Remi’s favorite slippery friends!

4. Protecting Family Time

Lately, Waffle only has one day off per week. I’m consistently working more than one job and am behind on at least one of them. I’ve also been traveling for public speaking a lot lately, revamping my website and online branding, making some big career choices. It’s been a lot for both of us. Whenever Waffle’s able to get a weekend day off that I’m also around for, we try to make that time meaningful. Even if we’re running errands, we do it together and build in some time for toddler fun.

I feel bad about how much we work. Sometimes I wonder if she’d be happier in day care with other kids her age.

5. Touch Em Touch Em Touch Em

Sensory boxes are all the rage with the pre-K set these days. We no longer use this sensory bin because Remi accidentally knocked it off the table while playing with it releasing a catastrophic amount of bouncy, wet, slippery Orbeez water beads all over the house. HAHAHAHAHA OMG, it was fun. We’re still finding the damn things. I prefer the kinetic sand.

Raising Baby T. Rex: Club Fawn, No Naps, and Reclaiming Procreation

When I decided to carry Baby T. Rex, I entered this emerging world of LGBTQIA people choosing to have children. We’ve always been around, queer folks with kids, but this specific type of parenting choice — carrying a baby through a uterus-having person with partner(s) who can’t impregnate that partner “naturally” — hasn’t always been readily available. It’s still not affordable to many and it’s still not easy to get insurance to cover and it’s still available based on whether medical providers in your area work with LGBT families.

However, it’s becoming more readily available to those with a moderate level of income stability, whereas it was primarily available to families with a lot of privilege and access to medical advocacy in past generations of queer folks. In my personal friend circle alone, I know three people who had a queer baby through assisted reproductive tech around the same time we did. A couple of those folks are having a second kid right now.

Same-gender parents have been foster parents and adoptive parents for ages (where it’s not been outlawed or restricted, anyway) and continue to be more likely to adopt than straight parents. Of course, there are also tons of queer parents who have children through current or previous relationships where sex resulted in babies. I definitely don’t mean to erase these queer parents. That’s the thing.

As fertility treatments become more available to queer people with uteruses, I find myself becoming more uncomfortable with the increasingly heteronormative assumptions people make about the decision to parent this way. As what’s available to us begins to look more and more like what has historically been the Path to A Successful Life for Straight Folks (monogamy, marriage, making babies, house in the suburbs), it feels like we’re being forced into that same narrative.

What I mean is the ever-present and deeply normalized bias that a child who is genetically or gestationally related to you is, somehow, more legitimate. That adoption is the less preferable option or is somehow less of a true family bond than giving birth. (I’m adopted.) That having genetic material or something to imitate an ancestral link from both parents is the best way and that not having that is something of a loss. (We intentionally chose a donor who is not the same race as Waffle.) That not being biologically related to your child loosens your bond to them. (Waffle is not biologically related to Remi.)

That marriage and making kids is the ultimate goal in a way that feels sticky and old-fashioned and Capitalist and exactly what Queer Nation warned us about. (YIKES.)

That said, when the Queers Read This manifesto was passed out at Gay Pride in NYC in 1990, it felt impossible that queer people could procreate. It felt like heterosexuality had the stronghold on the ability to create families through biology. In the manifesto, they wrote: Quite simply, the structure of power in the Judeo-Christian world has made procreation its cornerstone. Families having children assures consumers for the nation’s products and a workforce to produce them, as well as a built-in family system to care for its ill, reducing the expense of public healthcare systems. All non-procreative behavior is considered a threat, from homosexuality to birth control to abortion as an option.

When those forebearers of what became Queer Nation wrote the manifesto, they weren’t thinking about a future in which queer resilience could include taking back procreation in a queer way. Queering baby making wasn’t even on the table. Queer people were creating families through kinship and birthing through art and culture and activism and fighting for their very survival. Damn. We’re still fighting for all of that today.

In the aftermath of marriage equality and in the era of LGBT family-making being a trending topic, I feel more and more pulled to reflect on parenting through my queer lens. What if creating our own families, through intimate kinship with each other as lovers and friends and now, in this era, through expanding our legal families, as well, is another way to fight back against the regime of the norm—against heteropatriarchy and cissexism and transmisogyny? Why do we have to be defined by heterosexual norms just because we finally have some access to the procreative power that was so often used to invalidate queer relationships and trans people’s actual bodies? What if our very queer procreation is a threat to the heterosexual nuclear traditional family and what if we embraced that as our weapon?

I want to embrace it. Sometimes the path to doing so feels murky and complicated by the reality of the world. I’m never more acutely aware of how being queer and a parent is different than when I’m surrounded by straight parents. I’ve cultivated a fairly insulated personal queer community and having a child thrust me into the world of Parents, of other adults with kids. Anytime I go to a family-friendly space, I’m literally surrounded by straight people. It’s full-immersion heterosexuality. Finding other queer and trans families with kids is not impossible in my city, but it’s difficult to make time to be with each other. We have to create that space and time intentionally.

More often, I find myself talking to and exchanging babysitting time with the families who live near us, my neighbors who are very nice and very kind and also very, very, very straight. These are progressive folks, nice and smart and informed people who listen to NPR and are very welcoming to Waffle and Remi and me. They’re also in straight relationships and with the privilege of being straight, completely unaware of the gendered BS they joke about and have accepted as fact. I also feel like I got to enter a different level of closeness with my existing friends who are heterosexual and who have kids. Some of the things we bond over are truly universal to parenting. (Hello, sleep regressions.) Some feel untrue to me, primarily broad assumptions about “how boys act” and “how girls act” that just don’t align with my observations of Remi’s behavior or of my understanding of gender.

When I feel pulled into the heteronormative parenting vacuum, I try to remind myself of my own power. I’ve done this queer analysis on myself already. I’ve embraced my own femininity and seemingly-but-not-actually heteronormative gender expression as my intentional femme armor. I’ve built and grown my queer community intentionally. I’ve busted through respectability politics to a truer version of myself who doesn’t take shit and builds on trust. I know that my very blood is queer, my sexual orientation is perpetually bi/pan/non-monosexual, and my self can’t be separated from who I am and how I love, ever, no matter who I’m dating or where I am or what my family looks like.

I take a deep breath.

My family is my queer community, my friends and my loves and the people who I’ve loved and lost along the way. My family is Remi and Waffle, too, and the life we’ve very intentionally built together. We are not imitating heterosexuality. We aren’t building our family based on blood or ethnicity or genetics or anything. I can hold that to be true while also valuing that Remi is my only known blood relative and that means something to me, personally, deeply. What it doesn’t mean is that my relationship to my mother is less valid or that Waffle’s relationship to Remi is less valid. What it does mean is that Remi won’t grow up as untethered to her ancestry as I did and that Remi will also know and feel that families are built on love above blood, as I do.

It also means that, as a queer family, we can’t disappear into the suburbs. We have to keep fighting for those who don’t have the freedom to make choices around parenting. We have an obligation to continue to be visible and outspoken. We have to continue to work to expand who has access to family-making choices, particularly for folks on the margins with less access to healthcare, less financial security, less freedom over their bodies, less ability to use or afford assisted reproductive technology, who are still unable to imagine a future where having children is a reachable possibility. We’ve gotta acknowledge that marriage and children are not the end goal for queer liberation, that dignity and survival are still very real and vital goals for many in our queer and trans communities, that having the house and the baby does not mean we’ve achieved equity. It means refusing to assimilate or hold up the straight, white hetero family as the ideal, to commit to changing those powerful institutions even and especially from the inside.

My queer parent friends, those in real life and those I’ve met through this very column and through Autostraddle: I want this for you. I want this for us. I know it’ll be imperfect. I’m grateful that we’re in it together.

5 Queer Family Things I’m Currently Over-Processing

1. Nap Be Gone

Remi has been down to one nap in the afternoon for several months now. In the last few weeks, the nap has been pushed later and later and bedtime has been getting later, as well. We already put her to bed fairly late in the evening, but when norm started creeping up to midnight, which is honestly too late for Waffle and I to feel fully human, I decided to try something.

http://twitter.com/KaeLynRich/status/1097986009759973381

I took a gamble. I let Remi stay up without a nap. It was, honestly, fine. Kind of great, even. Remi had been fighting naps every day for the past month. I took her to work with me and she stayed awake the whole time, even on the car ride home. So I just let it ride out. Worst case scenario: There’d be a total meltdown if Remi became overtired. Best case? She’d go to bed earlier and hopefully be fine?

Remi was ready for bed around 9:15 instead of 11:45 and went right down and slept for 12 hours instead of 9 hours. I don’t want to completely give up the afternoon nap, but we’re transitioning to a “quiet time” for an hour in the afternoon, during which Remi can take a nap if she wants or play in her crib. But I don’t have to play the game of trying to get her to sleep when she isn’t tired.

The downside is that Waffle works late at night and may not be able to see her at bedtime if Remi’s schedule changes. We have a very cute family bedtime routine that ends with a group sing-along of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star that just won’t be the same without Waffle. But it may be worth it to have some time back to ourselves at night. We’ll see!

2. When the Mommy is Away…

…the Waffles will play! I’ve been traveling for work a lot lately. Scratch that. I’m always traveling or running around a lot, so nothing’s new there. Now that Remi is firmly in the toddler stage of life, she and Waffle have a lot of fun when I’m away. Some might say TOO MUCH FUN.

3. Blast Off

Remi is entertaining many possible future careers. Musician, horse farm owner (Is that what it’s called to own horses professionally?), doctor, baker, artist, socialite, explorer, paleontologist, and now… astronaut! To infinity and beyond!!!

The world is truly her oyster, ya’ll.

4. Camp Fawn is Coming

When I was very pregnant and also very sad to be missing A-Camp in 2016, Rory and I had this chat about my feels and also came up with a vision for Club Fawn, the baby disco version of Klub Deer.

Rory sent me this very cute card in the mail shortly after.

This year, at A-Camp XI, I’m finally making a return, with Remi by my side. I’m very excited to be with old and new friends and to share it all with Baby T. Rex! I’ve already spent a very long time reading every possible article on flying with a toddler and looking into many options for restraining a two-year-old in an airplane seat and it’s kind of a stressful thing to do a six-hour flight for the very first time flying with a kid, and to do it as one adult, but I’m excited! I can do this, right? Right?

More importantly, will we see you at Club Fawn?

5. I’m Fine

Just leaving you with this gem from my week. Hope your week was swell!

http://twitter.com/KaeLynRich/status/1098933310133276674

Raising Baby T. Rex: Dinos Resist! A Guide to Raising a Little Activist

I started taking Remi to political and activist spaces when she was very small. Partly this is because I work in the often-fraught world of “professional activism,” a.k.a. paid community organizing and legislative advocacy and civil rights nonprofit work. When I went back to work after parental leave, Remi was eight weeks old and it was literally my job to show up to government meetings and community organizing planning sessions and rallies and marches and protests.

In many ways, I’m extremely lucky. I’m living the dream of a lot of y’all: fighting the good fight and getting paid a living wage for it, to boot. In other ways, I’m limited by having to channel my activism through my work, leaving little time for me to pursue things I’m personally passionate about. Or, rather, finding it incredibly hard to extrapolate my personal activism from my work activism because there’s so much overlap. Regardless, activist spaces are just a part of my life out of choice and out of obligation to my job.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BQy5K5FBn96/

It was inevitable that I’d be one of those parents who brings their kids with them. When Remi was very little, she spent half-days at the office with me. I had a whole setup in my office with places for Remi to play and sleep. I’d sometimes hire babysitters to come to my office so I could slip out for a city council meeting or evening training. Other times, I’d strap Remi to me and we’d head out to a rally or meeting or event. Often, I’d schedule meetings at my office so I could let Remi play on the floor while we planned and strategized around campaigns.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BWmlcBFBp-S/

My job responsibilities changed around Remi’s tenth month of life and I’m out in the field less now. It’s honestly a welcome reprieve with a little one around, but it also means I have fewer opportunities to share my work with Remi. I still try to take her to events like lobby days and meetings where I think I’ll be able to provide kid-friendly space.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BgSACMZDRf7/

Before I had kids, I saw parents (usually cis moms) bringing their kids to marches and rallies and meetings and I was so in awe of how they made motherhood/parenting and activism look so seamlessly compatible. If I ever wanted to have kids, I’d wanna be like that, I’d think. I wouldn’t slow down at all. I’d just bring them with me.

Now that I have a toddler, I realize how challenging it is to bring a kid to a lobby day or entertain a kid through a three-hour meeting. Y’all. It’s exhausting. It’s often embarrassing and overwhelming.

Yet I do it anyway — out of necessity when I can’t get a babysitter, usually — but also because I want Remi to have these formative experiences. She doesn’t totally understand what we’re doing yet, but I want advocacy and activism to be a part of her story of growing up. Who knows?

For example, on a recent trip to Albany to see a long, long, long overdue transgender non-discrimination bill pass, I brought Remi into the Senate Gallery with me so I could watch the vote. One of my queer mom friends who used to work on that legislative campaign also brought her kid, who’s younger than Remi. I was very jealous of her ability to nurse her kid through it while mine was yelling, “Baby Shark!” “Yeah!” “Mommy!” during the floor debate. Remi was having a ton of fun, but I eventually had to take her out to the hallway outside the Senate Gallery anyway because she was just too loud and is not yet old enough to sit still and be quiet for more than five minutes at a time. I missed the actual vote because I set up a station for Remi on a bench and didn’t feel like packing up to bring her back in.

http://www.instagram.com/p/Bs03Ej6hxq5/

Later, my boss asked me to speak at a press conference about the bill, which was a really nice thing to ask me to do. However, the press conference went on for hours, Remi got hungry and frustrated, and it was ultimately… very hard for both of us. At one point, Remi just spread out face down on the floor and I let her because, like, I was right there with her and also she wasn’t running around or touching anyone, so it was a better situation IMO.

It was OK, though. I was glad we were there. I’m glad I have these pics to show Remi, that I can tell her she was a part of this historic vote, that she got to see protections enacted that directly impact her family and her dad. It was worth it.

I want Remi to see herself as a member of society with an obligation to helping others. I hope that, in small ways, she is getting that message through osmosis, through coming with me into the “field” and through seeing me working. I feel bad about how much I work and how that takes time away from her, but I also feel proud that she sees me working and will grow up with a sense that activism, hard work, and helping others is important.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BmJUp4OhzPi/

My parents didn’t necessarily try to include me in their activism with intention, I don’t think, but I remember much of it distinctly. They were both involved in their teachers’ union and my dad was the president of the union at their rural school district. I remember stuffing folders for union meetings, cuddling up to my mom in my parents’ bed during my dad’s annual trip to Albany for the union’s lobby day.

I remember watching them plot to systemically take over the local school board and starting their own activist organization in our town to do so, spray-painting lawn signs in a barn with other parents. I often was brought along, probably out of necessity. I didn’t really understand the context for it all and I was often bored and stuck playing with other people’s kids for longer than I would have preferred. Later, as an adult, I realized that my inherently strong moral compass was bolstered, in large part, by seeing my parents affect change in their communities throughout my life.

I want Remi to have that gift and I hope that one day she finds her own way to fight for the causes that are important to her, even if they’re different than my own. I can’t wait until she’s old enough to really understand what I do, what we are doing together, to form her own opinions and ask her own questions about it. I can’t wait to see what gifts Remi brings to the movement.

These days, when I see another parent dragging their kids along to some action or community meeting or what-have-you, I give them a knowing smile. It’s not easy. We’re making it look easy, but it’s all a show. What I’m saying is, if you’re sitting in the Senate Gallery trying to hear the floor debate and someone’s kid starts crying or yelling “Baby Shark!,” please be kind to them. They’re doing their best and that kid is going to be awesome one day very soon.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BpNHqgqHFwn/

Four Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Over-Processing

1) Four Words, Y’all!

Out of seemingly nowhere last week, Remi started busting out complete sentences and four-word sentences. “I want the apple!” “Get my cup!” “I want to go!” As you can tell, she’s two years old and pretty demanding. Waffle and I were both floored. We were eating breakfast out two weekends ago and she just started saying whole sentences out of the mother f-ing blue!

Language development is so cool and weird! I can’t believe that she’ll be basically talking like an adult in a year.

2. Potty Training Prep

Remi is showing a lot of signs of potty-training readiness. We’ve been talking about the potty, playing with potty toys, reading books about the potty, watching kids’ TV shows about using the potty. We weren’t going to get her a little kid potty. Rather, we planned to just let her use the big potty right away (with a seat insert for little butts) but decided to get her a free-standing little potty after she started showing a genuine interest.

Honestly, we’re both feeling pretty gun-shy. I don’t want to start until Remi can completely remove and put on her pants by herself. She’s close — she’s got the legs and front all figured out — but she’s still learning how to get the pants over her rear end. I also kind of want her to be even more verbal and patient before we start because I don’t want it to go on forever. That said, she understand us and follows directions pretty well already.

I know it’s not a race. I also know that somehow Remi will be potty-training probably before her next birthday. It’s just really hard to imagine. It feels like when we were transitioning her off of bottles or when she started eating real solid food, like… HOW?! I imagine, like those things, it will just happen with some patience and practice. At the moment, it feels impossible that we’ll figure this out in the next few months?

3. Parenting Things I’ve Googled This Week:

potty training average age
orange feet toddler cause
how many words should a 28 month old know
language development two three years old
above average language skills toddler

4. Penguins, Attention!

Raising Baby T. Rex: Terrifying Sharks for a Toddler Ocean Explorer

My hand-painted white tee featured a crudely drawn killer whale and the words “Save the Whales,” because it was the 90’s and I was really into Free Willy. I was 10. My career goals included joining Greenpeace and cutting whale nets to free all captive marine life.

The right-side-up killer whale I painted looked more like a breaching blue whale because I used way too much white paint. My overzealous painting resulted in my teacher giving my “Save the Whales” design an award. The t-shirt was displayed in the hallway outside her classroom for a few days of schoolwide recognition.

I was obsessed with animals and the environment as a little kid. My parents got me a subscription to Zoobooks (They’re still in print today!) and I devoured each edition. My favorite show was Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures. I don’t know if the early ’90s were heavily influenced by environmental action or if I was just personally fascinated with it

I vividly remember this one PSA spot that came on PBS in the mornings about conservation. It showed a spunky animated fish tragically losing all the water in his pond because some careless animated child let the water run while brushing his teeth. If you waste even a minute amount of water, you’ll kill a happy fishie! That’s what I took away from the ad. I was always harping on my parents to turn off the lights when they left a room or to cut the soda rings so sea turtles wouldn’t die.

I was earnest AF about my mission: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! Save the Whales! (Cue “Will You Be There?”)

My parents encouraged my interests, but they weren’t big on whales and they definitely wouldn’t consider themselves environmentalists. Why did I have such an interest in animals? Later, why did I develop a love of poetry when literally no one in my household read or wrote poetry? As an adoptee, I’ve always wondered about nurture vs. nature. Was one of my biological parents a writer or lover of words? Did I just love animals because my parents had pets? Or was it because of something in my nature?

Remi just celebrated her first Christmas that she actively participated in! Her first Christmas, at three months, she didn’t understand and was mostly just a baby prop to pass around to family members. Last year, at one, she liked her presents but didn’t understand the holidays conceptually. This year, at two, she could point out Santa and say, “Ho ho ho!” when prompted. She unwrapped her own presents (and some of ours) with excitement. She said, “Thank you!” for her gifts and has been sorting and playing with her new toys all week.

Her most favorite toys are definitely the cheap plastic ocean animals Waffle found on Amazon. These are… not attractive ocean animals, but they’re very realistic? Honestly, I think they’re terrifying and monstrous both in design and texture. She LOVES THEM.

Ahhhhhhhhh!

She got quite a few presents that were ocean animal oriented this year. Right now, Remi’s napping and these are the toys she left in her wake from this morning’s play time. All of them were Christmas gifts.

I don’t know why she loves the ocean so much. Some of her other toddler interests are more predictable and we definitely played a part in shaping them. Dinosaurs, for example, were sort of forced upon Remi and, well, it makes sense that she’d be attracted to them since we decorated her room with them and have been talking about them since her fetushood. Books are a constant in our house. She has had them in her play area and as part of her bedtime routine from a very early age.

The ocean, though, is all her.

It must have started with the PBS show Splash and Bubbles when Remi was really little. It definitely got more intense after introducing Finding Dory over the past year. The discovery of Baby Shark sent her into a total frenzy.

Remi’s obsession with ocean life is very specific. For a while, she was just generally into animals, but in the past several months, she’s specifically into aquatic animals above all others. Since she got her ugly, soft, rubbery sharks and sea animals, she hasn’t even taken out her stuffed cat and dog toys. She can name different types of fish like eels, rays, clams, seahorses, octopuses, pufferfish, and sharks.

I don’t know how she even picked up on this, but we were reading Remi a new Splash and Bubbles board book recently and there was one page of the cartoon characters reacting to a plastic bag floating in their reef. Remi got visibly upset, pointed at the illustrated plastic bag and exclaimed, “Oh no! Oh no! Bad!”

Watching Remi become her own person is endearing and unfamiliar. I still wonder about nature vs. nurture. Is her empathy for aquatic life somehow related to my investment in freeing the whales when I was a kid? Do we share some biological need to take care of vulnerable creatures and our natural world? Is there a personality trait, or some random strain of DNA, we share that draws us both toward marine animals? Is her interest in sharks solely because of Baby Shark or is it also because Waffle is obsessed with Shark Week and watches videos about sharks as a hobby? He doesn’t watch them with Remi, though. Did we plant these seeds, either by nature or nurture, without intending to?

I don’t know, but I’m sure that I’m going to watch Free Willy with Remi as soon as she’s old enough to appreciate it.

4 Queer Parenthing Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. I’m Baking!

Because we started watching Nailed It: Holiday! Edition on Netflix, Remi’s been especially interested in playing pretend cooking. She gets her play food out and uses a plastic spoon to stir her pots and cups while exclaiming “I baking! I baking!” What a great age to enlist her help in making cut-out sugar cookies for Christmas, I thought! How much fun we will have, I anticipated! Wrong. I was wrong.

For starters, I kicked off this journey by making the very, very, very stupid mistake of touching the blade of my immersion blender while it was plugged in and… immersion blended the tip of my finger. Don’t worry! It was just the one pulse! And a LOT of blood. HAHA. OK. I was using the immersion blender inappropriately to begin with, but that’s a whole other story. (No, my finger probably did not need stitches? Yes, it’s gross and going to take a long time to heal.)

After I had a mini panic over the kitchen sink and decided that a Christmas Eve urgent care trip wasn’t necessary, I finished up the cookie prep. After dinner, I asked Remi if she wanted to help with some baking. She was so excited, ya’ll! She really wanted to help.

What I didn’t anticipate was that she would not be able to press the cookie cutter into the dough by herself, which was fine, except that she really, really wanted to do it by herself, without help. (“No! My turn!”) She also didn’t understand that you have to cook the cookies before you can eat them. Many emotions and a frustrated crying sesh later, we presented her with a star-shaped cut-out fresh from the oven. “I baked it!” she said before taking a dino chomp.

I didn’t take any pics of the cookies or the toddler baking activity. I have deep regrets and you’re just going to have to believe me that it happened.

EDIT: Waffle did take pics after all! Thanks, Waffle!

2. Cativan

Hat tip to our friend who rightly called Waffle out on missing an opportunity to hashtag his post #cativan!

Long story short, after over two years of Jeter making very little progress toward returning to a good quality of life post-baby, our vet offered anxiety meds and we decided to take the plunge. Jeter definitely has higher levels of anxiety than any cat I’ve lived with before. Before we had a kid, though, he’d adapted to our house and he was very social and cuddly and happy in his home.

Since we brought Remi home, he has consistently separated himself from the family and rarely comes downstairs until we put her to bed. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if the meds were the right decision. I didn’t know how he’d react to it, but it’s actually helped a lot! Now I just need Remi to take it down about 10 more notches so Jeter will be inclined to trust her.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bri51-DBNfY/

3. We’re All Doing Our Best OK

I am months behind on putting together a book proposal that my agent wants to get out and the publisher for my first book is interested in seeing. MONTHS BEHIND. I keep thinking I’m going to get it done, but it feels impossible. Sometimes I’m heading into a guilt spiral, but then I remind myself that I’m not pushing it off because I’m lazy. I’m just doing too many things. I know I am. I don’t know where to pull back because I either need to do these things (day job/mom job) or I want to do these things (Autostraddle/teaching) or both. I just want ya’ll to know that I don’t have the answer to work/life balance. I am actively talking myself into believing that my time is valuable when I feel so behind on something so important.

I used to see these badass queer feminist parents out in the world doing activism, doing long hours and important work – traveling around speaking at colleges, writing books, writing blogs. I thought they had it all figured out. I realize now that it’s hard and we pretend it’s not hard because we feel pressure to make it look like we’re killing it. And, like, no one person is “having it all” without also occasionally having a total emotional breakdown.

I know I can look like one of those people. I signed a book deal before my child turned one! I write for this amazing site; I work for a heavy-hitting nonprofit civil liberties defender and I take cute pics of my family for Instagram. I just want you to know that it’s really, really, truly challenging. I couldn’t do most of it without an incredible, supportive co-parent and I constantly feel like I’m disappointing someone.

(Like literally right now Remi woke up from her nap 20 minutes ago and I’m pseudo-ignoring her because I just need to get this piece finished before I make her dinner! She’s fine. She’s singing to herself in her crib, but, it’s definitely not GOLD MEDAL PARENTING.)

4. Still Cute Though

On that note, I thought you might like to see these pics from a mini-session we did with Jessica Stringer, the same photographer who did Remi’s newborn and one year pics. They’re incredibly good considering Remi sat still for exactly zero seconds for during the entire 20-minute session.

I can’t believe we’re those people who pay other people to take pictures of their kids, but HERE WE ARE. What’s next? A minivan?! Please don’t let it be a minivan…

Raising Baby T. Rex: Temper Tantrums and Dinner Dance Parties

Remi is a good listener, 95% of the time. She’s at that developmental stage that happens in the year between two and three, where kids learn to assert their independence. She’s always been stubbornly independent, so combine that with hitting this stage and she’s a volatile little spark of a dino. When she wants to do something, she wants to do it. She wants to put on her shirt by herself and her pants and her shoes.

We let her do it, but she often still needs a little help as she learns how to, you know, get her foot all the way into her pant leg. BECAUSE SHE’S ONLY BEEN ALIVE FOR 26 MONTHS. If she catches us helping her, it’s all over. The pants come all the way off, the whole event must start over and she scolds us with an emphatic, “No! Noooo!”

Still, we can usually get her through it without a total meltdown. I think it says something about this stage of child-rearing that a mini-meltdown feels like a decent, reasonable outcome. Here are some things Remi has shed tears over during a mostly manageable mini-meltdown lately:

Not wanting to wear any shirt (not even the horsey shirt),
Not wanting me to change her dirty diaper,
Wanting me to put her shoes on so she can go outside to play at 10 pm,
I tried to color with her,
I put a blanket on her at naptime.

Those were all dealt with fairly quickly. She moved on from the shirt when we went downstairs for breakfast. She thrashed and wailed until she gave up and she let me change her diaper and then I distracted her with a book as she was emotionally recovering. She put the shoes down to watch Moana. I put down the crayon and backed away slowly. I don’t try to cover her at bedtime anymore so she can “cozy” her blankets herself. We worked it out every time.

When she’s overtired, though, it’s a different story. Yesterday, when I arrived to pick her up, the babysitter said, “Guess what we didn’t do today?” and laughed. Remi didn’t take a nap at the babysitters’ house. She wouldn’t go to sleep for them. She was having too much fun playing with the babysitter’s four-year-old kid. She seemed okay when I got there. She was laughing and running around and having a great time.

http://www.instagram.com/p/Bq01fJzhyc4/

That is until I tried to put her jacket on. In a grand combination of not wanting to leave her neighbor friend and demanding to put her winter coat on herself (something she hasn’t quite mastered yet) and us having to leave because the babysitter needed to leave soon… well… I’m sorry to my neighbors who got to hear my barefoot, jacketless child shrieking uncontrollably as we walked across the street to our house.

On a normal day, we could have de-escalated from there. But she wasn’t having a normal day. She didn’t want her shoes off… or on. She starting throwing anything she could get her hands on, which is a no-no for us. (We’re trying to teach her not to deal with her anger in physically aggressive ways.) She kept pulling her jacket down and wailing, “Jacket!” and throwing herself on it. She wouldn’t listen to me and just kept going on her rampage. For an hour and a half.

Dealing with a toddler having a temper tantrum is a lot like putting out a fire. When there is a fire happening, it doesn’t really matter why it’s happening. The cause of the fire becomes completely irrelevant once you’re tasked with putting it out. The fire is ON FIRE. That’s all you can focus on, because once you lose the ability to contain it, it will feed on anything in its path, growing more and more voracious.

How you put the fire out doesn’t matter, either. Throw water on it to shock it into submission. Contain it with sand until it fizzles out. Stop, drop, and roll and roll and roll and roll until it’s pressed out. Just don’t give it more fuel.

I tried all the tools in my parenting toolbox. I sat her down and talked to her calmly about her feelings. I put her in time out for two minutes to cool off. I did some short, stern voice. I did some calm, reassuring voice.

I took some steps I’m not proud of, including a “stern” voice that was more like unhinged angry yelling. Also, trying to forcibly strap her into her booster seat (she usually gets in her seat and straps herself in, but she was refusing dinner) which resulted in her thrashing so hard she fell off the counter-height seat head-first and almost landed on a pile of plastic toys that she’d dumped out in retaliation.

At the worst point of this marathon of tears and rage, the baby was in her 5th time out and I was Googling, “overtired toddler temper tantrum.” Remi was released from time-out after two minutes, but just sitting there still sobbing. I tried a new tactic from the internet: ignore the temper tantrum until it stops? Thank lesbian Jesus that Waffle got home from work at that exact moment.

Usually, Waffle and I work as a team on discipline, but I just wanted Remi’s temper tantrum to stop. I had definitely lost control of the situation. She was crying so hard that she was choking. She was so mad at me that she wouldn’t let me come near her, so I couldn’t pick her up to console her or talk to her. She was also so mad at me that she ran right into Waffle’s arms, snot dripping down her face and her hair slicked to her cheeks with tears. He held her and patted her back and shushed her like she was a little baby, like we did when she was an inconsolable newborn. She nestled her whole face into him and… fell asleep.

We let her sleep for just about 20 minutes because we didn’t want to mess up bedtime, but she needed that power nap. When we woke her up, she groggily decided she was ready for dinner. She ate well. We played and had fun until her actual bedtime and then she went to sleep.

As much as I loathe the temper tantrum stage, I love how aggressively independent Remi is. What if I was as certain of myself and emphatic about my life decisions? What if I could just yell, “No!” the next time a man unnecessarily and impractically holds a door for me and make him close it so I can reopen it myself… instead of walking faster so as to not inconvenience him and mumbling, “Thank you.” What if I stood up in a work meeting and was like, “I do it!” when someone ignored my potential? What if I openly cried when someone hurt my feelings or immediately rallied when someone hurt my pride? What if I actually… took pride in all my accomplishments every day?

I love that Remi is finding her voice and trying things on her own and asserting herself. I also need her to never skip her nap again. And learn how to put on her own jacket, goddammit.

# Queer Parenting Things I’m Currently Overprocessing

1. Oh, Xmas Tree

We’re not Christian or Pagan, but we love a well decorated tree. My mom puts up beautiful trees in her home every year and she uses fake trees, which is what I grew up with, including a huge nine-foot tall faux tree in the family room. Honestly, I always preferred fake plastic trees, until Waffle introduced me to real Xmas trees. I don’t love the extra work of watering a tree or having pine needles everywhere or the risk of bringing a whole spider colony into your home. What won me over is the smell. I love the way a fresh pine tree smells, a bright tingly clear-water smell.

For the last two holiday seasons, we didn’t have any trees up, fake or real. For the first Xmas, we were just barely alive parents of a newborn. Last year, we decided we didn’t want to put up a tree and deal with babyproofing it or watching Remi every second of the day to be sure the tree is safe from being pulled down. We got her a felt tree with little velcro felt decorations to play with instead.

This year, this very weekend, in fact, we’re going to get Remi’s first real tree! I hope she loves it! And doesn’t pull it down or try to climb it!

http://www.instagram.com/p/wSrpOcM7ka

Imagine this situation, but, like, with a toddler making chaos in the foreground.

2. Feline/Baby Watch 2018

Look! This happened! It wasn’t a very long happening, but it did happen so yes that is good.

3. Things I Googled This Week

two year old temper tantrum
how long time out toddler
how to stop a temper tantrum
how to help overtired toddler
how to get overtired toddler to sleep
overtired toddler temper tantrum

4. Mom Bod

I’ve written about my mom bod and how making a baby gave me many feelings about my body in many ways. This past month, I took part in an all-femme naked photo shoot for the Adipositivity project and it was, honestly, one of the most beautiful and empowering things I’ve ever done for myself. Even though I espouse body positivity and try to live it, I was nervous about seeing the photo, what with my body being extra soft and big and shaped a bit different than how I used to be. It’s gorgeous. I don’t want to publish it here without permission, so you can see the photo and Substantia Jones’ other work on her site and order prints, even! If you were looking for a holiday gift that actually a nudie pic of me, well, here ya’ go! You’re welcome!

5. I’m Right Over Here

Remi’s new favorite song. We’re listening to it on repeat right now. Sound on.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqtBTs4Bdad/

Raising Baby T. Rex: How We Learn “Good” and “Bad”

There’s so much bad in the world. I’ve always known it. No, that isn’t true — I learned it. At some point, there was no external good or bad in my world, just my own individual perception of good and bad. Did I feel good? Did I feel bad? There didn’t need to be a carefully curated and readily defended rationale to understand what’s good and what’s bad.

Hungry? Bad.

Full belly? Good.

Feeling scared? Bad.

Feeling safe? Good.

Too cold? Bad.

Warm and cozy? Good.

I don’t want to unknow the complexity of the world. As early as I can remember, I was asking questions about everything around me. I want to be in the world, the gritty, scary world, not safe in someone else’s white-washed tower.

And yet. And yet. As a parent, I want to wrap Remi up in my arms and shield her from the world for as long as I can. She’s two and she’s just beginning to understand empathy for others. Everything in her world revolves around her and her experiences, coupled with two-year-old logic.

Don’t feel like wearing those pants? Bad.

Really wants to wear these pants? Good.

Can’t play with the cat because he’s terrified of me? Bad.

Going to the playground today? Good.

Spinach? Bad.

Strawberries? Good.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BpNHqgqHFwn/

Her life is relatively simple, which is a marker of the privilege we have. She’s never experienced hunger that couldn’t be sated. She’s never been cold in the night or without shoes that fit or experienced anything truly hard. I want to keep it that way as long as possible.

I also know that the bad in the world will come for her eventually and I want her to be prepared, not so closed off from struggle that she’s ill-prepared to survive it. I know she’ll be safe in ways others are not and I want her to have an understanding of that, a sense of self that includes a sense of others without Othering difference.

I spend a lot of time thinking about who Remi will be, the infinite possibilities ahead of her. Her interests range from cars to horses to dolls to dinosaurs. She’s smart and loves to read and loves to dance and throw her balls and take on physical challenges. She could be so many things, choose so many futures.

I’ve started to think more about who I want Remi to be and when and how to have those conversations. For example, as she becomes more verbal, I want to be sure we’re talking more about different kinds of families. Having a “mommy” and a “daddy” has made her emerging family play more gendered and heteronormative than I’d really like. She’ll point to a character on TV and declare them “mommy,” “daddy,” or “baby.” She’s not quite old enough to understand the nuance, but I’ve been trying to talk about and show her more families with same-gender parents or to say that not all kids have a mommy and a daddy. I’m not sure how much she understands.

http://www.instagram.com/p/Bouxx4enHGy/

I was talking to our neighbor who babysits Remi on Thursdays at her home. Remi plays with her kid, who’s a year and a half older than Remi and is also assigned male and identifies as a boy and is white with white parents. Most of Remi’s “friends” which are actually our neighbors and friends with kids are white. The few friends I have who are Korean don’t have kids or have much older kids.

I was talking to our neighbor who babysits Remi and we were talking about policing practices in our city and we were talking about race. It all started as a conversation about Paw Patrol, a popular kids TV show about dogs who are emergency responders. (You read that right. Who pitches these shows?) One of them is a police dog. I was half-joking half-totally-serious sharing that Remi has a Paw Patrol toddler slide and I didn’t want Waffle to put the decorative stickers on it because I felt it was pro-police propaganda. Haha and also, really, though.

She was agreeing that the police in our neighborhood aren’t friendly and don’t care about the people who live here. I was saying I don’t want Remi to fear the police, but that I did want her to understand that Black and brown kids in the city have to fear them, that policing isn’t fair, that they’re not cute altruistic puppy dogs in practice. Then she said that she agreed, but didn’t think she had to talk to her kid (still a toddler) because it wouldn’t affect him. I said I think we do need to talk to white kids and Asian kids. We don’t need to have “the talk,” per se, but they need to understand that their relationship to law enforcement is very different than their peers. We need to talk to them so they know that calling the police on someone can be a life or death situation, so they don’t believe that police protect everyone equally, so they don’t turn into part of the problem.

I’ve been thinking about Danye Jones, the young Black man hanged in his own backyard. He was found by his mother, Ferguson activist Melissa McKinnies, the fourth Black person who seems to have been targeted because of their activist work in Ferguson. (Police are investigating it as a suicide despite evidence to the contrary.) I’ve been thinking about the young girl who died from a respiratory illness she contracted in ICE custody soon after finally being reunited with her family, the other child who died in unsanitary conditions at an ICE detention center in Texas, the many kids who reported sexual and physical and emotional abuse, the children who are still lost in the system maybe forever. I’ve been thinking about the most recent study that shows, again, that suicide rates are highest among trans and non-binary youth.

I’ve been thinking about the bad in the world and, as a parent, it breaks me in a new and more intimate way. I’ve been thinking about who Remi will be. I want to protect my little dino from all the bad that might hurt her individually. Our class privilege and passing privilege with a mostly-white family will protect her. Like my mother didn’t have to, I won’t have to worry about Remi being profiled by police while walking down our street or standing in our backyard. I won’t have to worry about Remi being dragged down into the school-to-prison pipeline because of some small (or even large) dumb kid-logic decision she made.

But I don’t want to protect Remi completely. I want her to know what’s going on outside of her individual experience of the world. I don’t want her to grow up thinking “we’re all the same human race,” or “all lives matter.” I need to talk to Remi about so many things as she grows up. Silence is not an option.

We need to talk to our kids, especially those of us with light or white skin, especially those with class privilege and cis privilege and straight privilege. We need to talk to our kids, especially those who could become part of the problem, especially those who will grow up thinking their experience of “good” and “bad” is a universal experience. They’ll learn about the good and bad of the world on their own, eventually, but we’re responsible for shaping where they see themselves and how they see their role in making a better future.

Trauma? Bad.

Healing? Good.

Taking advantage of? Bad.

Taking action? Good.

Ignoring injustice? Bad.

Fighting for equality? Good. Good. Good.

5 Random Parenting Feelings I’m Currently Over-Processing

1. ECHOLOCATION!

Remi is obsessed with Finding Dory right now and one of her new skills is echolocation. Thanks, Bailey the beluga whale! She’s been doing this for a few weeks, often first thing when she wakes up (and then we wake up) in the morning.

“Echo! …Rainbow! OooooOoooo! OooooOoooo!”

I couldn’t find the clips from the movie on YouTube, so if you don’t know the reference, you’re just going to have to watch the movie. It’s become a family favorite, though I’m perpetually Team Gerald and I DON’T KNOW WHY THEY MADE GERALD THE BUTT OF BULLYING JOKES WHEN LITERALLY THE REST OF THE MOVIE IS ABOUT DIFFERENT ABILITIES BEING A STRENGTH BUT OK. JUST A DISCLAIMER.

2. The Terrible Twos

They’re here. Get used to it! In all honesty, the twos haven’t been the worst, but she’s definitely in her feelings about things. There’s a lot of brain development and self-actualization around this age which results in Remi being like, “TODAY I SHALL NOT WEAR ANY PANTS UNLESS THOSE PANTS HAVE CATS ON THEM!” or “NO, I DO NOT WANT YOU TO READ THAT BOOK. THAT BOOK MAKES ME ANGRY.” or “WHY CAN’T I PET THE CAT INSTEAD OF YOU ATTEMPTING TO CHANGE MY DIAPER? WHY DO YOU HATE ME? WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME? WAAAAAAAAAh!”

3. Grown-Ups Only Halloween

We always say it’ll be our last, but we left our kiddo once again for an adults-only Halloween with friends in NYC.

http://www.instagram.com/p/Bpm6X2pBJRx/

Remi does not care. She is having a BLAST at Gramma’s house. We did buy her a costume. She loved it in the store, but hated it on her actual body. Like, she screamed and cried when we tried to put it on her… twice… then we gave up. We took the tags off already, so not she has a half-limp horse face pillow that she drags around the house.

We did do a family fall weekend a couple weekends ago during which we went pumpkin picking, got cider and donuts, visited a family farm with a petting zoo, and rode on a historic train!

http://www.instagram.com/p/Bo5WQzqHxWJ/

So we’re not the actual worst parents for leaving her behind on Halloween, right? RIGHT?!

4. Sad Sick World

It’s fall. The pumpkin spice is fragrant. The leaves in NY are crunchy and colorful. The air is crisp AF. And the non-stop cold season is upon us. We’ve shared two family colds in the last two weeks, the most recent of which went back-to-back with the first one for Remi.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BpATxxqHFfu/

I’m recovering from the second one. Waffle is just starting to get it. Remi is running around totally wild with her non-stop runny nose and seemed very nonplussed by the whole situation.

5. The Jeter Situation

Some of you have asked for deets on the Remi + cat situation. Jeter is still very annoyed by her, but he’s recently begun coming into the same room as her for periods of time. Waffle instituted a treat for the cat as part of Remi’s bedtime routine, which has helped build their relationship a little, too.

http://www.instagram.com/p/BoyEKIwHeOr/

I’ll be honest that I thought we’d be at a better pace two years and two months into Jeter and Remi’s relationship, so I hope he’ll be around long enough to actually accept her very loud offers of friendship once she’s old enough to chill out a little. I really hope so! I have dreams of cat and baby snuggles at the same time!

Raising Baby T. Rex: The Soft Underbelly of a Hard Femme Mama

I remember one of the first times I recognized an adult’s body. Like, the first time I saw an adult body and really understood it as a body different than mine. I was a little kid. My mom had recently taken a shower and was in the kitchen wearing a towel around her midsection. He hair was wound up in another towel on her head. She was looking for something or messing with something on the kitchen counter when her towel slipped, revealing her back and sides. I think I’d probably seen my mom undressed before. We weren’t particularly reserved about nudity in our family. My mom, sister, and I all shared a bathroom and often used it at the same time. I’m sure I’d seen her drying herself after a shower before or wearing a towel while getting ready in the mirror.

I remember this moment, though, because I really noticed her and how her body was different than my little kid body. What I remember most of all was the curve of her waist and hips. What I remember is that I thought she was so beautiful. Once, in church, I interrupted my mom singing along with a hymn to tell her she was a beautiful singer. She sort of laughed it off and said, “Thank you.” I thought my mom’s body was beautiful in the same way I thought she could be a professional singer, in the way a little kid believes their parents are absolutely perfect.

I’m 14 years old. My two best friends, Heather and Cathy, and I spend every weekend together, rotating between houses from Friday through Sunday. We try on each other’s clothes and take pictures of each other attempting to pose like the models in YM. My friends wear size 5/6 and 7/8. I wear size 11/12 or 13/14.

“I’m so fat,” I whine, pinching my belly fat. “Nothing fits me.”

“But you have such good legs,” Heather reassures me. “I’m so jealous you don’t have any cellulite at all! My legs are gross.”

“I wish I had your thick hair,” Cathy jumps in, touching her own hair.

“You have really pretty hair,” Heather agrees.

Cathy snaps a surprise photo of me as I’m changing into another outfit. I’m wearing a white bra and a red plaid skirt. I yelp and turn my face and body away from the camera as the shutter clicks. I get the photos back a week later and I immediately flip to that photo. All you can see is my back and the side of my head as I’m caught mid-turn. My hands are covering my face. I fixate on the slight line where my bra band digs into my back. My back fat, I would have called it. I hate it. I hate it I hate it I hate it.

“Your baby lived in here!” I protest. Waffle is telling me I have to throw out my maternity jeans, the ones that I wore all during my pregnancy and that I’m still wearing to chase around a two-year-old. No one makes jeans like this for fat girls. Comfy, soft, intentionally cradling and hugging my roundness and sitting high on my waist, stretching stretching stretching to accommodate all of me. Why don’t they make clothes likes this for my non-pregnant body, clothes that fit a belly, honor it, draw attention to it and celebrate it? I know the answer. I still ask the question.

Wearing my fav maternity pants in this pic. Note the child very much done gestating.

The fabric has been fraying where my thighs meet, threatening to split as the denim wears thinner and thinner. A huge hole inevitably appears one night, stretching across the upper inner thigh.

“It’s time. They have to go,” Waffle says. He goes online and buys me super high waist stretchy non-maternity jeans, which are very comfortable and not quite the same. “Promise me you won’t put them back in the washer,” he says.

Waffle and I tried to do Weight Watchers in the months leading up to our wedding ceremony in 2011. Weight Watchers promised they weren’t a typical diet. It wasn’t about denying yourself. It was a body positive community. Waffle wanted to lose weight. I wanted to feel healthier.

We paid for the monthly subscription. We downloaded the app and tracked our points. I substituted whole pints of applesauce for ice cream, diet soda for sugary lemonade or juice. We both dropped significant weight immediately. I started fitting into size 12 and size 10 again, the first time I’d fit in a 12 since freshmen year of college.

I got so adept at counting points that I didn’t need the app to estimate after the first few weeks. I was just counting them in my head, all the time. I’d be sitting at my desk at work, musing over what to eat for lunch, calculating the points. Always, always, thinking about what I was going to eat and adding and subtracting my daily and weekly allotment. The more you lose on Weight Watchers, the fewer points per day they allow you. I started with 29 points per day. As I lost weight, I got down to 22 points per day and the diet that allowed me to “eat anything I want” started to feel like an old familiar calorie-counting restrictive diet.

It ended when I found myself sitting on the floor crying, because all that negative self-talk I’d untaught myself was overwhelming me. Somewhere along the way, I’d started thinking of food as “good” or “bad” again, as though food could be ranked on some arbitrary binary scale. I’d started ignoring my intuition and drinking diet soda to curb hunger between meals. I wasn’t thinking about being healthy anymore. I was thinking about being thin — thinner, thinner, down one more size.

I thought I’d left that person behind, the one who was obsessed with disappearing, but here she was all along right there just past the curtain into my subconscious mind, ready to shame me into obsessing over every point, sighing in my ear, “You’re going to have to exercise if you eat that 8-point bagel.” “Maybe you should just skip lunch so you have enough points for dinner.” “You’re going to get fat again.”

I quit Weight Watchers.

“You don’t look that much different,” Waffle commented. I was looking at my post-baby body in the full-length hallway mirror. I was trying to remember what I looked like before I was pregnant. I didn’t show right away, but my stomach hardened up and got a little higher and rounder. I’d definitely had a round belly, though, to begin with. I was thick around my waist with small hips, an almost rectangular shape except for my large chest. I’ve always carried my weight in the front and I’d developed vertical stretch marks around my belly button in the year before getting knocked up.

When I first got those new belly stretch marks, I had to consciously force myself to embrace them. “These are fine,” I’d say in my head to myself as I ran my fingers over the red lines. “Lots of people have stretch marks. They’re beautiful.” I didn’t believe it, but I just kept saying it to myself until it became my truth.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my body. Loving my body is a full-time occupation. I need constant reinforcement and reassurance and permission to be kind to myself. The truth of body positivity is that it isn’t a one-stop destination. It goes on and on and on and you are always practicing it and always kind of not quite getting it right, too.

After pregnancy, my tummy was still there. I still carried my weight in the front. The stretch marks faded, but my tummy hasn’t toned back up. The skin was tauter and stretched over my fat before pregnancy, like the cute accent pillows on my couch. Plump and stuffed and fitted just right. Now my belly is more generous like the king-size pillows on my bed, soft and fluffy and pliable, a gentle place for resting. It’s a bit saggier. It hangs a little lower. I have a little crease under my belly that’s more pronounced now. I have belly dimples. My pants can’t sit under my belly anymore without my tummy flopping over the waistband.

I love how soft I am postpartum. It’s a reminder of how my body stretched and grew and changed to grow a tiny human, how it protected Remi for almost 10 months. It’s a reminder of how I howled and rocked and focused completely naked and sweaty and raw for hours and hours to bring her into the world. I didn’t know I could be that strong and that soft simultaneously. I didn’t know my softness could be my strength.

“I’ve got a six-pack under all this fat,” I joke, “because all I ever do is suck in.” I’m always looking for ways to appear slimmer, always holding my stomach in. I automatically inhale when I stand up. I sit on the edge of my seat in class with my shoulders back and my pelvis forward and stomach flexed. I wear body shapers under my prom dress to create a slim waist, so tight I can barely eat my fancy dinner. I wear pantyhose under my pants to slim my thighs. I have a bikini that I only wear for tanning, at home, never in public. My BMI is in the “overweight” category, the gym teacher reminds me every year. I’m stuck at 142 pounds. I can’t get smaller than a size 8 or a size medium. I have this one skirt that’s a size 4 that I can just barely squeeze into and I wear it just because it makes me feel petite. All I want is to be small. Boys would like me if I was small. If I was small, I could be happy.

Remi snuggles into me when she’s in the mood to lounge. In those quiet moments, I love how she rests her hand on my belly or lays with her head across me or leans her whole body into me and relaxes into my softness. It reminds me of how I used to snuggle up to my mom, how it felt so good to be breathing her in all nuzzled up and warm, like slipping into her pocket.

I want Remi to love my body the way I am. I want her to see me as beautiful the way I saw my mom as beautiful, with my short hair and my double chin and my hanging belly. Perfect. It feels so right when she reaches for me and throws her arms around me, when she rests her head on my chest or shoulder, and even when she uses all my bumps and lumps as footholds to scale me like a human playground.

As a queer hard femme, my gender expression is about hard edges more than feminine touches. I like an exaggerated cat eye in a black liquid liner that’s so sharp it could cut you. I like bright red and dark purple and black-blue matte lipstick and glowy silver highlights and dramatic jewelry. A student recently told me I have B.D.E., which I had to ask them to define and then did not completely love the definition of, but I think they meant that my presence commands attention. My femme-ness has never been soft and delicate. I’m scared to be that vulnerable as a woman. My hard edges have been there, in so many ways, to protect my softness.

Being fat and soft with Remi feels different. Being a fat, soft mama makes me feel sturdy, like an immovable mountain or an impenetrable fortress. It’s a strength that would never harm Remi, could never poke her with a hipbone or a hard angle, and could protect her infinitely. My capacity to move for her and make room for her and mold my life to hers is one way to love her, with all of myself.

Remi loves her belly. She really, really loves her belly button. She lifts my shirt to find my belly button and pokes it or kisses it and exclaims, “Boop!” It makes her giggle so hard she has to sit down. She shows her belly off to anyone. She’s so proud of knowing her body.

One day, as much as I try to be her radically soft mama and model body positivity, she’ll wish her belly was small and flat and firm. She’ll want to hide it. She’ll learn to hate her body. I hope my softness shows her how strong soft bodies can be. I hope she never stops loving my softness. I hope it helps her love herself against all odds.

4 Random Parenting Feelings I’m Currently Over-Processing

1. Baby Shark Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo

Ya’ll. I didn’t know about Baby Shark. I didn’t know. I don’t know why this song, specifically, is so endlessly entertaining to kids. I do know it is a very catchy tune that gets stuck in your head. I know putting on this video is a surefire way to distract Remi if I need to get some work done. If you don’t have a child, you may not be aware of this entertainment gold. If you don’t understand the appeal, watch it with a toddler. I am slightly concerned that this is Remi’s first exposure to Korean entertainment, but OK we’ll deal with that later, I guess.

(This is on in the living room right now while I wrap up this column.)

2. Things I’ve Googled This Month

what age toddler bed
how many words 2 years old
counting age normal
signs ready for toilet training
why do kids like baby shark
toddler nightmares
toddler doesn’t use blanket

3. Late to Bed, Lazy to Rise

Our kiddo has a really late bedtime of somewhere between 10pm-11pm, which we’re kind of embarrassed to admit. She’s never been a long sleeper at night, though, and she sleeps at most 10 hours. Also, we like to sleep in because Waffle works nights, we’ve been able to avoid having to pay for daycare because Waffle watches her during the day, and I don’t need to be to work until 9:30 or 10am most days. So, like, it works for us until she starts school (or daycare — whatever comes first). It’s just a little awkward to talk about because most of our parent friends put their kids to bed at, like, 7pm.

4. Baby Shark Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Part II)

http://www.instagram.com/p/BoL98ALHFmV

Raising Baby T-Rex: My Mom Says We’re Exactly The Same

By the time I got around to having my own kid, I’d spent over three decades imagining and actualizing myself as a writer, an activist, a queer feminist, but never as a “mom.” As queer people do, once Waffle and I decided we were going to have a baby, I spent two full years overprocessing everything I could imagine or predict about joining the mommy cult before I even got knocked up.

I kept processing it all during the pregnancy as a queer feminist pregnant hard femme. I documented a lot of that here, on Autostraddle, with all of you. Still, I wasn’t at all prepared for first time parenting. No one is. Some things you just can’t prepare for. The hardcore sleep deprivation, the zero-sum-game of trying to maintain a sense of dignity postpartum, the ritualistic hazing that is trying to force an overtired baby to take a nap, the constant feeding-changing-sleeping-crying routine.

Literally just humble-bragging about how cute we are. Like, we’re really cute. (via our first birthday shoot with Jessica Stringer Photography)

What I wasn’t even remotely prepared for was how parenting would affect me as an adoptee.

I spent some time processing pregnancy as an adoptee, but I didn’t anticipate the feelings I’d have about being adopted and raising a toddler who still isn’t as old as I was when I came to the United States on an airplane. I thought I’d banished those ghosts a long time ago, the questions that I used to ask my mom over breakfast when I was little: “Where am I from?” “Why did they give me up?”

Me annoying one of our family dogs, Molson (named after the Canadian beer, yes, my parents were cool)

Recently, my 16-month-old baby has started to call for me by name in the morning: “Ma! Ma!” I always get up with her, something I resented in those early months but cherish now that we’re both sleeping through the night. (Parenting, like most things in a relationship, is so much playing to each others’ strengths. Waffle is a grouchy bear in the early morning. I can survive on less sleep and I was breastfeeding for the first six months, so I do my part on the wake-up shift. Waffle does his part in many other ways, like doing all the meal planning and grocery shopping.) Remi wakes up every morning knowing I’ll be there because I’ve been there every morning for the past 16 months, almost every single day of her life.

When I was a little over 17-months-old, I was delivered off a plane and placed into my parents’ arms and into my whole existence. Everything before that moment is gone, is vapor, a few translated sentences in my adoption papers. The loss of my history has never struck me the way it does now that I have a baby. I guess I’d always thought of babies as little, nonsensical, silly things. I didn’t know the difference between a one-week-old and a one-year-old until I carried my baby through that first year, from learning to latch to fighting over eating her vegetables.

Remi as a newborn (left) and at 6 months old, learning to sit up (right).

I didn’t comprehend that Little KaeLyn or, rather, Little Eun Jeong, had a whole 17 months of development and language and culture and food and exploration and family in another country halfway around the globe. Who I am was split in two at the moment I got on that plane to meet my new family. It might as well be a different person in a different world who lived my life before I came to the U.S. When I imagine it, it’s like imagining a foreign movie with subtitles or the plot of a book about Korean children, written by a visiting Western author. I will never get it back; even if I go to Korea now, as an adult, I’ll be a visitor. I can never go home to Korea, but Korea was my home. For 17 months, I was someone else. Home was somewhere else.

At 16 months, Remi knows the sound a cow makes (“Muh!”). She can bring me a book or a stuffed animal on request. She signs “more” fervently when she’s hungry and she loves cats (“Kah-Tah” as she says). She’s started sorting objects by type and loves to stomp her feet to music. She expects applause when she puts a ball through her Fisher Price basketball hoop. At 16 months, she knows a dozen baby words and understands more than that. Her favorite movie is Moana and she giggles or shrieks at her favorite parts. When she hears one of us in the bathroom, she runs in and drags her stool up to the bathroom sink to wash her hands. Right now, she’s double-fisting saucy strands of spaghetti and emphatically grunting, “Mmmmm,” between bites. At 16 months, she shows her love for us when she runs to meet Waffle at the door with a “Da! Da!” or when she grabs my neck in a big hug and gives firm, little pats on my arm (pat-pat-pat).

At 16 months, I knew…

At 16 months, I played with…

At 16 months, I said…

At 16 months, I loved…

At 16 months, I woke up and asked for…

Who Remi is, is so clear already. She’s cunning and likes to play little tricks on us. She’s a fearless adventurer who takes calculated risks and hard falls and gets up ready to try again. She is already insistently independent and wants to do everything herself. She’s a fast learner and a fast runner. She’s truly extra in every way and I love that about her.

My mom says we’re “exactly the same.” As she gets older, I definitely agree. Our pictures are almost identical to the untrained eye. But I wonder what I was like before my mom knew me. I wonder what words I said that no one in my American family could understand. I wonder how I interpreted getting on a plane in one world and popping out in another one, a new place where I couldn’t understand a single word and where no one could understand me. Surely, I was talking. Remi talks all day. Where did I think my biological parents went? How did I process moving to a home where nothing was familiar and where no one looked like me?

My adoption photo and my first picture of myself.

My mom and dad say I adapted quickly to my life in the U.S. and wasn’t afraid at all. I went right to them or to any stranger. I didn’t cry. I was a happy baby. I see that tenacity in Remi. She fears nothing. She adjusts quickly when traveling or going to the babysitter’s house or spending the night at Gramma and Grandpa’s house. She never seems to worry that we aren’t coming back. She’s so sure of herself.

Was I ever “just like” someone else? Are personality traits hereditary or chance? It’s hard to say, but I like to think that I’m getting a peek into who I might have been by knowing who Remi is. Her life story will be different than mine, a little more filled out, but it will still have gaps. Gaps in my history, that I can’t pass down to her. Gaps in the donor’s history (though we actually know way more about the donor’s biological family than we do about mine). And gaps where the complexity of being a Korean person in a mostly white family become painfully clear.

I went into parenting ready to reclaim “mommy” and ready to queer momminess. I didn’t expect to reclaim my need to explore my lost ancestry or my identity as Korean-American. I didn’t know that it would open something I thought I’d sealed up inside me a long time ago, the whispers of ancestors I can’t quite hear.

For now, I see parts of myself in my baby and it makes me feel simultaneously a little more empty and a little more whole. When I think about Remi growing up, I think about learning about Korean culture together, learning to cook Korean food for her, and ultimately about going back to Korea together. I just recently let myself say out loud that I’d like to do a birth family search, though I know how improbable is it that I’ll find anything. Anyone.

Remi’s dol-bok (Korean traditional 1st birthday garment) and cake smash, Korean and American first birthday traditions captured by Jessica Stringer Photography

In a couple weeks, she’ll be the same age I was when my plane touched down at JFK airport. I’ll finally be able to put pictures of her and me side-by-side to compare.

Me (left column), first year in the U.S. ages 17 months to 24 months. Remi (right column), first year of life ages 9 months to 12 months.

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: Remi is Here, Labor is Hard, and Mesh Undies Are Glorious

Remi burst into the world at 5:58 AM on September 1, 2016, weighing just under 7 lb, 3 oz and measuring 19.5 inches long. She’s incredible and smart and perfect and Waffle and I are deeply smitten.

Our first family pic with Remi.

remi9

For about three weeks before I went into labor, I’d been having pre-labor contractions in the evening. I’d go to bed and wake up to find the contractions had passed while I was sleeping. I had other pre-labor symptoms, too, including my bloody show, but none of them progressed to actual labor.

On the evening of August 30th around 9 p.m., a week and a half past my due date, I started feeling the familiar uterine cramps and lower back pain. I was scheduled to be admitted for an induction at 8 p.m. the next day and I’d somewhat given up hope that I’d go into labor spontaneously. However, these contractions seemed to be coming at more regular intervals than the pre-labor contractions I’d had in the past. I surreptitiously opened the contraction timer app on my phone and started monitoring.

After an hour, I spoke up. “Babe,” I said to Waffle, “I’m having contractions again. But they’re coming 15 minutes apart and they’re, like, 30-to-45 seconds long. This might be it.” I monitored for another hour and the contractions were still coming at regular intervals. We decided to go to bed right then in case it was the real deal. Labor was going to start the next day, anyway, whether Baby T. Rex came on their own or was coaxed out with Pitocin. Maybe Baby T. Rex was a procrastinator like me, waiting until the last possible second to avoid induction.

At 4:30 a.m., I woke up still having contractions. They were coming faster and stronger. I got up, went to the bathroom, and started timing. They were 10 minutes apart, then eight minutes. At 5:30 a.m., they were coming six or seven minutes apart and I decided to take a shower.

I heard Waffle come into the bathroom. “You alright?” he asked sleepily from the other side of the shower curtain.

“They’re coming faster now,” I said, “Like, six minutes apart.”

“OK.”

“So this is real?”

“I think maybe, yeah.”

I got out, dried off, and put on a loose-fitting black dress. Waffle was tense. His nervous concern was not well-masked by his forced smile. “I’m going to call Christy,” I said.

Christy, our doula, told us to call her when I thought I was in labor, because the plan was to do early labor at home. Christy gave me some tips for coping with the contractions. She said to call again when I couldn’t talk or walk through them. She said that Waffle might notice before I did when my mood shifted. Meanwhile, Christy worked on getting coverage so she or a backup doula could meet up with us. We were pretty far past my due date and of course it just happened to be a day when she had a bunch of appointments and commitments.

I turned on the TV. The contractions were regular, but not too painful at first. As they became stronger, I had the urge to stand up and walk them off. I began to have to actively breathe through them. I tried to remember what I could from our childbirth class. I used the door frame for support as I leaned into the tightness in my lower abdomen.

Waffle started loading our hospital bags into the car. He got me a heating pad. Every couple minutes he’d ask if I was OK. He followed me from room-to-room when I got up to walk. He was quietly panicking and not hiding it well.

Between 6:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m., the contractions progressed from six minutes apart to two minutes apart, lasting 60-90 seconds. I anticipated I’d stay in the five-minute range for longer. I assumed we’d have a few hours at home before I would go to the hospital. However, according to the literature I’d read, two minutes apart was more typical of active labor, when the cervix dilates from four to ten centimeters. Most hospitals want you to call when you’re five minutes or two minutes apart.

At 8 a.m., the contractions were still coming two minutes apart and they were more painful. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law had very quick labors and I wondered if I should be more concerned, if I was going to keep progressing this quickly. I couldn’t talk through the pain at this point and I felt like I couldn’t breathe each time a contraction crested. The lower back pain was becoming unbearable, even with a heating pad. I had to grip the couch or lean over a chair when I felt one coming. I told Waffle to call Christy.

Christy suggested I get in the shower for relief and that Waffle call the midwives. Waffle called the midwifery group and told them what was going on. I stripped off my dress and got in the shower, turned the water on scalding hot. I let the water run over me and leaned against the wall, moaning through the pain. Waffle said he could hear me from downstairs. The midwives instructed us to come to the maternity center. They seemed concerned that my contractions were already two minutes apart.

The five-minute car ride to the hospital maternity center was awful. I typically drive, but obviously I couldn’t. Waffle was stressed out. I was stressed out. I kept snapping at him to follow the GPS when he asked me for directions. Waffle thought I was going to give birth in the car. I assured him I wouldn’t as I gritted my teeth through a contraction.

I didn’t want to spend a long time laboring at the hospital. I would have stayed at home slightly longer if my contractions hadn’t progressed so quickly. Or if I could have waited long enough for Christy to make it to our house and coach me through the pain. But that’s not the hand we were dealt.

When I got to the maternity center, a nurse hooked me up to a monitor in their triage room. My cervix was only two centimeters dilated. Even though my contractions were two minutes apart, which is more typical of active labor, I was still in early labor. They could have sent me home. Since I was scheduled to be induced that night anyway, they decided to admit me. I was glad to be admitted. I couldn’t walk during the contractions and I had to hang off Waffle’s neck and lean into him and sway to get through them. I hoped things would continue to move quickly.

Christy met up with us at the hospital. Thank god. Having a doula was the best decision we made. She provided support to both of us and was an instantly calming influence on Waffle. She knew the hospital and was friendly with the staff. She had the experience of assisting with over 150 births and she’d seen most anything from home births to C-sections. She came up with ingenious ideas we wouldn’t have on our own, like making a sling out of a pillowcase to keep my hand with the IV out of the bathtub or wrapping the birthing ball in a bedsheet so it wouldn’t roll away. She suggested positions and helped me breathe through the pain and always, always listened to what we wanted.

When we had to make decisions about medical intervention, she talked through it with us and assured us we were doing what was best for us and for Remi. We both had a better labor experience because Christy was there. Waffle was an incredible support person in no small part because he had a support person in our doula.

I won’t go into the grisly blow-by-blow details of the rest of my early labor, partially because I don’t want to turn this into a fifty-thousand-word post. The contractions continued to be painful and long and one-to-two minutes apart, but my cervix was very slow to dilate. At 4 p.m., about eight hours since I’d been admitted, the midwife came to check my cervix and I’d just finally made it to four centimeters. I was laid out in the jacuzzi tub screaming through contractions and had been for a few hours at this point. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I was still so far from the finish line. Christy reminded me that each contraction was moving me forward as I turned onto my side in the tub and wailed into a makeshift hand towel pillow.

Five hours later, at 9 p.m., my cervix was finally seven centimeters dilated, making the beginning of the transition stage of active labor. The midwife assured me it would start moving faster now, as this stage usually lasts 15 minutes to an hour. However, two hours later, I was still at eight-and-a-half centimeters, curled into the fetal position on my left side and feeling unable to stand or move. I could barely talk between contractions. I continuously moaned and vocalized. (According to Waffle, the low moaning noises I made sounded like the theme from Jaws.) The pain never subsided, just gradually built into a ferocious stabbing pain and came back down to a moderate pain level for a minute or so in between. The back labor felt like a knife being twisted under my skin.

Over the course of the long day, I learned to breathe through the contractions, to keep my moans and sobs low and guttural, to conserve my energy as best I could in the minute or so of relief between contractions, to visualize the pain subsiding with each outward breath. The contractions were actually more painful earlier in the day, but my body was so worn down that each contraction felt more and more impossible. I’d been awake for almost 20 hours and working through very emotionally and physically intense contractions for almost 16. I was shaking and cold and exhausted. “I can’t do this,” I whisper-whimpered to Waffle.

I pride myself on having a high pain tolerance. I wasn’t nervous about pain during labor because I felt confident I could handle it. I had no idea how hard it would be. The pain, itself, would have been manageable on its own or for a shorter period of time. However, with relentless contractions coming two minutes apart for so long, it became torturous.

I’ve never before been pushed to my topmost limit, to the very edge of my physical threshold. I made noises that were pulled up from this primal, earthy place, that didn’t sound like they were actually coming from me. I grabbed Waffle’s hand and arm so hard I left bruises and dragged his skin off with my nails. I whimpered. I shrieked. I made sobbing noises, but I couldn’t cry. It was too much effort to cry and all my focus was on making it through the contractions. I kept chanting in my head, Just make it through this one. Just one more. Just one more. Just one more.

By 11 p.m., though, I felt like I couldn’t take one more. I dreaded each contraction as I felt it start to build. “You can do this,” Christy assured me, “Breathe through it. You’re doing great.” I kept breathing. I held Waffle’s hand. I took each contraction as it came because I didn’t have a choice. I felt like I might be in transition forever.

At this point, the midwife offered pain management options. I’d really wanted to have a natural birth, but my birth plan was always open to me changing my mind or things going differently. Part of me, the stubborn part, felt like I’d been doing this so long that I wanted to see it through to the end. The other part of me, the pragmatic part, knew I had hit a wall. Physically and emotionally, I didn’t want to keep going like this. I chose to have an epidural.

The epidural was instant relief. I was finally able to talk, to thank Waffle and check in with him. I realized we had barely spoken all day, not since my contractions became too painful to talk. I’d turned inward to this meditative place to deal with the pain. He was amazing throughout the labor. He knew I didn’t want to be talked to. I just needed him holding my hand or letting me hang onto him or letting him rub my back. While I laid and moaned in the jacuzzi tub for three hours, he poured warm water over my back with a cup. In all our years together, I’ve never felt so close to Waffle. I don’t like needing people and I’d never needed him as much as I did that day. I was vulnerable and literally naked (I ditched my hospital gown early on and never felt like putting it back on) and raw and exposed and I kept reaching for Waffle and he was right there every time. It is, hands down, the most intimate experience we’ve ever shared and that I’ve ever had with anyone.

Because of the epidural, I was finally able to get a couple of hours of rest. Though, between the endorphin high and being hooked up to a blood pressure monitor that went off every 30 minutes, I didn’t actually sleep. Waffle took a nap on a fold-out chair next to my bed.

The epidural slowed down my contractions and I still wasn’t fully dilated, so I opted to be administered Pitocin to strengthen my contractions. Pitocin is what they use to induce labor, so ironically, I’d avoided induction but still ended up needing Pitocin to augment labor. The Pitocin helped me dilate fully and then, finally, a full 24 hours since I’d woken up in labor, it was time to push.

I was still numb from the waist down because of the epidural. The nurse and midwife told me when to push because I couldn’t feel my contractions. The nurse put a mirror at the end of my bed so I could see the head crowning. It was surreal, seeing my body giving birth, but not being able to feel it, like having an out of body experience. It was strangely peaceful after a long day of difficult labor. It was beautiful, too, seeing the top of the head, the blood and everything else, and finally, witnessing the final push as Remi’s head emerged with the shoulders and body following closely behind. Waffle and I watched together, holding hands, as I birthed Remi into the world.

Meeting Remi for the very first time.

I’d prepared myself to not have an immediate emotional reaction to my baby. I know some people don’t feel intense feelings right away and that’s normal. I tend to not be very interested in babies, so I thought I might not react strongly. I was wrong. I loved her the moment I saw her, the moment I looked into her little face and saw her little nose that looks just like mine. The nurse put her on my chest immediately after birth. I held her close. “She’s perfect,” I said to Waffle, holding back tears.

Unfortunately, we only had a few minutes with Remi. Waffle never even got to hold her. She was having trouble breathing. She had meconium (baby poop) in her amniotic fluid and it was possible she’d inhaled meconium in utero. She was taken for tests and observation by special care.

We were moved to our postpartum room without her and not knowing if she was okay. As soon as my epidural wore off, I threw on some clothes and we went to see her. She looked awful. She’d aspirated meconium in utero and her respiratory rate was way too high. We couldn’t really touch her at first because we didn’t want to overstimulate her and she was hooked up to a bunch of machines. You could see her little diaphragm working hard with each breath.

She stayed in special care for the next 48 hours. We visited her every few hours and, when she was able to start eating, helped with her feedings.

Waffle holding Remi for the first time, the day after her birth.

Visiting Remi in special care.

Remi couldn’t figure out how to latch and my breastmilk was slow to come in (possibly because we’d been separated so early on), so we gave the OK for her to be fed formula. She started recovering quickly after that. She was well enough to stay in our room on Saturday.

Remi’s first day staying in her parents’ room.

On Sunday, we had to be discharged without her and she went back to special care. She was supposed to stay there for seven more days. However, Monday morning I got a phone call that she could finish her antibiotics at our pediatrician’s office and she could come home that very day.

Coming home day!

Since then, she’s fully recovered. We’ve switched her off the formula and onto breast milk exclusively. I feed her every hour or two and Waffle and I tag-team childcare so that we can both get naps in here and there. Waffle’s got the magic touch for putting her to sleep. She is trying to lift her head already and has strong reflexes. She’s gaining weight and makes adorable noises and regularly tests our limits as new parents. I can’t believe she’s really here and I love her so much! She’s tough like her mom!

remi12

5 Random Final Thoughts on Queer Baby-Making

1. Letting Go of Perfect Birth Plans

We knew that our birth plan could change at any time and I think that was the best way to approach birth. Almost every person I’ve talked to about their birth experience had a different experience than what they planned or hoped for. Labor and delivery are unpredictable. There are too many variables you can’t control.

However, I think having a strong support team is what made our birth experience feel empowering and positive, even though I didn’t labor the way I’d hoped to. Doulas aren’t always affordable. Childbirth education isn’t necessarily readily available for free. Not everyone can choose a midwife for their care. Not everyone has a supportive partner. I was lucky to have access to all these resources and support. I can totally see how some people get bullied into birth choices they don’t want or talked into medical interventions that are unnecessary.

I had a moment of self-defeat about choosing the epidural, but my doula reminded me that I did all the work and that I did what I needed to do to deliver my baby. “You did this,” she said. “It was all you. You are so strong.” By choosing midwives for my care, I avoided being pushed into other kinds of medical intervention like episiotomies or a C-section. There’s nothing wrong with having a C-section. I just didn’t want one unless medically necessary or if there were other options to try first. We were able to discuss our options for medical intervention with our doula and she gave us useful advice so we didn’t feel like we were making decisions in a panic.

Everything feels like a life or death decision in the moment, but it really isn’t. Epidural? Life or death. Formula? Life or death. Ultimately, you have to do what feels right to you, whether that’s a scheduled C-section or a home birth. It’s just hard to feel like you have autonomy when you are worried about your baby and dealing with a huge amount of stress and pain and uncertainty as new parents.

2. Reflections from the Non-Gestational Waffle

by Waffle

The waiting game was just as awful as everyone said it would be. The constant stream of unsolicited advice was obnoxious. The stress of trying to figure out my time off in a country that places emphasis on job productivity and little value on family was, well, stressful. In the end though, I can confirm 100% that it was worth it. Kae asked me to jot down a few non-gestational parent notes so here goes!

This will not be new news to anyone who has read first hand accounts of support people during labor experiences but the most striking feeling during labor, for me, was helplessness. You constantly hear partners talking about their experience of feeling sorry for the gestational parent. THE STRUGGLE IS REAL FOLKS! I was sure I would feel bad for the pain that Kae would endure but I was totally unprepared for the magnitude of helplessness. While there were things I did through the labor that I am sure “helped” as much as anything can help during labor, for the most part I felt wholly useless.

There are no words to describe watching someone you love go through something so intense and painful while having no control over alleviating that pain. KaeLyn swears up and down that I was helpful but I truly felt like I was useless 90% of the time. It was much harder than anything I had anticipated. I will fully admit to crying out of hopelessness at one point shortly before the epidural was rolled out.

One word: doula. I like to joke that our doula saved our marriage. For real though, our doula saved my life. I feel super privileged to be in a position where we could, financially, use a doula and it was the right choice. I do straight up think KaeLyn would have murdered me had it not been for our fantastic doula. I was a panicked mess when we decided to take it to the hospital. I had zero real-world experience with labor and delivery and try as I might, I definitely lost my ever loving shit. I know I was driving Kae crazy but I couldn’t stop my fear from manifesting in obnoxious overbearing ways.

The mere presence of our doula gave me the calmness needed to properly support Kae. I didn’t have to worry about logistics like how to work the tub or where the hot packs lived and was able to be physically present for the labor. I was also able to follow the doula’s lead on pain management. I was at a loss on how to help KaeLyn manage the pain. I read books and researched methods to cope with contractions but most of them went flying out of my brain when the time came. The doula was great about making helpful suggestions of pain management and when something seemed to help a bit I was able to use those suggestions. It calmed me and made me feel empowered in a situation that was totally out of my control. I was able to sneak short food breaks without feeling like I was leaving my wife hanging. If you can, get a doula.

Once Kae had the epidural, it was nice to be able to enjoy the actual birth together. We were both able to physically watch our daughter being born and it was, hands down, the best experience of my life. KaeLyn makes perfect, beautiful, strong Baby T. Rexes. I must have told her she was amazing about one million times in the hours following Remi’s birth.

Perhaps the best thing was watching Kae fall in love with Remi. I was one of those parents that looks at the ultrasound photos and gloats about how cute the baby looks and how smart they will be based on their brain pics. I loved Remi from the first ultrasound about seven weeks in.

Watching Kae meet Remi and fall in love with our daughter was the best! I know she was unsure if she would love Remi immediately or if it would be a love that would develop over time but it was evident from the first moment she held Remi. I didn’t actually hold Remi due to the respiratory distress until she was almost a day old because I wanted Kae to have that experience and I don’t regret that decision for a minute. I love Remi unconditionally and we have a lifetime of hugs and cuddles to look forward to thanks to my amazing wife!

3. I Stole This Underwear

I’d read in the mommy forums about the infamous postpartum mesh underwear they give you at the hospital for maternity pads. I fall squarely in the “love it!” camp. These undies are so stretchy and comfortable. They feel like nothing and provide absolutely no support and that is exactly what I wanted after pushing out a baby. I totally raided the hospital stash in my postpartum room so I could keep them in rotation at home.

Panty raid.

I’m wearing them right now. I wish I could wear them forever.

4. Things I’ve Googled in the Past Week:

newborn won’t sleep on back
meconium aspiration common
formula spitting up gassy
how much should a newborn eat
bleeding from umbilical cord stump
how to clip newborn nails
tummy time when to start
how to get breastmilk to come in faster

5. Breast is Best(-ish) But Not for Rest

The formula that Remi was eating was giving her a lot of gas and stomach upset. She was spitting up after every feeding and, like, a lot of spit-up, sometimes hours after the feeding. I finally was able to get her to latch onto my breast the day before we were discharged from the hospital, but she preferred the bottle. I don’t blame her. My milk still wasn’t in and I wasn’t producing a lot of colostrum. The bottle is also just easier to get food and, therefore, satisfaction from. We decided to keep mixed feeding her, breast and formula. We followed the feeding schedule of the special care unit at the hospital, two ounces of formula every three hours and I topped her off with breastmilk if I could.

However, the spitting up and gassiness seemed to be more than what we thought was normal. We asked our pediatrician about it at our five-day check-up and she said the hospital was overfeeding her. She assured me my milk supply was enough and suggested going back to breastfeeding exclusively. So we started transitioning her off the formula. I have absolutely nothing against formula. I don’t think it’s wrong to formula feed. I do think it’s expensive and, for Remi, it didn’t seem to be working well.

Breastfeeding must-haves: my Boppy pillow, a lot of H2O, and nipple butter.

Since we’ve switched her back to breastmilk, her stomach upset is a lot better. The first day was especially rough and there was a lot of crying and screaming as we took away the bottle gradually. Now, she’s totally transitioned back and seems satisfied with breastmilk. My milk is also coming in a lot faster and I have to pump a lot less now that she’s feeding regularly. The only downside is that breastmilk digests a lot faster than formula, so I’m feeding her on demand every hour or so, sometimes every half hour when she’s fussy, every two hours if I’m really lucky. That equals a really weird and unreliable sleep schedule.

Thankfully, all my breastfeeding anxiety was for naught. It isn’t my favorite thing and my nipples are constantly tender, but it’s working fine (after a slow start) and my body is cooperating. Remi is mostly cooperating.

Thank y’all so much for the love and support you directed toward Waffle, Remi, and me over the course of this miniseries. It’s been a hell of a lot of fun sharing our experience in queer baby-making with you. Don’t worry. There will be more dispatches from parent-land in the future. Now, this exhausted queer mom is going to try to sneak in a nap.

We’re not co-sleeping; we’re co-snuggling!