By; Rosy Barren

I was asked to drink at least a quart of water prior to the procedure to ensure my bladder was full for the transfer.  I grabbed a water bottle for the car ride over and figured I’d down it on the way.  I was drinking quickly and was nervous, as this whole process is a big mystery.  I didn’t know what to expect and I’m not a fan of hospitals or doctors.  At each stoplight my wife was challenging me to drink as fast as I could until the light turned green just to encourage me to get it down.  I was supposed to leave a half hour between drinking and arriving at the clinic.  By the third light, I turned white, grabbed a bag, and all of the water came right back up.  I hope I didn’t screw anything up.

I explained to the doctors when I got there and they didn’t seem to think it was a huge ordeal, but I felt foolish for not even being able to complete my simple part of this procedure.

They took us into a stark room with a silver gurney in the center and told me to take the Valium my doctor had prescribed. I’ve never really taken much medicine, Percocet, or any of that stuff, and let me tell you, that Valium is a treat.  I melted into the cold, hard gurney for about 30 minutes until they strolled me into the next room.  There, they inserted the embryos inside of me and voila! I saw them floating around on the screen.  My babies!  I was so happy and tired and had to pee…bad.  The worst part about this whole process was the 20 minutes I had to lay elevated with a full bladder.  Torture.  When the nurse finally released me, I couldn’t get to the bathroom fast enough.

Now I wait.  14 days.  14 days!

By: Jillian Lauren

This used to be my town, but leave New York and it leaves you behind so quickly. I don’t know what restaurants to go to or where to shop or where the nearest subway stops are anymore. At the end of the day, I prefer my garden and my house and my slow, sunshiney LA life, but I still always feel a sense of longing when I arrive in New York. There’s something about the pace of the sidewalks here that feels like home to me.

I thought that Tariku would probably like it here, but I didn’t quite anticipate the depth of his passion. Our hotel is four blocks from the park and we’ve been spending hours there every afternoon. He pretty much thinks he’s entered paradise on earth. Horsies, buses, airplanes, flowers, swingsets, boats, fountains, the zoo, a giant meadow, hot dogs, street musicians, break dancers, a sketchy guy making giant bubbles with a rope contraption and a bucket of detergent…the list goes on. Each of these delights could alone fill an entire afternoon. But a place with all of them? I’m sure he wonders why I’ve been holding out on him for so long.

We’re not going to all of the New York area shows because the drives are a little long for T without a bus. I’m also scrambling to get some work done in a town where I know people and I can get a babysitter for a couple of hours. After we get on the bus on Sunday, writing is going to be a whole new kind of challenge. But we had a fab time at the PNC Bank Center show last night. Jersey is my home state, so Grandma and Grandpa came to the show. They were definitely the only senior citizens sitting in the first ten rows, but they’re old pros at this now. My mother actually called afterwards to offer some lighting suggestions.

I didn’t get great pictures. Try taking pictures while keeping a squirming baby from ripping off his headphones. I did get this one from the dressing room…

Current tour reading selection:

The time demands of motherhood have made me a greater short story enthusiast. In my spare moments, I’m reading Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry. I feel about her work the way Tariku feels about Central Park.

By: Ann Brown

Dr. Strangemom

I need to keep some things to myself. I am beginning to notice the looks people give each other when I start spouting off.  For instance, I have two topics that never go over well at dinner parties.

One, is that sometimes when I am in the same room as a man, I fantasize about kicking his ass. Is that  twisted? Hear me out. I don’t wantto actually kick his ass; in fact, I know that unless he is dead drunk and tied up (not that I’d ever fantasize about that) I probably couldn’t do it anyway. I honestly don’t want to hurt anyone. I won’t even wear sheepskin. I just wonder ifI am capable of doing it, you know?

This post, however, is not about that little quirk. This is about the other one:

I believe that- given enough time and the right teacher – I can learn to do anything. Yes, anything. Well, no, not anything – not shit I am just physically incapable of doing, like pole vaulting or reconciling my checkbook. But pretty much anything else. Like……learning to do heart surgery……or speaking backwards….or building a rocket…drafting a Senate bill….I believe that is within my grasp. Key to my position, keep in mind, is the caveat of infinite time.

Probably half of what I can’t do is a result of my lack of interest. I possess an embarrassing dearth of curiosity. I think it stems from my fear that if I use up brain cells for shit I don’t care about it, I will be left unprepared when, say, my life depends on learning a secret code word or when I am called upon suddenly to name the Supreme Court Justices or when I have to remember which kid is deathly allergic to bee stings. A decent amount of brain space has to be kept available for that kind of information.

It was hard to be a mom of two curious children who wanted to, I don’t know, learn things. The first years of motherhood filled up my brain with dinosaur songs and I am here to tell you that if you think algebra is useless in later life, try finding a reason to remember this:

My name is Stegosaurus, I’m a funny looking dinosaur,

And on my back are many tiny spikes and on my tail there’s more

My front two legs are very short, my back two legs are long

My body’s big, my head is very small, I’m put together wrong.

By the time my son’s dinosaur phase was over I was alarmingly low on brain space.

The most effort I put into supporting my children’s intellectual curiosity was to buy those laminated place mats with Flags of the World and The Solar System on them. And even then, when they got funky, I threw them out and bought earth tone hemp ones from The Pottery Barn.

Here’s what the books don’t say and what friends won’t tell you when you are pregnant: it is really boring to raise smart kids. They want to talk about the shit they learn. They want you to listen to them. And you have to mute the TV and pretend you care that the rings of Saturn are made of ice and dust. I remember when my kid was about five or six years old, he came home all whipped up about a new dinosaur that had recently been discovered. Or renamed. Or exhumed or quilted or something. As he recounted with wide-eyed excitement the plethora of details of the new dinosaur, I tried – really tried – to pay attention to what he was saying so I would have something to add or ask at the end of the lecture. My head started to explode and finally, I murmured, “excuse me, sweetie” to my precious son, opened the freezer door, stuck my head into a bag of frozen peas and mouthed the words, “shut up, shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up!” until I was able to turn back to him, smiling.

I have always felt bad about doing that. Until a few days ago when I was telling my son all about my new blog and I saw the look in his eyes. The shut up shut up shut up shut the fuck up look. And I knew that, more than twenty years later, I was boring him to death.

I feel better.

Ann Brown

By: Allison Norris

All dolled up and ready to go, I met my “fill in” babysitter at the door. She had never watched Bay before, so I was nervous. She was going to be the one putting him to bed and I was just sure that he was going to scream the entire time… not that he ever has before, but you just start to imagine everything horrible that could go wrong.

She read all of my 3 pages of written instructions and assured me that they would be fine. Believing her, I decided that we could leave.

Baby Daddy (BD) bought us tickets to one of my favorite shows, Vicci Martinez, at the Triple Door downtown. I let him open my station wagon car door for me and even let him drive. We pulled up to the valet and BD let me know that he’d rather do valet than have to walk, no matter what. Liking this statement in my three inch heels, I wobbled my way inside the venue.

Waiting at the hostess desk, the woman in front of us was spelling her last name over and over, louder and louder,

“C-H-R-I-S-T-E-N-S-E-N” as if the hostess would magically find their reservation easier.

“Ma’am, what show are you here to see?”

The woman looked at her with a blank face, “uh, shoot. It’s the 16th tonight, isn’t it. Our show is on the 23rd. I am just remembering.” She let out an embarrassed laugh and turned around.

Our turn, finally. “Hi, reservation under Norris…” Her fingers punched away on the keyboard.

“What was that last name, one more time?”

“N-O-R-R-I-S”

Just then BD stepped forward with an important question, “Who is playing tonight?”

“It’s Joseph Arthur, sir.”

Not so much Vicci Martinez.

Just then a heat wave covered my skin and a sinking feeling consumed my gut. How did we mess this up? I was the one who got the babysitter, so I guess it’s my fault for just assuming it was on a Saturday night? Defeated, we left and went somewhere else for dinner.

I had asked my regular babysitter to watch Bay while we were at the concert in an email and wrote down “Sunday, Jan 16th”… which, of course, the the 16th was on a Saturday. Confused, she just never responded and asked me in person which date and day I had actually meant. Not double checking, I just PICKED a day and went with it.

I saw my regular babysitter a couple of days later.

“Lindsey,” I ask, seriously.

“Yes…” she chirps back. I swear she sings when she talks or is a Disney character or something – I just adore her.

“You have another task to add to the list – other than making sure my laundry is put away…”

She looks at me concerned, wondering if her $12 an hour is going to seem smaller because of a new task.

“I need you to keep me sane, ok? If I start sounding crazy, please tell me. Please?”

What is she supposed to say to that… is she supposed to tell me that I sound nuts most of the time?

“Haha… ok, Allison.” She sounds timid and changes the subject.

By: Cyndi Whitmore

Scenario: My sitter is black. Priscilla has been babysitting for me since Tyler was 2 mos old. So as not to deal with the hassle of receipts, I pay her by check with the note “childcare” and the dates covered in the memo section. Every month for 3.5 years I’ve written her a check drawn on Wells Fargo Bank. Almost every month for the last two years she has been cashing these checks at the same branch. On the third of this month she went to the branch and dealt with a white male employee whom she’d never seen there before. It so happens that while she was in the bank, I was at the drive-thru teller getting cash. The teller asks me, as my cell phone is ringing, if I’ve written a check on this account recently that someone might be trying to cash… I said yes, my sitter, check # such and such, for $XXX. She’s says OK, just checking… of course I miss the cell phone call. After I finish my transaction I leave and check my voice mail. It is the bank employee my sitter was dealing with, calling to verify the check. He leaves a number for me to call him back. I got his message within 5 minutes of him leaving it and called the number back, twice… the first time letting it ring for about 3 minutes, the second time I let it ring for nearly 4 minutes. He never picked up the phone… but kept my sitter waiting there until the branch closed (over 20 minutes). She had her ID, she was fingerprinted, my account had over $2000 in it, and if the nimrod had scrolled back through my account, he would have seen that a check for that same amount is cashed (usually at that branch) between the first and fifth of EVERY SINGLE MONTH. After speaking with her later that evening I find out she was not able to cash the check and that she was told by this employee to come back tomorrow but that she’ll need to make sure I’m at home because they will still need to verify the check. Well, since I had dance class the next morning I called their 24-hour customer service to find out a) why she hadn’t been able to cash the check and b) to ask them to note in my account that I had called, been verified through their automated system, and given the OK. I never got a satisfactory answer for the incident. At first it was pointed out that the check was for a large sum.  I pointed out that a) it may have been a large sum, but it’s certainly not an unusual activity for my account, and b) that I write a larger check every month for my rent and have never had a problem there. They said, well, it’s because she tried to “cash” it instead of depositing it… I pointed out that she “cashes” it every month since she’s never had a checking account the entire time I’ve known her. It was pointed out that I’d recently had a couple overdrafts… I laughed and pointed out that that is not new or unusual activity either… I am terrible at keeping track of my check book, they make a fortune off of me in NSF fees, and should be perfectly happy to suck up to me for making them easy money. Then I was told that it would not be possible for them to indicate anything on my account and I would indeed have to sit at home in case they needed to contact me. I had a fit… and it took two or three steps up the hierarchal chain AND me pointing out the potential race issue before I finally got someone to say they would call my branch the next morning and make sure my sitter would be able to cash the check.

Curly Mama

A family is a family is a family airs this Sunday, January 31st at 7PM on HBO

By: Tosha Woronov

Sometimes it rocks to be an Angeleno. Pete took me to see the LA-only Pee-wee Herman live show at Club Nokia last weekend and all I can say is…genius!

I was a bit confused at first about what we were going to see.  I loved the Saturday morning program, but am just young enough (love saying that) to remember it only as a kids’ show. My husband, however, old man that he is (to be fair, only 4 years older than I), is a true Pee-wee fan and knows him for his adults-only humor.

The second we sat down, I got it.
And I was overjoyed.
The set (the Playhouse, just like it was on TV) is gorgeous, pure eye-candy.  All the old friends are there: Chairry, Terry, Jambi the Genie, Ms. Yvonne, Conky the robot, Cowboy Curtis, Magic Screen.  The audience clapped and hooted each time one entered the stage.

The word of the day was “FUN” (”waaaaaahhh!!!!”).  Boy, was it ever.
I had no idea that man/child Pee-wee was so surly!  So bratty!  It was hysterical, especially as parents of a 5-year old boy prone to his own low moments of churlishness, to hear Pee-wee say “I know you are, but what am I?” and “If you love it so much, then why don’t you marry it?”  He stomped and pouted and screamed.  We laughed and laughed and laughed.

My favorite moment:  Pee-wee protests, “they can’t marry each other!  They are GIRLS!” to which Conky replies (imagine robot voice), “they…can…in…Connecticut… and…Maine… and…Massachusetts …”

The crowd went wild!

I looked at my husband then and said, “This show is everything that is right with the world.”
It only runs until February 7^th, so if you live in Los Angeles, hurry.  You won’t regret it.   (And if you live elsewhere, make a wish that Pee-wee comes to your city.  Mecca lecca hi, mecca hiney ho…)

By: Brandy Black

I’m reading a book “Lesbian and Gay Parents and their Children” by Abbie Goldberg and it got me thinking about my passion for marriage or as some prefer to call it- commitment ceremony.  I will occasionally get into this debate with gay friends who don’t understand why it was so important for me to marry Susan.  At the time we had a ceremony, I didn’t even realize what it would mean to me.  Frankly, my mother talked me into it right after I “came out” to her.

The days leading up to my coming out were torturous and I was prepared for the absolute worst case scenario.  I was ready for my parents to be angry and hurt and quite possibly disown me.  I made myself sick night after night worrying about telling them the truth.  In my case it was the dishonesty and lies that were the worst of it all, because once I actually told my parents that I was in love with a woman, all of the baggage and pain I had been carrying around suddenly dissipated and I was able to love Susan to my fullest for the first time.

But in that conversation with my mom, me weeping and my mother accusing me of being homophobic as she couldn’t understand why I was the one so upset, she asked me if we were going to get married and have kids.  It had never occurred to me that this might be an option – this was 10 years ago when conversations about gay marriage were barely stirring in the media.   She then went on to explain to me the importance of committing to each other in front of friends and family.  “It’s not just for you but for the people around you who don’t understand the blurry lines of gay relationships, it’s a way to tell everyone that you are pledging to one another for the long haul.”

I thought about it a lot, what it would mean to “marry” Susan.  It seemed as if it was a dream come true, we were the renegades in my eyes, the naughty girls that were doing what we shouldn’t, even though it felt so right.  After talking to my mother, she disarmed me and made me realize we weren’t rebels, or bad girls, we were following our hearts and allowing ourselves the life that we deserved.  After getting “permission” to feel proud of my relationship from two of the people closest to me, I wanted a wedding more than ever.

Once we had the ceremony in front of 80 of our closest friends and family -when it wasn’t legal- life was different.  Something changed after we made those vows to each other.  We opened our hearts and let the other in, we were partners with a flood of trust and love for one another.  I can’t explain the meaning of it all but she shifted from my girlfriend to my life, I mean wife.

Now having gone through all that a wedding encompasses, a shower, a ceremony, registering and a honeymoon- it was all worth it.  The constant validation from all of the people in our lives was amazing.  We needed support, we wanted it and it came gushing our way. The speeches, the notes in our guest book, the tears that poured from our friends’ eyes as Susan and I walked through the sea of people to find each other, Susan standing beautifully before me in all her glory, my best friend becoming my wife.  That day was life changing.

So when people tell me that they are against marriage because of the fact that we are trying to “be like” heterosexual people- I say call it what you will but find a way to share your love publicly with your family because it will make all the difference in the world.

Why did Abbie’s book make me think to write this wordy blog…

“Qualitative research by Alderson (2004) provides evidence of some of the perceived effects of civil marriage among lesbians and gay men.  Alderson interviewed married lesbians and gay men in Canada and found that, for many participants, getting married created an added sense of security that was deeply felt and greatly appreciated.  Consistent with the findings of Solomon et al. (2005), Alderson also found that many participants felt that marriage brought greater depth and completion to their relationships, cementing them in both financial and emotional ways.  They also understood their marriage as symbolizing monogamy and as providing recognition for them as a family.”

This was true for me.

Out With Mommy
By: K. Pearson Brown

Away from the little one for my first extended trip, a press junket – Glam Girls Getaway in Vancouver. Looked forward to actually sleeping through the night without the pitter patter of little feet running to my bedside at 3 am, but when I woke in the hotel alone I missed him so much I couldn’t get back to sleep. Thank goodness for my computer and access to YouTube so I could see him, though in video. Night night Sweetie!

Out With Mommy