All the Horrible Girliness

Rize

For art through oppression, art through pain and rage, art through suffering, art through God, see Rize, in theaters now.

posted by Samus @ 10:17 PM 0 Comments

How can you blame them? When you get old, you want to go over to your kid's house, have the same delicious dinners and open the same shiny presents on Christmas day. You want to hold your grandkids, slather them with kisses, spoil them with toys. The same things that brought you joy, true happiness, like family, love and kids, you want that for your kids. You want that for your grandkids. All that struggling you did, all the struggling you see other people doing in the world, you want to save your kids from that.

Sister Benilda, the nun who brought me to Catholocism six years ago, told me, "We want you to live a happy life." You do these things, like getting married and having babies and being faithful, you'll be happy. You'll have less conflict than people who go a different direction. It's just plain easier.

Today on TV, I saw a documentary about a couple. They met and fell in love in college twenty years ago and have been together ever since. They have a big beautiful family: four boys and a girl, ranging in ages from five to fourteen. The kids are doing well in school and extra curricular activities. They're always running around and swimming and playing and roughhousing. They laugh a lot. They kiss a lot. I mean, there is a LOT of kissing going on. The littlest ones are practically lining up for their kisses. In their bedrooms, the parents say goodnight and turn out the lights, and the kids say goodnight back, and then there's a little pause. Out of the blackness, the smallest voice says, "I love you." And the parents say, "I love you, too."

This family gets death threats. People scream at them on the street. Good people. People who claim God's authority. These are the people yelling at the littlest ones. They tell the kids that they deserve to die. You should see the confusion on the teenagers' faces. The terror on the littlest ones'. All this, because the parents are two men, and all the kids were born with HIV.

When these kids were born, they were considered "unadoptable" by the system in Florida. That's the real term they use. Unadoptable. That means that your good, God-fearing married heterosexual American couple wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole. I guess these newborns, mostly black, all very sick, with dozens of hospital trips before their first birthdays, just don't look right at church on Sunday morning. It would be hard to explain to the other kids in the family, right? Plus, all that expense. I saw it on the documentary: the bottles lined up, the mountains of pills, the trips to the doctor, waking every two hours for years to suction out tiny noses whose mucous glands don't work right. This is stuff you just don't see on TLC's 'A Baby Story.'

Unadoptable means babies sit in institutions and hospitals until they die, almost always before they turn two. It's expensive, and Florida's child care system is pretty well fucked up. They've "lost" over 3000 kids. No explanations. It's kept quiet, for the most part.

Unadoptable means, oh well, I guess it's okay for the gays to take these ones.

So they did. This couple, Steve Lofton and Roger Croteau, they weren't making a political statement. They just didn't turn their faces away when they saw newborns in tiny hospital beds surrounded by plastic and shoved full of tubes. They took them home and raised them like normal kids, except for those huge daily doses of pills. Except for the nose suctioning. Except for the thousands of problems that would inevitably arise. For them, it wasn't about a gay couple raising kids with HIV. It wasn't about white parents raising black kids. It was about whether babies would die in a hospital surrounded by strangers, or at home surrounded by family.

Ginger died when she was six. She graduated from preschool but went downhill after that. Her ashes are in a little urn, and her sister and brothers know why she's gone. One brother, Frank, asked if he could still dream about her, and Steve said yes.

See how it's already in another dimension in your mind? The kids are sick, the parents are gay, a six-year old dies and you were already kind of ready for that. It's sad, right? But a six-year old dies in a car accident, maybe killed by a drunk driver, that hits harder, doesn't it? Because that kid was born with a future. But you should see these men talk about their daughter dying. You'd think, if nothing else could bring us all together, the loss of a child would be universal. But it isn't.

Bert's one of the boys. He's a teenager now. He's softspoken and introspective, very sweet. He's different from his brothers and sister because these days, he's testing negative for HIV, somehow. And that makes him what the state of Florida would deem "Adoptable." And that means that any day, he could be taken away from Steve and Roger, his brothers and sister, and put into another home. Yes, that's right: you can raise a boy from infancy to adolescence and, because you're gay, your son can be taken away from you by the government. None of these kids have been adopted by Steve and Roger, because that is illegal.

You should see the family activists in the interviews. They say the boy needs to see the other side of life, the straight side. They like the phrase, "In the best interests of the child." You hear that a lot.

They say Steve and Roger should be thanked for all they've done, but at the end of that sentence they say "good heterosexual family." They say, "Mother and a father." They say "Good living environment."

The other kids, they don't talk about. The unadoptables. Those ones don't need a "Mother and a father." They don't need a "Good living environment." Nobody says "In the best interests of the child" when talking about the unadoptables.

It gives them a sense of satisfaction, these evil people. Some people, they're confused or uneducated or ignorant, but I'm talking about the evil people. The ones who blocked funding and research for AIDS during the beginning of the epidemic because it was effectively wiping out the people they hated: gays, blacks, prostitutes, drug users. The ones who thought AIDS was God's mighty hand. There is true evil in this country, and it doesn't have a color or sexual orientation. It's just a monster.

So, every week, this family gets a letter from the State of Florida giving updates on the search for a family for Bert. He's black, though, and a teenager, so maybe that only makes him technically "adoptable." Let's hope so.

***

It came up somehow, in my living room, crowded with cousins, aunts and soon-to-be grandparents. What if he's gay? The "Noooo!" was deafening. It still makes my ears ring.

"This homosexual perversion is poison to our society." That one was my dad, a week later, on the phone.

He likes the phrase "running rampant."

It's tough when all you see is Pride Week on TV. Guys like Steve and Roger, they're pretty boring. They're just dads. They don't make the news much. My dad would probably change the channel within seconds if he saw one of these guys talking about his son's drama or chess club. That's stuff he knows, stuff he's experienced as a dad. What keeps him interested is what's scary, what's different. Hairy guys in leather, Dykes on Bikes, that's what'll keep my dad's blood boiling.

***

I rub my baby's back and tell him I'm sorry. His back is over on the left. On the bottom right corner of my trunk, I feel his fingers draw on my insides, little cave writings. On the top right, his feet push up and over my ribs.

I'm sorry I'm bringing you into this. I'm sorry there's so much hate and evil in the world.

He shuffles around a bit, trying to get comfortable but only getting bigger. You can almost hear him grumble, like an old man with a hip problem.

I'm sorry. It's going to be confusing. I'm sorry that whatever decisions you make, there are going to be people who tell you the decisions are wrong, and that you deserve to die for them.

He finally gets settled and falls asleep.

I'll be here for you, though. I'll defend you. If you have half the heart of Steve and Roger, half the courage of their sons and daughter, you will be a fine person. I will always love you.

***

How can you blame them? My family? They just want it to be easy for him. But if Steve and Roger had taken the easy route, would they be nearly as happy? Would their lives be as full of love? Would they have found the best parts of themselves, the parts most like Jesus himself, inside their own personalities? I don't think so.

I'm not praying for my son's life to be easy.

***


www.lethimstay.com

posted by Samus @ 12:28 PM 0 Comments

So this is what it is.

When I told the doctor in Newport that I was moving she said, "Better now than..." and I interrupted her with, "than with a newborn," but she shook her head and said, "than the third trimester."

But I know better. Women all over the world, pregnant and bent over to work. Women whose husbands make tree houses for their pregnant wives, so when the elephants attack, the women can climb up to safety. My mom-in-law, who taught school. My trainer's mother, who swam every day. The lady in my old spinning class with her enormous belly. All of these, you add "until the day they gave birth" to the end of their sentences. I can't even shop at Ikea, have lunch out, and read a little without being incapacitated. Light bulb always flickering.

Today the frame of our first bed is being delivered. I have an hour before the delivery window begins. If I could just pick up dinner and swim a little and shower, I could lay down again with the phone close to my ear.

I fell asleep on the couch, on my left side like the new doctor said, and while I slept my blood went pouring into my uterus, feeding the little belly that is a week behind. When the doctor said he was concerned I wasn't resting enough, I said it was hard to sleep for all the bathroom breaks, and he said he wasn't worried about me sleeping so much as resting. Two hours every afternoon, he told me, and my mom-in-law, who stood on her feet teaching every day including the day she gave birth, she nodded as if she'd been bothering me for months about working too hard. Which she has. But she's been wrong every time.

Maybe by this weekend, Mister Aran and I will sleep together on our first bed.

posted by Samus @ 2:53 PM 0 Comments