When my mother first told us all that she was in a relationship with another woman, my sister and I were in college and being gay was quite popular, so we just felt this made us a little cooler. Our father, long since remarried, claimed he knew there was something funny going on all along. It was our grandmother, predictably, was had the most trouble adjusting to the news. She kept saying over and over how it was us, the children, whom she was worried about.
Everyone knows now that gay people make great parents, and the old objections about the kids getting teased and lacking this or that are probably fading away now that so many well adjusted kids with gay parents are moving along towards adulthood. I was thinking about this the other day because over the weekend we had two friends from Holland visit us and they are gay. Not everyone in Holland is gay, but these friends Todd and Sonder, are. Here they are holding cousins Elsie and Ida. We told them they could take the girls back to Amsterdam with them, but they declined.
On Saturday evening we sat around drinking liquor and discussing gay parents and gay babies and how I have a high percentage of gay people in my family so maybe there's such thing as a hereditary gay gene. That's what got me to thinking about Elsie being gay, by the way. Who knows? Anyway, the next morning I had this slight headache for some reason and who should greet me at 6:30AM but Elsie smiling in her mother's arms, clanging two pots together. Maggie lay our daughter and her pots in bed with me as she got ready to take a shower.
"Why did you give her two pots to play with?" I asked my wife.
"It was either them or the fire poker," she said.
It's true, Elsie loves that fire poker. I wrenched one of the pots from her little fingers and tossed it on the floor, probably waking up our dutch guests who were sleeping downstairs. Elsie can crawl now so my mornings of lying about while she played on the bed next to me are over. We parents need to form some kind of union or something. End the tyranny! I knew exactly what fellow Babble blogger Rebecca Woolf was talking about on this post. Our kids should have to sign some kind of sleep hours contract. I wished Elsie would go back to sleep that morning, but she wouldn't, probably because she is gay. I'm kidding! Of course! Anyway, I got out of bed and rolled around on the floor with little Elsie, like many other parents were no doubt doing on that particular Sunday, and eventually I started to feel a little better.
