My corner of the internet has been in a tizzy since Allison’s article dropped earlier this week. It’s a great read — vulnerable, biting, self-deprecating, zeitgeist-y beyond belief, all about the ways adult friendships inevitably change when kids enter the picture. Not a groundbreaking topic in and of itself, but Cailin framed it best: what made the piece feel so radical is that it was written from the perspective of the person not having the baby, and therefore adjusting to change they didn’t create. Some people interpreted it as a referendum on themselves, various group chats exploded everywhere, getting invited to Samin Nosrat’s weekly intergenerational feast was the only thing everyone could agree on.
Kishori happened to send the link at the same time that I was in Los Angeles, celebrating the first year of life of a very special baby named Mirah, our friends Sasha and Rachel’s child. We joked that the only way to maintain adult friendships with kids is if you have them all together, a third way out of the "parent vs. childfree" binary. Mirah’s sperm donor is my partner Mike and her birthday was also a chance for all of us to check in, one year into our queer family arrangement.
We’ve been amazed by what a joy this year has been, how expansive it has felt, negotiating a different kind of intimacy, rolling new words around in our mouths. Rachel is Mom, Sasha is Mutti (German for Mom), Mike is Babbo (Italian for Dad), I’m Birdie (origins unknown). Interdependence and abundance, a proliferation of imagination, an exercise in staying curious.
Sasha and Rachel have a framed poem in their home, by Kahlil Gibran from The Prophet (1923). A century later, it rings true as ever:
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
While we were in LA, we did a family outing to the Broad to see Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody. We were moved to tears taking in his “Unfinished Painting”, one of the last works he completed before he died at the age of thirty-one. The cause was AIDS-related complications, which, in 1990, the country did little to treat or prevent. It’s a self-portrait - Haring knew then he would not have the time to create all the art that he wanted to make. I thought a lot about my parents, losing some of their dearest friends to the AIDS crisis in New York at the same time, only to now find so much triumph and delight in being Mirah’s grand-birdies.
The day before my flight, my parents came to New York. We spent our overlapping day out of the oppressive heatwave that was blanketing the city, wandering through the air-conditioned galleries of the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection. I was struck by a series of photographs by PaJaMa, the combined names of Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret Honing French, who photographed themselves and each other from the late 1930s through the early 1950s.
Their art extended to their relationships — Paul and Jared were lovers, Jared and Margaret were married in 1937. Cadmus said, “After we’d been working most of the day, we’d go out late afternoons and take photographs when the light was best. They were just playthings. We would hand out these little photographs when we went to dinner parties, like playing cards.” They passed the camera around, switched between subject and maker, building a queer community through their artistic explorations. “A shared vocabulary built through collective practice” read the panel by their framed photographs.
I loved reading
’s now dormant food blog Orangette when I first moved to the U.S and now she writes the equally great newsletter . Her recent series about making a baby as part of a queer couple is so illuminating, generous and candid. Ash, her spouse who is nonbinary, was the gestational parent and Molly has an 11-year-old child from her previous marriage to a man. She writes, “Most days, I don’t feel my queerness, no more than I used to feel my straightness, which is to say not at all. The combined facts of my whiteness, my economic privilege, my being a mother, my being married, my living in a liberal coastal American city populated by a lot of people like me — these facts coalesce to cancel out, within my everyday consciousness, the fact that being queer, this particular shape of my existence, is still inherently antinormative. Even in a country with legalized same-sex marriage, even in a state run by Democrats, even given this, even given that, being queer is a rebellion against dominant pressures and structures. It’s not like I sit around and think about that all the time, feeling heroic, polishing my sword; what I mean is that living as a queer person requires inventing your life, the possibility of your life, in real time.”A field trip!
What: A clothing swap
Where: Footlight Underground at The Windjammer (552 Grandview Ave, Queens, NY 11385, USA)
When: Monday, September 18, 5:00 - 9:00pm
Till next time,
ASK
What a beautiful anniversary for a lovely fam 💘 congrats!