David Minerva Clover

The reality is the shift is happening slowly; for queer kids, and kids of queer parents, it might be too slow. Representation for LGBTQ families matters!

Babies, while awesome in so many wonderful ways, do not give a single shit if you really need another hour of sleep. If the baby is up, you’re up. So we were up.

I had always considered myself to be extremely body positive. I loved my body! I had several close friends who were fat activists, and I was working hard to be a good thin ally. But despite all of that, I wasn’t ready for the changes that were happening in myself.

I mess up and do things very differently than I want to sometimes. When that happens, I have one rule for myself: I stop and apologize to my kid.

Teeth are inseparable from class in this country. I have gotten by in life largely by being able to “pass” as middle class, by being white and articulate and confident. People meet me and assume that I must have gone to college. Middle class people talk to me like I’m their peer. But I am not their peer. I will never be their peer.

I think kids and parents need old school trick-or-treating. I think it has a value far greater than the sum of its candy. I love trick-or-treating!

I think “It can be difficult” probably qualifies for the understatement of the century. There is just nothing in a phrase so casual and noncommittal that conveys anything like the reality of this labor of love. I’m not saying that we need to be all doom and gloom about parenting all the time — there are plenty of joys in parenting, and plenty of space to talk about those joys — but I do think that when we’re trying to talk about the hard parts, we should, you know, actually talk about the hard parts.

Once upon a time, the only thing to consider was “Does your kid watch too much TV?” But now it seems like nearly everyone can agree that kids these days spend far too much time looking at screens of all sorts.

I expected it was only a matter of time until someone sent it my way. I mean... friends have even called my relationship with my wife “inspirational.” [...] [O]nce I noticed that I still hadn’t been invited, I started to notice something else: Everyone that I saw posting “love your spouse” pictures was straight....

But what I did write, and write constantly, were diaries and journals. I kept notebooks and three-ring binders filled with observations about my life that I thought were interesting. Sometimes I worried that these personal stories were too naval-gazing, but I still held on to them, hoping that someday someone would want them.