Enough with the Lists Already

I do not know why my year end retrospection has taken the form of ‹ol ›
‹li › ‹/ol › but I think this is probably the end of it.

5 Things I would do differently

1. Forgo circumcision and leave the kid intact
   
2. Breastfeed longer
   
3. Lay off the McDonald’s cheeseburgers and the JP Licks milkshakes during my pregnancy
   
4. Start my consulting business a year before I had him, not now
   
5. Try and be a little bit more relaxed about everything
   

5 Things I would do exactly the same

1. Get the epidural
   
2. Quit my job and cash in my 401k so I could stay home with my baby
   
3. Go with #3672
   
4. Become so enraged that a friend of mine and her family are harassed by a bigot in Brookline Village, that I start a gay parenting blog.
   
5. Defy James Dobson, Mitt Romney, Ron Crews and every other homophobe, and create a family with my wife and son!

The new normal

Like I mentioned, I was at a party a couple of nights ago. I was seated with my son next to an older lesbian on one side, and the director of the insemination program at the local gay health clinic on my other side. One after another, the lesbian families started arriving at the party. The babies were all different ages, and they just kept coming like it was Provincetown’s Family week.

“This is freaking me out,” my friend on the left said, “In my day, if you were a gay mother, you did it the old fashioned way. You got married to a man, had a family, and then ran off with a woman.”

“It freaks me out too,” my friend on the right said. This is the one who runs the insemination program for lesbians.

“You? You enable this!” I protested.

Which got me to thinking, in my neighborhood, almost all of the families are gay. If you have kids in my neck of the woods, you probably are in a same sex marriage. The children have come to us from all sorts of different ways. Foreign adoptions, adoptions out of DSS, artificial inseminations, and maybe even some the old fashioned way (see above). My little guy is going to think same sex couples are the norm. He will think it’s the kids of straight parents who are weird!