Thanks to mombian, I got a reminder about this day. There’s nothing that can make me blog, but this day, each year…it does. I like raising up my voice as a part of this community…this community creating family, creating queer families, creating love in oh-so-many ways. It’s nice to have a reason to “come around” to the blog. To pay a visit, so to speak.
I find myself not coming around so much mostly for the sake of privacy. Q is 12. W is 4.92. Life marches on. We spend our days in the realm of the mundane: school, music practice, swim practice, nudging, coaxing, recovering from overwhelm, laughing. And we still spend our days in ways that few others do: navigating bathrooms, considering pronouns, protecting, preparing, choosing just the right outfit.
Coming around here means I get to retrace the evolution of conversations in our family — a family where three of us readily embrace our unique queer identities. Where the fourth one of us is only almost 5 and has an ever-changing identity, moving from “almost a kindergartener” to “a really good monkey bar-er” to “a really good draw-er.” We talk now, a lot and still, about all the ways the world boxes us in. But three of us now trace, together, all the changes we’ve seen, even as we’ve been together figuring out life: social media sites that offer many pronoun choices and identity choices, surveys we get that have three gender boxes instead of two (I think our family would vote for more. Or, actually, we’d vote for none.), schools that are willingly proactive and inclusive of trans kids, gender non-conforming kids, non-binary kids, gender creative kids, etc. We have come far. So coming around here feels good. Clearly, there is further to go. But for now, I’ll sit back for a moment — just a moment, I promise — to mark the change that I see from all the years that I’ve been coming around. Thanks, mombian, for the invitation back to these parts.