we’ll just keep doing those things in our families of choice

Alex: I am recording. It’s so kind of you to join me for the last conversation for my personal blogging practice that will end when the new president arrives. I chose you very specifically to end this process because of the intimate nature of the collaboration that we’re going to discuss. Sometime after the president takes office, you’re going to have a baby and I am going to come and live with you for three months! The two of us, and others, are going to be in community and collaboration during the first few months of the life of a child that you are having on your own.

Speaker 2: Thank you for having me as the last person that you’re talking to as part of this project. And I think as someone who also works in academia, there can sometimes be the cerebral or academic ways of thinking about collaboration. That’s such a big part of both pedagogy and the kind of things that I think about and teach about. But there’s something that’s just so personal and so intimate, having a child. This is helping me to think through how to bring intentionality into that, and how to communicate what I’m hoping that’ll look like to those who will help. I think it’s important for a baby and a child to have a larger network of people in their life with different experiences and backgrounds and ages and jobs and so on. That works against seeing parenthood as primarily about the hetero-nuclear family, and just two people, and all the pressure and expectation that comes along with that. So, the more the merrier, the more people I can get and the more help I can have around me and the baby, the better.

Alex: One of the amazing models that queer families of choice put out for everybody is all the intention that drives the construction of our families—from procreation to parenting to community—in a way that heteronormative monogamy can more easily leave things unthunk or stuck. And again, nothing against lots of wonderful straight people who’ve done all kinds of imaginative things, but we have to do every step as a choice.

And then, there’s a bond between mother and child that is very intense, formative, beautiful, important. And there are other bonds that form community through a child and with a child. I couldn’t name a larger privilege than to be able to be in on the early stages of that grouping with you. What are some of the things that you want to happen in your household in the first year of your child’s life, your dream of that given that we can’t control much of anything and now the world outside looks to be scary, confusing, new, damaging, cruel?

Speaker 2: Well, to be perfectly honest, for the very beginning, I’m just wanting to survive as a solo parent and be intact with my sleep and my mental health and really leaning on people for help, where I can ask in different ways that I haven’t been able to in my life. I have neighbors who I’ve gotten to know really well, and I ask them if they can lift things for me, or move things, or shovel my walk, which are things that are hard for me to ask for, but you just have to when you are pregnant and by yourself. I’m just going to have to ask people for help.

If I were to dream about or have a sort of ideal, what would the first year look like? it would be having and building community that can help to make a young life thrive in community, in a world that people are trying to make healthier and better, not just for this one life but more broadly. I hope I can make as many connections as possible because I fear it can be a very isolating process and one that can, for a lot of parents, become so focused and so myopic.

It’s such a hard process to become a parent for some people, including myself, so you really see how little our society, our government, supports pregnant people. Even me, as someone with so much privilege, and so much help, and so much support, including from you and from so many other people, encounters how hard it is to be a parent. And so hopefully I can continue to foster patterns of mutual aid so as to be in relationships with other people who struggle around all of these things: childcare, healthcare, education, every part of the process. It’s very challenging, but obviously very exciting.

Alex: One of the marvelous things about working on this blog has been that I have these one-on-one conversations which are quite delightful. And then I’m talking to people in my life about them because they’re very present to me. I was talking with Cathy yesterday about the fires—she has been featured on the blog, too—about how so many of us are thinking that whatever work we do to resist, whatever work we do to organize politically, there’s another thing that’s about to happen in and about the domestic, writ large. The ways in which we already produce beautiful and vibrant community: in our families and friendships, with our children and parents, with our students, in our activist circles, in our social worlds, we’ll just keep doing those things. They’re not going anywhere, but they are going to feel more important. And maybe they always were that important, but we lost sight of that: our art, our friends, our conversations, our families of choice. Each one is a model that we can delight in about how to be right in the world. And that’s what I heard you say about making a family as a single queer mother in the new world order. Just the simplest model of how to have right intention in our country at this time.

Speaker 2: It’s a really scary time. How to balance out, how to foster something new, like a life in this space of so much looming cloud. That’s going to be a real challenge, to be completely honest. It’s not going to be easy. And at the same time, I am in this moment where I’m feeling so much excitement and so much joy and so much actual sense of opening around the things that I want to happen in my life, even daily life, that I haven’t necessarily felt for a long time. And so I am really excited about what my life can look like with other people with me and with a child and in response to what’s happy. That’s a thing that I’m experiencing at this moment that is also very hard; just, excitement.