Her first self-portrait
“Daddy, when I’m an adult, I’m going to grow a baby in my belly.”
“That’s great, Honey, and if that’s what you decide, then yes, you can.”
“But Daddy…?”
“Yes?”
“How does it get in there?”
“How does what get in there?”
“The baby… how does it get in my belly?”
“Um… well…”
“How does it get in there, Daddy?”
“Well… um… actually, for Daddy and me… we had a doctor put you in.”
“Oh. OK.”
Giant sigh of relief.
I realized yesterday that Drew and I had let our subscription to Westchester Magazine lapse — both of them, in fact. When we first moved here, two different people gifted us with the magazine. (We also get two copies of Parents magazine, but one is for babies and one is for toddlers, or something like that. Pretty much the same magazine, but the kid on the cover of one is a little older than the kid on the other.) It was easy to imagine that Westchester Magazine would just keep arriving forever, one or more copies at a time.
Then yesterday, everyone else but us got the June issue in the mail, and Drew told me that we never renewed. Oops. It figures the first issue we didn’t get would be the one we were in. One of their editors asked me a while ago to write a column about being a gay dad in the area, then they decided to run the piece as part of a Father’s Day special feature, with two other dads. (Both of their pieces are great, by the way.)
They sent a photographer, who took some gorgeous pictures of the kids, even though they were sick and tired and cranky when he showed up. Now we have this great keepsake, with a full-color glossy shot of our family (see above), that we don’t have. Good thing for the internet… and for Barnes & Noble, which is where I’ll be schlepping the kids this afternoon to pick up a few copies.
In the meantime — and for you non-Westchesterites — you can read the column here. (Please note that Drew takes issue with being labeled a stay-home dad. As he puts it, “I work a lot less hard.”) Also, I worked very closely with the copy editor to make sure all our names were spelled correctly… and then the online editor went and called me Jerry Maloney. Oops.
Whatever, I’ll still be renewing.
You want to make a 3 1/2-year-old laugh? Tell them you’re turning 42.
My kids are convinced I’m screwing with them.
“How old do you think I am, guys?”
They’ll think for a minute. “4?”
They’ve heard of kids who are 6 or even — gasp — 7, but they can’t imagine an age as big as 42. It wasn’t until very recently that I could imagine turning 42 myself, like in the last few weeks. When I was a kid, I used to imagine myself in high school, or in college… and that was about it. In part, it’s because I was convinced back then that there would be a nuclear war that would, at best, leave me hairlessly wandering a scorched hellscape where age had no relevance. So at least we dodged that bullet.
But today’s the day. I’ve lived 42 years on this planet. Laugh if you must.
In my head, I haven’t changed much from when I was a teenager. I still have a lot of the same insecurities and fears. I still judge myself by the aspirations I had when I was 16, even though I’m nothing like the person I was then. I want to smack that kid, seriously.
And I don’t believe that bullshit that you’re as young as you feel. I’m 42. Check my driver’s license and you’ll see.
I’ve given up on being celebrated for my youth. I was never on anybody’s list of Top 20 Under 20 or Top 30 Under 30, and nobody does a list of the Top 43 Under 43, so screw it all to Hell.
I’m not trying to say that I feel bad about getting older. What do I look like? Some kind of asshole?
Whenever I actually feel bad about getting older, I try to remember two people. One is Future Jerry. Future Jerry is a guy who means a lot to me, and he hates when I call myself “old”, because Future Jerry is always going to be older than I am. “You think you’re old now?” he says to me. “Just wait!”
I’ve been as guilty of prematurely feeling old as everyone else. I think back now on how I felt when I turned 30, with a mixture of disbelief and dread. How could I ever have thought 30 was old? I was so lucky to be 30. Then I realize that someday, I’m going to feel that way about being 42. And by then, maybe we’ll have invented time travel, so I can actually travel back in time and smack myself. 42 is a whippersnapper by many people’s standards. Why wait until it’s gone to appreciate it? I’m 42. Yeehaw!
The other person I try to think of when I fear growing older is Heather O’Rourke. You may not remember her name, but she’s the little girl who said, “They’re heeeeeeeere!” in Poltergeist. Then in Poltergeist 2, she said, “They’re baaaaaaaack!” Then, while she was filming Poltergeist 3, she died.
Bummer, huh? Heather O’Rourke lived to be 12 years old. That’s it. That’s as far as she got, and you know what she says to me from inside my television whenever I complain about turning 42?
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yoooooooooou!”
Heather O’Rourke never learned to drive. Never got to waste six years of her life watching Lost. And she never got to whine about turning 42. She has my permission to complain about her age.
Then, if I’m feeling really morbid, I think about the billions of others who never made it as far as she did and never got to meet Steven Spielberg either.
There are places on this planet where the average life expectancy is 12, and here in America, people blush and insist they’re still 29 because they’re embarrassed to say how old they really are. Embarrassed? You should be wearing a freaking badge. “I made it to 50!” You’d be the envy of everyone in Zambia.
Age is a gift. That’s why we don’t count backwards from death. Well, that and the fact that we don’t know when we’re going to die, and that’s another reason to appreciate the time we get. Every birthday I make it to signifies one more year I didn’t get run over by a truck or get cancer, that I wasn’t killed by some asshole’s homemade bomb or didn’t fall victim to depression, drugs or alcohol abuse. It’s one more year I got to play XBox, waste money on sneakers endorsed by professional skateboarders and watch my kids learn to sass me with increasing cleverness.
After they’re done laughing at me, my kids will ask, “Am I going to be 42 someday?”
“Yes,” I say, and then I’ll think to myself, “… if you’re lucky.”
42 years. Happy birthday to me.
*****
Hey, you know what makes a great birthday present? When you like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter and/or subscribe to this blog by entering your email in the upper right corner of the page. (No solicitations, I promise. You just get an email every time I post something new. It’s like a birthday gift for YOU!)
Shamelessly yours,
Jerry
There’s a dirty word among gay dads. The M-word. I’ve written about it before, and I’ve done everything I can to avoid saying it around my kids. Back when Drew and I first decided to pursue surrogacy, the head of the surrogacy agency himself told us to write it out of our vocabularies. An egg donor is an egg donor, not a “biological mom.” And a surrogate is just a surrogate, not a surrogate m-word.
It makes sense, in a way. If we’re going to have a non-traditional family, we should embrace who we are, both with our kids and with the world. Nope, no Mommy here. Try the next family. It might be hard on our kids at times, but it’s better for them to appreciate what’s different about our family than try to force ourselves into some rigid ideal of what families are supposed to be, which will never really fit us.
So we’ve been very clear. We have two dads and two kids, and that’s our family. We also have two very special aunts, our surrogate and our egg donor. (Sure, we’ve broadened the definition of the term “aunt” so it doesn’t just mean daddy’s sister, but let’s not be nitpicky.)
It’s been very easy to explain to the kids, because, of course, they’ve had no idea what the hell we’re talking about. Sure, they picked up pretty quickly on the fact that most families have a mommy and we don’t. But “surrogate” and “egg donor” have always been pretty empty terms to them, since they’re way too young to understand what those things mean.
They’re starting to, though.
We’ve made a point of celebrating Special Aunts Day (a/k/a Surrogate and Egg Donor Day, or Other’s Day) the day before Mother’s Day. It’s a way to remind the kids of where they came from, to show them how proud we are of our family and to honor two incredible women whom we love dearly. Plus, this way, the kids don’t feel as left out when all the other kids at school are making Mother’s Day crafts.
We’d lost touch with our surrogate a bit since we moved away from California. Drew and I still felt incredibly close to her, but our 3 1/2 year olds hadn’t seen her for nearly half their lives. We don’t want them to forget her, Â so we decided to fly her and her son out this year to spend Special Aunts Day with us and the kids.
(Selfishly, I’ll admit I had an ulterior motive, which was to have her take publicity photos for my upcoming book — coming Spring 2014! It just so happens Aunt Tiffany is an amazing professional photographer.)
We also invited Aunt Susie and her daughter to make our Surrogate and Egg Donor Day complete. We decided to make a long weekend of it. It would be great to spend the extra time with them, but that left a troubling prospect looming over our heads.
Our surrogate and egg donor, who are arguably m-word adjacent, wouldn’t just be spending Surrogate and Egg Donor Day with us. They’d be here for Mother’s Day as well.
We started prepping the kids for the upcoming visitors months ago. “You know two daddies alone can’t make a baby, right?” we’d say. “So Aunt Susie donated her eggs and Aunt Tiffany carried you in her belly, and they helped us make you.”
We read them a photo book we’d made about their conception and birth. We wanted to make sure they knew the role their special aunts had in making our family — what it was, and what it wasn’t.
It had been almost three years since we were all together, but there’s only one way to describe how it felt to have them with us again. It felt like family.
The kids are currently at that awkward age, roughly between 2 and 27, when they get shy around people they don’t know very well. We feared that might happen with Aunt Tiffany, who has yet to figure out how to use Skype. Apparently, though, all the preparation made a big difference. Despite the fact that they hadn’t seen her in years, the kids welcomed her instantly with big hugs.
We spent Surrogate and Egg Donor Day at Legoland. (Good thing we’ve forgiven Legoland.) Bennett gave it his usual review of “Best day ever!”, and I concur.
Still, I was afraid of how the next day would go. We couldn’t ignore it. Aunt Susie and Aunt Tiffany were both moms themselves, and they’d brought their kids with them. They deserved to be honored for their role in their own families.
So we did it all over again. We spent Sunday in Times Square, where we rode the Toys R Us ferris wheel and I got testy with some of the costumed creeps, (“Hey, Spiderman, go away! You’re scaring my kids.”). We didn’t shy away from the M-word, because that’s what the day was all about. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever said the M-word more in one day.
“Isn’t Aunt Tiffany a great mommy to Gavin?” we’d say. “Isn’t Grace lucky to have her mommy?” “Let’s give a toast to two great mommies!”
Just that quickly, the M-word was back. It’s a beautiful word, and my kids deserve to hear it, see it and respect it. Despite what I always feared, I think it will only make them appreciate our family more.
I know my kids are still young, and I know there will be times in the future they’ll be sad that they don’t have a mom. Maybe when they hear it in certain contexts, it might sting a bit.
But for now, this year, things were just perfect. Sure, it helped that the weekend was a non-stop funfest. It’s hard for a three-year-old to be sad about anything when he or she is meeting Elmo live, in the fur.
But if I had any doubt about how my kids felt toward their special aunts, it was erased every time I saw Sutton hug one of them. She wrapped her arms around them, smiled a smile that was somehow twice as wide as her face and squealed a very special message just for them.
“Thank you for making us!” she said.
My new post at Lifetime Moms was inspired by the last time my kids got sick. It was awful, of course, because it’s always awful when kids are sick. But it wasn’t nearly as awful as it was supposed to be, because their medicine came in delicious candy flavors. (I guess someone at the drug companies finally took Mary Poppins to heart.)
It was a relief to me as a parent, because who wants to deal with giving their kids medicine? But as a former kid, I was kind of pissed off. Lucky little squirts don’t know how good they have it! So I came up with a few other ways my kids are living the sweet life, at the risk of being labeled a grumpy old man. Check the Lifetime Moms site to read the whole thing.
And as always, if you have any of your own to add, leave me a comment over there.
Also, I’ve started a second twitter account, @MommyManBlog. In theory, it’s going to be the place where I post anything specific to the blog, so it’ll be lighter on my personal “jokes” and observations. (I’ll still link my blog posts on both accounts, though. I’m no slacker when it comes to self-promotion.)
If you want to choose one to follow, stick with @WhyJerryWhy. That won’t be changing. The big difference is that I’m going to follow all the @MommyManBlog followers back. I’ve seen enough of these “I follow back!” people to wonder if I’m the douchebag who’s been twittering wrong all this time, because I’ve tried to keep my feed to a level I can actually keep up with.
So now I have one feed I’ll actually keep up with and one where I just follow whoever is nice enough to give me a follow. Hey, I get it. I like getting that “new follower” email notification, too.
I started writing a whole blog post about my impressions of Twitter etiquette, but I decided to scrap it, because trust me, that one really made me sound like a grumpy old man.
jerry-mahoney.com 