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Queer Rock Love

A Family Memoir

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Paige Schilt

Stripes and the Slippery Slope

A few days ago, I was hanging out in the backyard with my son, Waylon, and his friend, Mike. I was watering the garden; they were molding playdoh into fantastic, multi-colored monsters.

“Mama,” Waylon asked. “Do you like stripes?” Since my sartorial preference for striped shirts is a well-established fact, I didn’t think twice before answering “uh-huh.”

“Do you love stripes?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you marry stripes!?” asked Waylon, in the triumphant voice of a little kid who has just mastered a classic playground rejoinder.

“Silly, I’m already married to Mommy.”

“Well, why don’t you divorce Mommy and marry stripes?” he teased.

“I don’t want to marry stripes,” I said good-naturedly.

At this point, Mike decided to enter the conversation.

“Why not? You’re already gay,” he reasoned.

Although the tone of our talk was light and absurd, I have to confess that I was a bit surprised at how easily a six-year-old was able to summon the classic slippery slope argument.

Luckily, my combined experience as a rhetoric teacher and an activist has prepared me to answer this particular logical fallacy.

“Just because I’m gay, that doesn’t mean I think stripes would make a good partner,” I said as I turned off the garden hose. “Stripes can’t make dinner. They can’t rub my feet. They can’t even talk.”

And then, just to make sure I had the last word on the subject, I tickled them both soundly and then sent them inside to wash their hands.

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Thomas Beatie Bedtime Story

The other night, my 5-year-old son, Waylon, was sitting on the toilet and reading Us Weekly. (Normally I would not confess that our home harbors such toxic tabloid sludge–much less that we expose our child to it–but since it is pivotal to my tale, I will just clarify that it is all my spouse’s fault.)

“Mom!” Waylon shouted from the bathroom. “Come here! You gotta see this cute baby.”

I marched into the bathroom, prepared to deliver my “stop stalling and get in bed” speech. Then my gaze met the baby in question. It was Thomas Beatie’s daughter, Susan. She really is a cute baby.

Amazed that Waylon, a child with a trans parent, had somehow managed to pick out the only trans family in the whole magazine, I sat down on the side of the tub. “Look at her cheeks,” Waylon cooed.

“Waylon,” I said, “did you know that the daddy in that family was born with a woman’s body and he had to change his body to match how he felt inside?”* My son studied the picture, raising the page to within a centimeter from his nose. I assured him that Thomas Beattie looks just like any other man, but Waylon persisted in his examination.

“Hmmm. Let me see….I think he looks–I think he looks French,” pronounced Waylon, who is also the child of Francophile parents.

To say that transgender families are underrepresented in children’s literature would be the understatement of the century. At our house, we create lots of stories with characters that mirror the diversity of the people whom Waylon knows and loves. But sometimes he still complains that the families in books are so different than ours. So I have to admit that–for one brief, bedtime moment–I was actually grateful for Us Weekly and the unexpected opportunity to show Waylon a family with a story like his own.

*(This is the five-year-old version, not necessarily the language I’d use with an adult.)

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Boys and Buddy Time

Yesterday I spent the morning perched on a tiny plastic chair, observing my son Waylon’s yoga class. Although I have studied yoga for years, kindergarten yoga was most enlightening. For instance, I learned that the lotus position can also be called “criss-cross applesauce.” And kindergarten apparently presents an exception to the ancient injunction that yoga must be performed barefoot. (I suspect that convincing a group of five-year-olds to put their shoes back on would challenge the inner calm of even the most accomplished yogi.)

But the most fascinating lesson occurred when the class paired up for “buddy time.”

The girls ran to their girlfriends with wide eyes and huge smiles. They hugged and swayed and held hands while they waited for the teacher to call out the next pose.

And the boys?

Same exact story. From the looks of joy on their faces, buddy time might have been Christmas morning. I watched as Waylon and his friend Charlie wrapped their arms around each other’s waists. Between poses, Charlie rested his head on Waylon’s shoulder.

I checked the other pairs of boys and found that they, too, were beaming and clinging to one another. Their happiness was infectious, but it also made my heart hurt. I took a deep breath and tried to stay in the moment, but I found myself already anticipating a future when this easy intimacy between boys would disappear.

Waylon is my first child, so I can’t say exactly when it might happen–second grade? fourth? middle school?–but I fear that, far too soon, the majority of these boys will have internalized the implicit and explicit rules of our culture’s version of masculinity. No more lounging with their head on their buddy’s shoulder, no more looking deeply and directly into his eyes.

Watching their little bodies lean against each other in supported bridge pose, I grieved for all that they might lose: the sense of trust and openness, the comfort of a friend’s touch. Girls have their own real and harrowing challenges in our culture, but I don’t think they are expected to eschew intimacy with same-sex friends as a rite of passage.

As adults, we sometimes defend against the awfulness of this loss by telling ourselves that these gender differences are inevitable, natural, even biological. But I defy any observer of kindergarten yoga to tell me that boys do not have the capacity to develop close, nurturing friendships with other boys. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to acknowledge that it is cultural forces–namely sexism and heterosexism–that threaten to impoverish the emotional lives of our sons.

At the end of class, the instructor asked the kids if they remembered the intention that they had set at the beginning. “To be happy!” they called in chaotic harmony.

As I walked out the door, I wanted to collar every parent in that class and plead with them:

Don’t teach your sons that boys can only touch when they are fighting or playing sports.

Don’t teach them to hold themselves stiffly and keep their eyes to themselves.

Don’t teach them by teasing and example.

Don’t do it for their future friends and lovers.

Don’t do it because you want them to be happy and because it diminishes the sources of comfort and support that are available to them in this hard and crazy world.

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Teaching Kindergarteners About Gay Marriage

I’ve been holding my tongue for a while now.

My son, Waylon, started kindergarten this past August. Until two weeks ago, his entire public school career had overlapped with the campaign against Prop 8. Although we live all the way across the country in Texas, we heard the rumors about focus groups in California: lesbian and gay families with children weren’t testing well and were asked to keep a lower profile while more palatable spokespeople made the case for our marriages.

Now that we know how well that strategy worked, I can finally talk about my latest obsession: insinuating gay marriage into the kindergarten curriculum.

As adults, I think we tend to repress the trauma of the first day of kindergarten. When we dropped him off in the cafeteria for the first time, Waylon looked like a deer in the headlights. One of his classmates was crying so hard that his tears literally made a puddle on the polished institutional tile.

Watching our baby navigate a new place, new people, and a new routine was heart wrenching for us too. For the first week, my wife, Katy, and I stood in the hallway every morning until his class trooped by in their single file line. We blew last-minute kisses, wiped away our own tears, and exchanged hugs of solidarity with the other parents.

With all of these emotions swirling around, we had little time to think about how conspicuous we were–nor could we spare much thought for how to instruct Waylon and his classmates in the virtues of gay marriage.

Luckily, Waylon’s first assignment was to create a “me” collage to introduce himself to the school. A demanding and opinionated artist, Waylon insisted on including a printout of his first ultrasound, when he was just a tiny bean in the womb, as well as a staged photo of himself standing next to the Obama sign in our front yard. He selected sandbox snapshots of his three best buddies, a formal portrait of our dogs, and two family photos: one from our annual outing to the Nutcracker and one from our vacation trip to the Space Needle.

Once this unapologetic propaganda for alternative lifestyles was adorning the halls, we didn’t have to wait long for our next point of entry. The second unit in the kindergarten curriculum was “family.” I’ll admit that we felt some trepidation about this topic – who wouldn’t, when conservative commentators are constantly reminding us that this embattled institution is the cornerstone of all civilization? Katy checked in with Waylon’s teacher, who encouraged us to supplement the classroom’s collection of family books. Being a bleeding-heart social worker, Katy went a little overboard; she donated books on adoptive families, interracial families, single parent families, and penguin families. How better to spread the gay agenda of inclusiveness?

Luckily, our careers as LGBT activists and intellectual elites also give us the flexibility to volunteer in Waylon’s classroom. Katy’s favorite gig is field trip helper, and mine is guest reader. Just the other day, I brought in notorious gay author Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice. You should have seen all those five year olds, sitting in a circle and calling out the refrain of this unabashed paean to the love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name: a boy’s passion for chicken soup.

But, to paraphrase George W. Bush, where’s the accountability? How do I know that Waylon and his classmates are really learning about gay marriage? The answer is clearer than a standardized test. One fall evening, about six weeks into the semester, we were at the PTA’s backyard concert. Katy and I were setting up our lawn chairs next to the soccer field when we were suddenly surrounded by a roving band of five-year-olds. “Waylon’s Mom! Waylon’s Mom!” they called indiscriminately. Their questions betrayed an unwholesome interest in our marriage:

“Where’s Waylon?”

“Will you tie my shoe?”

“Can I have a dollar for a glow bracelet?”

“Where’s Waylon?”

Finally, one extremely promising pupil clarified the homosexual subtext of the entire exchange. “I know Waylon has two moms,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Because I have seen you both!”

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Coming Out to My Gay Dad

When I was 20 years old, I met my Dad in D.C. for a weekend of sightseeing and shopping. My real agenda, however, was more serious.

I had rehearsed the words I needed to say for weeks: “I think I might be gay.” I wasn’t ready to venture a more affirmative statement. I was starving for external validation of what I knew, deep in my heart, to be true.

For two long days I waited for the right moment. On the last night of our trip, when we were seated at our favorite Georgetown restaurant, my throat felt tight and constricted. Each time I opened my mouth to speak the dreaded words, I felt like an invisible force was pushing them back down.

Looking back, I realize that the resistance I was feeling was more than just my own fear of conflict. Part of that invisible force was my dad’s unconscious resistance, rooted in his own hidden sexual identity.

Three years later, it was my dad who came out first.

His coming out process started slowly, but the clues were pretty obvious. He suddenly knew a lot about Marky Mark and Calvin Klein underwear. He stopped listening to John Cougar Mellencamp and started buying techno music. When he called me from a payphone just to say, “I’m in the Castro,” I couldn’t take any more insults to my intelligence. I wrote him a letter about not keeping secrets. He flew to Austin for another awkward restaurant dinner. But at the end of this meal, someone actually came out.

In the meantime, ironically, I had gone even deeper into the closet. I indulged my rebellious streak by getting married at 23, which nearly killed my feminist parents, although they were remarkably good sports about it.

But like many closets, mine was embarrassingly transparent to anyone who cared to look closely. I was studying queer theory in a department where brilliant lesbian professors attracted scores of lesbian grad students. I think I hoped that one day one of my professors would size me up and pronounce me queer with a flourish of scholarly authority. I was still waiting for the validation of my identity to come from outside.

Once my dad came out, being an ally and supporter to him became the cover story that explained my passionate interest in queer politics and LGBT rights. I spoke at rallies about how much I loved my gay dad. I was more involved in his liberation than he was. Internally, I wrestled with whether my deep attraction to queer culture was indicative of something more personal.

When I finally did come out in my late twenties, I don’t think anyone in my life was surprised. By that time, my dad had become much more comfortable with his own gayness and he took my coming out in stride–although he did say “your mother is going to kill me.”

I sometimes feel like having a parent who came out in my young adulthood slowed down my own coming out process. But I wouldn’t trade it. How many queer kids get to experience the unique pleasure of hearing their dad try out his first words of gay slang? I’ll never forget how proud he was when he was finally able to quote Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? at the appropriate moment.

In the end, I came out when I was ready. For me, that meant maturing to the point that I wasn’t waiting for some outside authority to affirm me and give me a gold star for being queer. If I could speak to that 20-year-old me, I’d tell her- “listen to yourself. The validation you need is inside you.”

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My Family Gender Odyssey

Lesbian and gay family events are not always comfortable spaces for me and my fam.

That’s partly because some folks don’t know what to make of my genderqueer sweetie, with her man-chest and her female pronouns. It’s partly because the “same-gender parenting” paradigm may or may not describe us, depending on the situation, our moods, and the alignment of the planets. But it’s mostly because there aren’t always other trans parents and partners at gay family events, and the programming doesn’t always reflect our interests and needs.

So I was ecstatic last year when I read the Gender Odyssey program and saw a workshop titled “Fierce Dyke Seen Doing Husband’s Laundry.” Here, finally, I would find folks whose passions and preoccupations were–if not exactly the same as mine–at least in the same neighborhood. While I processed with other partners about identity and inference, Katy found her niche in sessions like “What’s the Rush?” where participants explored new paradigms and time-lines for transition.

But the most amazing thing about Gender Odyssey is that it’s fun for the whole family–even the kids.

Last year was the first year that Gender Odyssey shared time and space with the Gender Spectrum Family conference for people raising gender variant children and transgender teens. The brilliant folks at Gender Odyssey and Gender Spectrum decided to organize a kids camp for children whose parents were attending either conference. Which means that, while I was sitting in the town hall meeting on Dyke/FTM Community Relations, my son, Waylon, was happily gluing googly eyes on a family of sock puppets.

This year, Katy and I proposed a workshop for parents. The conversations in our session were wide-ranging — more often than not, the group’s parenting concerns were not related to gender at all. But while the topics might have been similar in any parenting workshop, it was such a relief that we didn’t have to explain our family or worry about other people’s assumptions. Talking about child-rearing in that context, with other trans parents and partners, was like finding something I didn’t really know I was missing.

Now I’m hooked. I can’t wait for Gender Odyssey 2009, but I’m also interested in broadening my horizons. I hope readers will use the comment space below to suggest other trans family events or to plant the seeds for new ones.

P.S. This year at Gender Odyssey, Waylon made two stick puppets named “Sweetie” and “Smiley,” who seem to have a penchant for scolding George Bush and John McCain in chirpy little voices.

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On Buddhas, Babies and Brains

A few weeks ago, I went to a conference called “Of Buddhas and Brains” to hear Khen Rinpoche Tseten, the Abbott of the Tashi Lunpho monastery-in-exile. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Tashi Lunpho monastery plays an important role in the education of young Dalai Lamas, and the Rinpoche concluded his talk with several charming stories about teaching mindfulness and compassion to children through gentle questioning. I left the conference on a cloud, full of new ideas about how mindfulness could inform my activism and my parenting. Katy and I held hands as we walked to the car. “Hon,” I said, putting my head on her shoulder, “let’s practice meditation tonight.”

Then we picked up Waylon from the babysitter.

In our absence, Waylon had secretly gained control of his Easter basket, hidden it in the laundry hamper, and consumed enough chocolate to kill a small dog.

Naively, we decided to take him out for pizza–vegetarian pizza, of course, because Rinpoche had just reminded us that even mosquitoes have the seeds of the Buddha inside them. We discussed this idea over our slices, even as chocolate and end-of-the-day fatigue were mixing inside of Waylon like a ticking time bomb.

To Waylon’s credit, he managed to hold it together through most of the meal, but he went into complete and total meltdown during dessert negotiations, which resulted in the kind of tantrum where one parent removes the child kicking and screaming from the restaurant while the other parent sheepishly settles the bill. This time it was my turn to pry Waylon’s fingers from the door of the pizza parlor and carry/drag him to the car.

When I finally got him in the car, I tried to meet his distress with compassion and attunement. “I know you’re disappointed that you couldn’t have that brownie,” I said, making what I hoped was a mirroring facial expression.

In response, Waylon unbuckled his seat belt and started trying to escape into the busy parking lot. Still breathing mindfully, still holding onto those seeds of the Buddha, I grabbed him and held him–gently but firmly–in my lap.

“Help! Help! Help!” he screamed, as though he was being abused in the backseat.

If you have ever tried to protect someone from harm only to have him react as if you are, in fact, torturing him, then perhaps you understand that this behavior did not exactly evoke compassion. In fact, at that moment I knew exactly how far from enlightenment I was, because my internal response to my son’s hysterical cries for help was something like “I’ll give you something to cry about.” Sadistic impulses flashed through me, and I could feel my jaw clenching.

This is the unconscious métier of four-year-old tantrums. They have an uncanny ability to stir up primitive, uncomfortable emotion.

“What’s going on?” Katy asked as she climbed in the car, clearly alarmed by Waylon’s shouts, which were audible across the parking lot. Together, the two of us were able to get him back in his car seat, and by the time we pulled into our driveway, we had all been able to take a few long, deep breaths…which sustained us until the next tantrum started…about three minutes after we got out of the car.

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Don’t Make Pride “Benign” on Behalf of My Family

I live in Austin, Texas, where Pride tends to be a little more laid back than other cities. Let’s face it, when it’s 97 degrees outside with 30% humidity, your eye shadow will melt, your leather pants will feel like a personal sauna, and any outdoor festival is going to feel like an endurance test.

Nevertheless, as a dutifully proud mama, I’ve been bringing my son to Austin Gay Pride since he was six weeks old. It’s where he coined his signature Pride chant, “Rock on, gays!”

This year, the organizers of Austin Gay Pride successfully advocated with the city to move the fest to a prime downtown location. National acts MeShell Ndegeocello and Pansy Division were set to headline. It seemed like Austin’s Pride was really coming into its own. And then, in an Austin Chronicle article that still has local queers buzzing, one of the organizers characterized the new and improved Pride as a “benign, family-friendly” event.

Here’s a longer excerpt from the Austin Chronicle article, which quotes Ceci Gratias of the Austin Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce:

Our biggest issue is [that we have] minors watching the parade,” said Gratias. “We don’t really need to express ourselves so outrageously. And it’s not out of acceptability but rather out of respect for the families watching.”

Although I wasn’t able to attend Austin’s Pride this year (too busy gettin’ hitched in California), I’m sure it was a lovely event in many ways. But as a queer parent, I feel the need to speak to the assumed dichotomy between “family friendly” and “sex positive.” I believe that queer cultural values are among the most important things that I can bequeath to my son. At its best, queer culture can offer the rest of our society a lesson or two about valuing pleasure and eschewing shame.

While it hasn’t happened yet, it is true that my son might someday see a thing or two at Pride that we need to talk about and contextualize. But the same is true of mainstream pop culture that he’s exposed to every day.

Right now, Paramount and Lego are aggressively marketing the entire Indiana Jones saga–which is chock full of adult sexuality (it’s pretty clear that that whip has multiple uses)–to preschool age kids. And I haven’t heard a single straight parent at my son’s school complaining. So I don’t think we need to hold queer culture to a different, desexualized standard on their account.

I certainly hope that no one is making Pride more “tasteful” (another adjective from the organizers) on my son’s account. After all, we’re talking about a kid who thinks “Fart Mama fart in your face farty fart fart” is witty repartee. Assless chaps would probably make him laugh himself silly.

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Boygirls, Pillbugs, and Cool Dudes

Last week was spring break, so I got to spend a lot of time gardening with my four-year-old son, Waylon. He was really excited to capture his first roly poly bug of the season. The poor creature had curled up into a little protective ball, and Waylon was about to shove it in his pocket, but then thought better of it (ahem) with a little parental prodding. He decided instead to free it in a pot where we had just planted a little green succulent called “Mother of Millions.”

“Mom, I put that roly poly in the plant, and he or she—or if it’s a girlboy or a boygirl—is going to dig in the dirt and make it soft.”

Waylon, you had me at “he or she.”

As a feminist parent, I have experienced few greater joys than hearing non-sexist language carefully applied to a pill bug. But although I would love to take credit for Waylon’s refusal to assume the gender of the pill bug, it’s really his own creative adaptation to his context, just as “girlboy” and “boygirl” are categories he created to describe the people around him.

Now, when I was in college, my Child Development professor taught that children begin to consolidate their concepts of gender identity around three years of age, and that the process is often marked by heightened rigidity about gender norms. So I thoroughly expected Waylon to become a little gender cop when he hit three. He did go through a phase when he wanted to categorize everyone. One of his favorite games was a toddler form of people watching, where he would look at people in the park or in the grocery store and yell out “boy!” or “girl!” And while I wanted to support Waylon in whatever developmental thing he was working through, this game could be extremely socially mortifying. I would estimate that he was “right” (in that his attributions matched the gender identities of passersby) about 75% of the time.

Luckily it didn’t take Waylon too long to come up against the inadequacy of his binary categories. Another of his favorite games around this time was to ask, over and over, “Mama, are you a girl?” For me it was easy to answer with a straightforward “yes,” but for Katy things were not so simple. Since he asked this question about ten times a day for at least a month, she had plenty of time to formulate a good answer. “I’m kind of a mix of girl and boy,” she’d say. “I’m a mommy, but I look more like a boy than Mama does.”

Contrary to what child development specialists might predict, Waylon did not skip a beat. Before long, he was asking “Mommy, are you a boygirl?” ten times a day, and Waylon’s four-coordinate gender axis (girl, boy, boygirl, girlboy) was born. It may not be exhaustive (what gender system could be), but it has more descriptive depth than a binary. The first time we really saw this system in action was when our friend Kelly came to visit from San Francisco when Waylon was three. Kelly is a trans-identified butchy queer with blonde, boyish looks. She has tattoos of ships on her arms and endless patience for playing Thomas the Train, so Waylon adores her. One morning Kelly and Katy were taking Waylon and his best friend, Flynn, to the playground. Katy was driving, Kelly was riding shotgun, and Waylon and Flynn were strapped in their car seats in the back. Flynn leaned over to his buddy and said, in an astonished three-year-old stage whisper, “Waylon, is that a boy or a girl?”

“Silly, that’s Kelly,” said Waylon. “She’s a boygirl.”

Around that same time, Time published an editorial in which James Dobson condemned Mary Cheney’s decision to have a baby with her partner. “Love alone is not enough to guarantee healthy growth and development,” Dobson opined. “The two most loving women in the world cannot provide a daddy for a little boy–any more than the two most loving men can be complete role models for a little girl.” This week, as I’ve been pondering Waylon and his pill bug, I’ve been also been contemplating what the four coordinate gender axis does to Dobson’s notion of a “complete” gender role model.

When I was growing up, I had a family, and a father, that at least resembled Dobson’s prescription, but I still grew up only knowing one version of masculinity—my dad’s verbally-fluent, academic, leg-crossing, middle class version of masculinity. I rarely saw my friends’ dads (the 1970s in suburban America were not that different from the 1950s in terms of paternal involvement, as far as I can tell), but when I did, I always thought they must be mad about something, because I was so unaccustomed to their predominantly silent, aggrieved, inexpressive ways. (I distinctly remember seeing my friend Amy’s dad, who had just come back from Vietnam, open the fridge and drink milk from the carton, and it was such a disturbing breach of known fatherly protocol that I almost had to run home.)

The fact is that there have always been multiple masculinities, multiple genders, and queer families probably have even better resources in terms of introducing their children to a range of genders and gender expressions. And, although Dobson might like people to believe it, we’re not raising our kids in a test tube—we have families and communities. For masculine role models, Waylon has his (now openly gay) grandpa, who takes him for rides in his Corvette and lets Waylon throw an endless supply of pebbles in his pool. He has “Uncle Brian,” his donor, an old working class rocker who found his calling as a social worker with mentally retarded people. Most importantly, he has Mommy, who created her own uniquely Texan brand of female masculinity from her cowboy big brothers and her football coach dad.

Our extended family “village” also includes the teachers at Waylon’s school, Habibi’s Hutch. I don’t know if it’s because childcare is so undervalued (and under-compensated) in our society, or if it’s the remnants of the 1980s daycare sexual abuse hysteria, but daycares with male directors and male teachers seem relatively rare. Habibis’ has both a male director and a gender balanced staff of committed teachers, many of whom have been teaching there for more than a decade. Waylon has loved all of his teachers, but the dudes have played a special role in his life.

When Waylon was first potty-trained, his lesbian mothers thought it would be great if he kept sitting down to pee for a long as possible, thus saving our bathroom floors from his errant stream for as long as possible. I’m pretty sure it was the male teachers at Habibis who intervened to save him from parentally-programmed dorkiness, and before long he could hit the bowl like a pro. Several months later, Waylon was peeing at home and I was sitting on the edge of the tub, talking to him. He stopped mid-stream, adjusted his pants a little further down, and resumed his pee. Then he turned to me and said, with casual confidence, “It’s called choking your balls.”

“What?!?”

“When your underwear goes up too high while you’re peeing. It’s called ‘choking your balls.’”

I would never have known.

As I write this post, I’m mourning the fact that this will be Waylon’s last spring at Habibi’s. He’ll start kindergarten in the fall, and then his preschool teacher, Mike Esparza, won’t be as much a part of our daily lives. Mike has taught at Habibi’s for fifteen years. He usually sports long hair, a moustache and goatee, tube socks, and black plastic glasses. He looks a bit like a Mexican Jad Fair, but more handsome and coordinated. He rides a BMX bike to work, and he regales the kids with tales of death-defying bike adventures, as well as yarns from his childhood with a rotating cast of characters like his friend “Fat Jason” and his “dumb uncle.” Mike tends to speak in aphorisms that get repeated like the sacred word around our house. I can always tell when I am about to get a dose of Mike wisdom, because of the reverential tones in Waylon’s voice before he enlightens me.

“Mom, if you’re looking for something, and you stop looking for it, then you’ll probably find it.”

“Mom, people who say ‘stupid’ a lot probably are stupid.”

“Mom, the headliner is usually the best one.”

Some of the male teachers at Habibi’s are really warm, fuzzy, nurturing guys. If Waylon is having trouble with the morning transition, then hands-down it is Andrew he wants to go to. Andrew hugs him and tells him, “I’m so glad you’re here,” in the sweetest, most sincere voice imaginable. Mike’s style of nurturing is different, but not indifferent. There’s a little more distance there, but it’s an interested distance, one that lets the kids have their own process and make their own discoveries. I appreciate it, because I want Waylon to grow up comfortable with lots of different styles of masculinity and lots of different versions of “role model.” I know Waylon appreciates it too. When I asked him to describe Mike, the usually loquacious Waylon would only say, “he’s cool.”

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