Gayrenthood – Year 1

My son is now one year and two weeks old. That's how long I've been a papa.

I was looking forward to writing about my adventures as a gay parent, but as any regular follower of this blog (ha!) knows, the updates arrive less frequently than a decent Dreamworks animated feature.

The main reason is the simple fact that being a gay parent, at least in the first year, is a lot like being a non-gay parent - only gay.

Many exciting things have happened in the last year, but those are things that are only exciting for the child's parents and close friends. The first time Blake sat up on his own, then the first time he pulled himself up, then the first time he stood up just using his legs. The first few steps, vocalizing, holding his own bottle, using a sippy cup... Tons of little milestones that blow your mind away even though you know they'll happen. The thought that I'm going to have conversations with Blake soon still make my head spin.

But that's not very exciting to write about. Just look at my most most recent blog posts. Writing about Heroes, baby mobiles and my feeble attempts at creating self-published comics that will be read by five people (including myself).

The simple fact is, we have not encountered any real problems as a gay parented family - yet. Blake is still home all the time, taken care by either one of us or, rarely, babysat by some close and trusted friends. His encounters with the real world are restricted almost entirely to the playground and since I'm don't leave the house with a "Gay Dad" sticker on my forehead, it's not noticeable to the other parents. The only time we did point out that we're gay was when we went to visit a possible school for Blake and we were reassured it shouldn't be a problem and in fact we just found out he got in! Yay!

So even though it would have been far more "interesting" to write about our battles against discrimination, so far our parenting life has been quite easy. Please let it remain this type of “boring”.

But things will get more interesting now whether I like it or not. He's older now. He’s no longer a chunk of dough that pees, poops and eats – he’s a little boy. We'll start going to more places. He'll start going to day care in a few months. He'll start talking soon and with that come questions. Then it’ll start being more “interesting”.

If I won’t write it all down, I’ll forget the small little details. So from on I’ll try harder to write regularly. Hopefully Blake will supply me with a constant flow of anecdotes!

--Mickey