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Being the mother of a son whose birth father does not live near, I think about Tin’s male role model needs quite a bit. I read and study up on what it is to be a boy.

My introduction to boy-ness came from four older brothers and a father along with countless uncles, cousins, and my two grandfathers. I’ve been steeped in boys since early on.

I’ve also had three husbands and many boyfriends, lovers, not to mention colleagues, friends, and nephews and great nephews. So when I adopted a son, I knew boys were going to be boys. But of course. And you could take all the feminist and studies about how we have to raise our children gender neutral but the simple fact remains teaching your children to respect gender differences is better than teaching them that there are none.

And I’ve been noticing a lot more differences as Tin enters his post-toddler years – from a moment in the toy store where Tin was so engrossed watching a father, on his knees, engage in a Battle Royale with his son using NERF swords, to watching Tin jump on and swing from my friend’s fiancé arms every time he sees him, to the cool, jazz moves he’s adopted from his musician godfather. I’ve been observing him and I know once again this is something I cannot replicate despite what people say about our containing both masculine and feminine qualities.

On Friday, a friend of mine arrived from California to spend the weekend and I was a little surprised at how Tin took to him like a duck to water when he is usually a bit more cautious with new people. This morning he told me “Michael is my best friend.” Michael and Tin have been feeding the baby doll to the sharks, engaging in mystery night games like finding the lost treasures of Atlantis, putting together a transformer truck thing that has a cannon on it, and hanging out in their own boy world of banal violence, grossness and unadulterated silliness. I’ve watched from the sidelines, curious, yet not eager to join them.

The truth is I have read the book on roughhousing, I have endured the love jabs from my son that actually hurt, and I’ve been climbed on, tackled, and jumped on by this 40 pound child and I’m telling you – it’s odd. I don’t have an inclination to want to hit someone or to be hit. I see Tin does – he likes to be tickled till he almost pees his pants, he likes for me to pop his booty with a rolled up dish towel, and he likes to jump from extremely high places and say, “Oh, that hurt!” as if that was the intention.

So when he came home from camp and was talking about the fire force galaxy nonsense of a fantasy gun he held up to my nose, I said, “Where did you learn that?” and wanted to scold the counselor who taught him this sort of aggressive behavior. But then I walked in and saw Ellie hanging from a rope as bait for the invisible sharks surrounding Tin and Michael, and thought of how I had tried unsuccessfully to get on my knees and hit Tin with a NERF sword, I realized how much boys will be BOYS and this secret of boyness is not mine to model for him, not mine to comprehend, not mine to possess – it is his gift to the world.

Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be critical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.

© Max Ehrmann 1927

Tatjana left her car here while she is out of the country and so I’m using it because it saves on gas with taking Tin to camp. So I was washing both her car and my truck, when I realized that my truck had been broken into and my iPhone charger and headset among other things stolen. As I was closing up both cars my transvestite neighbor – a real sweetie – was walking by with a shopping bag and I said, “Oh, my truck got broken into.” And s/he looked at me and said, “Wish I had a car, it’s so hot out here today.” S/he had just come from the grocery on Broad.

Reminds me of when I stopped at Ray Boudreaux’s house on the bayou and was transfixed by the beauty of his classic modern home – it was so Eames, so Saarinen, so fab that it almost diminished how I felt about my brand new house and then my friend, Joe, the lawn guy came over to look at the lawn and said, “Rachel’s got another mansion.”

It’s always good to keep perspective.

So I’ve had a lot of visitors lately – not having a babysitter means mi casa es tu casa because I’m trapped like rodentia over here. I’ve had some stoop hanging, some dog hunts (Heidi jumped through the front door and took hot pursuit after a cat causing a HUGE dog search only to find her a few blocks away), fun hula hooping in the backyard, and certainly a few bottles of wine have been opened and consumed.

That is why it interests me greatly how I came to have this dream: I went to the LaLa and walked in and looked around – I was happy, and was sort of just poking around seeing what was going on – every surface had been changed to something different – copper, leather, wood – all this masculinity had poured into the LaLa and I was just smiling while I was checking it out. Then the owner asked me to leave. The next day I went back again, and was poking around and came into the room where the owner was at his big masculine desk and smiled and he said, “Really Rachel, you aren’t allowed to come in here anymore.” And I said, “Oh yeah, right, my bad, my bad.” And was smiling almost blissfully the whole time as he walked me out – but even though he was being assertive as he led me to the door, he was also massaging my back and tickling me.

I keep shaking my head – I was the visitor in the LaLa – was ushered out – smiling the whole time.

Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.
-Rumi

~ by Ma Deva Padma

I woke up this morning happy as a lark – well a bloated lark – which was most likely due to the salty snacks. Yes, I broke in the stoop last night and sat outside with a friend, white wine, a sweet cigar and yes, there were salty snacks. And it made me think more about this front house design of mine – the one that called for a porch until another friend said but you now have a stoop – good point. So perhaps porch isn’t necessarily what I need – just a place to hang out out front – maybe tweak the stoop, maybe invent it? A stoop/porch.

The night was capped off by me and my friend scooter racing down Cleveland Avenue – yes this is what grown ups do. He had brought a box of toys for Tin and two almost like new scooters – so naturally, Tin had long been asleep, those scooters were begging for a test run.

I woke up thinking about my work because I dominated our conversation last night with it – after years of everyone and their mother telling me to write a book – I now have three book projects in planning and am psycho to get them written and published. I want to push against what is pushing against me – racism in our country – I don’t want my son to wake up one morning and find out a popular Food Network celebrity makes it a habit of being a racist – because what is he going to do with that information? What if he really liked that celebrity and now he has to feel bad about the whole thing. I want a better world for him (and for me).

So I saw this on Anne Flournoy’s FB post and decided to own it for today:

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once,
but of stretching out to mend the part of the world
that is within our reach.”
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The notion of who I am and what I want in life has surfaced more times than I can count in the last weeks and even to the point where when I went to speak on It’s New Orleans about my work on race and parenting, questions of my identity came up – since I’ve already determined all the identities I use that are fraudulent – let me add this: I’m a fraud LGBTQ as well.

And honestly instead of that F-word – fraud – let me use this F-word – FLUID. I’m fluid and really squirm with a label affixed to me.

Recently, I spent one very long day and afternoon discussing relationships and what I am looking for in a partner – I had four attentive ears asking me who’s next – a man or a woman? – and another later that same day recounting her tales of woe in partnerships. I have already staked out what I seek in a partner – a person who will bring their truth to me without fear and handle my truth without fear.

That statement took me 54 years and countless relationships to articulate – call me a slow learner.

And the truth is now that I know what I want – #whatamIgonnado?

I have a strong feeling my partner is already making their way to me because I cleared out a ton of mental baggage I’ve been carrying for years and my heart is open and fierce.

Does it matter – absolutely not. I am a happy person, with friends, a beautiful son, an aspiring second life career, and I don’t have to have a partner in life -which oddly enough drives most men crazy yet turns most women on.

Go figure.

So I read Kathleen Gerson’s post about the declining demand for husbands with profound interest. Gerson says:

What are implications for future of marriage? The decline in marriage rates is both practically and symbolically important, but it does not signal a wholesale rejection of marriage. We need look no further than the fight for same-sex marriage to find evidence of its enduring importance. There may be a declining demand for husbands — at least the traditional kind — but there is a rising demand for a life partner to share the joys and woes of earning a living and caring for others in an intimate setting. [emphasis added]

Yet having the option to marry is not the same as actually getting and staying married. New generations of women are more likely to exercise that choice if and when they are able create and sustain relationships that are more equal and flexible than the gender-divided structure of traditional marriage. In this sense, young women are not simply lowering the demand for husbands; they are also raising the demand for work-family policies that would make it possible for men as well as women to integrate committed work with caretaking. If we do not rearrange our work and parenting institutions to help support these aspirations, then more women will resist traditional marriage and more men won’t be able to support it.

I have a vision for a life’s partner – one who wants to walk beside me – not follow, not lead – who would be an equal life partner and share my joys and sorrows. But like many women, particularly post 50, I would be fine without one as long as my spirit is alive, my child is healthy, and my friends are near.

Yes, we are now firmly in the 21st century where men are discounted for being the stereotype of a man – and it’s up to all of us to parent children differently – our sons and daughters – so they will be ready for this new world and their future partners – it’s time for all of us to evolve.

Birth is violent, whether it be the birth of a child or the birth of an idea. Beginning stages are rough. The most giant tree begins as a tiny green sprout, but that sprout pushes dirt out of its way as it forces itself up through the earth to the sunlight.

Marianne Williamson

Yesterday was one of those nonstop days where everything just keeps getting pushed further out till day and night run together into one long dreamy sequence.

I spent the day moving this bad daddy of cupboards into the house:

This was one of those purchases I did not want to pass up – I needed a cupboard and cabinet space and this one screamed to me from the get go. It’s all cypress and was taken out of a house uptown and it fit perfectly into the kitchen and I get to pay it off in installments until August next year. Plus I got it for half the price because I boldly asked for it.

I then segued into a hastily prepared lunch of fatoush salad, penne with lemon and shaved parmesano reggiano, asparagus with brown butter. Wala – lunch is served. And Tin got his playdate that has been a long time in the making:

Tin’s playmate is eight years old and though half his age, Tin followed his friend, doing cannon balls in the pool and swimming across the pool underwater like a fish. This morning, Tin rode his bike like he had been doing it forever. I realized as I watched Tin doing what had been a huge feat just two days ago that the reason he has been high and low and psycho lately is he has had growing pains.

I remember growing pains as a pre-teen; I would lay in bed with achey muscles and joints, but now as an adult my growth hurts me more in the soul, and in my head and my heart. Perhaps these same areas hurt when I was young, but I was not given context or vocabulary to identify them as such instead I just felt the pain deep in my bones.

I watched Tin up close and from a far the past week. He had three little girls in tears in the spate of 24 hours – his friend Violeta, the mover’s daughter Kelley, and his playdate’s sister, Amaris. I told him his record was not looking too good. Meanwhile, he was over emoting to his playdate who he was meeting for the first time, wanting to hug him up till the young boy was starting to stand back.

Scaring girls and identifying with boys.

It must be what I’d now call unidentifiable soul growth.

We went to visit with friends yesterday evening, and Tin devolved into a tangled web of angst – throwing himself on the floor, crying for no reason, having an urgent need to look just like Tin Tin the cartoon character by having his pants rolled up just so, and generally wanting to be in my lap between Katy-bar-the-door tantrums.

My friends just watched in horror.

While the adults grooved to one after another of Anthony Hamilton’s crooning soulful songs, Tin found new places to meltdown and I listened to a woman telling me she had “just been through something” and that every time she thought she was clear, “the tide would rise back up” and she’d get “smacked down, again and again,” she said as she beat her fist into her hand, “by competing forces coming from all directions” – she took a deep breath, and opened her chest wide, then exhaled and said, “I’m finally coming out of it” and I nodded knowingly as I mirrored her posture and took a deep breath before saying with a smile, “I too, had a similar bout, and one thing I learned was to quit dragging that poor pitiful narrative around” – she shook her head; she said her pitiful story was running on fumes … almost done.

And it was high time for it to die.

The good thing about being a kid and having growing pains is you are sort of oblivious – you can’t articulate what it is that is happening to you, so it becomes this bad mood that passes in a day, a week, or weeks, but once gone, it gives up its ghost to wisdom and wonder.

If only adults had the same mechanism for processing what we can articulate but all too often wear as the too-tight clothes of yesterday’s pain, letting our cedar trunks overflow with sad mementos of regret, unable to let loose the clutch that rises up to stop us every time we try to open our chest and shout ENOUGH!

The woman thanked me as I was leaving and said, “I appreciate your listening” but I told her, as I would tell any of you, “oh no, thank you; you and I, we’re soldiers on this journey, we’ve walked through a battlefield together, we’ve grown, and now we’re on the other side.”

As my friend was telling me earlier in the day – about a man she was dating who didn’t want her to ever speak about her past – but she said “I have one” and I laughed out loud and said, “Indeed, I am a woman with a past.” We all have a story to tell, and the beauty of life is our story gets to be edited, modified, rewritten, enhanced, embellished, and revisited many many times, till we get it right.

So where did I leave off? Was it somewhere where I was tip toeing through the tulips and espousing grandiose feelings of joie de vivre? Perhaps, or if not, let’s start there. I’ve come to realize that life is what you make of it and your body and your mind can be transformed by your will. Seriously.

Does it happen often? Not often enough. I’d have to say that four days into Tin loving on me like there’s no tomorrow has made me feel claustrophobic – not just for me, but for him. I feel like telling him, honey you need to get out more because his clinginess has become unnatural to his normal independent self but I understand where he’s coming from so I’m indulging but only to a point. I’m loving on him like crazy but my son is the constant negotiator and so I’m also aware of how he is playing me when he’s still just a little kid.

So today I insisted that he go out to the boat parade with me and go swimming with his friend. He kicked and screamed, but he did it. And I got to sit on Rodney’s porch and have an ice cold Amstel Light brought to me as I chatted with friends/neighbors going to and fro. Across the bayou, almost as an after thought, was the LaLa, still and quiet, no one on the porch.

From Rodney’s porch, Tin was still in command – he wouldn’t enter the house and wouldn’t indulge anyone in conversation except a little chihuahua name Pip he took a liking to.

I conversed with Rodney’s neighbor – a young man about to have his fourth child – you heard right. He just got home from working on Bourbon Street and he was spent. It’s Essence, he reminded me. It’s hard to believe Essence is going on right now – today was chock a block full of talks I really wanted to go hear but I was trapped like rodentia so I had to do other things. As the boat parade got underway and friends of mine in crazy costumes cruised by in canoes and pirogues, I instead, left the comfort of the porch and went into the backyard to take Tin swimming with his friend.

And swim he did – like a fish. He chased me in the pool and he was faster than me (ahem, I was going backwards, but still). And so I realized that here we are, he and I, and everyone else, in life, in it, doing it, and again, I was asked if I was his grandmother, and I said, no, I just became a mom at 50 so I’m his mother – and yes, whatever this looks like from the outside it is very great on the inside.

I left the bayou, my old home and drove to my new home where yes, another dog had left a gift for me to pick up and yes, there is no glorious bayou outside my window, but inside is home, and it feels like it, and all of the things that await us in our precious life have already taken root, and outside there are fireworks overhead and I felt the need to say that today, it has been a good day, and tomorrow will be another.

This photograph I took – it’s artistic inclination purely happenstance – a product of some glitch that created art – as if this photograph were a mirror revealing the constant reframing my life has demanded of me and the constant beauty that erupts spontaneously: