Fuel and airplanes and outness

I think Mateo must be having a growth spurt, because he has been eating like he is preparing for a sumo competition. In turn, this makes me very hungry. It's kind of fun! Today, I had breakfast at 7 am, lunch #1 at 11 am, lunch #2 around 2:30 pm and dinner #1 at 6:30 pm. Then Mateo had a gorge-fest around 8 pm, which led to me having some ice cream as a snack and finally caving and eating dinner #2 around 8:30. Now, around 9:00, I feel pleasantly full but certainly not stuffed. I also feel as if I have drunk enough water to drain the Willamette. I am beginning to understand why babies start on solids around six months: their caloric needs become difficult (and then impossible) to keep up with on breast milk alone!

In unrelated news, I have been pondering travel lately, for no particular reason. Before Mateo was born, I read The Kid (by Dan Savage). Okay, I think I've read it at least five times cover to cover. It is my favorite book about queer families and kids. In it (or maybe in his subsequent book, The Commitment?), Dan Savage talks about traveling with his partner and their son. Presenting as two men with a small child and all having different last names, they tend to get questioned by airport screeners and airline gate people. They bring their son's birth certificate everywhere. Other passengers repeatedly ask them (or their baby) "Where's Mommy?" This leads to interesting explanations of their family.

We traveled on an airplane several times early in Mateo's life. I expected that this same thing would happen to us, only with "Where's Daddy?" substituted. I thought all sorts of people would ask us about our family. I felt kind of anxious about it, actually. I pictured some nice people and some confrontations. I was a little bit afraid that we would run into a militant fundamentalist who would snatch Mateo and make a break for it. Sacha and I talked generally about what we might say if someone asked where Mateo's dad was. We thought we might explain that Mateo has two moms who love him very much, and that he also has an important relationship with his Apa.

Instead, we sailed through all our plane flights (and really, all our travel experiences thus far) without so much as a peep from anyone. No one, not even our seat mates, asked a single thing about our family. We realized that women alone with children in public are the norm, not the exception. Moreover, while asking a man where his child's mom is is a socially acceptable thing to do, the same doesn't hold true for asking a woman where her child's dad is. It's just not something you ask a stranger.

So, instead of feeling exposed while traveling, I ended up feeling like our family was invisible. I think people assumed Sacha and I were friends or sisters and that one was helping with the other's baby. In some ways, we're probably safer when others make that assumption...but really, I'd like people to see us for who/what we are and to navigate things from there. It will be interesting to see, as the gayby boom continues, how our experiences in public may shift and change - both in our little liberal enclave and out in the great big world beyond it.

*************

I showed this post to Sacha before I posted it and we ended up having an interesting talk about being invisible versus being out. She read what I had written and said that actually, she had never felt more out than she does right now. Working as a teacher in a setting in which everyone knows she has a baby, she has a lot of conversations with other staff and parents who want to know where her baby is (home with her partner) and if she's breastfeeding, which inevitably leads to an explanation of our family. She's instantly outed in a situation where she would have been more subtle in the past. It's definitely a different experience. It's one thing to be a queer couple, but adding a child to the mix makes things a lot more interesting!