quotable

I loved Kenneth Branagh's "Belfast." The story, the acting, the cinematography were all on point. Branagh's love letter to his youth brought the Troubles to life and had me riveted.

Buddy:"Daddy, do you think me and that wee girl have a future?

Dad: And why the heck not?

Buddy: Did you know that she's a Catholic?

Dad: Buddy, that wee girl can be a practicing Hindu, or a Southern Baptist, or a vegetarian antichrist. If she is kind, she's fair, and you two respect one another, she and her people are welcome in our house any day of the week."

quotable

“What is the body? Endurance. What is love? Gratitude. What is hidden in our chests? Laughter. What else? Compassion.” -Rumi

quotable

For better, for worse but never for granted.

all this i did without you

Tom Hiddleston, deliciously reading Gerald Durrell's love letter to his future wife, Lee McGeorge. I'm a puddle after hearing this.

 

Letter No. 028

July 31st, 1978

My darling McGeorge,

You said that things seemed clearer when they were written down. Well, herewith is a very boring letter in which I will try and put everything down so that you may read and re-read it in horror at your folly in getting involved with me. Deep breath.

To begin with I love you with a depth and passion that I have felt for no one else in this life and if it astonishes you it astonishes me as well. Not I hasten to say, because you are not worth loving. Far from it. It’s just that, first of all, I swore I would not get involved with another woman. Secondly, I have never had such a feeling before and it is almost frightening. Thirdly, I would never have thought it possible that another human being could occupy my waking (and sleeping) thoughts to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Fourthly, I never thought that — even if one was in love — one could get so completely besotted with another person, so that a minute away from them felt like a thousand years.

Fifthly, I never hoped, aspired, dreamed that one could find everything one wanted in a person. I was not such an idiot as to believe this was possible. Yet in you I have found everything I want: you are beautiful, gay, giving, gentle, idiotically and deliciously feminine, sexy, wonderfully intelligent and wonderfully silly as well. I want nothing else in this life than to be with you, to listen and watch you (your beautiful voice, your beauty), to argue with you, to laugh with you, to show you things and share things with you, to explore your magnificent mind, to explore your magnificent mind, to explore your wonderful body, to help you, protect you , serve you, and bash you on the head when I think you are wrong… not to put too fine a point on it I consider that I am the only man outside mythology to have found the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end.

But — having said all that — let us consider things in detail. Don’t let this become public but… well, I have one or two faults. Minor ones, I hasten to say. For example, I am inclined to be overbearing. I do it for the best possible motives (all tyrants say that) but I do tend (without thinking) to tread people underfoot. You must tell me when I am doing it to you, my sweet, because it can be a very bad thing in a marriage.

Right. Second blemish. This, actually, is not so much a blemish  of character  as a blemish of circumstance. Darling I want you to be you in your own right, and I will do everything I can to help you in this. But you must take into consideration that I am also me in my own right and that I have a headstart on you… what I am trying to say is that you must not feel offended if you are sometimes treated simply as my wife. Always remember that what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts. But I am an established ‘creature’ in the world, and so — on occasions — you will have to live in my shadow. Nothing gives me less pleasure than this but it is a fact of life to be faced.

Third (and very important and nasty) blemish: jealousy. I don’t think you know what jealousy is (thank God) in the real sense of the word. I know you have felt jealousy over Lincoln’s wife and child but this is what I call normal jealousy, and this — to my regret — is not what I’ve got. What I have got is a black moster that can pervert my good sense, my good humour and any goodness that I have in my make-up. It is really a Jekyll and Hyde situation… my Hyde is stronger than my good sense and defeats me, hard though I try. As I told you, I have always known that this lurks within me, but I couldn’t control it, and my monster slumbered and nothing happened to awake it. Then I met you and I felt my monster stir and become half awake when you told me of Lincoln and others you have known, and with your letter my monster came out of its lair, black, irrational, bigoted, stupid, evil, malevolent. You will never know how terribly corrosive jealousy is; it is a physical pain as though you had swallowed acid or red hot coals. It is the most terrible of feelings. But you can’t help it — at least I can’t, and God knows I’ve tried. I don’t want any ex-boyfriends sitting in church when I marry you. On our wedding day, I want nothing but happiness, for both you and me, and I know I won’t be happy if there is a church full of your ex-conquests. When I marry you I will have no past, only a future: I don’t want to drag my past into our future and I don’t want you to do it , either. Remember I am jealous of you because I love you. You are never jealous of something you don’t care about. OK, enough about jealousy.

Now, let me tell you something… I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey-coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multi-coloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers.

I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously.

I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten.

I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotized and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.

I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red Howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes.

I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things… but –

All this I did without you. This was my loss.

All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain.

All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.

late fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
-Raymond Carter

my renewed pledge on national coming out day

On National Coming Out Day, I renew my pledge to teach my son (and daughter) what I didn’t learn at home:

• That the greatest family value is valuing all families.
• That home is a safe place to be yourself.
• To embrace your identity and the identities of others.
• That there is no normal ... there’s who you are and that is wonderfully unique.
• To speak up for those who are afraid to use their voices.
• To stand up for those who feel powerless.
• To be a friend to those who feel alone and are most at-risk for checking out of this world.
• To fight for a world where there is no need for closets because there is no longer any reason to hide.
• That love is love, and that loving families come in many shapes and sizes.
• That they are loved by me and by their father, no matter what.

love, the second time around

A gorgeous piece from the New York Times' Modern Love essay series.

Modern Love: A Second Embrace, With Hearts and Eyes Open
 I looked across the restaurant table at my date, an attractive brown-eyed man with two young children and a broken marriage, as he recounted his romantic history.

“I used to think the relationship part of my life was settled and I never had to worry about it,” he told me. “Now I think, if you love someone, you have to take it one day at a time. And you have to work at it one day at a time.” There was a hopeful gleam in his eye.

I smiled and thought, “I could be in a relationship with a man like this.” In fact, I knew I could. Reader, I had married him. On this night, long after we had thrown in the towel on us, here we were again, crawling back into the ring. This time, though, it would be different. We just never imagined how different it would become, or how quickly.

Our unraveling had not been a swift, decisive catastrophe but a smaller series of no less destructive forces. We came apart the way many couples do: via the gradual realization that we were unhappy, and the inescapable conclusion that our relationship was not a refuge from our unhappiness but a cause of it. We were two nice people who had been deeply in love but who found themselves, nearly 20 years later, in love no more.

Neither of us wanted to spend the next 40 years going on as we had, seemingly safe within an institution but deprived of its most essential nutrient. If we had not had children, it would have been simple. We no doubt would have disappeared amicably but entirely from each other’s lives. But we did have children.

As my friend Linda, whose husband left her while she was pregnant, once told me: “No matter what, it’s a lifetime relationship. I’ll be at my son’s wedding and my ex will be there.”

Likewise for us, there was never any question that the good will we had once shared, combined with our love for our daughters, was stronger than any current disappointment we could harbor toward each other. We sat together at school plays and parent-teacher conferences. We shared holidays and birthdays. We even took another apartment in the same building, to make the situation easier for the children. After a while, the wounds of the breakup healed, and a new friendship was formed, a bonding unique to the front lines of parenthood.

The end of a long marriage, especially a marriage with children, will shake your world to its foundation. If you’re lucky, you’ll eventually come out of it a little braver and wiser. It wasn’t long after the split that I realized I liked the new person inside of me that this heartbreak was forging.

What I hadn’t expected was that I’d like the person he was becoming, too. Then one day he said something funny and I laughed, and then he looked at me with a directness I had never seen before and said, “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m flirting with you.”

I’ve always been a sucker for a man with a smooth line. So I flirted back. And when he asked me to dinner, I said yes.

A short time later I strolled through a museum with my friend Lily, a woman who had recently reconciled with her husband after a yearlong separation. “How did you know?” I asked her. “How did you believe again, after everything you’d been through?”

“He said what I needed to hear,” she said, “even though I didn’t know what I needed to hear until he said it. You’ll see.”

Soon after that I went on a date with the father of my children, and over a plate of plantains, I did see.

Our reunion, low key and unmarked by flying rice though it was, prompted a variety of responses among our friends and family. There were enthusiastic cheers from the romantics, and there was skepticism and concern from others, who remembered all the miserable details of our unraveling. But falling in love again after a breakup is no simple matter of retreat. We are not the people we were when we met two decades before, and we had no desire to relive a marriage that had, to the best of both our recent memories, failed unequivocally.

Yet if we had taken the leap of faith it takes to end a long-term relationship, surely, we figured, we could muster the even greater trust it would take to open our hearts again. Besides, it was nice being with a man whose emotional baggage from his crazy ex I could really understand. And my children were happy about Mom’s new man.

What ensued that summer we began again was a blissful period of lazy days and tender nights. Then it took a severe swerve. On Aug. 10, I had updated my Facebook status to read, “Best summer ever.” On Aug. 11, I learned I had malignant melanoma.

As I lay in a hospital a few nights later, doped to the gills, bleeding from three surgical sites and hoping I was clear of cancer, he and I held hands and watched “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” on TV.

“I’m sorry about all this,” I said groggily, “because now you have to stick with me. Otherwise all our friends will think you’re Newt Gingrich.”

“I see you had this planned all along,” he said. “Well played.” But later, when I told him I knew this wasn’t the reunion he’d had in mind, he just chuckled and said, “You’re not getting rid of me that easily this time.”

As I recovered through the bleak period that followed, through a grim rediagnosis that left me with a prognosis of mere months to live and then into a clinical trial that shocked us by eradicating my disease entirely, he cooked dinners and did laundry. He arranged playdates for the children and read them stories. He picked up prescriptions and cleaned up enough blood to make Eli Roth shudder. He left me awed at a strength in him I had never seen before. I had never had to.

Our relationship already had attained a bittersweet edge by virtue of its status as a second go-round, but there’s nothing like journeying through the wringer together to take that whole skipping-through-the-daisies aspect out of your dates. Although our experience has been far from sexy, it has been peculiarly romantic.

Nobody writes songs about sitting on the edge of the tub while a man applies topical antibiotics to your oozing skin graft. There are no poetic odes to women with gaping scars, no sonnets to men who may be wearing the same shirt for the third day in a row.

But maybe there should be, because everything I thought I knew about love at 24 seems pretty absurd now. I didn’t know then that a wonderful relationship would one day become unsustainable. I couldn’t have imagined that later on, strangely enough, it would become a new kind of wonderful.

The wedding ring I so optimistically slipped onto my finger long ago, the same one I despondently removed many years later, is now permanently retired. But I wear a small moonstone on my hand, the symbol of hope. Hope for healing in all its forms.

Neither of us sees the world in guarantees anymore. We recognize them as the comforting fictions they are. We accept that you can’t always keep the promises you made when you were barely above drinking age. You can’t know how you will change, or what life will throw at you.

Having our marriage fall apart and having disease come in and try very hard to kill me did away with our cozy assumptions that the future looks just like the past, but with more laugh lines. But he and I have learned, because we have had to, the difference between the illusion of security and the liberating joy of the present, between obligation and choice.

And choice, terrifying as it can be, is so much better. We had to leave each other to discover that: to understand what it really means to decide to be with a person, one day at a time, however many days there may be. Love isn’t a fortress. It isn’t a locked room. It’s full of doors and windows and escape hatches, and they’re not scary. They’re how, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, the light gets in.

A few weeks ago, after an exhausting round of tests and doctor appointments, we flopped together into bed, almost too tired to speak. We watched the ceiling fan spin, lulled by its hypnotic rhythm, until at last he spoke just six words: “I’m glad I didn’t lose you.”

I looked into semidarkness at the man I love, the man I once left, and said, “I’m glad I didn’t lose you, too.”

Mary Elizabeth Williams, a senior writer for Salon, is working on a book about her cancer experience.

quotable

“What is grief?” I recently asked psychologist Steven Stosny, posing the obvious question I’d avoided for so long.

 “It’s an expression of love,” he told me. “When you grieve, you allow yourself to love again.”

 “How do you grieve?” I asked him.

 “You celebrate a person’s life by living your life fully.”

Asra Q. Nomani, in This is Danny Pearl's Last Story.

quotable

Love is the whole thing, we are only pieces.
Love is the sea of no end, we are a drop of it.
Rumi

quotable

“Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.” ― Hamilton Wright Mabie

“mommy, they are just like me.”

What an amazing parent. In a time when bullies and gay teen suicide are finally being taken seriously, it's refreshing to encounter a mom who is focused on her son's happiness and supporting whatever choices he makes.

I aspire to be this kind of parent. If my little boy is lucky enough to eventually find love and someone who loves him and deserves him, I really don't care if that person is gay, straight, or purple. So long as he is good to my son and good for my son, I'll be thrilled.

“Mommy, they are just like me.”

My oldest son is six years old and in love for the first time. He is in love with Blaine from Glee.

For those who don’t know Blaine is a boy…a gay boy, the boyfriend of one of the main characters, Kurt.

This isn’t a ‘he thinks Blaine is really cool’ kind of love. It is a mooning at a picture of Blaine’s face for a half hour followed by a wistful “He’s so pretty” kind of love.

He loves the episode where two boys kiss. My son will call people in from other parts of the house to make sure they don’t miss his ‘favorite part.’ He’s been known to rewind it and watch it over again…and force other to, as well, if he doesn’t think people have been paying enough attention.

This infatuation doesn’t bother me or his father. We live in a very hip-liberal neighborhood, many of our friends are gay, and idea of having a gay son isn’t something that bothers either of us. Our son is going to be who he is, and it is our job to love him. End of story.

He is also six. Six year olds get obsessed with all kinds of things. This might not mean anything at all. We always joke that he’s either gay, or we have the best blackmail material in the history of mankind when he’s a 16 year old straight boy. (Take that naked bath time pictures!)

Then the other day we were traveling across the state listening to the Warblers album (of course), and in the middle of Candles, my son pipes up from the back seat.

“Mommy, Kurt and Blaine are boyfriends.”

“Yes, they are,” I affirm.

“They don’t like kissing girls. They just kiss boys.”

“That’s true.”

“Mommy, they are just like me.”

“That’s great, baby. You know I love you no matter what?”

“I know…” I could hear him rolling his eyes at me.

When we got home I recapped this conversation to his Dad, and we stood simply looking into each other’s eyes for a moment. Then we smiled.

“So if at 16 he wants to make a big announcement at the dinner table, we can say ‘You told us when you were six. Pass the carrots’ and he’ll be disappointed we stole his big dramatic moment,” my husband says with a laugh and hugs me.

Only time will tell if my son is gay, but if he is I am glad he’s mine. I am glad he has been born into our family. A family full of people who will love and accept him. People who will never want him to change. With parents who will look forward to dancing at his wedding.

And I have to admit, Blaine would be a really cute son-in-law.

love

Leap
by Brian Doyle

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.

Via Aaryn

quotable

"This is your life. Do what you love and do it often.
Start doing things you love.
Life is short. Live your dream and share your passion." -- The Holstee Manifesto

quotable

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along. - Jalal ad-Din Rumi

quotable

"Yes, some man will love you, child, because it's your nature. And I hope it will be somebody who loves you for who you are, and not for what he wants of you. We have a right to what we want." - DH Lawrence

quotable

"It may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery." - E. Annie Proulx

danny & annie

The most moving romance you'll ever see (in five minutes, no less).

Danny Perasa and his wife, Annie, came to StoryCorps to recount their twenty-seven-year romance. As they remember their life together from their first date to Danny’s final days with terminal cancer, these remarkable Brooklynites personify the eloquence, grace, and poetry that can be found in the voices of everyday people when we take the time to listen.

teach your children well

It might be the hormones, but I'm all sniffly after reading Aaryn's One Love post about this weekend's Pride parade. (Visit her blog to see all the awesome photos.)

We missed this year's parade due to the heat and the fact that I'm 40+ weeks pregnant. As we drove through Hillcrest, we talked about our plans to take our little one to future parades. Part of the conversation centered on the values we want our children to understand. And part of it was about the sheer joy of community.

I'm confident that our little one will grow up understanding that diversity is beautiful, that his gay aunts and uncles love their children in the same way we love him, and that it's better to do the right thing than the popular thing (because the majority is often wrong). More to the point, I hope he has the courage to be who he is, and to know that we will always love him. As usual, Aaryn summed it up much more eloquently:

I don’t know who Ruby will love when she grows up. And I don’t care. I just want her to love, to be loved and to be happy. I hope that’s what she is learning from me.

I can't imagine a better message or values to give to my child than this.

One Love
By Aaryn Belfer 18 July 2010

I never really understand why people are hesitant to take their kids to the Gay Pride Parade. Over the weekend, I had several different conversations about it—since I’d planned to take Ruby—and got several interesting reactions. One couple I met at breakfast this morning said that they’d always wanted to go, but motioned toward their six-year old and whispered that they’d heard it’s “basically a porn show.” Another friend dismissed it because all the “cocks” aren’t appropriate for her daughters.

Now, the porn thing is off by astronomical distances: This is a public event with participants from all across the city. The Mayor was in this past Saturday’s Pride parade, as was Republican Ron Roberts from the County Board of Supervisors, and believe me, there isn’t anything remotely titillating or even vaguely pornographic about either of these guys. Even the public defender’s office represented with a float bearing the slogan “Getting people off since 19[something or other]!”

However, while nobody was whipping out their cocks along University Avenue during this weekend’s party, I have to admit the my friend’s concern was wholly legitimate.

I stand corrected because I did indeed see Cox at the parade. As did my daughter and my bestie’s daughter and all the many children and grown-ups and families who sat on the curb in the heat, beneath a sky the color of swimming pools, sharing sun screen and snacks and spray bottles, celebrating our gay brothers and sisters.

Ruby was very excited about all the swag, the horses ridden by the Wells Fargo people (I suppose it could be argued that bankers are pornographic), and the stilt walker.

I was excited about my friend, Barbarella‘s piglet, Carnitos—who may have cured me of my bacon habit forever—and the Gay Men’s Chorus, since my friend’s Skip and Andy were marching.

I didn’t find Skip and Andy but they were out there and they were proud, I know.

Oh, and speaking of excitement, Ruby just about peed her pants at the sight of the man with the RAINBOW! HAIR!

Who’s not tickled by RAINBOW! HAIR!? I was tickled by the message on his shirt because the message is the reason I bring my daughter to the parade. Love, not hate, is what I wish to instill in her.

I guess this could be considered Jesus porn because I was practically orgasmic at the sight of these folks.

Standing there in the street watching groups of people march beneath such signs is encouraging. They make you believe in humanity and remind you that The Rock church doesn’t represent all Christians. Just too many of them.

Of course, I’d be lying if I represented the parade as all Hail Marys and Holy Water. There was a little bit of shaking, jangling flesh out there, too. And God Bless it!

So she has pasties on her nibbles. Still: Not porn. Just a little edgy. And, I’m guessing, much cooler than my flesh-toned padded bra that’s so old it has dimples. Anyway, have you been to the beach lately? Right. Moving along…

Every parade is better with queens:

In fact, pretty much every situation in life is improved by the presence of a drag queen.

However, the people you really want on your side when the chips are down (or up, no matter) is your family. Which is why PFLAG is the greatest part of the Parade every single year. PFLAG is, hands down, the very best group, float or no float.

I challenge anyone to remain stony when these people walk by. I wanted to run up and hug them. Instead I took their blurry picture with my phone.

I don’t know who Ruby will love when she grows up. And I don’t care. I just want her to love, to be loved and to be happy. I hope that’s what she is learning from me.

modern love: mom/ not mom/ aunt

I have a few friends who are walking the path to parenthood via donors and surrogacy. I hope their outcomes are as wonderful as this one.

Mom/Not Mom/Aunt
By JERRY MAHONEY
July 16, 2010

AFTER five loving, fulfilling years with my boyfriend, Drew, I suddenly found myself online, looking to meet a woman.

I spent hours poring over profiles, bios and stats, looking at poorly lighted digital pictures and videos of awkward faces uttering tightly rehearsed self-promotional pitches. I narrowed the flash mob of candidates to six. Then I summoned Drew for his approval.

Together we had a decision to make. One of the strangers on this Web site could end up contributing half of our child’s DNA.

“Big nose, bad hair, gross skin, ugh — those eyebrows.” Drew sped down the list and blackballed them all.

I fought for a few: “But she has a 4.0 at veterinary school, and this one teaches autistic kids to tap dance!”

Drew was unmoved.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. As a writer, I’m drawn to characters with intriguing quirks and heart-tugging back stories. But for Drew, who spent 12 years overseeing reality programming for MTV, this was proving to be just another casting session, albeit for the significant supporting role of egg donor.

We’d been instructed by our surrogacy agency not to use the “m-word.” “This child will have two fathers,” the staff member scolded. “He or she will have an egg donor and a surrogate, but no mother!”

Whatever you call these young women, there’s no shortage of them. For all those who are desperate to stop gay couples from adopting, there are others who are eager to help us down a more complex path to parenthood.

And for the most part, they are merely girls — some as young as 19, still in their awkward phases. You click on a face and up pops a video in which an acne-cheeked college sophomore talks about her poli-sci major, her love of soccer and “One Tree Hill” and, eyes wide with optimism, about the corporation she’ll be running in five years. A few write in texting shorthand: “Would luv 2 help u.” Drew and I are nearly twice as old as some of them. If we’d been straight and careless, we might have had a daughter their age by now.

Drew and I found each other via similar means, an online dating site. We used the kind of systemized vetting that, these days, takes the place of destiny. Drew screened out guys who liked house music or who mixed up “your” and “you’re.” I vetoed anyone who in place of a head shot uploaded a crotch shot.

Choosing a biological relative for our unborn fetus wasn’t going to be as simple. There were so many more variables and bigger questions to ponder. Most candidates requested the standard $8,000 fee, but some negotiated their own rates. If she was blond, athletic and Harvard-educated, she thought she was worth 30 grand.

Everybody wants their children to have the best, but this process threatened to bankrupt us even without all the premium options.

Besides, who knew what that money would really buy? If we picked someone with an astronomical price tag, couldn’t we be saddling our child with the greed gene? And how would we explain it to him? “Your egg donor was top of the line, son. We got you, and she got a Porsche.” Or, “We wanted you to be taller, but anything over 5-foot-9 was out of our price range.”

For us, two men who struggle over which Netflix movie to watch, this decision could stretch on long after our biological clocks had run out.

That’s when Susie called.

“You know you can have my eggs if you want them, right?” she said.

It was that swift, that casual, as if we were talking about borrowing her hair dryer or Ani DiFranco CD’s, rather than a part of her womanhood. But with that simple statement, it got even more complicated. Susie was everything an egg donor should be: kind, beautiful, smart, a gifted artist and, at 28, practically at the peak of her fertility.

She was also Drew’s little sister.

Despite being nine years apart in age and on opposite sides of the country, Susie and Drew couldn’t be closer or more alike. They talk on the phone nearly every day, make the same facial expressions, laugh at the same dirty jokes, have the same mercurial temper. Drew was constantly trying to persuade Susie to move to Los Angeles, where we live. He offered to lease an apartment for her, find her a job, do whatever it took to have her close by. With Susie’s offer, I knew generosity was yet another trait they shared.

All along Drew and I had wondered whose sperm we would use. With Susie, the matter was settled: I would be the biological father. Yet for the first time, Drew and I were also able to imagine what it would be like to have a child who had genetic roots in both family trees.

What would she look like? How would he act? How would our respective features merge into one warbling little miracle? We’d grown up when coming out meant putting an end to dreams of fatherhood. Now we were giddy with the possibilities of reproduction that most straight couples take for granted.

But what exactly would Susie be sacrificing?

She was young and unattached. She wanted her own children but wasn’t ready. So was she prepared for someone else to have her child? And how would she explain this particular brand of baggage to a potential husband someday? Most of all, would she be satisfied always being Aunt Susie to this child and never, you know, the m-word?

Drew and I had doubts, but Susie considered it a done deal. This was her brother, and if he needed eggs, damn it, he was going to take hers. She was exactly as stubborn as Drew would’ve been if he were offering and she were the one in need.

She didn’t flinch when the doctor explained the pain and inconvenience she would endure before her eggs were extracted: months of genetic tests, weeks of self-administered hormone injections and the resultant mood swings. Most troubling of all, she’d need so much time off for trips to California that she could risk losing her job. To all of this, she shrugged and asked only one question: “When do we start?”

When the day of the extraction finally came, the hard part was supposed to be over. With the right dose of medication, most women Susie’s age produce dozens of healthy eggs. But for reasons the doctor couldn’t explain, Susie produced only five. Of those, two failed to fertilize.

The outlook was bad for us, devastating for Susie.

The physician spoke about her fertility the way Al Gore describes the polar ice caps: Time is running out, and it may already be too late. He warned that if our surrogate couldn’t become pregnant with Susie’s eggs, it was unlikely Susie ever would, either.

We all agreed the only option was to implant the three embryos and begin an excruciating wait. If this didn’t work, Drew and I would return to the Web sites full of strangers, if we even had the strength to try again. And we didn’t want to think about what that would mean for Susie.

TEN days later, we were visiting Drew’s family in upstate New York. It was two days before Christmas, and we all were trying our best to talk about anything but babies. My cellphone rang, and a hush fell over the room. The nurse on the other end didn’t stall.

“Jerry!” she squealed. “I have some exciting news.” A cascade of cheers drowned out the rest of the call, and Susie, Drew and I shared a tight hug that seemed to last for hours.

A few weeks later, we joined our surrogate for her first ultrasound, where an even bigger surprise awaited. From the grainy soup on the sonogram monitor, two peanut shapes emerged. Drew and I were going to be the fathers of twins.

Our son and daughter are now 10 months old, and when I look at them I see traces of each of us. My nose, Susie’s eyes, Drew’s chin. They’re just starting to invent a secret language to communicate with each other. If we hear one baby cry, it’s a safe bet that the other just stole her pacifier or hit him with a stuffed monkey. But then, when no one’s looking, sometimes they’ll reach out and hold each other’s hands.

Susie gets to witness it all, because her frequent phone calls with Drew have become video chats with our whole family. And as I watch Drew proudly showing off our children for her, I realize the gift Susie has given us is much more valuable than just a genetic link to our offspring. It’s a brother and sister — tiny, perfect and gradually building a special bond all their own.

Jerry Mahoney, a writer, lives in Los Angeles.

sweet dreams

"Sweet Deams" by Kirsten Lepore was named for a Special Jury Award at SXSW 2009.

The film follows the sugar-coated journey of a cupcake who longs to head out on the open sea. When he finally scrapes together the courage to set out, it isn’t long before he is marooned on a lone island. I won’t spoil the ending for you...