Good Stories

Yesterday evening, we went to a dinner the church organized for all of the parents of preschool-aged children.

Childcare was included, although somewhat complicated. Children over 5 went one place, 4-5 another, 2-3 yet another, and the under 2s were in the basement of the house where the adults had dinner.

Noah had a wonderful time, and so did we. The most interesting conversation I had was with a couple whose understandable mild confusion about how Noah came to be (they lived in the neighborhood where we moved to Jill could adopt him) led to a great conversation that I hope will help their family.

Mrs Very Nice has a lesbian sister, who lives with her legally recognized wife in, of course, Massachusetts. And it makes Mrs Very Nice sad that her sister and sister-in-law don’t visit very often, because they are concerned that they’ll be uncomfortable here in The South.

Well, if you haven’t spent a lot of time in the Atlanta metro area, it’s an easy stereotype to have. We had it in droves before we were lured down here.

What fundamentally changed our minds was this: Jill and I separately called real estate agents whom we suspected had significant gay clientele, and asked to look at neighborhoods while we were here for my interview. Our criteria were:

• Doesn’t have to be the gay ghetto, but we don’t want to be the only ones at the grocery store;
• Not on the front wave of “transitional neighborhood” (we did that at 3rd & Q NW when we lived in DC); and
• Family/young child friendly.

BOTH agents told us, “Oh sure. For the first one, you should be fine anywhere inside the perimeter. But here are the 5 neighborhoods I would recommend.” And their lists were not identical — we ended up with recommendations for 6 or 7 neighborhoods!

Honestly, I don’t think I could come up with that many for  the Washington DC metro area.

Of course, under the law, we are still in Georgia, and that presents certain problems. Certainly the issue of our having to move for Jill to adopt Noah was hideous. But, she was able to legally adopt Noah, which we couldn’t have done in Virginia, or in my home state of Wisconsin.

Even though Georgia is about as red a state as there is, being in Atlanta has certain unexpected advantages. On a day to day basis, I’ve never had an issue or incident stronger than awkwardness, and that could have been totally unrelated to my being a lesbian mom.
My personal theory is that every liberal and gay person who grows up in The South at least considers moving here, and many, many do for at least some period of their adult lives. It’s a big blue button on the red region.
Anyway, I hope Mrs Very Nice’s lesbian sister and her wife loosen their monolithic view of The South and come to visit the Very Nice Family. We’d love to meet them too.

So that was MY good story. There was another good story about a Massachusetts lesbian family on NPR’s Story Corps on Friday. It made me cry — in a good way — while I was driving, and you should go listen to it. (The written version is not anywhere near as moving as the audio.) I blogged about it in detail for SoVo and LesbianFamily.org.