A Day Late
Yesterday was Blogging for LGBT Families Day and were my life filled with spare time instead of the great bliss and exhaustion of having our brand new baby, well, I would have blogged then.

But all things being equal, let's just admit that I'm operating on Queer Standard Time and here's that entry today.

Other folks I read spent this day talking about the lack of legal protections available to far too many families and the lack of basic rights available to these families. For their struggles to have some of the same protections that a straight couple, married or not, would have in regards to their child, my heart breaks. Is it really right that a kid who has two parents from the start only gets one of those parents on their birth certificate, that the parent who gave birth to the kid has to write some document stating that the kid's other parent has the legal right to take that kid to the ER?

No. Not at all.

But when I read these posts, I count us among the lucky, no, the Very Lucky. Because we live in lovely, expensive, crowded California, in a house 1/3 the size that the same price would buy us just about anywhere else, but that the life we've built here allows us some very important things when it comes to our relationship and now, to our daughter.

1. As domestic partners, Andrea is automatically allowed to make medical decisions on my behalf instead of "next of kin," which I suppose would be my parents, half a country away.
2. We also get some automatic property inheritance rights (new! for 2006!) when it comes to each other's stuff. So Andrea would get my collection of Carly Simon CD's and my automatic fart noise machine, er, rather, my assets, if I died.
3. Most importantly? By being registered, by having conceived Valerie as a group project within that partnership, we were both automatically considered her parents. From day one.

We don't have to do a second-parent adoption (but we can and probably should, just in case we visit Someplace Else) and most importantly, Val's birth certificate reads Mother: me, Parent: Andrea.

Obviously it would be better if both listings were either Mother (which is what I write in at the doctors' offices, boldly crossing out 'father') or Parent but really, who cares? That oh so very important document lists BOTH of her parents as her parents and has since the day it was made.

That simple document is a huge gift to us as a family and makes all the challenges of living here worth it. Because it means we don't have to prove to Anyone In Authority, not even those with poles up their rear ends that we're a family, that Val is *our* daughter.

See? We can say, it says it right here.

I can only hope that other states pull their heads out of their collective rear ends and offer other families like ours this very basic yet highly necessary protection.