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"You don't look like your dad!" Tales of Legal Adoption

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"You don't look like your dad. You must be the spitting image of your mother!" or "Your brothers look just like your dad! I bet you take after your momma." I heard these statements a lot growing up. And it's true. I don't look like my dad. And for a while, I didn't really look like my mom. I do now, but that isn't the point. You see, my dad adopted me when I was around six or seven years old. He had been a part of my life, for, well, all of it. When my mother and biological father (sometimes I refer to him as my sperm donor, because I think it's funny, but his name is Chris), got divorced, my dad, Kenny, married my mom resulting in a blended family of me, who was biologically my mom's, and my two brothers, who were biologically his. Suddenly I went from being the only child to being the middle child in a family dynamic that takes a lot of explaining to do. They say divorce and the things I supposedly went through in my early childhood...
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Melanie and Melanie: Growing up with Separated Lesbian Moms in the South

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I came from a sperm bank, well I came from a vagina, but first I came from a sperm bank. That’s not generally my opener, but we need to make it clear. My moms discovered their sexuality long before I came along in 1992. When I was three, they separated. Gay marriage had not been legalized up to this point, so there was no divorce process involved. However, my mama, Sharon, she gave birth to me, and she wanted full custody of me. My other mom, Sylvia, worked tirelessly to pay for my existence and Sharon’s pregnancy care; she loved me, and I was her child no matter what. They went to court, and Sylvia became one of the first lesbian parents in the state of Texas to receive shared custody of a child that was not biologically hers. In some cases, this still doesn’t always happen, particularly in cases with gay and lesbian parents, regardless of how involved the parent is in their child’s life. “Who do you want to live with?” Flash forward seven years or so, and I’m being given more...
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Storytelling for Social Cohesion

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            If I had the opportunity to create an intensive storytelling workshop series for the public, I would like to focus my efforts on something that would be a boon to whole communities, rather than focusing on simple self-help. Though I do think that there are many self-focused narrative-crafting tools that are extremely healing and necessary, I think that our tendency in this capitalist culture is to locate the source of all of our problems squarely within ourselves. We are always discouraged from looking at the systemic causes of our alienated condition, and all the self-help in the world will not solve major forms of social and political oppression.              I would craft a series that blends both self-healing and community-healing forms of narrative. I would like to model my workshop series on the techniques and methods of a Palestinian-Israeli youth...
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