2/23

Whoa....you send out a couple of mass e-mails and suddenly you are hearing from everyone!!!! Jeez, I should have tried that approach sooner. Thank you to everyone that wrote me to express your support for the baby and for my blogging. It was very sweet. I was nervous about how people would respond to my foray into on-line writing.

OK, a couple people had questions as to the father-of-the-baby (Here on out labeled as FOB, which convienently rhymes with SOB. Ahhhh, I knew those pregnancy hormones would kick in eventually. Combined with a little bit of bitterness and I'm brutal). For the people that haven't met him, I'll describe him to you. He's name is Leigh, he is 33 years old, works as a server in a restaurant in NH, which is where I met him. When he first approached me he said something ridiculous like, "Do you want to go see a flick sometime?" I wasn't sure if he meant, in general, like, do I ever like to see movies, or if I wanted to see a movie with him. I also wasn't sure if I should date a person that used the word "flick" as part of their colloquial language. But, he had a honest face that won me over and we started dating. To the FOB's credit, he was always supportive of my queer identity and my ex-girlfriends. After all, he did attend M's wedding with me, which was not in short supply of exes.

To the detriment of the baby, the FOB has chosen to not legally acknowledge the baby as his own. Since we weren't married when I got pregnant, paternity can only be proven through legal acknowledgment or a genetic test. By forcing me to wait until the baby is actually born to do a DNA test, he gets out of paying neonatal child support. That is fun loophole, huh? Fortunately, my crash course in family law has forced me to think about the legal protections I enjoy because I had this child with a man. The gay community has none of these protections because in many states, queer families cannot adopt children or a same-sex person cannot adopt the biological child of their partner, let alone getting a court order for child support. As I rant about child support and custody in the coming months, know that I do so with this consciousness of my privilege.