When the therapist said, "I think you're still grieving the three babies you lost, don't you?" tears salted my eyes, an unexpected assault.

"Babies," I echoed the triggering word. The room filled with a thundercloud of conflicting emotion. "I don't use the word babies. I call them miscarriages."

"Maybe...

K-Bird and his kindergarten classmate are rearranging magnets on our fridge when his buddy notices a family photo and says, "So you don't have a dad?"

"Nope," K-Bird says, moving the Canada magnet next to the Hawaii magnet.

"No dad?" Buddy asks again, just to get it right.

"Nope. Just...

"Another child victim of biological engineering!" An anti-gay protestor shouted this at my then four-year-old son K-bird and me, as we were walking up the stairs into the California Supreme Court building in San Francisco, heading to one of the many Proposition 8-related hearings.

In the reflections on the glass...

On Dec. 31 my neighborhood inaugurated a new tradition: decorating our front yards with luminarias, paper bag lanterns lit by candles, a sign of welcome to neighbors and friends. Always up for activities that foster beauty and community, my family opted in.

Because the email suggesting the luminarias had arrived...

The first time I heard Cat Stevens' "On the Road to Find Out" (as a teenager, while watching Harold and Maude with my beloved "Island of Misfit Toys" friends), the song broke me open in that teary-eyed, truth-that-knocks-the-wind-out-of-you way. Taking the first shaky steps of what would become...

"We're making a whole page of pictures about death and dying and deadly stuff," my son B says in an affected, tough-guy tone.

"Yeah," his brother K agrees, in the voice of a monster truck rally announcer, "a whole page of boy stuff."

They are 8 and 6 years old,...

Waiting for the Supreme Court of the United States to issue a decision on California's Proposition 8 can feel like waiting for your alcoholic ex-girlfriend, who also happens to be a pathological liar, to pay back the money she borrowed from you so that she could rent a truck to...

This morning I woke to the kind of burning tension in my neck that signals a migraine on the horizon. Crap. I have three defenses against migraines: Go back to sleep, down four ibuprofen tablets or drink a glass of wine. It's 7:30 a.m, and in an hour my friend...

As the clock ticks toward Nov. 6, my shoulder muscles ratchet tighter, my mind gets busier debating invisible political opponents, my psyche buzzes as if inhabited by a flock of summertime cicadas, and I begin to wonder how to counteract the negative impact that the recent firestorm of campaign-related anti-gay...

On election night 2008, my wife Tracie, our two sons and I were crowded into a restaurant booth, attending our local Democratic committee's results-viewing party. Our table was littered with the usual family paraphernalia: mac and cheese, coloring books, milk in no-spill cups. Tracie and I were engaged in the...

"I wish I had a dad." My oldest son was 3 when he told me this, sitting in the bathtub, his shampooed hair shaped into punk spikes by yours truly.

Though this is not exactly the phrase a lesbian parent longs to hear, by that point in my parenting...

My children are making me stronger and braver. My children are making me stronger and braver. I chant this silent mantra while clinging to the side of a cable car as it thunders down one of San Francisco's famed, gravity-defying hills, whooshing past double-parked delivery trucks, daredevil bike messengers, and...

Twelve years ago my fiancée Tracie coaxed me out of San Francisco and into a three-bedroom house on a suburban street that looked eerily similar to the cover art from Fun with Dick and Jane. For a lesbian couple a move like this amounts to a monumental cultural shift: from...

B is stuck in a tree. For real. Perched on a winter-bare branch, six feet above the ground, my 7-year-old son looks rather like Dr. Seuss' faithful elephant, Horton, sitting on that abandoned egg.

But B's stuck-ness is not the real problem here. The real problem: I can't help...

Most parents I know dread the birds-and-bees conversation, avoiding it until their children ask, point-blank, "Where do babies come from?" Not so in my household.

In our older son's early years, my wife Tracie and I actively sought opportunities to educate him about his origins. Why? Because we figured...

My kids' bookcase is full of banned books: Heather Has Two Mommies, And Tango Makes Three, The Different Dragon, and King and King, to name a few. However, when the principal of my oldest son's elementary school asked me to be a...

My wife Tracie and I have been playing "suburban lesbian poster family" since our oldest son was kickin' it in utero. If you go to the Wikipedia page for "lesbian" and scroll down to the "Families and politics" section, you will...