Say what you need to say: A Mother's Day Tribute of Mourning

Today is Mother's Day. It is also, coincidentally, my 33rd birthday. So it is the celebration of motherhood, and it is also the celebration of the day my mother became a mother.

I think I'm finally ready to post about this now.

A recent photo of my parents

My mom was a beautiful, intelligent woman.

Soft-spoken and tender, she spent the years before my birth as an elementary school teacher. She taught proficiently, and she nurtured and loved her students well. I was reading her journals from those years the other day (I'm transcribing them) and was brought to tears when she told a story about when she saw her student--a little girl--with a large bleeding gash on her forehead. She said that she ran to the girl and swooped her into her arms, and that as she walked her to the office she never knew if in the next step her legs would buckle, and I knew that feeling. The feeling of hurting, and having her, as a young woman, run to me and swoop me into her arms. It felt so familiar. So familiar, and so distant.

She was the perfect mother for me.

She had the sweetest faith I've ever known. So often I would walk in on her praying at her bedside that in my youthful egocentrism, I would get annoyed that I couldn't ask her what I needed to ask. (Often, it was if I had permission to play Nintendo.) It wasn't until years later that I contemplated the possibility that in those moments of outpouring she might have been--and was probably often--praying for me. And that those prayers had kept me safe at times in my life when I was headstrong and reckless.

I attribute much of what I am today as a human being to that woman, and to her prayers.

My mom is dying.

Top 10 thoughts I have while I'm on a diet.

Top 10 thoughts I have while I'm on a diet:

10. On day two, looking in the mirror: "Wait, that can't be my body! I'm a skinny person now!"

9. "I don't care what anybody says. Fruit is not a 'delicious dessert.'"

Favorite Childhood Memory + Childhood pics!

All right, I have a FFAQ backlog. BTW in my brain, I pronounce FFAQ as "f-fack" so FFAQ backlog rhymes in my head. Fascinating tidbit, I know.

The question that won last FFAQ (by a landslide) is probably the hardest question that I've had to yet answer. It's not difficult because it's a challenging question. Instead, it's been hard for me to answer because the answer is so broad that I have no idea how to narrow it down! But it's also been a really fun change of pace.

Here's the question, posed by Maud:

I want an answer to a not-so-serious, not-about-your-sexuality question!

What is your all time favorite childhood memory?


Hmmm. My all-time favorite childhood memory?

Aprons, to the rescue!

*sigh*

Today's been a long day.

First of all, thank you thank you thank you so much for the many, many, many messages of support that Lolly received over the course of today. She was incredibly touched by so many of the amazing words you all shared. Thank you for helping her feel better.

Unfortunately, mixed in that bag was another comment that was not very nice at all. I was in Portland, so I didn't get home until about an hour ago, and when I did Lolly came downstairs and said she'd been crying for hours. She's not an especially sensitive person like the last couple of days might make her sound--it's just that we were apart from each other, and online vulnerability is so hard. It's hard when someone you know passes harsh judgment. We have moved the conversation with that person over to private channels, and everything will be okay. But overall, Lolly and I have ended this weekend apart feeling very raw. And also very blessed. And also so, so, so incredibly supported by so many amazing people, who said things that we will cherish forever.

Thank you for that.

Along those lines, I am posting tonight about someone else who needs support. I believe that this blog has become a community, and I feel that when a member of our community is down on her luck, we should rally around and support her.

Now, I'm not at liberty to say what is going on, but our friend Bjorge Queen is going through a hard time. We've become friends, she and I, over the last ten months and to distract herself from the difficulties she is currently facing, she made and then sent me these:

A comment that made Lolly cry. And not in a good way.

Well, we got a comment today that made Lolly cry.

That hasn't happened for a while. It used to happen last summer when people came to this blog and judged us for our life choice to get married, often calling us insulting things. People said horrible things about her and about us as parents, and about me. I was rarely bothered. The only time I was really bothered is when a comment would make Lolly cry.

It happened again today.

I may be a gay man, but before that I am a man married to a woman I love, and when someone makes that woman cry, my masculine instinct to protect her to comes out in full force. So, you'll forgive me for being blunt as I defend my wife.

Here is the comment which was posted on yesterday's post about our choice to participate in a Vh1 docu-series (and there seem to be more comments like this following, so I figure, let's nip this in the bud.) 

You doing this is way over the line... What will your girls think when they grow up :(. I'd be super embarrassed if I was a kid abd my parents were on a show like this. your daughters will be embarrassed someday, i myself an embarrassed for you both. Walking the gray is one step from denying. I am do sad to see you guys participating in a smut TV show. People have it right ... Was the money worth participating in smut?

Let me tell you, anonymous, why this comment is so upsetting:

Hey guess what! I can finally talk about this now.

Hey guess what!

I can finally talk about this now.

So, back in February we had a bunch of strangers come to our house off and on for four days, and they brought a lot of pets. And when I say "pets" I actually mean "big huge cameras." And they used those big hug cameras to record Lolly and me and the kids for one episode of a Docu-series on Vh1 called "So I married a..."

I would like you to fill in the blank for which title best encapsulates Lolly and my story. 

So I married a....

10 ways not to suck at blogging (hint: it involves posting more)

It's Thursday. And this post is phoned in. Other than that, I'm totally on my game.

10. Post more.

9. Then post more posts.

8. Occasionally take a break for a day but then

7. POST!!

6. Have I mentioned you need to post?

5. Because you do. If you don't have much to say... POST.

4. If you don't have much time... POST ANYWAY.

3. French bread is delicious.

2. I will

1. Post daily.

This list was pretty much a poem by e.e. cummings.

I'm really sorry, Weeders. I've gotten messages and comments from many of you because of my lack of postage and I hear you. I will do better.

In fact, I will post every single day for a week. (And then hopefully beyond.)

What prize do you think I should give myself if I reach this ambitious goal????

(PS--upcoming attractions: two FFAQ answers from a while back, one about scouts and one about something totally different, plus my response to a doozy of an ill-informed comment about locker rooms. Should be fun! Unless you hate those things. Then it will be not fun.)

Oh hi!

Totally not dead.

Totally working on book stuff.

Totally need to stop saying totally.

So, here's a random thing I was gonna post a long time ago:

Every night we read to the girls. Tessa loves this book about things being hard if you're little. It's a Sesame Street book. And ever since she was one year old, she has always gotten to a particular page in the book and cried out "Daddy!" as if she had just stumbled upon a picture of me.

And then she would kiss the picture. Like she was kissing her father.

Would you like to see the picture she thought was such a likeness that it filled her with glee every time she saw it?

That awkward moment when...

So at about this time last year, Lolly and I had had several very strong impressions that we were supposed to share our story, and that it would lead to some changes for us. We had no idea what those changes would look like. We didn't even know what we would be sharing about our story at this point or where we would say it, but we knew we were supposed to prepare ourselves for something. Something that felt like it would be big.

With that in mind, we faithfully started calling people. Every Sunday, for weeks, we would call a close friend or family member that we knew needed to hear our story from our lips.

I'm sure you can see where this is going. The following speaker phone conversation between us and Lolly's brother, Scott, and his wife, Mickelle, happened a year ago today on a random Sunday:

Lolly and Josh: Hey guys. How's it going?

My witness of the resurrection.

It was 2001.

I was in a dusty town in Venezuela, sitting on small bus that would take my companion and me to an incredibly poor part of town that rested atop a plateau. The bus was crowded, filled with laborers coming home from working in the main part of Guarenas.

Guarenas wasn't a beautiful town. There was a joke in the mission about Guarenas. It went something like this: if Guarenas is the butthole of the state of Miranda, and Miranda is the butthole of Venezuela, and Venezuela is the butthole of South America, and South America is the butthole of planet earth, and planet earth is the butthole of this Universe, where exactly does that put me?

(Note: I don't actually believe that about any of those locations. It was just a joke I heard. Please don't harass me with your love of Latin America. I love it too.)

I remember feeling tired this afternoon.