David Minerva Clover

[CN: PTSD, pregnancy, birth] Something snapped inside me and I was transported backwards in time.

Back when we decided to have a baby together, we had a plan. She was never, ever going to have to work full-time. She was going to work part-time, and I was going to work part-time, selling dog food at that cute little store I used to work at. We would have one day off a week in common, and we would be broke, but we would get by. We would be tired, but we would be happy.

There’s just no getting around it, and other than one half-hour spell where he sat with a good friend of ours while both of his moms took a swim, one of us had to be with him the entire weekend. And let’s be honest, because I’m “boob mom” and he was nursing even more than normal, it could never really be divided 50/50. All of that was fine, but it was often just fine, and there’s just no denying that it was a very different trip than it would have been without a kid.

[W]hen tickets went on sale for a DIY punk music festival that my wife had attended several times before we were married, and she lamented that there was “just no way” that she’d be able to go, a light bulb went off in my head. “What if we just all went together?” I said.

I stand at the ready to remind these adults what ought to be common sense: mind your own plate. Stop policing how kids eat!

Here are six tips that can serve as a basic outline of how most parents can strategize to help feed a toddler and to calm the heck down.

I don’t want to deprive my child of these magical Halloween memories, I just also want to light candles and talk about our ancestors.

I mess up and do things very differently than I want to sometimes. When that happens, I have one rule for myself: I stop and apologize to my kid.

The reality is the shift is happening slowly; for queer kids, and kids of queer parents, it might be too slow. Representation for LGBTQ families matters!

I think “It can be difficult” probably qualifies for the understatement of the century. There is just nothing in a phrase so casual and noncommittal that conveys anything like the reality of this labor of love. I’m not saying that we need to be all doom and gloom about parenting all the time — there are plenty of joys in parenting, and plenty of space to talk about those joys — but I do think that when we’re trying to talk about the hard parts, we should, you know, actually talk about the hard parts.