Of all of the chapters in this book, this is the one that leaves me most unsure whether to laugh or cry. Probably both at the same time. Here, our fearless alterna-dad dives into the larger world of … people who are mostly not alterna-dads. And shares what he learned along the way.

White

My kids are black. My neighborhood is mostly black—until recently, every homeowner on our block who isn’t me was black. My kids’ elementary school was primarily Latino and Asian. Among their California aunts, uncles, and cousins are a number of African Americans, a mixed Cuban Irish, a Chinese American, and a Mexican. Their caretakers, babysitters, tutors, and so on have included an Asian American, a Latino, and, again, a handful of black folk for good measure.

For those who haven’t been following closely, I am white.

Which means . . . well, maybe nothing, ultimately. The reality is that for over ten years, the boys and I slept under the same roof, and woke up under the same roof, and were a family under the same roof. I’m grateful that in the 2000s and 2010s, a single white guy having two black kids means a lot more (less?) nothing than it would have even a decade, and certainly a generation or century, ago.

When I was in training at the adoption agency, the staff spent a fair amount of time on transracial adoption. They emphasized how important it was for the parent(s) to include in the child’s life people who looked like the child, traditions that reflected the culture of the child, and experiences that involved an understanding of the racial reality of the child.

In other words, don’t try to raise your nonwhite child white.

On the one hand, I had to laugh: Come to my neighborhood, folks. But on the other, I get it—or maybe it’s more accurate to say, I get that I don’t get it. As amazing as I—sometimes successfully—try to be, the experience of having me as their dad is, by definition, different for the boys than if they had been raised by one or more black folk. There are social, identity, and other realities that I can’t even pretend to understand, let alone engage with them about.

So I tried to do the next best thing: to let them know that I don’t know, to make it clear that there are ways in which their reality is and will be fundamentally different from anything in my experience. And then I did the next next best thing: encourage them to seek out, check in, and bond with other black folk, whether in our family or in their own circles.

And then the kids did what kids do everywhere: They made the connections to whichever peers and adults they felt like. Most of whom weren’t black. (On the other hand, when Daveon moved from the melting-pot Bay Area to a state known for its overwhelming whiteness, bonding with the three other black males he met became very important,  indeed.)

I like to think that being a gay man gives me some measure of empathy for what otherness is like. But again, empathy and understanding are two different things, and the “My pain is just like yours” line doesn’t cut it. I’ve never been stopped by the cops walking to school, nor followed in a store—just two examples of things that the boys experienced multiple times before they graduated high school.

I also encourage them to let me know if anything ever comes up for them about being raised by a white (and/or single and/or gay) man. I tell them that I’m a pretty tough cookie—I can handle it. So far, not a peep—my kids are nothing if not extremely loyal. But who knows what may come down the line.

Daveon once reported feeling like an Oreo, “black on the outside but white on the inside.” As someone who’s more comfortable obsessing over my failings than my successes, I immediately started to question whether there was more I could be doing to promote Daveon’s black identity. I never came up with a clear answer—and I’m not sure whether, as his white dad, I could even authentically try to accomplish this. How does a white person encourage a black person to feel more black? What would that even look like?

When I was teaching special ed years ago, a white administrator decided that we needed to celebrate Kwanzaa, given that the student population was almost entirely African American. We held the event, lit the candles, explained the principles—and then got roasted by the kids, who complained unanimously: “What is this stuff? We celebrate Christmas.” By all means, if you’re a transracially adoptive parent, listen to the trainers. Include in the child’s life people who look like the child, traditions that reflect the culture of the child, and experiences that involve an understanding of the racial reality of the child. And all the while, let your kids tell you who they are. They’re going to be that, anyway, so you might as well get comfortable with it.

There’s another aspect to the transracial parenting issue that’s come up for us fairly often. I have found that many, many people can’t seem to wrap their brains around “black kid, white dad.” When the boys and I have traveled, I’ve been asked multiple times if I was their: coach, counselor, or teacher, just to name a few. (Yes to all of the above, though not in the way you mean it.) And if I had a nickel for every time I heard, “I need to see one of their parents,” I could (almost) afford Mark’s skating lessons.

Straight People

Before I had kids, I considered myself a pretty equal opportunity gay guy. Some of my best friends were, and are, straight!

What parenthood taught me is that, as far as the straight world goes, I had a lot to learn.

In my usual wing-it fashion, I hadn’t at all thought about how being a dad would put me into a world that is overwhelmingly—almost exclusively—straight. For the most part, that was fine. A lot of straight people are really nice! And genuine, thoughtful, caring, funny, etc. But—and this is based just on my own experience, so take it for what it’s worth—what I found is, a lot (most? all?) of them have this . . . way. It’s a bit hard to describe, but it has to do with accepting certain statements or perspectives as givens, without ever questioning where these perspectives comes from.

An analogy from my own childhood: As a high school senior, I applied to eight colleges, and was accepted to all of them. (As I’ve mentioned, I was one of those kids.) A few of those colleges were Ivy League. When my parents and I met with my high school college counselor, he said, “Of course, you will choose one of the Ivies.” Keep in mind, as families go, we weren’t exactly the most college-savvy. Among my parents and their siblings, only a couple went to any college at all—and that was the state university or a technical school. My older sister? State again. So, we did what many people do when they have no idea. We all nodded our heads in tacit agreement. Of course.

No one—least of all myself—bothered to ask about that “of course.” Why was that a given? I’m sure there are a million good reasons for attending an Ivy League school. In hindsight, I’m even more sure that, for any given student, a non-Ivy might be as good a—or even a better—fit. And you know how I feel about fit.

This kind of thing came up with my dealings with the straight people—teachers, coaches, other parents—in my kids’ lives all the time. That (implicit or explicit) “of course” attached to many issues around schooling, discipline, developmentally appropriate behavior, extracurricular activities, etc., etc., etc.:

• “Of course teenage boys act this way.”
• “Of course you want (or don’t want) to send them to X high school.” (shades of my Ivy conversation)
• “Of course it’s preferable for kids to be raised by a mom and a dad.”*

(*Yes, someone actually said this to me.)

I’m pretty sure I even had a few “of course” conversations about which kinds of snacks the kids should eat, and what brand of shoes to buy.

This was all somewhat confusing—not to mention off-putting—to me. And then one day, a wise (nonstraight) friend of mine explained it this way: Society has developed a million and one conventions. Both the developers and the beneficiaries of these conventions are straight people. Therefore, a straight person—especially a straight white person, and super especially a straight white male—grows up in our society never needing to challenge these conventions. In fact, for the most part, this group isn’t even aware that the conventions exist, so there’s nothing to call into question. You can’t question a rule if no one clues you in that this rule is just one option among many.

The best parallel I can think of is living on a planet where only one language is spoken. If you lived on that planet, it would never occur to you that there is such a thing as language, and that maybe there are other ways to describe a dog, a cloud, or a chair.

For the nonstraight—and nonwhite and nonmale, etc.—person, forming one’s identity is all about recognizing, questioning, and then accepting, rejecting, or customizing society’s conventions. Because many of them don’t work for us, we can spot a convention a mile away—and often run screaming (not that I speak from personal experience). Many, if not most, of us develop a more idiosyncratic approach to life. And when you’re a nonstraight (white/coupled/etc.) parent in a majority straight (white/coupled/etc.) parenting world, I believe it’s important to be aware of the implicit “of course” that lies beneath much of the input you get from your majority peers. Not that you need to reject the input outright—just check to see if it aligns with your likely-more-idiosyncratic values and beliefs.

This understanding might be part of the reason the boys and I bonded as well as we did. Before I got them, they clearly hadn’t been raised according to the dominant conventions. From their earliest days, they were forced to adopt their own viewpoints—to call into question pretty much everything that the majority takes as a given. So landing with a dad who, in a very different way, had gone—and continues to go—through the same process created a unit of like-minded souls.

Of course.

Gay

Now that I’ve gotten straight people off my chest, let’s bring it closer to home.

Being a dad as a gay man is . . . well, it’s weird.

Weird, of course, in the sense that—you might want to sit down for this—most gay men don’t have kids. And, conversely, most people who have kids aren’t gay. Of the gay men who do have kids, only a small percentage are single. So (although this is changing, slowly but steadily) within the world of gay, I’m something of a novelty.

Which isn’t to say  that people haven’t  been wonderful. They (mostly) have been, and are. I’m a novelty more in the sense of a “Wow, isn’t that amazing” piano prodigy than in the sense of an “Oh, that’s weird” person with six toes.

Having said that, I do struggle with the fact that nonparental gay folks—especially the dudes—don’t really have a sense of what being a parent means. As in, “No, I can’t meet you for dinner in an hour on a school night.” Or, as I will discuss shortly in more detail in regard to dating, “Well, it’s fine (not really) that you’re canceling at the last minute, but I’ll have to look at the family calendar before I can reschedule.” Or, on an even more trivial level, “Nope, haven’t seen [insert name of latest must-see TV show or movie here]. I’m kinda busy. But hey, throw a Pixar or Harry Potter movie at me, and there’s a good chance I’ve seen that one.”

Meanwhile, within the straight community, I experience my favorite thing about being a gay dad. I could bring a female friend to a little league game, or go out with one to dinner—heck, I could say hello to a female cashier at the grocery store—and nongay folk automatically assume that said female and I are a couple. It’s actually kind of charming. If my straight acquaintances had their way, I would have had at least twenty or so girlfriends or wives over the past fifteen years. That’s an even worse track record than my actual history with guys. I guess over there, it’s hard to imagine that a guy could, or would, choose to raise two kids by himself—or that said guy could be in proximity of a woman without the requisite romantic tie.

In contrast to all this, I have to give a major shout-out to the other kids in our lives. As is usually the case, compared to anyone over the age of twelve or so, they are so much more open-minded and flexible about what reality can look like. They neither make assumptions about our family one way or another, nor do they care when the truth is revealed. The best example was the time Daveon revealed to his second-grade class that over the summer we went to New York “to celebrate my dad’s boyfriend’s birthday.” The kids still let me come and help with reading.

I’d say the most probing conversation I ever heard from the under-eighteen set went something like this:

Kid (pointing to me): Hey Mark, who’s that?

Mark (in his usual verbose, descriptive manner): My dad.

Kid: Where’s your mom?

Mark: I don’t have a mom. Just my dad.

Kid (considers, waves): Hi, Mark’s dad!

If only everything about parenthood were that easy.

Dating: Dad Division

Let’s cut to the chase: When you’re a single parent, dating is really, really hard. The obvious reason, of course, is just finding the time to get out of the house and meet people. Especially with younger kids, the days are a flurry of remembering who needs to be where, getting them there and back, feeding, checking on homework, bedtime—all on top of one’s day job (or jobs, in the case of us freelancers).

Even when you finally make it to Friday or Saturday night and things are quiet and the coast is clear, the last thing many a single parent wants to do is dress up, go out, and make nice with a stranger— especially with the thought of putting one’s best foot forward to try to make a good impression on a potential mate. Often, the only thing we want to do with our feet is put them in our slippers, to complement the sweats we’re wearing, as we finally collapse on the couch in front of the TV. The most seductive dream we have at this point is an early bedtime.

My hunch is that another factor may be more prevalent in the gay world. Where dating is concerned among gay men, it’s treated a bit like deciding whether to get dessert after a meal out: Tonight I will; tonight I won’t; nothing on the menu here grabs me so I’ll go somewhere else; I have a pint of ice cream in the freezer at home. It’s all very spur-of-the-moment, subject to change in an instant, on a whim.

This would be a good place to point out one concept that doesn’t work very well—or at all—in the parenting world: spur of the moment. Of course, we make spontaneous decisions all of the time where our kids are concerned: “Michael just asked if I can stay for dinner. Can I?” “The store doesn’t have any shoes in your size. Let’s try that other one.” “You have a fever. Need to stay home from school today.” And so on.

But where our adult lives are concerned, the magic word is: plans. My own experience tells me that folks who don’t have kids really have no clue how vital it is for us to plan, as far in advance as possible, for get-togethers—and how important it is for those plans to stick, barring emergencies. And again, maybe specifically in the gay world, the epidemic of “Can’t make it for the date that was supposed to happen in an hour. Sorry.” can really throw a potential date-parent off his or her game.

I know this flakiness epidemic is . . . well, it’s pretty epidemic across our community. The difference is, if you’re a nonparent and you get stood up, you now have an open slot that you can fill pretty much however you want: trying to meet someone else, waiting till tomorrow, even spiraling into deep (if temporary) depression and balling your eyes out, bitching to your best friend over text, or binge-watching and binge-eating. For the parent, that few-hour block of time might be the only free space for the next couple of weeks. Trying to regroup and figure out how to spend those hours—for what, a hookup?—isn’t exactly inspiring. And binge-whatever-ing is out, because the kids are in the next room with the sitter watching Cartoon Network, so how are you going to sneak in all that ice cream that you would never let them eat in one sitting?

The other thing that factors in here—and again, this may just be me—but over the years as a parent, my expectations for what I want from a guy have gotten pretty high. Given that the bulk of my time has been spent nurturing—or creating a system for nurturing—two young and growing lives, I’ve grown less interested in meeting anyone with a lot of unmet needs. That has screened out of lot of people, unfortunately. At this point, I need stable—and, for good measure, someone who can actually step forward and take on a little bit of need-addressing himself—especially if he doesn’t have kids of his own. This seems to be a tall order, especially if you throw in the fact that it would be nice if he were cute.

It doesn’t help matters that I work from home, so my daily routine doesn’t allow for a lot of socializing. It also definitely doesn’t help that I’m an introvert, and my favorite free-time activity is binge-reading mysteries.* I’ve tried online dating, which . . . well, you get a lot of first dates. Second ones? Still reaching for that brass ring.

(*Recommendations welcome.)

Single

As someone who loves my kids more than life itself, I say this with all sincerity:

Single parenthood? Dumb.

It doesn’t matter how good, responsible, and/or on-the-ball your kids are. Raising even one . . . and especially multiple . . . kids by yourself is dumb. Choosing to do so, as in my case? Really dumb. And it’s dumb for a lot of dumb reasons.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for a very, very long time, you’re probably aware that the traditional model of one-mom-plus-one-dad-raising-some-number-of-mutually-biologically-generated-kids-under-the-same-roof has been shrinking for a very long time. But still, the reality is that most of the things your kids are involved in assume a two-parent structure. This plays itself out in a number of ways. Many of them involve timing and schedules:

• The practice that is scheduled from 4 to 5 p.m. ends at 6, because, hey, Mom’s home to make dinner and watch the other kids.
• The school talent show, play, or other event goes to some ridiculously late hour—on a school night—because, hey, if the little kids need to go home, Parent 1 can take them while Parent 2 stays to bring the older ones.
• The schedules for practices, competitions, and events shift endlessly (I’m looking at you, skating), based on the principle of: Of course we can change the Friday practice—on Friday— to Saturday afternoon, because, hey, with all of those spare parents lying around, who cares if skater child has siblings who might have other commitments? Spare parent is there— with spare car, of course!—to pick up the slack.*

(*Apparently, people who make schedules say “hey” a lot.)

As you might have guessed, I’m pretty protective of my time. I was happy—OK, willing—to run around all day for either or both of my kids, as long as I had some warning—in advance—of when and where said running around needed to happen. The last-minute thing? Not so much.*

(*I’m not counting the times where there can’t be a warning, like the emergency room trips when your kid’s leg does a 180. Those come with the job description.)

Schedules and timing are only the most obvious of the external issues with single parenting. There are plenty of internal ones, as well. A friend of mine once reminded me that being a parent in and of itself means that I am in taking-care-of mode all of the time—it’s so consistent that it becomes second nature. And like many second-nature things, I often forget. I forget that my life is substantially different from my nonparent peers, which means I forget a lot of corresponding things—like how, when the kids were home and parenting was 24/7, it was not only OK, but healthy, and even necessary, to take as many breaks as possible. As many evenings and days off as possible. Heck, as many weeks off as possible. How that was better not only for me, but for the kids as kids and for us as a family.

How it really, really takes a lot out of a person to be making all the decisions, all the time—especially when you try (with variable success) to base your decisions on what’s right for the other person in question, not (always) what works for you. It’s like having a running “Who’s on First?”* dialogue in your head at all times, except—with two kids— there are three voices arguing instead of two. You’re imaging what the other two are contributing to the conversation, as you try to visualize what their owners might actually say. And somewhere in there, you need to figure out who’s actually on third base.

(*Another Google search for the youngsters.)  

I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

I know in theory—and I know in practice folks who are examples of this—that being in a parent couple doesn’t necessarily make any of this easier. In fact, when two parents aren’t on the same page about a given parenting issue, the potential conflict can actually be worse. I’ve witnessed how some of those “Who’s on First?” routines play out, and it isn’t pretty. So this isn’t a my-pain’s-worse-than-yours argument. They are different, and unique.

But when you screw up as a single parent, there’s no one to make up with later. Which means you don’t get to have any fun makeup … um, activities.

Next Chapter: Dad on Dad