10/22/09

Joining the Gayby Boom

I’ve been out of work for eighteen years. Or at least that’s what Social Security thinks, since freelance writing assignments and portrait painting rarely raise my income to the point where a tax return is required. Eighteen years ago I went on maternity leave from my forty-hour sit-down job at Airborne Express answering phones and pleasing irate customers in microseconds (following a grossly underpaid stint in retail and fine art), to have an eight-pound, ten-ounce baby boy. Never went back to work. Dr. Clark handed our naked, vernix- (that sticky white stuff that keeps babies from shriveling up like prunes inside the amniotic sac) covered boy to me, I looked into his open eyes, looked into my wife’s face and said, “I’m not going back to work,”...

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