My coworker, K, gave birth to a beautiful baby girl six weeks ago. She brought in little A to meet the office the other day.
We stand around the water cooler, people taking turns holding baby A, cooing, oohing, ahhhing, and generally exclaiming over the widely-agreed adorableness incarnate. She sleeps blissfully through it all. K plays the accepted part: the shining, but exhausted, new mama. She fields the usual questions. Does A sleep through the night? (Not yet, but four hours last night.) Is maternity leave just flying by? (It is.) K spouts the latest stats on how much little A weighs, and how long she is, to approving nods and smiles from mothers, fathers, aunts, and uncles. K asks me if I’d like to hold little A. Er...generally, I stay out of the way of holding the little ones. I demur with a shy smile. "I’m afraid I’d drop her," I say. "She looks like such a fragile little doll."
We note that our coworker G, who married a week before my husband and I did, is now an expectant father. His wife is due in April, someone said. We all follow K to G’s cube and shower G with congratulations. We talk about how another coworker is due in just a few months. And then conversation turns to our coworker N, who’s the youngest of us. She’s engaged to be married.
N will marry her fiancé in just a month’s time, and they’ll wed over a thousand miles away in Vermont. It’s hard to schedule a destination wedding (even when your family’s in the same state as the destination), and the lead-up to the wedding has N just frazzled. She and I have been sharing the travails together, since she saw me last year go through the same tribulations planning a wedding over a thousand miles away in California. I’ve been her counselor, the voice of reason and experience, the bride’s best gurl, if you will, saying, "It’s almost over. I promise, it’ll be done before you know it. Just hang in there – the next thing you know, you’ll be sharing a honeymoon suite over the beach with your new husband. Breathe, honey...just breathe. No, you may not strangle your cousin. Jumpsuit-orange is not your color."
Of course, I don’t share every detail with our coworkers, but they, too, see how much stress N is under. We all start talking about how hard it is, no matter whether you’re getting married in town or not, to herd friends and relatives together to celebrate what is supposed to be "the best day of your life". K mentions that she’s already told her younger sister that she’d just pay her to elope rather than have to deal with her family in wedding mode again. M chimes in that her mother, getting married a second time, is doing just that and having a party when she and her new husband return home. I laugh and say that if we had it to do all over again, we might have eloped, too. K laughs knowingly, and she’s holding baby A in her arms and looking at me with that, "Are you sure you don’t want to hold her?" look in her eyes.
All of a sudden, it dawns on me that no one else I’m talking to is gay. I’m just being treated like anyone else – someone who’s living the same traditions, similar experiences to many others in the office – no different, no better, no worse. Just...married. And unquestionably accepted as such. No one says anything to distinguish our wedding from any of the others – they’re all beautiful, but stressful, and all about the same love. No one, thankfully, brings up Prop 8. Everyone simply smiles as we talk about our lives and what we, as human beings, share in common. Men, women, babies, families, people.
Suddenly I’m extra-glad we got K that rainbow set of baby bibs that say things like "fabulous" on them. And I decide to step up and share this experience with everyone else.
I stand there and beam at K, holding little A snugly in my arms. "You look like a natural," says K. "When are you and R going to start a family?"