Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [55]
“No problem,” I told her. “I lived with a woman for a very long time. I can take it.”
But the next time I heard from her, she told me that although the overwhelming majority of the women in the group wanted me in, the leaders would not allow it. They had decided it wasn’t a good idea to have a man in their midst because there was so much personal talk among them, and they didn’t want other women to feel inhibited. Bullshit. My wife was dead and I didn’t give a shit about women’s body parts or bodily fluids or any other personal talk. All I wanted was access to their valuable information about parenting in Los Angeles, setting up play dates, and finding good day care.
“Matt, I’m just floored by this,” Windy said. “I know two gay men who adopted, and they won’t let them in, either. So you know what? Fuck ’em. We’re going to start our own group.”
If Liz had been there, we probably would not have been seeking out such help, but without her I not only wanted this support system, I needed it. I knew it would be invaluable as I tried to raise Madeline on my own.
And so Windy and I began to meet for coffee to talk about how the group would take shape. It started small but continued to grow, mostly thanks to Windy’s efforts and organization. The more she and I planned, the closer we got, and eventually Windy shared with me that she was a lesbian. Strange as it may sound, that gave us a lot of common ground to walk on, as neither of us was necessarily what people thought us to be when we passed them on the street with a kid. The potential assumptions about me as the father of a baby girl were obvious: he’s lazy; his wife must be at work; he doesn’t do shit. As for Windy, most would figure that she was a stay-at-home mom, that her husband was the breadwinner, and that she and her partner were just friends.
One day while we sat at the coffee shop talking, Windy’s daughter, almost two at the time, was in the playroom with some other children. A guy walked in and saw her picking up toys. “Your daddy must be so proud of you!” he exclaimed.
We looked at one another and just burst out into raucous laughter. I felt I had more in common with a gay parent than I did with anybody else, and Windy became part of my chosen family. It was a fantastic feeling—no matter how different we might have seemed, we had a bond. Without Liz, I was now the one responsible for creating a community for Madeline and me. Without her, I was learning, I had to be the friendly one.
When I started to blog again, my community expanded even further, and my encounters were no longer limited to people in my geographic location. I hadn’t thought that blogging was something I would continue after Liz died. On March 28, A.J. posted the obituary that his wife had written about Liz, the one that I still have trouble getting through. I believed at the time that it might be the blog’s final post, but a few weeks later I found myself turning back to it in hopes of some kind of emotional release. In the days after Liz’s death, writing my thoughts down—like the thoughts that had turned into the words written on her funeral program—had been really effective in helping me deal. As time passed and I continued to write, the blog just seemed like a natural place to put them.
It felt great. At first I thought there would be nothing much to say, but with Maddy home, something in me wanted, or maybe needed, to record everything. Were my posts revelatory? Not exactly. But having an outlet where I could say whatever I wanted and work through my constantly shifting emotional state was invaluable. I knew it when I wrote that first post after Liz’s death; I knew it again the next day, when I wrote a post about how the better of Madeline’s parents had died; and I knew