There is an African proverb that says, “Truth is like a Baobab tree; one person’s arms cannot embrace it.”
For many reasons, this proverb and the baobab itself speak to me.
How can anyone decide the truth of another’s love and devotion? When anyone commits to caring for another human life, regardless of how that life enters the world, this is a profound decision. Such a profound decision is vast like the baobab’s trunk, solid as its wood, elemental as the water that the baobab preserves, ancient as its roots — some baobabs have survived for thousands of years. There is no way to put your arms around such a feeling. We can try to contain it through language, through law. The rainbow above the baobab represents this. The rainbow is beautiful and illusory. We can create images of this love through poems, music or other expressions but we cannot capture its essence, even for ourselves.
The rainbow, like the shadows on Plato’s cave wall, does not represent reality. It is a fading image that is dependent on environmental forces: rain, sunshine. If we think of the law this way it, too, is dependent on forces: societal, rather than environmental. These forces combine to construct an illusion akin to a rainbow. Though the illusion may last a generation rather than a few seconds, it is no less an illusion, no less a contruct created by the mitigation of society’s opposing forces. In nature, these forces are dark and light, rain and sunshine. In society, these forces are similarly opposed and what results from their tension is the illusion of law.
This may sound radical. I am hardly an anarchist.
Laws help us navigate and understand the world. But in some cases, they fail to embrace the truth. In the case of LGBT parents, this illusion is clear. Depending on where you live, you have the right to be a parent to the child that you are raising or not. Depending on the how the law defines your relationship, you will be declared able to care for this life to which you have devoted yourself or you will have that life taken from you.
It is heartbreaking when adults who love one another are not able to declare that love publicly and have it respected, legally, by society. It is criminal when a child who loves and depends on a parent cannot maintain legal ties with that parent.
This site was started because as I fought to protect the shared custody of my daughter, I often felt scattered and scared, the branches of the baobab blowing with whatever wind came along. It took time to realize that the truth that mattered was the truth that I lived everyday: the truth of love and devotion played out in a million daily rituals. In my case, this is the truth that prevailed as I am fortunate to live in a place that recognizes that parenting need not be tied to biology or gender. Not everyone is so fortunate and if you, like me, are looking for stories of others who have gone through something similar: this is the reason for this blog.
May you find and maintain your strength so that you may continue to protect and shelter your children. Just like the baobab with its plentiful reserves of water, you have the source within you to carry on and to remain steadfast no matter how strong the winds that blow. My hope is that this blog may be a guide on that journey and a way to connect our individual stories.
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