My life has taken a weird course in the past few weeks, and it has felt crazy to write about it. But I thank you for being there and listening and offering so much advice:
The night Charlie denied his affair, he fell asleep next to me, but I got up and turned on our computer. I was afraid that the next time he logged on, he would delete all the evidence.
What I wanted most, what had kept me reading all this dreck, was to see what Charlie would say about me. Read more »
Dear Reader,
I welcome my stepbrother, Matt, to this public discussion of our private business. I owe him thanks for the clarification of our conversation from the other day. I think I follow his argument, but I’m not completely persuaded. As he writes, behavior results from an interaction of genes and the environment. Our parents were a fundamental part of that environment when we were growing up. My point is not to blame them. They acted out of a kind of idealism when they got into their group marriage. But I don’t want other parents to take the same decision lightly. There’s a reason why our civilization stopped practice polygamy a thousand years ago.
I’d like to point out as well that none of the four children from that group marriage have not gone on to raise their own biological children with a partner. I don’t think that can be coincidence.
As a doctor, I’m trained to see bodies as machines. But as a parent of adopted kids, I know there’s something more than deoxyribonucleic acid involved in the cock-eyed way my daughter Chloe is looking at me as I type this. She knows this half-smile, her head tilted to one side, will draw me away from my keyboard, knows from all the experience of her thirty-five months of life that I can’t continue to ignore her when she plants little kisses on my shin… I’m signing off…
If kids can have more than two parents, biological mothers and fathers will begin to lose their importance before the law.
That’s the essence of the objection that traditional family folks have mounted to legislation expected to pass the California Legislature this week. Read more »
Were our ancestors polyamorous? That is, did they have multiple spouses? Influential biologists going back to Darwin think we descended from small bands of people whose sexuality was not confined to a single partner. Read more »