Meri Perra blogs about the challenges she and her partner face in trying to raise their girls with feminist values
2012 is around the corner and so is, incidentally, the one-year anniversary of
Queer as Moms. Last night, on the way home from Catharine’s family celebration, driving into Toronto, I stepped out of the holiday mental fog, realized what day it was and said: “Queer as Moms, is due tomorrow, what should I write about?”
Catharine said I should write about how queers celebrate Christmas and to
please, please not write about vomit, which it seems I have a habit of doing. Exhibits
A,
B,
C and
D. (I think she’s grown weary, since on the way up to her family’s our four-year old got carsick for the first time ever. All I can say is, thank goodness for Tim Hortons’ washrooms and wet wipes. So I’ll abide by my partner’s wishes and not write about you-know-what, which is fine, it just means I also can’t write about the Disney Princess gifts our girls got this year.)
So, just what about our Christmas is queer, other than we’re a part of it? The
holidays are about family, and most queers are experts at creating chosen families. So I’ll talk about mine.
We went to my sister’s in early December to celebrate Christmas. She lives
outside Toronto, with her wife, in a four-bedroom townhouse they bought for the equivalent price of what you would pay for a down payment on a closet in Toronto. She served our traditional Christmas meal, which is an extremely regional dish from Silesia, where my mother was born, in Germany, which became Poland after the Second World War. Wonders of the Internet,
it’s described here.
As I’ve written about before,
my mom passed in 2009, and her own parents and only sibling had pre-deceased her years before. The point being, no one who’d ever set foot in Silesia was actually at my sister’s celebration, but of course she served our Christmas fishtunke dish anyway.
My parents split up when I was nine, but always raised us together. Our lovingly stubborn, mildly crazy and opinionated Italian father, who hates Berlusconi, food with preservatives “perservants”, but who loves his grandchildren, Peruvian wife and teenage stepson (who has saved me more than once from computer software disasters) were at the table.
My stepmother and stepbrother are committed vegetarians, my stepmother
is Buddhist as a chosen religion and my dear step-bro is a committed atheist,
capitalist and animal rights advocate.
My sister is an artist, a teacher, and is married to a woman who wore her kilt
at their wedding and swears haggis tastes good.
Also at my sister’s table were our cousins. Make that our chosen cousins. Afamily of dea r friends we’ve been celebrating the holidays with for years, whom, like us, don’t have any extended family of their own. They’re also Scottish from way back, though they do not eat haggis.
And of course, there was Uncle A., Catharine’s best friend. He’s one of those
queers who was not united with his family for a long, long time. That’s why he
starting coming to our celebrations. And now, thankfully, he and his mom are
sorting things out.
My Catharine is a British-born mix of several European and South Asian
backgrounds, from a large Catholic family where bunch of siblings, herself included, happened to partner up with Italians. She thinks Christmas is all about the turkey. I don’t. I’m a half-Italian fishtunke eater.
So there we all were, eating my family’s regional German dish, that my sister
has perfected vegetarian style. (Which is nothing short of brilliant, our Christmas fishtunke is a beer sauce made without fish, with lots of ham and sausage, that you pour over meat, potatoes, red cabbage and sauerkraut.)
Some of us met again for a casual potluck on Christmas Eve. My stepmother’s
straight dude construction worker nephew came, and along with good old gay Uncle A, his newly re-united upper-middle class mom. We were at my dad’s and step mom’s crowded two-bedroom East York condo.
A’s mom, who brought gifts for our girls, even though she’d never met
them before, thanked my step mom for inviting her. “But of course,” my step mom said, “You’re family.”
My Buddhist, vegetarian Peruvian stepmother raised a glass, “To family!”
And to Catharine: I hereby resolve to not write about puke (so much) in 2012.
I have a friend who swears our daughter Lileith is a shoe-in Lily for on Modern Family. I say, there are enough similarities between that sitcom
family and mine!
Meri Perra is a community worker-turned-journalist living in Toronto’s Riverdale neighbourhood with her partner and two daughters.
