Ep 168: Asexual Parenting feat. David Jay
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SARAH: Hey what’s up hello. Welcome to Sounds Fake But Okay, a podcast where an aro-ace girl (I’m Sarah. That’s me.)
KAYLA:… and a demi-straight girl (that’s me, Kayla)
DAVID: And aro-ace guy, that’s me, David Jay.
SARAH: talk about all things to do with love, relationships, sexuality, and pretty much anything else that we just don’t understand.
KAYLA: On today’s episode: ace parenting.
ALL: — Sounds fake, but okay.
SARAH: Welcome back to the pod!
KAYLA: M’onsters Inc.
SARAH: Oh, okay, good.
KAYLA: Moving on. It’s a bit we do at the beginning of every show and then we have a guest on and then I get embarrassed about my stupid bit I started like a year ago so I’m sorry.
DAVID: It’s cool, you have an empire now, you don’t have to apologize for anything. You have a Sounds Fake But Okay death star, it’s my understanding, so, be yourselves.
KAYLA: They do call themselves the Fellowship of the M’ob at this point.
SARAH: Oh the M’ob. Fellowship of the M’ob.
KAYLA: Yeah, so.
SARAH: Excellent. On that note, Kayla what are we talking about this week? Who do we have with us?
KAYLA: Obviously we have a third person with us this week and it is the amazing David Jay, finally on the show.
DAVID: Hey! Excited to be here.
KAYLA: Finally made it.
SARAH: Excited to have you here.
KAYLA: Yeah, I feel like we’ve been wanting to have you on for forever and it’s finally happening. We’re very excited.
SARAH: Indeed. For any of our listeners who might live under a rock or maybe are just new to the community, can you give a brief intro of who you are, David?
DAVID: Sure. I am the founder of AVEN, asexuality.org, which I started when I was 18 after spending my whole high school trying to come to terms with my own ace identity and at that point really just asexual identity, ace didn’t exist. Really wanted to talk to other people like me so I started the site back when the only the other thing that was around was Haven for the Human Amoeba, actually started before I knew that existed too to try to find other asexual people and create a space for us to figure ourselves out and many things have happened since then. I’m currently on the board for AVEN, I still do some amount of ace visibility stuff, though a lot of what I do is try to support folks who are more out in the front of organizing now. And, yeah. But have been a fan of you all for a long time and excited to be on the podcast.
SARAH: Thank you! When you suddenly joined our live stream last year, me and Kayla were both like, “It’s David Jay!”
KAYLA: We were both fangirling so hard. Before that live stream, I don’t think we saw ourselves as players in the activism scene or anything. We didn’t see ourselves as a big deal and we were like, “David Jay knows who we are?” And now it’s like, oh yeah we know David Jay, that’s normal right? I don’t know, it’s so weird.
SARAH: We were freaking out and also live at the same time.
DAVID: I was biking with my daughter to take her to the beach.
KAYLA: I remember you were streaming from the beach.
DAVID: I was listening to this live stream, and I was like, how could I participate so I was trying to keep her from drowning and the same and at the same time, be like, “hey, what’s up!”
KAYLA: Just parenting things.
SARAH: That’s as good a segue as ever. I actually thought of a really excellent, and when I say really excellent I mean a really bad segue earlier, and I’m going to say it. The kids at home, some of you may know David Jay as the father of modern asexuality. You know what he’s also the father of? A child.
KAYLA: A child.
DAVID: Octavia Hausfather Jay Kent.
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SARAH: Amazing. Kayla do you want to start us out? You kind of started these questions before I popped in and out into them.
KAYLA: Yes we kind of wrote some talking points so we could keep ourselves on track because for those of you who listen, you know things are never on track here. Let’s see, where do I want to start. Where do I want to start? This is kind of like, I know our listeners have requested that we talk to people about this. I think from the outside, being asexual and being a parent, people see it as a juxtaposition cause people are like, “oh to have a kid you must have sex. And if you’re asexual, you must hate sex,” which all of those things are untrue. Was that a struggle for you personally? First of all, did you always know you wanted to be a father? Second of all, when you also realized you were asexual, was that something you had to grapple with?
DAVID: Yes. This is a deeply soft preference, I think of myself more as a parent than a father a little bit, like I don’t not think of myself as a father, but part of what’s fun—I’ll get to this—I get to occupy this less gendered role which is fun.
KAYLA: Yeah I didn’t even think about that. That’s really cool.
SARAH: Sounds fun.
DAVID: But yeah parenting has always been my long game. I’m the oldest of three siblings in my nuclear family. I’m the oldest of 12 cousins on my mom’s side and I’m the third oldest of 24 cousins on my dad’s side. So I had a lot of children around me growing up all the time. I was surrounded by kids and I loved it. I just got such energy from being around, when I was a teenager, like having kids at every age beneath me. And when I graduated college and I started doing worky things, and was suddenly in this world where I only hung out with people in their 20s, I felt that after. So I remember being on the BART train going from my first job in San Francisco, in 2005 and seeing this ad for queer adoption, so it was like 2 dads and a baby that they just adopted on the BART. And I almost broke down, I was like, “that’s what I want.” So I’ve known it because of how kids have been to me and the struggle was never the biology of it, cause I was like, “there’s so many ways to have a child in once a life legally or otherwise.” That part I’m not worried about. The part that was really challenging for me was the commitment part. I was like, if I can avoid it, I don’t want to parent alone, not because that’s not a great experience for many many people, but because it’s a lot. If I can have support, if I can have people doing it with me, I think I can be a much better parent. I think I’m going to be a lot more happier and a lot more balanced. And not to say anything against folks who parent single by choice but for me, I knew I wanted a path, and I at that point was like, figuring out my aro self and like, all my friends can date and the expectations of sexuality doesn’t feel right to me, romantic language and scriptiness of it doesn’t feel like how I feel in relationships, so how do I have relationships that are taken seriously enough that one day I can want to parent with other people? And that was a lot of my motivation to start figuring out how to go on long walks with people, introduce intentionality into our relationships. I started doing that with a bunch of people, I started doing that with couples. There was one couple we were talking about co-parenting together and there was a moment in the documentary Asexual where someone was like “oh we want babies, we want you to be a part of that,” that was that first couple and that didn’t end up working out, which I expected it might not, we were far from having kids at that point. But in another one of my relationships, where we spent much time building trust, it did wind up becoming possible, it was amazing. I’ll pause on that part of the story cause I’m guessing you’ll get to it but the answer is, yeah it was really hard to imagine because I had a really hard time imagining how do I build commitments that strong, that was the struggle.
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KAYLA: Yeah I think that gets into a lot of just other aspects of the aspec community, is those relationships that are outside of romance and sex, like when people talk about qprs or we just kind of talk about how I see asexual and aromantic culture as being very friendship-based and really caring about those platonic relationships and I think kind of what you’re talking about works with having to have like you were saying, the intention in relationships, really caring about relationships that aren’t deemed most important because they aren’t romantic or whatever society says and kind of breaking those things down in order to get the things you want, which in your case, the ability to be a parent.
DAVID: Yeah, and there’s a lot in life that just takes a lot of trust and it takes people who are used to doing really hard things together and used to knowing how to make really serious promises together. And I think one of the missions that my ace experiences in life have put me on is just like helping more people to do that outside of romantic script. Cause romantic scripts are great, romantic people, they’re beautiful but that shouldn’t be the only way or one of the only ways to make promises that are that serious.
SARAH: Right and I feel like too, there are so many people who have children when they don’t have that level of trust with each other you know, like accident kids or whatever, and I think it’s good that you’re going into it being like, I intentionally want to build this trust, and I’ll intentionally build these relationships so I can be a good parent so that I can create this good little world for my child and you know I think other people who look at that as a little bit strange it’s like, well—
KAYLA: It’s probably what we should all be doing. I feel like anyone who has a child should probably be putting in as much effort as they can.
DAVID: Yes and I don’t want to tell other people how to parent. What I’m saying unrelated to our conversation today is being a parent is like you learn how there’s this multibillion-dollar parental shame industry that takes over social media and bookstores and everything and it is important to avoid that. But yeah, I think intentionality is good. It’s a good thing to know how to wheel. And not surprisingly, I chose a family where that’s our jam. And we’re like, we get to spend a weekend whiteboarding about our feelings, let’s do it! And that’s not for everyone for very legit reasons but it is for us. So that’s been helpful.
KAYLA: Yeah I can’t imagine Sarah whiteboarding her feelings. I remember in an early episode of the podcast we had watched your Ted Talk and I don’t know if you’ve done multiple, one of your Ted talks. You were talking about the exercise of sitting down with your friend and talking about defining your relationship with your friend, and I’d asked Sarah in that very early episode if she would do that with me jokingly and she was like, no. Because that is not Sarah’s situation.
DAVID: Well, y’all aren’t having any babies.
KAYLA: That’s true, just a book baby.
SARAH: Just a book baby. It’s actually really interesting that we’re having this discussion today because earlier today I was at a virtual baby shower and they were—it’s the first of my cousins to have a child in a long time. My one cousin has a daughter who’s 16. The first of the new generation of children of my cousins and so there haven’t been kids around in a while in my family and so they were talking about like, here are all the things that no one ever tells you that’s like not so rosy about parenting that you need to be prepared for and they were just telling all these stories and I was sitting there like, I could never. I respect parents so much. It’s not for me.
KAYLA: I can’t wait until—cause Sarah also has a fear of baby bellies, Sarah is very disturbed by the visage of a large belly with a baby in it—so, I was actually thinking about, I was watching a TV show where someone called their best friend to tell them they were pregnant and I was like when I tell Sarah I’m pregnant she’s going to be like, “don’t see me for the next year, I don’t want to see your stomach. I will not be there. I’m happy for you but please leave.”
SARAH: My sister recently got a puppy and I was so excited, I was like, I’m just going to warn you, I’m going to be way more excited about this puppy than when you have kids. And she was like, “No I understand.”
DAVID: I can respect this because I’m the opposite. So my co-parents have cats. And they’re like totally cat people and they love these cats and they have great relations to them and I just for some reason do not emotionally resonate with cats. I’m like, “you’re great, you’re here, I guess you need food I’ll give you food, I’m not out to be cruel to you, and you walk in the room and I don’t have a reaction,” in a way that if any child walks into a room my whole world is their world instantly. I understand and respect that people do the opposite. This is one thing that becoming a parent has taught me is how much I’m a parent because that’s who I am and that’s how I am wired and it is not for everybody. There should not be an imperative—I think there’s way too much shaming of folks who don’t want to be parents and that’s also like silly.
SARAH: Just a reminder to our listeners, we have two aro-ace people who have very different stances on what they want for their lives in terms of children, just note that. There’s a wide range, folks.
KAYLA: I mean we always say on the show, me and Sarah’s experience of our aspec-ness does not go for everyone and that’s obviously very true here, you have two people with the same broad identity who feel very differently about children.
SARAH: I’m going to be the coolest aunt and that’s where it’s going to be.
DAVID: See this is the thing. The question for me is not like, do you want kids, it’s how you want kids in your life. And the answer could be, “not at all,” it could be, “I want to hang out with a kid once a month,” and “I want that kid to know who I am.”
KAYLA: I feel like that’s how Sarah’s going to be.
DAVID: Yeah, that’s legit.
SARAH: My first job was coaching gymnastics so I was dealing with kids and I’ve been told that I’m good with kids, it’s just after about an hour, I’m like, “okay I’m done.” Like I can spend some time with you, if the kid’s related to me I can probably handle more than an hour but after a while I’m like okay, I’ve had my fill of children. Moving on. Anyway.
DAVID: That is—I don’t want to blast people—one of the things one of the people in our little community of queer non-traditional families talk about, is they said, it’s not that parenting is hard, it’s that it’s unrelenting. There’s parts of it that are hard, there’s parts of it that are gross, there’s parts of it that are anything else, it’s the you have got to be keeping this person safe and entertained like for the next 48 hours. And you don’t get a break from that. I think that’s part of why even just moving from two parents to three parents, for us, makes such a big difference. So much more of my parenting time is the first 2-3 hours when I’m most in it, and then I get to go do something else and refresh and come back for those most in it 2-3 hours, and so many people I know who are parents who are like, they're like on hour 15 a lot of the time. It’s just a really different place.
SARAH: People who are single parents or stay-at-home parents, you’re dedicating your entire like, sunup to sundown and also in the middle of the night when your kid wakes up screaming, to this child and that’s wonderful, but also it’s hard. It’s not an easy task.
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KAYLA: Something that I’ve been thinking a lot about too as I get older is that my parents are also still parents. Last year, when I first graduated college, I went off on my own for the first time and I was having the worst anxiety of my life, I was vomiting every day before work and every day I was on the phone with my parents, having them talk me down and I was like, these poor people, not that they weren’t happy to do it, they’re lovely people. But I was like, these poor people have been parenting me for 23 years and it’s still not over. These poor people until they are very old and it’s my turn to take care of them, like oh my god they don’t get a break ever.
SARAH: That’s another thing too that when people are like “oh are you sure you don’t want kids,” I’m like, yeah I’m sure, cause I feel like people when they think about kids, they think about having a cute little four-year-old. Or they think about just the stuff that’s Instagrammable, it’s like no. You’re taking care of this human person at least until they’re 18. If you’re a good person, longer than that. So it’s a lifetime commitment. And it’s something that not all people are willing or should have to make if they don’t want to.
DAVID: Completely. Just to return to the topic of how different we are, that thought was the deal closer for me. I was like, I know I’d love to have kids around, it’s good energy. And I looked at my parents now, and my siblings and I have a great relationship with our parents. And I look at their life where they’re like, oh we’re hanging out, we’re doing the things we like to do, and then we have these people who we’re really close to who are out doing new and interesting things in the world who we can import a little bit and stay in touch with. I’ve tried to imagine myself being in my 60s and 70s without kids and I was just like, I can’t, I can’t imagine myself being that age and being happy without someone in a generation below me. That’s a me statement. That was the thing where I was like, that’s how I absolutely know.
SARAH: Yeah I mean that’s good though that you were so sure about it, I’m just sure in the opposite direction.
DAVID: Yeah!
SARAH: You mentioned earlier that you have a group of queer parents. I know you live in the Bay Area and that culturally—
DAVID: It’s weird out here.
SARAH: But, did you receive any pushback when people found out about what you were doing or when they find out you’re in a three-parent household? What has that been like for you?
DAVID: I think part of my decision to be in the Bay Area is tied to me wanting to be in a place where I can build relationships with my family. So that is also a piece of it. The structure—I can give the blow by blow of how our family came together in a bit if that’s relevant. But we’re now in this place where I’ve legally adopted Tavi as a third parent. And the fact that I’m ace means that whatever weird feelings have about poly-ness or sexuality don’t get projected onto us. We just get an overwhelmingly positive response. People are like, “that’s awesome,” and if they’re a parent, they’re like, “I wish I had another person.” The fact that we figured out how to do it with three people and not two, I think there’s a lot support of. I think there are a few communities. There’s communities that support queer parents, like our family coalition. There is a group a really good friend of mine put together called Alt Parenting that’s just a bunch of folks, not all of whom are queer, figuring out how to form families that don’t look like a traditional romantic and sexual two-parent couple as the only parents. And it’s a bunch of folks who are in couples and they want to find someone else to have some relationship with. Some people who they’re like someone to exchange DNA with, who is maybe a little bit involved but not fully involved. Some people who have whatever their intimacy life is and they’re looking to be co-parents with a couple in a way that may or may not be intersecting with that. A bunch of people just approaching it in different ways. We’ve had a conference, we’ve had a few meetups, we’ve done a few virtual stuff in the Bay, and I’ve stepped in after we navigated that, to try and help other people try to navigate that, it’s just been really fun. There’s a few other kids that some people are integrating existing kids and it’s been cool to hear the different stories that come out of it.
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SARAH: Yeah that’s great. Did you have any legal issues? You said that you adopted her legally, did you have any hurdles with that or was it fine for you?
DAVID: We didn’t have hurdles but it was new. The story is, for a long time in California, there’ve been all structure family, there have been genetic donors who want to be part of the kid’s life, and so there were all of these pacts to create trust funds, to govern together, to manage visitation, or other stuff but there wasn’t a way to do legal parenting. And then not long ago, a law passed in California that made it legal to basically you can be on a birth certificate if you are giving birth to a child, if you are genetically related to the child, or married to someone who’s genetically related to the child. That allows up to four people on a birth certificate. And then you can then do what we did and in our case, my co-parents Avary and Zeke are married and also the two genetic contributors. I didn’t have any standard to be on the birth certificate right away. But there’s this other thing they wrote into the law which is basically you go through the entire adoption process and they added a checkbox at the end that’s like, “I know I’m giving up this kid up for adoption but we’re also not giving up our parental rights.” So basically you do everything that would happen in a legal adoption including a bunch of weird social work and question stuff as if you’re giving up the baby and at the end, you’ll be like “and we’re not, psych.” So we did that route and that took about a year and a half after she was born, which is longer than it normally takes in part cause we weren’t the first ones to do it, but they hadn’t thought of it a lot, but they had the answers figured out, how the forms worked. But that was hilarious because I had a social worker who had to come and interview me and do all of the adoption stuff and they showed up in the process both as the parents of the child being adopted and the roommates of the person adopting the child so they had to get interviewed as my roommates and they had to get medical tests and stuff as my roommates.
SARAH: That’s funny.
KAYLA: That sounds to me and my very anxious brain, it sounds like, what if I didn’t check that box and then I accidentally give up my child. Cause you say oh they were going through the process as if they were going to give the child up for adoption and then they were like, psych. But what if they had accidentally given up the child? That’s just my irrational fears.
DAVID: We’d still live together. I would have to give it up for adoption back to them. When they were filling out the form, and this is part of it, there was a social worker who was with them explaining everything to them which I think is also what you do for regular adoption, be like “I want to make sure that you feel comfortable with this still.”
SARAH: My godfather, he was single when he adopted his daughter, he started dating his now-husband when she was six months old. Now that they’re married he had to go through a whole process to get his husband also added to officially adopt the daughter. I know that’s a process, I know when he was first adopting her, he had to talk to social workers and the birth mother and he had to get approved and he had to make a whole thing and it’s a process. It’s definitely a process.
DAVID: Yeah and that being said, it wasn’t that bad. And I have a lot of privilege. I have class privilege, I have other privileges. There are two types of family law, there’s like rich people family law which is managing divorces or privileged people family law and there’s other people family law that’s much more the state interjecting people and just that mechanism wasn’t pointed at me but could very well be pointed at a lot ace people and a lot of other legit families. Social worker stuff that was easy for us. It was smooth, it just took a while. And then I got to have an adoption party, which was great cause I didn’t have a wedding I’m probably never going to have a wedding so this was my equivalent but I get to sort of make it up. There was no traditions so that was fun.
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SARAH: That’s nice.
KAYLA: We’d always talk about Sarah having—what did we call it?
SARAH: An adult quinceañera.
KAYLA: Yeah Sarah’s going to have an adult quinceañera at some point because she’s probably never going to have a wedding but she wants a party.
DAVID: I know! This is a thing. It was really fun to get design from scratch I’m just saying.
KAYLA: So, Sarah you need to start thinking about your adult quinceañera.
SARAH: I’ll do that. I’ll start planning that. I’ll do it for my 30th birthday so we’ve got a couple years. You kind of mentioned this obliquely earlier about how you became parents. I guess, can you give a smidge more details just so the listeners can understand? You met this couple, you formed a bond with them, you decided you wanted to co-parent. What was the next step from there?
DAVID: So the step up to that: I met Avary at a conference which is where I meet all of my people, some sort of conference. I met Avary at a conference in 2010 and that is right around the time she started dating Zeke. And Avary and I hit it off, we had all of these professional parallels in terms of what we cared about in the world. We were going to be intentional coworkers. We were going to hang out in the cafe together and work next to one another and talk about our stuff because there’s all these cool parallels. I got to know both of them. After about a year I had my first aro intentionality conversation with them and then we just started doing a bunch of stuff together like Avary hired me at one point, Zeke invested in a company I started, we went on trips, we did a bunch of stuff that built a lot of trust and I knew that I really want a kid, knew that I really wanted a kid with a couple and was kind of interested in them as a possible place that might happen. But I didn’t feel comfortable asking them directly, so instead I just did a lot of hint dropping like, I don’t know what romantic people do pre-engagement, but that kind of stuff. And then they got married and I played the role—not the officiant but leading up to it—I was the person who met with them to reflect on their relationship and how they wanted it to change. And after they got married, I moved to New York and when I moved to New York I said, “I want to be in a committed long-distance relationship with you. So I want to fly back to San Francisco three times a year just to see you.” And they were like, “that sounds great!” And have calls in between. So during one of my trips back to San Francisco, they sat me down and said, “We’ve been thinking, we really want to have a family, we really want you to be involved in a big way in that family, we don’t know what that looks like but we would love your help figuring that out.” And that was a really big moment for me because as I mentioned, aro long game, I was like “oh my god, this is happening.” I said, okay there’s a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, baby’s crying and I give the baby back, and on the other end of the spectrum, I’m changing diapers at 3 in the morning as close to an equal co-parent as we can get. And I said, “you don’t have to answer now, but give me a sense of where on the spectrum you want to talk. Because I could do the middle, if it’s like, I could do the middle of the week, like that would be exciting, I can work with that. I’m excited about the more intensive end of the spectrum but I want to meet you where you’re at.” And so they reflected on it and they decided they were also excited about the more intensive end and then we set this norm of ‘we’re going to try to be as equal as possible.’ And we did a bunch of stuff. We talked about our family’s origins cause we wanted to reproduce, we talked about discipline and education and money and put together a whole big agreement document. We spent two years having a bunch of conversations but the norm it came back to was, there’s times where we can’t be equal, but we’re going to try to be. We’re going to try to figure out kids, family, living expenses, and equally contribute to them. And we’re going to figure out how to divide up the day so that one person is primarily on parenting duty and that spreads around evenly. So, when Tavi was first born, Avary was the only one who could breastfeed but Zeke and I split the night in half, and one person would sleep and the other person would get up and help with whatever needed happening. And once she could drink from a bottle, Avary and Zeke would take half the night and I would take half the night. And now we divide evenly mornings, bedtimes, bath times and that makes a really big difference because in a lot of families, everyone’s always on, there’s a system that you should be there, and we all can be there and with the baby if we want to, but knowing that there’s times where it’s okay for me to go and do more work, or work on a creative project, or make time with a friend and I can not be present because I know that I’m going to be present later, and everyone knows that and there’s no guilt. That has been really amazing for us. Sorry, I can’t remember what the question was.
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SARAH: No, you’re good. Your response was better than my original question. I think the guilt factor really stood out to me as you were saying that you know, I can go and leave and do this and I can imagine that a lot of other parents would feel a lot of guilt if they went to do these other things, I think especially people who are socialized as women who are mothers and they’re like, “I can’t leave my child alone” and I think it’s good and it’s healthy to acknowledge that your child is a big part of your life and at the same time you have a life, you don’t have to be a parent 100% of the time in this kind of other section of your life.
DAVID: Yeah so my co-mom after Tavi was born took up fire spinning where she was like, “this makes me really happy, I have a better relationship with my body, it’s creative, it’s expressive, it’s all these things, it lets me show up in a better way as a parent and in general” and that meant that she was going on Friday nights to do these things and that was awesome because one of us just made sure to have her on Friday nights. And I had some things that I liked to do on Monday nights so I could have space to go do that and being able to do the other things that put me in balance and know that I was letting them do the same was really powerful. And it’s also been amazing for their relationship and for my various aro relationships. Before the pandemic, they got to go on dates. Now they occasionally get to go on these COVID-safe weekend retreat things. But they get space with their relationship in a way that is really good for a family and that I think feels more spacious.
SARAH: Just out of curiosity, you mentioned Avary as being a co-mom. What does your daughter refer to all of you as?
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DAVID: So Avary is mommy, Zeke is daddy, and I’m dadda.
SARAH: Okay.
KAYLA: Aww.
SARAH: I’m always curious about that cause my godfather he’s daddy and his husband is papa. And different families have to come up with different terminology.
DAVID: We have name-based conflicts cause there’s three sets of grandparents. So Zeke’s dad was already papa to his other granddaughter, so papa was taken.
SARAH: Yeah.
DAVID: Daddy and dadda works well.
KAYLA: I keep getting worried that if I have kids with my current boyfriend and so we have a cat together so when I talk to the cat I’m like, “oh that’s your papa” because I think papa is funny word even though that’s what I call my grandpa and so I keep being worried that if I have kids with him one day that’s going to turn into his father name which I don’t necessarily want because that’s what my grandpa is called. This is all very unrelated but I’m just worried that I’ve just already conditioned myself to what his father name would be and—
SARAH: Kayla’s just having a crisis.
KAYLA: I’m just having a crisis because my cat is my baby currently so.
DAVID: You know it’s never too early to freak out over parental name-based conflicts.
KAYLA: I mean, clearly.
SARAH: Incredible. Hard pivot. David, what do you think more traditional parents or people in general can learn from your experience in a three-parent household?
DAVID: This has come up a lot in this group and then there was this Atlantic article that Angela Chen of Ace the book fame did was awesome. The big thing that I wish happened more, that I wish people would learn, is how to have intentional committed conversations with people who are not primary parents about not showing up in a kid’s life. There are a ton of people out there who want more kid in their life and there just isn’t a way to create the rituals around it for it to cut through modern life. And that’s sort of what I found as a new parent. If we get to the level of every Tuesday, or the first Tuesday of the month or at some level, we don’t need to negotiate, I’m just going to be here unless there’s some reason not to be. Having the inertia in that way makes a big difference compared to if you have a kid, it’s really hard to plan things because you don’t know what their energy is going to be, you don’t know what your energy is going to be, and having more people to make commitments like that, to be showing up is a thing that I wish more people did. And beyond that, because we haven’t followed a traditional script, we just have been forced to be more intentional about everything, like we have a weekly family meeting where we figure out schedule, which not a lot of families do but it’s super useful to know ahead of time sort of what my parental responsibilities are and where I have free time. And it’s really useful if there’s something that’s bugging someone to have official time in the week where we can sit down and talk about it and not put it on the person is feeling frustrating to make the space for that conversation. Little things like that allow our communication to happen in better ways that I really like.
SARAH: I imagine that that intentionality, even for parents who may be a heterosexual couple, having that sort of intentionality can help you avoid just falling into gender stereotypes. And reinforcing that kind of stuff. That’s also just really helpful regardless of the number of parents, the gender of parents, whatever to have that intentionality so you’re avoiding falling into the trap of gender norms doing what you’ve been brought up to think you should.
DAVID: Yeah and that’s the other thing, is having an explicit way to check in about who’s doing what and then check-in if that’s actually happening is very helpful for breaking through that.
(45:00)
KAYLA: I feel like it’s an interesting reflection on, you kind of talked about modern life, working in kids into your life. I think kind of an interesting reflection of modern western society looks like too. I feel like you look at a lot of societies that aren’t western and they are much more family group oriented where there is a whole group of people helping raise a child or everyone intentionally lives more close together, or the grandparents are more involved in parenting a child, aunts and uncles are, and it’s an interesting way to get back to a place like that where I think just the way modernization is going, we’re going further and further from that.
DAVID: The notion of a nuclear family and the notion of I think from the books I read when I was an undergrad studying and stuff, the notion that you have two people together raising a kid and stuff the way it works has a lot more to do with the economic need to constantly have people split up and following jobs than it does with what’s good for raising kids.
SARAH: Kayla even as you were saying that, I’m sure that part of that fragmentation has to do with the fact that we’re an increasingly, because of the Internet and also because of whatever, people are moving away from home more. People are able to live farther away from family and still be in contact with family but not necessarily have those people there to help their children. It’s just kind of a different dynamic because of the way that, I’m even thinking of my own family. My dad was one of eight kids. And seven of the eight kids stayed within driving distance of each other. They were all there. But now looking at my cousins, we’re starting to split up. Most of my cousins are in Michigan but I have one who’s going to be Texas. I’m in Los Angeles. I have a cousin who’s in Las Vegas. We’re splitting up and it’s kind of sad.
KAYLA: My family’s the same way. I am used to having every holiday with my cousins because we all lived in Michigan and now we all live in different states. I’ve already moved twice since graduating. Oh Hello.
SARAH: We have a guest!
DAVID: You want to say hello?
KAYLA: Another guest!
DAVID: I’m having a phone call and they can ask you some questions maybe if you want to tell them stuff.
KAYLA: Our youngest guest yet.
DAVID: Let’s see if I can figure out how to get this on speaker. What are you doing? Did you just wake up?
OCTAVIA: Rest time.
DAVID: Oh you had your rest time? Did you have a dream?
OCTAVIA: No.
DAVID: No you didn’t? But did you have a dream last night?
OCTAVIA: Mm-hmm.
DAVID: What was it about?
OCTAVIA: Robots.
DAVID: Oh man, what kind of robots?
OCTAVIA: Talking robots in real life.
DAVID: Oh man, they were talking robots in real life in your dream?
OCTAVIA: Mmhmm.
DAVID: That’s a good dream.
KAYLA: Sounds very exciting.
SARAH: That’s pretty crazy.
DAVID: Yeah. Tavi do you have any questions you want to ask?
OCTAVIA: No.
DAVID: No you don’t?
OCTAVIA: *babbling*
DAVID: Tavi, what’s a song you like to sing?
OCTAVIA: *sings something in the tune of Twinkle Twinkle*
DAVID: That’s a good song!
KAYLA: That’s a good song.
OCTAVIA: Silly song.
SARAH: I like silly songs, I think they’re good.
DAVID: Tavi I got another question I don’t know if you’ll have an answer for this one.
OCTAVIA: What?
DAVID: What do you like to do with daddy and what do you like doing with dadda?
OCTAVIA: I don’t know.
DAVID: You don’t know? That’s okay, that’s alright.
OCTAVIA: I want to go back.
DAVID: Okay you want to go play? Okay, go play.
SARAH: Bye Tavi.
KAYLA: Our youngest guest. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve done it.
SARAH: What a delight.
KAYLA: That reminds me, there is one podcaster I like who sometimes does a short podcast with his oldest child who’s like five, and they call it the Charlie and Daddy Show and they talk about her favorite candy and stuff, it’s very—I feel like we should have more children making content. We gotta get em in this content game early. Monetize them soon.
SARAH: Yeah, monetize the children early. No for a second I thought you meant we should have more children on this podcast and I was like, it’s hard to have children on podcasts over Zoom, Kayla.
KAYLA: That’s true they’d probably get pretty bored.
DAVID: She’s been shy recently, usually she’s very outgoing. But she just discovered Jenga so she was kind of distracted.
(50:00)
KAYLA: I’ve seen a lot of things about babies born in quarantine who aren’t like properly socialized who are now starting to meet people and getting super freaked out because they aren’t used to seeing people outside of whoever lives in their house. I mean I get stressed out by people too.
SARAH: Way to bring us down Kayla.
KAYLA: Sorry, it’s just like, kids need to see people I guess. I don’t know how children work. I guess before we wrap up, for other asexual, aromantic, aspec people who are interested in having a family, having kids in their life, what is your advice to people like that?
DAVID: I would say, it is very possible. There are way more people out there than I expected—way more allo people, way more non-queer allo people who want to explore and so there are people out there who want to explore romantic parenting, aromantic parenting, whatever. The thing for me is knowing enough that I wanted it that I could start talking about it. When my friends were talking about their relationships or gossipping, l would talk about this as a thing that I wanted, that I would try to imagine. And being able to name it to other people let them know that it was what I wanted and let them help me find it long before I got to the point of actually having a conversation and sitting down to seriously talking about it. So, practice being able to talk about it in a way that you feel comfortable with.
KAYLA: Manifest it. Manifest it into your life.
DAVID: Yeah, like those books.
SARAH: Excellent. I know you had another sort of unrelated, but it’s all related on this podcast, thing you wanted to talk about. I’m just going to give you the floor and you can say what you will.
DAVID: Cool. And another thing that has come up in the world is that there are some changes happening in the federal government of the United States, I don’t know if anyone—
KAYLA: Shocking. What now? Not our federal government, couldn’t be us.
DAVID: That means that there might be a possibility—it might be slim—that there might be an Equality Act which deals with discrimination based on housing and employment might be coming up for vote. And if that happens, right now it includes a definition of sexual orientation that does not include ace or pan people. And there is some desire in pushing folks to include it. That might be really hard but it’s also possible. And one of the things that’s really missing, like when people go to congressional offices to talk about it, is they don’t have good stories of ace and pan discrimination. They don’t have stories to see and look at. So we’re doing a little bit of an experiment, if you go to bit.ly/acediscrimination there will be a jaunty little video survey where you can answer some questions and record a video, if you have experienced discrimination, record a video of what that experience was like. And then we will follow up and check-in with you, and if you give permission, they include that video as a resource in educating non-profits and elected officials about why ace discrimination is a thing they should care about. We’re focused on ace discrimination, if you have stories of pan discrimination and you want to share those, then you’re welcome to do that too. But we’re trying to find pan people who could lead asking for those stories cause that felt like.
(55:00)
KAYLA: And I’ll definitely include that link in the description of that episode so people can—and we’ll tweet it out and everything—so people can share their stories.
DAVID: Awesome.
SARAH: Great—not great that you have to do this. But that the work’s being done.
KAYLA: Other than kind of submitting those stories, are there other ways people can get involved in this initiative if they’re really interested in helping push this forward?
DAVID: There’s this Discord group that’s coming together, and I will give you a link to that.
KAYLA: I think I might actually be in it. I think I might be—I’m not in it typically but I’m in it. We should get permission so we can put it.
SARAH: I don’t know what you just said, but sure.
KAYLA: I’m in it, but I don’t usually spend a lot of time in it because—
SARAH: Oh but you’re not in it, okay I get it now.
KAYLA: I don’t know. You know.
SARAH: We’ll post all the links in the episode description. We’ll tweet em out, we’ll, you know. Cool.
KAYLA: That’s very cool to get more asexuality representation especially official government things, then “excuse me we are real,” says—not that you need the government to tell you you’re real that’s kinda—
SARAH: JOE BIDEN VALIDATED ME!
KAYLA: Feels good, anyway, it is a big deal, even if it shouldn’t be a big deal, whatever.
DAVID: And it’s good to be able to make a case for why people should care about our experience.
KAYLA: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Is there anything else on the Equality Act you want to plug or add, any other exciting projects you want to promote? Anything like that? The existence of your child, that’s a cool project I guess.
DAVID: She’s great. I’m doing a bunch of stuff but most of it’s my day job, not ace related.
KAYLA: Same, same.
DAVID: I think I’m good, I’m really glad you all covered this topic. I run into it various times, other ace parents, other aces exploring parenting, other aces who are taking the steps and I think it’s really awesome. I think it’s a really good thing for our community to be talking about. Like, on the full spectrum of how do we stop people who aren’t having kids from getting shamed to how do we support the people who want to have kids in their lives but not be legal parents, I think that whole conversation is important for our community and also is a place where we can push the normative world in a good way.
KAYLA: I know we have at least one ace parent in our Discord community. I’m sure there’s others, I can think of one.
SARAH: I think there might be two, I don’t two.
KAYLA: Whether you are a parent already or wanting to be, I’m interested—our community always has very interesting conversations after episodes because they’re smarter than us. So I’m very excited to hear everyone’s thoughts on this one especially.
SARAH: I also think too just normalizing this discussion is helpful for people outside the aspec community in part because the aspec community is seen as so online and so young and it’s like, “oh it’s just teenagers, they don’t know yet.” No, these are fully grown adults who have put thought into their lives—
KAYLA: And are raising an entire child.
SARAH: They’re raising a whole human being.
KAYLA: Terrifying.
DAVID: Sometimes more than one, not for us, but you know.
SARAH: Exactly. Just a handful of human beings.
KAYLA: Wow, that’s terrifying. I’m clearly not ready to be a parent I guess, imagine that.
DAVID: Fun fact, part of the reason that she’s named Octavia is that there’s a tradition of having Octavias in my name, because there is a tradition of having eight kids. My grandma was one of eight, my dad was one of eight, one of his siblings have eight, a couple of those kids are on their way to eight.
KAYLA: So are you going to have eight? Is that what you’re trying to tell us? You have seven more kids dropping soon?
DAVID: We started with Octavia so we can skip the end.
SARAH: That’s a good plan to be honest.
KAYLA: That’s a good hack. Hey gamers this is how you speed run having eight kids.
SARAH: Oh boy, okay. Kayla, what’s our poll for this week?
KAYLA: I don’t know, what do we want to ask the people?
(1:00:00)
SARAH: The only question that came to mind just now was, do you have kids?
KAYLA: Just, do you have a child?
SARAH: Not a very productive poll.
KAYLA: It’s not very exciting.
DAVID: Maybe something on the spectrum of like, you don’t want kids, want kids a little bit, maybe not legal partners, kid once a month, kid once a week, legal parent, legal parent with many other parents, solo, there could be many desires out there.
SARAH: Yeah, that’s interesting let’s do that. Cool, okay, Kayla I imagine you’re still typing that—
KAYLA: I’m actually not.
SARAH: She’s not.
KAYLA: I wrote a small note for myself that I’m going to flesh out into a better tweet later.
SARAH: Well cause you’re not typing, I’m going to ask you, Kayla what’s your beef and your juice this week?
KAYLA: My juice is that I’ve lived in this house for a full month and we just now got a coffee table. Which I guess is kind of a beef that it took that long cause it’s incredibly annoying.
SARAH: Was it your beef last week that you were using your couch as a coffee table?
KAYLA: I thin it was because I was but now we have a real table so that was exciting. So that’s a juice, we got a table today. Let’s see, beef is periods. They’re not fun.
SARAH: Yeah, cancel them.
KAYLA: I started pms-ing today and brain decided today was a good day to be depressed. And I was like, I actually had things I wanted to do today but I guess I’ll sit on the couch and cry to my boyfriend.
SARAH: A classic move.
KAYLA: Sometimes you must. Being a person with a uterus is actually the worst.
SARAH: Terrible.
KAYLA: Yeah, big news, I know no one knew that. I know that’s breaking stuff but yeah.
SARAH: My beef, my juice, I didn’t prepare any, I know we last recorded 2 days ago, nothing has happened since then. My juice is that it’s only 50 degrees today in Los Angeles.
KAYLA: Oh my god, is it warmer here than it is there?
SARAH: It rained? What an absolute delight.
KAYLA: It’s 59 for me!
SARAH: Oh my god! The rest of the folks in SoCal are like, oh my god it’s cold and I’m like, it’s beautiful. My beef is that my car was very dusty and I never get my car washed because why would I spend money on that when I could instead drive around a dirty car? I’m from Michigan, my car’s always dirty. And I was like, “it’s raining, it’ll wash off my car” because I need to drive to the Internet store today and stand in line for a long time. But then, it didn’t rain enough to fully wash all the dust off my car, so no my car’s all spotted, polka-dotted, you know.
KAYLA: That’s tragic.
SARAH: It is tragic. David, what is your beef and your juice this week?
DAVID: Oh man. I guess we’ll make headlines out of it.
SARAH: You can do whatever you want. We do big beeves.
KAYLA: It depends on the week.
SARAH: Last week my beef was capitalism. You can do whatever you want.
DAVID: What did capitalism ever not do to you? So, okay, my juice, this is really from two weeks ago but I’m going to count it. Tavi discovered a Mongolian metal band named the Hu band which I recommend you check out. She’s into metal and Magic School Bus right now in a big way. And I hadn’t realized how many metal emotions exist if you’re three but it’s a lot. And she’s also been singing for the first time and it’s beautiful.
KAYLA: Oh my god, she’s like a tiny teenager.
SARAH: That’s amazing.
DAVID: That’s been great.
KAYLA: I’ll get all my music recs from three-year-olds for sure. Tavi should be making a playlist, “here’s my metal playlist for when you’re feeling emo.” I have some music in the background on the speaker or something, let me turn it off.
KAYLA: Oh no, we can’t hear it.
DAVID: Hey Google stop. So, juice is metal. My beef is, I think this is more of an ongoing thing, my partner’s in New York. My aro non-parent partner and we haven’t gotten to see each other in a year this week. And so I’m bummed about that. We talk all the time but I don’t know when we can see each other again.
KAYLA: Me and Sarah didn’t see each other for over a year. We were roommates for four years.
SARAH: We lived together. And then we saw each other for one day and you went back to Louisiana and I went back to California and I won’t see you again until probably next year.
KAYLA: But it’s okay cause you physically can’t get away from me because—
SARAH: Contractually obliged.
KAYLA: We have to be friends for the next two years contractually so.
SARAH: Well, you can answer our poll, tell us your beef, your juice, your experiences with ace parenting on our social media @soundsfakepod. David, where can they find you on social media?
DAVID: I’m @davidgljay on Twitter. I’m on Facebook but I’m not in it.
KAYLA: You’re in it but not in it, you know.
DAVID: Yeah, yeah. And I’m on the AVEN board so there’s AVEN but I don’t get to hang out on AVEN that much. I kind of am emotionally not on social media because my day job is about how social media is horrible. And it keeps me too busy to be on social media.
SARAH: That’ll do it.
KAYLA: I got a new job where my job is social media so now I’m extra on social media so. But I get paid to go on TikTok so I’m not mad about it.
DAVID: That’s the dream.
KAYLA: Yeah, kind of is.
SARAH: Okay, wonderful. Find David, find AVEN, don’t find him at his house, find him online. AVEN’s also an excellent resource. We also have a Patreon - patreon.com/soundsfakepod. I’m going to throw it over to Sarah in the future. Thanks Sarah from the past, it’s always a delight. We have some new $2 patrons, and they are Megan O’Sullivan and Alana Bissinger. Thank you, you’re lovely, I appreciate you both. Our $5 patrons are Jennifer Smart, Asritha Vinnakota, Austin Le, Perry Fiero, Dee, Quinn Pollock, Emily Collins, Bookmarvel, Changeling MX, Simona Sajmon, Jamie Jack, Jessica Shea, Ria Faustino, Daniel Walker, Lily, nope, yes Lily but also Livvy both of them, Madeline Askew, James, Corinne, AliceIsInSpace, Skye Simpson, Brooke Siegel, Ashley W, Savannah Cozart, Harry Haston-Dougan, SOUP, Amanda Kyker, Vishakh, Jacob Weber, Rory, Amberle Istar, Rachel, Kate Costello, John, Ariel Laxo, Ellie, Tessa, MattiousT, Chris Lauretano, Sam, Kelly, Scott Ainsli, Orla Nieve Eisley, and Julianne, you’re all great. Our $10 patrons are Arcnes who would like to promote the Trevor Project, Benjamin Ybarra who would like to promote Tabletop Games, anonymous who would like to promote Halloween, Sarah McCoy who would like to promote Podcast From Planet Weird, my Aunt Jeannie who would like to promote Christopher’s Haven, Cassandra who would like to promote manifesting positivity, Doug Rice who would like to promote "Native" by Kaitlin Curtice, Maggie Capalbo who would like to promote their dogs Leia and Minnie and also H. Valdís, who is our next patron, Purple Chickadee, who would like to promote figuring out one’s gender identity and the non-binary community, Barefoot Backpacker, who still hasn’t come up with anything but I believe in you, great. Ashlynn Boedecker, who is @shlynnbo everywhere, The Steve who would like to promote Ecosia, Ari K. who would like to promote The Eyeball Zone, Mattie who would like to promote The Union Series by T.H. Hernandez, Derek and Carissa who would like to promote the overthrow of heteronormativity, Andrew Hillum who would like to promote the the work of Elle Rose who is @secretladyspider on Twitter and thank them for their amazing support and friendship, that’s very kind, Aaron who would like to promote free forehead kisses, and Khadir who I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, I believe Khadir bumped up their patronage just to support the name Fettuccine for Kayla’s new cat—now we recorded this episode before Kayla got the cat, but Kayla has a cat, the cat’s name is Gnocchi Fettuccine and Feta for short. There was some discussion on the Discord about what the cat was going to be named and Khadir felt very strongly about Fettuccine and I believe that’s why they upped their promotion so. Khadir do you want to continue Fettuccine as a cat name? Do let us know. We’re onto our $15 patrons now, this is a mess. I’m really not editing it. Our $15 patrons are Nathaniel White - NathanielJWhiteDesigns.com, my mom Julie who would like to promote Free Mom Hugs, Sara Jones who is @eternalloli everywhere, Andy A who would like to promote Being in unions and IWW, Martin Chiesel who would like to promote his podcast, Everyone’s Special and No One is, which is his podcast, Miranda Denton who would like to promote Casa Q, Leila, who would like to promote love is love also applying to aro people, Shrubbery who would like to promote the Planet Earth, Dia Chappell who would like to promote their Twitch channel, twitch.tv/MelodyDia and Dragonfly who would like to promote the fact that we forgot to mention that our episode of Queery with Cameron Esposito, Cameron’s podcast, it came out and we forgot to say anything about it because we were so enamored by David Jay. So give that a listen if you haven’t, hear what it sounds like when the audio’s properly mixed. Anyone have any tips for dummies who have Adobe Audition for how to make our voices sound better? Let me know. I don’t have a lot of skills. They need to be simple tips, guys. Anyway, cool, thanks bye, back to Sarah in the past.
KAYLA: Thanks, Sarah from the past, this is me, Sarah from the future doing the weather. Back to you.
SARAH: Thanks, Sarah from the future. I don’t even have my thing pulled up cause I’m not reading the patrons. Thank you so much for joining us, David, it has been a delight. Any last words for the kids at home?
DAVID: However you want to have kids in your life or not is great. Take the time to name that with conviction and pride.
KAYLA: Hell yeah.
SARAH: Good. Excellent. Kayla—what’s the outro? Thank you—
KAYLA: Thank you for listening. Tune in next Sunday for more of us—should we switch it this week? Should I say that? Do you think people would have an aneurism?
SARAH: Yeah, sure, mix it up. Thank you for listening, tune in next —week, no next Sunday for more of us in your ears.
SARAH: And until then, take good care of your cows.