A new answer to an old question

As is evident from the number of days since I have last blogged, going back to school has somewhat consumed my life.  I try never to complain about going back to school in the fall since I know that we, as teachers, are incredibly lucky to even have a summer break.  But truly, nothing in my life is quite as exhausting as the first few weeks back at school (at least until a baby enters our lives).  Since most of my time this week has been spent at school, it is only natural that the inspiration for this blog post occurred while I was at school.

At the end of one these past few days, I was walking down the hallway towards the office.  I was stopped by a good friend of mine, another teacher, who wanted to tell me about a Dateline that she saw the night before on transgendered children.  As the token gay teacher, I often get to hear about such things.  We were then chatting for a while about how our students really needed more education on gay and lesbian issues, including gay and lesbian parents.  During the discussion, she stopped and asked me if Carla and I were planning on having children.

The question caused me to pause for a few seconds.  For so many years, my automatic response to that question was, "No."  And since the answer has changed for Carla and I in our own minds, we have been careful about who we have told.  We know the road ahead of us is going to be a long one and filled with a whole lot of ups and downs and we just haven't been sure when we should tell the people around us.  So for a lot of people in my life, they are still under the belief that Carla and I don't plan on having children.

So here I was, standing in the hallway of the elementary school I work in, being asked if we are planning on having children.  And for the first time in my life, I could confidently respond, that yes, we do want to have children and yes, we are planning on beginning the adoption process after our wedding.  All of a sudden, I had this brand new answer to a question that I have answered a million times.  But it felt right.  It felt good.  It was strange to me how not strange it really felt.

And so we talked for a few minutes about what had been going on in our quest to learn more about adoption and then I walked away with a huge smile on my face.  It felt good to talk about with another person and it felt good to know that I was so sure of our decision.  So now I look forward to the next time that someone asks if we are planning on having children.  I look forward to being able to answer, "Yes. And we are planning to adopt."