Nathan Had Two Mommies - Until Uncle Phil Cut Him Loose

 Laura and Felicia Grant-Middleburg were married in a simple ceremony in the Vermont woods, in a verdant copse they had discovered when walking in the Green Mountains. 

'Isn't it perfect?' Laura said to Felicia, hugging her and giving her a big kiss.  'Just the place for our marriage.'

The young women were in love.  Their paths had crossed at Harvard when they were both undergraduates, found each other delightful, compatible, and sympathique, and were soon an item on campus.  Harvard administrators were delighted when they learned about the affair.  They had deliberately recruited gay students, and had found ingenious ways to skirt the affirmative action strictures imposed by the Supreme Court.  The promotional brochure for admission said this:

Harvard is a welcoming, open society of thoughtful, intelligent, and caring student.  We are looking for the brightest but also the unique.  The Harvard campus can only benefit from the presence of those who value difference, who love differently, and who think differently. 

That paragraph ran the gamut of lawyers, and finally passed muster.  Nothing about actively recruiting gay students was in the text but its meaning was clear.  The accompanying photos, where the gazes of young women at each other in 'that way' would be an unmistakable confirmation of Harvard's intent. 

So, it was not exactly a coincidence that Laura and Felicia found each other.  There were quite a few women 'that way' from whom to choose, but there was something ineffable - the way of love - which drew the two girls together. 

College is a time for temptation.  The first time away from parents, family, and familiar surroundings should not be wasted, and so both young women were thrilled at the prospect of sleeping with so many beautiful, talented classmates; but in some women the urge for bonding is strong, and Laura and Felicia remained faithful.  More or less of course.  Both laughed at former President Bill Clinton's famous, 'It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is'.  Fellatio under the Lincoln desk was not exactly sex, he insisted to Congress. 

So the two girls admitted to a little 'what is, is' sex that really didn't count against the capital invested in their relationship. After all, being out of the closet had its perks. 

In any case the two women were married in Vermont surrounded by bridesmaids dressed in sylphlike white, flowing dresses.  The minister, herself a lesbian performed the ceremony, and rings and kisses were exchanged. 

Laura wanted more of a femme to marry them, but this jackbooted bull was the only priest willing to make the long trek from Boston. Life out of the ordinary was often make-do. 

Felicia and Laura argued bit over who was to be wife and who was to be husband; but they both agreed that 'husband' was far too straight.  They would be each other's wives and be done with it.  If, God willing, they had children, the issue of 'Father' on the birth certificate would be sticky, especially since the biological father would be Donor 357; but Vermont was at the forefront of liberal sexuality, and had changed the format of official birth certificates to accommodate the increasing number of 'unique' marriages in the state. 

Both women were lawyers.  Although the commute between New York (Columbia) and Cambridge (Harvard) was tedious and the law school curriculum devilishly time consuming, they met up at least every other weekend, graduated with honors, impressive clerkships, and headed to Washington where they would work. Laura with McKensie, Locke & Finch, and Felicia in the Justice Department. 

The bought a condo in a new building on Thomas Circle, and were very happy. 

The time soon came for pregnancy. Both women wanted a child, and IVF via an anonymous donor was a relatively simple operation.  The agency that facilitated all this was top of the line, and the women trusted them completely.  They had as much donor DNA screening data as was technologically possible, and an elaborate donor bio.  The choice was easy - Donor 357 was the one. 

Laura, the younger, would be the birth mother.  The pregnancy went well and she gave birth to a bouncing baby boy. 

At first both women were disappointed.  They had of course wanted a girl, but the decoding of the genetic double helix had not gone that far.  They could be sure of some things before they chose a donor but not the sex of the child. 

Now, double motherhood does not come easily.  Both women were brought up with fathers who were indeed father figures - strong, decisive, but loving men who provided the right amount of discipline and support - and so foundered a bit when it came to raising a child, a boy in particular. 

The luck of the draw was such that Nathan turned out to be a terror, a willful, rude, nasty little boy who allowed no retreat. As he grew older, he became a discipline problem at school, and the two mothers were repeatedly called in for consultation.  At the first meeting only Laura attended. Felicia was prosecuting a federal case in Minneapolis and would be away from home for an extended period of time. 

'You need to get the boy's father involved, Mrs. Middleburg', advised the third grade teacher who had not been informed of her double-mother marriage.  The school had been advised by lawyers from the School Board never to inquire about the sexual orientation of anyone, students or parents. 'Don't say you heard it from me, but the boy needs a good hiding', said the teacher. 

Laura and Felicia were discouraged.  They were doing their best, but despite their sexual orientation, they were still women and lacked that unique male, testosterone-driven anger and intimidation.  'Wait till your father comes home', was the old, now ridiculed meme of an earlier era; but there was truth in it.  had Felicia and Laura had a girl none of this would have been an issue.  But there it was.

Things only got worse. Nathan's willful disobedience, disruptive behavior, and downright meanness only grew, and the two women were at the end of their ropes.  Worse, the boy was heard joking about 'my two dyke mommies', and wanted nothing to do with them.  All his friends had fathers, and he had gotten screwed out of one. 

The high school suggested consultation with a child psychologist.  The boy refused, but finally after the threat of expulsion and having to leave his friends - a very bad bunch from 'across the tracks', bussed from deep ghetto Anacostia to white Northwest for 'diversity' - he gave in. 

'He's resentful for not having a real father', the psychiatrist explained to Laura and Felicia, 'and', he added, 'some nasty bits from the donor's DNA decided to show up'.  

He was a bad seed, Laura said, remembering watching the 1956 movie The Bad Seed, when a mother’s vague suspicions about having been adopted are confirmed: she is the biological daughter of a notorious serial killer and was adopted at two years of age by her foster father and his late wife. The mother now worries that the serial killer and therefore she herself is the cause of her daughter Rhoda's sociopathy, and that her homicidal behavior is genetic, not subject to influence, let alone reversal, by parenting or a wholesome environment.

'Same deal', Laura said to Felicia. 'Bad luck of the draw.  Out of the billions of XY chances, we get dealt a bad hand'. 

'Yes, but we love him', replied Felicia, 'Let's not forget that'. 

'Why not ask Uncle Phil to help out?', Laura added; but Felicia refused.  If there was ever a throwback, an unreconstructed male chauvinist pig, it was her Uncle Phil.  'I don't want that scum anywhere near our boy', but the suggestion had resonance, and Felicia finally let up and Uncle Phil had a sit-down with the boy over beer and cigarettes.  Everything from then on was 'Uncle Phil this, Uncle Phil that'. Talk about father figures! The boy was desperate for one. 

The two women felt defeated and disconsolate.  They assumed, out of a firm belief in the gender spectrum that sexual orientation was a choice, not a given, and with conviction homosexual sex would become universal in the coming Utopia.  They were not prepared for the Uncle Phil Effect, so casually referred to by the school psychologist who shared his observations about the socially more adaptable Nathan.  

'Sorry, ladies.  The boy needs a father - a real father', for which statement he was censured; but the truth of the matter was undeniable; and when he explained the entire situation to his supervisors, they cut him some slack, for quietly and secretly they thought the whole two mommies thing was weird. 

Now, the combination of the reprobate Uncle Phil and the bro's from the 'hood was the perfect storm, and although Nathan finally settled the two mommies issue in his mind - they were dismissed as his parents once he turned eighteen - he was, as the now fired school psychiatrist related to a colleague, 'one fucked up kid'.  

But who wouldn't be with that set up?  Uncle Phil felt that he had rescued the boy, Nathan was living somewhere in Texas 'punching cows' said Uncle Phil, and happy. 'Don't fret', he said. 'How were you to know?'. 

So Laura and Felicia led out the rest of their lives as old maids, as Phil called them, picky, bitchy single ladies in a Miami condo.  Be careful what you wish for. 

Political Hysteria - Why Is It A Female Problem? The Jekyll And Hyde Tale Of A Madwoman

Picture a liberal protest - pick whichever issue you want, ICE, the black man, transgenderism, the climate - and you will find angry women in the front lines. Many of them will have blue hair and nose rings.  Others will be ordinarily reserved dutiful women - female Dr. Jekyll - but at the barricades turn into Mr. Hyde.  They become wild-eyed, spewing hatred with volcanic anger, apoplectic, and hysterical.  They seem possessed, and in fact they are.  Somehow a bolus of uncontrollable hatred has invaded them.  

 

One is reminded of the horror film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers where ordinary people are infected with alien spores, fall asleep, and while sleeping become transformed into a new, alien life form.  Their bodily appearance has not changed - they look no different than before the invasion - but they are now part of a demonic extraterrestrial race. 

Women like Marfa are invaded by a viral hate that spreads quickly through their bodies and infects their minds.  By the time they march up the National Mall in unison, they have become thoroughly unrecognizable.  The spew vileness. They shake with venomous hatred, they are like legions of harpies arisen from some unholy nether region. And then, spent, empty, calm, and deliriously happy they return home. 

Marfa Potter was one of these women.  As she browned the pot roast and tended to the mashed potatoes, she was the very image of a Fifties housewife without a care in the world other than Kinder, Kuchen, Kirche. 

'How did it go?' asked her husband Barney, giving her a kiss on the cheek. 

'Fine dear.  All the girls were there', and with that the subject was dropped.  Barney had no idea how transformed his wife would become once out of the house and in a protest march. How would he know? And why would he want to know? but Washington being the center of American politics and the only place to catch the President's attention, Marfa's weekends were always spoken for.   

Psychiatrists have weighed in on the question of 'female revolt', and Harlan Evans Lord, professor of forensic psychiatry at the Duke Medical School has been one of the most involved:

Suffrage was a psycho-social turning point for American women, for it showed that concerted effort can make a political statement and effect positive change.  From that point on, women increasingly felt empowered.  They were no longer the dupes of patriarchal men.  They had withstood too much dismissiveness and second-class citizenship to remain quiet. Now was their time. 

Yet for most of these women, the elision from dutiful housewife to political activist was not easy, and suffrage ironically caused an upwelling of anger and animosity towards their husbands. Still unable to free themselves from marriage, and consigned to an unhappy life in the home, they became caviling and insufferable, but never understood why. 

The suffrage protests felt good, but they worsened the situation at home. Women under the duress of an authoritative husband took their pound of flesh in pieces, and the marriage became an untenable, chaotic mess.  

No wonder why Freud had so frequently chronicled female hysteria. The fact that Marfa was able to lead this Jekyll and Hyde double life was remarkable, but again the phenomenon has been well-researched.  Dr. Armand Phelps of Wayne State wrote the following:

American women have been perhaps unfairly caricatured as blue-haired harridans, spewing bile at political protests. Unfairly because the psychodynamics of the female are complex and difficult to decipher let alone to be disaggregated enough to pinpoint cause and effect; but fairly because the gender association cannot be ignored. Women simply are far more prone to political hysteria than men

'The pot roast was delicious, dear'. said Barney as Marfa was putting away the dinner dishes.  He gave her a hug and retired to his study. 

'Just like a man', thought Marfa, 'an unreconstructed throwback, a moral recidivist, a male brute who has never lost his club'.  

She was lucky that the next day was to be a protest against ICE - Donald Trump's gestapo deployed to round up legitimate asylees, lock them in holding pens, and send them back to the misery of brutality and corruption endemic in the countries they left.  

She left early in the morning, boarded the Bluebird school bus commandeered for duty from Montgomery County, and headed down to the National Mall.  Along the way down Massachusetts Avenue, through downtown, and finally onto Independence Avenue and the Mall, she felt her gorge rising and that familiar flow of adrenaline, emotional energy, passion, spirit, and desire. 

By the time she reached the Mall her Jekyll-Hyde transformation was complete, and the woman who got off the bus had become a wild-haired harridan, a Wicked Sister, a Salem witch, the Madwoman of  Chaillot.

It felt good, this release from emotional, male bondage.  It felt especially good to be with her sisters-in-arms, all marching to the same drummer, all expletive in their rage against Trump and their viral hatred of all he represented. 

It was a ferocious jamboree - a coven which covered the Mall from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, a razzing, cheering, howling gestation of pure hate. 

When she returned home to prepare the roast chicken, Spring potatoes, and glazed carrots she was calm and composed.  A woman at peace.  A woman who had spoken and become a spokesperson for right. 

'Delicious, my love', said Marfa's husband, kissing her on the cheek and giving her a hug, and the whole cycle came round again; but there was no demonstration planned for tomorrow, and so her fevered anger simply kept her up all night. 

The next day, she was unusually snippety, banging the pots and pans, sighing, and stomping in and out of every room in the house.  The situation - that inner psycho-social complex described by Prof. Lord - was becoming untenable. Political demonstrations, as satisfying as they were as expressions of both moral commitment, hatred of Donald Trump, and resentment for her husband who despite all overtures to the contrary was just as bad as the President - an arrogant prick- were her whole life.  

The end of the marriage and her commitment to St. Elizabeth's Wellness Institute came one after the other.  No sooner had she walked out the door leaving her husband with the dinner dishes, than she was picked up naked and wild on Pennsylvania Avenue making her way to the White House. 

'Something is bound to snap in these women', wrote Professor Lord in a sequel to his paper published in the New England Psychiatric Journal

No woman can sustain a double life for long, and for some yet to be discovered reason, political hysteria is a certain predictor of psychotic madness. 

As of this writing, Marfa is still at St. Elizabeth's and despite rounds of electroshock, insulin therapy, and heavy doses of anti-psychotic drugs, she remains interned. 

'No one ever claimed recovery from her type of psychosis would be easy', said the Resident Psychiatrist in charge of her case to Marfa's sister.  'We must remember that this illness started long ago.  She hated Eisenhower, didn't you say? or was in Nixon?'

Election Fist Pumps And Jubilation - Democrats? No, Putin, Xi, And The Ayatollah

The gym was a happy place, a jubilant place as members fist-pumped, hugged, and smiled broadly.  The Ogre of Pennsylvania Avenue had been given his comeuppance, and the party of conscience and compassion now ruled both Senate and House.  Yes, the President still had a veto, and turning back his hateful, racist policies would not be easy sledding, but right always defeats wrong. 

The jubilation, however, was tame compared to that in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran where Putin, Xi, and the Ayatollah were all dancing with joy.  Finally, the only president who knew, understood, and practiced Machiavellian realpolitik, who recognized their imperial designs and had his own, and who had finally thrown off the traces of moral exceptionalism - and who, therefore, was a serious, implacable adversary - was soon to be gone. 

In its place would be a nation of Neville Chamberlains, political idealists mired in ideas of social reform and world peace; a government unwilling to challenge them, always eager to compromise, negotiate, and come to mutually beneficial agreements.  In other words a government which would give them what they wanted.  

The mullahs - or the Republican Guard - whichever is the ruling power in Iran were delighted beyond belief.  Imagine that! they said, a Congress which hates Israel as much as we do.  A Congress which has already made its pro-Palestinian sentiments clear.  In a miasmic fog of idealistic good will, commiseration, and compassion, these Democrats have lionized, almost deified Hamas; and now that they are in power, they will encourage - tacitly, but undeniably - Iranian support. 

Of course Hamas and Hezbollah are nothing like the mythical heroes limned by America's liberal Left.  They are intellectual frauds who have notions of infallibility and a fevered desire to take over Jerusalem from the Jews - and Iran is well aware of this, but has used them to fight their battles to rid the world of the infidel. Now, with liberal Democrats in power, the historic geopolitical fight can resume. 

Putin and his advisors did handstands in the Kremlin, for they couldn't believe their good fortune.  The Biden era was back, and in the spirit of peaceful accommodation and good will, free rein has been handed to Russia.  Of course the Democrats will pass resolution after resolution condemning Russia's continued aggression against Ukraine, but will do nothing.  Under Trump a realpolitik settlement was in the offing, now off the table, but Putin is unfazed, just a little more powder in the cannon until The Little Guy decides it's time to leave, seeks asylum in the south of France where he can live happily with the billions he 'diverted' from America's myopic generosity. 

Xi is the happiest of all.  Already the leader in AI, and understanding how the new Congress will freeze all new American data centers, will stop innovation in artificial intelligence for fear of the zombies it will release, China now will control the industry and exercise even more financial, economic, and geopolitical influence. 

Democrats' crippling of the oil and gas industry under the aegis of environmentalism and global warming, will further increase America's vulnerability.  China, investing trillions in electric power and using its abundant coal resources and those from complaisant nation states, will control the market.  The US will fall farther and farther behind in energy production and become weaker in the face of a continuingly aggressive China. 

All three of America's principal adversaries were once the world's imperial powers, and none of them have forgotten this legacy; and all have a central ethos around which political interests can be coalesced.  The Chinese know that with the living legacy of the world's great dynasties behind them, and with the continuing ethical center of Confucianism at the core of their culture, they can dominate once again. 

The theocrats of Iran have an evangelistic belief in Islam, and building on the greatness of the Persian Empire - their historical legacy  - it is a perfect storm for geopolitical expansion. 

Putin has been open and transparent about his respect and honor for Tsarist Russia and its imperial reign. Russia has emerged from the stultifying miasma of communism and is poised to resume the glory of its royal past.

The United States has none of these central, consolidating, beliefs.  It is a country which has veered so far into diversity, identity, and a blatantly fantastical Utopian ideology that it has no ethos, no ethical center around which its citizens can be rallied. 

The United States is a beacon no longer.  Its democracy has descended into the worst gutter-sniping, senseless and purposeless political caterwauling, that it retains hardly a vestige of the Enlightenment origins so valued by Jefferson and the framers of the Constitution.  America is now under the new far-Left liberal government, a nation of patsies, easy marks, rubes. 

The gym members who had kept their virulent hatred for Trump and his supporters indirect and non-confrontational over the last two years of Republican control of all three branches of government - White House, Congress, and Supreme Court - were now ecstatic, bullying, and undaunted.  In just the morning after the results of the election were known, all reserve was dropped, and the locker room was filled with the most crude, hateful, arrogant slander. Every Republican defeated in the election was a piece of shit, a corrupt, elitist cocksucker. 

The reality will soon hit.  The Democrats over the last decade have offered nothing in the way of substance, thoughtful policy, engaging discussion, or innovative ideas.  They have existed on a platform of hate and nothing more.  Now that they are in power, there is nothing on the shelf, nothing in the larder, nothing. 

The radical Democratic Socialist agenda so admired by this new Congress - a giveaway program sure to bankrupt federal and local governments will increase hardship, economic difficulty, and social erosion.  By the time of the presidential election in 2028, the far-Left Democratic agenda will be discredited enough to enable a Republican presidency at the very least. 

Worst of all the racially biased, anti-democratic programs of Diversity Equity Inclusion will return with renewed commitment, and as a result the country will become more divided, parochial, self-centered, and exclusive than every before.

Putin, Xi, and the Ayatollah are delighted, for this neo-socialist agenda will further weaken the United States.  It will be so beholden to these petty ideological distinctions of race, gender, and ethnicity, that it will lose whatever focus it once had on global affairs. 

The whooping and hollering in the locker room will not last.  Jubilation over nothing is fanciful ignorance at best.