Lucas Camilo

Recently, the brilliant Rad Dad zine was re-launched as a full-on magazine.  The first issue includes a plug for a certain blog written by a couple parents about their son Lucas:

I’ve come to know Lucas Camilo through the blog his parents create and I am a better father because of it. Hell, I’m a better human because of it.  I felt so angry when he couldn’t view a movie because the theater had no handicapped accessibility.  Then angry with myself when I notice how often I participate in events that don’t either. I was terrified when Lucas was hospitalized and had to be resuscitated but brought to tears by the story of him meeting the first responders a year after the incident. Yes, I’ve been following Burke and Krista, Lucas’ parents, that long because they do an amazing job of balancing the personal story of their son and parenting a child with special needs while also reminding their readers of how they are still part of a lager community; they still work hard to create a more just world.  Burke and Krista and Lucas are the kind of of family I want mine to be.  Do yourself a favor please, read this blog!

It’s a very generous and flattering review written by the founder of Rad Dad, Tomas Moniz.  (And, you may recall that an essay about fatherhood by Burke was published in the Rad Dad book that came out back in 2011 so this plug was not out of the blue.)  We appreciate the plug and also recognize that it’s a little weird to have a personal blog — which we started ostensibly to update family and close friends about Lucas’s early health challenges — become something that would get reviewed in a magazine.  The truth is, many of our posts still focus primarily on Lucas’s day-to-day activities and probably aren’t that interesting for the broader “rad dad” audience.  And yet, at times our reflections on parenting a child with special needs seem to resonate beyond just the people that know us well.

The fact that people still appreciate Lucas’s blog is one reason we keep writing it.  But it’s also for our own personal benefit: the experience of parenting has ended up being quite different than we ever expected and so writing about it is one way to come to grips with the dissonance between those expectations and our current reality, how we see most other families around us, our own experience of childhood vs. Lucas’s… and so on.  We don’t always write eloquently about it, but just acknowledging that it is so helps us be more grounded in the world.

Still, we sometimes feel ambivalence about being so public.  On the one hand, we’re organizers… and most of our adult lives we’ve tried to live in a way that reflects our values, and even promotes them.  Tackling disability, grappling with grief and challenges, celebrating successes — and doing it publicly — fits into that.  On the other hand, there are certain things that are harder to share publicly; and yet once you start down that path it’s hard to know how far to go.  We’ve talked about the fact that Lucas has a hereditary genetic disease, for example, and therefore thinking about expanding the family gets complicated quick.  That reality is a big part of our life but not something we feel comfortable talking about in detail on a blog.  But we have written about feeling isolated around disability, about confronting feelings around death, about money, privilege, and battles over medical insurance coverage.  It’s all quite complicated and interconnected, made more difficult to articulate and talk about publicly because of how closed-minded our society sometimes is to honest conversations about parenting, among other things.

Trying to push the envelope around honest parenting conversations is what Rad Dad is all about… so if you’re interested and live in the Seattle area then join us this Saturday (March 1) for a radical parenting celebration, and some readings!

Rad Dad & Hip Mama Relaunch! SEATTLE – BLACK COFFEE COOP

We’ll leave you with this blurb from the inside page of Rad Dad that describes what its all about:

Being a rad dad is not about being cool. It’s not about being hip, not about trying to be in style, not a trend. A rad dad is about radical parenting. The uncomfortable kind. The difficult kind. Radical as in not complacent, as in conscious and conscientious of our impact on our children, our partners, our environment. Radical as in taking responsibilities for the privileges some of us have, whether we want those privileges or not. Radical as in being cognizant of how we challenge patriarchy (or not), how we impact those around us, how we might depend on unquestioned roles of authority and hierarchy.