Lucas Camilo

As some of you may know, a new book was just released called “Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood” and in it is an essay by Burke.  Here’s a post about the book…

Last winter we organized a public event that featured parents reflecting on having children with disabilities, and out of that I was connected with the founder of Rad Dad, a small zine edited by Tomas Moniz which explores parenting ideas and ideology, mostly from the perspective of dads.   The concept was really exciting to me, for as I previous wrote, it’s been hard at times to track down other dads (especially of kids with special needs) who are a) as engaged in shared parenting as I try to be, and b) bring their politics to parenting as it relates to disability, gender roles, health care, etc.  Subsequently I submitted a revamped version of a blog post to Tomas for consideration in the Rad Dad book he was co-editing with Jeremy Adam Smith (who wrote the Daddy Shift and whom I talked about previously).  The piece was accepted and six months later the book has been released.  Check it out and pick up a copy from the publisher or your local bookstore.

As the promo explains, the anthology comes out of previous publications by Tomas and Jeremy which:

“have explored parenting as political territory… pushed the conversation around fathering beyond the safe, apolitical focus and have worked hard to create a diverse, multi-faceted space to grapple with the complexity of fathering.  Today more than ever, fatherhood demands constant improvisation, risk, and struggle… Rad Dad is for every father out in the real world trying to parent in ways that are loving, meaningful, authentic, and ultimately revolutionary.”

Both Krista and I have done a lot of writing about Lucas and the challenges/wonders of parenting a child with special needs.  The piece I submitted for Rad Dad isn’t the most complex, or amusing, or emotional thing we’ve written, but it does get to the heart of a paradox that we’ll continue to confront in the years to come: celebrating Lucas for who he is while at the same time wrestling with the “weighty” challenges of severe disability.  It’s a theme that is repeated throughout the hundreds of posts we’ve written for this blog over the last two years.  At the time I wrote the essay that became “Upsidedown Lucas” for the book I was thinking a lot about Lucas’s rapid weight gain and what that meant for him and for our future given his extremely low muscle tone.

You should really buy the book and read the whole thing but if you want you can read my chapter by finding it on Google Books (my essay starts on page 51).  Our copy should arrive today so I haven’t actually read much of the book yet myself.  But I’m especially excited that it includes an essay by Raj Patel (an amazing writer and activist around food justice issues) as well as an interview with Ian MacKaye (founder of the seminal DC punk band Fugazi who also happens to live right up the street from us).

Finally, I wanted to mention that I really appreciated the response I got from my first reflection on dadhood that we published last May on Lucas’s blog.  I look forward to continuing the discussion now that the Rad Dad book is out, and I encourage people in DC to come out to a reading on September 23 at St. Stephens Church – details coming soon.