The Call of the Buffalodaddy!

It was several years ago as a young father that I began to see a need for some space for Daddy talk from daddies more like myself than the stereotypical white, middle class -middle-aged, nuclear family champion of old.

I was not white - I am Chicano

I was not middle aged - I was in my early twenties

I was not middle class - I was living in student family housing supported - holding down three part-time jobs and going to school full-time, poverty

I was not a champion of the nuclear family - I love my family and believe that there are many kinds of healthy loving families.

There was a publication that I read at that time that inspired my imagination to wonder whether a forum of sorts could be developed. The publication was one that my midwife-in-training wife was exposed to in one of her many hippie-earth-mama type settings of the time. It was and is still called "Hip Mama" You can read it at http://www.hipmama.com/ It was created by Ariel Gore and has been around for several years now. It still is a wonderful publication and community.

I am a little older these days and have moved significantly towards the economic middle class. I am still a Daddy first and all else second. I am a Chicano and I still consider my spirit animal to be Oscar Zeta Ocosta's Brown Buffalo (Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo - if you have not read, you must do so immediately.) My politics are still wedged between radical and liberal and my aesthetic sentiments are still untethered but tend towards punk-rock, heavy metallish with a generalized application of primal scream therapy. I think beauty is complex but universal and transcendant and I am a pop culture junkie.

I am interested in your Daddystories. Write about what it means to raise happy healthy confident bambinos swathed in daddylove in a postmodern-post zeitgeist world. What insights have you gained - what do you long to learn - what does a Buffalodaddy think of American Idol? All is fair game and I hope that you accept my invitation.