My Motherhood As An Elemental Force; My Family As Molecule

Because I really don’t think I can write a better post on the subject, I offer this as my contribution to the Second Annual Blogging for LGBT Families Day (even though it’s more than a month early) 

On the eve of our very first insemination, clear back almost three years ago now, when Julia was just a glimmer in my eye, I went to lunch with a friend from my graduate program. We were talking and she asked how our baby plans were going. I told her that we were going to inseminate the next afternoon and made the observation that in just a little over 24 hours I could be a mother (see how optimistic we were as newbies?)

I’ll never forget the look of shock and surprise that crossed her face. “But…” she spluttered. “But I thought it was Kristin who was going to be getting pregnant.”

Oh.

Right.

That.

She apologized. She apologized vociferously. Her apologies became embarrassing because in their very extreme sincerity they hinted at falseness. Like someone deeply apologizing to the emperor for mentioning the color of his nipples (which shouldn’t have been visible through his “clothes”.) And that’s when I learned that even with our liberal, sensitive, queer-positive friends I was going to have some explaining to do.

***

When we started trying to conceive (TTC) a child we didn’t know any other lesbian couples. We didn’t know any other lesbian parents. Oh, we had heard tales of such wonders, but as for real-life role-models, we had none. I hadn’t discovered the blogosphere yet (and, when I did discover it, it didn’t have the richness or complexity that it’s developed in the last 2 years) and so I felt completely unprecedented. And I was treated as if I were, too.

I had thought TTC was hard. We had fights after every ovulation, and each month we had our ovulation-induced, TTC-stress fueled fights, I was certain that we were the only lesbian couple doing this who were obviously too dysfunctional to be rewarded with a pregnancy. But, in many respects TTC was the easiest part of the journey for me. I had a clear role: I was The Wielder of the Sperm. I was The Wrangler of the Donor. I was The Pusher of the Plunger. People talked to me of our progress and journey as much as they talked to Kristin. Except for cervix-gazing (which I was forbidden to do because I couldn’t control my facial expressions when gazing) I was fully involved.

That changed after Kristin got pregnant. In fact, it changed nearly immediately. The night we found out that conception had occurred, we went to a winter holiday party thrown by my graduate program. We were surrounded by my friends, and those friends threw their arms around me and hugged me and congratulated me (they’d been well educated in the preceding months after the Lunch Incident). But a few days later, at Kristin’s and my big holiday party, we announced the pregnancy to our friends (among whom was our non-secret donor). And those friends congratulated Kristin and turned to congratulate the donor. Anger and hurt (on my part), embarrassment (on the donor’s part), and rushed apologies (on their part) ensued. I remember how our donor re-directed the congratulations back onto me as I stood there, spluttering and wordless. I fell in love with him in that moment and whatever small reservations I’d still been harboring over having a known donor disappeared. But that interaction was only the first of my being pushed aside in favor of bio connections. For the duration of the pregnancy, I felt lost and without place. It didn’t help that I was unemployed, that there were no jobs available to me in my field, that the community college chose to cancel composition classes rather than take me as an instructor with only a Master’s Degree but no experience, and that the PhD program I’d applied for turned me down. I was out of place in every aspect of my life, but it was the motherhood aspect that felt the most hurtful.

I went to every doctor’s appointment, every Non-Stress Test, every ultrasound. I went to the birthing classes where the instructor used gender exclusive language. I read books on expecting fatherhood and couldn’t find myself in those pages. I experienced couvade: gaining weight, having cramps, hair-trigger emotions, a fully-fledged nesting instinct, my breasts grew large(r) and sore. We met some lesbian mothers, but they were bio moms and single and had nothing nice to say of their former partners… and none of those non-bio mothers got any time with their children.  Because they held authority as “real” lesbian mothers, those women did more to undermine any sense that I was truly an expectant parent than any of the straight people who surrounded us.

And thus the pregnancy passed and the child was born.

***

Outside of legalities, what constitutes motherhood seems to fall into one of two paradigms for people: motherhood as an inherent, indelible fact inscribed by biology and/or pregnancy; and motherhood as a status that is earned. The battle for supremacy and “ultimate rightness” of the two positions for a not-insignificant number of people is a nasty one and takes no prisoners.

Yet, in the lesbian household where one woman gives birth and the other does not but they both consider themselves mothers, these two paradigms co-exist. It gives people the heebie-jeebies.  Who is the ”real” mother here?  More importantly, though, it can make the co-mothers feel at odds with one another in a scarcity-fueled battle over territory and (emotional) goods.  Especially in the absence of any legal protections for the rights of the mother who didn’t give birth.  As the child-birthing mother nurses and coos and basks in the glow of accomplishment, the mother who didn’t birth can often feel like a mother-in-waiting. She isn’t a mother until she’s earned it, proved it, changed enough diapers and wiped enough noses and taken enough rectal temperatures. She isn’t a mother, according to many, until she’s not only proved herself an indispensable part of that child’s life, but also until she’s proved that she has a unique bond with that baby that only a mother could have.

I don’t know how this plays out with the addition of a second child, but with the first child, this can be… troublesome. There are only so many diapers to be changed, after all, there are only so many awake moments for the baby to get to know you (the fact that Julia recognized my voice at birth didn’t seem strong enough proof that she was bonded to me). There’s just only so much TIME. And for me, it felt like I needed to get in there and earn my motherhood pips right away. In the back of my mind was the thought that if anything happened to Kristin before I had “earned” my motherhood by a dispassionate judgement, anyone could come and sweep my child away with a claim of unfitness and lack of biological connection (thus falling outside the bounds of both major motherhood paradigms and resulting in a knee-jerk judgment of Not The Mama by most) Surrounded by these fears and outside opinions, it was, at times, hard for me to remember that Kristin and I were supposed to be cooperating, not competing. That we are here to change those dominant models of thought. We’re creating a new paradigm — one that doesn’t work by survival of the fittest.

***

I’ve given a lot of thought about what makes a mother. Or, rather, what makes a parent of any stripe. Nudged a bit by this post of Julie’s at A Little Pregnant (and the NYT article she mentioned but that you now have to purchase to read, so I’m not linking to it) and heavily influenced by Lesbian Dad’s take on the issue, I’m going to propose that what makes a parent, what makes a mother, is the kind of primal love that would have you leaping between your child and a rampaging semi-truck and getting up at night, for the umpteenth time on the umpteenth night in a row, to provide some need to that self-same child, and spending hours just talking, playing, reading with the child.

This kind of love isn’t earned like a badge. This kind of love doesn’t necessarily come from a pregnancy or birth. This kind of love comes from a choice to open oneself up to it.  It comes from a commitment to embrace the responsibility and vulnerability that makes up a parent.  This kind of love just is and it must be there before that combination of above-mentioned stuff will happen.  And it remains, even if that child is later ripped away by death or circumstance or deliberate hate in any form.  And that love, that choice of openness, is what makes both women (or both men) equally a parent when the child makes its entrance into the world (whether that’s through birth, or adoption, or fostering). Like an atom looking for an extra electron, with the child providing that extra electron, fusion occurs and a molecule is formed. That’s the image of family-building that I’d like to see taken up and spread. H2O. My family is water, and water is one of the greatest forces for restructuring this world has known.

It’s a radical notion, I know, that no other qualification makes a parent but love. But then, radical notions and children go hand in hand. After all, someone wiser (and most likely with a better memory than I as I can’t remember who said this for the life of me) than I once said that parenting is a radical act of faith in the future. It’s a radical act of faith and love in the making.