Adventures in (Lesbian) Baby-Making

We asked you to send us your stories about being truly unstoppable lesbian moms, and the following essay by Lynne Marie is our contest winner! Thank you to everyone who submitted essays — you all are seriously unstoppable, and brilliant and inspiring and I want to be your best friend and hear all your stories all the time. —Laneia

I can’t remember if it was the first shipment of sperm that got stuck in California or if we’d already tried once by then.

It seems like I’d remember. But those early days just blur together now.

Even the middle days are not so clear. That time we tried in the doctor’s office in the middle of the workday? We’d been at it more than a year already. I wore a navy linen dress and came back to campus afterward to meet with my new boss. Did the semen really trickle down my crotch as I set my face in a shape of curious attentiveness? It seems unlikely, what with the vial being smaller than a thimble and the insemination having gone directly into my uterus. But I remember stickiness and linen, the bruised internal feeling that follows a speculum, and my desperate lack of interest in anything but the collision of sperm and egg.

The weekend the sperm got lost, Peach brought Tizzy up from New York to visit. I told Liz that Tizzy was our London friend who came to the states all the time to visit her various lovers and friends from college, when she travelled the U.S. as a footballer. I didn’t tell her how attractive and funny and flirty Tizzy was. It was fun to see Liz blanch as they came off the bus.

“You didn’t tell me she was cute,” she snipped.

It would have been a good weekend if I hadn’t had a god-awful cold, if we hadn’t decided to stop eating everything delicious — wheat, dairy, meat — if I wasn’t so worried about the damned sperm. At lunch at P&E’s I ordered the hummus platter without the whole wheat roll, even though everybody knows the whole wheat roll is the best thing on the menu. I was so congested all I could taste was the lemon I squeezed onto everything. I was so feverish I wondered how I was going to walk home.

I kept thinking, “I only get to see Tizzy every few years, I should be enjoying this more.”

I kept thinking, “I wonder where my damned sperm is?”

I left Peach and Tiz in town with Liz and went home to hunt down my sperm. It should have been waiting for me in our back hall on Friday, and here it was Saturday and no one knew where it was. I called the nice girls at the sperm bank again. Finally someone called me back.

“We found it,” she said. “It’s at the Oakland Airport.”

Whenever I think about that shipment, I imagine a silver canister of liquid nitrogen tagged with universal biohazard labels circling endlessly on a baggage carousel, all the other luggage anxiously pulling away from it.

Most of the lesbians I know got pregnant on the first try. This is not actually normal but it kept happening, so it seemed normal. Also all of the women in my department at the University got pregnant. We laughed at staff meetings and said, “It must be in the water.”

I drank the water, but I didn’t get pregnant on the first try. Or the second or third, either.

The process of figuring out when to buy the sperm was challenging. I had to take my vaginal temperature every day and track it on some kind of chart. Also, there was a very fancy ovulation predictor we bought at Walmart that tracked things automatically. We hated to buy anything at Walmart, but that’s where the fancy ovulation predictors were, so we braved the bright lights and wide aisles.

I had to pee on a special stick every day during the middle weeks of my cycle then push the pee-stick into a slot in the computer. It would tell me whether or not I was ovulating. It could tell me when I was approaching ovulation. But it couldn’t ever tell me exactly how many more days it would be before I ovulated. So I still had to guess about when the sperm should come out of the freezer in Oakland, be placed into the canister of liquid nitrogen, and get sent to the airport.

Samantha gave me a hard time about buying the ovulation predictor and the pee-sticks at Walmart. “I bet you could order them online,” she said, after I’d concluded I couldn’t. She’d put a fair amount of energy into trying to fight Walmart coming to her little town and they’d come anyway, so I wanted to cut her some slack.

But I had to think: “You can get sperm from that husband of yours any time you want. I’ve got one chance a month and I’m gonna be damned sure it gets here on the right day.”

A year after we hooked up, Liz and I stuffed her belongings into a rental car and drove over the bridge to my apartment in Brooklyn so we could bank her rent and plot our escape from New York. It wasn’t long after that until we borrowed my dad’s wood-paneled station wagon and drove out to see a financial advisor in some leafy Connecticut suburb. He came highly recommended by an evangelical Christian on my job. He assumed that we would adopt in a future so distant we didn’t need to start saving for it, but that we’d need a $30,000 car soon. Our combined income was under $100,000. We set up bank drafts that sucked most of both paychecks into mutual funds every week.

Liz flattened a woodchuck driving home from the Christian financial adviser’s office. She couldn’t swerve without causing an accident on the parkway, so she aimed that tank of a car right over its doomed, slow-moving bulk with tears streaming down her face.

There is a sperm bank within 100 miles from our home, an entirely drivable distance, but it didn’t have an identity release program. The identity release bank we chose, over three thousand miles away, offered the largest available catalog of sperm donors willing to be contacted by their future progeny upon the child’s 18th birthday at the child’s request. These donors’ vials had a surcharge for the privilege of an option that might never be taken. In the online catalog these donors are marked “yes” in the identity release field. We came to think of them as “yes donors.”

I’m supposed to say that there are lots of ways to make a family — that “yes donors” are right for some families and “no donors” for others, and some dykes just get knocked up by a good friend or neighbor, and that’s a great choice too. But there was never any choice about it for me. I could not know my donor. I did not want even the shadow of a parent other than me or Liz. I feared the whispering presence of grandparents or siblings. I wanted legal-clad certainty that he could never initiate a shift from donor to dad.

I wanted him to be sure, as sure as a person can possibly be, that he was just giving me sperm. Even if what I got was was a baby.

But as deeply as I knew that I wanted to be knocked up by a stranger, I had no idea what my kid — my imagined, wished for, yet un-conceived kid — might want. What if he wanted a father? What if she needed another family? What if my child was so different from me that he needed to know the other side of the equation, where his personality originated? What if she was so curious that she couldn’t stand part of her own self being a mystery?

What if, in some future so far away I couldn’t even imagine it, my child—a person who didn’t even exist yet needed to know?

The Zen koan asks, “What was the shape of your face, before your mother or father was born?”

We chose “yes.” We paid the freight.

Shake, Don’t Wipe!

Motrin^®‘s mission is to create solutions that stop pain from stopping you. Motrin^® does this by effectively treating at the source of pain, allowing you to stay extraordinary and granting “unstoppable power.” Also unstoppably powerful? Moms. Of course around here, when we talk about Moms we’re talking about queer Moms. Lesbian Moms face unique challenges on the road to extraordinariness, and thus Autostraddle and Motrin^® are proud to bring you “True Stories of Unstoppably Extraordinary Lesbian Moms,” an essay series featuring some of our favorite “mommy bloggers” telling stories of challenges faced and tackled.

The third piece in this series is from Deborah Goldstein, Managing Editor at VillageQ and Publisher at Peaches & Coconuts.

“You can’t do that to him. Shake don’t wipe!!” yelled Matt, Wendy’s husband from what sounded like the other side of their house. Wendy was relaying my conundrum to Matt while I waited not so patiently on the other end of the phone. I hadn’t quite achieved the level of panic, but I was concerned enough to seek outside counsel.

Sometimes, when you’re in the business of parenting, you have to phone a friend for a bit of perspective and advice. Sometimes, you have to phone more than one. And sometimes, moms need input from dads just as much as they do other moms. Parenting is stressful, high-pressure business. One misstep, and your kid’s therapy will cost exponentially more than college tuition, she said neither confirming nor denying that she was speaking from personal experience. This particular mom needed to hear from all interested parties to avoid a monumental parental gaffe.

Few developmental milestones set a parent up for supreme failure than toilet training. Do it wrong and the results may be catastrophic. We could have ended up with an anxiety-ridden excessively controlling delinquent who covered our bedroom walls in feces in the middle of the night, or at least a very constipated child. Who knows how many crimes are committed each year due to lack of regularity? I was at my most vulnerable in facing the pressure of managing a healthy, affirming, supportive and hygienic toilet training. Having already successfully chaperoned one child out of diapers, our friends Wendy and Matt would be my consiglieri during this critical time.

Had I been toilet training a daughter, I wouldn’t have felt as conspicuous. Due to our basic mechanics, there are few choices in the early years. Sit, wipe, flush, wash. Children with boy parts have the option to sit or stand. Should we start with a seated potty or stand him up on a booster and take aim? Or do we invest in a child-sized, training urinal? Yes, they exist! Then there’s the matter of wiping. While all children wipe the backside, only girls are expected to blot in front. This double standard made no sense to me when blotting would clearly benefit both parties.

“But Wendy,” I said justifying our recent toilet training teachings, “what about the residuals? A good shake isn’t always sufficient, is it? You can’t guarantee that there won’t be leftovers after a shake, can you? Sure, it makes sense that girls wipe, but why don’t boys? Isn’t the goal the same for both genders? Shouldn’t everyone be taught that clean, dry underwear is preferable over picky, stained underwear? Ask Matt. Ask him!”

Before we had children we discussed all the challenges two women would face. We knew it wouldn’t be easy but then again, when is it ever? We tried to anticipate some of the questions our kids would ask, and we tried to prepare answers to have at the ready. We contemplated some of the ignorant people and ugly situations they may meet in their lives and discussed how we would empower them with education, love and confidence. We’d surround ourselves with a supportive community and hope for the best. We never talked about whether boys should wipe or shake.

I waited for Wendy to submit evidence in favor of boys wiping themselves after evacuating. I paced back and forth while I waited for the verdict. I knew what Matt would say. Boys don’t wipe. The fact that they should wipe is not evidence enough to teach our son to be the only wiping boy child at preschool and beyond. I had to ask myself the question that I never wanted to ask out loud or even in my head, “Would a father have done a better job?”

I loathe that voice in my head that negates all that Gabriella and I have done to create our family and provide a safe and supportive environment for our children. I loathe that taunting, judging voice, but I can’t pretend it’s not there. I hear it when Asher asks me if he’s going to have to shave when he gets older and I wonder how I’m going to teach him. I hear it when the neighbor kids ask Asher to play football with him, and he doesn’t know the first thing about the game because he’d rather watch a cooking show than football. I hear it every time we’re standing outside a public restroom, and I have to decide whether to let him go into the Men’s room by himself.

Of course, I know how to shut that voice up. I answer myself with all the intellectually correct responses. “What of all the single mothers, by choice and otherwise, raising sons? What of the straight, married mothers who take on the most of the day-to-day child rearing? What of the fathers who also prefer a cooking show to football?” I quiet that voice temporarily, but I’ll never be rid of her entirely. There’s too much at stake to feel completely confident.

All parents wonder if they’re doing it right. We all focus on our shortcomings and worry that we’ll do our children a disservice because we aren’t everything they need. In my heart I know my son does not need a man in the house to realize all that is amazing about him. I know that Gabriella and I are good parents who could not love our children any more than we do. I also know that we have created a strong and supportive community amongst our friends and that there is no shame in checking in with them to gain a little perspective every now and then.

“Matt says you can’t do that to him anymore,” Wendy reported, and from the other side of the house I heard Matt chime in once more, “Shake-don’t wipe!”

“Ok,” I conceded. “He’ll shake.”

I work at a preschool now, and I accompany many young children to the bathroom. Most of them are in the early stages of toilet training. Occasionally, I help pull up underpants and push down flush levers. The other day, I helped a small, 2-year-old boy up on to the toilet seat, his preference being to sit while he peed. I knew his mother and father from the neighborhood, but we weren’t close enough to discuss his toilet habits. When he finished, he held out his hand to me.

“Do you want me to help you down?”

He shook his head, no.

“What do you need?”

He pointed to the toilet paper.

I ripped off some paper for him. “Kank-you,” he said as he gave himself a wipe.

Deborah Goldstein is a freelance writer, blogger and managing director for VillageQ.com, a community site that gives voice to the experience of LGBTQ families. Deborah publishes a medley of miscellany on her personal blog Peaches & Coconuts, identified by Huffington Post as one of the 7 Favorites For Post 50 Women. At times, she steps out from behind the screen to bring her words to life at spoken word events such as Edgy Suburban Moms, Listen To Your Mother, Funny Pages and Staten Island’s annual arts festival, Art by The Ferry. Follow her on Twitter at @psandcs.

Win a New Tablet With Your Unstoppably Extraordinary Lesbian Mom Story

My mom is my hero. She’s truly the most extraordinary person in the world. She’s always been a total dynamo, from the time she talked my 6th grade math teacher out of failing me (undeservedly, I promise!) to the time I called her after I got hit by a car and she showed up at the scene with the store’s phone still in her hand. Seriously, the woman was an EMT when she was pregnant with me and still answers the phone when I call her at 3am. She has worked countless hours to give her children a better life and has never once complained about it. My mom’s unstoppable. I hope I someday I’m half as amazing as my mother was.

(via craftedbylindy.blogspot.com)

When I tell people about my mom, they usually have similar stories. Mothers are incredible people, and they’re usually the last person to ever admit it. In fact, my mom always says, “Just doing what I had to” if you ever give her a compliment about her actions. Well, it’s about time credit is given where it is so rightly deserved — and we wanna hear it straight from the source!

True Stories from Unstoppably Extraordinary Lesbian Moms: Essay Contest

Are you a lesbian mom? We want to hear about how incredible you are, too! We think it’s time you step up and toot your own horn. No need to be humble, we already know you’re awesome and it’s time everyone else did, too.

an example of an incredible mom (via catmeow.com)

We’re looking for first-person story submissions from lesbian moms about when you faced a challenge and triumphed through it — a time when you were or felt unstoppable.

Did you once kill a wasp with your bare hands so it wouldn’t sting your daughter? Have you driven all night so you could be with your son after his dog died? Did you recover smoothly from a divorce or breakup that threatened to weaken your family bonds? Did you raise a thriving family in a homophobic community? Was there some seemingly insignificant moment that was anything but which made you realize that you were unstoppable in your own unique way? We want to hear about it!

Winning submissions will be featured and published on Autostraddle.com (articles sponsored by MOTRIN®) and perhaps best of all: you’ll be the happy winner of a new tablet provided to you by the makers of MOTRIN®!

We’re also excited just to hear stories from the many mothers in our community — perhaps this contest will enable our family to grow a little too. We wanna listen to your voice!

Official Contest Rules
No purchase necessary. To enter, send your typed, double-spaced essay (between 800 and 3,000 words, .doc or .docx format) to laneia [at] autostraddle [dot] com by Wednesday, January 1st at 12pm pst. Please include “Unstoppable Mom” in your subject line. Contest begins Wednesday, December 18, 2013 at 10am pst and runs through Wednesday, January 1, 2014 at 12pm pst. Only one entry per person, please. Open to legal residents of the United States 18 and older. Void where prohibited by law. All entries will be judged by Autostraddle senior editors based on originality, creativity, use of language, and adherence to contest theme. Submitted essays must be original, nonfiction works. Incomplete, inaccurate, and invalid entries are subject to disqualification. Decisions made by judges are final and binding. Winner will be notified by email on or about Tuesday, January 7, 2014.

We’ll announce the lucky winner on or about Wednesday, January 8, 2014!

Happy writing!

How My Motherhood Made My Mother Accept My Lesbianism

Motrin^®‘s mission is to create solutions that stop pain from stopping you. Motrin^® does this by effectively treating at the source of pain, allowing you to stay extraordinary and granting “unstoppable power.” Also unstoppably powerful? Moms. Of course around here, when we talk about Moms we’re talking about queer Moms. Lesbian Moms face unique challenges on the road to extraordinariness, and thus Autostraddle and Motrin^® are proud to bring you “True Stories of Unstoppably Extraordinary Lesbian Moms,” an essay series featuring some of our favorite “mommy bloggers” telling stories of challenges faced and tackled.

Our second piece in this series is from Vikki Reich, Managing Editor for VillageQ, a site that gives voice to the experience of LGBTQ parents.

I came out to my mother when I was 20 and it didn’t go as I had expected. Meaning, she did not say “I have suspected this for years and I still love you.” It went more like a Scared Straight kind of thing but instead of scaring me about drugs and a life of crime, she wanted to scare me straight, straight. “Just Say No to Lesbianism” straight.

“Have you ever seen a lesbian, Vikki?”

I was about to answer but it turned out to be a rhetorical question.

“There’s a lesbian that lives down the road and she wears overalls and drives a tractor. You cannot be a lesbian.”

Given my aversion to hard labor and dirt, I could see why my mother couldn’t picture me as a tractor-driving lesbian, so I tried to explain that there were other kinds of lesbians. But she wouldn’t listen.

See, we lived in a small town in Southern Missouri called Climax Springs (ironic, really) and in Climax Springs, there was only one kind of lesbian and that lesbian was a farmer, and since my mother deemed me incapable of farming, clearly I was not a lesbian.

If there was a “Scared Straight Straight” manual, my mother skipped right to the last chapter and threatened to disown me. “When you walk out of this house at the end of the summer, you will no longer be my daughter.” I suggested that perhaps I should spend my summer vacation somewhere else and she said, “No. We’ll suffer through these last three months and then say our goodbyes.” It was the making of the worst “What I Did On Summer Vacation” essay ever.

The days passed and we barely spoke to each other, each of us biding our time until the summer would end and I could return to Grinnell College which churned out lesbians at a delightful rate.

Then one morning, I came out of my bedroom where I’d been hiding – playing the guitar and pining for my girlfriend who was in Vermont – and my mom announced that she’d be digging up the septic tank “by hand” and thought maybe I could help her.

My first thought was that no one digs up their septic tank by hand so I told her that she should hire somebody with an appropriately large piece of machinery to come do it. She explained that the ground was too soft to get a backhoe down there and I took her word for it because I didn’t know what a backhoe was and then declined her invitation.

Instead, I watched her from the upstairs window as she sat herself on the ground with her small spade and set to digging up the earth. She’d had a triple bypass the summer before and I noticed that her shovel-wielding strength wasn’t what it had been in the days of old. So I stewed in my own anger and frustration for a few minutes before finally storming outside, announcing “This is completely ridiculous!” and then grabbing a shovel from the garage and joining her Septic Tank Digging Project.

We dug and we dug and before long a funny thing started happening — we began to talk. We talked tentatively at first – about the dirt and the rocks and the blisters forming on our hands – and then we talked more openly – about how she felt weak, about aging, about my friends at school and then she asked about “the girl”. There were no big revelations, just simple conversation and some laughs. We dug, we took breaks, we drank cheap beer that went down like water, dug some more, talked a little, and then dug some more until all the digging had been done.

When we finally stopped towards the end of the day, we each opened another beer sat on the patio. I looked at my mom and she nodded her head towards the front yard. There was an enormous hole in the yard and I realized that we had, much to my surprise, dug up the entire septic tank by hand. It took the entire day and a twelve pack of beer but we did it.

Then she said, “It’s going to take me some time.” She wasn’t talking about the septic tank, of course, she was talking about the one thing we hadn’t talked about all day — or ever, really. Acceptance would take time. I sipped my beer and said, “That’s ok.”

My mother didn’t disown me after all. I returned to college and she occasionally called to try another chapter from her Scared Straight Straight manual and I sighed a lot. She threatened to skip my graduation but she didn’t, instead she showed up and stood stiffly beside me in pictures. She told me she came to “keep up appearances” but I knew that even my lesbianism couldn’t overshadow the fact that I was the first woman in my family to graduate from college, and that she was proud of me for that.

Over the next few years, our relationship improved. She met my partner and she came to help us work on our first house and she settled into a quiet acceptance. But even though she’d given up trying to change my lady-loving ways, there was one thing on which she refused to budge: she was adamant that I not bring a child into my “lifestyle.” She argued that if we had a boy, he would never learn to pee standing up and, if we had a girl, we wouldn’t know how to do her hair.

Given arguments with such substantial merit, it’s amazing that we had the courage to persevere.

I took advantage of every opportunity to remind her that we were planning to have kids because I didn’t want her lulled into thinking that we had changed our minds.

If we were at a restaurant and saw a couple with a baby, I’d say, “We’re going to have a baby someday.”

If we were watching TV and a commercial for Pampers came on, I’d say, “We’re going to have a baby someday.”

When I ran across a candy conversation heart that said “baby” on it, I told her about it and claimed it was a sign.

It became a game – “Ways to Remind Mom We Intend to Have Kids,” which was a lot like a competitive family game show but heavy on the “feud” part and light on the cheering.

Each time I brought it up, she’d simply purse her lips, close her eyes and shake her head. When I finally did get pregnant, I called her up to share the good news.

“You remember two weeks ago when I said we were going to have kids?”
“Yes.”
“Well…I’m pregnant.”

She was absolutely silent – no sighing, no audible pursing of the lips. For a brief moment, I thought we’d lost our connection and was about to launch into the requisite and repeated “Hello?” when she finally responded.

“What do you want me to say?”

I suggested that most people go with “Congratulations” but she went a different direction – “You’re going to be a horrible mother.” I should have been hurt but maybe I’m a little broken because I just gave a short laugh at the irony of her words.

Over the next nine months, she made it clear that she believed what many people believe – living as an out lesbian is a choice and it shouldn’t be forced on children. I made it very clear that she was casting a shadow on my pregnancy glow.

She didn’t want to hear about my pregnancy and I didn’t want to hear about her bigotry so, for the last three months of my pregnancy, we talked only about the weather. We talked about the changing of the seasons, the humidity of summer, the state of my lawn, weeds and the success of her tomato plants. Our conversations had about as much emotional and personal flair as weather forecasts.

Then, in July of 2001, my son was born. Everyone talks about the magic of that moment, about looking into that innocent face and knowing you’d do anything for that little person. I’m sure I felt that but I also thought, “Oh my god! I don’t know how to do this!” followed a couple of days later by “They aren’t really going to let us take him home, are they?!”

I remember very little from the first week. It was all laughter, tears and breast milk. When my mother came to visit, I remember strapping my wobbly-headed baby into his car seat and driving from Minneapolis to her hotel in Burnsville, hoping the visit would be less painful than the name of the suburb implied. I had two thoughts – I hope the baby’s neck doesn’t snap and I hope I don’t cry when I see her.

I knocked and she ushered me in and immediately started unbuckling my son from his car seat. She sat on a chair, her elbows on her thighs and my son’s head in her cupped hands with his body running the length of her arms. She held him and just smiled. Her face was pure joy and something in that moment righted us both. Four years later, she held my newborn daughter the same way and she smiled that same smile and moved us forward once again.

After our children had been born, my mother never once mentioned the impact having two moms might have on them. She judged us for our fondness of tofu and our aversion to toys with lights and sounds and our reluctance to raise our voices but nothing more. Maybe she found my children irresistibly adorable. Maybe she got tired of arguing with me. Or maybe, she realized that we were just a couple of people raising a family.

There were, however, things about my life as a parent that I did not or could not share with my mother.

I didn’t tell her about the preschool teacher who responded to our daughter’s question, “Where’s my daddy?” with “He’s at work.” I didn’t tell her about meeting with the preschool administrator and the teacher, didn’t tell her that we donated several children’s books to the school – not just books about gay families but families raised by grandparents and single parents as well.

I didn’t tell her about the camp counselor who threatened to call my son’s father when he didn’t follow the rules. That time, we got away with an educational phone call.

My mother died at 72 when my kids were 7 and 3. She was already gone when my son got into a heated argument on the school playground after another kid used an anti-gay slur, when the marriage equality fight finally did arrive in Minnesota and I had to prepare my kids for what they might hear about families like ours.

It was better this way – better that I kept those struggles to myself, better that she never knew – because she was able to simply see me as a mother.

She watched me balance work and family. She looked on in amusement as we set limits with our children and doled out consequences when the kids ignored them. She watched us deal with sibling rivalry and playdates and soccer schedules and “Oh my god, would you just brush your teeth well the first time?!” and really, those are our primary struggles, the ones that consume our day-to-day. The political conflicts are big, of course, but we spend a lot more time dealing with homework than we do talking about DOMA.

One night, shortly before her death, I was talking to my mother on the phone and she said, “You have two great kids.” She was never one to give compliments and I must have been stunned because I didn’t respond with sarcasm or a joke to steer things into less vulnerable territory, “I don’t know, mom. I feel like I’m making so many mistakes.” I expected her to agree with me, to tell me that she always knew I wouldn’t be able to pull off this mothering thing but she said, “You are doing the best that you can. You are doing much better than I did.”

I needed to make peace with my mother and I did.

I’ve also had to make peace with myself.

Before having kids, I imagined I would be a perfect mother. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes my mother made. I would love my children unconditionally. I would never raise my voice or lose my patience. But raising hypothetical children is so much easier than raising actual children and I have made many mistakes, including some of the same ones my mother made.

There are only a few things about which I am certain but I know that, someday, our children will sit down with their friends, share a bottle of wine and malign us. They will tell stories about our quirks and their friends will laugh. They will list their grievances and their friends will shake their heads in sympathy.

Most of those stories will have little to do with the fact that we are lesbians. Though that defines us to the rest of the world, it doesn’t define us to our children.

We are just their parents.

We embarrass them at soccer games and school plays by cheering too loudly. We nag them about homework and brushing their unruly hair and making their beds. We argue with them about the appropriateness of movies and music. We raise our voices and lose our patience. We expect too much of them and are not always adept at hiding our disappointment.

Hopefully, they’ll eventually learn what I have – we’re all imperfect people just doing the best we can — but if you dig a little deeper, you might be surprised by what you find.

Vikki Reich writes about the intersection of contemporary lesbian life and parenthood at her personal blog Up Popped A Fox and is a Managing Editor for VillageQ, a site that gives voice to the experience of LGBTQ parents. She is also the co-director of Listen To Your Mother Twin Cities. In 2013, she completed the Foreword Writing Apprenticeship in Creative Nonfiction at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and is a 2013 recipient of the Beyond the Pure Fellowship for writers.

Comments have been disabled for this post citing FDA standards. But you can always tweet her up!

Defining For My Own “Right” Way To Be A Mom

Motrin®‘s mission is to create solutions that stop pain from stopping you. Motrin® does this by effectively treating at the source of pain, allowing you to stay extraordinary and granting “unstoppable power.” Also unstoppably powerful? Moms. Of course around here, when we talk about Moms we’re talking about queer Moms. Lesbian Moms face unique challenges on the road to extraordinariness, and thus Autostraddle and Motrin® are proud to bring you “True Stories of Unstoppably Extraordinary Lesbian Moms,” an essay series featuring some of our favorite “mommy bloggers” telling stories of challenges faced and tackled.

We open today with a piece from Dana Rudolph, the GLAAD-Award Winning writer behind Mombian, talking about a more subtle challenge: how she dealt with an abundance of unsolicited input on the “right” ways to parent.

I knew my spouse and I were in trouble when we opened the gift bag we’d been given by our hospital’s pre-birth class and found that it was composed almost entirely of coupons for products promising to make parents’ lives easier. I’m all for an easier life — but balked quickly at the onslaught of messages characterizing parenting as an endless stream of problems solved by this-or-that gadget or pre-packaged food product. This went beyond the gift bag, of course, because the world was full of magazine articles, blog posts, and acquaintances happy to tell me the “right” ways to parent: what time we should stop breastfeeding, whether cloth or disposable diapers were best, or why only a certain brand of bottle would do. As a lesbian mom, it was especially hard to fight the urge to do the “right” thing, however slippery a concept that was, because I was representing a community, not just myself, I thought. It was almost enough to make me want to raise our son in a log cabin off the grid somewhere.

Yet we remained in suburbia and in the ten years that I’ve been a parent, one of the biggest challenges has been learning to tune out those directives and parent according to the particular needs of our son and also the values my spouse and I hold, with the advice of family and friends.

The first challenge was all the baby gear. We were overwhelmed the first time we set foot in a baby store to register, having been (kindly) pressured to do so by co-workers who wanted to throw us a baby shower. Sure, we needed some basics, like a crib, a car seat, a stroller, and diapers—but an electric diaper-wipe warmer? Not so much. And who knew there were as many options on baby strollers as on cars, including cup holders and built-in audio? (We opted for the former and not the latter.) Alas for us lesbian moms, though—one cannot, in fact, obtain babies at a baby store, despite how convenient that might be.

I’d constantly remind myself: women have been having children for thousands of years without [this product]. Will it really make our lives easier or definitively benefit our son’s development? Occasionally, the answer was yes. (Those little rubber-lidded cups that let kids snack on cereal without spilling? Terrific.) Most often, we passed. (I’m guessing Einstein’s mother didn’t have an digital music player-enabled belly band that played Mozart to him in her womb, and he turned out just fine. As did Mozart, for that matter.)

We didn’t need a specialty diaper bag when my old knapsack would do just fine — and there’s nothing like using a pack previously dragged to women’s music festivals and camping trips to make you feel connected to your lesbian identity, especially when the world’s always assuming you’re straight just because you’ve got a baby on your hip. I tried to limit what we hauled around — usually just a snack and drink, diapers and wipes, and a couple of small toys. I figured I could improvise for the rest, and that in itself was a good lesson for our son.

It felt awkward, sometimes, when I’d encounter one of those moms (they were inevitably moms, not dads) dragging around an enormous bag full of every item her child might possibly need. I’d wonder: Was I not being a good mom if I didn’t have three different kinds of snacks and eight toys at hand? Or was it that our society’s definition of a “good mom” was so bound up with consumerism (“if you love your family, you’ll buy our product”) that even I was seeing the gear-laden moms as “better,” regardless of what our actual parenting was like?

The truth is, though, that I’m the kind of gal who goes camping with little more than a bandana or a pocket knife, so of course I’d be the kind of Mom who’d take a minimalist approach to baby gear, too. That’s just me. I’m a minimalist, and I feel everyone should let their parenting identity reflect who they are as a person, whatever that may be. If you’re a gadget freak and have the wherewithal, by all means get a color video baby monitor. If not, get an audio-only one—or none, if your house or apartment is small. Ignore the ads that imply you’ll be putting your child’s life or college admission success at risk if you don’t BUY THIS PRODUCT RIGHT NOW.

Conversely, I tried not to pay too much attention to the people who advised abandoning certain modern conveniences for higher ideals. I sought a middle ground. When I was making carrots or squash for dinner anyway, for example, I’d purée some in the food processor for Junior—but I also bought some baby food in jars, for convenience. (Sometimes the apple-blueberry ones became my own dessert.)

From observing my son and his peers and the many differences among them, I eventually realized that the answer to most parenting advice was “it depends.” I had to give myself a virtual slap upside the head sometimes to snap out of it. Attempting perfection inevitably leads to failure, even assuming we could all agree on what “perfect” means.

Then there were all the messages about the extra burdens LGBT parents carry. We do tend to face different hurdles than many families, and they can be significant—but for over 40 years, out LGBT parents have been finding ways to go over and around them in order to have the honor and the joy of raising children. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’ve gotten used to it.

Most profiles of LGBT families in the mainstream news, however, seem to be about them being LGBT families, focusing on the difficulties they faced in either starting their family or obtaining legal protections. Stories focusing on other aspects of LGBT families lives are rare. Granted, it’s vital that the world is aware of these obstacles so that we can change minds and laws, and reading about LGBT families who’ve faced similar problems as you have can be incredibly comforting. But an endless stream of stories about LGBT families facing problems because they are LGBT (even if they overcome those problems) can be draining.

I’ve tried therefore, not to let all of the things we’re told can be “issues” for LGBT parents turn into issues. Take the start of the school year. One common piece of advice I’ve heard is to set up a meeting with one’s child’s teacher (at least in the early grades) in order to get a sense of their level of knowledge and acceptance. This can be useful if you live in an area where there might reasonably be problems, or if you’ve heard rumors about the particular teacher that you’d like to confirm.

In our particular community in liberal Massachusetts, however, we’ve always figured the odds were pretty good that the teachers would be accepting. Instead of separate meetings with our son’s teacher each year, my spouse and I simply show up to the Parents’ Night held during the first week of school. We introduce ourselves—not with “We wanted to let you know our son has two moms,” but with “Hi, we’re [son’s name] moms.” Both ways alert the teacher to the fact that there is a two-mom family in the class (a useful reminder to keep language inclusive)—but the first way emphasizes the difference about our family; the second, simply on who we are. The former implies that our family structure needs a special announcement because it could be a “problem” in the classroom. Again, our method may not be the solution for everyone—sometimes it’s better to be clear and proactive—but for us, living where we do, it’s been a way for us to avoid focusing on our difference as if it was going to be a problem.

It can still be tough. Many LGBT-inclusive children’s books focus on a child being teased because of her or his parents. It’s a valid concern for some families—and these books were groundbreaking in portraying our families at all—but I always worried they’d put fears into my son’s mind that weren’t there already.

More recent books (including ones by Newman) have shifted away from this “problem” approach and more often depict LGBT families simply living their everyday lives.

Sometimes focusing on the “problems” of LGBT parenting also serves to distance us from potential allies. Television portrayals of LGBT families, for example, have mostly shown LGBT parents just starting their families, concentrating on what seems to set us most apart from “traditional” families, and treating it as a problem to be overcome. I can’t count the number of storylines about a lesbian couple and their wacky search for sperm. Even in family creation, though, LGBT parents hardly stand alone. Straight, cisgender people also foster and adopt, undergo fertility treatments, and use donors and surrogacy, too—and we can often find common ground with those families.

I am thrilled that shows like ABC Family’s new dramas are showing LGBT parents raising older kids and dealing with issues that any parent of adolescents might face, as well as issues that are LGBT specific.

Not that there aren’t challenges we face specifically because we are LGBT parents—most notably, the lack of legal rights in many states for both parents in a couple, even in this new era of federal recognition. But we can’t let ourselves be defined solely by our differences.

We also can’t let ourselves be pressured by the constant buzz of messages contrived to make all parents worry that we’re not attentive enough, educational enough, or even stylish enough. One of the best pieces of parenting advice I’ve gotten is from those who remind me, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” If we make every small hill into a big one, we won’t get very far.

Parenting rocked my world, to be sure—but at the end of the day (a long and exhausting day), I am still much of the same person I was beforehand. I know my values and interests, and am hoping to convey most of the former and a few of the latter to my son. My touchstones are my own childhood, my own parents, and friends who got to parenthood before me. Yes, we will encounter challenges, big and small—and I have concerns about this whole raising-a-teenager thing that’s coming up—but I hope the challenges stem from my son’s actual needs as he learns and grows, rather than being placed upon us by a society that likes to invent them.

We don’t plan to have another child (we figured we’d quit while we’re ahead), but if we did, a better item for our new-baby gift bag might be not coupons, but a mirror (an unbreakable, child-proof one, of course). It might remind us to parent according to who we are, based on the needs of the child in our arms. The rest is optional.

Dana Rudolph is the founder and publisher of Mombian, a leading lifestyle blog for lesbian moms and other LGBT parents, covering a mix of parenting, politics, diversions, and resources. Mombian was named “Outstanding Blog” at the 2012 GLAAD Media Awards by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

Dana also writes a regular “Mombian” column for several LGBT newspapers around the country, and has reported on a variety of other LGBT political and legal topics for both mainstream and LGBT publications. She has been a speaker at numerous LGBT and blogging events.

Dana began her career in Internet content development, strategy, and marketing during the first dotcom boom, and has worked at a startup, a Fortune 100 corporation, and a non-profit, in addition to her freelance work. She balances parenting, job, and blogging in the Boston area with her spouse of 20 years and their 10-year-old son.