Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
since parenting is linked but separate issue from marriage, i've decided to start a new thread about the issues surrounding same-sex parenting, something which is legal in nearly all 50 states in some form of another, and which has been a part of gay life since at least the 1970s.
to start it off, here's this article from the NYT -- it touches on issues of gender essentialism, as well as race (gays and lesbians are more likely to adopt across racial lines), and presented as food for thought:
to start it off, here's this article from the NYT -- it touches on issues of gender essentialism, as well as race (gays and lesbians are more likely to adopt across racial lines), and presented as food for thought:
June 22, 2013
The Misnomer of ‘Motherless’ Parenting
By FRANK LIGTVOET
SOMETIMES when my daughter, who is 7, is nicely cuddled up in her bed and I snuggle her, she calls me Mommy. I am a stay-at-home dad. My male partner and I adopted both of our children at birth in open domestic adoptions. We could fill our home with nannies, sisters, grandmothers, female friends, but no mothers.
My daughter says “Mommy” in a funny way, in a high-pitched voice. Although I refer the honors immediately to her birth mom, I am flattered. But saddened as well, because she expresses herself in a voice that is not her own. It is her stuffed-animal voice. She expresses not only love; she also expresses alienation. She can role-play the mother-daughter relationship, but she cannot use her real voice, nor have the real thing.
I have seen two types of arguments in the discussion on gay adoption. The first is the civil-rights argument. You find this in David Strah’s book “Gay Dads: A Celebration of Fatherhood,” which contains interviews with gay fathers. “The men in this book stuck it out, kept struggling, claimed their rights, and triumphed in the end,” it says. “They are heroic, and their heroism is a gift for their children.”
The books adds: “If coming out was the first step and forming a movement the second, then perhaps asserting our fundamental right to be parents is the third step in our evolution as a community.” The argument is not so much about the voices or feelings of the children but about those of their dads.
More child-focused, but still reflecting the values of the grown-ups, is the second argument: the good-enough-parent idea, as developed in the series of research papers on gay and lesbian adoption of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. The executive summary of the 2006 report states: “Social science research concludes that children reared by gay and lesbian parents fare comparably to those of children raised by heterosexuals on a range of measures of social and psychological adjustment.” Kids of gay dads (and lesbians) do just as well as kids of moms and dads, the research shows. Being a good-enough parent counts for gay people, just as it does for straight people.
What is not expressed in both arguments, which I consider valid, is the voice of the adoptee — my daughter’s voice, that is. Her awareness of being a motherless child is not addressed. I don’t want to appropriate our child’s voice, but I want to speak up for her, and her older brother, and I want to acknowledge their feelings.
Being a “motherless” child in an open adoption is not as simple as it looks, because there is a birth mother, who walks in and walks out of the lives of our children. And when she is not physically there, she is — as we know from many accounts of adult adoptees — still present in dreams, fantasies, longings and worries.
In a closed or an international adoption there is also a mother — sometimes in photos, but always in the narrative of the child’s birth, which also starts for them with “in your mommy’s tummy.” When the mother walks into the lives of our kids it is mostly a wonderful experience. It is harder for them when she walks out, not only because of the sad goodbye of a beloved adult, but also because it triggers the difficult and painful question of why she walked out in the first place.
The answer initially depends very much on us, and we have to help our kids find a narrative that is honest about the circumstances and the unjust world we live in, yet loving and respectful toward the mother. To do that properly, gay families have to create an emotional space where the mother lives as a reality, a space where she can be addressed and discussed without any shame or secrecy.
So, motherless parenting is a misnomer. Also, the wider world around our kids sees mothers when they are not there. Every step we as a family take outside in public comes with a question from a stranger about the mother of the children: a motherless child seems unthinkable. When I picked up my sick son from school one day after a call from the nurse’s office, we bumped into his class in the hall. One of the boys saw us and called, “Hey, where’s your mom?”
THAT was awkward, because our son had introduced himself to his classmates at the beginning of the school year with pictures of our family and of his birth family. That had made a deep impression. The boy who called out was without doubt aware of our son’s situation, and he was certainly not meanspirited. But he was just not able to see the scene of a father and a sick son objectively and injected a mother, who would have been there in most cases. The forces of normalcy, as I would like to call them, are strong, and can be difficult and confusing for children who live outside that normalcy.
Gay parents, trained to deal with those forces, should be aware of the effect on their children. What these questions do touches on a vulnerability in the children’s identity, the identity of the motherless child. The outside world says time and again — not in a negative way, but matter-of-factly — you are not like us. We have to give our kids the chance to give voice to that vulnerability, and to acknowledge the sad and complicated feelings of being different. (And show the pride in that as well.)
How to parent around these issues of motherlessness and vulnerability is a personal choice. There are practical matters, like where your family lives, where your kids go to school, what clubs and churches you are members of, what friends and family you have over for dinner, where you go on vacation. Still, the overarching idea behind parenting by gay men should be that it is great for a child to have one or two dads, and that not having a mom in your daily life can be hard. And that it is O.K. to long for a soft cheek instead of a stubbly one.
Frank Ligtvoet is the founder of Adoptive Families With Children of African Heritage and Their Friends, a New York City support group, and a member of the board of the New York State Citizens’ Coalition for Children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/o...therless-parenting.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print