Intercultural Life at Lake Forest College

By Teryn J. Robinson, Assistant Dean of Faculty for Learning Support

“I just heard you’re having a baby! Congratulations! What wonderful news!” And then, the inevitable… “How are you feeling?”

Fine. Happy. Terrified. Excited. Overwhelmed. Those adjectives are never my answer because what they’re really asking is how the pregnancy is going.  I’m not unlike them, an outsider to the richness and wonder of my growing child.

“No, not me. My partner’s the one who’s pregnant.”

I’m the  “other mother.”

I bought a book with that phrase in the title: Confessions of the Other Mother: Nonbiological Lesbian Moms Tell All (Beacon, 2004). In the collection’s introduction, editor Harlyn Aizley writes:

And so we were off, in the beautiful—though often unexpectedly complex—terrain of two-mommy parenting. To extend the metaphor, we soon learned that this new land that was our home, while frequented by many, remained virtually uncharted. Where were the guidebooks? Where were the stories from the other settlers? […] Where were the anecdotes from women who, like Faith [Aizley’s partner], had opted to postpone or forgo their own birthing experience to assist their female partner in hers? Where were the tales of life at home raising another woman’s child, a child who is also your own, but in a wholly different way?
[…]
That it took me some time to grasp that Faith was as much our daughter’s mother […] I blame now […] on the limitations of language rather than my own lack of comprehension. With no name for her role, Faith had only her heart to guide her as she carved a place in the world for herself and our family.

I’ve never considered myself to be a pioneer. I never even enjoyed playing “Oregon Trail” when I was in middle school. Very shy, I’ve always kept my head down and done what needed to be done. Now, though, I’m immersed in something that, from its beginning, has been far more public than most birthing stories—because human beings are naturally curious[1] and because it takes a lot more science than romance for two women to conceive a child. What Aizley writes about, though, has been a pretty solitary part of all of this for me, and even her collection of nonbiological lesbian moms’ tales hasn’t really struck a chord with me because, halfway through the collection, I have yet to find an “other mother” whose tale resonates with me.

Perhaps part of this comes down to gender. My partner and I perform gender in quite similar ways, so the stories of the “butch” nonbiological moms are unfamiliar to me. I don’t perform masculinity; I hate to fish, I don’t know anything about cars, and I throw like a girl. I’m living outside a parental dichotomy by not wanting to be like or identifying with fathers. I’m a mom. I’ll teach my child about music and fairness and love, and I’ll leave the fishing to my in-laws, the car repairs to the mechanic, and the ball toss to my mom, who eventually learned to let me stay inside on the couch with a book when she took my brother out to play catch.

My mom may actually be the mother whose tale resonates most with me, and her life as a parent has been quite different from what I expect mine will be. She raised two kids as a single mom after my parents divorced when I was twelve, and she learned a lot more than how to parent a teenager in the years soon after her divorce. She learned to manage a household on her own, from buying her first hammer and screwdriver to teaching my brother and me how to do the chores that kept a household running, like cutting the grass and doing the laundry. Most importantly, the three of us learned we were in it—this household, this life—together.

When I begin to worry about things, like the first time my elementary-schooler is bullied or excluded for having two moms, I fall back on the reassuring thought that my own mother created a space of honesty and dialogue and love that my own child will come home to at the end of that difficult day. We need not discuss the heartache and tears I’ll have long after my child is asleep at the thought of such a small miracle of a human being growing up in a world filled with so much hate and injustice. Knowing that my own mother has given me the strength to help my child go back out into the world the next morning with compassion for those who show hate is the hook upon which I hang my hopes.

So, here I sit, the child of a working-class single mother, preparing to raise my child with another woman. Plenty of closed-minded folks have much to say about how people like me are destroying marriage and family values. To them, I’d point out that the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study out of UCLA recently released findings that the adolescents in their study reported a 0% rate of child abuse from parents or caregivers.[2]  When you contrast this number with the national average of 26% of adolescents reporting child abuse, I’d say that lesbian parents are doing pretty darn well for family values. Coincidentally, we found out about the pregnancy within a few days of the study being released. It’s certainly not evidence that our child will grow up a happy, well-adjusted human being, but I do think that we’ll find that, once you get past the looks, my family is a lot like yours. I’m looking forward to navigating this new territory with my wife and my child in a home where we respect all kind of families.