Beren DeMotier’s The Brides of March: Memoir of a Same-Sex Marriage is a raucous, personal, touching look at the brief legalization of same-sex marriage in Multnomah County, Oregon in March 2004, and its impact on her and her family. She also writes with knowing humor about the ins and outs of lesbian motherhood. I have a full review coming out in Bay Windows, and will crosspost it here shortly. In the meantime, Beren was kind enough to allow me to post two excerpts—the Preface and the chapter “No Closet, After Kids,” which seemed especially appropriate for this audience. Enjoy!
(If you like it, buy it, and read the whole thing, please consider posting a review to your favorite online bookstore(s). Authors tell me this makes a difference.)
Preface
As a little girl, I didn’t dream of getting married someday with a Cinderella dress and six matching bridesmaids in puce. I didn’t put lace tablecloths over my head and weave up imaginary aisles clutching a dozen dying daisies. I didn’t even have any predictable wedding fantasies for a child of the sixties, like imagining myself a barefoot princess in a white hippie dress, marrying the handsome (if long-haired) prince, and living happily ever after, maybe in a commune. My one childhood foray into marriage fantasy was when I became briefly engaged to a pleasantly plump, easy-going boy named Douglas in kindergarten. It was Los Angeles, fall of 1969, and we planned to marry on roller skates, which seemed ever so important at the time.
Admittedly, I was not exactly force fed bridal veil, lacy gown, packed pews, and Tiffany & Company romance at home. My mother was married in her parents’ backyard with a gold band, a handful of her parents’ friends, and a simple off-white lace cocktail dress. Years later, she buried this classy number on the beach next to the charred remains of every single one of her wedding pictures.
My one adolescent wedding fantasy focused on marrying for money while wearing a red satin strapless gown á la Rita Hayworth as Gilda, because I had a lot more faith in my figure than in love. Marrying a man for love just didn’t come into it; which made sense when I came out as a lesbian (as did the fact that my Barbie doll tended to kick Ken across the room and hang out with that babe, Malibu P.J., instead); and marrying a woman for love was not an option.
In 1983, gay marriage was unthinkable, legally or symbolically. It simply wasn’t done.
It wasn’t until my spouse and I had spent years living in sin that commitment ceremonies became common and marriage moved from my unconscious back burner to the front of the stove on high. I got wedding fever, wanting desperately to marry the woman I loved, not just for the legal rights, but for the chance to say “I do” with feeling.
Being very able at accessorizing, I developed a whole scenario involving a voluminous white skirt, barefoot children running around, green grass, white flowers and, in some versions, a baby in my arms. My spouse, bless her pragmatic heart, had no fantasies in the marriage department other than if it became legal, she wanted to do it. In the end, we both had some of our dreams come true.
This is the story I hope to be telling grandchildren years from now, about the day my wife and I were married in a short, sweet, extemporaneous church wedding, on a rainy Wednesday morning in March, with nary a skirt in sight.
By then, I trust, this story will have a different ending.
. . . .
No Closet, After Kids
When we first had Duncan, I wanted to be such an exemplary mother that it wouldn’t matter that I was also a lesbian. I was looking for some kind of benediction for daring to have him, simply because we selfishly wanted him. As if by being exemplary, I could be forgiven this audacious act, and he, and his siblings, would never feel the breath of prejudice.
I got over all that, some strange cocktail of internalized homophobia and post-partum depression that left me breathless.
Many years into lesbian motherhood, I can say from experience that there is a rule of reciprocity about being out. If you feel confident, and assume it will be fine, most often it is. Equally, if you approach revealing your sexual orientation as if it is a tender subject and potentially volatile, it will be.
During the long months we discussed becoming parents, before taking the plunge to make that happen, a major topic was being out. We knew that once we were parents, there was no going back.
The real transition from discreet to wide open was a little bumpy. We were the first out of the closet couple to have a baby at Providence Hospital in Seattle; yet, two months later, I was huddling inside our freezing nineteen-seventies Volkswagen van while Jannine brought Duncan to her office at Boeing to meet her co-workers, who knew that Jannine was adopting him (and wondered how she’d gotten her hands on a green-eyed, blonde, white baby in such a short time), but had still to learn that Jannine was living with the birth mother as well.
By the time he turned three months, and Jannine’s co-parent adoption was finalized, her co-workers knew, and rose to the occasion.
At first, it felt like a big deal every time I had to say the words, “He doesn’t have a dad, he has two moms.” I would pause every time someone wanted to know what my husband did, or if he looked like his father, or how long I’d been married. Each time there was that subterranean fear. Would the mom next to me on the bench stand up and walk away? Would I hear a spirited lecture on modern morality? Would my child witness some kind of right-wing religious response right there in the line at the supermarket?
So far, no.
Jannine takes care of most of those “what does your husband do?” kind of questions by posting photographs of me and our kids in her cubicle at work, and she came out in the job interview when we moved to Portland, getting it on the table from day one.
I still get butterflies in my stomach when I’m meeting the parents of one of my kids’ classmates for the first time while setting up a play date, or while assuring the parents (before their child comes over), that we have no guns, drugs, or weird relatives at our house. The butterflies aren’t for me, but for our children. I worry that the friendship is going to be stalled by a parent who says, “No, Sarah can’t play with Anna,” when he or she discovers that Anna has two moms. Despite the butterflies, I have to be straightforward about who we are, so our kids will be, too.
Being straightforward can reap unexpected rewards. Years ago, a mom from our son’s school turned to me and said, “So you stay home too, right? What does your husband do?”
I looked at her long bleached-blonde hair, serious cleavage, tight jeans, and high-heeled boots, knowing from previous conversations that she was from a large Catholic family, trying not to stereotype her any more than I’d want her to stereotype me.
Then I told her where “my partner” worked.
“Oh”, she said. There was a long pause. Then she told me all about her two gay sisters, one of them struggling with it because of being Catholic. “She should just get over it and be happy.” I still get reports from time to time on her sisters, one now expecting twins with her partner.
Because I was out, she felt free to talk about her sisters.
I think sometimes it is our children who will change the world for us. Three of our daughter’s closest friends are from very traditional, Christian families, nice girls with good manners who like to come to our house because it’s teeming with pets, and because, despite a culture that pressures girls to be mean, Anna is a nice girl. She has become expert at calmly explaining her family structure, knowing when to give details, and when to just give the basics, without apology, qualification, or hesitation. The only thing the girls have said about our family is how lucky Anna is to have two moms.
Duncan has been our biggest proponent from day one; his love and faith in us made it clear that we were OK the way we were, that we were the parents he wanted to have, and he has communicated that faith, whenever it has come up, for his entire thirteen years. He has a calm rationality that lent him the title “Mr. Switzerland” in second grade, and allows him to counter argument or prejudice without sinking to the level of his opposition. Graeme is entering a new world because of them.