As promised, here are more quotes from And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families
On with the quotes. This time, they’re reflections from mothers—biological and nonbiological—on their donors:
Chip was a natural choice for Jessie’s godfather and he stood at her baptism, resplendent in a purple shirt and lilac tie. Chip played the role of godparent-donor perfectly—present but not overly present. He hung back, perhaps to avoid the wail of five-alarm sirens blasting in my head. Sarah held Jesslyn at the font. Without Jessie in my arms, I felt unmoored, without a paddle, drifting. If Jesslyn were to identify Chip as her father, only one of us could be her mother, right? There was no precedent for a mommy and a mama and a daddy. In this three-minus-one equation, somebody had to lose. Who was going to get voted off the island? I didn’t want it to be Sarah. More importantly, I didn’t want it to be me.
—Mary Bowers, “The D-Word”
“How old is your son?”
I look up from the floor of the pharmacy, where I am trying to prevent my nearly-two-year-old son from stripping the shelves of their contents. I locate the asker, a burly, bearded young guy in a hunting jacket, and I’m about to answer him, when I realize that his question wasn’t directed towards me. Rather, it’s been lobbed over my head to Rob, who is waiting with us.
Rob is not prepared for this. He fumbles the question, and misses. It hits him hard in the chest and then shatters and begins to drip — warm, wet — down the front of his coat and puddle in his shoes.
“Twenty-two months,” I tell the guy, who glances at me briefly and then beams at Rob in what I can only assume is a guy-to-guy—a dad-to-dad—bonding kind of way.
Of course, I think to myself, this guy thinks that Rob’s the father. He thinks we’re the parents.
And then I remember: Oh yeah, he is. We are.
—Susan Goldberg, “Mamas’ Baby, Papa’s Maybe”
It jars when, as it all too often happens, on Facebook, casually between acquaintances, from random strangers in the park, someone insists that one or the other of my sons looks like Rob. It’s not that the similarities between Rob and the boys aren’t there—they may well be—but they are always open to interpretation, and interpretations are never neutral. The insistence on the primacy of biology takes many forms, but it invariably works to erase my relationship with my sons. Of course, no one claims this is what they mean; they would never mean to do that. It’s just that the logic of biology is so compelling, so obvious, so inadequate.
—Rachel Warburton, “He Looks Just like You”
When Madeline was just five months old, and she and I were still securely floating about together in that strange, hormone-induced, gooey breastfeeding bubble, we ran into an acquaintance who is a friend of our sperm donor. She, another queer mom, took one look at the small creature in my arms and by way of introduction said, “Oh! Let me see Bob’s daughter!”
The bubble burst. I had no idea how to respond. It was a terrible surprise to me, although perhaps it shouldn’t have been, that another queer woman and mother could so easily, and likely thoughtlessly, dismiss the work and experience of the two mothers standing in front of her and in its place reassert some archaic notion of fatherhood: “Who sired this child?” To my great dismay, this kind of reaction has turned out not to be archaic, but rather commonplace.
—Chloë Brushwood Rose, “Learning to Talk”