From the “how could I have missed this” files: While studies show [and they do] that children with same-sex parents are just as well-adjusted as those with different-sex parents, they might lead us to overlook the full experience of adopted children, wrote Frank Ligtvoet in the New York Times a few weeks back. Ligtvoet, a gay dad with two adopted children, reminds us that “motherless parenting is a misnomer.”
He explains that in open adoptions, the birth mother is still in the children’s lives, though not always physically present. In closed adoptions, the mother is still in the narrative of the child’s birth, which also starts for them with ‘in your mommy’s tummy.'”
The outside world, too, sees mothers even in two-dad families:
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. . . . 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.)
Ligtvoet raises some excellent points, and I encourage you to go read the whole piece. He’s writing only about adoptive families, and only from the perspective of a gay dad — but I think there are parallels with lesbian-headed families and those created through surrogacy and sperm or egg donation. At the same time, in our society, a child without a visible mother is more noticeable than one without a visible father, which means two-mom and two-dad families may experience all of this somewhat differently from each other.
What has your experience been?
(Thanks to Gay Parent magazine for the tip.)
