This ran in my newspaper column in 2007 but I somehow never posted it here. I think it’s still relevant as we LGBTQ parents and our children navigate issues of difference and bias.
I still remember the first time it happened, when my son was in preschool in the early aughts. I’ve shared this story before, but not for a while. As we approach the season of parenting holidays, I thought I’d do so again.
Hot on the heels of Lesbian Visibility Day, today is Donor Conception Awareness Day, a time for raising awareness of all families, LGBTQ and not, who started via donor conception. Here are a few great new, LGBTQ-inclusive resources for both parents and kids—and a little about my own family story.
COLAGE, the national organization for people with LGBTQ parents, recently released an updated edition of its groundbreaking guide for donor-conceived people with LGBTQ parents. It’s an invaluable resource for donor-conceived youth and adults—but also feels critical for the parents and others supporting them.
It’s International Lesbian Day, so let’s celebrate with the latest results from the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), the longest-running study on any LGBTQ-parent families. This summer, the project published a study of the relationships between the adult offspring of lesbian parents and their unknown or known donors.
I have a new post up at HuffPo that I hope you’ll pop over and read (and please “Like” it over there if you enjoy it): “In the Sandbox.” It’s a revised version of an old piece from when my son was younger, describing the first time another child asked him, “Where’s your dad?”
Most LGBT parents, I suspect, wonder what will happen the first (or the second, or the tenth…) time their children get asked questions about their family, such as, “How can you have two moms [two dads]?” I wrote about my own experience with this a few years back—and yesterday, Mom1 over at 2 Moms 2 Boys wrote about hers.
This was soon followed on my Twitter feed by Els Kushner noting her kids’ snappy response, “Well, why do you have a mom & a dad?” and MommieV saying, “Would love to see how single/choice moms handle similar.”
So have at, folks. I know many of you have similar stories and questions, and I hope you’ll share in the comments. (You can just leave a link to your blog if you’ve written about it before.)
I really don’t want to be writing about sperm again. Some won’t stop, however, and so I find myself once again turning to matters seminal to clear up some misconceptions about donor-conceived children.
There’s always a first time. I was with my son at his school playground last week, taking advantage of the unseasonably warm weather to hang with the other parents and kids at the end of the day. My son wandered over to the sandbox, where another boy his age was playing. They introduced themselves in
I’m very pleased to bring you a guest post today from Abigail Garner, a writer, speaker, and educator who has long been an advocate for LGBT families and the LGBT community as a whole.
