Zena Sharman’s memoir in essays is a powerful testament to the transformative potential of queer families. The book “took ten years of grieving to write,” after her mother died, she tells us. The first part charts her childhood and memories of her single mother, who had suffered ritual abuse in her own childhood. Sharman writes of her mother’s mental health struggles and their life on welfare, disconnected from any family of origin. Her mother’s love was constant, however, and her death a blow that left Sharman with unanswered questions and no help through her grief and the trauma she inherited.
The cracks in Sharman’s first marriage were exacerbated by the strain of grieving, and it fell apart soon after her mother’s passing. She then found herself in a new relationship with a nonbinary partner who was already planning to co-parent with two queer women, another couple. Although Sharman had hesitations about becoming a parent, with so much unresolved from her own past, she took the chance, forming a family of four parents and (eventually) three children in Vancouver.
Yet parenting “isn’t a choice I made once. It’s a threshold I cross again and again,” she writes. As she shares the story of their family, Sharman delves into what it means to navigate intergenerational trauma while parenting; how she found her own parental identity away from inherited meanings of terms like “mother” and “dad”; and how her femme identity and queer kink have helped heal and sustain her. (She is very clear, since she is also writing about parenting, that the latter is only with consenting adults.)
This is queer family in the queerest sense, uncharted and evolving. There is grief and trauma here, but there are also possibilities: of healing, of love, and of “the legacies of chosen kinship and collective care” that we both draw upon and pass down to our children. Powerful and original, this memoir won’t be for everyone (see content warning below), but for others, it will be thought provoking and even nourishing, making it a highly recommended title.
Content warnings: suicidal ideation and attempts; childhood sexual abuse, incest, and other forms of abuse, including intimate partner violence, which are mentioned but not described in detail; miscarriage; BDSM.
