“Every day since my father died has been at least a little fucked up. There is no such thing as a non-fucked up day when you are a Daddy’s girl without a father.”

“It’s funny. We have legal documents declaring our marriage valid in two different states. We’ve been together and in love for years. But it was the birth of our daughter this daredevil, this personality, that really made our home feel like family.”

“Suddenly I was looking at all these little boxes online, little question marks where the faces would be, each one representing another human that shared half of my daughter’s DNA.”

So maybe my pregnancy path isn’t as simple and straightforward as baby books would have you believe it should be because I’m a poor QPoC with anxiety, but it has been an interesting worthwhile journey so far. I can’t wait until I can take the next step.

It’s a boy, until and unless he tells us otherwise, I thought. It’s a boy who will be raised without gender roles. It’s a boy who will be defined by their heart and mind, not by the organs that happen to be between their legs. It’s a boy who will be loved wholly, deeply, and completely by the two women who created him.

“Sometimes, when you’re in the business of parenting, you have to phone a friend for a bit of perspective and advice. Sometimes, you have to phone more than one.”

She didn’t say “I have suspected this for years and I still love you.” It went more like a Scared Straight kind of thing but instead of scaring me about drugs and a life of crime, she wanted to scare me straight, straight. “Just Say No to Lesbianism” straight.

“As a lesbian mom, it was especially hard to fight the urge to do the “right” thing, however slippery a concept that was, because I was representing a community, not just myself, I thought.”

Sometimes the gulf between my own experience and “typical” parents is the same as that between parents and non-parents. And yet, on a fundamental level it’s also the same joy and the same challenge that we all face.