The word takes on new dimensions but keeps old values
by Adrienne Martini
Helen's son is a typical second grader. He likes Harry Potter. He takes karate. He does well in school. In most respects, he is an 8-year-old like any other. Her newest son, who is still an infant, could pose for a Gerber ad. He's a cutie, with chubby thighs, a sweet smile, and an infectious giggle.
Helen fiercely and equally loves both, like any good parent would. But only one of these boys is biologically connected to her. While both have the same father, they have two different mothers. And all three parents live happily under the same roof, choosing an unorthodox relationship that appears to work well for all parties.
Not so many years ago, the word "family" had a static definition involving one mommy and one daddy and two kids, preferably a boy and a girl. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins as well as the outside world circled like loose electrons around this nucleus, influencing but never breaking this primary bond. Regardless of how their own home life may be structured, this Leave it to Beaver-esque picture is the first one that pops to mind when folks start talking family.
But this image is just that, an idealized model of how the world works. Even during the days of black and white television, the structure of families was fluid. The unit adapted to fit the circumstances. Grandparents raised their grandchildren when their biological parents were unable to. Aunts and uncles took in nieces and nephews, when their families of origin stopped functioning.
Single parents used to hover on the edges of respectability. Now, 27 percent of households have just one adult in them. Blended families are mainstream, with step-parents and half-siblings and everyone in between living under one roof.
Until a national talk show host decided to speak out, there was another type of family that was virtually invisible. Rosie O'Donnell's step out of the closet proved that you can have kids and be gay. While this has made the issue more visible, it hasn't made it more accepted.
The American Academy of Family Physicians, which represents more than 93,500 doctors and medical students nationwide, recently adopted a policy supporting legislation that "promotes a safe and nurturing environment, including psychological and legal security, for all children, including those of adoptive parents, regardless of the parents' sexual orientation."
Their definition of "family" now reads "a group of individuals with a continuing legal, genetic, and/or emotional relationship. Society relies on the family group to provide for the economic and protective needs of individuals, especially the children and the elderly."
Despite this new awareness of how broad a family can be, acceptance comes slowly.
"In certain areas of the country, people still feel threatened," says Corri Planck of Family Pride, a national organization devoted to advocating for gay and lesbian parents. "In some places they could lose their jobs, their housing, their kids. That's something that people don't want to play with."
Because of the stigma that is still attached to these gay and lesbian family units, it's difficult to estimate how many there are in the United States. Numbers range from 2 million to 16 million. Call it 8 million, maybe, if you were shooting for an average. Data on even less traditional families like Helen's is scarce at best, given how her polyamorous triad steps on several cultural taboos.
Local non-traditional family members are reluctant to speak for fear that there will be reprisals. Names have been changed for this story. While granting such anonymity is not Metro Pulse's editorial preference, it was the only way that these parents would speak about their kids. But if you pay close attention to what they say, you'll note that these are the sorts of things that a straight mom or dad would say. Parenting cuts across sexual orientation.
The success or failure of these families boils down to the same sort of criteria that mark more traditional structures.
"Most people would go 'maybe that's not what I would do, but the kids are doing just fine,'" Planck says. "I think if more people knew our families, they wouldn't have a second thought."
Here, then, are some local families who are changing what the word means, one day at a time.
Alex and her partner Sue had to climb a rocky road to become parents. For seven years, they tried the biological route through artificial insemination but had no success. They tried private adoptions—which are contracts arranged between the would-be parents and a pregnant woman not brokered through an agency—but something would always fall through. Eventually, they found a social worker in Philadelphia who was able to set them up with an adoption agency.
"Thirteen days after we signed with the agency, we got a phone call to come get her. Fast. You can't tell me that you don't end up getting the kid that you're supposed to get," Alex says.
Fran was days old when this couple came to collect her. Now, she is 10 and in fifth grade. Her classmates know about how her home differs from theirs.
"The kids at school give her more grief about having two mommas than they do about her being African-American—and there are only three African-American kids in that school," Alex says. "She's also strong enough that she doesn't take any shit off of anybody. She's like 'you don't know what it's like in my house so how can you talk about my moms in that way?'"
Legally, Sue is Fran's mother, not Alex. Tennessee doesn't have a legal provision for second parent adoption, which is not likely to change until the state lifts its ban on marriages between two people of the same sex. Alex can't put Fran (or Sue, for that matter) on her health insurance. If Alex dies, her Social Security benefits will not be passed to her child. In the eyes of the law, this collection of people is not a family.
The opinion of Alex and Sue's extended family, however, differs.
"My partner's mother is very supportive," Alex says. "Her father was alive whenever we first started talking about this and he said 'you're doing the wrong thing.' When Fran was 18 months old, he said that it was the best thing we'd ever done. With all the bigotry and bias, people come around when you personalize it.
"My partner is the granddaughter of the preacher of a local Baptist church. Yet when we adopted Fran, the church ladies gave us a shower," she says, then admits how much that surprised her.
Of course, there are challenges that come with raising any child. While Alex believes that her home is more nurturing than that of a straight couple, she does worry about Fran not having strong male influences. And that was something that Alex missed out on as well when she was growing up.
"Having not really had a good emotional relationship with a male figure in my life, I miss that for my daughter. We work hard at putting men in her life who will teach the same kinds of values that we have," she says, and adds that a couple of gay men in her West Knox neighborhood take Fran to Girl Scout dances and other father-daughter events.
Among the other challenges are the rough spots that crop up in every parent-child relationship as the child moves through different developmental stages and tests her independence.
"We never love her any less," Alex says, "and just know this is one of those hard places that you've got to get through. But I wonder how much our family and circumstance exacerbate the problem, if at all."
So how does Alex define family?
"Any group of people that loves one another and cares for each other, whether or not they live in the same household," she says. "That's it in a nutshell."
One of Daniel's most cherished memories is rocking his sons to sleep. When they were babies, he had a rocking chair on the porch and he would take them out there in the wee hours when they were restless.
Now his boys are too old for that, except on rare occasions. The oldest is six and was adopted when he was three weeks old; his brother is four. Both are imported from Vietnam, one of the few countries that would allow single men to adopt. It has since changed that policy.
The adoption process was not an easy one. Out of the 150 agencies Daniel initially contacted, three returned his calls. Two of them replied simply to tell him that they couldn't help. The third agency, which is based in Michigan, could. No local agencies replied.
Lesbians seem to have an easier time from the start. Not only can one of the partners take the steps to give birth to a biological child, adoption agencies don't seem as prejudiced about single women.
"If you look through the adoption books, about 97 percent of the agencies say that single women are OK to adopt," he says. "I think it's not always an assumption that if you're a single woman that you're a lesbian, but it is always an assumption that if you're a single male, you're gay."
In this case, that assumption would be correct. Daniel is gay and a single dad. Once he found an agency, the adoption process for his older son took 18 months and was full of challenges. One was due to geography. At the time, he was earning his Ph.D. in South Carolina, a state in which it is illegal for single men to adopt under any circumstances. Daniel maintained a home here and commuted constantly. Even the final step offered a challenge.
"When my adoption was finalized in the United States, I had a friend go with me to court—not someone I was with, it just happened to be a male friend. He wasn't allowed to go back into the courtroom where the judge was, because friends said if the judge saw two men standing in a room, that she wouldn't approve the adoption and say that more paperwork was needed," he remembers.
"All of the barriers have given me a sense of who I am and what my capabilities are. I think we put limits on what were capable of doing. I didn't think that I'd ever be able to adopt a child and now that I was able to do that, I feel that there really isn't anything I'm not able to do. There's a 100 ways to go around something to get what you want."
There are, of course, still challenges to raising children once they've been adopted. Daniel's mom (his father is deceased) was initially against the idea but came around once she saw her grandchild and is now a
great source of support. Daniel's neighborhood is full of kids the same age as his own, which provides strong social connections. His neighbors don't seem to care too much about this single dad's sexual orientation. He's never been asked nor has anyone told him that their children can't play with his because their dad is gay.
"But we still have barriers because we're not a traditional family," he says. "Children will often ask 'Where's your mother?' My sons are well aware that their mothers are in Vietnam. When they say their prayers at night, they pray for their moms. They know that they exist—but that they exist someplace else and are not part of our family in a traditional sense.
"We've talked about a lot of different families—divorced families, single-mom families. Maybe a single-dad family is unusual, but there's different things that make up a family."
According to most psychologists, sexual orientation isn't an indicator of one's ability to parent. Bruce Seidner, a local clinical and forensic psychologist and custody evaluator who also does divorce mediation, says "I am unaware of any study that says that children in homosexual families have more problems. In terms of adoption, what we're concerned about is the capacity of a family to attach and the quality of their bonding and its consistency. Our research says that homosexuality is not a significant variable.
"If you're growing up in the West Village, you have less prejudicial feedback. But even those kids growing up outside of more supportive communities—it's certainly a challenge, but it doesn't appear to affect their self-esteem. If anything, they tend to have more of a sense of esteem and ability to deal with adversity," Seidner concludes.
Six years out, Daniel thinks that the road facing gays and lesbians who'd like to adopt has become even more difficult, despite sexual orientation becoming less of a hot button issue on a national scale.
"In some respects I think it's worse," he says. "There are a lot of children who need homes, and I know several people who would like to provide homes, but they won't go through the public ridicule and through the hoops. I know of two lesbian couples who wouldn't adopt a child unless they were able to adopt the child openly—and they weren't allowed to do so in the state of Tennessee."
Daniel would like to see things change in the next 10 years, for the definition of "family" to be made more broad.
"We've expanded a lot of roles in our society with regard to gender, race, and culture. I'd like to see a raised level of tolerance that 'different' enhances our community and a child's experience. We can be a product of different households yet still have the same successful outcome. I mean, I had two heterosexual parents and ended up being gay—and my sexuality doesn't increase or decrease the likelihood that my children will be gay. They have the same one-in-10 shot that I had," he says.
"Hopefully, they can come from this experience and be advocates, say 'I turned out OK. Why is this a problem?' But they're too young to speak at this point, and I won't obligate them to do so. I don't want them to become poster children for the gay community. I like to give them as many choices in life as I possibly can—and they're not old enough to make that choice yet."
Before she had kids, Helen used to speak on panels and in front of classes about sexual orientation.
"Then it was just about me," she says, "but now that it involves little helpless people and school-age kids—that makes it hard to come forward."
Her living situation is the one most likely to raise eyebrows clear up to the crown of one's head. For 12 years now, Helen and Nick and Liz have lived under the same roof as a family unit. They share a bedroom—but Helen does have a dummy bedroom for the occasions when more conservative extended family members visit. The older child is biologically Nick and Liz's; the younger Nick and Helen's. But that difference doesn't matter when it comes to caring for the kids.
"Everybody at my workplace knows that I have this other kid who's kind of mine," Helen says. "They don't exactly understand the relationship and the dynamics of our family but a lot of people have said 'So this is totally different.' And I'm like 'No. It's really not.'
"When Liz had the first son, she was starting grad school. I was the person who stayed home with him. Now, the days when I'm home with the second son feel very much like that. I'm sure for some people biology makes a whole lot of difference. But except for things like breast feeding—the stuff that is biological—overall there's not a difference."
Legally, this relationship isn't polygamy. Nick is married to Liz. Period. Besides, modern usage of the word polygamy usually refers to an older man marrying many younger women and is generally an abusive situation. A better name for this arrangement is "polyamory," a recent coinage that indicates more than two people who are committed to each other and share a household. And after 12 years, this relationship has lasted longer than most first marriages, half of which end by their eleventh year.
"There are people who know who misconstrue our relationship. Like, we have some friends who just moved back into town and we've sort of gotten the feeling that they think we're like swingers or something. Not that there's anything wrong with being a swinger," she says, with a laugh, "but we're committed to each other. We were drawn to each other because of the people that we are, not because Nick and Liz said 'we're looking for a third person.' I would say that we spend most of our time doing stuff that other people with babies do. It's not as different as people think."
The legal challenges haven't been as mountainous as one might think, since there is a genetic connection. The trickiest bit is drafting a will that guarantees that the children end up with one of these three, even if there is no biological link between that parent and the child.
Socially, however, there have been challenges, most poignantly after the premature birth of the youngest son, who had to stay in intensive care for a few weeks after delivery.
"Liz couldn't go in to see him because she was not 'a parent.' She could go in with me or she could go in with Nick, but she could not go in by herself," Helen remembers. "We explained what the deal was to the people who seemed like they'd be cool with it. If those people were working, we'd be fine. But there were nurses in the hospital who made a point to make Liz not feel welcome."
While the oldest son is old enough to realize that his home situation is different from other kids, he seems untroubled by it. If he asks questions, they'll be answered openly and in an age-appropriate manner.
"But he almost seems to have an innate understanding of it. It's weird, because it's never like we've sat down and had a talk. He knows that there are some things that we're discreet about. He's always known that there are people who are OK with it and people who aren't," Helen says.
She and Nick comment about how they marvel at single mothers with small children, wondering how they manage to get through without a break. Is it easier with three sets of hands?
"Oh, yeah. And I think one more would be great!" she jokes.
If you didn't know the specifics of her situation when you listen to Helen talk about her kids, you'd assume that she is in a conventional relationship.
"It sounds sort of trite but I really do think having kids makes you a better person in a lot of ways," she says. "I'm a lot less self-absorbed. Kids give you a focus—here's the person who comes first. Also, just like any other parent, we have that sort of attitude of 'what was it that we talked and laughed about before we had kids?' They are just so much fun."
In her opinion, the definition of family is both broad and simple.
"Biology doesn't really enter in to it much," she says. "Two or more people who love and support each other. If you say you're a family, you're a family."
May 15, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 20
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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