“Daddy, What’s a Sperm Donor?” This is the question I fear most

May 8, 2013 – BY MARK OPPENHEIMER, NewRepublic.com

Last week, on the day that Sports Illustrated posted NBA player Jason Collins’s essay announcing his homosexuality, I was walking with Rebekah, our six-year-old. We were going to pick up our car at the auto mechanic’s shop on the corner, when across the street I spotted a neighbor going in the other direction, strolling hand-in-hand with her two-year-old son. They waved to me, and I said hi, and then we walked on. “Who was that?” Rebekah asked.

I hesitated. I could have given a very simple answer: “That was Evelyn’s wife.” (Evelyn, as I’ll call her, is a woman Rebekah has met several times.) But I didn’t. I told her something else, something true but a little bit evasive, something like, “That was our neighbor Claire and her son—they live next door to the O’Malleys.”

 My three daughters all know that when they grow up, they can, if they so choose, marry women. They know this because they have schoolmates who have two moms; because my wife and I talk freely about our circle of friends, which includes gay men and lesbians; and because, when Rebekah comes home from school with first-grade talk of boyfriends, who “likes” whom, and whom she’ll marry someday—first grade is, it seems, junior high with training wheels—we occasionally mention that her future spouse could be a man or a woman. Even so, this moment on Jason Collins’s big day was not the first time that I found myself being slippery when a daughter had inquired about a lesbian mother, even in a context that had nothing to do with lesbianism.