How Can Gay Parents Explain Orlando to Their Kids?

Ever since the tragedy in Florida, many are asking, how do gay parents explain Orlando to their kids?

Today’s column is written with a sense of emergency. The baffling massacre in Orlando has insinuated itself into me in unexpected dimensions, and caused me to ask all kinds of questions that, amazingly, I’d managed to sidestep until now. How do gay parents explain Orlando and talk about violence against LGBTQ people? What can I do differently, if anything, to keep them safe when the toll of violence is made so clear? How do I balance talking about uncertainty with the need to reassure them? And, perhaps most troubling, how do I deal with this fact: My fear for my children is bound up in my fears for myself, usually safely stowed in the overhead compartment but subject to falling out when I encounter unexpected turbulence. (I should add here that I don’t have to create or answer these questions on my own; I have a level-headed husband who’s been just as involved in working through this mess.)LGBTQ

I’ve been a regular contributor to Slate for years, but an introduction seems in order. This will be the first in a series of monthly columns I’ll be writing on one type of parenting: ostensibly, gay parenting, but more accurately, just my own up-and-down efforts at the task. Tolstoy’s opening line in Anna Karenina is famous but wrong—all families, not just the unhappy ones—are unique. So while the pieces will run each month in this Outward blog, any broader lessons that might be drawn for LGBTQ families—let alone other families—will be some combination of luck and the (soon-to-be-legion) readers’ own connections to whatever I happen to be discussing.

My kids have been lucky so far. They haven’t had to deal with any of the bullying and collateral trauma that their fathers did, and, in our progressive Philadelphia community, our family structure hasn’t caused them any problems, either. So figuring out what to say to them about violence against LGBTQ people is quite different from, say, the anguishing task Ta-Nehisi Coates set for himself in Between the World and Me. Though he recognizes the generational changes that complicate understanding his son’s experience, his eloquent, heartbreaking account of the thousand natural shocks to which African American bodies are heir is their shared, lived reality.

Our kids, by contrast, are usually safe—to the extent that any kids are safe, at least. That makes explaining anti-LGBTQ violence a different kind of challenge. They’ve had infrequent, and mostly painless, reminders of the stubborn fact that their family is different. Here’s a memorable example:

Scene: Coffee shop, circa 2010. An early Saturday morning. Me, alone with the kids.

Waitress: “Oh, is it mom’s day to sleep in?”

Kids, age 6 [in chorus]: “We don’t have a mom. We have two dads.”

Waitress, not missing a beat: “Wow, you’re lucky! I don’t even have one dad, and you have two!”

See? Kind of a positive experience.

So when Orlando happened, we were starting from zero. Our kids have no experience with fear or rejection of their family. They’re much less at risk, it seems, than we were as children. (I mostly avoided being bullied, but only through a series of baroque stratagems, the creating and sustaining of which imposed their own costs.) But we needed to talk about the incident, especially since we were taking them to a vigil to mourn and mark the event, collectively.

We found ourselves explaining how and why some madman would even want to harm gay people. A simple script seemed sensible: Most people, as you know, treat gay people the same way they treat everyone else. A few people still don’t like gays, though. And a very, very tiny number of people, with serious mental health problems, do crazy, horrible things like what happened over the weekend in Orlando. (From what I understand, the daily CNN news report the kids consume in school discussed the massacre on Monday, but, incredibly, the teacher didn’t follow up the harrowing broadcast in any way.) We opted for reassurance over nuance.

by John Culhane, Slate.com – June 14, 2016

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in Parenting / Recently Added  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

The Corrosive Politics That Threaten L.G.B.T. Americans

As families began planning funerals for the victims of Sunday’s rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., gay Americans mourned a loss that extended beyond the lives cut short.

Omar Mateen shattered the tenuous, hard-fought sense of personal safety that many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans have begun to feel as the movement for equality has made significant gains in recent years. His bullets and the blood he left behind that early morning were a reminder that in many corners of the country, gay and transgender people are still regarded as sinners and second-class citizens who should be scorned.

While the precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear, it is evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians. Hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur where bigotry is allowed to fester, where minorities are vilified and where people are scapegoated for political gain. Tragically, this is the state of American politics, driven too often by Republican politicians who see prejudice as something to exploit, not extinguish.LGBTQ

Since the 1990s, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans have made considerable progress in the fight for equality under the law. By living openly and proudly, they have changed society’s attitudes about sexual orientation and gender identity. That shift has prompted politicians who were once wary about embracing equal rights for L.G.B.T. Americans — including President Obama and Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — to become resolute allies. The 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage was celebrated by many in the gay community as the crowning achievement of a decades-long quest for respect and dignity.

Yet, that fight remains far from over. Since the marriage ruling, several Republican-led state legislatures and Republican governors and federal lawmakers have redoubled their fight against legal protections for people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. So far this year, more than 200 anti-L.G.B.T. bills have been introduced in 34 states.

Donald Trump, unlike some other prominent Republicans, called the Orlando massacre what it was: an attack on gay people. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, could not even offer that recognition to a community in pain.

Yet, Mr. Trump has vowed to choose Supreme Court justices who would overturn marriage equality, and he supports the deceptively named First Amendment Defense Act, an effort to approve discrimination against gay and transgender people nationwide under the guise of religious freedom. And Mr. Trump backtracked from his statement that transgender people should be able to use the restroom consistent with their gender identity after Senator Ted Cruz used his words to attack him during the nomination fight.

Click here to read the entire article.

by The Editorial Board – New York Times – June 15, 2016

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LGBTQ Literature for Children and Teens Comes of Age

LGBTQ Literature for Children and Teens becomes relevant and contemporary.

LGBTQ literature is taking a new turn.  When David Levithan wrote the YA novel Boy Meets Boy (Knopf, 2003), he faced a precedent in which books with LGBTQ characters were issue-based: focused on the angst of coming out in a hostile world. “We were tired of the misery plot, and wanted to re-write it,” Levithan recalls. “I wanted to write a romantic comedy.”

Today, that “misery plot” is no longer the norm and 2016’s children’s books and YA novels depict a wider range of LGBTQ experiences and family dynamics. Increasingly, the central conflict has little to do with being gay.

Such is the case with Levithan’s upcoming YA novel You Know Me Well (St. Martin’s Griffin, June), which he co-wrote with Nina LaCour, about the burgeoning friendship between a boy and a girl – both comfortably out, and both navigating the uncertainty of imminent adulthood.LGBTQ literature

“Nina and I wrote the book because we really wanted to show the common ground between a lesbian character and a gay character,” Levithan says. “Part of that is navigating romantic relationships, which is hard no matter who you love.”

Levithan, who is also editorial director and publisher at Scholastic, notes the characterization of queer characters has become far more nuanced. “Authors are really delving into what it means to have this identity,” he says. For instance, Jane B. Mason’s Without Annette (Scholastic Press, Jun.) depicts the growing tension between two girlfriends as they maneuver through the politics and elitism of a new boarding school.

“Without Annette is about navigating love,” says Levithan. “The fact that they’re girls attracted to girls – there’s obviously something specific to that, but it doesn’t define their love.”

Similarly, in Kody Keplinger’s Run (Scholastic Press, July), the main character’s bisexuality doesn’t define her. “Certainly a decade ago, if these characters existed, the whole story would be about that facet of their identity,” Levithan said.

Characters are increasingly certain of who they are, so there’s less drama around the search for identity. This assuredness is evident even in some middle grade novels and picture books. Sara Cassidy’s middle grade book A Boy Named Queen (Groundwood, Aug.) is about a boy who flouts convention and sees no need specify his orientation throughout the book.

“The story for every child isn’t going to be about coming out as LGBTQ,” says Groundwood president and publisher Sheila Barry. “In [A Boy Named Queen], the kid is very confident in every aspect of his being.” Similarly, in the picture book Big Bob, Little Bob (Candlewick, Oct.), by James Howe and illustrated by Laura Ellen Anderson, Little Bob, who dresses in girls’ clothes and wears flowers in his hair, is perfectly comfortable with who he is and what he likes.

Family and Friends

While there’s still a place for stories about understanding sexual orientation or gender identity, those narratives now show a broader range of relationships within friendships and families.

in Adoption / Foster Parenting / Personal Stories / Recently Added / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 1 comments

Same-Sex Couple Details Adoption Hurdles

For the majority of their relationship, Alphonso Reyes, 34, and his husband Melvin, 41, have dreamed of becoming fathers. In fact, they started talking about parenting on their first date.

 

Some six years later, the conversation may be closer to a reality for the Bronx, New York residents. The process, however, has not been simple.

“There is just a lot of red tape regardless of if you are LGBT or not,” Reyes told NBCOUT. He did acknowledge there are additional hurdles for gay couples.

“A lot of agencies do not want to adopt to same-sex couples. The way we have experienced it was through a lot of feet dragging.”adoption

Over the past year, the couple has fostered two children. The first, a newborn baby girl, was an emergency placement and temporary. The agency they worked with placed the child with another foster parent after only two months.

The couple has been fostering their son, whose name they prefer not to share, since February. They are in what is called pre-adoptive status – where the birth parents’ rights have been revoked and the child is eligible for adoption.

“Right now, everything is still in court; we do not have a date,” Reyes explained. “From the day he came in our home, he started calling us Daddy and Papi … So, he will always be our son, officially adopted or still in foster care.”

Fostering a child may be the best route to becoming adoptive parents for couples like Alphonso and Melvin Reyes. According to AdoptUSKids, a Maryland-based organization that assists LGBTQ couples in the adoption process, there has been an increase in children adopted out of foster care for at least the past 10 years.

“In 2014, 52 percent of the children and youth adopted were adopted by their non-relative foster parents,” Kathleen Ledesma, national project director for AdoptUSKids, told NBCOUT via email.

“The ‘enterprise’ of child welfare adoption,” Ledesma added, “centers on the best interest of the child, and that includes consideration for the child’s attachments to his or her caregiver and minimizing the number of moves a child has while in foster care.”

There are currently 415,000 children and youth in foster care in the United States, according to Ledesma, and of that number, 108,000 are available for adoption.

While there is no reliable data at the national level regarding the number of same-sex couples being approved for adoption, Ledesma said LGBTQ families and individuals are at greater risk for dropping out of the approval process to foster or adopt. The reason for this may be the additional challenges these families face.

In 2008, AdoptUSKids worked with the Children’s Bureau to draft Report to Congress: Barriers and Success Factors in Adoption. The report was an effort to help lawmakers understand better the issues facing LGBTQ families in the adoption process.

NBCNews.com, June 7, 2016 by Mashaun D. Simon

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in Adoption / Parenting / Recently Added  by Anthony Brown 2 comments

Gay custody battles force law to define what a parent is

A spate of gay custody battles are forcing the law to reconsider what constitutes a parent, with one particular case in New York set to have major implications for many more LGBTI couples.

The New York Court of Appeals is to decide whether the ex-girlfriend of a child’s biological mother should have legal parenting rights – despite having never adopted the child in question, or been married to the biological mother in one a several gay custody battles that could define LGBT family law in New York and around the country.

Brooke Barone claims she acted as the child’s ‘Mamma B’ when her girlfriend Elizabeth Cleland gave birth after artificial insemination. But when the couple split up, Cleland reportedly denied Barone visitation rights to the child – which is what Barone is now fighting for in court. Cleland claims she does not feel safe leaving her child with Barone.

lesbian family law

drawing of a happy couple of lesbians and adopted child

Tangled gay custody battles

The argument against awarding parental rights outside of biology, marriage or adoption centers on the potential for opening up bogus parenting claims. These, lawmakers argue, could come from friends, nannies, or even abusive partners seeking to gain control and cause distress.

However, those in favor of broadening the definition of a parent point out heterosexual men have been recognized as parents without genetic or adoptive connections, in order to compel child support payments.

The legalization of same-sex marriage in the US has thrust the tangled legalities of same-sex families into the spotlight, with several similar cases currently being fought in other US states, including another typically gay-friendly state, Massachusetts. And in Canada, the premier of Ontario has pledged to change the law so that both parents in an LGBTI couple are immediately entered onto the birth certificate, hopefully avoiding gay custody battles. This is a huge change to the province’s current law, where a non-biological parent in a same-sex couple is forced to begin the lengthy and costly adoption process in order to be legally recognized.

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Columbia Law professor Suzanne Goldberg said that ‘It’s only an accident of law that leads one of those parents to be unrecognized [in these cases].’

New York decision to set precedent

Even when a partner has adopted the child, however, a biological parent looking to disavow their former partner of parentage has legal recourse – as a recent case involving a lesbian couple in Alabama showed. The Alabama courts were eventually obliged by the US Supreme Court to find in favor of the adoptive parent, however.

Click here to read the entire article.

GayStarNews.com – June 5, 2016 by Laura Chubb

in Legal / Parenting / Recently Added / Second Parent Adoption / Step Parent Adoption  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Study Says Women in Lesbian Relationships Feel More Parental Stress

A Williams Institute study from the University of California Los Angeles has found women in lesbian relationships feel more parental stress than straight couples.

Ninety-five lesbian parent households were compared with 95 straight parent households to “compare same-sex and different-sex parent households with stable, continuously coupled parents and their biological offspring.”
The study found that in terms of the children’s emotional difficulties, coping behaviors and learning behaviors, there was no difference between those raised in the different households.
However, lesbian parents did experience higher stress levels.parental stress
“Some of our earlier studies have shown that lesbian mothers feel pressured to justify the quality of their parenting because of their sexual orientation,” psychiatrist and co-author of the research, Dr. Nanette Gartrell said.
In the study, parents from both households were matched for characteristics such as age, urban or rural residence, their children’s age, race and gender and whether the parents or children were born in the United States or elsewhere.
Gartrell focused on lesbian couples because there were smaller numbers of male same-sex couples that fit the criteria. The families studied showed no history of family instability or transitions such as divorce or separation and all parents had been raising their own biological children from 6 to 17 from birth.
“This study is consistent with the literature over the last 30 years, with the overwhelming consensus that kids do better with two parents than one parents, and that there’s very little difference in long-term mental health for kids when their raised by either same-sex or different-sex parents,” psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and editor of Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health, Dr. Jack Drescher said.
It’s estimated that 690,000 same-sex couples live in the United States and 19 percent of them are raising children under 18.

Click here to read the entire article.

by Kelly Morris, TheNextFamily.com – May 24, 2016

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Couple Adopts Newborn Baby With Help From Facebook

Brian Wildmo and Brad Mahon have adopted a newborn baby and they’re crediting Facebook with making it happen.

“We never expected this,” Brian told WJRT. “We keep having to pinch ourselves because I feel like we’ve been in a movie.”  And all with the help of Facebook.

The Michigan couple had been fostering for a year when they decided to adopt a baby. To help them get the word out, they created a Facebook page and started networking.

One day, Brian, a nurse, and Brad, an emergency medical technician, posted a link to their page on an online nurses support group they belonged to.

“Somebody saw it and connected us,” Brian said.Facebook, adoption, gay adoption, gay families

But after getting in touch with an expectant mother in Missouri who had an adoption plan, they lost contact with her about a month before her due date.

They figured the relationship was over until one day they got a call that the woman was in labour and had chosen them to be parents of her baby.

“Social networking is just so powerful,” Brad explained. “That’s how it happened.”

While Brian headed to Missouri to meet their new daughter, driving 12 hours through the night and being up for 36 hours straight, Brad stayed behind in Michigan so he could reunite their foster child with her birth mother.

Brad eventually arrived in Missouri to meet their daughter, whom they named Kennedy. There a judge signed off on their adoption, making Brian and Brad her legal parents.

The couple credits social media with bringing Kennedy’s birth family and them together. But they also say that patience played a big part in their story.

“Everyone’s really excited,” they said.

One of the mantras that adoption professionals tell waiting parents is to stay active on social media and let everyone know that you’re adopting.

After all, you never know who will come across your profile or, as Brian and Brad’s story has demonstrated, how they’ll find you.

Click here to read the entire article.

AmericaAdopts.com, May 22, 2016

in Adoption / Recently Added / Resources  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Same-Sex Couples and Their Children Speak Out: ‘My Family Is Just as Good as Anyone Else’s’

First comes love, then comes marriage—same sex couples and everyone knows what happens after that.

Children are the expected outcome of matrimony. Now that gay marriages are legal, the kids of their unions are subject to even more scrutiny, on top of the years of criticism from socially conservative groups like Focus on the Family and Americans for Truth About Homosexuality.

But according to a recent study in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, the kids are more than just all right; many of them are thriving. While the study focused on the biological children of lesbian households, there’s been tons of research—73 studies, meticulously reviewed by other social scientists—proving that stable same-sex partnerships, just like heterosexual ones, produce physically and emotionally healthy kids. The Root spoke to four same-gender families about the three factors they believe fuel their success.

Family Planning

According to LGBTQ-advocacy organizations like the Family Equality Council, successful gay families are often especially deliberate about planning for children. And many of those families are multiracial, with white parents raising kids of color. Gary Gates, retired research director of the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, a research center focused on sexual orientation and gender-identity law and policy, found that among white long-term couples raising children under age 18, 17 percent of single-sex couples have at least one nonwhite child, compared with 3 percent of different-gendered couples. In fact, single-sex white couples are more than five times more likely than their different-gendered counterparts to be raising nonwhite children.more gay couples are embracing surrogacy

Race mattered not for white-and-Latino couple Eva Smith, 44, and Liz Fuentes, 46, of South Orange, N.J., who are using pseudonyms to protect their African-American children’s privacy. Parenting was an essential part of becoming a family, as was careful planning.

“As a woman, [wanting children] was almost innate for me,” says Smith, who has been with Fuentes for 20 years. “I wanted to be a mom, and there are so many children out there who need loving families—we weren’t concerned with the genetics.”

Ten years ago, the couple began the adoption process of their two black sons, Peter and Adam, both age 10. After completing nearby New York’s rigorous process of workshops designed to prepare parents for adoption, which includes extensive background checks, a home study and home inspection, Smith and Fuentes were matched twice by the state with foster children they eventually adopted. The family have since relocated from the busy streets of Brooklyn, N.Y., to the quieter New Jersey suburbs to give their children the best possible quality of life and access to competitive schools that could address the boys’ developmental delays.

Sometimes a child’s geographic upbringing can be both a help and a hindrance. Growing up in rural Maine, for instance, gave Family Equality Council Co-Interim Executive Director Brent Wright, who is white, a quiet life, but left his desire to be a father “a dream deferred” because he’d never seen any gay families. As his community evolved and changed, so did his prospects for parenthood. He and his husband, Sandis, who have been together for 25 years and live in Andover, Mass., with their two black daughters, went forward with adoption after months of classes and meetings with clergy, mentors with social services experience and people of color.

“[We] had a really good grounding in the importance of cultural respect and understanding what it means to transracially adopt,” says Wright. Their girls, Olivia and Noelle, are 7 and 2 and participate in gymnastics, theater and ballet.

lesbian family law

drawing of a happy couple of lesbians and adopted child

Honest Conversations

Though today’s climate for LGBTQ families is stronger than in years past, parents must prepare themselves and their children for the realities of intolerance and hatred of all kinds. Yvonne and Rebecca Johnson, both 33, are a black lesbian couple raising their sons, Raphael, 12, and George, 14, who are Yvonne’s biological children. They live in Columbus, Ga., where their closest neighbor has a Confederate flag proudly on display. (The family’s names have been changed to prevent personal and professional backlash in their conservative hometown.)

“When the kids were young, we explained to them that people might say or do hurtful things [because of our family],” says Yvonne Johnson.

George, a ninth-grader with a passion for acting, is grateful for the confidence instilled by such conversations.

by Tamika Anderson, May 17, 2016 – TheRoot.com

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in Adoption / Anonymous/Known Donation / Known Donor / Legal / Parenting / Recently Added  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Children’s Books To Help Discuss Gender and Being Different With Your Kids

Some time ago, our blogger Stephen Stratton wrote an excellent article entitled “How to Talk About Gender and Trans People With Your Kids.”

We are republishing Stephen’s list of good children’s books dealing with being different, gender, and trans people. Reading them with your kids could be a great starting point for conversations in your family about these topics.

In Stephen’s words, “When we start to break it down, the easiest way to talk to your children about trans people is just to make space to talk about gender, early and often. The more we as a community normalize openness and honesty around gender and trans experience, the more space we make in the world for families like mine to feel safe, welcome and celebrated.”

I Am Jazz – Jessica Herthel

The story of a transgender child based on the real-life experience of Jazz Jennings, who has become a spokesperson for transkids everywhere

“This is an essential tool for parents and teachers to share with children whether those kids identify as trans or not. I wish I had had a book like this when I was a kid struggling with gender identity questions. I found it deeply moving in its simplicity and honesty.” — Laverne Cox (who plays Sophia in “Orange Is the New Black”)

From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body. She loved pink and dressing up as a mermaid and didn’t feel like herself in boys’ clothing. This confused her family, until they took her to a doctor who said that Jazz was transgender and that she was born that way. Jazz’s story is based on her real-life experience and she tells it in a simple, clear way that will be appreciated by picture book readers, their parents, and teachers.

My Princess Boy – Cheryl Kilodavis

Dyson loves pink, sparkly things. Sometimes he wears dresses. Sometimes he wears jeans. He likes to wear his princess tiara, even when climbing trees. He’s a Princess Boy.

Inspired by the author’s son, and by her own initial struggles to understand, this is a heart-warming book about unconditional love and one remarkable family. It is also a call for tolerance and an end to bullying and judgments. The world is a brighter place when we accept everyone for who they are.

10,000 Dresses – Marcus Ewert

Every night, Bailey dreams about magical dresses: dresses made of crystals and rainbows, dresses made of flowers, dresses made of windows … Unfortunately, when Bailey’s awake, no one wants to hear about these beautiful dreams. Quite the contrary. “You’re a BOY!” Mother and Father tell Bailey. “You shouldn’t be thinking about dresses at all.” Then Bailey meets Laurel, an older girl who is touched and inspired by Bailey’s imagination and courage. In friendship, the two of them begin making dresses together. And Bailey’s dreams come true!

This gorgeous picture book — a modern fairy tale about becoming the person you feel you are inside — will delight people of all ages.

Red: A Crayon’s Story – Michael Hall

A blue crayon mistakenly labeled as “red” suffers an identity crisis in the new picture book by the New York Times-bestselling creator of “My Heart Is Like a Zoo” and “It’s an Orange Aardvark!” Funny, insightful, and colorful, “Red: A Crayon’s Story,” by Michael Hall, is about being true to your inner self and following your own path despite obstacles that may come your way. “Red” will appeal to fans of Lois Ehlers, Eric Carle, and “The Day the Crayons Quit,” and makes a great gift for readers of any age!

Red has a bright red label, but he is, in fact, blue. His teacher tries to help him be red (let’s draw strawberries!), his mother tries to help him be red by sending him out on a playdate with a yellow classmate (go draw a nice orange!), and the scissors try to help him be red by snipping his label so that he has room to breathe. But Red is miserable. He just can’t be red, no matter how hard he tries! Finally, a brand-new friend offers a brand-new perspective, and Red discovers what readers have known all along. He’s blue! This funny, heartwarming, colorful picture book about finding the courage to be true to your inner self can be read on multiple levels, and it offers something for everyone!

Jacob’s New Dress – Sarah Hoffman

Jacob loves playing dress-up, when he can be anything he wants to be. Some kids at school say he can’t wear “girl” clothes, but Jacob wants to wear a dress to school. Can he convince his parents to let him wear what he wants? This heartwarming story speaks to the unique challenges faced by boys who don’t identify with traditional gender roles.

Meet Polkadot (The Polkadot Series Book 1) – Talcott Broached

Have you been looking for a story with which to begin and/or continue meaningful and accurate conversations about gender identity?

Perhaps you wish to have dialogues that center and normalize transgender identities but you feel worried you may not have accurate information?

Maybe you ARE trans or you have a child/family member who is trans and you are ready for a book that honors transgender experiences rather than sensationalizes transgender lives and bodies?

Meet Polkadot is the first in a series of books that introduces readers to our main character Polkadot, a non-binary, transgender child. This book is an accessible introduction and primer to the the diversity of gender identity, the importance of allyship, and the realness of kids like Polkadot.

Gayswithkids.com – April 25, 2016

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in Egg Donation / Parenting / Recently Added / Step Parent Adoption / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

As a Gay Woman, I Thought I’d Never Have Kids – but I Was Wrong

We had some challenges, but we got a happy ending.  A lesbian mom journeys toward family.

I’d always wanted a baby or two (or more). For me, a lesbian mom, it just wasn’t a question of if I get pregnant but when. In my daydreams, I’d see myself picking my son and daughter up from the school bus to walk our treelined block until we reached our Colonial-style home. I’d open the gate of the white picket fence, they’d rush in, drop their backpacks and the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies would greet them as they entered.

All of that.

But I’m gay.parent adoption

When I came out at the age of 16, those fantasies weren’t so realistic anymore. I just didn’t think getting pregnant could happen for me. The desire was still in my heart, but I was unsure if it would — or could — become a reality. I was missing one super obvious and important ingredient in the baby-making process: sperm.

I met my would-be wife when I was 26. On our first date, I told her of my lifelong dream to get pregnant and have kids. She told me she vaguely thought about adopting a child — and only one child. When we got married three years later, I told my wife how quickly I wanted us to try to conceive. She needed longer to settle into the idea. For her, things were moving quickly. Not to mention, we would have to finance the pregnancy.

We started to talk about getting sperm from a known donor versus an unknown donor.

For us, the best option was to go with the recommendation of our friends — fellow lesbians who were either trying to conceive, or who had just finished or had started but had never had a successful pregnancy. They recommended reputable sperm banks long before my wife and I actually ever walked into our reproductive endocrinology clinic. Luckily, our newfound clinic recommended the same sperm bank as our friends, and we eased into the process of searching for a donor. When we were seriously looking, we created a user profile. Doing so, I felt, made the process real to me.

Even so, we still contemplated going with a known donor. We thought, Hey, wouldn’t it be great if our kid could have access to the knowledge of his/her biological make-up? But our doctors reminded us of all of the legal issues which could ensue if our friend (potential known sperm donor) decided he wanted rights to his child. We didn’t want to go to court nor did we want to subject our own mental health or the livelihood of our family to the ramifications of such a decision.

Our decision to go with a donor who chose to be anonymous was our ultimate decision. This meant that any child we conceived in the in vitro process would never get to know his or her biological father. If we went with a known sperm donor from the cryobank, that child would have the legal right to meet him once they reach the age of 18. With my wife being Sri Lankan and I African-American, we knew we wanted a Sri Lankan donor since I’d be the one to carry our child.

Once we decided on the cryobank, we had access to so much information about the sperm donor. We knew his ethnicity, height, weight, and even his astrological sign — all of this information is available before making the expensive purchase of sperm.

Cosmopolitan – By , Apr 29, 2016

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in Anonymous/Known Donation / Known Donor / Parenting / Recently Added  by Anthony Brown 0 comments