Lesbian Parenting
How and what do lesbian parents teach their kids about sexuality? How do queer-identified or questioning kids with lesbian parents navigate their own family and sexual identities? To find out how some might answer these questions, I spoke with lesbian mother of three and parenting columnist Lucky Tomaszek of suburban Milwaukee and Caroline Cox-Orrell, a queer-identified queerspawn activist who was raised by two moms in suburban Boston.
Rainbow Rumpus: How have your identity and experience as a lesbian shaped what you teach your kids about healthy relationships and sexuality?
Lucky Tomaszek: A lot of the way that I approach sexuality as a parent actually came from all of the years I spent doing birth work, as a doula and then as a midwife, not actually because of my orientation. I worked with so many women who had so much fear and shame about their bodies, women who didn’t have any idea what it was that their bodies were doing, women who had pent-up remorse and anger at themselves for previous decisions. I decided I didn’t want my kids to grow up with any of that. The range of normal human sexuality is so big!
With regard to orientation, the same things apply in my parenting. It doesn’t matter. Gender really has no meaning in love. Our spiritual goal as people is to find good love, and to share good love with people. I believe that’s just as important as the biological drive to reproduce. If you find that love with someone, you should take it and share it and love as best you can.
RR: You’ve created a safe space for your children to grow in, so much so that I know your precocious older daughter felt comfortable identifying as bisexual and talking with you about it. How’s she doing?
LT: I was asking her last night if she identified as bi. She said, no, she’s straight. I said, “You identified as bi for a while, though.” And she said, “You know what, Mom? I don’t know. I’m young, and I don’t know yet. Right now I really like boys, and before I really liked girls. I just don’t know.” And what I love about that is that she already acknowledges that there’s a fluidity to her sexuality.
When she identified as bi, though, I could never get her to tell me which girls she thought were cute. I know she had a lot of angst. She told me she didn’t tell anyone at school because she didn’t think anybody would want to be her friend if she told them.
RR: What did you tell her?
LT: I told her she should always be herself, and that it might not be the fact that she identified as bi that would make people uncomfortable, but that a lot of people aren’t thinking about boyfriends or girlfriends or sexual orientation, and that she is probably because I’m gay and it’s something that’s a part of our life. Most people don’t start thinking about this till high school. They walk along thinking they’re straight until something that happens inside of them tells them they’re not.
RR: What was the journey like for you, having two moms and identifying as queer?
Caroline Cox-Orrell: I didn’t really have a coming out to my parents ever. I don’t talk to my parents a lot about my personal relationships. Because our house has always been so open to different sexual orientations and gender identities and queernesses, there was never this sense that I was hiding this from them. Even when my sisters and I were younger and we had crushes on people or whatever, our parents would never assume that it was a boy. It really was never an issue. I assume they know now, because they’ve met girls that I’ve dated. But it’s never been an explicit conversation.
RR: How have you found community with other queer-identified or “second gen” young adults with LGBT parents?
CC-O: I do a lot of programming with COLAGE. I’ve done advocacy; I do a summer program. There’s a very, very active and awesome second gen community every summer. We have a lunch, and there’s a lot of discussion among second gen queerspawn about what it’s like. I think it’s really important to have that community and be aware of and friendly with other second gen queerspawn. One of the things that we talk about a lot is how second gen queerspawn are really affected by trophy child syndrome.
RR: Trophy child syndrome? What’s that about?
CC-O: It’s this idea that children with gay parents, especially older children with gay parents, when you feel like you’re the only one people know with gay parents, you feel like you’re representing an entire community. People judge the way gay people parent based on you. It’s a pressure that comes from society’s expectations. Especially with the whole gay marriage debate, there’s that question of how are the children ending up.
There’s this pressure—for me it was pretty much my internalized pressure—to be perfect, to be straight, to love your gay parents. But the reality is that we have families like everyone else, and like everyone else, we have our problems. I think by the time I was emotionally ready to be dating people, I think I had kind of gotten over it. It was a huge pressure until I started to meet other second gen queerspawn, and then I was like, “Okay. It’s my life.”
