June 1st, 2011 | |
Posted in Family
For the past three years, our little gay family has been just as normal as any other family I know. Just like every other family out there, we don’t eat dinner at the kitchen table enough. We get behind on laundry. We go out to dinner once a week. We watch TV. We have a pet or two. The General and I take turns helping The Kid with homework. I drag them to sporting events; they talk about comic books and nerdy cartoon stuff. That’s pretty normal, no?
And just like any other family, gay, straight or otherwise, we want to expand our family. Past The Kid, past the dog and the cat, and add a baby to the mix. Why not, right? I mean, what else do we have going on? And I think when we finally started to seriously consider that option is when I realized that — holy crap, we’re a gay family.
When/if we have a baby, who’s going to accept him/her? Who’s not? Who will make a huge deal out of the fact that our child will have two moms? And who will just be ecstatic because, HEY!, we had a baby! Does the baby have grandparents? Aunts? Uncles? Or do we just raise our baby with family that we choose for him/her? That kinda thing gets trick if you really start thinking about it.
Then, there’s the whole issue of two ladies not being able to make a baby. I gave The General a turkey baster on our 3 month anniversary. It was more of a joke than anything. And besides, I’d stolen the turkey baster from a neighbor when I was moving out of the suburbs and into Minneapolis, so it’s not like I really expected her to use a used turkey baster… but still. It’s not like we can try to get one of us knocked up. And if we did, it would probably have to require entirely too much alcohol and a stranger with a penis. In other words, not really an option.
This is disjointed, I know. I want to post today and I want to post on this topic, but it’s hard to wrap my head around what it’s like to be a gay family. We’re just a family. And probably a whole heck of a lot less dysfunctional than most of the families out there.