Mother’s Day for One Queer Family

Cassie Eurich

I have never thought my family was weird. Growing up I had one parent who went to work, one parent who was a stay-at-home mom for a couple of years while she built an addition on our house, and a younger brother I got along with most of the time. I had a couple of grandparents and an abundance of aunts and uncles and cousins, some of whom lived only a couple miles down the road. We had as many as four cats at one point. Our living room was full of musical instruments. We played hockey using brooms and a whiffle ball in unfinished rooms while the addition was being built, and then moved it out to the driveway in later years. In the winter we made sledding tracks on our hill of a lawn that were fun enough they required wearing helmets. We got into arguments playing Monopoly. My family was normal, I just had two moms.

I like to think of myself as a fascinating experiment in the nature vs. nurture debate. I have a lot of quirks from one mom and emotional responses to most situations that match my other mom. I have mannerisms picked up from both. I have the same smile and the same nose as my birth mom, but I am the only person amidst the many relatives on the genetically-related-to-me side of my family with curly hair, where I somehow match my non-birth mom. She would come to parent teacher conferences and my teachers would often say, “Oh, I see the resemblance!” to our great amusement.

But we didn’t look like any other family I knew, even living in Vermont. I never saw a family that looked like mine on TV, and rarely in books. When I was younger, I read everything I could get my hands on. In middle school we had to track how many books we read in a school year, and the teachers let me stop counting every year when I hit 100. I read through the school library entire bookshelves at a time. And in all that, I remember a single picture book about a family with two moms from when I was little, and just one of my middle school fantasy books with a lesbian couple in parental roles. And then in high school my parents got divorced, and a couple years later one of my moms got remarried. So now I have gained a great step-mom, but I also have yet to see a family that looks like mine in any piece of media I have ever consumed.

And yet, that never really got in my way. I didn’t need to see my family anywhere, because I knew it looked different but it didn’t feel different. I was not bullied. I was not picked on. It wasn’t a secret. In elementary school I had many conversations with baffled classmates about I could possibly not have a dad somewhere amongst my parents, which was definitely a much harder conversation for them than for me. In middle school kids would try to find “subtle” ways to figure out if I had two moms by starting conversations with things like, “I saw your mom at the grocery store yesterday,” which mostly just sounds like the start of a bad “your mom” joke. I found it greatly amusing to just answer with things like “which one?” and watch them try to figure out where to go with the conversation from there when I had just come right out and confirmed it for them. I have never been ashamed.

And then the summer I turned fourteen I started going to what I can only describe as a hippy music summer camp, where I met a girl who’s family looked like mine (at least it did when we met): two moms and a younger sibling. My summer camp attracted what I would consider a statistically higher than average population of LGBTQ folks, and over the next decade as we all grew into ourselves, more and more of our friends who identified as female and not straight would come to ask one or the both of us about what it was like to have families like ours. We would talk about how she knew her sperm donor, and mine was an anonymous concept behind a single packet of medical history. We would talk about how my brother and I have the same birth mom and our last name from our other mom, while my friend and her sister have different birth moms and a hyphenated last name. We would talk about how my parents are divorced and one remarried, and her parents are still together. We would talk about how we both called one parent “Mommy” and one parent “Momma”, even though that’s not what my parents had planned to be called (whoops, guess very small me took that decision into my own hands!). When I went to Smith College - widely known for the rumors of its high concentration of lesbians – I can’t even tell you how many of these conversations I had. It was the logistics and the tiny details that always mattered the most, because here we were living proof of the kinds of families they dreamed of having.

I love to talk about my family, but there was always something a little sad about the wonder with which many of these mostly young women would approach the conversation. I often wish that more kids could see families that look like mine, not because a lack of representation was ever something that made my life hard, but because I wish that it was normal for everyone to look at my family and see that the only real difference in having a whole basket full of moms is the number of phone calls I will be making on Mother’s Day.