What’s in a Name? Perspectives from Non-Biological and Non-Gestational Queer Mothers

By Demeter Press

Queer parenthood: It's multifaceted. It's complex. And it is constantly changing, as laws and culture shift around us. What's in a Name? reflects on this complexity through the voices of nonbiological/non-gestational queer mothers/parents who explore our experiences parenting across our different social and familial locations. The authors have all taken different routes to parenting, live in different countries, and understand our relationships to parenting through our own personal experiences. What we share is a commitment to parenting beyond the limits of biology, and of building families that are drawn together and maintained by the love and labour of parenting. The fifteen essays in this book address three key moments in our parenting journeys. First, we examine the routes we took to parenting, with many of us specifically focusing on the experience of being the "other" mother while our partners were pregnant, and the particular fears, anxieties, and triumphs that come with it. Second, we locate ourselves "in the thick of it" as parents, where the experiences shared among parents are colored by our particular experiences as nonbiological/non-gestational mothers/parents. Finally, we reflect on our identities, including the identity of "mother," and how those grow, shift, and develop throughout our parenting journeys.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Sep 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781772583021

Book preview

Name?

What’s in a Name?

Perspectives from Nonbiological and Nongestational Queer Mothers

Edited by Sherri Martin-Baron, Raechel Johns, and Emily Regan Wills

What’s in a name

Perspectives from Nonbiological and Nongestational Queer Mothers

Edited by Sherri Martin-Baron, Raechel Johns, and Emily Regan Wills

Copyright © 2020 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: What’s in a name?: Perspectives from nonbiological and nongestational queer mothers / edited by Sherri Martin-Baron, Raechel Johns, and Emily Regan Wills.

Names: Martin-Baron, Sherri, 1977- editor. | Johns, Raechel, 1976- editor. | Wills, Emily Regan, 1981- editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20200257528 | ISBN 9781772582376 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Nonbiological mothers. | LCSH: Nonbiological mothers—Psychology. | LCSH: Sexual minority parents. | LCSH: Sexual minority parents—Psychology. | LCSH: Parenthood. | LCSH: Parenthood—Psychological aspects. | LCSH: Motherhood. | LCSH: Motherhood—Psychological aspects.

Classification: LCC HQ73.6 .W43 2020 | DDC 306.874/30866—dc23

Acknowledgments

The editors, Sherri, Raechel, and Emily, would like to acknow-ledge the support of Demeter Press and in particular Dr. Andrea O’Reilly and Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin. Without Demeter Press, this book would not be here. Demeter Press supports publications around parenting, and particularly motherhood. When the editors were first discussing the book, Demeter Press was our first preference for a publisher, and we were thrilled when they liked the idea.

We would also like to acknowledge all of the contributors. Your stories have made us laugh, cry, and ponder, and we thank you for all of your thoughtful contributions. We also acknowledge you, the reader! We hope you love the stories that have been shared with you.

Sherri would like to acknowledge with gratitude her coeditors, Raechel and Emily, for their confidence in this project and support in bringing it to fruition. It has been a labour of love. She also thanks them for their encouragement to write her own chapter. Sherri would also like to thank two friends, Dr. Emily Perkins and Michelle Loheac, who read early drafts and gave marvelous suggestions for editing her own chapter. She feels grateful to live and work in a community of writers and readers. Lastly, Sherri wishes to thank her family, friends, and colleagues for their love and support, especially her close childhood friends Stacey and Lily, her brother and his family, her parents and parents-in-law, her wife Michelle, who has been her rock, and their three wonderful children.

This project is an interesting blend of family and work, more so than many other projects. As such, when reflecting on acknowledgments, Raechel would like to thank everyone who has supported her in all of her varied roles—professor, parent, wife, daughter, sister, friend, colleague, writer, leader, and so on. Raechel would like to acknowledge the support of her university, the University of Canberra, for supporting her to work on this book. Raechel is grateful for the support of all her family. To her partner and children – this book would not be possible without you! She would also like to thank her broader family (parents, sisters, in-laws, etc.) for all the support provided to her, her partner, and children since they embarked on this crazy parenting journey!

Raechel would also like to acknowledge Sherri for the idea to undertake this project. Sherri shared the idea in a Facebook group. From there, Raechel and Emily joined Sherri to plan the project. This project came to fruition because Sherri had the courage to reach out and suggest she wanted to make this book.

Emily would like to acknowledge the support received from a publication grant from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa to underwrite the costs of producing this book. In addition, she would like to thank everyone who supports her in balancing parenting and writing. At work, that means her colleagues Nadia Abu-Zahra and Diana El Richani for creating a team where care work is as important as paid work, her department, which never minds having small people wandering the hallways, and her students who accept and even seem to enjoy the chaos. At home, that means her nonbio sister Isabel, her mom Rose, and, most of all, her wife Kate, who has had the harder job for about twelve years now and is really due her own sabbatical.

For Ellie, Willa, and Miriam, who are the brightest stars in my sky—SMB

For my children, for making me ‘Mama’ —RNJ

For my mother, and for my kids, who have taught me what being a parent means—ERW

Contents

Introduction

Any Other Name: Why We Edited This Book

Sherri Martin-Baron, Raechel Johns, and Emily Regan Wills

Chapter 1

Little Arrows

J. Ryann Peyton

Chapter 2

Big Little Love

Jacki Jax Brown

Chapter 3

Family Recipe

Leah Oppenzato

Chapter 4

Redefining [M]other

Beth Cronin

Chapter 5

Becoming Mommy

Louise Silver

Chapter 6

Love Is All You Need

Sherri Martin-Baron

Chapter 7

Vinzi Is the Name of My Son

Nadja Miko-Schefzig

Chapter 8

Making a Mama Bear

Melissa Boyce

Chapter 9

From Ambivalence to All In: Biology Does Not Matter, Love Is All That Counts!

Raechel Johns

Chapter 10

Of Children and Choices

Claire Candland

Chapter 11

Unnatural Parenting

Emily Regan Wills

Chapter 12

All the Ways We Didn’t Have a Baby (and a couple of ways we did)

Stacy Cannatella

Chapter 13

Are You Having the Next One? Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My (Empty) Womb

Patricia Curmi

Chapter 14

No, That’s Mom

Allie Robbins

Chapter 15

Queering Biology through the Glue of Love

Sonja Mackenzie

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Any Other Name: Why We Edited This Book

Sherri Martin-Baron, Raechel Johns, and Emily Regan Wills

Queer parenthood: It’s multifaceted. It’s complex. And it is constantly changing, as laws and culture shift around us. What are our experiences as modern queer parents? The voices we often hear are from the biological or gestational parent; however, just as important are the voices of the other parent, who often hold a complicated relationship to whatever title they use. This book is a collection of personal essays by queer women and nonbinary people who are nonbiological and nongestational mothers/parents. Our essays explore our experiences parenting across our different social and familial locations. We have all taken different routes to parenting, live in different countries, and understand our relationships to parenting through our own personal lenses. What we all share is a commitment to parenting beyond the limits of biology and of building families that are drawn together and maintained by the love and labour of parenting.

Sherri

When I tell people that my eldest child, now five, still prefers her other mother, I usually get reassurance that parental preferences change. But I worry that’s never going to happen. You see, I am the nonbiological and nongestational mother. I didn’t grow my child in my body. She doesn’t have my DNA, and I couldn’t stay at home for the first few months of her life, as my wife was able to through maternity leave at her job. Does my child love me and enjoy spending time with me? Yes. But would she prefer her other mother? Always. I am hopeful that as she gets older, this will even out a little. But that doesn’t change the complicated feelings I have about this issue. Very few of my friends in my daily life are nonbiological or nongestational mothers like me. I can share my anxieties and experiences with others, but I’m not sure that they quite understand the nuances.

When my wife was pregnant with our firstborn, I tried to read up on what to expect as a new parent. I found only one book that was meant for people like me, and I honestly found it quite depressing. I appreciated and wanted stories that were complex, yes, but also positive.

So instead, I searched online for queer new parent forums and found one that resonated with me. One night after an exchange on this forum about the lack of resources for queer nonbiological and nongestational mothers, I realized with absolute clarity that if the resources we need aren’t out there for us, we need to create them. We will make our own book! I wanted to put our voices out there, for ourselves to build that support, and for others to begin to understand our experiences.

I reached out to this online community of queer mothers from around the world and put my idea out there. The response was overwhelmingly positive, so I decided to move forwards and found support and partnership along the way.

What I have enjoyed most about this process, besides working with two extraordinary coeditors, is communicating with our contributors. Most of our email exchanges have been very businesslike, polite, and brief. But others have been lengthier conversations, sometimes revealing tiny parts of ourselves or showing understanding or sympathy about our personal experiences. I had no idea that this would be part of putting together this book collection. But it makes sense: My desire to have this community see itself in what they read means that I get to see and reveal myself as well.

Writing my own piece was not something I had originally intended to do. Instead, I was intensely focused on the desire to build a community resource and give voice to positive, real stories. It was through this community that I was encouraged to write, even though I had never considered myself a writer. It has been truly an honour to help put these voices together and I am proud to be among them.

Raechel

Some young kids spend their days playing house-type games. They talk about their lives when they have children in the future. They dream about their sons and daughters. Sometimes, they even plan their future careers around parenting. And when they start dating, talking about having a family is a natural transition for them. This was not the case for me. I wasn’t going to have children, and now I do—happily, I should add. My chapter shares my story, so I won’t repeat it, but the point is that once I seriously considered having children, I wanted, perhaps needed, to read about parenting to get a sense of it all. Because I hadn’t imagined it forever, I needed a crash course on parenting. In particular, I wanted to read about same-sex couples raising kids and conception stories. I wanted to read about identity as a parent. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I loved those stories, but I knew there was space for more. And that’s where my role in this book came in.

Sherri reached out in a Facebook community; she wanted to read more queer positive stories and asked whether anyone was interested in dis-cussing creating a book. I contacted her immediately. I am a keen writer, and academic, and knew that our stories could help people plan their families or navigate becoming a nonbiological or nongestational parent.

I’m in so many social media communities, and in these groups, you often see posts at points of crisis. I often read stories from people worried about attachment and bonding. Some people talk about their discomfort when someone mentions that the baby looks like them or looks like their partner. I have read stories about people who wanted to carry a child but couldn’t, and in passing the baton to their partner, they felt incredibly envious rather than excited as their partner’s belly grew. It’s wonderful participating in these discussions and providing support on social media, but they don’t offer a full story or resolution, in the way the chapters in this book do. Many times people also reach out for support during a difficult time in their lives but don’t share the positives. The chapters in this book vary—some cover a relatively short period of time (for example, conception), whereas others cover a longer time, such as an entire decade of parenting—but each chapter provides a story of a journey towards nonbiological and nongestational parenting that is beautiful and shows wonderful attachments created out of love. The positives are there, with some day-to-day challenges, too.

Whether you read for entertainment, to learn, or because, like me, you want to understand how other families have navigated it all, I’m sure you’ll love the stories in this book. Some will make you laugh, some might make you cry, and some will, no doubt, have you nodding along in familiarity. I’m so thrilled that these stories are now out in the world. They contain perspectives from a variety of countries, but many of the feelings are shared among the writers and their families.

I’m so pleased I had an opportunity to contribute in a small way towards getting them to you, the reader. When I embarked on my own parenting journey and tracked down stories to help my understanding, I never imagined one day I would be involved in a project like this, and I’m so proud that I have been. I wish you well in your parenting journey, however it happens.

Emily

I am an odd creature: I find tremendous comfort in complicated social theory. When my wife and I were preparing to get her pregnant, I was reading The Ultimate Lesbian Guide to Conception and Pregnancy along with her, but also Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition and Bartkey’s Femininity and Domination, along with a dozen other abstruse books of continental political theory because that was my job right then as a graduate student about to start my dissertation. I inseminated my wife in our bedroom between rounds of working on my comprehensive exam; my thesis proposal defense was scheduled as early in the term as possible so I’d be sure she wasn’t going into labour as I was arguing about the relationship between power, discourse, and struggle.

Theory matters to me because it helps me understand my world; it helps me make sense of my feelings and make sense of how things work. bell hooks writes the following in Theory as Liberatory Practice: I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend--to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing. This healing function of theory has always been central for me in how I experience it and in why I keep turning to it.

In this book, I see us beginning to write a theory of mothering/parenting beyond biology. My experience as a mother has been one of struggle against my own limits and constraints, against heteronormative assumptions and biases in law and social relations, against the capitalist devaluing of care labour within the household, and against the wear and strain that all of this work can put on our love and our lives. It has also been an experience of building joy and connection, of casting my net wide and finding the other ends held by people who love me, and of watching my children grow into my wife’s freckles and my bad attitude.

We, the writers in this book, wrestle with what it means to not have the bodily experience of growing a child or what it means to not share a genetic relationship with our children. We turn over what it means to have our dreams of pregnancy disrupted and what it means that we never dreamed of it at all but still found ourselves with babies in our arms. We look at the social relations that demand we account for ourselves over and over again, and we both resent it and appreciate the chance it gives us to articulate ourselves to ourselves. We look at our children and imagine how we can narrate ourselves to them.

As a community of queer mothers/parents thinking about our parenting beyond biology, we are doing some of this necessary work of sketching out a first path through this theoretical terrain. As you read this book, I hope that you find that our theory feeds yours and can do some of the work of helping us all heal.

Conclusion

As editors, we went back and forth a great deal about how to organize this collection of essays. After all, there is so much that connects these stories, and each author talks about different issues that have an impact on their parenting experience. As we received and read each chapter, we realized that there were a number of themes that echo each other, with each author describing their own path to and experience of being a parent. We originally tried to group the chapters by theme, but there was so much overlap that we found it was impossible. However, we think you may find many of these themes throughout the chapters, and we hope that they help you reflect on your experience as well.

One of the major themes is the particular struggles that come with being a parent, especially a nonbiological or nongestational one, such as Sherri’s story about her relationship with her daughter and her agony over sometimes feeling unwanted by her. Other struggles are specific to how the writers’ identities affect their parenthood, such as Jax’s reflections on their experience as a disabled parent as well as a disability activist in the context of assisted reproductive technology, which can reproduce many ableist and heteronormative assumptions, or Allie’s experience of navigating parenthood as a masculine-of-centre mom when motherhood is so closely associated with femininity. At other times in the book, moments of crisis help resolve ongoing debates—such as, the clarity Ryann experiences when their son is born premature and how their ambivalence about the gendered concept of motherhood is eclipsed by their love for their baby. All of the parents face struggles in the work of parenting. For these authors, these struggles are deeply connected to being a nonbiological and a nongestational mother.

These mothers are not always immediately recognized as parents by the law or by their communities. They often wrestle with this feeling alongside their own deep, personal identifications with being mothers/parents. Two of our authors, Beth and Jax, mention the role of the struggle for marriage equality in Australia as a part of the backdrop to their parenting journeys, reminding us that legal recognition is still in progress everywhere. Claire’s story combines her passionate love for her kids as well as her conviction that they were meant to be hers with a legal struggle with her ex-wife and known donor for legal recognition of her relationship to their children. As Sonja says, reflecting on the alienating nature of the second-parent adoption process, these processes alienate nonbiological mothers from their own experience as parents, inserting the state as an arbiter for who really is a mother.

Alongside legal recognition, social recognition is central to our own feelings about parenting. Leah talks about always wanting to be a mother and being so excited when her wife was pregnant—only to have people dismiss her motherhood in casual conversation, as if only pregnancy matters. Nadja identifies as a comother, and even though she feels some awkwardness in the context of heteronormative parenting contexts, she approaches the world by asserting her rainbow family structure and making sure her family will be accepted and welcomed. Patricia discusses the way that assumptions about her desire to be a biological mother undermined her sense of self as a mother to her first child but eventually helped cement her conviction that she was happy being a nonbiological mother.

As nonbiological and nongestational parents, the role of biology and the desire (or the lack thereof) to become pregnant are a part of our experience of parenting. Several of the authors in this book, such as Melissa and Beth, had originally wanted to get pregnant but experienced fertility issues, leading to their partners being the one to get pregnant. These experiences can lead to complicated feelings of jealousy and grief but also to finding new types of joy in the experience of parenting as a nonbiological mother. Emily writes about deciding as a teen that she would never get pregnant, in part due to her history as a cancer survivor and her complicated relationship to her body, but accepts the awkward way she gets integrated into spaces dominated by biological mothers. Raechel writes about never wanting to be a parent and then becoming one through adoption; she discusses her own fertility journey that gave her a new understanding of the different ways to be a mother. In addition, many of our authors are both nonbiological as well as biological mothers, such as Louise, Stacy, Leah, and Sonja, but they still find that their love for their children is less determined by their biological relationships than by the love and work that makes up their parenting journey.

We hope you find these themes as well as the others you discover as you read this book to be nourishing and supportive of your own reflections on what motherhood/parenthood, love, and biology mean to you, no matter whether you are a biological or nonbiological parent. Thank you, dear reader, for joining us in this exploration of the experiences of nonbiological and nongestational queer mothers/parents. We’d love to hear from you—your stories, your thoughts on the book, or any other comments. Please email the editors at [e-mail]

Works Cited

Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. Taylor & Francis, 2015.

Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. MIT Press, 2007.

hooks, bell. Theory as Liberatory Practice. Yale J.L. & Feminism,

vol. 4, no. 1, 1991, digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlf/vol٤/iss١/٢. Accessed 14 July 2020.

Pepper, Rachel. The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians: How to Stay Sane and Care for Yourself from Pre-Conception to Birth. Cleis Press, 2005.

Chapter One

Little Arrows

J. Ryann Peyton

We named him Archer. He was brave and had piercing blue eyes. In the moment he looked at me for the first time, I felt my heart explode. He had my last name. He had my eyes and my hair. He was all of mine, yet he was also none of me. He was a stranger. He wasn’t breathing. My wife was bleeding. The nurse said I had to go … NOW.

Discovering one’s identity as a parent is a complex journey. The impact and intersectionality of gender identity on parental identity is a topic most first-time parents never have to consider. As a gender-queer, nongestational parent, I spent eight months of my wife’s pregnancy wondering how I would ever mother a child who did not come from my body and who would never know me as the feminine ideal of motherhood I thought he deserved. Yet when my son entered the world on his own terms, five weeks early in a blizzard at an altitude of nine thousand feet, my identity as a parent came swiftly into focus. I never imagined I would discover my identity as a parent in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Yet it was the most perfect, remarkable experience I could have hoped for.

Our children choose us. Whether we create them genetically or otherwise, our children accept us based on the lessons they have to teach. In the first week of my son’s life, he taught me that pronouns, gender expression, and legal status didn’t define whether or not I was his mom. I was his mom because I held his feet for hours while the doctors worked to save his life. I was his mom because I was the only one at his side as he was transported from one hospital to the next. I