Thursday, June 01, 2006

Blogging for LGBT Families Day

 
It's funny, but I hardly think of us as an LGBT Family.  Though clearly we are.  I think in my squirrely little mind I differentiate between those queer families who knew they were queer and then decided to have kids, and folks like me, who had a child and *then* came out. 
 
Generally my identity as a single parent overrules my identity as a queer parent.  I'm privileged to live in Portland, where my sexual orientation has little or no bearing on my daughter in school or otherwise (as far as I know).  My big issues are those shared by other single parents, regardless of their gender: loneliness, scarcity of resources, exhaustion, a ridiculously few number of hours in the day.
 
Also, most of the queer parents I know have children much later in their lives than I did (I was 19), and so, if our kids are the same age, they're ten or twenty years older than me, and if we're the same age, they're having babies.  Which is great, but doesn't give us too much to talk about.
 
I also don't date much, so my sexual orientation lately has been: NONE. 
 
Although, come to think of it, my daughter has been the deciding issue in all of my long-term relationships; mostly that the partner wasn't ready to "settle down and be a parent."  Which I think is kind of funny, because I'm unsettled a lot of the time.  But really, my straight single-mom friends tend to get guys who want to rescue them from their awful situation; I get women who run in the other direction.  I think it has to do with the fact that pregnancy could be an accidental result of hetero sex at almost any time; a child is not necessarily the result of a lesbian relationship at all, ever. And especially not when you're 23 or 24 or 25... and never by accident.
 
But still, we deal with my family's homophobia and occasionally have to represent some soccer mom's idea of diversity, or stand for some test of how liberal a particular family it.  We are an LGBT family, in our own particular, peculiar way.

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