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By
Polly Pagenhart
© BEACON PRESS, 2006
The Beginning
I didn’t always know I would be a lesbian
dad. Sure, I always knew I was a lesbian - knew
it somewhere deep inside, back when I was a tyke,
back when I didn’t have a language for it
all, before I knew the difference between lesbian
and thespian, say, or Lebanese. My predilection
for Ken dolls over Barbies, and my dogged determination
to cross-dress as a swashbuckler every Halloween
made it clear I wouldn’t be an ordinary girl,
at the least. I also always knew I would be a parent:
this was impressed upon me by my dad, despite the
fact that my mom encouraged my sister and I to think
that we could have a fulfilled life without becoming
mothers. Both my parents were right, ultimately;
I managed to become a parent without becoming a
mother. It’s actually not as complicated as
it sounds.
Parenthood is a Very Gendered Thing
So we all know there are mothers, and there are
fathers. And there’s nothing in between, parentally
speaking. Female parents are the mothers, male parents
are the fathers. If there’s any modifying
going on, it’s still given this fixed (and
mutually exclusive) pairing: there can be step-moms
and step-dads; adoptive moms and adoptive dads;
old or young ones; rich or poor ones; world’s
best or deadbeat ones. But the either/or, male/female
fixity of the basic roles pretty much goes without
saying. Unless, of course, one’s gender itself
lies somewhere betwixt and between the poles, as
mine does. This queers the do, as they say, highlighting
how parenthood is implicitly a gendered binary.
If you’re trying to plot a middle path, you’ll
find the underbrush a little thick in there. All
of which became clear to me at a dinner party some
years back, when my partner Jennifer and I were
beginning to actively explore becoming parents.
We were at her brother Curtis’ house in Berkeley.
At the table were his wife, their two young kids,
my partner’s playwright/activist mother Martha
- whom, in reference to Jennifer’s and my
extra-legal partnership, I have taken to calling
my mother “out-law” (as vs. in-law),
much to her delight - and her partner Sandy, a Buddhist
scholar and writer (and also a lesbian). We gather
every Sunday night for dinner, and this week, guests
at the table were Douglass, an old friend of Curtis’,
and two old friends of my mother out-law’s,
from her hippie days on a Cape Cod theater artist’s
commune, some thirty years back.
We were slowly finishing the meal and the dinner
plates were being cleared for dessert. The old Cape
Cod commune-istas had caught up enough with my mother
out-law and were now asking after notable events
in the lives of her offspring. Soon, the focus of
all attention was Jennifer’s and my campaign
to have a baby. The usual bevvy of questions sprouted
up.
Q: Which of us would bear the child?
A: My femme-bot sweetie, Jennifer; she’s always
wanted to and I’ve always drawn a blank whenever
I tried to imagine myself with child. With a child,
great; with-child, eh, not so great.
Q: Would we want a known or an anonymous donor?
A: We were lighting candles and importuning all
deities for a known donor, ideally a friend.
Q: Would we want to include him in the child’s
life?
A: We hoped to, if he was amenable; that was a big
appeal of the known donor thing. But it would be
in a strictly avuncular fashion: we would be the
only parents on the scene.
After we had outlined the whole shebang, someone
generously offered that even if I wouldn’t
be bearing the child, I would make a great mother.
To which I found myself objecting; I had every reason
to expect I’d be a splendid parent, but whatever
I would be to my child, I wouldn’t be a mother.
A mix of amazement and amusement ensued. Eyebrows
arched. Jaws went slack. I may as well have just
rhapsodized about the nuanced political wisdom of
George W. Bush.
“What do you mean you won’t be a mother?
Of course you’ll be a mother!” This
from one of the genial, erstwhile hippies. I surmised
that her line of reasoning went; this nice young
person doesn’t feel entitled to the title
“mother,” and deserves some encouragement.
“No,” I insisted. “The name just
doesn’t feel right to me. I’ll be a
parent, definitely. I’ll be a loving, caring
parent. But I just don’t feel motherly.”
The mood at the table slowly shifted from jovial
to sober when it became clear that two equally passionately
held beliefs were in complete opposition.
“But how can you not be a mother?” said
my mother out-law’s sweetie. Who, by the way,
wasn’t one herself. A mother, that is. Yet
she seemed to be moving ahead of the pack to become
the most flummoxed.
I felt the need to stand firm. “I can be something
else. Something in
between a mother and a father.”
I was half making this up as I went along, half
giving voice to something I was now realizing I’d
felt for a long time. I thought of My Lesbian Husband,
the book by Barrie Jean Borrich about her relationship
with her butch lover. As a graduate student I had
been friends with this lesbian husband, and looked
up to her as a mentor of sorts, a tour guide in
the ways of the butch intellectual. The debonair
ladies’ gal-about-town.
“Maybe I’ll be a lesbian father. A dyke
daddy, of sorts.”
The old hippie commune-istas were eyeballing my
George Clooney haircut
and spiffy men’s duds with growing fascination
and a glimmer of new insight. My brother out-law
Curtis was smiling into his wine glass; for years
he delighted me by calling me the brother he never
had. He understood, and so, I sensed, did Douglass,
both were self-examined, pro-feminist men with whom
I had spent a goodly amount of time perusing and
debating the perimeters of masculinity. Curtis was
raised by a lesbian feminist, after all, and his
friend Douglass had more lesbian friends than, well,
most lesbians. If he didn’t have a beard and
pee standing up most people would mistake him for
one.
I found it challenging to be inventing and explaining
at the same time, especially considering the table
was collectively into its third or fourth bottle
of wine by then. But, faced with a critical mass
of sympathetic straight people, rapt with attention,
plus two distinguished lesbian elders - neither
of whom, it seemed, could intuitively make the leap
from the leather-clad butch bar dykes they had known
in their youth to the sweater-clad fatherly dyke
I was proposing - I felt I had a responsibility
to begin carving out a placefor myself, linguistically,
socially, emotionally. After all, if I couldn’t
make sense to a table full of liquored-up leftie
hippie Buddhist artists, who could I make sense
to? I cleared my throat, and tried to sketch out
the back-story I thought would help this lesbian
dad thing make sense to them. I told about how I
was always betwixt and between, gender-wise. I told
of my happy life gamboling about unfettered as a
tomboy. How tomboy works great as a between-genders
way station when you’re a preadolescent girl,
but your goose is cooked when you hit puberty. Or
mine was. I told how, when I came out at nineteen,
I finally discovered a way to be in my skin that
began to feel right, and how I took the next ten
years arriving at a sense of, well, arrival, regarding
my gender. How, poignantly, it was only after my
mother died (and I felt I could no longer let her
down) that I was finally able to make the last leg
of my gender journey andembrace the gentle-manly
butch within.
But impending parenthood, when it appeared to me
as Motherhood or zip, just took me back to my adolescence
in the mid-1970s, that time in my life when I felt
hostage to a monolithic model of my proper gender
role. The commune-istas were passing a bong back
in ‘75, I’m sure, doing floor paintings
with their long hair and swapping partners on low-slung
mattresses behind beaded doorways and such. Meanwhile
on the west coast my mother out-law’s partner
was busy ditching her husband and jump-starting
a feminist lesbian collective. But gender and sexual
liberation hadn’t made it to teen life in
my California suburb in the mid-70s, at least not
beyond Helen Reddy’s single “I Am Woman
(Hear Me Roar).” Instead, I was hemmed in
by an implicit societal ultimatum to decommission
the Hot Wheels, pluck my eyebrows, and act like
a proper young woman. There was no Kasey Kasem Top
40 hit “I Am, Well, Not All That Womanly (Hear
Me Try On Your Brother’s Clothes).”
So here I was now, looking at parenthood, feeling
adrift, no parental prototype to steer by that didn’t
trigger some cognitive tension at this visceral,
gendered level. My own mother, while a far from
traditional woman, still always wore a dress. (A
friend in high school nicknamed her “Mrs.
Butterworth,” after the maple syrup icon.)
Generally speaking, images of motherhood overwhelmingly
presuppose femininity. Not just femaleness, which
I grant is reasonable, but femininity. Which for
some of us gals is less- or even un-reasonable.
So every time I conjured up images of parenthood
(which I could only see through the lens of motherhood),
I couldn’t help picturing traditional icons,
June Cleavers and Laura Petries and Carol Bradys.
Where were the butch moms, I wondered? Not so easy
to find (or so I thought). Yet I was the very model
of the mother who was masculine. Thwarted by the
fact that in the collectivity of all my own experience
and in popular culture, the only butch mother I
could recall ever seeing was the character Marijo
from a French film I had seen, French Twist, back
in the mid-1990s.
That night at the dinner table I had, for the first
time, begun to name (and defend) my parental self
from a position slightly other than mother. Doing
so helped me to realize how much my emotional access
to parenthood was predicated on my feeling comfortable
with the title mother and the femininity that presumably
went along with it. Which I hadn’t really
felt able to do, exactly. Proposing an alternative
to mother that evening had led me to the threshold
of my parenthood. Lo and behold, it was language
that opened the door…
Continued in Confessions of the Other Mother, Beacon
Press, 2006.
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