Kristen and Eilis
Kristen and Eilis are expecting a baby girl in late May 2007. She was conceived at home with the help of a known donor.
Family is important to us and we really wanted the opportunity to create someone out of our love and to have that person to love together, and to teach that little person - by demonstration - the value of love as we have both experienced from our families.
The biggest challenge is the uncertainty of Kristen's role in the eyes of the law. The fact that she isn't legally seen as a parent feels terribly frustrating and unfair. Not being able to be on the birth certificate, not being able to be seen as a family by Medicare or the tax office, not being entitled to parental leave from work, and having to get a parenting order in order to protect just some of her responsibilities and her rights is onerous and not sufficient to reflect her role as a parent. We look forward to the day when Kristen can adopt our daughter and remove the legal and societal uncertainty about her role.
We've been lucky not to confront negative attitudes towards our family, but definitely confusion. Some people take time to get their heads around a two-mum family and ask all sorts of inappropriate questions. Other times we feel invisible because our situation isn't acknowledged or assumptions are made - for example our childbirth class didn't really acknowledge that some families have two mums, and as the pregnant mum Eilis is often asked what "hubby" thinks of the pregnancy. We're learning to be resilient about this and have to be each other's advocate and supporter.
The best thing about our little family, so far, has been sharing this pregnancy - all the highs and lows and excitement and fear. It wouldn't be the same to go through it alone and we do feel closer for having shared the experience. The intimate moments when it is just the three of us together and Kristen can feel our baby moving are are special to us too.
Our families have been very excited and supportive and somewhat curious. They have their concerns about the legal aspects of our family and want to make sure that everyone acts in the best interests of their granddaughter. But they have also been busily knitting and buying rocking horses and asking lots of questions and taking good care of us.
Being outside of traditional gender roles in a family means we both have more options and flexibility availble to us in terms of how we "do" family. Neither of us is automatically expected to work full time, bring home the bacon, be the homekeeper, or be the nurturer or the authoritarian. We get to challenge those norms and do things the way that suits us best as a family and as individuals.
Also, the fact that every step of the way towards forming our family has required careful thought and discussion about roles, navigation of federal and state laws, and some very practical planning, means that we don't take our situation for granted and we appreciate our family more than we might have if we hadn't had to fight for it and plan it.
And we're pleased that our daughter will be exposed to a broad experience of family, through our friends, our own families and her father's family. We think she's lucky to have both of us as well as a donor dad.
We want to protect our daughter from any bullying or teasing she might experience as a result of being from a rainbow family. We need to work to make society more used to rainbow families so that we are not seen as strange and so that the kids are not exposed to the prejudices of some conservative people.
We're not asking for special treatment, we just want to be treated the same as our straight friends when we decide to start families.
Kristen is a parent and it would make a world of practical, legal and symbolic difference to have this recognised in law.
