My mother died nine years ago today.

I’m not trying to be maudlin; that’s just how it is and what can you do about that? Some sentences are like that, especially when they push against the swelling wave of all the Mother’s Day messaging that starts rolling towards shore this time of year, crashing into me the second Sunday of each May and leaving me soaked in some unpalatable mixture of longing and resentment.

Each Mother’s Day, the fact that I myself am a mother, that Rowan and Isaac are going to bring home some kind of sweetly crafted double–Mother’s Day gifts, feels like an afterthought: that’s nice, dear, but where do I send my card?

Okay, that last sentence was maudlin.

But that first sentence: “My mother died nine years ago today.” It has two parts, and I am pondering the difficulties of both: the simple modifier-subject-verb of the first half and the descriptive clause (is that what we call that? I’m supposed to know those things, but today I’m not looking anything up. And is “modifier” correct?) of the second half. “Nine years ago” is just as unbelievable as the fact that she actually died — how is it that she’s been gone for nearly a quarter of my life? And yet, she shapes it, informs it, almost daily, and the memories and emotions are as clear now as they were then, unless I’m fooling myself into thinking otherwise. Am I?

That’s the most difficult thing about death — what I know today about the past nine years and what my mother doesn’t, can’t. Those two boys, of course, but all the tiny, daily things that make up a life, like what we’re having for dinner and that the roof is still leaking. I imagine daily phone calls in which we discuss these things; I imagine seeing her name pop up on the call display and sighing because I have things to do besides talk; I imagine picking up the phone anyway, every day. I console myself with the ways in which she does shape my life. I talked about it with a friend in Los Angeles last week, as she and I made up the guest bed in her home for me. “Really,” I kept protesting, “you don’t have to help. I can do this by myself.”

“Nah,” she said, stuffing a pillow into its case, “I can’t let go of the way my mother raised me.”

And we talked about that, the ways in which neither of us believe in ghosts but feel our mothers’ presence all around, live our lives according to (occasionally, or often, in defiance of) the way they would have, but always with them around us.

So she’s gone, has been for nine years now. But she’s here, too, so today, Sunday, every day, we’ll focus on that.

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Oh God, the sweetness of that picture just slays me every time. Look at those two — they get along as well today as they did then, all lovey-dovey and kisses, all the time.

Ahem.

Actually, when Rowan first met his baby brother, the morning after Isaac’s tumultuous arrival into the world, he said, “I take her downstairs. I read her a book.” And Rachel and I melted from All The Cute. That’s part of our family lore, which I discuss in this week’s post on Today’sParent.com.

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I’ve just read the Crib Sheet for LGBT parents of newborns by Dana of Mombian. As always, she provides spot-on advice and tips for LGBTQ+ families (and their allies). It’s funny: now that I have “big kids” (ages eight and five), so much of what we do as queer parents just seems old hat. Our friends know us; our neighbours know us; the school knows us; the pharmacists and the waitresses at our local diner and the soccer coaches and even the bank tellers know us. So it’s rare that we have to explain ourselves to our larger world.

But I remember a time when it felt like we were constantly explaining and how tiring and often frustrating that was.

Read and print out Mombian’s Crib Sheet for being the LGBT parent of a newborn now.

Mombian makes a great point on her Crib Sheet about handling parenting conversations with other adults: “A little preparation can help you sound comfortable with yourself.” I agree. My best advice (I hope) to aspiring or new queer parents is this: Think through your responses to questions in advance, so that you can be smoother than I was. And remember that sometimes even the insensitive questions are meant kindly.

* * *

When my sons were babies, we used to spend most Saturday mornings at the local farmers market. It was a godsend for parents of little kids: open early (a bonus, since we tended to be awake by 6 AM most days and were desperate to be out of the house by eight); warm and dry even during the coldest winter months; and full of friendly people who didn’t bat an eye when our toddler, Rowan, monopolized the free samples of chorizo or locally made Gouda. Plus, they served coffee and a great breakfast.

During one such morning, my partner and I had snagged one of the coveted breakfast tables and were waiting for our food. Despite my four-months-pregnant belly, there was still room on my lap for Rowan, and he climbed onto it. A woman we knew in passing asked if she could join us, and we said, “Yes, of course,” because that’s the etiquette of the farmers market: You make room. You share. We made a bit of small talk, and then she turned to me and gestured toward Rowan, who was plowing his way through a pile of cheese curds.

“Is he yours?” she asked. 

I wasn’t ready for the question. The sheer wrongness of it spiraled in so many different directions that I felt scattered, unable to even begin to answer her. I mean, it’s not the kind of thing that straight women sitting next to their male partners get asked about the toddlers in their laps: “Is he yours?”

Of course, Rowan was mine; to the extent that any adult could lay claim to a child, this child belonged to me. But he also belonged equally and passionately to Rachel, his other mother, the woman who had, with me, planned for him and cared about and for him since his conception, who loved him fiercely and protectively, and to whom he was equally passionately attached. And that question, those three words, negated the value of all of that.

Of course, what the woman at our table had actually meant was, “Did you give birth to him?”

But again, wording it like that would scarcely have made a difference. You may find that people will randomly, casually, ask you which — if either — of you gave birth to your own children. Often, “Who gave birth?” is code for “Who’s the real mother (and, by process of elimination, the illegitimate one)?” or “I’m uncomfortable with how your family works and need to understand it according to my own terms.” Decide beforehand how much of that information you want to share and when you want to share it.

Of course, one question often leads to another, and we also received questions about the “father.” Be prepared. “Do you know the father?” or “Is the father involved?” or “Does he have a dad?”

Be prepared to be asked about your kids’ father, even when they have two mothers, sitting right there. Clearly, we must have done a certain amount of important work to have got to the place we were at right then: at the farmers market with our toddler on a cold Saturday morning. Clearly, we had put a lot of effort into this situation, to have figured out how to procure a real live tiny human in a relationship where ovaries tend to dominate. It was frustrating, then, when we’d been up every morning at 6 AM for the past year and a half and our kid only started sleeping through the night three months earlier, and we spent our days cutting grapes in half and following babies up and down flights of stairs so that they wouldn’t bash their skulls in, to have people just so interested in the “father.”

For some lesbian moms, that “father” is a scant teaspoonful of genetic material, no name or face attached. For some families, that genetic material came from someone they know: a friend or relative or acquaintance who donated said material, and who in the grand scheme of things has very little to do with the ensuing children. In these cases, the correct word is usually “donor” — not “father” or “dad.”

In some cases, like my family’s, our donor, Rob, started out as a donor and has, over the years, morphed into a dad. His “dadness” is specific to our family, though: he lives in a different city, visits a few times a year, has started staying with the kids while Rachel and I take a much-needed annual vacation as well as some shorter getaways. He plays games with the kids (now eight and five years old) over the computer. He is a cherished and important member of our extended family, and we love him dearly. But Rachel and I are the ones who live with the kids and do 99% of the actual parenting. And we’d like to take most of the credit for that, thanks.

But without thinking through my answer beforehand, when that woman asked me, “Is he yours?” I blew it.

I panicked, and instead of taking a deep breath and pausing and thinking about just how I might respond, I stammered out, “Um, yeah.”

I felt flustered, and like a jerk, and Rachel felt doubly wounded — at the question in the first place and then at my response to it. It took us some time to regain our equilibrium that day. We managed to do it, to work our way through the guilt and the hurt and the defensiveness and the pain, by coming to a mutual understanding that our first responsibility as queer parents and partners was to our family. We needed to plan in advance for the intrusive questions of strangers and acquaintances and come up with responses that we both felt comfortable with and that respected our unique family — not someone else’s preconceived notion of what families look like, or ought to.

Sometimes, that means that we have to remind ourselves that we don’t have to accommodate other people’s questions just because they ask. A simple, “I’m sorry, but that’s private information” is well within our rights as parents. And sometimes it means that we have to do the work of acting as ambassadors for our family, of seeing the openness and the genuine support behind what might be misguided questions and gently redirecting them, even if it means moving slightly beyond our comfort zones. Because that is how you build community and make it more diverse.

If I could go back in time to that morning at the farmer’s market, I would have taken a deep breath and reached for Rachel’s hand. And then I would have looked that woman in the eye and smiled and said, “He’s ours.”

But then I would have added, “Why do you ask?” And I would have made an effort to have a real conversation, move the dialogue forward. Because, in my opinion, that’s the etiquette of these kinds of things: wherever possible, try to make room. Try to share.

* * *

What were your thoughts on the crib sheet? Any pearls of wisdom or tips for queer parents looking to navigate the world with their rainbow sippy cups in tow? How do you handle questions that feel intrusive? How do you balance wanting to expand knowledge about your family while maintaining your privacy?

This post is part of the BlogHer Absolute Beginners editorial series. Our advertisers do not produce or review editorial content. This post is made possible by Pampers and BlogHer.

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So, my friend Judy – godparent to my children, one of approximately three people who have seen my entire nuclear family at its individual and collective highest highs and lowest lows over Sunday brunches and other occasions the past eight or so years – sent me a wee message a few nights ago on Facebook:

my stress dream last night: you had a 3rd baby (charlie) but you were bummed that he was interfering with the lovely dynamic that you had as a 4-some, so you mostly left him at home. (like, you would come for brunch and not bring him.) i spent the dream fussing about what to do about charlie and the million possibilities of what i could be/should be doing. you were so nonplussed about the whole thing. Oi. woke up exhausted and so wanted to write and say thanks for not having a third baby. xox. i told some people at work about the dream, and so now the code for any decisions i need to make about students is “what are you going to do about charlie?” ha ha

Now, we’ve been through this: it’s not like anyone around here was considering having a third baby. We are a house of big kids now, the rhythms and needs of babies and toddlers vague, distant memories. Pregnant women, women with babies, look so young to me now, so unbroken, so sweet with their strollers and their round-faced children with those tummies who don’t know how to open doors. We are a house wherein, most of the time, most people sleep through the night in their own beds and wipe their own bums. Etc. Simply put, we are a household that is — more to the point, we are two 40-plus parents that are —no longer equipped to handle the crazy that would be another baby, a third child.

And yet, there’s something slightly disconcerting when other people are having stress dreams about me having another baby. I mean, I realize that dreams are dreams and open to interpretation, but still. It makes you wonder about the kind of angst I must have projected into the world as the mother of infants.

Because, as I recall, there was some angst. Or, as Judy put it in our ongoing chat, “Can you imagine if you had another baby????? Oi. the sleepless nights the feeding the helplessness. i get panicky just thinking about it for you. or maybe anyone.”

So, the short version is: we are going to do nothing about Charlie. And yet still, there it was, there it is: a tiny part of my brain that immediately thought, “Oooh, sweet baby Charlie! Mama would never forget to take woodums you to brunch!”

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Dear Isaac,

So, you’ve heard what they’re saying about four, haven’t you? That it’s the new two? As in, all us parents who sighed with relief when we made it through the so-called “terrible twos” with nary a tantrum or overturned sippy cup are now sucking it up because our kids have turned four. And it turns out we weren’t just fantastic parents all along. It turns out that four-year-olds are just a little bit tetchy.

I mean, you’re still cute. I’ve been waiting for approximately four years (okay, more like three years and eight months; the cute took a little while to emerge from under your newborn trifecta of baby acne, cradle cap and Friar Tuck hairdo. I’m sorry, but it’s true, and the rumour that all parents think their newborns are beautiful is simply that. My mother aside. But I digress.) for you to reach peak cute and it still hasn’t happened. It’s just that now it’s more that you’re cute like a mogwai who could at any moment erupt into a Gremlin.

(“Is he having some power and control issues?” one of the teachers at your daycare asked recently. Why yes, yes you are.)

But, you know, you’re still way more mogwai than Gremlin. And the Gremlin moments pale in the face of your beauty. Also, we’re seasoned: we’ve already done the four-year-old thing, courtesy of your older brother, who is all sinewy boy these days, while you retain still at least a hint of babyhood. You’ve cracked 30 pounds, sure, but barely, and you’ve shot up a few inches over the last year. But the babyhood is still there in your rounded belly, your torso still not quite big enough to contain your internal organs. It’s there in your tired moments, when your thumb creeps into your mouth and you cuddle, holding onto to your blankie.

You are beautiful, with your rosebud lips and your hair falling into your eyes. You are drawn to pretty things, a magpie with a keen eye for sparkles and sequins and bling. You find pretty rocks and broken glass on the street. On the rare days when I stick on some mascara or lipstick, you are drawn to it as though I have set off a homing device: wooot wooot wooot makeup alert! “Are you wearing makeup?” you ask. “Can you put some on me?” For your birthday, you have received all manner of Isaac-appropriate gifts: a huge bucket of sparkly beads, a pirate treasure chest filled with thrift-store jewelry and Mardi Gras necklaces, a magic wand and fairy wings and bracelets, socks with pink hearts on them, arts and crafts supplies, and a Snow White Barbie, which your other mother picked up on a whim at the grocery store. (And no, we would not likely buy a Snow White Barbie for your hypothetical sister. But, who knows? Maybe we would. Lord knows my half-dozen Barbies didn’t stop me from growing up feminist.) We had our first ever Thunder Bay Pride Festival last week, and you came downstairs in your wings and your bracelets and your necklaces, wearing your longsleeved pink T-shirt and looking fabulous. “It’s for the Pride,” you said solemnly, and my heart swelled even just a little bit more with love for you. And I look at all these hand-wringing articles and blogs about boys in pink and Princess boys and I think, Really, what’s the big deal?

You are an artist, constantly repurposing materials, rearranging elements, finding new potential in the old, the mundane. You don’t leave much alone before trying to change it, glue it, paint it; make it bigger, better, prettier. You have the utmost faith in white glue and scotch tape and kitchen string to hold together the various treasures you find; can’t understand why the tape won’t hold when you try to attach a silver chain to your porcelain snowman; get frustrated when the string you tie around your current favourite rock slips its bounds. You woke me up one morning a few weeks ago holding out a brand-new bar of soap, which you had cadged from the closet; you’ve got a bit of a thing for brand-new bars of soap. “This is my soap picture frame,” you told me. “Only you have to have dry hands to hold it.”

And then you put it in your special jewelry box, the one that you and your babysitter found at Value Village and that you painted together.

And then, of course, this is what happens:

Your Rob refers to you as Cali, goddess of both creation and destruction. No sooner have you attached to things within you decide you’d rather take them apart, unglue the sparkles from the paper, rip the pieces of paper off the collage, the bows off the shoes, the string from the rock. Maybe you’ll grow up to be like that guy who destroyed all his personal possessions in the name of art.

You spent the first two years of your life attached to me like a limpet, and then the next two years just as passionately attached to your other mother. In the past few months, though, I’ve seen the pendulum of your passion swing slowly back to middle ground, just as your brother did before you. Now, as often as not, you run into my arms when you are hurt as opposed to running past me into Rachel’s; you will occasionally climb into my lap at the end of dinner rather than march around the table to get to your other mother. “I love you, Susan,” you tell me, except that you still pronounce your Ls as Ws, so that the sentence comes out as “I wuv you.” Because you are still not quite out of babyhood.

Case in point: you can’t get through more than two days without a nap, although if you do fall asleep in the middle of the day, you won’t go to bed until 9:30 PM. On the Monday of a recent long weekend, you climbed into my lap on the couch with a pile of books and your blanket; four pages in, you were fast asleep. (Thankfully, too: you were in full Gremlin mode by then.) And that’s how we stayed for an hour and a half until you woke up. Sure, I was trapped, but even as my arm fell asleep and my neck cramped, there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

Happy birthday, big boy. I wuv you.

Love,

Susan

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I’m not quite sure how to account for the thrill that ran through me like a jolt on Sunday when Rowan showed me his first bona fide wiggly tooth. Something about that little white incisor, outlined in blood and moving back and forth in his gum, was electrifying, and not just in an “I may throw up” kind of way.

For him, too. After the initial shock and crunch and grief of biting into an olive he thought was pitless, he got all shy and proud in the way that he does when something momentous happens. We immediately set off down the street to tell his best neighbourhood friend, who was, unfortunately, too entranced (read: weepy) by the final minutes of Charlotte’s Web on DVD to pay appropriate attention, and so we also paid visits to both sets of next-door neighbours to tell them the news. He’d ring the doorbell, and then hide behind me when it was answered. “Rowan has some exciting news,” I would say by way of prompting, and then we would all wait expectantly and he would whisper to me, “You tell it.” Once the initial news was broken, he would step up and provide more context around the olive, as well as some obligatory wiggling.

And then we went home and told the cat. “She likes it,” he reported.

A loose tooth! It’s just such an immediate sign that he’s growing. His body is getting too big for its current home and is shedding its old trappings. Apparently, a friend with a six-year-old told me, it could take a year for the thing to actually fall out, but still, it’s a sign. Given the potential lag time between initial wiggliness and full separation, I am glad I resisted the urge to remind him not to lose the tooth once it did fall out. Such a weird parental impulse to rain all over the parade: Oh honey! How exciting! Your very first tooth is loose — now don’t screw up and lose it or anything!

Because then what would you blog about 30 years later?

Because, you know, that’s my own first-grade baggage. Working and working and working at my own first loose tooth until it finally popped out, only to have it tumble into the detritus of an elementary-school playground because, in my passion, I simply couldn’t leave it alone. I came home in tears and wrote an apologetic, greedy, phonetic note to the tooth fairy, which my parents, bless them, kept:

(Yes, “Susie.” That’s a whole different story for a whole different blog post, but don’t think you’ll escape intact if you try to get any leverage out of that one.)

Apparently, I lost the next tooth as well. In the intervening time, I learned how to spell the word “money” but it’s clear that my priorities had remained intact.

(Susie six yers old Dear tooth fairy may I have all the money in the world if you can’t give it to me at liest 5 dollers.)

(Dear dear tooth fary  Roses are red  Vilests are blue  I wand my  Tooth   so do you)

And, later still:

These are not the only note my parents kept. I will spare you, for example, the exquisite torture of the notes in which I painstakingly write out new lyrics to “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, asking my mother “Mommy, Whitch do you like best?” Rereading it, and the others, in which I announce in bright red magic marker, things like “I’ve got the best mommy in the world! Love Susan Goldberg” fill me even now with an jolt of embarrassment not so different to the sensation of watching my son wiggle his bloody first loose tooth.

I’m not sure whether I ever believed in the tooth fairy, or whether finding the notes I wrote to her in my mother’s dresser — which I did — clued me in. A few years ago, as he prepared to move out of the house he and my mom shared, my father stuck all of them in an envelope and sent them to me (actually, he addressed the envelope to “Susie Goldberg” ha ha ha), and I couldn’t quite bring myself to do more than glance through them. Somehow, it’s hard to remember yourself as a weird little kid, even as it helps you relate to your own weird little kids. It’s hard to remember yourself as naïve and vulnerable and greedy and exuberantly affectionate and wanting to show your parents everything. It’s hard to remember that, at one point in my literate life, I didn’t know how to spell.

“I’m at a different place in remembering my mother,” I said to Rachel over a rare beer in a bar on Saturday night. I remember less about her sick and more about her happy. But the memories are also becoming less distinct, softened around the edges from being thumbed through so often. “It’s just that life keeps making new memories, but my memories of her are finite,” I said. And then I got all weepy.

If my memories are finite, though, my fantasies are limitless, if humble. I imagine Rowan phoning my mom to tell her about his tooth, and how much she’d get a kick out of that conversation. I imagine her visits to this house she’s never seen, how the boys would tumble all over her with delight, how Isaac would snuggle up against her with his blankets and his thumb. I imagine our near-daily phone calls, talking about dinner and renovations and work and family. I imagine how she’d pout every time we decided not to fly down to Toronto for high holidays or some family event — how she’d check the seat sales, get my father to send the links.

It’s comforting, this sort of imagining. It’s my mother’s legacy, the imprint of a life so well lived, well loved, that I can fill in the blanks even now, when she’s gone. “Your Bubbie would love this,” I often say to the boys, about whatever meal we are gathered around, whatever activity we’re engaged in. When people ask if I believe in some kind of afterlife, this is where I go: the ghosts and the heaven that surround us in the tiny details of daily life. She’s here, and she’s gone. Did I believe in the tooth fairy, or did I know that she was my mother? Now, the distinction seems illogical: yes, and yes.

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This post originally appeared in the Globe & Mail’s “Facts and Arguments” column on May 30, 2008.

About five years ago, I decided to organize the thousand or so baby pictures that my parents took of me and my older brother in the early 1970s and then tossed into a huge cardboard box in the basement.

Of those thousand baby pictures, approximately 850 were of my brother, and the rest were of me. Or, of me and him.

Of course, the injustice of the situation was not lost on me, especially given the fact that I was newly pregnant with my first child and full of resolutions about how I would raise that baby and its subsequent siblings, assuming they ever arrived.

The injustice of the situation was also heightened by the fact that my parents devoted so much film — remember film? — to their firstborn despite the fact that he was not, shall we say, the most beautiful of babies. He did grow into a beautiful toddler, and is today a very good-looking man. But to this day, at least one close family friend still likes to torment him by telling him what an ugly baby he was. It is abundantly clear, however, from the number of photographs that my parents took — and the glowy way they look at him when they are present with him in those photographs — that they thought otherwise. “We just thought you were beautiful,” my mother used to tell him in the face of such cruelty. “We didn’t know what they were talking about.”

I vowed that I would not perpetuate this injustice with my own children. And by that, I mean I vowed that I would not deprive my second child of his or her fair share of photographs. There would be parity. No one would feel left out.

And now, if you look through the archives of my computer, you will find a couple zillion baby photos of, Rowan, and perhaps a million or so photos of, Isaac.

To make matters worse, when Rowan was a baby, we booked time with a photographer and had a series of slick, black-and-white photos taken and framed. We have yet to do the same now that Isaac has joined us.

I’m not quite sure how this happened. I mean, I try to take photos of Isaac, lots of them. I really do. And not simply because that would be the fair thing to do. I try to take photos of him because, simply put, I am madly, soppily, sloppily, heartbreakingly in love with Isaac. Isaac is, at 11 months, a perfect little ripe plum of a sweet baby, just on the verge of falling into what I am sure will be equally adorable toddlerhood. It’s not that I don’t gaze at him a hundred times a day and ache at his beauty, long to record and preserve each moment of his gorgeous, smiley, bow-legged, thumbsucky, crawly, screechy, hand-clapping, babbling little self.

It’s just that there’s this three-year-old around now. It was easy to take thousands of pictures of Rowan when he was the only, non-mobile child in the house. But now, leaving the room to grab the camera — let alone finding the camera amidst the toys and sippy cups and the like — is just more complicated. Plus, if I do get out the camera around Rowan, I have to fend him off because he inevitably wants to take pictures of the floor or his thumb or our legs.

Hence the disproportionate number of photos of my big brother, and the disproportionate number of photos of (and blogs about) Theo’s big brother. It’s not about more love, even if that is what my brother told me when we were children. It’s about time, and energy. And the fact that Rowan, at the moment, tends to take up more space. And that he’s just been around longer. And, possibly, realizing that no amount of photography will keep Isaac from inching out of babyhood into something else, so maybe I had better just soak him up a bit more instead of searching for the camera.

But what will Isaac make of all this? Hopefully, by the time my sons are old enough to notice such things, there will be slick black-and-white portraits of both of them on the walls. Maybe, we’ll achieve some form of photographic parity — and maybe we won’t. Maybe Isaac won’t even care. If he does, however, maybe I can show him this entry. Or, maybe, he’ll just have to wait until he has children — if he has children — of his own. When he does — if he does — I know this much: they will be gorgeous.

As I sorted through all the baby photos at my parents’ house all those years ago, my mother began to sift through the pictures. She shuffled through the 90 dozen or so photos of her firstborn as an infant and then looked at me, genuinely surprised, and said, “You know, now I can see it. He wasn’t very good-looking, was he?”

She paused for a moment, looked down at the photo in her hand, and shook her head. “But we still thought he was beautiful.”

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