Lesbian Motherhood

For this section of the blog, I will be responding to readings and questions we discussed in the unit regarding Lesbian Motherhood, analyze the experience of being a lesbian mother, and try to provide personal insight whenever possible about my own experiences as a homosexual in the context of our patriarchal society.

This is perhaps my favorite unit of the class or at least the one that hits closest to home. Many of the readings and questions we discussed on Lesbian Motherhood resonated with me and helped me to verbalize my pattern of thought (something I am normally terrible at) to people who might now understand two women wanting to have a child together. One of the most enduring questions of this class and particular unit in my mind was an examination at how we as individuals arrived at the idea of having children and how does this process differ from the subjects we read about in Mezey's articles on sociological experiments on lesbian individuals? I found this very interesting because I had to examine my own life experiences as a gay individual and see how they influenced my ideas on parenthood. 

I realized that I have a complicated relationship with the idea of fathering or adopting children. On one hand, I am overwhelmed by the amount of responsibility you have on your shoulders when you decide to become a parent. As a parent, you have to be selfless enough to put all your energy into how this other human turns out and often the child doesn't grow up to be what you hoped. But on the other hand, there's the idea of unconditional love that draws me into thinking I might one day want to be a parent. 

Parenting is unconditional love. The kind of love one feels when they have to give up their own life ambitions (although I am not saying that a parent cannot achieve their own goals and successfully raise children) to insure that this other person is cared for and has the most meaningful life they can possibly have. This is the kind of love my own strictly Catholic mother, born on a farm in 1950, showed me when I told her I was gay my freshman year of high school. To become a parent is one of the most selfless acts one can commit. I've realized how profoundly my own childhood has affected my own views on parenting. A part of me wants to become a parent so that I can give a child a childhood they deserve or correct the mistakes I feel my parents made while I was a child. Watching my friends interact with their parents as a child has also strongly influenced my views on parenthood as well as (to be completely truthful) romanticized versions of parent-child relationships played out in movies that I watched so often as a sort of haven when I was a child. I'd usually go to these movies when I was having a particularly bad argument with my mother and I suppose these moments are burned into my psyche juxtaposed with the shining examples of parents in The Parent Trap, Matilda, and It Takes Two. I'm also aware that another reason I lean toward wanting to be a parent is to raise a child that would not treat others the way I was treated throughout elementary and middle school by my peers for being more effeminate than the other boys.
I do think my somewhat ambivalent (but leaning towards parenthood) feelings towards wanting to raise children came very similarly to me than they came to Mezey's subjects. It is true that my childhood shaped my ideas and desires regarding childhood, which has likely influenced the way I feel towards parenthood now. Very much like Mezey's lesbian subjects, because of discrimination I feel I faced as a child, particularly from my own peers, has influenced my desire to become a parent. I do believe that gay individuals are very sensitive to feelings of alienation and isolation that we face when we are younger and we either decide yes, I want to be a parent to raise a child who doesn't have to go through what I went through, or no, I am not having a child because this world has treated me poorly and I cannot protect my child from this kind of pain. I want to raise a child who wouldn't think to ever make fun of the way someone is, but as a homosexual male I'd have to actively pursue parenthood (like Mezey explains about her lesbian subjects), which means one day my ambivalence has to lead to action. I also feel like Mezey's subjects in that I see the way my mother's life was and how it remains, see the difficulties she faced raising four children after my father passed away, and feel worry that my life could end similarly to this. Where I believe I differ with Mezey's subjects is my lack of having my desires influenced by early experiences with childcare.