Gayby Sightings

As mentioned in recent posts, while I am lucky enough to have a great community of queer friends and a burgeoning new group of parent friends, there is almost zero overlap between the two. Several of my queer friends are planning or actively trying to become parents, but for now, we've got the only gayby on the block.

Perhaps as a manifestation of my deep desire to bridge the gap between the queers and the 'rents, I hallucinate queer families everywhere I go. Two women with a baby carriage? Must be lesbian moms. Couple of dudes with toddlers? Hurray for gay dads! Inevitably, upon talking to them (or, eavesdropping on their conversations in the coffee shop), I discover that they are in fact sisters-in-law, friends from church, dads from the local neighborhood association taking the kids for the afternoon to give their wives a break. In my most significant faux pas, I mistakenly assumed that the butch woman standing in line behind me at airport security was partnered to the femme woman carrying a baby who was standing behind her. I was, of course, thrilled to see another queer family in transit. However, upon asking the butch woman how old her child was, she looked confused, and then laughed. "Oh no," she said, "that's not my baby!" The femme woman, on the other hand, looked utterly horrified, and awhile later I saw her and her husband (how had I missed him before??) boarding a plane to Salt Lake City. Right.

So the other day, when J and I were sitting in the local gay cafe sipping our coffees and chatting with a friend, I was thrilled to see a femme woman walk in carrying a young infant. Immediately, though, my excitement gave way to skepticism. Maybe she's just babysitting, I thought. Perhaps she doesn't know this is a gay cafe. A moment later, a butch woman walked in and joined her. I poked J. We stared blatantly, and lost all track of the conversation. Finally our friend suggested, why don't you go and say hello to them? And so, we did.

What's funny is how much we had to say to each other. We barely had time to sit down before the words were spilling out all over the place. Some of it was much the same conversation we have with our straight friends - breastfeeding and bottles, sleeping and teething, favorite toys and activities. But mixed in seamlessly with all that were the other realities of parenting that are indeed unique to queer families. The funny tanks that the vials of sperm arrive in, and what you say to the Fed Ex driver who delivers them. Second-parent adoptions and birth certificates. What we looked for in a sperm donor. How to find other queers with kids.

We left after exchanging numbers and emails, and as we walked to the car, J and I kept exchanging looks. Did that really happen? Did we just RUN INTO a pair of queer parents with a baby just a month younger than our own? We were giddy with excitement all evening.

Maybe it shouldn't matter. Parents are parents are parents, right? It felt so good though, just for a little while, to sit with a family that looked and felt a little bit more like our own.