Confessions of the Other Mother Part 2

eral years ago, when my partner, Jennifer, and I were beginning to explore becoming parents.

We were at the home of Jenniferas brother Curtis in Berkeley. At the table were his wife, their two young kids, my partneras playwright/activist mother, Marthaa"whom, in reference to Jenniferas and my extralegal partners.h.i.+p, I have taken to calling my amother out-law,a much to her delighta"and her partner, Sandy, a Buddhist scholar and writer. We gather every Sunday night for dinner, and this week, additional guests at the table were Dougla.s.s, an old friend of Curtisas, and two old friends of my mother out-lawas, from her hippie days at a Cape Cod theater artistas commune, some thirty years back.

We were slowly finis.h.i.+ng 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 oae'spring. Soon, the focus of all attention was Jenniferas and my campaign to have a baby. The usual bevy of questions sprouted up.

Q: Which of you would bear the child?

A:.

My femme-bot sweetie, Jennifer. Sheas always wanted to and Iave always drawn a blank whenever I tried to imagine myself with child. With a child, great; with child, eh, not so great.

Q: Would you want a known or an anonymous donor?

A:.

We are lighting candles and importuning all deities for a known donor, ideally a friend.

Q: Would you want to include him in the childas life?

A:.

We would hope to, if he was amenable; that is a big appeal of the known-donor thing. But it would be in a strictly avuncular fas.h.i.+on: we would be the only parents on the scene.

After we had outlined the whole shebang, someone generously offered that even if I wouldnat be bearing the child, I would make a great mother. To which I found myself objectinga"I had every reason to expect Iad be a splendid parent, but whatever I would be to my child, I wouldnat be a mother.

A mix of amazement and amus.e.m.e.nt ensued. Eyebrows arched. Jaws went slack. I may as well have just rhapsodized about the nuanced political wisdom of George W. Bush.

aWhat do you mean you wonat be a mother? Of course youall be a mother!a This from one of the genial, erstwhile hippies; I surmised that her line of reasoning went, aThis nice young person doesnat feel ent.i.tled to the t.i.tle amothera and deserves some encouragement.a aNo,a I insisted. aThe name just doesnat feel right to me. Iall be a parent, definitely. Iall be a loving, caring parent. But I just donat feel motherly.a The mood at the table slowly s.h.i.+fted from jovial to sober when it became clear that two pa.s.sionately held beliefs were in complete opposition.

aBut how can you not be a mother?a said my mother out-lawas sweetiea"who, by the way, wasnat one herself. She seemed to be moving ahead of the pack to become the most flummoxed.

I felt the need to stand firm. aI can be something else. Something in between a mother and a father.a I was half making this up as I went along, half giving voice to something I was now realizing Iad felt for a long time. I thought of My Lesbian Husband, the book by Barrie Jean Borich about her relations.h.i.+p 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. She was kind of a debonair, ladiesa galabout-town.

aMaybe Iall be a lesbian father. A d.y.k.e daddy.a The old hippie commune-istas were eyeballing my George Clooney haircut and spiae'y menas duds with growing fascination and a glimmer of new insight. My brother out-law Curtis was smiling into his winegla.s.s; for years he delighted me by calling me the brother he never had. He understood, and so, I sensed, did Dougla.s.s; 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 Dougla.s.s had more lesbian friends than, well, most lesbians. If he didnat 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 ma.s.s of sympathetic straight people, rapt with attention, plus two distinguished lesbian eldersa"neither of whom, it seemed, could intuitively make the leap from the leather-clad butch bar d.y.k.es they had known in their youth to the sweater-clad fatherly d.y.k.e I was proposinga"I felt I had a responsibility to begin carving out a place for myself, linguistically, socially, emotionally. After all, if I couldnat 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, genderwise. I told of my happy life as a tomboy, gamboling about unfettered. How tomboy works great as a between-genders way station when youare a preadolescent girl, but your goose is cooked when you hit p.u.b.erty. 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 and embrace 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 pa.s.sing a bong back in a75, Iam 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-lawas partner was busy ditching her husband and jump-starting a feminist lesbian collective. But gender and s.e.xual liberation hadnat made it to teen life in my California suburb in the mid-a70s, at least not beyond Helen Reddyas single aI Am Woman (Hear Me Roar).a 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 Casey Kasem Top 40 hit aI Am, Well, Not All That Womanly (Hear Me Try on Your Brotheras Clothes).a So here I was now, looking at parenthood, feeling adrift, no parental prototype to steer by that didnat trigger some cognitive tension at this visceral, gendered level. My own mother, while a far from traditional woman, had still always worn a dress. (A friend in high school nicknamed her aMrs. b.u.t.terworth.a) Generally speaking, images of motherhood overwhelmingly presuppose not just femaleness, which I grant is reasonable, but femininitya"which for some of us gals is less or even unreasonable. Every time I conjured up images of parenthood (which I could only see through the lens of motherhood), I couldnat help picturing traditional icons, June Cleavers and Laura Petries and Carol Bradys. Where were the butch moms, I wondered? Was I the first model of the mother who was masculine? 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 the French film 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 realize how much my emotional access to parenthood was predicated on my feeling comfortable with the t.i.tle mother and the femininity that presumably went along with it. 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.

Baba: A Name I Call Myself.

A few months after the fateful dinner party, an old grad school buddy visited me. Susannea"German, feminist, hippie, vegetarian, and now a New Orleansa"based professora"is the cla.s.sic straight-but-far-fromnarrow hetero ally. For years she resisted getting marrieda"for purposes of solidarity with her queer comradesa"until her lack of a green card was going to get her booted out of the country. When she did marry, it was during the intermission of a Grateful Dead concert, and the service was conducted by a nineteen-year-old gal deputized by her mother, the local justice of the peace. More than ten years later she and David continue to call each other apartner.a Susanne and I had sat ourselves down to a nice afternoon stckchen, as she would call ita"coae'ee and a pastrya"a ritual we had engaged in for years when we were preparing lectures for a womenas studies cla.s.s we cotaught. I was reviewing for her where Jennifer and I were in our baby-hatching process: rooting around for possible donor chums, carefully tracking ovulation cycles, naming the little bairn (we decided on the same name whether for girl or boy: Maclain, my motheras maiden name). Thus far, everything seemed to be progressing nicely, but I had been getting stuck on the dilemma of what parental names we would call ourselves. I say acall ourselves,a of course, because all along Iave known that as soon as our kid(s) acquired the gift of language, all bets would be oae' and wead pretty much be answering to whatever the little squirt(s) called out in our direction.

aI just donat think I can do the mamma/mommy thing,a I was telling Susanne, as I scooted around and organized the pastry flecks on my plate. aI mean, first oae', never mind the kida"Iad be confused all the time. I canat even get the names of my two dogs right when Iam jangled.a aIs that the only objection you have?a she oae'ered sagely. aBecause Iam sure youad catch on soon enough.a aWell, no.a I was caught. Susanne had spent years waving away the fog from around my head and holding up a mirror to whatever eventually became visible. My resistance to the mamma/mommy thing was just a front for a deeper unease.

aIam not so sure that either of those two names feel right for me, period. I wish Jennifer or I had some other language, besides English, in our backgrounds. Then one of us could be Mom and the other could be Ima, for example.a I had copped this fine idea from a couple whose story was featured in the doc.u.mentary Choosing Children, which I had seen eons before with my first sweetie, back in the mid-1980s. Because I donat speak Hebrew, ima seemed like an improvement over mom. But then again, the Hebrew word for doork.n.o.b would seem like an improvement over mom. More to the point, my secret preference was for abaa"dada"over ima. At this point, I hadnat gotten far enough in my thinking to realize that the alesbian dada I had begun to sketch at the dinner table might be worthy of her own special name.

aHmm....a Susanne was swirling the last of the coae'ee around the bottom of the cup. aYou know, in Frankfurter dialect, the diminutive for afathera is baba. Has a nice ring to it, donat you think?a aBaba.a I narrowed my eyes and began to nod slowly. aHmm.... baba. Yeah, baba!a I was Helen Keller with the tap water on her palm, or Eliza Doolittle making her breakthrough. I clapped Susanne triumphantly on the shoulder. aBy Jove, Schwester, I think weave got it!a The more I rolled it over my tongue, the better it sounded. Baba! Kind of like aba, but without the haunting a70s pop music connotations. And my paternal great-grandfather came here from Germany, so I could trace a cultural link, however tendril-like.

I began to explore the word baba with other friends. One, a Sicilian American, said that her family calls her grandfather babo. Of course! O mio babbino caro, I began to hum to myself, allegro vivace, or whatever. I could do worse than be a asweet daddya in Italian. Still another friend, a Belizean American and devout Rastafarian, told me that baba in Kiswahili means adad,a and also aprotector,a aguard,a and aforebear.a Good, good. It means agrandmothera in Russian (short for, and more p.r.o.nounceable to children than, babushka). And in some families I know, itas what the word bottle winds up being for a while. But everywhere else I looked, it was a diminutive or straight-up term for afather.a China. India. If I was to name myself Baba, seems Iad be some kind of father-like person in the eyes of most of the world, or at worst, a vessel delivering milk to others.

Overall, the term denoted a kindly, loving, protective family figure who was not the bearer of the child. That would be me! When I tried it on for size, I noticed some of the preparental tensions dissolving. With a name, I began to feel as if I were an actual thing. A somebody! Not a hyphenated mom, a kind-of-mom, a nonbio mom, an also-ran. But an actual, bona fide thing. My own turf. Some elbow room. The name Baba christened my earlier, inchoate musings about a lesbian fatherhood, and in so doing helped crystallize them.

Jennifer and I realized wead be able to celebrate Mamaas Day and Babaas Day, rather than crowd each other out of the way for the accolades on just one day of the year. Anyway, how could I compete with the bio mom on a day like that? All this might have been diae'erent had our relations.h.i.+ps to the child been more equalized by our adopting a child, or if I felt less cognitive dissonance over the thought of stepping into the berfemale role of mother. But they werenat, and I did.

Even if baba would require a little explaining to others, it made perfect sense to Jennifer and me. When we began to furnish the s.p.a.ce in our imagination that would one day be filled with our actual parenthood and child, we used this language. She imagined things we might say to the wee one: aNo honey, listen to Baba and take the string bean out of your nose.a We replaced various apapaa words and phrases with ababaa ones, all the while featuring our as-yet-to-be baby. And we each smiled a double smile, for the joy of envisioning our child, and for the joy of envisioning a place, the place, I would have relative to that child.

Conception.

I confess: finding a name for myself didnat eliminate my worries about being expendable, unnecessary, adjunct, optional, and otherwise of lesser significance to the whole baby-hatching scheme. Conceiving of isnat believing, in other words. Being situated in the fluid s.p.a.ce between the ma.s.sive and ma.s.sively charted continents Mother and Father, while right for me genderwise and parental-role-wise, still left me bobbing around in an unmapped sea. I could have used an anchor, which I imagined our child would one day be. Until the little nipper materialized, I felt easily threatened. And it wasnat just by my partneras easy recognizability as the bio mom. I was just as tempest-tossad by the breezy nonchalance with which fatherly authority could be conferred, by friends and strangers alike, upon our donor chums.

Our first donor chum was an old friend of Jenniferas. We had agreed that we wanted, ideally at least, a friend whoad be accessible to us and to the kid(s) in the future. For ourselves, we wanted to be able to consult on genetically rooted health issues, should they arise; for the kid(s), we wanted to permit them the option of knowing the generous man who helped us make them possible. Richard had met our number one criterion for donor chum: he oae'ered. We had a lot of other criteriaa"a time-tested connection to one or both of us, so we could all feel confident wead be able to work through the inevitable sticky wickets; respect for Jenniferas and my intention to be not just the primary but the only parents; willingness to disclose, even actively research, all sorts of intimate details regarding his s.e.xual history and health; a modic.u.m of motility; and a willingness to get back up on the horse, as it were, for a sibling down the linea"but the most natural initial criterion was the active desire to do this for us. Richard, G.o.d love him, had that in spades.

After some two-way and then three-way phone conversations, Jennifer and I made a pre-insemination diplomatic mission to Los Angeles, where Richard then lived. We went out to a restaurant and all felt mildly nervous and first date-y. Sure, we had already apopped the question,a and Richard had already answered in the aarmative, but this was our chance to eyeball each other over a table and see whether we had any lingering reservations. Since Jennifer and Richard had met as actors over ten years before, they did just fine with all the feelings. They had a long history of contemplating intense emotion together. Me, not so much. Also, the more we talked, the more I realizeda"or felt, I should say, since I had logically recognized long sincea"how clearly the existing paradigms make s.p.a.ce for her, bio mom, and him, bio dad. And then thereas me: nonbio. I was oae' the radara"legally, socially, and viscerally. I got skittish too when Richard used the term we, even though we three would be a awe.a I began to realize that, if all three of us were walking down the street with Baby M, letas call her, theread be no way that Iad look like anything other than somebodyas sister. A sidekick. An appendage . . . unless I managed to elbow Richard aside, grab Jennifer, and smooch her big, all the while expertly administering a bottle to the burbling babe.

When I started to spill my worries, I realized I had a lot, and they all had to do with the inverse relations.h.i.+p Richard and I had in this deal. The more afathera he was, the less parent I was. And the world, unless cued otherwise, would naturally defer to him as father. aDonor chuma is just not in most peopleas vocabulary. Through all this, Richard was a prince. He gently watched me fulminate, nodding soberly, leaning over to occasionally dab the foam from the edges of my mouth, and subtly motioning the waiter over to bring me some more water. And then he repeated back what he heard, and a.s.sured me that he could see my position and respected my concerns.

Wheew! With the worst of my fears on a leash, it seemed now all we had to do was sign our Donor Pre-Insemination Agreement form, corroborate our projected ovulation schedule, and get knocked up! In the ensuing months we made multiple pilgrimages south for seed, and Richard was all grace and accommodation, even when one night the only private place he could go to have communion with the artichoke jar was in the backyard of a mutual friendas house, near a swing set. Fortunately he not only has fertile sperm but a fertile sense of humor. Unfortunately for us, however, before we got knocked up he moved way far away to Seattle to be with his newfound ladylove. We had tried to connect with him for a few more ovulation cycles, but the miles were too many to make the proposition manageable.

I was bemoaning our donor woes to Sybil, one of my oldest friends back home in Berkeley, when she got a twinkle in her eye: aWhy donat you use Patas? It works great!a Iad known Sybil for as long as Iad known anyone other than family. We met during our first year in college, and have stayed in touch, across grad schools and continents, for over twenty years. I had met her then sweetie, now husband, Pat, in a Harvard Square Chinese restaurant one fall night about ten years before, just two months after my mother died.

And now Sybil and I were in my car, out in front of her Berkeley home, at the end of a long fall night in which Sybil had recounted her own motheras unexpected death the week before. Our joint members.h.i.+p in the sorority of motherless daughters was just making an old, strong friends.h.i.+p even stronger. Sybilas suggesting that perhaps her family could enable my own just made sense: a rare moment of grace, in which life might be kindled out of the ashes of death. It was just what we all needed.

Pat was more than agreeable. In fact, according to Sybil, their conversation went something like this: She: aPolly and Jennifer are having donor problems, and I was wondering . . .a He: aYes!a We were all blessed by a special symbiosis in the most fabulously crisscrossed ways. Jennifer and I had dined at their house for years, playing with their two girls at the table. Sybil had canoodled with gals and retained a solidarity with the daughters of Sappho; Pat had recently served as witness to their lesbian neighboras adoption of her partneras child, and wanted to support loving lesbo parents should the right pair appear on his doorstep. Sybil and I were freshly bonded by the loss of her mother. Up until her, I had no other local friends who knew, from experience, how tectonic this shock was. So providing a ready, steady ear for her was a balm to me.

We had our face-to-face dinner to corroborate our expectations and air our worries, but this time it felt a little less illicit, since we were two old, committed couples at the table. How could I feel like a third wheel when there were four of us? Sybil and I, in fact, stood to feel equally aout of it,a and yet it was by virtue of our connection that this extension of our families was happening. Furthermore, to Jenniferas and my relief, they had as many concerns as we did that we draw clear boundaries around our extant and would-be parenthoods. Sybil and Pat had their own little munchkins, then three and five years old, with whom they wanted to share this important act of generosity. While they would feel a special kins.h.i.+p with ours, the avuncular thing sounded just right to them. And could we put that in print? Could we put that in print! Music to our ears!

The aIt works great!a testimonial, by the way, was due to the fact that they had conceived in one pop, both times they set out to get pregnant. And, so, it turns out, did we.

Gestation: Baba Goes to Pride.

Happy as a clam was I, that next LGBT Pride Celebration in San Francisco. I was, I dare say, prouder at that Pride than Iad been since I went to my first one more than twenty years back. And there have been some doozies. New Yorkas twentieth anniversary of Stonewall. D.C.as twenty-fifth. d.y.k.e Marches in threea"no, make that foura"cities, one of which I helped organize and lead, unpermitted, through city streets (in fact, thatas how I snagged the mother of my child, but thatas a story for another day). So here I was, erstwhile lesbo rabble-rouser turned soon-to-be lesbo dad. I had me a name: Baba. We had us a peanut in Jenniferas belly, and the little critter was starting to show.

That weekend I was bound and determined to track down other lesbo parents like myself, bobbing around in their own dinghies in the same atwixt-gender soup that I was in. Was it going to be Heather Has Two Mommies everywhere? Or might one Heather have a mommy and a baba? I had to find out. So I made up a big placard that read something like, aLesbo Parents: Come talk to me about lesbian fatherhood!a Then I toted it around the kiddie playground in the park from which the Sat.u.r.day evening d.y.k.e March disembarked, and again the next day at the kiddie playground in the Civic Center plaza where the Pride parade ended up, enticing anyone who wished to come talk to me. I would point to my sign, point proudly to Jenniferas belly, and wave curious onlookers over. If they stayed long enough, Iad even thrust a homemade survey into their hands, asking about what they called themselves, what their role was, and how important it was to them that there be understanding about their kind of parenthood.

I had conversations with dozens of gals, which in itself was like drinking from an oasis pool after a long slog through the desert. Eureka! Butch moms and d.y.k.e dads existed! Evidently when they were all clumped together in one place I could begin to make them out. Of course it would all be braided together: the closer I would get to understanding my own kind of parenthood, the more likely I would be to seek out and find parents like myself. Yet it was only in seeking out and finding parents like myself that I would be able to get closer to understanding my own kind of parenthood. This was not unlike many of lifeas greatest treasures: a paradox, gift-wrapped in a conundrum.

Most of the women I talked with, hanging around the oasis that weekend, asked me right oae' what a lesbian dad was. To this question, I pulled the ever annoying but usually productive old teacher trick of reversing the question on aem. aWhat does alesbian dada mean to you?a Or, aWhat would you guess it could mean?a Some gals thought a lesbian dad might be the sperm-donor guy. But most c.o.c.ked their heads, thought for a moment, and then figured: a lesbian mom whoas more like a dad. Bingo! And while weare at it, take that, Henry Higgins! Why canat a woman be more like a man?

When it came to finding out who might identify as a lesbian dada" once they had the chance to give the term some thoughta"more often than not, it was the nonbio moms for whom the shoe fit: this shoe was pretty much a boot after all, and anecdotally speaking, more often than not, the butchier of the gals seemed to be the ones who, given the choice, opted out of pregnancy and into supporting the pregnant partner. I should say this is relatively speaking, when I say butchier: butch in Los Angeles is definitely closer to femme in San Francisco, and this is all just urban California, and these terms are movable, sometimes even provisional hooks onto which we toss our hats. Weare all very much more complicated than any either/or binary, the holding of which conviction, I hasten to note, is how I got into this whole goose chase in the first place. I realized this when one butchy bio-mom said she could just as soon feel like a lesbian dad as a lesbian mom. That weekend I learned that those ma.s.sive continents Mother and Father have, as all landma.s.ses do, dynamic sh.o.r.elines that are eroded and transformed all the time by original-thinking moms and dads of all ilks.

On the nomenclature question, I got every conceivable variant: Mom, Mama, Mommy, Ima, Mama Jane (or whatever the galas name would be), and more. There were also more fatherly monikers: Poppi, Papa, and, my favorite, P Daddy. This helped me to see that even if people werenat identifying themselves as alesbian dadsa per se, their parental names suggested that plenty of these gals were fine with scootching over and hogging up a little of the s.p.a.ce taken up by fatherhood. That I never came face-to-face with a gal who named herself Baba didnat dampen my excitement, especially when someone I spoke with said she knew a number of butch (nonbio) moms who had independently taken the same path I had, etymologically, and called themselves Baba. Talking to all these women helped me see more clearly where Jennifer and I were headed. One gal described parenthood as the toughest job youall ever love; another said it was like an eighteen-year-long blind date. But they were all just smitten with their kids, and loving the ride. I couldnat wait to get on.

Birth and Beyond: Where the Diaper Meets the Road The birth of our daughter was a lot easier than I thought it would bea" on me, that is. It helped a great deal that the birth went fast and without real complication, aided in no small part by Jenniferas tremendous focus and breath capacity (figures: sheas an opera singer). Lindy, our midwife, quipped, aIt looked like you were giving birth to a stick of warm b.u.t.ter.a I had been bracing for anything, since of course thatas what can always happen.

Birth stories are like coming-out stories: if youave got a vested interest (going to give or have given birth; came out at any point in the past), youall always be riveted, and even when the stories end up happy, they can include a lot of hards.h.i.+p amid the joy. And wead heard about plenty of hards.h.i.+p. These tales of woe entailed a lot of tribulation for the birth partner, too. You see, the more I had begun to contemplate being a lesbian dad, the more I had taken up and considereda"considered, mind you, not uncritically adopteda"the various foundational mythologies of fatherhood. The earliest are the ordeals of birtha"fears of fainting, blood hither and yon, the excruciation of seeing your beloved in mortal pain and thereas nothing you can do about ita"horrors of this nature. But birth was just the first of many parental moments that separated the d.y.k.es from the boys, as it were. Blood? Pshaw! Weave seen it coming out of our bodies for years! And how could one even consider fainting when there was so much work to do?

From the moment we entered the hospital, my experiences were at the same time traditionally fatherly and anciently female. When we checked in, before I even realized it, someone had cuae'ed my wrist with a little band that bore our identifying number and the word: Father. This moment, which could feel odd or maybe even disrespectful for gals who feel motherly, was not a contradiction for me. In fact it was a comforting aarmation. As soon as we were past the guard at the elevator outside the child-birthing floor, it was an essentially all-womenas world; we had staggered in with our female doula, and inside met our female midwife and the hospitalas female nurse. All fine for a father like me; in this company, I was no odd man out.

Just as we had practiced in our (lesbian couplesa) childbirth-education cla.s.s, I gently narrated Jennifer through wave after mounting wave of contractions and held fast to her body as she held fast to mine, all as our daughter nudged and undulated her way into the world. Fathers do this handholding, certainly, but then again, so, through the millennia, have groups of women. For me, this was another double confirmation: there I was being both. Did I start being a parent when I acaughta Maclain, or when I cut her umbilical cord? I donat know. For the previous nine months I had been tending Jenniferas pregnant body and psyche with as much care as I could: that was parenthood. I had been speaking to this little being nightly, back when she was both he and she, back before she had ears. I sang to her. I read to her. That was parenthood. All that was so, even though she wouldnat emerge having shared my body as she had Jenniferas, she would still begin her time outside knowing my sound. When I had to take her from Jenniferas chest for the first time, to be weighed, a little less than an hour after she was born, I felt the first test: just her and me. Away from her body-home, I held her close, and leaned in and spoke gently to her the whole way. And, G.o.d love her, she was comforted by my voice.

In the hours and days it takes for the birthmother to resurface up from out of the primordial estrogen bath she swam in during gestation, and plunged deep into for the birth, we who love and are committed, but did not give birth, watch over her. As she slowly begins the healing process, there we are in a vigil over both her body and that of the teeny newborn. In the days and weeks to follow the birth, though we shared an experience, the birthparent and non-birthparent recover from and adapt to very diae'erent facets of it: the birthmother bore the child, and we bore witness. The experience is etched into our psyches, but not written on the inside of our bodies, like it is in theirs. Itas not continuing to ooze out our nether parts for weeks and months, certainly doesnat drip out of our b.r.e.a.s.t.s when we begin to feel longing for the baby. That different embodiment continues to diae'erentiate our parenthoods, through breastfeeding. I expect these kinds of contrasts to s.h.i.+ft and mellow over the years. Jenniferas mother birthed two children and adopted one, and maintains that, over time, the diae'erences between biological and nonbiological parenthood become imperceptible. Motherhooda"parenthood, babahooda"is the sum total of dozens of skinned knees tended, hundreds of runny noses wiped, thousands of hurt feelings loved away. After all, one does this with, and to, both body and soul.

In the surreal suspension of those first days following birth, I started to gingerly introduce myself as Baba. Though the birth was a healthy one for both mother and child, we stayed in the hospital as long as we could. That was an easy decision. Trained professionals wait on you hand and foot. There was always someone at the other end of an intercom, ready to answer pressing questions like, aWhat the Sam Hill is that asphaltylooking stuae' doing coming out of her hind end?a Or, aAre all white babies this plotchy?a Or, aIf her eyes are shut, and her chest is slowly going up and down, does that mean sheas asleep?a And then the voice on the other end of the intercom would calmly rea.s.sure us, or dispatch the proper gal to come do so in person. When the staae' hung around and talked to us, after having finished whatever business brought them to the room, they would usually refer to me (respectfully, inclusively) as a mama/mother/mommy, to which I woulda"whenever there seemed to be time and s.p.a.ce enougha"smile broadly, puae' out my chest, and proudly announce that I was going to be called Baba. No questions, no problems. This is what these lesbians do. There are two of them, and they get to choose what to call themselves, and so hereas this one calling herself this name.

All the hospital staae' was great with us. This may be because they simply are great, period, or it could be that more lesbians give birth in this hospital in any given week than women, period, give birth in many rural hospitals in a month. I mean really, this was on the Oakland/Berkeley border, d.y.k.e epicenter of the Bay Area, queer epicenter of the nation. Still, I was relieved at how absolutely I was regarded as the parent of our wee Maclain. It helped that you couldnat peel me from Jenniferas and the babyas side with a spatula and a can of WD-40. It helped that I had that little wrist cuae' on with a number matching our childas. Still, I credit the staae' with a great deal of professionalism and compa.s.sion.

One nurse who was there to administer the diabetes test came out to us within about three minutes. Something about our room just got her to want to open up. Could have been that we let the natural light in and kept the TV oae'a"evidently thatas unusual. Whatever the reason, people kept wanting to repeatedly check in on us. They said we were the calm, peaceful room. (My own theory: our baby is hecka cute.) So the diabetes test nurse had entered the room while I was exiting the bathroom, jeans slumping low on my hips, baby in the crook of one arm like a football, having managed (with no small amount of pride) to pee while Jennifer was sleeping. She smiled at having caught me dishabille, and in a few minutes was telling us that when she saw me coming out of the bathroom, aAll looking like Big Daddy,a she just knew. When I told her about actually being Big Baba, and why, she was all smiles. aWell all right. Well all right then.a Babaas first trial run at the hospital and itas all systems go.

We even had a good experience with the woman who came to draw up the birth certificate. Granted, wead gone on the hospital tour some weeks back, and prepared ourselves for everything. But she was so friendly and matter-of-fact. When she asked us what wead be putting on the line where it says aFather,a I was ready. aWeare going with aDecline to State.a a I felt like I was on Jeopardy, or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? If next she asked, aIs that your final answer?a I was going to muster all my self-confidence not to cave. Was it the right answer? With the right amount of paranoia, any potential statement on that aFathera line could spell doom, mostly for me. But we figured all this out ahead of time. I was ready to hold firm. aGreat,a she said. Great! The only thing that would have made that step any more painless would have been our having given birth just a few months later. In California, thanks to recent expansions in registered domestic partner benefits, as of January 2005 I would have been able to sign my own name on that aFathera line before we left the hospital. I look forward to the day, should we be so fortunate as to take this ride a second time around.

We drove home from the hospital through a Maxfield Parrisha"tinted dusk, and it felt as if we were piloting a bathysphere through an undersea wonderland. All our senses were acutely heightened. We rolled down the windows to smell the jasmine blooms as we drove by, only to have to roll them back up again; the sounds of the traac were too intense. It was with great eae'ort that I brought the car up to the minimum speed limit, and I did that only to avoid getting rear-ended. There was our beautiful, splotchy little newborn, snoozing upright in the car seat. Even her being upright in a seat all by herself, rather than reclined in our arms, took eae'ort for us to cope with.

When we got home, we stayed on our bed together for days, as if it were a little raft and all around it was inky ocean. I only darted into other rooms to fetch some vital product, and then back Iad come to our little bed-craft. I was their baba: their protector, their guard. Friends and family brought us home-cooked meals for a full fortnight. It took a week before I ventured so far as the front of the house with the baby in my arms. And it should be noted that we have a really small house.

But as the weeks began to pa.s.s, we were ready to rove farther and farther afield, and began to present our (lesbian-headed) family to the public sphere. First we moved within insulated family s.p.a.ces, where we were greeted with love and where we were already presumptive parents. Even so, my role and t.i.tle needed frequent review (depending on the family member). Itas just too hard to see a female parent and not think: mama. And why not? Iam trying to be a new species of parent here, but itas not like people have watched a lot of Mutual of Omahaas Wild Kingdom specials on my kind.

I also get that Iam at the outset here of a long process of establis.h.i.+ng my sense of parental authority. I donat mean the authority I have as a parent, in the eyes of my child. For an atypical parent like me, at the dawn of parenthood, establis.h.i.+ng parental authority has as much or more to do with establis.h.i.+ng authority to be a parent in the first place, in the eyes of other people. I expect that this will be something, like the starkly different ways that Jennifer and I embody our parenthoods, that will soften for me over time. But meanwhile, it matters.

I expect that wrestling with authority will just be part of my early babahood, along with a frequent self-awareness in public. I know for all parents it seems impossible not to do parenting work inside a fishbowl; that oneas raising of oneas kids is ever subject to public scrutiny and comment, that there will always be someone who both disapproves of what oneas doing and has no compunction in sharing that disapproval. But this scrutiny feels especially keen to me, being, at least genderwise, such a nonnormative parent. When out of a context in which my kind of parent establishes the norma"which would be most of the time, other than at queer family events, or at the strategically located kiddie playgrounds on Pride weekenda"I canat help but be a walking Wild Kingdom episode about the wily and elusive butch mother (also known as lesbian father), unfolding live and unedited for whoever cares to watch. Itas the ordinary, workaday plight of any underrepresented minority. Are the viewers well informed or ignorant about my kind? Admiring or judgmental? Friendly or cranky? Curious or repulsed? Or simply blas about all of the above? Who knows? But for my kidas sake, at least, Iam going to make darn sure that the viewers (whenever there are any paying attention) come to understand and respect my kind. Some of them might even secretly wish their husbands were more like lesbian dads. With metros.e.xuality so rampant, maybe itas not that far away.

Other Than Mother.

I havenat been at this baba thing for very long, but I have already developed a repertoire of responses to the more predictable questions and a.s.sumptions.

aYes, sheas my daughter.a aOur donor friendas just that: our donor friend. If anyoneas the daddy, itas me.a aMy sweetie did all the hard work; I just got to watch.a aI like to call myself Baba.a aI feel more like something in between a mom and a dad, and this word says that to me. But Iall answer to anything she calls me, once she acquires the gift of speech.a Like that.

I notice general trends in myself. Whenever weare in public as a threesome, for example, I am very eager to be the one holding Juniora"more so if I have reason to believe no one weare likely to encounter has seen a lesbian dad before. I am motivated by both negative and positive reasons. Negative: holding our wee punkin lamb a.s.suages my fears of illegitimacy. The one holding the baby must for sure be a parent, I imagine others to be thinking. Look at how comfortable the little one is in hisa"oh! I mean hera"arms, they might say. On the positive side: when Iave got her swaddled in one or another of our fancy baby-carrying contraptions, folks do indeed read us together as a family unit. I get to be a parent, plus who I am, genderwise, all at the same time. Maybe gals like me will see me and think, Yeah! I could do that, too! Itas about being a sip of water for the fellow desert travelers.

My favorite, though, is when kids ask questions. Then it all makes sense. No fog of grown-up complication to wave away. Our first chance to frame our parenthood for kids was back when Jennifer was still pregnant. We were in an airport lounge with my sisteras sons, ages nine and six at the time, following an extended-family gathering in the Rockies. They were working their little thumbs away at those beeping Game Boy toys that keep kids occupied, and parents just slightly less harried, over the course of lengthy car and plane trips.

One of them looked up and asked the question we were secretly waiting to be asked by them: aHow did you get pregnant?a This must have been from Erik, the older one: head have known by then that a gal doesnat get pregnant just by wishful thinking. Any lesbian could have told him that much.

aWell!a Jennifer and I looked at each other, rubbing our hands together, all excited that the moment had arrived; their natural curiosity had opened the door to our desire to share and educate.

aYou know how it takes a man and a woman to make a baby?a asked Jennifer.

Whew. Excited as I was, I was glad she took the anchor leg.

Erik nodded his head. Patrick did, too, but who knows whether this was because his older brother signaled that this was a yes answer, or whether he knew, too.

aWell, Polly and I wanted to have a baby, but we needed to have a man help us. We got a friend and thatas how we were able to make this baby.a I was wincing inside, hoping the follow-up questions werenat going to get us into dicier territory. Were we really going to go there? The artichoke jar? The s.e.m.e.n? How the s.e.m.e.n gets from our friend to the artichoke jar? The late-night group hugs as we pick up the jar in its little sock? The cheapie, finger-size drugstore syringe, like the kind you use to get the kitty to swallow her medicine? The Barry White music and the little red plastic Kuan-Yin-holding-a-baby statue that Jennifer got from her mom, and the good-luck p.e.n.i.s-shape candle she got from her dad? Jennifer rotating like a Cornish game hen on a rotisserie for thirty minutes afterward, so that every drop would have an equal chance of slithering over and through the idiosyncrasies of her internal topography?

My sister was out of earshot up at the ticket counter, so we had no maternal cues regarding how far to go, or nota"such as a suggestion, from between clenched teeth, to aIx-nay on the asturbation-may.a Patrick asked the next question, a very good one and, thank G.o.d, not a follow-up on the mechanics of it all. aSo, Polly? Are you going to be a mama or a papa?a The people seated nearby stopped rustling their papers and started to list slowly toward us, combing their hair out of the way of their ears, waiting for the response.

aIam so glad you asked!a I erupted. I hoped my eagerness wouldnat betray how high the stakes were for me. Who cares what grown-ups think about all this malarkey? The real litmus test comes from the kids, the people these roles and names are meant for in the first place. Would I be a super freak to them, or would it all make perfect sense, as it had to Jennifer and me?

aIam going to be a little bit of both,a I oae'ered. aSomething other than mother, but other than father too. Iall be the best parts of a mama, plus the best parts of a papa. Which,a I intoned authoritatively, ais called a baba.a They looked at me for a moment and allowed a beat or two to go by, during which time I imagined this was all sinking into place. It would go where all new information goes: into the s.p.a.ces already prepared for it, by previous, related knowledge. There baba would go, next to a dinner-time chat Iad given about a year before to Patrick, in answer to a question he had about my gender (aAre you a boy or a girl?a). In the air, I had plotted out with my hands successive spots on a linear continuum, as I told him: aThere are boyish boys, and girlish boys, and boyish girls, and girlish girls. And Iam a boyish girl.a I had told him that Jenniferas dad was a girlish boy. aAnd itas okay to be whatever you are.a In that beat, in the airport lounge, I imagined they were filing this baba thing next to everything else theyad long known about me, such as how I look like a man from behind, such as how it took them a little time before they could match it up that, despite how I dress, I donat have a p.e.n.i.s or pee standing up and I do have b.r.e.a.s.t.s (Erik confirmed this by regularly fake-b.u.mping into me, when he was at an age where he wanted to double-check to be sure). I imagined they put this Mama + Papa = Baba thing next to another quiet but important truth about me: that, whether I was girl or boy, Iad love them forever, no matter whata"which, everyone knows, is the only thing that really matters.

As they looked at me, I tilted my head and arched my eyebrows, welcoming a follow-up question, should they have any. One alligator, two alligator.

aOh.a And they returned to their Game Boys. Easy as you please.

Nonbreeder.

Mimi Hill.

I came to the world of having children late in life, at age forty-two. On a personal level, as a d.y.k.e in Berkeley and Santa Cruz, California, in the 1980s and 1990s, I was too busy healing my inner child to have my own kids. On the political side, my experiences traveling in third world countries left me opposed to bringing more children into a world in which I felt there was too much suae'ering and starvation. (I still have a aNonbreedera b.u.t.ton I proudly wore in many Gay Pride parades during those years.) In addition, I never had wanted to give birth. It just wasnat me. I believed birthing to be full of the kinds of exposure, attention, and pain that made me feel uncomfortable and not at all maternal. Needless to say, my journey to parenthood was unantic.i.p.ated, the resulta"in parta"of an entirely diae'erent facet of my ident.i.ty.

As an Israeli American, throughout my life I made occasional trips to Israel. In 1999, during one such trip, I quite unexpectedly met and fell in love with Dana. By the summer of 2000, I had left my position at the University of California in Santa Cruz to work as a technical writer in Tel Aviv, Israel. Within this politically challenging climate, Dana and I began our dream life together.

At the very beginning of our relations.h.i.+p, Dana asked if I wanted to have kids.

My answera"aYes, of course.a I said yes because I thought that Dana wanted children; and I believed I wanted anything she wanted. In all honesty, at the time, I felt like I was lying. How could I want kids when, political beliefs aside, I had hated my own childhood? My suburban elementary and high school years were the darkest of my entire lifea"even without the added challenge of having gay parents. I wondered whether someone with a history

59.

such as mine could be a good parent, and whether I would be able to protect another being in a world that too often had revealed itself to be hostile and frightening.

Two years after our first baby conversation Dana and I purchased a home in Tel Aviv. As our love grew, the thought of Dana getting pregnant began to appeal to me, much to my own surprise. Sharing my life with a partner changed me. I enjoyed being a part of a family. I learned to trust Dana, and started to believe that pooling our eae'orts would provide our child an amalgamation of a awholea mom. Bit by bit, I came to feel that the love Dana and I shared was stable enough, warm and generous enough, to safely embrace a baby. I imagined our child, pictured myself nurturing him or her within the family Dana and I were creating, and believed in this image.

Still, I was riddled with fear about my own role. As primary provider for our family, I felt we couldnat aae'ord to have a child. We always lived on the edge, with just enough. Further reflection on the idea that perhaps we just could not financially support a family caused me to reconsider the many people Iad met in my travels. Thatas when it occurred to me that, despite the immense socioeconomic and political struggles I had witnessed, the challengesa"global and individuala"that left me so uneasy, many people were choosing to have children. Perhaps my reasons for not having kidsa"that the world was overpopulated enougha"was not the whole story. Perhaps my reluctance had to do with another sort of fear.

A descendent of European Jews who fled the Holocaust, I share my grandparentsa distrust of governmental powers, and have long been afraid of living in a world that does not represent my values. Since bringing a child into the world would be the ultimate act of coming out of the closet, I had to confess that my reluctance to have a family had to do with internalized h.o.m.ophobia; I didnat want to make our family a target for hate groups. I didnat want our child to have to spend his or her life defending him or herself and his or her mothers.

The revelation of these concerns prompted Dana and me to attend a aMaybe Babya group for lesbians in Tel Aviv. Over the course of several months, we heard from speakers such as psychologists specializing in kids of gay parents, biological and nonbiological moms, and a feminist lawyer. These speakers addressed issues including what it means to be two moms, our legal rights as same-s.e.x parents, and the process of navigating the Israeli health care system.