Monday, December 18, 2006

The new normal

Like I mentioned, I was at a party a couple of nights ago. I was seated with my son next to an older lesbian on one side, and the director of the insemination program at the local gay health clinic on my other side. One after another, the lesbian families started arriving at the party. The babies were all different ages, and they just kept coming like it was Provincetown’s Family week.

“This is freaking me out,” my friend on the left said, “In my day, if you were a gay mother, you did it the old fashioned way. You got married to a man, had a family, and then ran off with a woman.”

“It freaks me out too,” my friend on the right said. This is the one who runs the insemination program for lesbians.

“You? You enable this!” I protested.

Which got me to thinking, in my neighborhood, almost all of the families are gay. If you have kids in my neck of the woods, you probably are in a same sex marriage. The children have come to us from all sorts of different ways. Foreign adoptions, adoptions out of DSS, artificial inseminations, and maybe even some the old fashioned way (see above). My little guy is going to think same sex couples are the norm. He will think it’s the kids of straight parents who are weird!

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