Brian Michael Weaver and his son enjoy some time together.

“Go home tonight and ask Mom or Dad to help you find your homework,” I said to a second grader in my class. He belongs to one of those “conventional” nuclear families with a mother, a father, and a sister — all biological. His parents are high school sweethearts who still hold hands and make each other laugh.

Two children in my primary class differ from this mold. One is an adopted child. Family conflicts prevent the second, Brianna, from living with her biological parents. She, instead, lives with her aunt — and her aunt’s female partner.

Brianna had overheard me when I told her classmate to “ask Mom or Dad to help you find your homework.” It wasn’t the first time I had made this faulty hetero-presumption, the “mom and dad” slip. An administrator had once pointed out a similar mistake. That time, in a letter to my pupils’ parents, I suggested that children raid “dad’s closet” for white-collar shirts to use as scientific smocks the following week.

How many other children with same-sex parents or caregivers have teachers who take for granted the momanddad childhood experience? Did it register on Brianna’s radar? How would the women raising Brianna react?

I should know better. After all, I am the adoptive, gay father of a kindergarten son at the same school.

And yet it took a Mother’s Day art project to jar me into recognizing my own insensitivity to adoptive parents and children within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. I was teaching students how to make “coupon books” for their moms, when, a quarter of the way through, I remembered Brianna.

For whom would she be making Mother’s Day gifts? Would it be her mom, her aunt, her aunt’s partner — or all three? My mind raced through the rest of my students’ family situations, and I was relieved that she was the only student for whom I needed to adjust the lesson.

I knew that one of my other students was making a coupon book for her adoptive mother. Still, I called her adoptive parents to warn that Mother’s Day may “strike nerves” among adopted children. At that moment I realized that my own son also would be making a Mother’s Day gift in his kindergarten class for the first time. I had neglected to prepare my own motherless child for this holiday.

Not to worry.

My son’s teachers, brilliant as they are, had asked their students to make their Mother’s Day gift for a “VIW” (“Very Important Woman”). At first my child claimed to remember his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since birth. He recalled, or so he said, a mother who “made cake before breakfast” for him. Logan strongly notices and feels the turmoil of not having traditional parents. Consequently, it is no surprise when he invents and imagines facts about his birth mother, perhaps to give his family life some semblance of normalcy.

But that day in class, when he had to make a Mother’s Day gift, he settled on making his gift for a VIW whom he sees on a regular basis — his “Baba” — my mom.

No room for “my two dads”

I had taken pains in some cases to “train” my school community to understand that the fact my son has a gay dad does not mean he has “two dads.”

I’m reminded of how teachers used to treat Jewish and Christian holidays as a bit of a balancing act: “Can I use Christmas stickers on anything in class during December? If I do, should I use equal amounts of Hanukkah stickers? What about Kwanzaa?”  

In 10 years as an educator and three years as a gay dad, I’ve seen political correctness toward LGBT families grow from a quiet seed to a more paramount issue monitored and negotiated in our classrooms and communities. As my own son’s teachers taught me, there’s finally room for parents, students, and teachers to negotiate the definition and parameters of family.

One thing, however, is not negotiable between my son and me, when it comes to our family structure: There will never be “two dads,” even if I were to find a male partner.

After all, I am the dad — the one now making cake before breakfast!

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

OutProud
The National Coalition for Gay, Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Youth advocates and provides queer teens with resources and support.
URL: http://www.outproud.org

Gay Parent magazine
The oldest free nationally-distributed publication dedicated to LGBT parenting
URL: http://www.gayparentmag.com/

ProudParenting.com
An online portal for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender parents and their families worldwide
URL: http://www.proudparenting.com/

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