... our six year old son asked co-parent last night during bathtime.
When she recounted this to me after he was asleep, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that one of the kids he'd spent yesterday with had mentioned the L word. (Most of the children who attended the birthday picnic have two mothers - two 16 year old boys, 13 and nine year old girls ... and Olle.)
No, it turned out that a girl in his class had said to another girl the other day "I'm not a lesbian." [I don't have any more context to go with that story, but intend to investigate!] This must have been percolating in Olle's mind all weekend until it popped as this question.
Co-parent said she told him that a lesbian is a woman who loves another woman (ie he is not one), that it's all about love, that men can love men, women can love women ... then the word "gay" came up and he asked about that. She told him that we are gay but that he won't know what he is until he's much older. [I had wondered when he would ask about that as it's a word we tend to use a lot when watching TV - as in "Do you think he's gay?" etc)
He ended up saying that he loves his best friend Joe and would like to live with him when he grows up but not get married and that he (Olle) would not mind "being the girl".
Fascinating. I should say here that neither co-parent nor I is ultra butch or femme, we both work, we both do the housework etc so he's not getting any blatant 'one's the girl' ideas from us. [There may well be more subtle variations on gender roles at work in our relationship, but that's beside this point...] Instead I surmise that he's absorbing 'one's the girl' from the basic (heterosexual) culture that he lives within, including the specific culture of the playground, where apparently modern-day seven year olds say to their classmates "I'm not a lesbian". {I think I was at least fourteen before I encountered that word, not that that was a good thing.]
As I say, I don't know what "I'm not a lesbian" was about, but somehow I'm not surprised that the word 'lesbian' first came into his view attached to a negative. There, in a nutshell, is what now confronts us - the inevitability of Olle's realisation that some people, some powerful institutions, don't think that the relationship which is at the core of his home life is a good thing. In fact, a lot of people, a lot of the culture, think it is a yucky, repulsive, repugnant, bad thing. How do we let him in on that without letting it overwhelm him?
Of the two 16 year old boys who were at the picnic yesterday, one seems totally comfortable with being his own (bohemian) person in the world. He's the one with the gay dad as well as the two mums (and his gay dad is in a longterm relationship, but the other man isn't seen as the co-dad.) The other seems less at ease and each of his mothers told me (separately) that they think he feels the social strain of having lesbian mothers. There may be reasons for that to be found in his life story and his parents' attitudes, but I don't know them closely enough to say.
At the risk of being banal, parenthood is such an enormous challenge. It's on some level very strange yet also encouraging for me to realise that my precious child has no real idea that he has lesbian mothers. All those years I spent repeating that word [lesbian feminist; gay and lesbian liberation; lesbian politics, lesbian and gay rights, lesbian and gay solidarity, blah blah blah] and it turns out to have no meaning to him! In the 70s and 80s I turned my nose up at those who said "I don't like labels", but thank goodness today labels have virtually no place in my life. [Probably only because so many of us embraced and argued so passionately over those labels at that time. Being label-less is my reward for all that activism, I'd like to think.]
For me the big challenge with all this is wanting to help Olle be the sort of person who can both fit in yet be apart from the crowd and feel at ease in both situations. I do see in him a strong wish to be like the others (not that there's anything wrong with that). Yet the father of one of his classmates, who is an actor and a very nice man, told me recently that he thinks Olle is very "comfortable in his own skin". That observation made me very happy.
I suppose all will be revealed in time...
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