On (Gay) Marriage

There are some forty thousand children in California, according to the red brief, that live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and full status. The voice of those children is important in this case, don’t you think? -- Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy

This post has nothing to do with Lili.

This post has everything to do with Lili.

My daughter's family is composed of two mothers, two mothers who fought and clawed and hurt and struggled to come together, first as tentative friends, then as disenfranchised loves, and finally as fortunate, grateful, and unhesitating parents. One was two, and two was then miraculously three, joining the ranks of so many, many queer families that came before us, families who paved meaningful social indents through the era of Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate (incidentally, these books rank, respectively, as the 11th and 2nd most commonly challenged books in the United States). Beautiful, complicated families who have fumbled to find their place in their chosen communities and in this society, families who have thrived and contributed and fought and dismantled and loved, all without the institutional security afforded to their neighbors, their friends, and their family members. I am exceedingly humbled by these families, by these mamas and papas who stalwartly (re)defined what it means to be a family unit, and I feel their protective instinct within me as I make my way through this world with my own partner and daughter, knowing that we are ultimately unprotected. Vulnerable. Exposed.

I understand the urge to fight against societal confines, to throw the marriage baby out with the gay bathwater. Marriage isn't for everyone. And I get that. As a gay woman who was married to a man for two years, believe me--I really, really get that. But these words--marriage, wife, husband, spouse--these words have weight. And when families who seek it are denied access to that language, we begin to drift. Doubts become fissures become late night arguments become blame and mistrust and resentment and faded futures. The inability to accurately communicate who we are to each other in generally accepted terms (regardless of whether or not you agree with the existence of those terms), is both isolating and demoralizing. My partner and I have been together for over a decade. We have weathered sickness, health, death, birth, love, hate, separate continents and Franklin Avenue apartments. She is it. We are it. And in a world of workplaylaundrypugsbillsfeversbedtimestories…I don’t need or want to think about those few, rare particulars of which I am fundamentally certain. My family. My love. Yet I am forced to think about them, again and again--every time I file taxes as a single head of household, and during yearly will and testament updates when I ensure that should something happen to me, my partner is to retain ownership of our house and custody of our daughter. Even on happy occasions such as Mama Day, when our family celebrates the day that Mama legally adopted Lili, we are reminded. Of the extra work. The additional hoops. The impermanence of our family in the eyes of a larger society. So we hold each other up. We tighten our bonds. We wait to exhale. Lili picks out my wedding dress, and asks if it's our turn to get married yet. Mama hesitates.

I tell her it will be soon.