This post is goodbye, for now. My blog has served its purpose and it is a good thing to know when it’s time to stop. Mothering While Queer helped me look back and make peace with those early years of sorting out my identity as a lesbian mother. Happy-Ever-After I’m happy to report that the…
“It was an accident,” says no pregnant lesbian ever. The lesbian mother does not coo into her baby’s ear, “Honey, you were mama’s little surprise.” While getting pregnant may not have much to do with mothering, the act IS a necessary pre-requisite for someone in the having-a-baby equation. In my previous heterosexual world, it was…
There’s this thing I think about when I have an intense desire to run away. Not sure where I picked it up, but it works for me. If you’re going to leave something—a relationship, a family, a job, a place, a whole way of life—you’ll know you’re ready to exit when you have an idea…
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” -David Foster Wallace It is the summer of 1985 and gossip in my small community buzzes like the fat, lazy bumblebees sipping nectar from the flowers blooming all over Mississippi. Suddenly, it seems as if my whole life is on display.…
I didn’t know during the chaotic part of my life from 1984 through 1986, that I was not safe to embrace who I was becoming. I stubbornly wanted to forge my own way. Break some of the rules I’d been following. When I look back on those years, it’s the pain of not belonging that…
It’s hard to describe the explosion when all of my competing selves crashed into each other in the summer of 1984. “I was 24 years old and playing racquetball with my identity.” Each serve of the ball had me trying out another part of myself. The new parts collided with a loud thwack against the…
After reading the title of my blog, mothering while queer, my oldest daughter asked, “Mom, why queer? Isn’t that, like, a mean, derogatory thing to call someone?” This is my first child, born in 1983, a decade before my other two children, during a much different part of my mothering process. She relates differently to the…
I was born in 1959, in a small-town hospital in northeast Mississippi. We lived out in the country, so I went to a rural school called New Hope for twelve years—the same school my mother had attended back in the 1930s and 40s.