Who’s Your Daddy?

No one asks us about the Peanut’s donor except when wondering what colour his hair or eyes will end up being, or if he’ll be tall or left-handed etc.  And even then, we don’t get asked as much as we volunteer the information.  But now and again we get asked, and it’s almost always “What colour are the Dad’s eyes?” or “How tall is the father?”

The first time it happened was during lunch with a good friend of ours.  She’s a lesbian, a feminist,  knows all about the process we took – and when she asked something like “what colour are the Dad’s eyes?” I had the hardest time figuring out what she was asking.  I don’t know why I had to work it through — it was obvious what she was asking.  After a pause, I replied “the donor’s eyes are hazel”, and she called him the donor after that.

Visiting S’s family, I heard the same type of question, but with “father” instead of “dad”.  It still felt wrong to me to hear the donor referrred to as the father.  If I was male, I don’t think anyone would have asked me about the donor by calling him the  ”dad” or the “father”, at least not without adding “biological” in front of it.

And I guess that’s the crux of it.  Right now, at least, I feel like I’m the Peanut’s father – more in the sense of being the parent who isn’t his mother.  I’m not sure why “mother” doesn’t resonate with me.   Maybe it’s because he already has an excellent mother and I’m stuck on this binary mother/father societal programming thing.  Maybe it’s because when I played house as a child I always wanted to be the father (seriously, who wouldn’t?).  Maybe because, by being at work while S is on leave, I’m playing the “father” if this were a game of house.  I don’t know.

So we’ll see how I feel about the title “mother” when I begin my parental leave and S goes to work.  Will I feel more like a mother then, when I’m alone with the Peanut all day?

The nice thing, though, is how natural it is for everyone to accept me as his mother and therefore as his full parent.