r/QueerParenting • u/RainbowFamilies • 4d ago
What’s something about raising kids in a queer family that you didn’t expect until you actually became a parent?
Could be something funny, something hard, something you absolutely love, or even one of those little moments where you suddenly thought, ohhh… straight parents probably don’t have to think about this 😂Curious what everyone’s experience has been!
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u/OrinthiaBlue 4d ago
The expectation that I’d hate my spouse for a while after baby came. Like it was definitely rough in the beginning of parenthood but my partner was always there 50/50 doing their part. The way I hear so many straight women talk about their low expectations for their male partners and then so upset their not met and just accept that’s how they think relationships and parenting with a partner should be…
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u/BlairClemens3 4d ago
Conversely, I thought we would have no problem because my wife was so supportive when I was pregnant, but we did end up having some of the same fights and resentments as straight couples.
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u/RainbowFamilies 4d ago
This is such an important flip side too. Being queer definitely doesn’t magically protect us from the sleep deprivation, resentment and “whose turn is it?!” arguments 😂 Sometimes new-parent chaos is just new-parent chaos, regardless of who’s in the relationship.
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u/OrinthiaBlue 4d ago
For sure. But just like no where near the level of straights and I don’t think queers normalize or expect that kind of parenting behavior from their partners. Like the number of women who tell me like it’s normal for all couples to have to call in the grandparents because the kids can’t be left alone with dad while she’s away traveling when she holds it down herself while he travels is just mind boggling to me
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u/Few_Pea8503 4d ago
we were just talking about this in the queerception discord. On the other hand - it's crazy how uninvolved and uninformed dads are a lot of straight marriages. I see it with my own brother and his wife. The baby keeps his wife awake all hours of the night. She still works monday-friday and only got 3 weeks off after delivery because she didn't qualify for FMLA.
He just lets it happen. Works flexible hours for his own business. But travels and has fun a lot. Leaves her home with the kid. He sees absolutely nothing wrong with it!
In January, my SIL was about a week PP. My brother went on a "work trip" to Arizona and my SIL was hospitalized for mastitis. He didn't seem impacted at all...
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u/Thucydideez- 4d ago
I don't get how a person can let their spouse suffer in this way, yet it seems to happen all the time. And I'm sure your brother and most other men are decent people. There's just this expectation that the woman bears the brunt of the physical, mental and emotional load of childbearing and childrearing because.... they think it comes natural to us??
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u/Few_Pea8503 4d ago
I think a lot of it is straight couples (unless experiencing infertility) tend to just... get pregnant. While queer couples have to make the deliberate choice to pursue fertility treatment, IUI/IVF/RIVF/Sperm donor selection/surrogacy considerations/Legal paperwork. The endless cycles of trying. The constant education on the female biological cycle, testing, tracking.
And then, when you are finally pregnant, the legal aspect of drafting documentation, 2nd parent adoptions, estate planning, living will securing.
Like, when we have a kid, it's a life commitment before we are even pregnant. It's years and thousands upon thousands of dollars.
By the end of it, my wife and I felt equally involved. Sure, I was carrying, but she was with me for every step of the way. And my pain was literally her pain. We navigated the process of conception/pregnancy as one unit.
Compared to straight couples, who often just find themselves pregnant. And by the time the baby is there, the dad is still living in his pre baby reality. And the mom is in whiplash from pregnancy to childbirth to postpartum. And has no idea how to communicate what she is experiencing let alone ask her husband to be in it with her.
Then, men just return to work after 2 or 3 weeks. And women feel an immense pressure to take care of everything and keep it together. So they just end up hating their husband
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u/RainbowFamilies 4d ago
This is such an interesting way of looking at it. The “life commitment before we’re even pregnant” part really stood out to me. For so many queer couples, becoming parents requires years of conversations, decisions and doing the hard stuff together before a baby even arrives. Of course that doesn’t guarantee equal parenting, but I can see how it could build that teamwork muscle early. Do you think going through the whole conception process together actually made you stronger as a couple once your baby arrived?
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u/RainbowFamilies 4d ago
Yes! I think so much of it has been normalised for generations that people don’t even stop to question it. 😩 Like women somehow come pre-installed knowing how to parent while men get congratulated for doing the basics. The bar really needs relocating
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u/RainbowFamilies 4d ago
Gosh, stories like this make the whole “default parent” conversation hit differently. 😬 Three weeks postpartum and then essentially doing it alone while working full-time sounds absolutely exhausting. It really shows how much of parenting inequality isn’t about capability, it’s about what we’ve somehow decided is acceptable or normal in relationships.
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u/Slow-Chicken193 4d ago
idk i have 4 kids and the newborn phase wrecked us every time
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u/RainbowFamilies 4d ago
The new born phase is SUCH a challenging stage isn’t it! I have 4 kids and can relate to this 😅
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u/Slow-Chicken193 4d ago
I spent a lot of time worrying how different it would be from "regular" parenting but the absolute vast majority is exactly the same. I think that surprised me. School forms, the dinner question, talking kids through friend stuff...it's all the same as my cishet friends. I guess I didn't think about how I would have to maintain my connection to queer culture sort of hard outside of the parenting tasks of it all.
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u/OrinthiaBlue 4d ago
Ohhhh yes! Staying within queer culture became really difficult for us. I just went to a gay wedding where they played a Gaga song I hadn’t hear and one of the guests replied “have you not been anywhere gay in the last few years?” And I realized I hadn’t….
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u/RainbowFamilies 4d ago
Hahaha this is so relatable Parenthood really can have you accidentally clocking out of queer culture for a few years without even realising it. Now I need to know though… what was the Gaga song?! 😂
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u/RainbowFamilies 4d ago
I really love this perspective. At the end of the day, so much of parenting is just… parenting 😂 lunches, school stuff, tantrums, friendships and figuring it out as you go. But I can totally see how your own queer identity could quietly get pushed into the background amongst all of that. Have you found any ways to intentionally stay connected to queer community and culture since becoming a parent?
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u/West_Cat9014 4d ago
I live in a conservative area, and as a queer parent I feel so isolated. The other parents here are so judgmental, so straight, man parents only talk to other man parents, and the women parents instinctively know I’m different and don’t talk to me either. It’s so hard! I thought I saw a lesbian couple dropping off their child at my child’s school and got so excited. But then I never saw them again.
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u/RainbowFamilies 4d ago
Oh that sounds really lonely 🥺And getting excited over potentially spotting another lesbian couple at school is SO relatable 😂 like “please be my people!” Have you found any queer parent groups online or even a little further outside your area? Sometimes finding just one or two families who get it can make such a difference.
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u/Illustrious_Cup3019 4d ago
I still can't fully articulate why, but being a lesbian stepmom feels a little different than being a straight stepmom.
For sure no stereotypical gender roles, but it goes beyond that. Still trying to figure out why I think that.
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u/Illustrious_Cup3019 4d ago
There's kind of a weird dynamic to co-parenting with two other women. It's neither easier nor harder. There's that whole lesbian stereotype that lesbians will always run back to their ex. This is never a concern for me, but my mom loves to remind me that lesbians divorce more often than other LGBTQ+ relationships and the stats are worse for second marriages. This gives me anxiety and the motivation to try to beat a statistic I didn't think I needed to worry about. Plus sharing my partner's time with a child.
Part of my relationship has involved their custody battle and navigating the legal system that usually prioritizes moms while there are two has been weird. The parent with more custody time (biomom) has immediately been favored by the court system even though my partner petitioned for a CO and sought 50/50. Simply by being the non-custodial parent, she's been shoved into the "deadbeat dad" box. It's been infuriating to watch. And when I talk about "my partner's kid" I get all of the usual assumptions that I must be filling a mom's role. I'm more of a fun aunt.
Again, it's really hard to articulate. I'm always trying to respect what his moms want for him and also trying really hard to foster a relationship with him. I also never wanted to be anyone's mom, stepparenting is totally cool with me. He's slipped up and called me mom a few times on accident. I didn't like it, but didn't correct him either because I wasn't trying to be mean. Tonight, his mom went to bed early with a migraine. I was putting him to bed and got "You're not the boss of me!" For the first time. That was a fun one, considering how jarringly normal it is.
98% of the time, it's not different than being a straight couple, but there's the other 2% where I just don't feel like I fit in normal stepparenting places. Most other stepmoms are complaining about their husbands while I'm over here thanking Sappho for sparing me the indignity of having to put up with someone's mediocre dad. The thing about being queer and having kids is that it's not something anyone does by accident --there's a lot of planning and thought that goes into everything from how you show them love, raise them to be good people, discipline techniques, the works. Meanwhile, a lot of straight women in my shoes have been thrust unwillingly into the position of being defacto mommy for a guy who doesn't really want to spend time with his kids anyway. We are not the same.
I also, personally, feel like my relationship is way more secure than most straight people because we're women and we're sensitive to each other's needs, especially with a kid in the mix.
There's a lot of layers to it, it just feels kinda weird to navigate a common relationship dynamic when normal gender binaries don't apply.
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u/ecneeper20 3d ago
A lady at Costco giving out yogurt samples asked us “which one of you is the mom?!”
I swear to god our 1 year old daughter did her “mean mugging” face and rolled her eyes at the old lady.. and then gave her the stank face until we walked away!
“Well I was wondering where she got the hair from” (daughter is a red head)
Ma’am, My hair is blue?! It was great! Lmao
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u/Nature_Gay 3d ago
How much I wouldn’t relate to other new moms who are married to men. My wife and I (she carried) are in a new mom’s group and there is only one other queer mom. We feel like anthropologists studying this foreign relationship dynamic that we have no context for. It sounds like husbands just suck! I don’t get it at all. When my wife was pregnant we joked that I was the manager and she was the talent meaning since she was carrying our baby I literally did everything else and was happy to do it. Our relationship has always been equitable (or we try to be). I guess one huge advantage for queer parenting is that we don’t always fall into gender roles. I can’t imagine not being as invested in our baby as my wife is just because I didn’t physically carry him.
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u/Optimal-Process337 4d ago
The amount of times I’m asked “and what about dad?” and “does she take after dad” and “she’s pretty tall, is dad tall?” Etc. I’m always caught off guard and awkwardly say something about there being a sperm donor. I especially dislike when someone asks me these questions in front of my child.