Children’s Fiction About or Including Lesbian or Gay Families

• Mommy, Mama & Me (board book)
• Daddy, Papa & Me (board book)
• Uncle Bobby’s Wedding
• Heather Has Two Mommies
• The Family Book (and many, many other Todd Parr titles!)
• Emma and Meesha My Boy
• The Different Dragon

Children’s Non-Fiction about Lesbian or Gay Families

• And Baby Makes 4
• And Tango Makes Three (storybook with true story)

“Young Adult” (Teen) Fiction with Lesbian Parents

• Between Mom and Jo
• Donorboy
• From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun
• Jack
• Luv Ya Bunches (tween)
• Violet in Bloom (tween)

True Stories by People with Lesbian or Gay Parents (Teen/Adult)

• Let’s Get This Straight: The Ultimate Handbook for Youth with LGBTQ Parents
• What About the Children?
• How It Feels to Have a Gay or Lesbian Parent
• Families Like Mine
• Love Makes a Family (photo portraits of gay and lesbian families)
• Women in Love: Portraits of Lesbian Mothers and Their Families (photo book)

Books About and For Lesbian Parents

• Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All
• She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Non-Biological Lesbian) Motherhood
• And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families
• Waiting for the Call: From Preacher’s Daughter to Lesbian Mom
• Buying Dad: One Woman’s Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor

Books About Pregnant Lesbians

• My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy (humorous memoir)
• The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians

More Interesting LGBTQ Bibliographies

• 2011 ALA Rainbow Project List (4th Annual)
• Mombian’s Comments on the 2011 ALA Rainbow Project List
• I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the hell do I read?
• Lambda Literary – YA Book Reviews
• Queer YA – Book Reviews of fiction for LGBTQ teens
• For Youth Services or School Librarians – Serving LGBTQ Teens: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians
• 2010 ALA Rainbow List
• 2009 ALA Rainbow List
• 2008 ALA Rainbow List

Mamas Lesbianas a partir de los 42 años: about a couple and their adopted daughter

Adopcion nacional:  about two able-bodied adult white women in Spain who have one daughter with a disability adopted internationally and who are trying to adopt a second child with a handicap through national (Spain) adoption

Una Familia Especial: family with two adolescents in Mexico

Círculo de Familias Diversas:  Blog for LGBT families in Mexico City

Dos lesbianas, nueve meses y una nueva vida: who are pregnant

Dos mujeres, un niño y lo que venga: Spain with small child

El blog de Luli: Luli (who is tiny and beautiful) and her mothers blog

En busca de lo naranja y verde: Two moms and a little boy in Barcelona

La suma de nosotras: Expecting in Spain

Mami x opcion: Lesbian mom by choice of a 3 month old

Mamás lesbianas y bebé:  In madrid with a newborn

Matriz: Moms with a 4 year old

Milu, Nunu y un hada: Moms with a young child

Welcome to all the new blogs!!!

***Polly, can you help me get these into the blogrolls??? I don’t know how and I don’t want to bother Liza as she just had her beautiful baby girl Josephine Rose!!!!***

Many of you will have read Peggy Orenstein’s cover piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “Your Gamete, Myself.” For those who didn’t, or who just now linked to it and balked when you saw that it spans nine pages online, here’s a synopsis: Orenstein, an astute writer on matters feminist and maternal, looks at the medical and social evolution of egg donor conception. She interviews several families (mostly the mothers therein) who conceived their kids using donor eggs. She talks to doctors at fertility clinics, and weaves in anecdotal notes from her own journey to motherhood. Throughout, she explores the ethical and emotional ramifications (to parent and child) of donor egg conception. She muses about how, in ways both like and unlike sperm donor conception and adoption, donor egg conception blurs the “bright lines” that ordinary, “biogenetic” parenthood draws around parents’ “genetic, biological and social relationships to their children.” Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I have an answer, though you’ll have to wade through my own thicket of paragraphs to find out.

Those queer and queer-cognizant readers that do mosey through the entirety of Orenstein’s piece might find themselves nodding and murmuring in assent to this or that point, all the while waiting patiently for the moment when Orenstein would of course consider how queer family-making sheds a bright light from a fresh angle on the myriad emotional issues she’s examining. After all, we couldn’t be bigger boosters of alternative conception, both via egg- and sperm-donation. “Ah,” these readers might have said to themselves as they watched paragraph after paragraph slip by, “the sly dog! Orenstein’s holding her big guns ‘til the last section of the article!”

And many of these readers will have, like me, scratched their heads when they arrived at the end of the piece having never seen the word “lesbian” or “gay” in print. Well I have just one thing to say to that: lesbianlesbianlesbian!

Okay, maybe I have more than one thing to say.
[Read the rest of this post over at LesbianDad... ]

The one she addresses is a big one: if one partner is biologically connected to the child, and the other isn’t, and more, if that connection is evident physically, then this physical link will be the subject of comment, to one degree or another. It will be unavoidable that someone, others, maybe, or even folks inside the family, will remark that the kid’s this that or the other thing (eyes, ears, nose, throat) “looks just like” the bio-mom’s, or even deeper, a member of the bio-mom’s family, way back.

Given that the normative family unit stems biologically from the two parents at the head of it (and do note: “normative,” not “normal”), the ritual of looking for and finding bodily traces of both parents is an ancient part of baby-bonding. It’s a way, even, to draw the baby into the family community. But for families like ours, these are moments that cut in two ways at the same time. Bonding for the bio-mom, potentially isolating for the NON bio-mom.

You bio-mom sisters out there: when such moments arise, I hope Trista’s advice rushes into your head. I am grateful to the heavens and earth that my partner is cut off the same bolt, in this regard. That is, she and Trista are reading off the same page of the bio-mom hymnal. It helps, perhaps, that my partner has an adopted sister? Of a different race than her? Interestingly, throughout their youth everyone thought they were blood sisters, anyway. The shared energy, the mannerisms, all ran so deep. They have spent their lifetimes forging family love across that blood divide, noticing and brushing off the deeply ingrained impulse in folks to understand family on those terms first and most authentically. Funny, my first sweetie and I were also often taken for sisters. I’m white, she’s Chicana. We’re separated in height by a good ten inches. But still, the love bond had to be explained by folks, in a time when Lesbian Love was far less visible than it is today.

How do you all negotiate this stuff in your families? Go read Trista’s piece and then chat it up there, or here. It strikes at a tender core, and reminds us how we can make our families loving and strong, amidst the external forces that might (innocuously, perhaps) trickle some discord and weakness into them. When both parents aren’t bio, the drama surely plays differently. Is it harder? Easier? Trickier? You tell us!

To the unknowing outsider, I suppose it could seem like S and I have the perfect two uteri set up. She has one, I have one.  For those of you that have been following our journey, you know that we’re trying with my uterus. My uterus which must contend with my PCOS riddled body. My tubes which, while clear, are certainly nowhere near optimum.  My cycle, even when on fertility drugs is often long and drawn out. In contrast, S has perfect, 28 day cycles, and always has. There’s no indication that her uterus/tubes are anything less then perfect. Yet we continue to use me as the baby maker.

Why? Well, the answer….isn’t that simple. For one, I really really really want to carry a baby, and have really wanted to for quite some time. For whatever reason, while her desire to parent is strong, the desire to carry a child has never been evident for her. I think there are a couple of factors that weigh in on her decision, the first being that when you’re the kid of an obstetric nurse and lactation specialist, you may see some things from an early age that might just…scar you for life. I know that S was in attendance at some of her mom’s childbirth education classes from an early age. Perhaps that was enough to have her shy away from wanting to actually “do that.” Who knows?

Perhaps its that possibly less than optimum genetic material courses through her body.  I’ve never, in the 2 years I’ve blogged, talked about this, but I think the time has come. S’s brother, B, has Williams Syndrome.  People with Williams Syndrome are missing some genetic material on the 7^th chromosome, and this causes (among other things) distinct facial characteristics (similar to Downs Syndrome, but different,) and numerous mental and physical abnormalities. I think that growing up with B as a brother brought distinct challenges to S and her parents.  S has lived through how hard and difficult it can be to care for a challenged family member, and she saw the strain that it put on her parents.

To further complicate things, S has a few other mentally challenged family members that are close to her in lineage.  I think that, while these are not necessarily inherited characteristic, S is petrified of her genes being the cause of a less than “perfect” child.  If that fate is to befall us, at least it would be random, rather than a pre-disposed type of thing.

Perhaps it’s just that she REALLY does not want to carry. At all. Not with her eggs, my eggs, or donor eggs, she is adamant that her uterus will not be used as a baby growing location.

And I understand this. I really really do. But I’ve had to do a LOT of work to get to that understanding place, and honestly, sometimes I still have moments where I don’t understand. Where I wonder why she won’t do “this” for us. For me. For our family.  This is something I’ll likely have to contend with until that beautiful day when we bring home a child of our own. Which, no matter how it happens, there is comfort in knowing that someday, it will happen.  Two uteri or not.

Like Trista and Kristin, NSG and I wanted to adopt. And like Kristin, I really wanted to get pregnant. Seems straightforward enough: 2 uteruses, 2 adults who definitely want more than one child, multiple ways to bring kids into your family. Only, not so simple.

NSG was completely uninterested in having kids biologically. One uterus down. She was also uninterested in having any children who weren’t adopted. And, while I didn’t care about having a bio connection to me kid, I just couldn’t imagine how to prepare to become a parent without someone in the family growing the first one.

Now is the point where, if you’ve been through a home study, you realize you’ve just peed yourself laughing. The homestudy was, in retrospect, a MUCH more involved way to prepare to become a parent – if not from the perspective of the body, at least from the perspective of the mind.

Now, before those of you who have been pregnant or who have supported someone through pregnancy get mad at me, I’m not trying to suggest that you weren’t intensely thoughtful about every aspect of pregnancy and parenting. But a homestudy, when it’s done the way it meant to be done, is set up so that you have no choice but to be mindful. We had conversations ad nauseam about every situation that could possibly come up with an expectant mom making an adoption plan: no pre-natal care, depression, didn’t know the father, was married to the father, was 14, was 44, was a high school dropout, had a PhD, was from any imaginable cultural or ethnic background, and on and on. If I had been pregnant I imagine we wouldn’t have thought through nearly so many things.

Before we were actually ready to have kids, we had those behind-the-hand conversations so many about-to-be-TTC lesbian couples have about our male friends and our friend’s husbands.  He’s a great guy, we would whisper to each other. And we’ve been friends with his wife for so long I bet she’d go for it.

But when it came down to it, NSG really didn’t want us to get pregnant. She made me a deal: take a serious look at adoption. If you’re happy, we’ll do it first, and if you still want to get pregnant, I’ll support you. So I did, and I was happy. And it really didn’t take long. Now here we are on the other end of it, and, well, we have Roo. How could I help but be overjoyed at this little being who I get to call my son?

NSG meant it when she made her bargain, but I know she thought after we adopted one that I wouldn’t care about getting pregnant after that. But I have to say: I’m more clear than ever that having a biological connection to my child isn’t important to me, but I’m still not clear if I’m willing to give up the experience of being pregnant. 

Charlotte’s posts this week make it abundantly clear that having more options does not equal an easier process. And, despite all the jokes about lesbians and processing, I think lesbian couples by definition have to be pretty thoughtful about how to have a baby (though if anyone has figured out a way to get fingers to produce sperm, please leave your email address in the comments: I think there’s a wealthy future in store for you).

Where am I going with all this? Nowhere directly, that’s for sure. But I wanted to add my two cents (two dollars, maybe – this is a long post) to the discussion about negotiating adding to a family when the necessary equipment is not all built-in.

Anyone else want to run with this one?