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Amory Rowe Salem | Longreads | January 9, 2024 | 2,909 words (10 minutes)

Chances are Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sick long before the rest of us discovered her illness. When we did, the news hit us like a boxer’s mitt to the heart. Not just because her tiny frame seemed so completely incapable of carrying the weight of a serious diagnosis, but also because of the unfairness of it all. The injustice.

Ruth was small but feisty, often taking on adversaries of twice her heft. She was our David in an arena of Goliaths. Though she wasn’t spoiling for fights, she was skilled at ending them, rarely failing to punctuate her victories with a small show of rhetorical force. Ruth was unrelenting, vigilant, and inquisitive. We loved her for all of those traits. And because she laid blue eggs.

Only two of our chickens—Ruth and her flockmate Michelle Obama—laid blue eggs. The rest of our feathered badass lady gang—Simone Biles, Megan Rapinoe, Scarlett Johansson, Kamala Harris, and Aliphine Tuliamuk—all laid brown eggs, which were lovely and appreciated. But finding a blue egg in the nesting box surfaced memories of unearthing that rare piece of blue sea glass on the windswept winter beaches of my childhood. It felt like a treasure.

So when the tide of blue eggs ebbed, a sure sign of chicken illness, my children and I loaded Ruth and Michelle into the family van and drove them 45 minutes out of the city to the Tufts Hospital for Small Animals in Grafton, Massachusetts, the only place within 50 miles that will provide care to a chicken.

We were not veteran chicken keepers. We’d stumbled upon the delight of raising chickens entirely by accident when we traded a 50 lb. bag of flour and a jar of sourdough starter for a bucket of day-old chicks. It was the sort of barter people were making in the early days of the pandemic, when the unthinkable and the absurd upstaged the logical and the predictable.

We had no prior experience with poultry; we didn’t have a coop or a brooder lamp or the faintest idea of how to raise a palmful of down into an egg-laying hen. We needed to learn. Not just for the sake of the birds, but for our own sakes: we craved a learning curve. The world was going two-dimensional on us—all screens and games and apps—but those tiny feathered bodies, each one housing a beating heart the size of an infant’s thumbnail, demanded our attention. We became dedicated keepers of those hearts; and the flock, in turn, shocked our family’s flatlining system, giving us back the gift of emotional amplitude that had been compressed by our escalating attention to the glossy artifice of the staged and surface-level.

The coop was its own classroom. Our early chicken lessons were learned on the fly as we tried to stay a half-step ahead of our growing flock, keeping them fed, clean, warm, and safe. In that way, my children were initiated in parenting: balancing birthday parties and playdates with regular feedings and weekly “house cleanings,” summoning an uncommon vigilance over their brood.

Over time, we extracted bespoke wisdom from our gallinaceous charges. My son, whose outsized capacity for empathy was at odds with his narrow 10 years of experience, divined that a chicken was a fair barometer for human character. “If you can’t figure out how to hold a chicken right, you’re not a very kind person,” he’d concluded. He wasn’t wrong. You hold a chicken much the same way you hold an infant, with your forearm tucked under the length of its body so it feels supported. If you’re in the business of vetting people, there are worse metrics. At least one would-be boyfriend of his oldest half-sister has been summarily dismissed based on failing the chicken-cradling exam.

My daughter, an introvert with a preternatural instinct for hibernation, admired the chickens’ unerring sense of home. For weeks after we moved their coop from the muddy corner of the yard to slightly higher ground, the birds would return to the site of their original coop at sundown, standing with their prehistoric feet sunk in the muck as if their house was just about to materialize around them. What adolescent girl hasn’t stood, Dorothy-like in the Oz of the schoolyard, silently intoning: “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home”?

For my part, I watched with recognition as our rasorial creatures bent their heads to the ground and brought the full force of their attention to a single square inch of grass. They were excellent excavators of the granular, masters of the microscopic, capable of quarrying the tiniest insects and grubs. But they paid a price for their ground-level monomania, sometimes missing a juicy worm just a few feet away—or a predator overhead—because they simply weren’t seeing the bigger picture. As a mother, a teacher, a citizen, I also knew the opportunity cost of becoming mired in the details. It behooves all of us, every now and then, to turn our faces to the sun lest we lose sight of the magnitude of the stage on which we are playing.

Our first year of chicken-keeping had been full of tiny wonders and short on heartache. But as we rounded the bend into year two, with a flock of a dozen, the poultry actuarial tables were turning and the parade of covetable “firsts”—first flight feathers, first dust bath, first eggs—changed tenor. We had our first sick chicken.

In Grafton, the fourth-year veterinary student gave us a diagnosis for Ruth within 15 minutes of our arrival.

“It’s the first thing we check in backyard chickens,” she told me over the phone from deep inside the hospital, while the kids and I waited in the parking lot. 

Ruth was suffering from lead poisoning. Michelle, too—and likely the entire flock. But Ruth was presenting as the most ill because she was our smallest chicken and our best forager. I learned then that what is true for so many of us is also true for chickens: we are often drawn to what is not good for us. Even to what can kill us. The vet explained that lead tastes good to chickens: it tastes sweet. So if a hen finds an industrial-era cache buried just below the surface of our urban backyard, she’ll return to it again and again, sampling until the lead has permeated every muscle, organ, bone, and feather.

“Ruth’s lead levels were too high to read,” the vet explained. “She’s probably been sick for a long time. Chickens are very good at hiding their illness.”

My daughter, sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat of our idling van, cocked an ear in my direction. As a middle school-age girl she, too, knew something about hiding weaknesses for fear of having them exploited. Recently I had found her crumpled deep in the covers of her bed. Despite the fact that it was spring in New England, the sun still shockingly high in the sky for the late afternoon hour, she had burrowed into the darkest corner of her room the way a hen seeks the dim, still seclusion of the nesting box to endure her daily egg-laying effort.

Her story had come out in messy exhaled fragments hyphenated by tears. A classmate rebuked by a teacher for an outfit deemed inappropriate for school. The predictable adolescent backlash. A girl-led campaign to wear crop tops and short shorts to school in rebellion. My daughter’s discomfort and refusal. Her choice not to sign the offender’s dress code petition. A parade of protesting peers observed from a careful and conservatively clothed distance. The fallout. She had been exiled from the flock, hen-pecked in hallways and corridors of the internet—her pandemic cohort, recently reunited, now fumbling with the fizzy power of sudden togetherness.

Lead lodged deep in a body is easier to extract than loneliness. Many times over the next two weeks, as my daughter and I corralled our flock twice daily to inject each chicken with a chelating agent, I wished for as straightforward a solution as a hypodermic needle sunk into soft muscle to cure my adolescent girl’s unhappiness. A pinch of pain every 12 hours seemed a small price to pay to restore balance.

Every parent of double-digit-age children craves a return to the obvious fixes of infancy and toddlerhood when tears could be quelled with a diaper change, a snack, or a nap. But the grand bargain of parenting holds that as our children grow wondrously more complicated, so do their problems. Those simple early solutions get shelved with the board books and Duplos, as obsolete as last year’s ice skates. So I was surprised—as the late spring days lengthened and we extracted the last of the medication from its glass vials and injected it into Ruth and her flockmates—to see that both the birds and my daughter were improving.

Maybe it was just time. Maybe some other tween-age scandal moved onto the front page of her classmates’ attention. But I like to think that the caretaking of other hearts was its own slow-working salve for her adolescent injuries. My daughter needed something—affection, attention, patience—so she gave those things away. And in return, she got better.

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A month after our first visit to Tufts, we boomeranged back to Grafton to have the flock’s lead levels rechecked. Ruth’s numbers were much improved—as were the rest of the birds’—but the vet palpated a mass in Aliphine’s coelom and suggested she take a closer look. Aliphine, a tall Lavender Orpington with a gentle manner and eyes more elephantine than reptilian, was named after distance-running phenom Aliphine Tuliamuk, winner of the 2020 US Olympic Marathon Trials. Befitting her namesake, our Aliphine went on to endure an odyssey of diagnostics in the subsequent weeks: blood draws, X-rays, ultrasounds, and a fine-needle biopsy. The news was neither encouraging nor conclusive.

By the time the last of the tests was done, Aliphine was spending most of her days perched quietly in a corner of the run, an introvert in a flock of socialites. Unlike her fellow chickens, who were always busy scratching in the dirt, squabbling over the prime nesting box, and preening in the afternoon sun, she kept to herself. Short of invasive surgery, which the vet wasn’t sure she’d survive, our best option was to keep her comfortable and to try to catch the falling knife of divining precisely when she stopped behaving like a happy chicken and started behaving like an animal in pain.

That day came in late summer, when Aliphine failed to defend herself from a flurry of unwarranted pecks delivered by a cranky flockmate. Her will—and maybe her capacity for self-preservation—had waned. I called the vet.

It was an awful errand. Every prior trip to Grafton had been undertaken with the hope of a diagnosis or at least some new measure of understanding. But there was no avoiding the fact that this was a different journey altogether. My children, then 10 and 12, were not unaccustomed to loss. In roughly a decade they had lost two grandparents and 18 months of their childhoods, ideas made abstract by distance and time. Aliphine was theirs, though: a feathered beating heart for which they felt deeply responsible.

No parent wishes pain upon their child; but every parent wants the next generation to be able to bear up under its inevitable burden. I wanted so much for my children to avoid being among those who spent their lives carving routes around difficult emotional obstacles. While I wasn’t a trained educator capable of making cetaceans and early American history and square roots come alive for them, I was still a person equipped to teach my children about the living and, when necessary, the dying.

Before we left the house I sat the children down and laid out the path: we would take Aliphine to Grafton; the veterinary staff would bring us into a private room; we’d have a chance to say goodbye; and then the doctor would put her to sleep. There were several exits off the road ahead, I explained to the kids. They didn’t have to go to Grafton at all. Or they could keep Aliphine company on the drive to Grafton and not go into the hospital. Or they could say their goodbyes in the room itself. It was important to me that they made and owned their choices in this process, that they looked at this moment directly and felt it for what it was: a loss.

“We want to go,” my daughter said.

“But we’ll decide when we get there if we go into the hospital,” my son added.

While my daughter walked out to the coop to retrieve Aliphine, my son packed an ear of corn, a wedge of watermelon, and a fistful of blueberries—all of the chicken’s favorite foods—and carried them to the van. Aliphine sat quietly in my daughter’s lap for the drive, each one seemingly happy to feel the warmth of the other. As we made our way west, my daughter’s eyes welled with tears, emptied, filled again. Every few minutes Aliphine vocalized a chicken syllable or two, a sweet low sound that made each of us turn our gaze to her, and then to one another. It was hard not to hear those notes as questions.

When we exited the Mass Pike and began to slalom through the small town rotaries and farmland adjacent to Grafton, I felt that familiar tug, a nearly irrepressible urge to yank the wheel and change the direction of our distressed quartet. It felt so heavy, the weight of what we were carrying. The temptation to cast it off, even if only for a day or a week, to distract ourselves with the fleeting giddiness that comes from shirking responsibility, was overwhelming. But there was no outrunning this particular outcome and the inevitable impact it was going to have on each of us. We’d all done so much looking away: from grown men being choked to death on city streets, from riots and mass shootings, from atrocities at home and across oceans. The way forward had to be with open eyes and with hearts exposed to injury. We’d seen the price we paid when we failed to bear witness.

Once at the hospital, I pulled the van into a parking spot near the entrance. Aliphine perked up and preened a feather or two, seemingly animated, as infants are, by the transition from automotive movement to stillness. Without explicitly asking my children what their choice was—to enter the hospital or not—I simply opened the sliding door, an invitation. Each of my children stepped out onto the curb, my daughter still holding Aliphine and my son carrying her bag of treats.

As we began our slow procession up the walkway, my son reached for my hand. Thinking he was seeking a small physical reassurance, I turned my open palm toward him, but instead of slipping his hand into mine, he dropped into my palm a tiny ivory-colored tooth, still wet and rimmed with blood. Before I could ask the question, he bared his teeth at me: less smile, more grimace. There, in the front, on the bottom, I could see the newly vacated gap. I noted the loss, slipped the tooth into the pocket of my overalls, and walked on with my boy, my girl, and our chicken.

I said many things to my children in the low light of the room where Aliphine was euthanized. And my children said many things to her as they fed her corn and blueberries and watermelon for the last time. The vet spoke to all of us, told us we were making the right choice, that it was time. She spoke to Aliphine, too, as she pushed the Pentobarbital into the catheter she’d inserted into her leg bone. I watched closely, a hand on her feathered breast, as Aliphine’s body bucked once, twice, and then went limp. Of all of the words exhaled in that room, though, the ones that stick with me form what I think of now as our family’s most intimate catechism.

“We were lucky to love her,” I said to my children.

“And she was lucky to be loved,” my daughter replied.

“That’s not nothing,” my son added.

All true. Maybe the most important truths we can know.

The hospital was good at grief. There was no price or paperwork for the dead. Within minutes of Aliphine’s death we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road that would take us back to the city. As the emptiness of the van settled around us, the still and chirpless space yawning wide, I watched out of the corner of my eye as my son’s face twitched and then contorted. At first I thought he might be fighting back tears. But then I realized he was poking his tongue into the space where his tooth used to be, gently exploring the vacancy where something familiar had been and was no longer.

I saw him wince. I imagine it hurt. I imagine, too, that in that tiny moment he learned he could bear the pain. Then the pain ebbed. And he learned the shape of pain, its tidal behavior. And that understanding made him someone wiser and more durable. And I knew, over time, and his countless recoveries from those small waves of hurt, he would feel something new break the surface.

Amory Rowe Salem reads, writes, coaches, parents, and tends to her flock in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can read her work at amoryrowesalem.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

After a few minutes she told us he had passed his hearing screen. That’s when I heard the sound of crying. Not the infant kind. Across the dark room, Seth’s breathing was ragged. A few sobs escaped before he could dry his eyes and compose himself back into stoicism.

Sure, we were all tired and running on raw emotion. But his tears were my first, my only, clue that Seth had worried our child might inherit the hearing loss that had demarcated so much of his life.

Every other year, Seth visits his doctor for routine hearing tests. They measure the difference between his hearing and that of a typical ear. They also record whether that hearing has diminished since his last visit. So far both right and left are holding steady at the same levels as when we met. Still, I lie awake sometimes, imagining how we would conduct our lives if Seth’s hearing went away entirely. Would we set up some sort of marital Slack channel? Could witty text messages sustain our closeness? They already get us through the workday. When we hug, if I get too close to his ear, it squeals with feedback, like someone adjusting a microphone as their band comes onstage for its set. The sound used to make me retreat. But after all these years I know to tilt my head the other way, and just keep on holding tight.

Translation holds a particular and peculiar power. It is how we come to understand the world outside our own; that is, the world that exists outside of our own language. The Latin root word for translation comes from latus, the past participle of ferre or “to carry”; in Teju Cole’s beautiful metaphor, the translator is a ferry operator, carrying words from one shore to the other. To take this metaphor further: if the translator is the ferry operator, language is a current.

Soon after I gave birth, my writer friends arrived at my house with piles of classic English picture books. Determined to have my children rooted in their own culture, I set out to find children’s books with characters that not only looked like them, but stories that would help them navigate the complex world they will inherit. Just by the act of searching, I came to read wonderful writers from Japan, South Korea, and China with a completely different sensibility from Western children’s literature.

Reading children’s literature again as an adult, the difference between Western and East Asian stories was startling: Western children’s books are often centered on the individual’s journey, while stories by Chinese, Japanese and Korean authors emphasize respecting other people’s feelings, patience, and acceptance. As a child, I found many of these old Chinese stories moralistic and preachy. But to my surprise, I also discovered many wonderful children’s books which conveyed these same values without being didactic, and helped me as a mother understand my own feelings and moderate my response towards my child’s behavior.

When Krista Lee Hanson’s son Lucas was born, he couldn’t breathe on his own. At 2 months old, his doctors inserted a permanent tracheostomy tube. He has needed breathing support ever since, including the constant suctioning of saliva and mucus to clear his airway. Hanson weaves her reflections on the challenges of raising Lucas with an account of an experience at the symphony with him, and the whispers and raised eyebrows that came with it. Hanson’s essay on parenting and caring for a disabled child, and being seen, is at once tender and powerful.

The Seattle Symphony conductor enters from stage right, bows to polite applause, then lifts his arms to begin. I try to wait for the loudest crescendos to do the suctioning, but sometimes Lucas can’t wait. I feel smug disdain scratching at the back of my neck from the people behind us. I can’t hear them, but seated at our angle, I see them out of the corner of my eye. They point at us and whisper. I summon all my powers of meditation, of focus, to try to ignore them. I remind myself: We have the right to be here. The symphony donated these tickets to an organization for disabled people, so they knew who they were inviting.

Whether you’re a mother juggling work with raising a child, a person wondering what “community” or “sustainability” really look like, or someone questioning what it means to be happy, Teer beautifully weaves insights that might resonate with you.

Hearing this, I thought of the forest ecosystems under threat as climate-exacerbated droughts and heat waves make for longer, more intense wildfire seasons. I thought of the boy who grew up to be a man who took and took from the tree he loved. And I thought of our society’s focus on the isolated nuclear family, how mothers in particular are pushed to the brink of collapse by extractive structures, how difficult it is for mothers—especially single parents, women of color, and immigrants—to flourish.

But embedded in every such joy is perpetual pain. It’s no longer the raw, relentless kind that made it hard to stand up 10 years ago, Hensel says. But it’s still sharp enough to blindside you and bring you to your knees.

Hensel’s dear friend Francine Wheeler, who also lost her 6-year-old, Ben, at Sandy Hook, agrees. They share an aversion to the word “closure” and bristle at the very idea of a “10th anniversary” — and the implied expectations around where they should be in the arc of their grief.

In 2018, Tahlequah, a female orca from the Southern Resident community of the Pacific Northwest, gave birth, but her baby died shortly after. Tahlequah swam with the dead calf for 17 days before letting it go. During this “tour of grief,” the other female orcas in her pod took turns carrying the calf in an incredibly moving display of maternal support. I’d forgotten about this heartbreaking story, which Grace Loh Prasad mentions in the opening of her recent essay at The Offing.

In this reflective and braided piece, Prasad explores the bonds of family, building a life as a mother, and the need for community, among other musings. What’s it like to live thousands of miles away from your loved ones, and what happens when that family is gone? What’s the alternative, and what sort of network can take its place? I’m grateful that my parents are healthy and still live in my childhood home, less than an hour away, and that I’m able to see them often. For Prasad and her parents and brother, an ocean came between them. She writes about planting roots in the U.S., but no matter where she built a life, that family unit would remain intact, even if they weren’t all physically together.

Although my brother and my parents weren’t present in my daily life, they provided an invisible scaffolding that I didn’t realize I depended on until they were gone. All the things that proved I had a home in California—house, job, passport, driver’s license, ability to vote—were the result of choices I had made, rather than natural ties to a culture and community. It was a one-sided equation: I could claim it, but it did not claim me. The only true unit of belonging I had that was intrinsic and undeniable and could not be undone, that understood my complicated identity without needing an explanation, was my family.

I constantly think about the sacrifices my husband, who is British, had made when we got married at San Francisco City Hall a decade ago. Like Prasad, he adopted California as his home, choosing a future and day-to-day life without his family and friends in the U.K. But I also know that he will never fully feel like he belongs here.

My daughter was born in 2018. She’s an only child, and her cousins, who are much older and live four hours away, are hardly playmates. When she was a baby, we lived in a small town in California’s wine country; it lacked ethnic diversity, but we liked the slower pace and rural lifestyle. But we hadn’t made any real friends: people to text spontaneously for playdates, or to hang out and get a beer with. In fact, since we got married, we haven’t really made any new good friends as a couple. That has felt even more isolating as new parents.

We’ve spoken over the years about why that is: Are we too introverted? Are we not able to find people who share our interests? The answer to both is no. But it’s hard to make new friends as adults, and as individuals we miss our existing friends — across the U.S., the U.K., and other parts of the world — and would love to strengthen those relationships, especially friends who now also have kids. Geography, of course, makes this challenging, and these last several years, it’s been impossible.

Even before coming upon Prasad’s essay, I’d been thinking about the word “community.” We’ve moved seven times in 10 years, and have lived in four different homes with our 4-year-old daughter. We’ve now settled in Berkeley, have gotten acquainted with parents of her preschool friends, and live in a lively and diverse neighborhood that’s walkable and accessible to so much — community gardens, parks and playgrounds, free family-friendly events. Yet we still feel as socially adrift as before. But why? What are we really looking for?

Prasad reflects on raising a child without a family network, but also writes about a type of tight-knit community, beyond blood ties, that I’ve longed for.

I envy my friends who have healthy parents that live nearby, who have the ability to slip out for a spontaneous date night or to take off on a weeklong, kid-free vacation. How I wish we had occasional help that we didn’t have to pay for—something my friends take for granted—although it was never about the money. How I wish I had a sibling or cousin with children in the same city so that we could send our kids to the same school, share dinners and holidays, coordinate vacation plans, and so on. How I wish my son could grow up with a clan, a group of mothers and children traveling together through life like a pod of orcas, always looking out for each other, secure in their belonging to something bigger than a family of three.

Prasad also writes about the maternal qualities of spiders, recounting the first time she saw “Maman,” a giant spider steel sculpture by artist Louise Bourgeois, in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills. I saw this sculpture when I visited Japan; I remember it to be massive and menacing, not at all the strong and nurturing motherly figure that Prasad describes. I’d simply never considered a spider in this way.

Although monstrously large, as if made for a vintage Japanese disaster movie, getting close to Maman brings an unexpected feeling of intimacy. You can stand underneath her. You can be enclosed and sheltered by her, the same way your mother once enveloped and surrounded you. The spider mother appears delicate with her fragile skinny legs, but she is literally made of steel.

Maman is stronger than she looks. She is your first and forever home, and she weaves the world into existence.

Prasad describes her own mother as “a weaver of community, responsible for maintaining the social fabric that cushioned our lives,” and questions whether she has been able to do and build the same for her son. This hits me in the gut: I know that as parents, we’ve only just begun to build our family’s life, but I wonder whether we’ve found the right corner of the world to weave that web.

The older he gets, the more I worry that I have not done enough to knit a tapestry that will enfold and protect him, that will open doors and give him room to stretch while keeping him out of harm’s way, that will imprint a pattern so deep and recognizable that he can always find his way home. This is what I am most afraid of: that I will be exposed as the mother who cannot weave, who cannot on her own produce the work of many hands, the unseen web that no one notices but everyone needs. Try as I might, there is no material stronger than kinship.

The older he gets, the more I worry that I have not done enough to knit a tapestry that will enfold and protect him, that will open doors and give him room to stretch while keeping him out of harm’s way, that will imprint a pattern so deep and recognizable that he can always find his way home. This is what I am most afraid of: that I will be exposed as the mother who cannot weave, who cannot on her own produce the work of many hands, the unseen web that no one notices but everyone needs. Try as I might, there is no material stronger than kinship.

As Modi paced the aisle of a pharmacy in San Francisco, where she worked as Airbnb’s director of hospitality, the decision didn’t feel so simple. She was fighting off a fever, her daughter was screaming, and she couldn’t kick the feeling that she had somehow failed. The cans on the shelf didn’t look like the kinds of products that parents like Modi — millennial, coastal, Whole Foods shoppers — were used to buying. The formula was packaged in primary colors and had a list of multisyllabic ingredients on the back: cholecalciferol, cyanocobalamin. And some of them used corn syrup? Forget about it. Feeding her child a can full of powdered ingredients she would never buy for herself felt like a betrayal. In the harsh fluorescent glare of a late-night drugstore aisle, Modi came face-to-face with the emotion that dominates much of 21st-century parenting: the feeling that no matter how much you are doing for your baby, it is never enough. Modi says she was so embarrassed by the can of Similac she bought that she hid it in the back of her cabinet.

By Melissa Hart

In the 1980s, kids and their queer parents in the U.S. marched together in pride parades in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. I, on the other hand, hid in my bedroom in my abusive father’s house and longed for my mother. She had lost custody of me and my siblings after she left Dad and came out as a lesbian, and a homophobic judge declared her unfit to parent.

The first nine years of my life, Mom cooked, cleaned, and hosted Tupperware parties and children’s birthday parties — all the duties expected of a suburban housewife. My brother was born with Down syndrome, and she devoted herself to his well-being, enrolling him in physical therapy when he was still an infant and then in a therapeutic preschool. She led my Brownie troop. She drove the gymnastics carpool and baked cupcakes for school fundraisers. She took Spanish classes with me at the local library.

And then, she was gone. 

She’d fallen in love with my brother’s school bus driver, who saw her black eye one morning and invited us all to move in with her. Mom accepted, but my father showed up two weeks later with a police escort and a court order to reclaim us. It’s impossible to estimate how many parents found themselves torn from their kids after coming out in that tumultuous era. The DSM had, in 1973, removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, only to recategorize it under “Sexual Orientation Disturbance.” Some newly out parents retreated back into the closet, terrified to lose what limited child visitation they’d been granted. Others, like those featured in the 2014 documentary Mom’s Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers’ Custody Movement, banded together to fight the system. 

My mom fell into the former category. The judge allowed her to see us every other weekend; she’d pick us up on our father’s porch in her VW bus at 5 p.m. on Friday, and we’d spend a glorious 48 hours together before she dropped us off again on Sunday at 5 p.m. sharp, lest Dad get upset and call his lawyer.

Growing up, I felt alone. I believed my siblings and I were the only kids in the world with a queer parent, a beloved mother unjustly persecuted for daring to fall in love with a woman. At 31, I finally discovered the demographic that called themselves “queerspawn” — activist peers who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s and started the support group COLAGE while joining their parents in public protests against homophobia. Some of them were writing memoirs or compiling essay anthologies to reflect their childhood experiences. Meema Spadola made a documentary. Alison Bechdel wrote a graphic memoir. All of them inspired me to begin sharing my story. 

As the U.S. has seen victories for queer folks and families over the years, our family’s saga began to feel anachronistic. The next generation of queerspawn, and their parents, have been able to enjoy, even thrive, in a more tolerant time than my mother’s generation. But then Donald Trump became president. The same year, the Proud Boys surfaced with their far-right, extremist agenda, and what happened in 1979 to my mother and her children — to us — felt like a cautionary tale worth noting: a reminder of the injustice that had occurred and could occur again if we don’t remain vigilant. 

These days, I worry that if librarians continue to find themselves under attack for shelving books with queer storylines, if teachers lose their jobs for including LGBTQIA+ content in their classrooms, and parents face government inquiry if they seek gender-affirming care for their kids, then families may find themselves right back where we were four decades ago, mired in fear and oppression. Fortunately, the digital age enables queerspawn to easily connect and mobilize. There’s also a wealth of resources available online as well — memoirs, novels, essays, and interviews with older queerspawn. In this spirit, I’ve curated this reading list — for children of queer parents of any age — so that, hopefully, they’ll never have to feel alone.   

‘There Were No Models’: Growing Up in the 70s with An Out Gay Dad (Hope Reese, The Atlantic, June 2013)

I love Hope Reese’s interview with queerspawn Alysia Abbott about her memoir Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. San Francisco, where she grew up with her single gay dad, was always a special place for my mother and me; we rambled around North Beach and the Castro a couple of times a year. This is a fun read about the city in the ’70s and early ’80s, and I recognize parts of my mother’s journey in Alysia’s story about her father living out and proud among a community of queer friends and activists. Three years after my mom lost custody of me and my siblings, she met the love of her life, who introduced her to a group of buoyant, child-free 20- and 30-something lesbians. They had raucous pool parties and picnics. Sometimes, my mother took my brother, sister, and me to these gatherings, and I remember her friends treating us with kind indifference. I wonder how my mom felt in those moments. Did they see her as a “breeder,” a heterosexual woman tasked by her husband and society to bring children into the world? Was she embarrassed by our presence? 

But the gay parents of my father’s generation came into their parenthood very differently than gay parents today. Then, most children of gay parents were the children of straight unions, where one of the parents was closeted, or came out after the child was born and divorced, or stayed closeted. They were exploring their sexuality in the exciting, heady time before AIDS. Growing up believing all your impulses were sick, could get you arrested, and were sources of shame and secrecy and hiding—now suddenly you could be gay. And most of the people in that time and place did not have children. It was very unusual for a father to be fully responsible for a child like my father was. There were no models. There was very little in terms of how to make this work, or a community to compare notes with.

Did I Make My Mother Gay? (Meredith Fenton, The ArQuives, 2018) 

This piece explores how Meredith Fenton — the former program director at COLAGE — and her mother came out to each other as lesbians. I adore the witty anecdotes about how her mother sent her rainbow-themed care packages at camp and brought her best friend from high school — also a lesbian — to watch Fenton’s Harry Potter-inspired drag musical. And oh, how I relate to so many parts of this essay. When I finally discovered COLAGE and the queerspawn, I worried they’d regard me as a fraud. After all, my mother came out when I was 9, and I didn’t get to live with her again until I was 19. But the COLAGE community welcomed me and helped me find my footing.

When I first started becoming a leader among the queerspawn, as we affectionately called ourselves, I was worried I was kind of a fraud. I mean, my mom had only been out for a matter of years, and most COLAGErs had been dealing with divorces or donor insemination or custody battles or a lack of protections for decades. But what I learned is that every single person who has or had an LGBTQ parent, even though the details of our individual stories may be different, there is something essential we share.

I learned so much from my queerspawn peers—about resiliency and hope that was honed from surviving bullying and surviving HIV and homophobia in custody battles. I learned that there are as many different kinds of families as there are snowflakes, and that each of them is worthy of respect for the ways they take care of each other, overcome intolerance, create new traditions and define what it means to be a family.

What Could Gay Marriage Mean for the Kids? (Gabriela Herman, The New York Times, June 2015)

I sort of hate that I can totally relate to Gabriela Herman’s first sentence: “My mom is gay. But it took me a long time to say those words out loud.”

My mom came out in 1979. My classmates at my suburban schools throughout the ’80s hurled the words “fag” and “lesbo” at each other as insults, and I never, ever told anyone — not even my best friend — that my mother had a girlfriend. Later, in graduate school, I got to study with authors and activists Jacqueline Woodson and Sarah Schulman, who were instrumental in helping me see my story and confront the homophobia that had devastated my mother’s life — and my own — so that I could move on and celebrate our family’s dynamic while writing about the injustice that defined it.

The quotes that accompany some of Herman’s photos in this essay make me smile: They capture newly out parents’ awkward attempts to explain their sexuality to Generation X and millennial kids, raised in decades informed by homophobia and transphobia. Words like “partner” and “roommate” to describe same-sex lovers, or the idea of “coming out” about a parent … this all resonates with my experience in the ’80s and early ’90s.

As we talked, we recalled having to juggle silence and isolation. Needing to defend our families on the playground, at church and during holiday gatherings. Some aspect of each story resonated with my experience and helped chip away at my own sense of solitude.

We — the children of gay and lesbian parents — are not hypotheticals. While my experience was difficult, I am hopeful that won’t be the case for the next generation. This inequality will fade, and my future children will wonder what the fuss was about.

I Wanted to Like that NYT Photo Essay About Growing Up with Gay Parents (Christa Olson, The New York Times, June 2015)

This piece by Christa Olson is such a smart and thoughtful response to Gabriela Herman’s photo essay. Written from the perspective of a scholar in visual rhetoric — a lesbian raising a toddler with her wife — the commentary calls out the photographer’s decision to depict her portrait subjects as solitary, contemplative, even mournful. It’s not the wisest choice, Olson points out, when you’re trying to convince the Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage. 

Still, two weeks after Herman’s photo essay appeared in print, and three days after Olson’s rebuttal, the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. On that first day, June 26, 2015, my mother and I happened to be in San Francisco together, and we went to City Hall to watch the weddings. We stood in the rotunda and hugged each other and wept at the absolute joy on the faces around us. 

Taken one-by-one, the photographs capture strong, thoughtful young adults in moments of solitude. Cumulatively, though, the series takes on an inescapable sense of sorrow and isolation, and not just because of captions that frequently emphasize the subjects’ struggles with their parents’ identities. As a [gay] parent viewing the photo essay, I felt a rush of defensiveness and worry. As a scholar of visual rhetoric, I wanted to understand why. What was it about these photographs that so set me on edge?

After a hard look, it finally came clear to me: This photo essay explores the difficulty of having a gay parent in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s. As a reflection on what gay marriage means for today’s generation of kids, though, it is (I hope) rather out of date.

Surprise, My Gay Dad Is Sexist! (Elizabeth Collins, Narratively, January 2016)

I love this piece by Elizabeth Collins because it captures so many of the gender stereotypes and conflicts that my mother experienced, having grown up in the ’50s. Like Collins’ father, my mom spent her early years in a small town. Her father, a strict World War II veteran and a Mason, insisted she become a Job’s Daughter and attend cotillion. She married, as expected of her, at age 18, and didn’t come out as a lesbian until her early 30s. As a mother, she could be so much fun, but she could also be very prim and proper. A lady didn’t say “fart,” much less commit the act. A lady wore foundation and lipstick in public, even when she and I were heading out for a 50-mile bike ride. After my sister and I grew up and married, Mom cooked four-course meals for our husbands and sat at the dinner table lavishing her attention on the menfolk while we sat silent and ignored. It was both frustrating and hilarious, and Collins captures that dichotomy of emotion skillfully, especially when describing how her father would demand that she make him a cocktail. 

My father tried to do what his family and society expected of him. He played football, got married and had children. And while the irony is not lost on me that he was also putting unrealistic gender expectations on me, I had sympathy for him.

What Happened When My Dad Came Out as Transgender (Catriona Innes, Cosmopolitan, May 2017)

Though I knew no transgender people when I was growing up, I know a friend from high school who transitioned in their 20s, and my teenager has several trans friends at school. In this essay, I appreciate Catriona Innes’ candor when writing about her complicated emotions, particularly when she recalls looking at old family photos before her dad transitioned. This piece is full of insight on what adults who transition later in life may have sacrificed to protect spouses and children — and themselves. Ultimately, it’s a happy piece that can serve as a roadmap for people with a parent who’s transitioned. 

It’s because I want to break the rhetoric that surrounds being transgender. There’s a message out there that this is something that destroys families and I’ve always wanted to send out the positive side of the story. Especially since I’ve found that, unless you let it, there’s no need for a transition to affect a relationship at all – a lesson that most certainly emerged following my mum’s death.

Two Moms, One Heartbeat: Why CSU Rams Trey and Toby McBride Put Family First (Sean Keeler, The Denver Post, November 2019)

This profile of football players Trey and Toby McBride, who grew up with two moms, makes me smile every time I read it. It reminds me of all the wonderful weekends my siblings and I spent with our mom and her girlfriend in their sprawling house and yard in Oxnard, California. Safe inside their home, we could be exactly who we were with abandon. We built treehouses and ziplines and cooked huge meals and danced and belted along with the soundtracks from A Chorus Line and Victor/Victoria. We put on costumes from Mom’s dress-up box and went to IHOP late at night and made all the diners laugh. Always, there were cats and chickens and rabbits, and at least one dog trotting around dressed in toddler-sized clothing. I dressed my rabbit in doll clothes and pushed it down the sidewalk in a baby carriage. For two weekends a month, I was so happy, and so I love how Sean Keeler captures the joyful chaos that informs the McBride household in this piece.

Two moms, 12 adult dogs, a litter of new puppies and a pair of cats. Kate heads up the family business of breeding and raising Golden Retrievers. Jen works for the Morgan County Sheriff’s office.

Over the years, the McBride menagerie included ducks, geese, horses, emus and at least three llamas “to keep the coyotes away,” Kate explains. A loved one bought them twin goats once, and the duo used to have the run of the house.

So, yeah, traditional. If your idea of traditional is streaming on Animal Planet GO.

“That’s my normal,” said Trey, who went into last weekend third on the Rams in receptions (30) and receiving yards (381). “My parents are kind of like, ‘We’re just going to do our thing. We’re not going to worry about what anyone else thinks of us.’ I’m just very grateful that I grew up with them, that they took care of us and they did everything they could for us. It’s just normal for us.”

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Melissa Hart is a journalist, author, and public speaker from Eugene, Oregon. She teaches for the MFA program in creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, Smithsonian, Brevity, and numerous other publications. She’s the author, most recently, of Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Esteem in Tweens and Teens, and of the forthcoming middle-grade novel Daisy Woodworm Changes the World with a queerspawn character and another who has Down syndrome.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy editor: Carolyn Wells