Mother’s Day presents an issue for gay parents
Holidays honouring moms (or dads) can create awkward situations
One year for Father’s Day, Mike Cabotaje bought a picture frame for his daughter to give his partner. It read “Greatest Dad Ever,” which was odd, he says, “because it suggests I’m second-best at most.”
Cameron Smith, a partner at a large New York law firm, thinks of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as “Hallmark card holidays” that don’t merit a celebration.
Smith’s husband, Jeff Edwards — a former dancer with the New York City Ballet and now a faculty member at the Juilliard School — says he didn’t do much for his parents when he was young, but for a more practical reason: His working-class family didn’t have the leisure time to “mark the day in any dramatic way.”
But additional ideological, logistical and cultural issues surrounding these holidays come into play for these men now that they’re samesex parents.
Says Smith, “For a straight couple there’s a lot of the ‘give them the day off ’ thing, and we don’t do that obviously, because how would we do that for both of us?”
In this way, their experience echoes that of many single parents who, Heather Buen, the woman behind Dallas Single Mom, says, “don’t have the luxury of having someone else make plans, decide on breakfast in bed or brunch on the patio.”
And the other holiday can take on a melancholy tinge when a child doesn’t have a mother or father to fete.
“Father’s Day gets harder as the kids get older,” says Danielle Ramo-Larios, an assistant professor at University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and mother of three with her wife, Sandy. “We get a lot more questions now that they hear about it from school, commercials and store displays.”
Cabotaje can relate: “There’s a little anxiety for me on Mother’s Day, since schools make a big deal of it, and since most of our daughter’s friends have moms.”
The holidays can “create a perception of something being lacking,” agrees Smith.
Of course, every family is different. Ted MacGovern, a stay-at-home dad, and his husband, Dan Shih, put the focus on their daughters’ grandmothers and aunts, giving them the projects made at school.
“The girls don’t think much about it,” MacGovern says. “They don’t have mothers, so no big deal.”
In some ways though, the experiences of same-sex parents are distinct from those of single parents.
Cabotaje says his daughter video chats with her birth mother on Mother’s Day. Also, gay parents often do have two people, just not one who isn’t implicated in the holiday.
Like Buen, Ramo-Larios and her wife “want Mother’s Day to be about the spoiling of the parent,” but with two mothers and three young kids, “to try to have a holiday that focuses on both parents individually has become absurd.”
Moreover, “same-sex parents don’t have any models on how to make that day work,” she says.
“Do we focus on half a day for each parent? Just give up on the idea of being treated and have a family celebration? Do we get each other gifts? Do we both separately organize the kids to make things for the other mother? Or do we just say that’s too much work on a day that’s supposed to be relaxing for us?”
Ramo-Larios considered splitting the holidays. She would get Mother’s Day, and her wife, Mama, would get Father’s Day.
“That would fix the problem of focusing on one parent, but it brings up a whole other set of issues that may be confusing for the kids and invalidating for us,” she says.
“Our four-year-old would have the responsibility of telling his teacher, ‘I’m actually going to make this Father’s Day card for my Mama.’ And she isn’t their father. Neither of us is their father.”
Others agree that attempts to include gay couples in the off-holiday, though well-meaning, often don’t help.
“We had an experience when someone wished us ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ and that felt very off and wrong, almost offensive,” Smith says. MacGovern agrees. “I find it weird,” he says. “I may provide a motherly role, but I’m still a father.”