A Father’s Day with a difference

When Daniel Meadows was in daycare, at the end of each day the other kids would joyfully run up to their parent yelling “Mommy!” Daniel joined in. Only thing is, Daniel is being raised by his two fathers, Dad and Papai, otherwise known as Scott Meadows and Nelson Amaral. He simply picked up social cues from the youngsters around him.

“That was his choice,” said Amaral, who was the stay-athome parent when Daniel was first adopted as a newborn, coming straight home from the hospital where Amaral and Meadows witnessed his birth. “That’s the situation, right? It’s not a gender role. It’s more about how a child relates to the parent.”

Father’s Day, Amaral said, has never been a challenge for their family. Mother’s Day, which was on May 12 this year, tends to be a slightly different matter. In a society where the nuclear family is a female mother married to a male father — although “traditional” is quickly changing with the high rates of divorce and commonlaw couples, blended families led by step-parents or extended family, and the growing acceptance of gays, lesbians and people of different gender identities — these special days can be difficult to navigate.

In Daniel’s case, he always came up with the solution.

His birth mother died two years ago in Calgary. He used to make her cards on Mother’s Day, calling her by her first name, Belinda.

Since her death, his Mother’s Day crafts from school went first to his aunt, then to his grandmother in Oklahoma. But this year, Daniel asked his Grade 3 teacher at Windsor Park School to save the dragon he’d made until the Friday before June 16, so he could give it to Papai Nelson (father in Portuguese). That way, the mug he made with Scott’s face on it could be solely for Dad.

“It’s hard to decide which father to do,” said Daniel, at home for a pasta lunch with his parents before scooting back to the playground. “I decide each year.”

Usually, the two fathers share the gift: a golden clay picture of the family, or one of Amaral dressed in the colours of the Brazilian soccer team.

“We never interfere. We never try to influence,” said Amaral, a computing science professor at the University of Alberta. But he did suggest he usually takes up the mothering role: he cooks, and tends to be the parent Daniel turns to for snacks or Band-Aids when he’s hurt himself.

Meadows does the laundry, the kitchen cleaning, plants the garden (Amaral does the weeding) and takes Daniel camping. The two married on Daniel’s first birthday, having met in 1992 at a graduate students’ association meeting in a lesbian bar when both attended the University of Texas.

“There’s no automatic pattern handed down,” Meadows said. Both he and Amaral had to pick up the “typical” male hobby of hockey, since Daniel is an avid hockey and soccer fan and player.

“I couldn’t even have told you what the rules of hockey were,” said Meadows, who owns and runs Ashton’s Liquor store and is a third-level sommelier, or expert wine taster. “I never watched a full game on TV before.”

Even so, having a female mother figure for their son remains important to the couple. That’s come in the form of Scott’s mother in Oklahoma.

But Daniel’s family goes well beyond mother-figure, father and father, Meadows said.

“The social circle of the people you get to know and spend time with become the other parents of kids. It’s not really two dads,” Meadows said.

“It doesn’t make much difference if they’re same-sex or not. There are people on your school council, there are people on the sports teams.”

Most, since Daniel came along, are heterosexual couples as opposed to the gay and lesbian couples Meadows remains friends with, but spends less time with now that his priority is his son. Both men say their identities are more tied to family now.

Sunday will be Bro Day for Levi Clarke, 22, and Logan Fairgrieve-Park, 15, who have creatively redefined Father’s Day to suit their family.

Neither has a father, although Levi knows of the man who donated sperm so his birth mother, Bev Clarke, could have him. Levi wishes for no more of a bond with the man.

He’s had two parents since he was three years old, when Bev met Michelle FairgrievePark and they decided to have a second child together. That child was brother Logan.

“I don’t feel I needed a father or wanted a father,” said Logan, in Grade 10 at Strathcona High School. “It’s kind of overrated. It’s not like you need a male figure in your household the entire time, as long as you can talk to guys and see them and you can be friends with them. That’s enough.”

Plus, he always had Levi and kids he grew up with who simply knew he had two moms.

Levi, a third-year university student in arts and anthropology, sometimes struggled growing up in a same-sex family, depending on the school he went to.

From Grades 3 to 6, he attended Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic School and remembers students teasing him when they were making crafts for Father’s Day.

“They asked, ‘Who are you making it for,’ and I had to kind of dance around the subject or just flat out tell them who it was. And it wasn’t as open an environment as schools later on in life,” Levi said.

“They kind of would think it was weird I don’t have a father, kind of jibe me for that. They would say, ‘What’s the point of you making stuff if you don’t have a dad.’

“Well, you can give it to other people,” he said.

The birdhouses, the masks, the more “manly” clay figurines often went to grandparents. The beaded necklaces, the plastic stained-glass window decorations, the puzzle-piece picture frames, went to his Moms.

Each son was cross-adopted by the other Mom. The two women married unofficially in 1996, then made it legal in 2012.

They share the workload, although Michelle, a family physician by day, typically takes the boys to football and hockey games, having grown up with two brothers. Levi went to karate, Logan to boxing.

“I think too much emphasis is placed on same-sex,” said Bev, 48, who works at the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services at the University of Alberta.

“Families are diverse, no matter what genders are in the house or what the dynamics. I’m always of the belief that family units, if you have a very loving caring environment and you’re there for one another, that’s all that really matters.”

Michelle, 49, sits beside her wife and two sons, as the family’s Boston terrier, Kamea (Hawaiian for Precious), yips at a closed door.

“We’re like any other different family,” Michelle said. “There are so many different families out there. It’s not like one is better than the other, they’re just different, whether they’re two moms, two dads, a single mom or single dad or other blended families, like friends who are split up and have a step-mom and step-dad on the other side and they go from home to home.

“It is what it is.”