Family Parenting
Even in a Queer Marriage, There’s the Familiar Trap of Gender Roles
The wall that divided us in those early weeks of my first child’s infancy became a continued separation.
One Saturday in April, I left breakfast on the counter for my children, stepped into my chore boots, and opened the gate to the back pasture. There, my partner knelt in the wet grass as she attached our chicken coop to our riding mower with a pull chain. Our coop was on wheels and every week we moved it so that our laying hens would have access to new forage. My partner connected the coop to the mower like it was second nature, like she had no fear that the chain would come undone, that the mower would get stuck in a rut, that our coop would topple. Not me. As I stood there, I wondered how I’d handle this chore if she died.
The thought wasn’t purely hypothetical. Some weeks before—amid global pandemic anxiety— my partner’s asthma had flared. The episode lasted for weeks and didn’t ease with medication. Our doctor ordered an MRI, and the specialist reported a “crushed-glass pattern” on her lungs. By then her breathing had returned to normal, but our shared world felt fragile. Covid reminded me that no one is guaranteed a full life span, and the mental image of my partner’s lungs haunted me. I didn’t share my thoughts with my partner that morning, but she might have intuited them. “You should drive the mower,” she suggested.
She mapped a route in the air with her hand, instructing me to make a wide circle around the pasture and drive slowly. I started the mower and pulled forward. The chain tightened, and then the coop rolled along behind me. All worked exactly as designed.
Sometimes when I do such things, I think about how there’s no real reason I can’t do them: no reason I shouldn’t drive a mower, no reason I shouldn’t drive screws into beams or install flooring with a nail gun. These activities aren’t harder than the other things I do like bake and decorate a birthday cake or pack a school lunch. They don’t take more skill, strength, or coordination. The difference is that they come with a layer of dissonance, a this-is-not-me-ness that is a hurdle to jump.
My partner doesn’t have this dissonance. She organizes her life around large-scale projects—moving an outhouse from one side of town to another or installing rows of twenty-foot poles in our pasture so that she can grow hops. Though my partner is unequivocal about her identity as a woman, she’s magnetically drawn to many of the things society associates with men: power tools, for instance, and light beer. Many people in our world—even those who know us well—express surprise at the shape of our relationship. Many assume that the parenting between two women will be split fifty-fifty and that we’d easily avoid the gendered traps straight couples so often fall into. But I know the shape of that trap well enough to feel its teeth.
*
In the weeks that followed our first son’s birth, I spent much of my time in an old green armchair that had once belonged to my partner’s mother. I never cared for the chair. One side of it was ripped and the bottom gave too much when I sat in it. It remained ignored in a rarely used corner of our home for years. For some reason—maybe because the disruption of new motherhood prompted me to see old things in new ways, or maybe because the giant armrests that had once felt confining now proved useful as I tried to angle my baby—that green chair became my nursing chair.
I wore my uniform of new motherhood: a floral nursing nightgown someone gifted me, with a hole on each side for breast access. When the breast was put away, the hole would disappear into the pleats of the garment. Beneath it I wore flannel pajama pants. It was a ridiculous and practical getup.
My partner had offhandedly suggested I should sleep on towels at night so that when my milk leaked it wouldn’t seep into the mattress and leave our bed “smelling like goat.” She was joking, but also protective of the order in our world. Once she said it, I thought constantly of goats. I thought of one in particular that I’d seen on a friend’s farm, her udders so engorged that to look at her was to suffer alongside her. She stood nearly motionless in the middle of the pasture as if waiting for her kids to suckle and relieve her.
I felt like her. It had taken four days for my milk to come in, but once it came, it was relentless. Like the mother goat, I was constantly engorged, aching and stretched. During letdowns, my baby pulled away, coughing and crying as milk squirted from my nipple in wide arcs that landed on his face, his ear, his hair, sometimes on the carpet beyond us. When the flow calmed, he resumed, and strained to keep up. I could constantly smell my milk, though I didn’t smell like goat. It was a sharp mineral smell, more like wet rock than animal.
Like the mother goat, I was constantly engorged, aching and stretched. I was stunned by the labor of nursing, by how pinned to the chair I was, focused on this eight-pound furless creature who nursed until he slept, then woke, then nursed again. I worried my labor, to any outsider, looked like mere laziness: me sitting on a chair in my pajamas, holding a baby, smelling like rock.
Looking lazy was always a concern of mine. While my partner worked outside on ladders and roofs all day, I taught classes and sat in my office to grade papers and plan lessons. After work, while she worked in the yard, I walked our two dogs and made dinner. Though I was feeding both of us and tending to the needs of our pets, in my mind the work I did had limited value because they were tasks perceived as feminine.
As I nursed, I listened to my partner hammering and drilling at the back of the house. In the last months of my pregnancy, we had decided it would be smart to enclose our back porch and make it a mudroom, to create a space where our dogs could be warm, dry, and safe from this baby who would eventually crawl and grab. And so, while I lived in the green chair, my partner lived on the back porch. Some days her father came to help her. Other days it was her carpenter friend.
Friends stopped by for me too, but they went to great lengths to remain invisible. They left casseroles on my front porch and snuck away without knocking, obedient to a cultural directive not to disrupt a new mother. But my whole world was disruption and, more than anything, I craved company. This feeling surprised me, embarrassed me even. I kept it to myself.
From the back of the house, I heard the voices of people doing labor, the sounds of small motors, of doors opening and closing, of frustration followed by completion. When the mudroom was done, it was done. My partner went back to work.
I stayed in the green chair.
*
There was a time when I had the space to grow toward my partner, the space to let her dreams touch my own. Choosing her in the first place had been a step toward myself. I grew up in New England, surrounded by colleges. As a child, I rode the subway alone and visited museums on weekends. If you had asked me to imagine my future life, I would have pictured a city apartment and a bookish spouse. This life would have made sense, but apparently it would not have been true to me, for when I picture it now I feel no longing.
My partner has pulled me toward open land. We have acres of pasture, chickens, bees, and a cow. They are never my idea, but once we have them they feel right to me. In other words: I rely on her to reveal me to myself. Often, when I carry buckets of chicken feed at dawn, I marvel at how right it feels, this life I might so easily not have had. Though I love city apartments, museums, and historic libraries, I love even more stepping off my porch into the darkness and hearing the coyotes howl. I’ve discovered I like living in a world touched by mystery and reminders of mortality: a world of tree frogs croaking in the winter night, mouse bones in owl pellets, a raven flying from a carcass.
In the years before we had children, I was occasionally my partner’s apprentice. She would show me how to lay pavers in gravel and I’d spend quiet hours arranging with the radio on. She would show me how to safely use a chop saw and then hand me the boards that she measured and marked. I watched her and dreaded my turn. Always it went this way: a tide of panic rose in me at the idea of building something tangible and permanent. I felt far more comfortable making things that could be erased (an essay draft) or consumed (a pot of soup). Then my partner would hand me the nail gun, and I’d take comfort in the thwap it made, the satisfying way it connected floor to subfloor.
Having children was my idea. Raising at least one child felt essential to me. But the wall that divided us in those early weeks of my first child’s infancy became a continued separation. When my partner and I discussed having children, I pitched myself as the primary caregiver. I believed fundamentally in dividing the labor and playing to our strengths. Fifty-fifty, I understood, could mean that two parents equally split the housework, the childcare, the breadwinning. But I also believed that reciprocity could mean we were each devoted to building a home and a family, and that we each showed up in the ways that came most naturally to us.
Playing to my strengths meant that I no longer stretched myself. I became even more domestic, less pliable. I didn’t hold a nail gun or cut boards. I sat on the floor handing toys to my baby. I changed diapers, did laundry, sorted clothes. I taught courses online and graded piles of papers. I felt tethered.
My partner continued to do projects that kept her outside and in her body. I could have joined her, could have packed the baby on my back and painted shingles or weeded the garden—except I couldn’t. I had no give left in me. I could no longer move fluidly between indoors and outdoors, or between my inner world and the world at large. Every departure from home required preparation. I had to pack a bag for the baby and remember my own keys and wallet, strap him in his car seat, listen to his cries as we departed, and then strap him to me wherever we arrived. Out in the world, I was still tethered to him, forever making sure he was still breathing. My surroundings had become nothing but periphery.
My partner continued to do projects that kept her outside and in her body. When I imagined myself as the primary caregiver, I imagined I would enjoy the feeding, the putting to sleep, and the diapering. And I did. I did enjoy these things. I had spent a decade longing for them. But I hadn’t imagined the loss of autonomy and what that would feel like. I hadn’t imagined it because what was there to picture? It was a feeling only recognizable once I inhabited it: a vice.
*
While my first child was a toddler, I attended weekly classes led by a local parent educator. Parents sat in a circle on the carpet while children played with toys in the next room, supervised by the teacher’s assistants.
Mostly the parents were mothers, though occasionally a father attended. Once, there was a lesbian couple. I looked at them from across the room, wishing we’d connect, though I knew I was too shy and too straight-passing for any exchange to happen easily. The occasional father was typically there with his wife. I don’t believe I ever saw a dad who came to parenting class every week alone the way the mothers came to parenting class alone. In other words, the fathers for the most part came as drop-ins, as support or fill-in for their wives.
I came alone. It was a role I assigned myself. I cared about having a place to learn how to be a better parent. I knew that my partner would be uncomfortable in such a setting, hyperaware of her difference as neither a dad nor a straight-passing mom. So I made it my job to come every week and report back the essential information, for instance that we were supposed to find a healthy balance between setting firm rules and negotiating with kids, or that developing rapport between each parent and child was key to solving ongoing conflicts.
Parenting class always opened with a round-robin check-in, and one day a mother complained about how much freedom her husband took every weekend.
“Moms,” the teacher responded. She took a breath and looked around the classroom, taking in all of the mothers sitting cross-legged on her floor. “If you resent your husband for going to The Home Depot on a Saturday morning, you might take inspiration from that and take off for your own errand when he gets back. Women need to learn to feel less comfortable with resentment and more comfortable with guilt.”
It was a statement that simultaneously alienated and included me. Was I or wasn’t I one of the mothers she was addressing? I was a mom, but I didn’t have a husband. I had a wife, who did in fact take off for The Home Depot on Saturday morning. And I did need to learn to be more comfortable with guilt and less comfortable with resentment.
Resentment was a habit I’d formed to deal with my partner’s autonomy, which remained largely invisible to her. Things that wouldn’t have bothered me in our life before children bothered me now, like if she stopped at the store on her way home from work but didn’t call to ask if I needed anything. Or if she left to run an errand and then, on a whim, stopped to visit a friend on the way home. Part of me longed to steal these small pleasures from her so she could miss her own freedom the way I missed mine. I was ashamed of this impulse—I knew it was ungenerous—so I stayed silent, and in that silence my resentment festered.
*
For years, long after I’d completed the sequence of parenting classes, I carried the teacher’s advice in my head, but I didn’t know how to implement it. It is one thing to instruct a room of mothers to reclaim their own autonomy, but the question is: How?
Over the years, I watched my partner as if I were looking out a window. There she was, catching a swarm of honeybees. Here I was, picking up spilled LEGOs. There she was, cutting a fallen tree with a chainsaw. Here I was, nursing our second child in the same green chair. I felt stuck like the goat with swollen udders, bodily obliged to the small creatures who had transformed me. Though I missed my autonomy, I made no move to reclaim it.
Though I missed my autonomy, I made no move to reclaim it. And then March 2020 arrived. My children, who were by then larger, more unruly creatures, shared a house with me all day every day. Our routines collapsed. Our boundaries shifted. Often we were an amorphous mass of need and conflict. After the first three weeks of restrictions, my partner was called back to work. I stayed home with both children. My older son melted down daily from the frustration of online school. My younger son fought completing phonics worksheets with bottomless fury. I ground my teeth through professional Zoom meetings knowing that either child might burst through the door at any moment. By the end of the day, when my partner returned, I had a deep physical need to depart the house and close the door behind me. The change was instant and involuntary. I simply couldn’t take it anymore.
Spring’s arrival brought me relief. Our big-leaf maple changed daily as it grew long chains of chartreuse flowers, then sticky leaf buds, which opened and then grew. I noticed because finally I was outside. I found myself on the riding mower, finding satisfaction in the way my body jolted when I mowed over a bump. I found myself every day in the garden, pulling up weeds and turning soil with a spud fork. I told my children they could join me, but I was relieved when they declined. The guilt I felt was negligible. Our world was falling apart anyway, so what did it matter if I claimed some time to myself?
My frantic self-care invited a shift in our family balance. I left without instruction or expectation, and in doing so I left a space for my partner to step into. When kids asked for food in my absence, she served mac and cheese in tin cups with wooden spoons. She and the kids watched Marvel movies together and then drove down the road to visit our neighbors’ pigs. Or sometimes my partner joined me. We planted garlic in the garden and sat on buckets in the greenhouse where we drank beers beside the lavender starts. We came inside to messes of chip crumbs and drips of salsa on the counter. I took comfort in the evidence that my kids knew to feed themselves when they were hungry.
Other caregivers might have reclaimed themselves sooner. They might have handed their partner the baby and bottle and stepped into the wide beyond with minimal guilt, knowing that they would return nourished and whole. But I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t ready.
I have long believed that to love a person deeply is to, in a way, become them: to understand the world through their eyes, to integrate their ways of being into my own. I experienced early parenthood as an interruption in this way of loving. Mothering simultaneously stretched and shrunk me. I was a rock. My partner was a wall. For a long time we were only ourselves and not each other. Our marriage was winter, and then spring arrived.
*
This winter, the day after Christmas, snow fell and stayed. The water feeders in the chicken coops froze. Our cow (a recent addition) needed extra care. To avoid burst pipes, my partner turned off the outdoor faucets, so watering the animals required someone to fill ten-gallon buckets from our basement and haul them across the field.
On the first day of snow, my partner did these chores alone while I searched our house for mittens and snow pants and took our children outside to play. By the time she was done she was exhausted and wheezing, her asthma triggered by the cold.
In the frozen days that followed, we did morning chores together. In the basement, in rhythm, we put on muck boots, filled buckets, then stepped into our shared world to break the ice, feed the animals, and spread new straw on the ground. Inside, one child slept while the other made himself hot chocolate and waited for us to take him sledding. It was better this way: me inside the cow pen, my partner passing a bucket of water to me over the fence, the warm breath from our lungs visible in the air.
