Two Dads and a Swing Set
Eleven years after we won the freedom to marry, my son explained belonging in a single sentence.
Eleven years ago today, we won the freedom to marry.
I remember exactly where I was. My fiancé and I were living in Australia, where I’d taken an expat assignment in HR. We watched the news break from the other side of the world, half a day ahead of home, and I remember the strange ache of it. A moment so many of us had waited for, a right other people had been handed without a second thought, and we were celebrating it alone in our kitchen, half a world away from everyone we loved.
We were already planning our wedding back home for later that year. The venue and the menu had been settled before we left. The rest we ran from Australia, on calls at odd hours, working through seating arrangements and staying in step with our wedding planner across the time difference, while family back home gathered RSVP counts and relayed them to us. It only happened because they carried it for us while we were gone. They showed up and held the pieces together until we could get back. We were marrying into a freedom that was brand new, doing it on faith and on the backs of people who loved us enough to do the work from afar.
That ruling didn’t create our family. Love did that, and a lot of help from one generous egg donor and the two women who carried our sons. But it made us real in a way we hadn’t been the day before. Real in the eyes of the law. Real in a way the world couldn’t argue with anymore. For most of my life, I assumed a family like ours simply wasn’t in the cards, not because we didn’t want it, but because the law had decided it wasn’t ours to have. That morning, that changed. It gave us a place to stand.
And the truth is, our life looks like yours. This morning, my oldest is home from summer school with a fever. My husband and I are two working parents doing the math every parent does on a sick day. Who has the meeting that can’t move? Who can mute and hold a warm forehead at the same time? Who promised a deliverable by the end of the day and is now negotiating with a kid about whether seaweed counts as lunch. The logistics are the same as yours. The worry is the same. The love is the same.
A few years ago, I was at the park with our oldest. My husband and I were off to the side, close enough to hear. Our son was on the swings when a little girl sat down beside him, and before long, the two of them were giggling, going higher and higher.
A woman walked over. The little girl turned to my son and asked, “Is that your mom?”
He didn’t skip a beat. “I don’t have a mom. I have two dads.”
The little girl thought about it for a second. Then she said, “I wish I had two dads.”
No hesitation. No judgment. Just one kid being honest with another.
I spend my days thinking about how to build belonging at work. My son built it on a swing set in about four seconds.
Most days, our kids are the ones teaching us.