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Am I A Real Mum Now?

June 5th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in gay rights, lesbian

Gay FamiliesYesterday the NSW Parliament passed the Miscellaneous Acts Amendment (Same Sex Relationships) Bill. This bill means that the non-biological lesbian parent now has the same rights as the biological mother including her name on the birth certificate. Penny Sharpe MLC made a fantastic speech to Parliament which you can read on her website when this Bill was up for debate.

My friend M is the non-biological parent of a gorgeous 6 month old girl, Zoe. She emailed me today with this news as she had some doubts that this was now law. She ended her email with the phrase “Am I a real mum now?”. It broke my heart. She may have been joking as I am sure she considers herself Zoe’s real mum and I know her partner F definitely does. However, it made me think of all those non-biological parents out there who deep down may not believe that they are the real parents of their children - and my heart broke.

In my view, if you take care of a child, tuck them into bed and read them stories at night, take care of them when they sick and share their ups and downs - then you are their real parent. It doesn’t matter if you are their biological parent, adoptive parent, step-parent, non-biological parent, foster parent or caregiver, you are that child’s real parent. DNA does not make you the parent of a child. Ask a child who their parents are and they will point to the people who love and care for them, they don’t care whose egg or sperm was donated to bring them into this world. It is about time that the laws of this country realises this too.

So, to all the non-biological lesbian mothers out there, including M, congratulations! Finally the law recognises something all the rest of us have always known, you are your children’s real mother too.

Zemanta Pixie

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Family Commitments

January 20th, 2008 | 2 Comments | Posted in life

For some reason lunch with the family takes all day.  It does matter with we have lunch with my family or Lelak’s it takes at least 6 hours.  There are no quick 2 or 3 hours lunches, ever.

Today was Lelak’s grandmother’s birthday.  We left the house at 10:30am and arrived back at 5:30pm.  See, I was kidding when I said that lunch takes the entire day.  For some unknown reason they decided to have the lunch at Manly.  Manly is a lovely beach side spot, but the problem with Manly is that half of Sydney also thinks it is a great place to go on a weekend and thus it is packed with people and there is nowhere in the whole suburb to park.  This well known fact does not stop the family arranging a big lunch with 12 people attending.   Therefore everyone arrives at lunch extremely late and already pissed off because of how long it took to find a parking spot.  Family lunches are never free of a little tension but when you have the members arrive already grumpy it is never good.  Fortunately, everyone was well-behaved and kept their comments about others to themselves (well I know I did).  I was thankful to be sitting at the”kids” end of the table where I actually like everyone.  Seeing as though we were at Manly, lunch was extremely overpriced, but it was good.  Jumbo prawns are never a bad thing especially when served with garlic butter.

Lunch itself run from 12:30pm to 3:30pm.  It would have run longer but we managed to escape the ‘let’s go for ice cream’ section.  We went back to Lelak’s parents place where Lelak got a much needed hair cut (her mother was a hairdresser) and avoided being loaded up with junk from her parents cleaning out their house before they move.

The best of the day was stopping at the local service station for a Mint Slice Cornetto.  On a hot day, ice cream tastes so good.  We made it home just before a massive thunderstorm hit.  The rain has now just stopped after dumping 17mm in 30 minutes, the sun is making a comeback and the road out of the front of our house is partially flooded.

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An Australian Christmas Lunch

December 25th, 2007 | 1 Comment | Posted in life

I have just arrived home from celebrating Christmas with Lelak’s family.  It was a very Australian Christmas lunch comprising of a large Jewish family, a lesbian couple, an Indian Christian pastor and an Asian boyfriend.  Very multicultural. The afternoon would have been quite lovely were it not for Lelak’s cousins’ two children aged 4 and 2, who were frightened of our dogs and therefore screamed the entire afternoon.  For four solid hours these children screamed that high pitch scream that only children can produce everytime the dogs were in their line of sight.  In a small backyard, this was all the fucking time.
From my previous post, you know how good my dogs are with kids and this time they were just as good, if not better.  My dogs tried their very best to ignore the kids and keep out of their way, but it was damn near impossible.  Things were made even more fun when Lelak’s brother Julian turned up with his two dogs - a Kelpie cross and a German shepherd.  The kids were practically hysterical.  So, we put them (the kids) in the pool enclosure, since they wanted to go for a swim all day anyway.  They were quiet for a whole five minutes and then the screaming started again because the water was too cold.

The whole gathering let out a huge sigh of relief when they finally went home.  After that, the rest of the lunch was lovely.  We got to see the gorgeous wedding pictures of Lelak’s cousin Jessica and her new husband Shine.  It was a traditional Indian wedding and the clothes were just so beautiful.

By five o’clock, poor Rory was absolutely exhausted.  She had missed out on her midday sleep and her afternoon sleep as there was just too many people around doing interesting stuff like eating food.  In the end, she was doing her very best to sneak off and find somewhere quiet to have a sleep.  Even Caleb looked completely worn out.   I must admit I was feeling pretty worn out too.  So we said our goodbyes and headed home.  The dogs are now crashed out on the couches fast asleep and Lelak and I are on our computers.  It is going to be a quiet Christmas night at our house.

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The Gathering of the Clan

December 16th, 2007 | 1 Comment | Posted in life

Today is the one day of the year that my entire extended family comes together for a family brunch. It is the only time I see my cousins and their kids as my entire family lives 200km north in Newcastle, whilst I am in Sydney.

So this morning Lela and I got up at some ungodly hour for a Sunday morning and drove north for the traditional clan breakfast. It was really lovely to see everyone again and marvel at how much the kids have grown. My grandfather was in his usual high spirits replying when I asked him how he was - ‘”almost dead”. Then again, he has been saying that since he went into a nursing home about 7 years ago, which is something that he has not forgiven the family for, even though he has no idea who half of us are any more.

It was good to catch up with my cousins again and reminisce about old times and find out what they are doing. Now that some of the kids are older, you can actually have conversations with them, which I really loved. Zach told me all about how well he is doing in school and how he has been made library monitor. He is such a studious little kid and for most of the time had his head in the book we got him for Christmas -”The Dangerous Book for Boys”. His little brother Patrick and I had our very first real conversation. It was about cricket and how we can both dislocate our thumbs - welcome to hypermobility kiddo.

Lela found herself wrangling a certain cheeky two year old who decided that it would be fun to try to fling himself into the harbour. Fortunately, she reached him before he could do so.

The cheeky two year old Samuel.

After the massive family brunch, we retired to my parents’ apartment for present swapping time and caught up with my parents’ downstairs neighbour Leigh and her daughter Shana, who had just arrived back in Australia after being in the US for 8 years.

Then, if that wasn’t enough, we headed over to my maternal grandparents for afternoon tea, more presents and wandering through their gorgeous garden. We have a massive bag full of fresh spinach, tomatoes and squash now.

After all that it was time to start the long journey back home. Most of it went rather smoothly until about 30km out of Sydney where we hit heavy traffic, heavy rain and fog. That’s right, fog on a 30C day. Hello weird ass weather.

The dogs were not forgotten in all the presents - both my parents and my grandparents brought them gifts. So, when we got home it was Christmas time for puppies. Rory adores ripping open presents, especially when they contain plushy squeaky toys and Caleb was in seventh heaven having not one but two brand new tennis balls.

Rory unwrapping her gift

Caleb with his brand new tennis ball.

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