No, I’m not talking about THOSE words. Although, we’ve had our experience with them, too. Remember when, at around 2.5, Finn developed a fondness for exclaiming–with impressively accurate emphasis, I might add–“Oh, SHIT”?

No, I’m talking about a word that, to many, has a considerably different connotation than it has in our two-mom household.

Our family’s 5-letter word–the one that elicits near immediate shock and awe and, if I’m being honest, a bit of awkwardness–is DADDY.

Daddy. Dad. Father. Papa.

Those words didn’t always trigger us in the way they do now. Admittedly, neither Sona nor I have really close (or healthy?) relationships with our father figures. My step-father, Rich, is the most consistent male figure in our–and thus, our boys’–lives, but I’ve always just called him by his first name. So, though we’ve explained it to them in the past, I’m not sure that Finn and Elias register exactly how Rich–or, to them, Pops–fits into our family.

More importantly, they haven’t grown up hearing either Sona or myself call anyone “Dad” with any regularity.

Still, they aren’t obtuse. They live in a media-heavy world, surrounded almost entirely by representations of “normative,” heterosexual parents–even in 2020.

Whether its a pants-less tiger or a baby vampire on one of their favorite TV shows or a character in one of their most loved children’s books, whether it’s a llama or a superhero or an animate car or another little boy, most of the kids they digest as part of their multimedia diet have hetero parents; they have a mom and a dad.

Of course, we’ve tried to offset these biases by deliberately exposing our boys to alternative family structures. Though, it can be really difficult to find representations of different kinds of families in anything other than a book called Different Kinds of Families, and I’m more than a little wary about anything that reads as being too didactic. They are kids, after all. I don’t want to lecture them; I just want them to see families that look like theirs–and in the same kinds of contexts in which they see families that don’t.

Can someone please write a series of books that aren’t at all about same-sex parents but where the kids just happen to have–as an aside, not as a central plot-line–same-sex parents?

This is why there is so much value in shows, like Sesame Street or Arthur, that feature same-sex couples or same-sex weddings without highlighting them as being somehow different. They just are.

After all, we don’t learn about our world by being lectured to. We learn about our world by experiencing it. And I want my boys to experience a world where the families they see all around don’t constantly remind them that their own family is different.

When I first read online that Disney is likely going to give Elsa a female love interest in the next iteration of Frozen, I sobbed. Do you know what it would mean to my son–the one who, just this morning, had me play “Elsa’s song” three times on the way to school–if the character he so loves ended up, like his own mothers, loving another woman? It would mean the whole fucking world. That’s what.

I’m no stranger to what it is like to look at the world around you and see not a mirror, reflecting who you are, but a wall, reminding you that you don’t quite belong with everyone else.

Growing up as a lesbian, especially a lesbian in a small, Southern town, a lot of my own anguish centered around coming to terms with my sexuality was not that I felt bad about myself for being gay. Rather, it was that the world was constantly telling me–or showing me–that I was different, and I, like so many others, internalized that difference as bad.

That is, representation matters. Seeing only straightness or thinness or whiteness or richness or Christian-ness or able-bodiedness reinforces the narrative those those things are normal. They are good. And if you live in this world and aren’t those things? Well, it is nearly impossible to escape the suffocating weight of stigmatization that accompanies your own knowing–your own understanding–that what you are is, ultimately, an other.

I’ve never actually said this aloud, but to this day–20 years into a loving relationship with another woman, having an advanced degree and a successful career, being nearly 40 years old–I still catch myself wondering, “Is something wrong with me for loving other women?” I was raised on representations of relationships that only depicted love and attraction as things shared between a man and a woman. And no matter how long I’ve spent writing my own story, one that veers away from that narrative, I still have so deeply internalized that male-female love is normative that I question my own. (I could go off on a whole tangent here about the impact this has on the health of same-sex relationships, but we will save that for another time.)

This is all to say that, as Finn gets older, becomes more familiar with the families of his friends and classmates, and absorbs the media-driven representation of what a family looks like, he’s starting to realize that his family is different than many of the ones he sees.

He hasn’t said this, explicitly, nor has he asked questions about why he has two moms, but it’s clear that he’s been ruminating on what, exactly, a “dad” is–and why he doesn’t have one.

Earlier this year, he jokingly started calling Pops, my step-father, daddy. He said it facetiously, laughing after, but my mother was quick to come home and tell us about it, a deeply concerned look on her face. That concern wasn’t really rooted in a fear about how to respond; it was rooted in a fear that Finn had finally figured it out. The jig was up. He realized that he didn’t have a father–and that he should have one.

We blew it off and didn’t make any attempt to acknowledge his comment afterward. And truthfully, Pops is the closest thing our boys have to a father, and they are lucky to have him. I’m comfortable–maybe even relieved?–with their conceiving of him in that way.

After all, Finn has always seemed to have a pretty intuitively fluid conceptualization of what families look like. He calls Sona “Mommy” and me “Momma,” and, to him, those are distinctly different roles. Just try conflating them and see how quickly he will correct you.

When I say things like, “Darcy has a mommy and a daddy,” he’s quick to snap back, “Yeah, but she doesn’t have a momma.” He’s always considered having two mothers a bonus, and his school friends have been known to complain to their own parents that they don’t have two mothers like Finn.

One time, we were walking through our neighborhood, and we saw a little girl with three women. “Look! She has three mommies!” Finn said excitedly.

But increasingly, the “daddy” thing has become a more apparent fixation of Finn’s. He’s saying it a lot, and he knows that it elicits an awkward laugh, which is likely one of the reasons he keeps saying it.

Every morning this week, as we walk into his Pre-K classroom, he shouts “Daddy!” at his male teacher, Mr. Dom. We all laugh. Finn laughs the hardest. But beneath my laughter is some sadness.

The thing is, I’m sad for Finn in the same way I was sad for myself when I realized I was gay. That is, I don’t actually feel bad for Finn. Finn will be fine. So will Elias. I have complete, unwavering confidence in the family Sona and I have created to support our sons.

There is nothing missing.

We are whole.

They are loved every bit as much–and likely more–than every kid who has both a mother and a father.

Science agrees me. As there are multiple studies, like this one and this one, which evidence that children of same-sex parents, especially lesbian parents, are happier, healthier, and more successful than their peers.

But still, I know how the world sees us–even those closest to us. I know what people say behind closed doors. I know that folks worry that Finn and Elias are going to have trouble developing, especially because they are boys, without the presence a dad.

And if someone tells you that something is a problem enough times, even if they communicate it implicitly, doesn’t it become a self-fulfilling prophecy? If Finn believes something is wrong with his family becomes there’s no father, does not having a father then become an obstacle to his own happiness and fulfillment?

I don’t know, and that’s the source of the awkwardness and awe.

I know we aren’t harming our boys by raising them without a dad, but I don’t know if I can protect from a world that tells them that that absence is harmful.

For now, we will just continue to laugh it off when Finn calls people–including myself and Sona–“Daddy.” We will read him the few inclusive, albeit banal, books about families that come in all shapes and sizes. We will talk with him, as appropriately as we can, about what our own family looks like.

But if your biggest concern is that your little one is going to say “shit” or “fuck” sometime soon–if that’s the word your family most fears–consider yourself lucky, because the world probably considers you “normal.” And our little ones? They know that.

When people see us now, I think this is what they see. And I admit: it looks pretty damn good. We have a wonderful life. We are, as some VSCO girl might say, #blessed.

And yet, as much as I originally started this blog because of a desire to put our family out there as a representation that this (motions all around) is possible–that it does get better–I also see now that the narrative we’ve constructed is only partly true.

Yes, the lovely, joyful life we now lead feels easy. (I mean, easy in the we-don’t-agonize-over-our-sexuality-or-fear-the-repercussions-of-those-we-love-because-we-are-gay kind of way. Not in the we-have-two-careers-and-two-toddlers-and-just-enough-time-and-everything-is-fine kind of way.) But no, it wasn’t always.

To quote Langston Hughes, “Life for me ain’t been to crystal stair.” So, let’s back up a bit.

It’s National Coming Out Day. I think the Danielle of twenty years ago would have put on her Doc Maarten combat boots (which are back in style, btw), adorned herself with every possible rainbow-colored accessory, and made some sort of public stink about it. The Danielle of today sits in her very comfortable bed, listening to the rain fall outside, and writes a blog post.

The Danielle of twenty years ago was tortured. The Danielle of today has settled into herself.

Twenty years ago–or twenty one, if we’re being precise–I came out to the people around me. I was 16.

Unlike Sona, who says she conceived of herself as “gay” from a very early age, I never did. That’s not to say that I conceived of myself as straight, either. It’s just that my worldview wasn’t open to the possibility that I would love anyone but boys. Every woman I knew loved boys. Every TV show I saw orbited–either directly or indirectly–around girl-boy love.

(In hindsight, I now see that part of me did know I was gay at a very early age. I obsessed over the bodies of the other girls in my dance class. I begged my childhood best friend to play “house,” which meant that we would kiss under the stairs while my mother, who worked nights, slept.)

But I didn’t know during the summer of 1998. Will & Grace wouldn’t premiere for another few months. Ellen had come out the year before, but that was hardly on my radar. A few years earlier, some guy named Pedro, who was openly gay and living with HIV, moved into an MTV-funded house full of strangers and was the first openly gay person I’d ever seen on TV.

I guess what I’m saying is that I didn’t know I was gay because I didn’t realize that I could be.

Then, I met someone who was. She was the friend-of-a-friend at my very small high school in my very small Southern town. And what can I say other than that she awoke inside of me what must have been some long dormant desire to love and be loved by someone who wasn’t a boy?

My life can be divided into two periods: BP (before Pam) and AP (after Pam), which really has very little to do with Pam at all and everything to do with the fact that I think I spent 16 years of my life wondering who I was and the rest trying to reconcile exactly what truly knowing who I was actually meant.

There was a period between when I first started falling for Pam and when I admitted to myself that I had fallen for Pam that, in hindsight, were some of the darkest of my life. My family had moved from one part of Tennessee to the other. In the middle of my junior year of high school, I was thrown into a new school, a new community, and I didn’t know a single soul.

During that time, I was sincerely and utterly alone in my fear that I might be a lesbian, which was terrifying. Now, as I try to unpack where that fear came from, I think it must have been rooted in some deep-seated awareness that I was forever changing the course of my life. I was deliberately steering into much angrier seas. I might lose my family. I would probably lose friends (many of whom where deeply conservative and religious). Would I be able to have the life I’d envisioned for myself: a career, a marriage, a family? More than once, I didn’t know whether that life–or any life–was one I could bear to live.

At that same time, I was falling head-first into an Emily Dickinson obsession and had stumbled upon the book Open Me Carefully, which detailed–through letters, poems, and biographical accounts–the likely romantic relationship between Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law, Susan. That book became my bible. I would read it every night, and every night I would cry myself to sleep. As alone as I felt, I took solace in knowing that someone I admired–hell, someone everyone admired (albeit through misunderstanding)–was like me.

I drove back to the town where Pam lived (and where we’d moved from), I pounded on her door, she opened. And just like that, as if someone had finally wiped the wet-grey fog from my windshield, I could see what I didn’t want to see before: I loved her.

My BFF, Stephanie, was the first person I actually came out to. We’d traveled to Pittsburgh to attend my cousin’s bar mitzvah, smuggling cheap wine coolers into my grandparents’ basement. One night, as we were toe-to-toe in bed, I told her. She allowed herself half a second of shock and then, without missing a beat, asked all the same gossip-y questions any good BFF would when you tell them you are in love.

Coming out to my family wasn’t so easy. I came out to my mother first, while we snapped green beans for creamy Thanksgiving Day casseroles, my grandmother upstairs. To be honest, my memory of that conversation is hazy. I think my mother tried to dodge the conversation, made some comment about how it was a phase, and said something about how I was going to ruin Thanksgiving dinner. (I also have a very vivid memory of her going to hide in our coat closet after, but I know she would say that never happened now.)

My step-father, a man born in a dirt-road town to God-fearing parents whose church community was their only community, was next, and that was the hard one.

Because I love my parents who I know now both regret the way those years played out, and because it would be pointless to recount every single conversation in detail, as we all have different remembrances of how those years were navigated, I will move through the next few years quickly by saying that there were very long periods of time when I could barely stand to be in the same room with my parents, and I know they felt the same way about me. The tension was palpable–and for years. They refused to believe that I was really gay, giving the same excuses I think most parents do when their kids first come out: It’s a phase. It’s just because boys don’t want to date you because you are chubby. You are just seeking attention. Did that one neighbor touch you inappropriately when you were a child? Are you just trying to piss us off?

Ironically, because they were so deeply entrenched in their denial, my parents were also weirdly accommodating of Pam. She was at our house often, staying for days at a time. We were allowed to sleep together. In my bed. With the door closed. They pretended we weren’t doing anything that friends wouldn’t do, and we pretended we weren’t.

Still, when I came out, I’d drawn a line in the sand. For years, we all reacted by retreating–stubbornly and angrily, but likely out of pain–to our own sides. Ultimately, I did what any properly angsty teen would do: I rebelled.

You don’t accept that I am gay? Well, I’ll be the MOST gay. I put rainbow stickers all over my car. I watched every (bad) lesbian B-movie on repeat. I damn-near worshipped Ani Difranco. I took Pam to prom. In 1999. In a small Southern town. IT WAS A THING.

(At the time, I had moved back to my old town for the last half of my senior year of high school. I wanted to graduate with the friends I’d known, and my parents obliged [probably because they wanted to get rid of me], letting me live with a friend from January-May. When that friend’s parents found out I was gay, they wanted me out of their house. One night, when I happened into the kitchen at the same time as my friend’s father–a man who was widely thought to be The Nicest Guy in Town–he told me, milk dripping down his chin, “You know, in the wild, a pack of wolves eats another if he is too different.”)

Later, I became the president of my college’s LGBTQ organization as soon as I stepped on campus. And, when a local newspaper asked to interview me about LGBTQ issues, I accepted.

The article was published on the front page of the newspaper in the town where my parents live, complete with my name and a photograph. They were mortified. They saw in black-in-white text what they’d been trying to deny for years, and more embarrassingly, so did their friends and coworkers.

I was asked to leave my home. For months, I didn’t step foot in my parents’ house. I worked weekends at the CD store 10 minutes away, but rather than staying with my parents, I had to commute back to our college apartment, which was over an hour each way.

Meanwhile, Sona, who had also been disowned by her mother and thrown out of her house, continued to live in my parents’ home. That was more than a little awkward.

Like Pam, my parents loved Sona. I think they first took her in as some sort of motherless kitten. They always accepted her. They always cared for her and welcomed her. At the same time, they vowed they would never accept our relationship, they refused to acknowledge our engagement (after 6 years together), and they said they would never attend our wedding.

The rest, as I think you know, is history. I write more about the years leading up to our wedding–and our wedding–here.

This is what people see today–and this is what we see today. But we see the lives we have now through the lens of years we spent thinking we would never get here–through a lot of pain and resentment and fear.

I would be doing everyone following our family a disservice to think that we didn’t have to wade through some dark and scary waters to get to where we are now. And I would be doing them an even bigger disservice if I didn’t help them believe–if I didn’t help them see–that you can make it to the other side.

This is what everybody told us when we asked what it was like having a second child. That advice served it’s purpose; it scared us silly.

I’ve been pretty absent on the blog, which is something I’ve apologized for before. I could apologize for things I’ve haven’t checked off of my to-do list or projects I’ve abandoned until I’m blue in the face, and still, I’d need to apologize some more. That’s life with two kids.

When I did some crowd-sourcing on Insta, asking what folks would most like to see me blog about (cause, you know, a mom of two doesn’t have an ounce of creative energy to spare), the question I was asked the most was, “What is life/marriage like after with two kids?”

That was a couple of months ago, now, before I had to return to work, and to be honest, I thought to myself, “I don’t have an exciting answer, because life isn’t tremendously different than it was with just one kiddo.”

Oh, what a naive fool I was, folks.

Maternity leave ended, and I mournfully eased back into my life as a working mom. Elias started daycare. Our “real life” routines began establishing themselves, again. At first, it wasn’t so bad, unless you account for the fact that I broke down in sobs no less than three times during my first day back on campus, which was pretty mortifying.

I started work on a fourth textbook project. I committed to a new personal book project. I assumed some new responsibilities at work. My semester started, and I met 67 new students. Oh, and I am the keeper for my alcoholic father with dementia.

Elias still wasn’t (and isn’t) sleeping through the night. So, while I was deep-breathing through my re-entry, I was also still getting up every 2-4 hours, feeding a crying, perpetually hungry baby. That’s been our nighttime pattern for the past 6.5 months, which means I haven’t sleep through the night–or more than 4-5 hour stretches, on a good night–since Elias was born.

The thing is, I don’t think I really appreciated just how exhausted I was until I was actually expected to perform–to think, to collaborate, to contribute meaningful. It’s amazing how much the knowledge that you can come home after dropping your toddler off at daycare, stay in your pajamas all day, and nap whenever your baby naps can sustain you, even when you’re still really, woefully tired.

So, to answer the question now, after “real life” has started again, and I’m not longer a SAHM: life after two kids is exhausting. I know this is just a season of our lives. I know it’s a stage that will pass too quickly. I know that, one day, I’ll want desperately to be back in this stage, exhaustion and all.

But right now, I feel like I’m barely keeping it together. And by “it,” I mean my sanity, my marriage, my job, and any semblance of an identity outside of being a mom.

There’s good, too. Of course there is. That’s the parenting paradox that other parents know so well. Folks who don’t have kids will read this and think, “See–that’s why I’m never having children.” Folks who have kids will think, “Yep, I get you, sister.”

It’s as good as it is hard. Knowing that Elias is our last baby has made his first months all the more sweet. We’ve loved having him so much, in fact, that there have been more than a few occasions when we’ve questioned whether we’re really done having kids, checking our sperm donor’s supply and crying over the fact that it’s dwindling, quickly, which ultimately makes the decision for us.

And then there’s watching Finn and Elias together, which is enough to make even me want to go get knocked up this very second, despite the fact that none of us would likely survive another baby right now. Finn is an amazing big brother, and watching that part of his personality develop has been a gift.

In fact, if it wasn’t for the exhaustion, and the compounded sense that there will never be enough time and we will never be able to live up to all of our responsibilities, I could pretty honestly tell you that, yeah, life with two kids isn’t all that different than life with one. In fact, adjusting to Elias’s birth was a lot easier than adjusting to Finn’s. We were already parents. We already felt like we had no time of our own. So, that learning curve wasn’t as steep. As I said, in those first five months, it seemed–dare I say–easy.

But the exhaustion is there, an ever-present cloud, greying pretty much everything right now. It makes me a much less likeable person, a less attentive wife, and a less patient mother. Before Elias was born, I prided myself on that fact that I almost always kept my cool with Finn, even though he can be a high needs kiddo. I could count on one hand the times I had snapped at him. Now, I feel like I snap at him every other day. Some of that is because he’s 3, and a lot of that is because I don’t have an ounce of energy reserved for his antics.

I know I am a good momma, but I’m not really someone I’m proud of right now. I’m nowhere near the best version of myself, and I feel pretty guilty about that.

And marriage after two kids? See the above comment about not being the best versions of ourselves. Luckily, we’ve been giving each other as much grace as our patience will muster. Sona recognizes how weary I am, and she’s trying really hard to compensate. But, of course, she’s exhausted, too. And so, at the end of the day–and I literally mean the very end of the day, as our mom-ing and house-ing and life-ing duties don’t usually wind down until an hour or so before we both collapse into bed–we have very left for each other, right now. And that’s just something else we harbor a lot of guilt and shame about.

Also, providing semi-quality childcare for two kiddos, allowing us to maintain our careers? Not cheap. It doesn’t help that the cost of childcare makes it significantly harder for us to do the things that help us blow off steam.

I probably should have written this when I was in a better headspace. When Finn wasn’t still up, fighting bedtime two hours after we put him in his crib or Elias wasn’t on day 6 of a diaper rash that is making everyone’s lives miserable or we’d eaten dinner before 9PM. I don’t mean to scare everyone into having only one baby, but maybe, like all of those folks who tried to warn us, it’s not so terrible to have reasonable expectations of what life will be like with a toddler and a baby, at least for a while.

Today, Sona told me “you cry all the time and you look like a zombie.” She’s not wrong. Ironically, one of the things I cry about pretty much constantly (like at least 3 times a week, is this normal?) is that our kids are growing up so quickly and all of this tiredness and weariness will, eventually, be but a distant, serotonin-clouded memory. I’m full-on Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde over here. One second, I’m waxing nostalgic about this time with small babes, and the next, I’m stumbling out of bed, crying at 5AM, getting up with Elias for the third time in a night. (Hello, last night.)

I love Finn and Elias more than my career or my need to write or any other part of myself that is self-affirming, but I need those other things, too. Right now, I’m in the eye of the storm. Ask me when we’ve gotten through, and I’ll let you know how many walls are left standing.