When I was five, I started to understand that my family made other people uncomfortable. It wasn’t anything my mothers did. It was the way other parents hesitated at the playground, the way the teacher frowned when we corrected the "Mother/Father" boxes on permission slips, the way kids whispered when two women showed up to pick me up after school.
At first, I didn’t have the words for it. Only the feeling—a weight in my chest, a shrinking at the edges of joy.
At birthday parties, they asked, "Which one is your real mom?" At doctor's offices, they asked, "Who should we call if something goes wrong?" I watched the adults around me act like love had a checklist, and my family didn’t qualify.
But every time the world tried to make me question where I belonged, my mothers answered in ways that filled the cracks before they could grow. They mothered with open arms, open ears, and open hearts. They mothered with late-night talks where no question was too small, and quiet corrections when the world tried to erase them.
The systems we navigated demanded that we shrink. Birth certificates with only two boxes. School forms that were erased. Medical forms that are misnamed. Policies that asked us to split ourselves in two just to be recognized at all.
Parenting beyond the binary is not just a journey of love—it is an act of defiance against systems designed to erase us.
From adoption agencies that question our families to courts that deny parental rights to queer and trans parents, the policing of who gets to mother and who is deemed legitimate remains brutal and ongoing.
We mother under the weight of surveillance. We are mothers in a world that writes binaries into law, education, healthcare, and home.
And still—we mother.
We mother with resilience shaped by generations of survival. We mother with tenderness honed sharp by necessity. We mother with a grace the world often does not return.
It looks like signing forms and crossing out boxes that don't fit. It sounds like correcting pronouns in front of strangers. It feels like turning every "you can't" into "watch us."
Queer and trans parenting isn't a disruption. It’s an insistence—that our children deserve to live whole, celebrated, and unafraid.
Every bedtime story is read with a voice that affirms, every birthday cake baked by hands that refuse shame, every gentle "you are enough exactly as you are" stitched into the seams of childhood—each one is a revolution.
We are not raising our children to survive outdated systems. We are raising them to dismantle them.
Because freedom, once planted, cannot be legislated away. And love, once spoken, cannot be silenced.
We mother through barriers the world refuses to acknowledge—with tenderness honed sharp by necessity, and grace the world often does not return.
