From All the Women Caught in a Flaring Light :: Gay Lesbian

From All the Women Caught in a Flaring Light work start a big room of women doing anything,playing cards, having a meeting, the rattleof paper or coffee cups or chairs pushed back,the loud and quiet murmur of their voices,women leaning their heads together. If we leaned in at the door and I said, Those womenare mothers, you wouldnt be surprised, drop at me for pointing out the obvious fact.Women are mothers, arent they? So obvious. For My daughter Who Is Not MineWhen all the women in my life are mothers, what else stop I aspire to be? Arent motherhood and womanhood so intricately interwoven so as to run into one another, to conk one another? What harming of woman are you if you cant add to the discussions in the doctor office waiting rooms astir(predicate) nursing this minor or that through this malady or that? What kind of woman are you if you cant re-tell the story of labor and delivery, coition the hours, the pain, the excess or lack of your childs hairiness everywhere a church picnic while eating cold hot up chicken and coleslaw? What kind of woman are you if you cant feel the contradiction between the satisfaction of a job tumesce done and the sorrow at a loss for being inevitable when your child moves away from home? What else could I be but a mother? So, I am a mother, and yet am similarly not one, because I can tell these stories about my child with hardly partial knowledge. I am a non-biological mother of a child with two mothers, making my position ambiguous when I share my parenting stories realityally though, at home, when Aedin calls out Momma, Im all too blessed to be the one shes calling.The most common interrogative sentence we witness in public is whos the mother? as people waitress back and forth between Rachel and me, obviously confused. Its been asked matter-of-factly by doctors for their charts, shyly by new acquaintances out of curiosity, brazenly by total strangers out of nosiness, and sometimes not even spoken, but implied by a all-inclusive range of people knitting their brows in our direction in public places. When Im out alone with Aedin, no one asks this question Im sure Rachel has the same experience. Now that Aedin is verbal, she answers based upon how the soul asks it since Im her Momma and Rachel is her Mommy, she answers accordingly, but she only looks at them with astonishment if they use an ambiguous word such as Mom or Mother.