From the category archives:

Work-Family issues

Mother or Father?

by Lyn September 15, 2011

I’m enjoying the writing prompts on queer parenting at Regular Midwesterners, so I took a go at their second question. Josh and Gretchen ask: “Do you think of yourself as a “mother”? A “father”? Something in between? Why?” Five and a half years ago, my wife was pregnant with Leigh and I was in my [...]

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Who should birth the baby?

by Lyn October 1, 2010

Since many lesbian couples contain two working uteri, and possibly two women willing to conceive, choosing who will try to get pregnant is a place where lesbian couples have options that a straight families don’t.  In what follows, I’m making the assumption that both partners are open to pregnancy (though perhaps with a discrepancy in [...]

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A perk of shared parenting: guilt-free travel (by myself)

by Lyn August 22, 2010

For the first time since Ira’s birth, I’m on my way to a professional conference. For five days, someone else will do the cooking and I won’t have to clean up after anybody (well, other than myself a little bit). I can easily take a shower every day if I want to (without any children [...]

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An ode to non-parental care

by Gail July 20, 2010

I love spending time with my kids, and I think that I’m a fairly good parent. Lyn is a pretty good parent, too. I am thrilled to be parenting with her because she has skills that I don’t have. She draws better boundaries with our four-year-old, Leigh. She worries more about safety and keeps me [...]

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Back to work–How we do it.

by Gail September 25, 2009

A few weeks ago, Lyn and I went back to work in a serious way. In August we both fiddled around with work, doing some and getting used to our schedules, but in September we started back in earnest. It’s not easy. Everything that was hard about our lives pre-baby is now just a little [...]

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Three Years Ago: Looking Forward to Being an Onlooker

by Gail April 23, 2009

The last time Lyn and I were having a baby, we started to keep a joint journal in order to record and remember our experiences. We sent the journal back and forth on the computer, each of us writing in it when inspiration struck. Today I opened up that file and rummaged around in the [...]

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Facing the Costs of Nursing

by Gail March 25, 2009

Many other folks have weighed in on Hanna Rosin’s article The Case Against Breastfeeding, including both Amy and Marc at Equally Shared Parenting and Lisa Belkin at Motherlode, so I’m a little late to the party. But I can’t let the article go by without making some comment, because it is an important issue that [...]

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Vacation?

by Lyn February 5, 2009

A couple nights ago, Gail asked “Am I absolutely crazy to be thinking it’s great we’re going to have a baby because then I don’t have to work this summer?” Of course, she meant her paid work of being a math professor, and I’m sure she has conveniently forgotten the work of parenting a newborn, [...]

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What we did right without knowing it, Part II (aka Accidental Economic Advantages)

by Lyn October 3, 2008

Along with putting the slightly more communicative of us on the less traveled parenting path (i.e. me as the non-bio-mom, see Part I), another thing we did right without knowing it, was to have the mom with the most economic power bear the child. In a straight family in which mom gives birth, mom is [...]

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