Opinion | Our daughter wanted a mommy, so she picked one of her dads

Richard Just is managing editor for longform at NOTUS and former editor of The Washington Post Magazine.

Sometime last fall, our oldest daughter, then 3½ years old, began telling us she wanted a mom. My husband and I, two men, had known this moment might come. We had done everything we could to lay the groundwork for her and her little sister to feel pride in our nontraditional family: We’d stocked up on two-dad children’s books and recounted many times the story of how they’d come into the world with the help of a generous egg donor and an amazing surrogate. But, at least for our older daughter, none of these preventive measures had seemed to soften the blow of realizing that every other kid she knew had a mom.

For a week or two, she seemed genuinely upset. But then came a twist that neither my husband nor I expected: She announced that she would now call my husband “mommy.” And that, in her mind, seemed to settle it: Almost as quickly as she had become fixated on not having a mother, her funk seemed to lift, and she was back to being the energetic, funny, smart kid we had always known.

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I was happy she was once again happy, but I wasn’t quite sure what we should do about this change in title. Was it okay to let her bend reality this way? Wasn’t this too big a concession to heteronormativity? Shouldn’t we teach our kids to be proud that they are part of an LGBT family, rather than letting them sweep those differences under the rug?

My husband, though, had no ambivalence: If this was what our daughter needed, then he was going with it. I saw the logic in that — and, anyway, it was his title and therefore his decision.

So we embarked on a new era — no longer Papa and Daddy but now Mommy and Daddy. At first, I thought it might turn out to be a quickly forgotten phase, but our daughter — in a way that was entirely in keeping with her personality and that I had to admit I truly admired — made it clear she was digging in: Any time I slipped up and referred to him as Papa, she swiftly corrected me.

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Pretty soon, she began to police my husband’s pronouns as well. Initially, I had tried to pair his new Mommy title with the male pronouns that he uses — a small concession to reality, I guess — but it wasn’t long before our daughter began to insist that he be referred to as she and her. She had always evinced traits of a future copy editor — from an early age, if we missed or mangled a word in a story she had memorized, she was quick to let us know — and now she directed the full force of her editorial judgment at any deviations from the gender identity she had chosen for her mom-father. “She!” she would gruffly instruct me, as I unthinkingly mis-mis-gendered the man I had been married to for 10 years. “Why do you say ‘he’?”

To hammer home the point, she began every so often calling him “she-mother,” a title my husband delighted in. Occasionally, she would generously say that I, too, could be a “she-mother,” and she would have two moms.

People thought all of this was weird — or at least, I think they did, since just about everyone was too polite to say anything. As soon as she used the word “mommy” in public, I would hurry — a little embarrassed, a little proud — to explain the situation to whomever we were with. Her nursery-school teachers were, needless to say, confused. Then again, when Mother’s Day preparations began at school, things were simple. Her teachers the previous year had, after consulting us, rebranded the holiday as Parents’ Day — a gesture we really appreciated — but this time we required no special accommodation. Mother’s Day would proceed uninterrupted, since our daughter now had a mother.

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But did she? That was the question — or a version of it — that I have kept turning over in my head these past months. If a mother is simply a woman who is raising a child, then, no, our daughters do not have one. But are women really the only people who can be maternal? Why can’t the roles that were historically assigned to mothers be fulfilled by parents — or loved ones — of any kind?

These should be obvious points in 2024, but in four years as a gay dad, I’ve been struck by how much unnecessary gendering still exists around families and parenting, even in our liberal East Coast community: the local Spanish-language program that’s advertised as “Mommy and Me,” the email to me and other class parents that started “Hi class moms!” I don’t stew about these things — there are never, as far as I can tell, any bad intentions involved — but I worry about the message regarding gender roles that’s being delivered to our kids. And I wonder about the messages being sent to other parents, of all types. What about nonbinary parents who aren’t reflected in the mom-dad dichotomy? What about straight dads who seem to be getting an implicit directive: Don’t function too much like a stereotypical mom?

Our experiences, I realize, play into many culture-war topics du jour. But we are people, not ideological concepts. My husband and I are nothing more and nothing less than two parents who would do anything for their kids — including, at least for now, reconsidering the terms we use to describe our family and ourselves.

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In the end, I’ve come to believe our daughter has been telling us something beautiful and profound: that she has everything she needs — including those attributes that society has normally treated as the provenance of mothers — right here in her two-dad family. And so, on this Mother’s Day, I am filled with gratitude — to my wise and spirited daughter, for challenging me to rethink labels that I never imagined I would question, and to my husband, for being the best she-mother a kid could ever have.

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