Free That Takes Ovaries! by Rivka Solomon

“moms.” I have been Askia’s parent for almost four years now, and yet I am still amazed at how quickly and intuitively I fell in love with this child and accepted a role for myself I never thought I would have—or even want.
    When Bashir and I first started seeing each other, she was living in Los Angeles and I was still in New York. With all those flight hours between us, the fact that she had a seven-year-old son didn’t seem that big a deal to me. I certainly didn’t see myself as one of Askia’s parents. But after a year, when we moved in together, I suddenly realized that mother and son were a package deal. And, to put it bluntly, I was terrified.
Me, give up my vagabond lifestyle, be responsible to a child day in and day out?
I mean, I knew I was in love, but was I really
that
in love?
    I was never one of those people who thought of having kids as a “when” or even an “if” in my future. I hated it when older relatives such as my stepmother asked when I was going to settle down and have a family. “I’m not sure that’s going to happen,” I’d reply, before changing the subject. I knew from an early age that I had a nomadic heart, a need for the drama of moving from place to place. Since I turned eighteen, I had moved several times, leaving San Francisco for my first solo apartment in New Haven, my godmother’s living room in Manhattan, a mud room with no electricity in Kenya, a studio with no air-conditioning in sweltering Los Angeles … I loved being constantly in motion, just as my own family was during my childhood. Then, suddenly, all that came to an end.
    In the early days of living with Bashir and Askia, I worried thatall my fears would come true: that I was giving up a fundamental part of myself, sacrificing my free spirit to the demands of motherhood like so many women before me. But after a while I could see it wasn’t like that. Instead of a huge, mysterious gulf that swallowed me up, I found being a parent was made up of very small and ordinary things: Askia needed someone to drive him to school, to make his lunch, to listen to him talk about how it feels when someone teases him, to read him a story at night. And in living this everyday, drama-free existence, I discovered the bedrock inside myself, the strong self who had learned to find her own stability to survive a life of motion and change.
    “What do you want to read tonight,” I’d ask. I wanted to share with Askia the books I’d loved as a kid, like
Harriet the Spy
and novels by Judy Blume. But that first year, the books Askia wanted to read horrified me.
    “Animorphs!”
    I’d sigh and grimace and stall and finally pull one of the blue books off the shelf.
    From the beginning, it was important to me to make a full commitment to being a partner and coparent, rather than trying to leave room for a quick exit, should it become necessary, by telling Askia I was a “friend” or “aunt.” I knew Askia would eventually have to field questions about his queer parents, and so I wanted to be very clear that I
was
his parent, and that his family was just as stable, strong, and normal as anyone else’s.
    Fortunately, Askia has not yet encountered any superobvious or in-your-face homophobic reactions to his parents; it hasn’t seemed to matter much that he has two moms. Like all kids with same-sex parents, though, Askia did have to figure out what to call me, the nonbiological parent. In the beginning, he called me “Rebecca,” which felt safe and neutral for both of us. Then, a couple of years later, Askia looked up at me across the breakfast table and asked, “Can I call you Mom?”
    Taken by surprise, I answered without really thinking about it. “Sure, honey, if you want to.”
    “Okay,” he replied, picking up his spoon and digging into his Cheerios. “Thanks, Mom.”
    It didn’t stick though, he already had someone he called Mom. We tried a few other variations—Mommy, Mama—but ended up sticking with the