In this blog, Gianna Mula reflects on the challenges of becoming a parent within the LGBTIQ+ community, sharing her personal journey of moving across borders to create the possibility of building a family as a queer person.
By Gianna Mula
The journey of parents starts obviously earlier that the birth of the child, sometimes with the idea of a child or with the conception and then with the realization of being expecting. For LGBTIQ+ people, the road to parenthood requires lots of work, in getting past physical, legislative and social circumstances. Often queer people decide to or are forced to move to a new country in order to fulfill the dream of their own family.
I moved to the Netherlands to live with my Dutch partner and I married her while we were already trying to conceive with the help of a donor and the Dutch health system. When we finally had the lucky test result and we went through the pregnancy, our baby was born and it felt, for a second, that we had done the biggest part of the job. Yes, I was wrong. Becoming a parent filled me with joy and anxiety for the new role I was going to fulfill.
The fact of being a lesbian non-biological mother in the Netherlands, posed some issues. To ensure that I was legally recognized as parent internationally, we had to hire a lawyer, a translator and go through explaining our family situation to numerous strangers. Although the Dutch legislation recognizes married same sex couples as legal parents of their children, things can be difficult if one of both parents are not Dutch and they wish to have their relationship with their children legally recognized in their countries of origin. This leads to time and cost expensive processes for the luckiest, while for others, like trans parents or families with more than two parents, it can leave them in a total legal vacuum. All these complex legal issues are to be resolved after the birth of the child and often with urgency, putting queer families under extra stress in a delicate moment.
In the midst of the emotions and questions coming with having a new-born that are common to all parents, other than worrying of the legal side of matters, there were the social interactions. Something that I was not very focused on while we were trying to conceive became really important, especially for others. Questions about how I could be the mother of my child came up in the hospital and explanations were to be made in day-care and in every other social space in which we manifested as a family. There was not much space, outside of our four walls, to speak about this and other issues that affected us as new parents. When a friend suggested a Parenting Across Borders dialogue group, it took a while to make space for it in the busy times of early parenthood.
Finally, I joined a group of new mothers, specifying to the organizers that I was a queer non-biological mum. Each session I would sit with other mothers and we all tried to be honest with ourselves about this wonderful and messy experience of motherhood. What a journey. I remember coming home to my wife and saying: every single parent deserves this! With this I meant openness, space, intimacy and the possibility to think of your individual needs, undisturbed, for an hour and a half!
As a queer mother, I did share a lot of the same feelings, fears, achievements with other mothers but it also meant I had to constantly share the fact of not being the one who had difference in ways I was not always comfortable with.
At the end of the sessions, I was enthusiastic of the possibilities offered by the PAB dialogue and I thought: a similar group for queer parents is really missing, shall we start it? The organization responded enthusiastically and I took the opportunity to train as a dialogue facilitator with Parenting Across Borders in the hope to give back to others some of the benefits I had from participating in the sessions. As I look forward to begin co-facilitating the first group of queer parents, I bring with me the comfort, the insights and the warmth I got from all the parents I talked to.
Gianna was born and raised in Italy, moved to England in her twenties and then to the Netherlands, where she now lives with her wife and their 3 years old child. She is a volunteer at the Women’s Library and Queer U Stories. After taking part in a motherhood dialogue series, she completed the Parenting Across Borders training program to become a facilitator.
