Families have evolved.

Now language must too

Andrew Solomon

We need new words for new kinds of relatedness, ones that don’t simply hark back to traditional
roles

Monday 24 April 2017

It is a shortcoming of the English language that we have relatively few words to describe familial
relationships: father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, grandfather, grandmother, aunt, uncle,
cousin – occasionally with a prefix such as “step” or “half”.

We have had general access to computers in daily life for only a few decades, yet the terms we’ve
learned to help us accommodate that change are ubiquitous: email, pdf, smartphone, texting,
Googling, emojis, and so on. We have integrated this new vocabulary so deeply that such descriptors
are commonly used as metaphors: we speak of having insufficient bandwidth to achieve something,
or of being hard-wired to behave in a certain way.

This bubbling-up of language reflects how readily discourse assimilates widespread changes in
everyday life. And yet for families, the lexicon remains cramped. As a consequence, when we refer to
new modes of relatedness we tend to rely on the few existing forms for inadequate similes. We
shoehorn the expanding variety of families back into their capacity to imitate the traditional.

My husband and I are often asked whether our son George’s surrogate mother is “like an aunt”. We
are asked which of us is “really the mom”. Friends in an open adoption are asked whether their
children’s biological parents are “like cousins”. Single parents are routinely asked what it is like to be
“both mother and father”.

People apply this vocabulary with a blunt literalism, asking adopted children about their “real
parents”, in keeping with the presumption that nature consistently trumps nurture. People will
likewise ask my husband and me which of us is our son’s “real father”. What is my relationship to my
son’s surrogate and her wife, who are beloved members of our family – especially because the
surrogate is also the mother of my husband’s biological children? She is not exactly a mother,
because she is not a primary parent, but neither is she a special friend – the word friend denoting a
category too indeterminate for who we are, especially in the age of Facebook.

When my husband’s biological children, Oliver and Lucy, learned to talk, they called their birth
mother Mama and their adoptive mother Mommy. Then there was the question of what to call my
husband, to make it clear that Mama and Mommy were the primary parents, but that John had a
special relationship to them. John suggested Donor Dad, but they didn’t know what “donor” meant,
so they called him Donut Dad. Now they call my husband Papa and me Daddy, and the son who is
legally John’s and my child calls them Mama and Mommy.

Every time I explain the structure of my family, I have to reiterate these complex relationships in a
paragraph at least, because there are no words for them. Our relationship to Oliver and Lucy is not
less loving than our relationship to George, but it entails different responsibilities and different levels
of contact.
A friend who is bringing up a child as a single mother has met someone who used the same sperm
donor she did. They are not close friends. Are those two women’s children to call themselves
brothers? If not, then what?

When Jennifer Finney Boylan came out as transgender, her children felt they could no longer call her
Daddy, but they couldn’t go with Mommy because that title was already taken by their mother, so
they came up with Maddy.

A man I recently interviewed had wanted to have children but was HIV-positive. He couldn’t afford
sperm-washing, a process to separate the sperm from virus-carrying semen. So he asked a close
friend to be the sperm donor, the niece of another friend to be the egg donor, and a third person to
be the surrogate. Through this unlikely calculus, the four of them produced children who live with
him and see him as their primary parent.

“Because we were his idea, he’s our real dad,” his 10-year-old daughter explained to me. But what
are they to call those other three people, each of whom is involved to a degree in their upbringing?

When a lesbian woman I know asked a friend to be sperm donor for her and her wife, he said he
wasn’t interested in being a donor, but would love to be a father. Now the three of them live
together and all three identify as the child’s parents. It seems to have confused the schools a great
deal, and one of them still lacks a full legal claim to parenthood.

In our ecstatic embrace of the nuclear family, we are told that a child 'needs' a mother and a father

The idea is not so much to redefine the roles of father and mother – although such redefinition
occurs constantly as historical contexts shift – but to abandon the binary restrictions those roles
impose. Childcare has always been a collective activity. And relatedness grows ever more
complicated and varied.

The whole system has changed beyond measure since feminism broadened the right to divorce, and
thereby paved the way for step-parents, giving children multiple households (a phenomenon distinct
from the historical step-families produced when widows and widowers remarried). Feminism
likewise presses for a situation in which a father’s obligations are more commensurate with a
mother’s, but does not remove the stigma fathers face when they are the primary caregivers – or the
greater stigma their wives confront if they are not the primary caretakers.

Explaining a wider distribution of responsibilities among biological and non-biological parenting

figures carries the risk of similar ostracism. In our ecstatic embrace of the nuclear family, we are told
that a child “needs” a mother and a father, and that it is problematical for a child to be “missing” one
of those archetypal roles, or to look to more than two people for ultimate guidance and reassurance.

We should also question the tyranny of biological relatedness. Why should we presume that children
are better off with their biological parents than with anyone else? Some children have biological
parents who do not love them or are not competent to raise them; that is an old problem. But the
people profoundly involved in bringing up a child have always been both biological and non-
biological. Therefore, relatives should be an encompassing word, and each family should have the
right to define it to suit their own reality.
How can anyone suppose that I am more of a “real” father than my husband is? And how can anyone
presume that he is more “related” to the children for whom he was a sperm donor than to the one in
our household, for whom he has cared since birth? Let’s have a fiesta of new vocabulary for these
new forms of relatedness, and a society that recognises them.

There is nothing wrong with a heterosexual, two-parent, monoracial family: it’s an age-old
arrangement for bringing up children, and it can work beautifully. I raise no objection to it; I grew up
in such a household myself. But it is not the only method that can work beautifully. We need to
acknowledge that families come in multiple shapes and sizes, that love is not a finite asset, and that
caregiving involves more than a genetic imperative.