“And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.”
Since getting angry doesn’t help my daughter, though, I took a breath and tried to do damage control.
I told her that love makes a family, not size or gender or anything else. She wanted to know, then, why other families aren’t the same.
“There are some like ours, honey. Like Austin’s family—”
“Austin has a dad. He just lives somewhere else.”
I froze. I don’t want to say that the same is true of her. It’s not. She doesn’t have a dad, she has a biological father who doesn’t even take our phone calls anymore, who either doesn’t tell his girlfriends that she exists, or lies and tells them that I cheated on him and he doubts he’s really her father. (The Missouri and Pennsylvania courts would be surprised to hear that, considering they ran three paternity tests and garnish his wages every week, none of which he even contested.) I don’t want to lie and say he loves her and misses her and thinks of her all the time, that the only reason he doesn’t see her is because he lives so far away and doesn’t have enough money to travel. It would end this argument in a heartbeat, it would make her feel better, but it would still be a lie. And it’d be a lie I’d have to answer for ten years down the line, when she becomes a teenager and he starts building his replacement family without her.
I froze for too long. She started to cry.
“Sweetheart, there are other families like ours.”
“Then where are they?” she demanded. “Where are they?”
I dropped the ball on this one, you guys. I dropped it so hard it rolled away down the street and off a cliff.
Help 
darlas_mom pick it back up and more. She’s looking for photos “of you with your actual families. Straights with kids, gays and lesbians with kids, single parents (both moms and dads), blended families, families of different ethnicities or multiple ethnicities.” She wants ’em all. —Get yourselves into her book.
