<--Lovergirl in fishermen's pants Mikhela in fishermen's pants-->
Before we met him, Donor Dan had already successfully donated to another couple, Alwyn & Yolande, who live in Japan but are moving to England as I write. Yolande is Australian, Alwyn is German. Their son, Armand, is 18 months old. Recently they came to Australia for a couple of weeks to so Armand could meet Danny & James for the first time. He is exceptionally cute and a very happy little boy.
I really liked Alwyn & Yolande, and I'm keen to stay in touch. I think it will become important to all the kids, as they get older, to be familiar with those biological connections. The four of us were talking about how we would explain the kids' relationships to each other. I had some garbled spiel in my head about being 'like cousins' - I suppose a bit like I see Donor Dan & James as being 'like uncles' - but Alwyn said, 'You know, they are half-brothers and sisters.' For some reason that pulled me up short. That's a very close relationship. Our kids will have half-siblings that will probably never even live in the same country. I take our nuclear family structure for granted - it's really not that different to your average suburban family (except apparently two women are better at equally dividing household & childrearing tasks than a woman and a man - hard to believe I know). But there are so many important members of our family that don't have names.
What do you call the non-biological mother? (well, at least that's easy - mummy)
How do you label your relationship to your donor?
What do you call the other kids sired by your donor, but not to your family?
What do I call the parents of the other kids sired by our donor?
I call Lovergirl's family 'my in-laws' (or when I'm being not-very-funny, 'my out-laws'), which is easy shorthand that everyone understands. No one really cares that we're not actually married, and the emotional content of my relationship with them is the same as if they really were legally my in-laws. If I was talking about our relationship to Alwyn & Yolande's family, what would I say? 'The women who are the parents of the other family our donor donated to'?
I remember small snippets from Dale Spender's Man Made Language, which I read about fifteen years ago. She talked about the importance of having words to describe experiences and how the possibilities and limitations of language shape one's ability to think. You know, like the Inuit have twenty-seven (or whatever) different words for snow, while we have one, plus a couple of descriptors (powdery, slushy). So we don't see all the different gradations of snow because we don't have the linguistic capacity to distinguish.
Calling Lovergirl's family my in-laws is legally untrue but emotionally true for me. Conversely, for me the label 'half-brothers and sisters' doesn't really work for the relationship between kids of the same donor. Biologically it's correct - they have half the same genetic material - but being a brother or sister, or even half a one, implies a particular sort of relationship in my mind. It's an emotional term not only a biological one. I know we'll end up using it, and we'll adopt it and it will no longer seem unwieldy and inappropriate. But it feels kind of clunky - uncomfortable - and as we move into parenthood I find more and more concepts for which I don't have the language to describe my world.
9 comments:
Donor Dan? Is that like Diver Dan?
yep just like that.
Now get back to your writing (methinks you're procrastinating)
twenty weeks!
is that a comment on my rotundity?
We also have relationships to half sibs (or donor sibs, as some people call them) and their mothers. We call them 'the women who have children from the same donor'. Our son calls the kids his "half brother" and "half sister". We initially used a description of them as "G, who has the same donor as you", with the emphasis on what causes the relationship so that he would understand that.
How many weeks are you now? We're not getting much of a pregnancy diary!
Keep the pants, you look comfy.
Polly over at LesbianDad uses the term "special cousins."
What I found especially cool is that the donor and his nuclear family, including the kids, use the same term for Polly's children.
For me, 'special' is a word that has been badly overused and now seems to mean second rate, defective or disabled. But I like the idea of finding a new term. Although new terms, taken on by oppressed groups, will eventually acquire undesirable undertones.
fisherman pants
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