Family Pride’s Blog

We’re excited to bring this guest post by Cindy Rizzo, Director of Grantmaking Programs for the Arcus Foundation.

The battle for GLBT family recognition and full legal rights is being waged not just in courts and state legislatures. It is being waged on a daily basis in the media, in PTA meetings and in daycare centers throughout the country. These are the places where it has become important to assert, in the words of The Who, that “the kids are alright.” But beneath the magazine cover stories with glossy photos of smiling parents and beautiful children, and unspoken in conversations about grade-point averages and athletic or artistic talent, lies a growing worry that our deep, dark secrets—our kid might be a bed wetter or on ADHD meds or coming home red-eyed from smoking pot—could get out to the straight world. We fear that as soon as any of these secrets becomes widely known, somebody will say, “See, I knew this kind of thing would happen if they had children.”

So instead we keep up appearances and tell the world that we do a better job of raising kids because we worked so hard to have them in the first place. Parents become public relations agents armed with study data and anecdotes of children attending elite colleges or doing important community service work. As if parenting weren’t hard enough, we have this “image thing” to contend with as well.

A parallel effort is going on in the fight for marriage equality, where couples are forever talking about how long they’ve been together, how loving and secure their relationships are, and how they have persevered and worked hard to maintain their connection. No one mentions divorce, couples therapy, the dreaded “lesbian bed death” or infidelity. And there is not one word about domestic violence.

This pressure to be perfect places an enormous strain on our families and can prevent us from seeking important mental health, substance abuse or other services that could address the very problems we feel constrained from discussing. It leaves service providers unaware of the need to put certain programs in place. And it can prevent us from reaching out to friends and family for support.

Lately I’ve taken on a new crusade: to assert that GLBT parents are merely equal—no better and no worse than heterosexual parents. We have kids at Harvard and we have kids who dropped out of high school. We have the toddler who shares and the toddler who bites without provocation. We provide a loving, nurturing environment, and yes, some of us don’t. The equality argument leaves room for an admission of vulnerability and says to our families, “You are no worse off than anyone else, so go get the help you need to make it through the rough spots.” The alternative—suffering in silence—is really no way to raise kids.

Cindy Rizzo is the parent of two sons, ages 20 and 15. One attends a very good college and the other is studying Chinese. Both are on ADHD meds, one has been brought home by the police twice and one is not involved in any extracurricular activities.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS