Whadda you, some kinda queer?

Some of the differences between my experience and those of the women in The Other Mother is that they are all (presumably) lesbians, and I am bisexual. I'm not going to go off too much on a tangent here, since this is a baby blog, not a bisexuality blog, but I need to kvetch a little.

The bisexual experience is different than the gay or lesbian experience. I never went through that "realization of being different because I like girls and not boys" or worried about how I would have a normal life. Not that all lesbians have the same coming out experience, but there are differences in the process you go through in coming out, and while the lesbian experience has been explored quite a bit, the bisexual experience has not. In all these lesbian parenting books I've read, I never seem to read anything that really speaks to me.

Although, actually, the thing that bugs me about this particular book, now that I think about it, is maybe not the bisexuality issue at all. All the women in that book seemed to be either women who couldn't get pregnant and were jealous of their partners, or women who thought of themselves as "boyish" or "somewhere between a mother and a father" or "male-identified" or something like that. And that's totally great, IMO. I like it when people explore these (artificial) boundaries we have that define what exactly women and men are and should be and should act like, etc. But it made me feel like there was no room for a woman who simply doesn't want to have a baby Not someone who is exploring her gender identity, not someone who always related more to traditional men's roles than to women's, not someone who considers herself to be outside traditional gender descriptions. None of those is a path I've ever been on. Just a woman who doesn't think having a baby is something she needs to do. I know I'm not the only one; I've met women a lot straighter and more conventional than I am who feel the same way.

OK, enough kvetching for one day. I'll try and be less whiny tomorrow. (Always a good goal.)