The Imagined Family

It's the family so many of us dream of: beautiful, loving mommy, big strong handsome daddy, 2.5 cute, good-natured kids. Perfect. But those perfect, fantasy families get us into trouble when we insist that real life fit into that fantasy mold. Not even the finest family quite measures up.

It's not just a personal problem. The disconnect from real-family reality sometimes reaches the highest level of government. Latest example: the British Parliament is currently busy deciding whether the perfect family should be required by law. In fact, they may vote on it in the House of Lords today (Jan. 15). There's sort of a "no child left behind" idea afoot among traditionalists, where the legislative goal is to make sure that every child the government permits to be conceived enjoys an ideal childhood ensconced in the ideal happy family structure. Alas, government can't control the many conceptions that take place on the fly, in bedrooms or back seats of cars. And it's kind of hard to control the male end of the fertility equation. But as we've discovered with abortion, the part of procreation that takes place in a woman's body is a lot easier to get under legal control--especially if it's something that happens in a doctor's office. Which is what the U.K.'s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is charged with doing. In addition to ensuring safe and responsible medical practices, the authority gets to decide which women get to take a shot at conception--and which don't.

Part of The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, the one the Lords will likely vote on today (if not, they take it up again on January 23), proposes relaxing those eligibility requirements. Conservative groups in the U.K. have been all to pieces about this legislation, which has engendered hysterical articles and comments by men insisting the bill spells the end to fatherhood as we know it, and, heck, maybe to the whole male half of the human race.

The reason for all the hyperventilation? A provision in the bill that would stop requiring doctors to consider the future child's need for a father when helping women get pregnant through artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization. Translation: Lesbian couples and single women could more easily have kids using anonymous sperm donors--children would not have dads.

Women conceiving and raising children without men -- it's an idea that sparks a lot of anger and emotion. I should know -- not only am I one of those single women who chose to conceive a child via anonymous sperm donation, but I wrote a fairly upbeat book about it, called Knock Yourself Up. As a result, I've been called a lot of bad names: I'm selfish and thoughtless, for starters -- diabolical, even -- and when my poor son (now a joyous 18-month-old who would like you to know that the sheep says, "baaa!") ends up in prison as the inevitable result of my despicable choice, I should be jailed, too.

Yikes. Strong words for my decision to go create a family where there's only one parent and no dad. I do applaud the instinct to protect children, if that is what is motivating the critics of single motherhood by choice. But are they really protecting the children, or their own childlike fantasy of what a family is?

These critics of single parenthood (who tend not to be so fond of gay parenthood, either) seem to be totally, willfully disconnected from the reality of the nuclear family, believing the mere presence of a mom, a dad and a marriage license creates an ideal environment for a child. Have those elements in place and presto! You've got the Cleavers. Somehow these folks have never heard of a lousy dad or mom, or a family that was relatively loveless because the kids were totally unplanned. Meanwhile they call single parenthood (and gay or lesbian parenthood) a "social experiment," one likely to have devastating results for the children.

Actually, the idea that the nuclear family (just Mom, Dad and kids, operating largely outside any extended family network) should be the "norm" is also a relatively new social experiment--the term was coined in 1947--one that, with our near-50 percent divorce rate, could be reasonably considered to have failed, despite many individual successes. But most people don't need statistics to know that score. We've all seen that perfect-looking families often aren't perfect and that imperfect-looking ones often do a pretty good job. So why all the people in denial, clinging to and shrilly defending ideal notions of family that don't pan out half the time?

I can't tell you for sure, because I've spent a boatload of time floating down that very same river in Egypt. Ironically, most of us single moms by choice had the exact same problem as those who rail against the choice that we've made: we were clinging so tightly to the fantasy family that we lost our grip on reality. That's why we waited so damn long to have our kids. (I was 43!)

As a society, we've shifted many of our cultural expectations regarding marriage (like, it's OK to leave a really bad one) and the role of women (like, it's OK if they have a career or even run for president), but we haven't shifted our ideas about how a family is supposed to work. That's part of why a growing number of women find themselves single, nearing the fertility end-zone of 40, wanting children and not knowing what to do. We imagine the perfect nuclear family, and we can't imagine family working well any other way. I suspect this lack of ability to imagine and embrace more options is really hurting us, as a society, and keeping many of us from achieving the kind of happiness--and happy families--we might otherwise create for ourselves.

Before I set out on the path towards single motherhood, I was aware that the research into the fatherless children of donor conception -- the ones born to lesbian couples and single mothers, the ones some Brits are trying to save from that terrible fate by making sure they're never conceived -- shows that most really thrive. (Same thing, I'd wager, for kids who have only one or two loving dads, and no mom -- this isn't an anti-dad thing. In fact, more and more forty-ish single men are deciding to become single dads through adoption or surrogacy, for the same reasons that women are deciding to become single moms.) And when you compare the donor-conceived kids of single moms and lesbian couples to the kids from traditional families, they still look like they're doing just fine. I do think, as do experts in the field, that it's ideal for a child to be able to trace his or her biological roots, so I'm for open-identity egg and sperm donation. What the research that specifically looks at these chosen families finds is that it's the quality of the parenting, not the number or sex or sexual orientation of the parents, that matters most to a child. It's the individual situation! Imagine.

Even knowing all this, I was fairly, shall we say, wedded to the idea of the nuclear family. My progressive take on it was that it was fine if the partners were two men or two women, but other than that I stuck pretty close to the cultural script. I especially wanted my kid to have a dad, Ward Cleaver to be specific. It took me years to wrap my mind around an alternative model.

Even now, in my happy new identity as a single mom by choice, I get mired in traditional ideas. I know of two families that were set up in a way that's pretty far from the norm. At first glance, they appear to be totally traditional: Mom, Dad, baby. But on closer inspection, it turns out that Mom and Dad are just friends. They don't even live together--the child goes back and forth between households, as in a divorce. The difference being the parents still love each other--at least, as friends--and the custody arrangement predated conception. As far as I can see, these kids appear to be thriving.

Still, part of me sounds an alarm: Isn't this a dangerous social experiment? Isn't this confusing and disruptive to those poor kids? Well, maybe--but if so, certainly less so than it is for children of divorce, who, on top of shuttling between households, also have to deal with animosity between their parents and with their own shattered expectations. What stops me from looking at it another way? These are kids who, from the beginning, had two loving parents and two safe, loving places to call home. Couldn't that be seen as being even a better deal?

Now, most people--even those of us in the "alternative family" camp--don't want to throw out the romantic, two-parent model. I sure don't. And of course fathers are important and valuable. So are mothers. Duh. But the really important stuff--a good dad, a good mom, a happy childhood, a happy marriage--just can't be legislated into existence, though the British Parliament can sure try. You can, however, cling so tightly to the ideal of a traditional nuclear family that you miss seeing the value of other kinds of families. Isn't it about time that we, as a culture, started not only seeing the strength in some of the diverse family models around us, but also stopped obsessing on the same old fantasy family--the one that doesn't always work, if we really tell the truth about it--and started imagining some new ones?