Danielle T. Pointdujour writes at Ebony magazine about a woman who is having a baby with a man who happens to be her gay male BFF.
The concept of “family” mystified me in my youth. Although people always talk of traditional families, it always seemed to me that there were slight variations on what “normal” looked like. Some people had a two parent home with four grandparents; some only had two parents and one grandparent. Others still had only one parent, with no grandparent, aunt or uncle. And all too often there were homes with no birth parent at all, just a bunch of people who cared enough to mean something along the way. As an adult, I came to the conclusion that there is no “traditional” family, just the family you have (or create), know and love.
When I decided that I wanted to be a mother, it was the idea of family that scared me. I wanted my future child to have the perfect life, to grow up in the little house, with the manicured lawn, car in the driveway, playful dog and two parents who loved him or her more than life. However as life happened, nothing was happening to make my picture perfect fantasy a reality. No man, no money for the cute house and turns out I’m allergic to dogs. I started to think that motherhood would never happen for me. It was during this woe-is-me phase that my BFF Devin reminded me that I should never give up on something that means so much to me, and reminded me that just because I can’t get the “traditional” family, doesn’t mean I can’t have a family at all and in that moment, my plan to get knocked up at a sperm bank was formed.
Read Danielle T. Pointdujour's entire piece at Ebony magazine.
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