At last year’s Dyke Day in Los Angeles, I stood with some family friends looking out onto a sea of toddlers, preschoolers, and babies strapped to their mothers’ chests. Our big kids, we all realized, stood out.
We hadn’t all met up here on purpose. We just happened to run into each other and realized how nice it was to be together. I said we should we should start a group for queer moms of older kids, and everyone agreed. But finding a weekend that worked for everyone proved impossible.
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When I first became a mom, I was desperate for community. I was lucky to have a solid support system around me; several friends had babies around the same time, so we could lean on each other through sleepless nights, body changes, growth spurts, and everything in between.
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But I wasn’t out back then. By the time I began looking to connect with fellow queer moms, my son was seven and had a routine of his own. My wife and I, along with our son, had also moved somewhere new, and most of the parents I met through social media only had little kids. They planned playdates around naptimes and witching hours, while we were long past those days.
Parenting resources are so often geared toward moms in the early stages of motherhood. There are mommy and me classes and play groups, and dozens upon dozens of online groups for moms of young kids – and it’s hard enough finding queer families within those spaces.
Nevertheless, many families do seem to find their people and then stick together as their kids grow. But our son is 11 now, and finding two-mom families with kids his age who also want to make new friends feels like searching for a needle in a haystack.
It is imperative for all parents to have friends with kids, but for queer parents, it’s equally important for at least some of these friends to be queer, too. We need people who can empathize with the unique challenges of raising kids in a heternormative world.
“Having some community who understood the specific concerns or issues or even just family structure is so helpful,” California mom of one, Amanda Deibert, told LGBTQ Nation. “I met an amazing lesbian mom with kids just a few years older than mine when my daughter was a few months old and having someone to talk about the lesbian-family specific things made a tremendous difference.”
“This year especially, there are other kids who have lesbian moms in her class and that has been lovely for her and for me. It’s nice not to always be the only ones, even in a community of lovely and mostly supportive and loving people.”
Babcock added that it can be “maddening” at times being around hetero parents. “So is being around our amazing child-free lesbian couples — they think they get it but really don’t, especially around socializing.”
My wife and I have been lucky to connect with a couple families like ours, but with older kids also comes the added challenge of busy schedules.
“We have no time to invest in friendships unless we arm wrestle our schedules, which takes a buy-in from all parties, including kids,” Audrey Babcock, an LA mom of one, told LGBTQ Nation.
Besides, things like compatibility and shared interests matter, too. Two families won’t automatically mesh well just because they both have two women at their helms.
“I’ve found that the older queer moms already have their communities, and the younger queer moms don’t have the same interests as my wife and I,” said Connecticut mom of three Nikkya Hargrove, adding that she yearns “for more of a local, queer women of color [mom] community” as she and her wife get older.
According to the Williams Institute, 75% of LGBTQ+ parents are cisgender women. There is so much potential for community, and no doubt so many lonely queer moms out there in search of one. Queer moms with older kids need support, too, especially as the United States becomes more hostile to families like ours.
It may be hard, but my wife and I will continue to fight to find our people.
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