“And How Many Daddies?”

I recently ran into my friend Amy and her son Joey when I was downtown for an event with my daughter Sally. Amy had a similar evangelical upbringing to mine, and is today happily married to her partner of fifteen years, Kate. Their son Joey is two. I’ve gotten together with Amy for lunch on occasion, and when we ran into each other again last week we repeated, again, that we should get out families together sometime—when we weren’t so busy. I introduced Sally to Amy and Joey and then we parted ways.

As we headed off, I turned to Sally. “Joey has two mommies,” I told her.

“And how many daddies?” Sally asked.

“Um, none. It’s just Amy and Kate.”

“Then how did they make Joey?!” Sally exclaimed.

This exchange was fascinating. Sally accepted the idea of two mommies as completely normal. What she balked at was the idea that a child could have no daddy—but she balked for biological reasons. Sally may be only five, but she knows where babies come from. She knows about eggs and sperm, zygotes and fetuses. So when I told her Joey had two mommies she jumped immediately to polyamory (something we’ve never actually discussed). There was no value judgment, just honest scientific confusion. So I explained in vitro fertilization to her, and, well, that was that.

Watching Sally encounter LGBTQ individuals has been incredibly interesting. Sally is still figuring out the world around her, taking in information and categorizing it. A couple weeks ago we watched a Torchwood episode in which Jack Harkness kisses a WWII military captain—a man. Sally’s response? “A boy kissing a boy? That’s strange!” She’d never seen a same-sex kiss before, so her response was natural—but utterly without judgement.

Last week Sally was watching a documentary when she looked up suddenly, with a sort of curious excitement. “Mom! In this one there’s a man who turned into a woman! He wanted to be a woman, so he changed into one!” Again, no judgement. Rather, Sally had simply learned one more thing about the world around her—one more thing to be added in with everything else when formulating her understanding of it. And this excited her—because the world is an exciting and interesting place.

I love Sally’s youthful openness and honesty, I truly do. She encounters these things without prior preconceptions and without priorities. She soaks up new information without judgment and integrates it into her understanding of the world. She still has plenty to learn—she didn’t used the correct pronouns for the transgender woman, for instance—but she is open to and interested in learning.

My youngest sister is only a few years older than Sally, but she has none of Sally’s openness. She is already closed off. When my two-year-old son Bobby wore pink sandals on a recent visit, my sister responded with indignation—a boy, wearing girl shoes!? When Sally wore a two-piece swimsuit, my sister shamed her for it. I’ve heard my sister deride homosexuality—because a boy kissing a boy is apparently disgusting in addition to twisted and sinful—as well as premarital sex and “immodest” clothing. She is repeating what she has been taught, but what she has been taught is bigotry—the opposite of openness.

Let us hope that more children will grow up open, like Sally, rather than closed, like my youngest sister. We need more children asking questions like Sally’s.

“And how many daddies?”