Are We The Only Gay Family At Daycare?

And why does that matter?

Do you ever have one of those recurring, place-specific thoughts? The kind that pop up whenever you walk by a certain house on your block, or buy your coffee, or see the same dog on the street?

Because whenever I walk into my son’s daycare, I have the exact same thought:

Are we the only gay parents here?

Then my brain gives itself this little slap on the wrist:

Shush. why does that even matter to you?

Both of these questions are hard to answer. For one thing, we don’t really have any kind of regular contact with the other parents and caregivers at our daycare. Sure, we see certain parents more often because our pick-up and drop-off schedules line up; we chat with the teachers and the cook and the director; we even do the occasional curriculum night (yes, our daycare is really great).

And even if I did, say, have access to some kind of daycare census where I could see exactly how many other gay people are sending their kids here - what would I do with that information? How would it make me feel?

my wife and I dropping our son off at daycare for the first time.

I brought this up with my wife one day as we were walking the dog. I wanted to know if she had ever had this thought (are we the only ones here?), and if she - someone who knows my brain better than most anyone - could figure out why I was so fixated on this (why does that even matter to you?).

“I think if we knew there were other gay parents, we’d try to be friends with them,” she said.

And it’s true - we are severely lacking in local queer friends. For whatever reason (and probably the subject of a whole other post), my wife and I don’t have many gay friends in our home city. In fact, we have only one other lesbian couple that we hang out with regularly. So often, I bemoan that I feel totally cut off from the LGBTQ+ community in Montreal - I don’t go to queer events, I don’t talk about the myriad issues in the news (Italy removing gay mothers from birth certificates, WTF?!), I don’t have other people around me who feel the same kind of attack on their personhood when they absorb yet another horrific assault on LGBTQ+ rights by a legislature.

I am aware that this is partially my fault, but it’s also kind of a product of being a parent. It’s hard to make friends as an adult in any context — especially when you have a tiny person to take care of. Free time is extremely limited, and there are a lot of competing interests on that little slice of time: do I want to nap, work out, clean up, try to maintain some kind of hobby? Or do I want to get a coffee with someone new, someone who also walks into our daycare as a queer person and feels a bit…I don’t know…lonely, I guess?

I think I am asking this question to myself like a broken record (are we the only ones here?) because I am craving a community within my existing community. I am looking for an easy way out of the loneliness I feel as a queer person. I love our daycare; they take great care of our son and they make us feel safe and secure leaving him in their care. I love saying hi to the other parents we see, the director, the cook, the teachers. I love looking at the kids’ art on the walls. I just wonder if there is another queer parent in the halls, thinking the same things as I am, sometimes. Someone who might understand the way my wife and I walk through life.

Do you ever ask yourself something like this? What’s your recurring question that just won’t quit? I’d love it if you’d leave it in the comments.

Sincerely,

Lonely, overthinking Queer Mom