"Who's Your Other Mama?"

We always knew the questions would inevitably come from our two-and-three-quarter old grandson about his family. We have waited so long for him to begin to speak in sentences, and now we are delighted that he is not only speaking using nouns, verbs, and the usual parts of speech but also showing evidence of his thinking abilities. One recent night, as our daughter and he were having their usual bedtime conversation, he asked his mother "Who's your other mama?"

Now the question may seem unusual to some of us, but to him, it is a perfectly natural one. You see Cole is in the position of having two mamas, two daddies, two grandmothers, and one grandfather. In this modern age, it seems that many children have multiple parents and grandparents either because of divorce and remarriage or because of gay and lesbian parents sharing the responsibility of child rearing.

In my day and age, as we old ones tend to introduce our memories, I was quite the exception to be a child in a divorced family. I will always remember my mother's startled reaction after a sixth grade Mother's Day presentation when my teacher said she was surprised that I was so "normal" since my parents did not live together. Again, we have come a long way since then as the cliche goes.

Our grandson is blessed to live in a city that is accepting of non-traditional families. There are many more older mothers since they have chosen to postpone having children until their careers are well-established. There are many children from rainbow families such as Cole's. There are many children also being cared for by their often very young nannies. Here in the deep South, however, people still stare at non-traditional families since we are known here to have babies while we are often in our late teens or early twenties.

Just as our nation is changing in its attitudes relating to race and gender, it is good to mark progress toward accepting other families' choices as well. Now we are waiting on Cole to ask his dads the same question, "Who's your other dada?"