There were these constant reminders, ‘You’re not a family.’
“Family, kids, marriage is my top priority,” shares Sammi, a 20-year old college student. “All I want are kids. I want a career too. I’m thankful I don’t have to choose, I really am, but if I had to, I know what I would choose, which I think comes from my family. We grew up as a cohesive unit. My family is very, very, very close. And they modeled that when things are hard, you can figure it out, when you love something.”
Sammi’s parents did just that at a time when same-sex marriage wasn’t legal. But her moms, Deb and Ro, made it work.
“I grew up with two moms and an older sister,” Sammi recalls. “I think that that is rare for someone my age, and very rare for someone my sister’s age, who’s 27 I feel like most people who have gay parents from our age had ‘straight’ parents who got divorced and then one of them met their partner. My moms were together. Deb desperately, desperately wanted kids and was picking between the love of her life and a family, because it was the ‘80s.” Deb felt like she had to choose between having kids and staying with Ro, thinking she would have to be with a man in order to have kids. Sammi explains. “Gay people didn’t have kids then. It wasn’t easy to do. But sperm banks existed. That’s how my sister and I ended up being born.”
When Deb brought up with Ro the idea of getting pregnant, she was supportive and encouraged them to go for it even though kids weren’t at the top of her life list. “Ro never particularly wanted kids, but she wanted Deb more than anything, and was just like, ‘We can do this.’ That’s why Deb carried my older sister, because Deb was the one that wanted to be pregnant. She really, desperately wanted that experience,” Sammi says.
The couple turned to sperm banks to build their family. Deb carried Sammi’s older sister Avery and Ro carried Sammi, after some convincing from Deb. “She just really thought Ro would connect to the experience of being pregnant and she was right. Ro is thankful every single day that she was pregnant. Ro said it was the first time she ever connected to feeling like a woman and loved every minute of that process and can’t really imagine her life without it,” shares Sammi.
The sisters, Sammi and Avery, don’t share biological parents because their moms weren’t able to use the same sperm donor, despite trying. While the sisters are close in every other way, their lack of biological connection has always been a source of sadness for Sammi. “I think people’s obsession with biology really contributed to my own obsession with biology,” Sammi says. “I had a very hard time not being biologically related to my sister and my mom. I did a million things to be like my sister.” The absence of biological and legal ties also presented some logistical challenges for the family of four.
Ro is Canadian and the family would fly to visit family there, but couldn’t go through customs as a family. Avery and Sammi each has the same last name as their biological mothers, so in going through customs, they would pair off — Avery would go through with Deb, Sammi with Ro. “The customs officials would be like, ‘Well why are you guys here?’ ‘To see family.’ ‘Well you don’t have family.’ We did it a lot. It was very anxiety-producing for me. There were these constant reminders, ‘You’re not a family.’” At school, the two were never listed together in the school directory because they didn’t share last names, although that was the custom for siblings with straight parents.
Deb and Ro did what they could to ensure Sammi and Avery were protected from homophobia and raised in an understanding environment. “I went to a very, very liberal, progressive private school in Manhattan, which was very intentional on my parents’ part. I think that my parents did the best job they could to protect us.”
Deb and Ro even went through a complicated and intrusive adoption process when Sammi was seven to ensure that their children would have two legal parents in case anything happened to either of them. Sammi describes the process as “really terrible. We had home visits many times. It was a woman with a clipboard coming in observing and taking notes, family interviews. I had to be interviewed by myself. I call Deb Emama, because Ema is mom in Hebrew. They were like, ‘Do you want your Emama to be your mother?’ I was young and confused and just started to cry. I felt like she’d always been my mother.” For Sammi, the process was also frightening at times. Sammi remembers the anxiety it caused her and her parents. “I was just like, ‘If I answer these questions wrong, is Deb going to be taken away? Is my sister going to be taken away?’”
The cross-adoption and Ro adopted Avery and Deb adopted Sammi while keeping each biological mother’s rights intact. But it came with a hefty price tag of around $15,000. Many families have managed to navigate the process of adopting their own child in a system that is designed to transfer parental rights from one or two parents to a separate parent or couple. But the time and money that process takes is clearly prohibitive for most people.
What makes families strong and functional is clearly more about love and commitment than biology, but the legal status and benefits conferred to those biological ties unnecessarily deprives families that are created through different kinds of bonds. With an increasing number of people choosing to make family in ways that aren’t supported by our policies, more of us are recognizing the many ways in which families are being failed by systems.
This piece is part of Family Story’s All Our Families story-telling project.
Family Story is dedicated to shifting the conversation about families today from one of judgment, hopelessness, and despair to a beautiful new vision of families and family life to which we can each aspire.
Our mission is to create a conversation that meets people where they are, embraces the dignity and value of a wider range of family arrangements, and elevates models that illustrate the resilience and creativity of families today.
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