Two mummies. Only one is genetically related to each child. But that doesn’t matter: we both do all the mummy stuff and both mummies are on both birth certificates. Simple.
The grandparents are grandparents. They do all the grandparent stuff – the knitted jumpers, a bearded kiss goodnight, chocolates from a handbag at the theatre.
But what about my grandparents? And their parents? And their grandparents? What are they to my non-birth child? Do ‘relatives’ who died before he was born and to whom he is not genetically related count?
And what about my step grandparent? My Nana wasn’t genetically related to me. Will my stories about my nana – when she made trains with me out of cardboard boxes, my embarrassment when she fell asleep watching me in a school play, how she mispronounced lasagne, ‘lasange’ – will these stories somehow make her ‘count’ as late step-great grandmother to my non-genetic son?
Then of course there’s the donor’s family. Who are the donor’s parents to our children? By the time Luna and Willow are old enough to potentially choose to seek them out, they might have died, which seems a bit sad. What about their parents…and their parents…and their parents?
The concept of two mummies seemed so simple to us. It’s not. But then ‘simple’ isn’t a word which applies to many family configurations. And maybe that’s ok.