Family Life

Much has been made in the last few years of just exactly how a family is constituted. It can be a biologically-attached family, the traditional partnership of a male and a female and their offspring. And it can be as diverse as a street gang of young people taking comfort from the deep and intimate friendship they find among themselves, having been deprived of needed emotional attachments through a conventional family situation.

More latterly a family can be construed as an emotional bond between people of different gender or same gender, living together in social harmony, looking out for one another. And then there are the children. Where the children fit into all of this. At one time it was parents and children equalled family, and then the extended family offered additional emotional and social support to that unit that used to be called a "nuclear family".

Then we began to hear about layered families, where divorce took place, and separation and children were living partly with one parent, then the other. Complications set in further when either or both parent married again, and sometimes begat other children with their new spouses, and sometimes just adopted as it were, the existing children of the new spouse that had been divorced/separated just as they had.

It it seemed confusing to the adults involved, imagine how confusing it must have seemed to the children. Who must have felt deeply, convulsively, that life would be a whole lot simpler if their parents had just behaved like mature individuals and learned to live together in goodwill and appreciation of what drew them together in the first place. The children's homes and lives would not have been disrupted...and they dream on.

Now comes news of gay and surrogate families, and society becomes more complex, and seemingly more dysfunctional day by day. Children now accustom themselves to having two 'mothers', no fathers, or two 'fathers', no mothers. Or a 'mother' who is biologically male, along with a 'father' who is also a male of the species. Where might the child figure he/she fits into this zoo?

Alberta's Court of Appeal has chosen to uphold a decision that declares a gay man the legal father of a ten-year-old girl whom he had helped to raise for the first three years of her life. The gay man was not the biological father; his same-sex partner at the time had inseminated the child's mother who had agreed to surrender the child to the two men to bring up, as a family of three; two fathers, one child.

The child called one 'Daddy', and the other 'Papa' and all, seemingly was well. Until three years into her life they had a falling-out and separated. But the non-biological father decided he wanted to retain official legal title as the child's father nonetheless. And this he was granted. Her biological father is her guardian and his one-time partner now is her father. Figure that one out.

According to Nicholas Bala, a family and children's law expert at Queen's University Faculty of Law, the decision reinforces and reflects two legal trends; one to give more recognition to "social or psychological" parents, the other to give credence to the new realities of reproductive technology, rendering the old categories of 'mother' and 'father' somewhat redundant.

Among that group in question the two gay men, there were two lesbian women; one of whom gave birth to the little girl. They decided to, between themselves conceive another child. This child turned out to be a boy, and that boy is being raised by the two women. 

And if your head isn't spinning by now, it may be by the time things become even more complicated, and a generation of children unlike any before them comes to maturity imagining other novel ways to form family units.