#four moms

Kathy Clarke (she/her/hers) was born in Dallas, TX and moved to Ashville, NC at age 8. She attended boarding school in Mercersberg, PA, spent a year at Culford School in Bury-St. Edmunds and now lives in St. Paul, MN.

All photos in this story are from Kathy’s Snapchat series. The full Snapstory can be viewed at the bottom of this page.

What communities do you consider yourself a part of? I’m a child of queer parents, child of divorced parents, graduate of the Rainbow Mountain Children’s school, a graduate of Mercersburg Academy. I’m a white, cisgender, straaaight? woman...emphasis on the question mark. I’m an older sibling. I’m a summer birthday. I’m a grown-up emo kid. That’s super important to me.

Which aspect(s) of yourself drew you to this project? The story of strange story that is all my freakin’ moms. I was born without a father; my mom had me and my sister through donor insemination. Everything you can assume, my story resists those assumptions. If I said I was raised with two moms, you would assume that those moms were romantically involved, but when I was born, they weren’t. And when I say “my parents got divorced” you can assume they were married, but they weren’t because it was the ‘90s in Texas. (But it was a divorce, let me tell you.) And then when you say “my mom remarried” you assume she actually got remarried, but she didn’t; she was just with another woman for 13 years. And you assume if I were to say “I have three mothers” that they would all identify as queer. But one of my moms, my birth mom’s first partner, Anne, didn’t come out [to my sister and me] until I was a senior in high school. We’d known, of course, but my sister took it really hard. Well, my sister took it initially hard and got over it quickly, and then I was super initially supportive and then had difficulty with it later on in the summer.

How did you have more difficulty with it later? The way she came out to us was super dramatic, actually. She came up to [our] boarding school and took us out for donuts at like 10 am on a Saturday morning, and she’d brought her friend Lois with her. We knew Lois: she was a mom of kids we were friends with at Rainbow Mountain, but she was also one of those moms who was always helping at school, and so was Anne. So we knew they were friends.  

So Anne says she has news for us, and Emma [my sister] goes “Oh, do you have a boyfriend?” because that’s the kind of jokes she makes. And Anne goes “No,” and takes our hands the way mothers do, and goes “I have a girlfriend.” And Emma’s face just falls. She was joking and she’s upset that she was right. She pouts for the rest of the day. Whereas I was initially super verbally supportive and happy, and very ready to take Lois into my life. But then later that summer…I wasn’t resistant to it until it changed my experience of my mother. Anne had always been a person who was very present in her house; she worked from home, she didn’t really go out. But when she started being with Lois, she wanted to go to bonfires every Saturday night, and Lois would be over cooking dinner, and there was this sort of disruption of what I could anticipate from a Saturday night at Anne’s house: not watching Law and Order with Anne as it had been since I could remember, but a bonfire at Lois’s with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Which, for someone with social anxiety like I have, was just really not on the agenda. But Emma was fine with all of that.  

Do you ever have any internal conflict with having three, and now four, moms? For me, I think the biggest conflict is the degree to which I feel like I belong in queer spaces. Especially [because] I don’t generally present queer, and don’t feel queer, but absolutely I feel like I belong in queer spaces more than not-queer spaces because I was raised in them. My step-mom Patrice, who was my mom’s second partner was one of those super political lesbians. She found this resource for the city of Asheville called The Lavender Pages, I think, with ads and classifieds for any sort of business person or contractor who was queer in any capacity, but particularly lesbian. And they were the only people who ever came to our house and did anything.

What was this like for you growing up? It was very easy for me to own this, having queer parents and growing up in a queer space, when it was a non-issue—so when I was at a super-hippie school in this super-hippie town. There were other kids with queer parents at my school.

Then I get to this reasonably-conservative high school, and I have to own this part of my upbringing a lot more forcefully. And also have to contextualize it for some people; there was a girl freshman year who asked me “if your parents are gay, does that mean you’re gay?” She absolutely could not understand that the answer was “no.” What I actually did was look her dead in the eye and said “Because straight people always have straight kids, right?” And she went “Yeah.”

So what that translated to was a lot of involvement in what we then called the Gay/Straight Alliance, and a lot of just telling people about this. Junior year at a community gathering, which is like a [biweekly] assembly, I told my story, and told my parents’ story. Showing people that families like mine are present and visible, but not because we are queer families. We’re visible because we’re here.

How do you feel like you’ve grown from having four moms, and the questions it brings up? It’s been very formative in my concept of my identity, especially in the way that I separate my identity from that of my sister, because the way we treat this is very different. She spent more time at various conservative prep schools and is thereby a lot more conservative about revealing this part of herself. Whereas I’ve always felt it’s my duty to bear this flag for my parents and to fight for equal treatment.

For me, being “the activist kid” about queer issues was very formative for my identity in high school. Especially when I went to boarding school in Britain. If Mercersburg was middle-of-the-road leaning toward conservatism, Culford was an upstanding British Christian school. To a degree, I weaponized my upbringing. Kids would be saying derogatory comments about queer people of any variety—usually gay men and lesbian women—and I would snap at them: “You know this is offensive to someone who was raised by gay parents, right?” And they would look at me. It absolutely felt like a grenade, shutting people down when they were assuming normativity, and it was a way I could check them, and make them check themselves and realize they were making assumptions…you know, without hitting them over the head with a bat.

For some reason, I felt like those were my issues too, that I had inherited them from my mother—from all my mothers. Especially because [they] are all very passive about queer issues. I’m their only source of information other than very normative Gay And Lesbian Equality-type stuff, because they were all second-wave feminists, and they feel like they’ve fought their fight.

This feeling of needing to fight for my parents and for my peers didn’t really translate into college. I had a feeling that fighting that fight wasn’t staying in my lane anymore. Even though I might be queer? I don’t know.

Have you ever met other people who share this part of you? [laughs] I met another girl in fourth grade who also had three moms, which was my situation at the time. It wasn’t just that she had gay parents, it was that she had more than two of them, and that she was also a donor insemination kid. And I was like “NO, THAT WAS MY THING. YOU CAN’T HAVE THAT. IT’S TOO WEIRD FOR MORE THAN JUST ME AND MY SISTER TO HAVE YOU CAN’T HAVE IT.” I found myself being super critical; there was very much a degree to which I was policing who could have my experience and who couldn’t.  But also, I was in fourth grade. That time was about drawing lines and making boundaries and figuring out how I was different from others.

But other than that girl, I’ve never met someone with more than a set of queer parents—no one else has had so close to my exact upbringing. But other kids with queer parents in high school…I was always super upset that I didn’t find out they had queer parents immediately. I was upset they didn’t seek me out and want to talk about it.

I’m not sure if it was a personal thing, like “How could you keep me feeling isolated for so long?” But also “How could you keep yourself separated from me when there’s this obvious bond here?” I think that upset me because it was such a big part of how I formed my identity, that I wanted other people to form their identities around that as well, and reach out to me because of that.

There was absolutely a desire to not feel alone in my experience. Especially because my sister had spent so much time separating herself from it and rejecting it in a lot of ways, finding others was important to me. But at the same time, I almost wasn’t fussed. I knew my family’s experience was singular, and I wasn’t really ever expecting to find other people with experiences like mine.

Have you sought out any online communities? I haven’t, strangely enough. Upon doing this interview, I’m actually reflecting about why I haven’t. I think that, especially with online communities, I’m afraid it’s going to be more of a place for airing one’s grievances. And I’m all for a good stitch-and-bitch, but the reasons I have to complain about my parents aren’t connected to their queerness.

What would you want from a community about this, whether online or elsewhere? Honestly, a recognition of the fact that the kids are all right. I think that’s a thing I have felt that I could fight for, that I was absolutely staying in my lane: when I was getting in Republicans’ faces and being like “Yo, I  have queer parents and all the shit I’ve achieved. All of those things you said about kids being messed up—I am not that.”

There’s this kid from Iowa who made this speech that went viral. I think he had two moms. We watched it in English class. My asshole of an English teacher made us watch it four times in one day—for the sake of rhetoric, because the rhetoric was brilliant—but I was sobbing. Because this kid was explaining my experience. That was kind of the only time I saw it outside of any immediate experience I had with other kids, the only time I ever really saw it on the internet or presented.

What do you love about having four moms? I love having all these parents. I love having all these people in my life who play a mother role. I love their nuances, and I love the ways in which they are flawed. Especially as a person who identifies as a woman, having all of these parents who are women – having their experiences as women to access and to have the legacy of their experiences is really important to me.

[It’s] important to note that I only have sisters as well. My family is just cisgender women. It’s been so central to my relationship with men particularly, and the way I had to learn to navigate that with nothing, being a pubescent girl realizing I was, in fact, interested in boys.

But I wouldn’t be me. I am so much a product of this feminine experience, and this total total feminine upbringing. I wouldn’t want to lose any part of myself, but especially this part of myself.

Can you talk a bit about the Snapchats you made? I was thinking about how it’s useful to use captioned photos to talk about the visible nature identities. I also like to use Snapchat to talk to people because it’s able to supplement facial expressions for tonal shifts that are often left out of text exchanges. Also, I'm a bit vain and I like my face.

Kathy’s Snapstory (picture changes every 7 seconds; loops back to start)