I Don’t Have Children, But I’m Still a Mom—Kind Of
I’ve never wanted children. This I have always known. Growing up, women told me to wait and see, until I was older, until I fell in love, until I was married, until, until, until. They told me I would change my mind, and I always wondered how I could change my mind about something I so deeply knew in my bones. I once asked my doctor if I could donate my uterus—I knew some women desperately wanted to have biological children but couldn’t and mine seemed to brand me as a surefire mother whether I wanted it or not. She said no. I got married in 2016. I turned 30 last year.
Over the past three years, I wrote a book about undocumented people around the country called The Undocumented Americans, which came out this month. One of the chapters is about undocumented men—the fathers of American citizen children—who have taken sanctuary in churches to avoid deportation. Through one of the cases I met a family with two teenage girls, Franny and Brianna (not their real names). They were wary of the media. I started talking to them, building trust between us so that I could interview them for the book. But eventually we became friends. You’re crazy, they told me. You look like pomeranians, I told them. We started spending all our time together.
My partner and I taught them about tampons, about toxic relationships, about how the best razors aren’t pink, about safe sex, about drag queens, about Harvey Milk, about internalized racism, about college financial aid and contracts and Latinx Republicans and female anatomy. We went to see their plays and took them on college visits. They slept over, we dropped them off at school at enough of a distance so as to not embarrass them with our Volvo. We took road trips and FaceTimed them on the mornings of their birthdays to sing to them.
I did the 14-year old’s makeup for coronation at her best friend’s school where she called to be picked up, squealing, heels in hand, after meeting someone on the dance floor, and for the 17-year old’s graduation photos, where I sent her off with a pink Glossier bag, complete with Charlotte Tilbury blush and Marc Jacobs lip gloss for touch-ups. She has never returned either to me. (Are you reading this, Brianna?)
I think I’m the only adult person in their life who wears makeup, so they didn’t have much of a choice when it came to a makeup artist, but I took the responsibility very seriously, and exfoliated, toned, face-masked, moisturized, and primed their skin before even approaching it with foundation. Both of them are tomboys, and I didn’t recognize them in full glam, their hair flat-ironed long.
Once, I had to contact Franny’s school. “Just say you’re my mom!” Franny said. But I wasn’t. She had confused her classmates too by calling us “my moms” when she sent a picture of my partner and me with her at Buffalo Wild Wings to their group text but then in a class exercise explaining how her mom and dad met. She brushed off their questions. “I have a biological mom and dad, and also two moms,” she told them.
What my partner and I are, really is othermothers. The word finds its origin in black scholarship to refer to the women who are not biological mothers but who assume childcare responsibilities for another woman’s children—they can include family members like grandmothers, sisters, or cousins, or fictive kin, which means they are not related to the child by blood or marriage. Patricia Hill Collins has written about how blood mothers and othermothers worked together to survive the transition from slavery to a post–Civil War rural agricultural economy. They shared parenting responsibilities in small communities, and their relationships were based on trust. It was a revolutionary system and continues to this day.
When we meet strangers, and I have to introduce the girls, I sometimes avoid having to identify our relationship by just saying their names, but everyone assumes I am their young mom. Other times, I say, “This is my kid.” Sometimes, the girls will get a wicked look in their eye and introduce themselves—“I’m her daughter.”
When they come over to our apartment for taco night or to eat my famous dinner of “engagement chicken” (which I got from this very magazine) and roast potatoes, we choose shows to watch “as a family”—like High School Musical, or AJ and the Queen—and it is forbidden to watch those outside of that arrangement: the four of us and our dog, Frankie, on the couch, with chamomile tea and snacks, blankets draped over us. The girls always raid our pantry for snacks seconds after finishing dinner, and my partner makes their teas just so, with ice cubes and sugar, in mugs they choose.
The girls’ dad once told me I should be able to claim the girls as dependents on my taxes, but I wasn’t keeping them alive. I didn’t feed or clothe them daily, didn’t put a roof over their heads. Their parents did that. But I was spending a lot of money on them, and there was no way for me to formally recognize with the government that I kind of did have kids. Sort of. It was an alternative family structure, and the IRS has never been good at recognizing those. Not for queer families, of which I’m a part, and not for those whose relationships don’t adhere to the traditional nuclear structure. I also, for example, help take care of my mom and brother, and the IRS doesn’t have a form for that either.
Having the girls in my life hasn’t changed my decision about wanting kids in the conventional sense. But it has made me resolve to always have enough money and be emotionally stable enough to serve as a sturdy presence. I didn’t seek out Franny and Brianna. We stumbled onto each other, and we fell in love with each other, and we became family. I do think of them as my children, and I know they think of me as their mom. I hope and assume that once they’re grown up, and I no longer have this exact role in their lives, I’ll find more family. I would like to do this again, I mean, and so would my partner. Other kids need u, too.
I’ll never forget the looks on their faces when one Christmas, I gave them gift cards to Barnes & Noble when they’d wanted some hot new Air Jordan release. And they’ll never forget the look on my face when they showed me what they’d bought with those gift cards—not books, but Yale hoodies and stuffed animals from the Yale bookstore, where I earned a graduate degree.
I’ll never forget the feeling of finding out the boy advice I’d given Franny and Brianna had spread from girl to girl in their high school like wildfire, putting the fucbois in their lives on notice.
They’re my kids. And they’re not. I’m their mom. And I’m not. And that’s the case for millions of families in this country, families who have been affected by the war on drugs, by mass incarceration, by detentions, by deportations, by poverty, by the opioid crisis, by COVID-19. Millions of us have stepped in to take care of children who need us in very specific ways, and we’ve come to love them so that they might as well be our blood. This is what family looks like.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a writer who lives in New Haven. Her first book, The Undocumented Americans, is out now.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
