Coming out. I think and hope that people who identify as heterosexual are starting to realise that it isn’t a one-time event but something that those who identify as having a different sexuality have to do on a regular basis.

It is a decision; a decision you make every time you meet someone for the first time.  In your initial conversations with someone new, you try to gauge what their reaction may be and you consider what the impact of a negative reaction might be.  How much you do this varies. Certainly for me, as I’ve got older, it is less of a decision,  I have a much more bullish attitude as to being my authentic self than I did when I was younger.  Working in a professional environment in law, never having faced any homophobia, has given me a sense of confidence in myself.  But coming out to someone new has always been a decision, a choice.

Kate Mikolajewski

Then I had a child.

I am of course immeasurably fortunate to be mother to two beautiful girls. But in having children, the decision and choice to come out in new situations was removed.

When I was pregnant, the forms still referred to the baby’s father. Some parts of the form were completed with the details of my wife, others had to reference the few details we knew about the donor. When we saw a new medical professional, we found ourselves quickly introducing my wife as just that: my wife, not a sister or a friend.

When it came to registering our eldest’s birth, we had to wait for the registrar to find the right forms, whilst commenting pleasantly that he’d never had to register a birth where the baby had two mothers – he seemed genuinely chuffed for this first!  In my hormonal state a few weeks post-partum, it stung a little when he recorded me as the “mother” and my wife as the “second parent”: she was our daughter’s mother too!

Once we settled down into those hazy newborn days I felt, to a certain extent, the choice was returning. I was on maternity leave; my wife had returned to work. I was the one attending the baby groups and  could edge back into the closet and assess the situation as I had done previously. But the newborn days don’t last long and gradually you have a walking, and more importantly talking child with two mums.

When our eldest was small, we referred to ourselves and each other as just mummy.  Then one day, in typical toddler fashion, our daughter started calling my wife by her first name: they had spent the day together with a friend and she clearly had picked up on the friend calling my wife, Anna. At this point, the natural decision for us seemed to be to call ourselves Mummy Kate and Mummy Anna.

From this point forward, we had children who waxed lyrical about their Mummy Kate and their Mummy Anna to everyone who would listen.  We didn’t encounter any issues. We found a local inclusive Church of England church who welcomed our family into theirs, baptising both girls much to the delight of my Catholic mother-in-law.  However, there was always that safety net that everything we did was an option. If we had run into any negative reaction, it would be simple to walk away, drop the group, and our daughters would be none the wiser. Whilst it was no longer a decision, we still had control over the outcome of coming out to a certain extent.

Then our eldest approached school age. Every parent is nervous when their child starts school: will they settle? Will they make friends?  We had an added layer of nerves: what would the reaction to our family be and, most importantly, would our children be adversely affected?

I had an expectation, as I had when I was receiving pregnancy care, that as they are professionals, we would not encounter any noticeable negativity from the school staff. I was more concerned about the parents of our children’s peers. Would they accept us as a family?  Would our children be singled out, not invited to birthday parties, or playdates? Would they tell their children that our family set up was, in the eyes of their religions, cultures or own views, wrong? How would that impact our children?

Again, we were fortunate.  We faced no issues from the class parents, no issues from the school.  We lead active roles in school life: helping with the PTA, I was co-opted as a school governor; our children get invited to parties and we go to the adult socials. The girls bring home two cards for Mother’s Day and we are contacted before Father’s Day each year by their class teacher to check what we are happy for the girls to do. Our eldest daughter even brought home a school reading book where the protagonist had two mums.

I was acutely aware of the protests in 2019 regarding the inclusion of reference to LGBT in the primary school curriculum, the suggestion that it was inappropriate, that it compromised innocence and that children as young as five years old were being sexualised. Having been involved in the development of the school’s Relationships and Sex Education framework, it was clear that this was a hysterical response. What detriment has there been to my daughters’ peers, who have known since they were three or four that their classmates have two mums? Have they been sexualised or lost their innocence? Of course not: they have all just accepted that this is our status quo.

On reflection, looking at my experience of the girls going to school and in the wider world, I question how much homophobia is based on “otherness” – that for some, as and when they meet colleagues, friends, people they respect and trust who identify as LGBTQIA+, views start to change.

I am sure we have trials and tribulations still to come. The world of high school awaits.  But, when I mentioned to our eldest daughter I was writing this, and asked her about her experience of having two mummies at school, it was actually very insightful:  “No one cares, mummy. Someone once asked me whether my dad was dead and that was why I had two mums, but I explained.”  Long may this openness and tolerance continue and hopefully the ongoing coming out process will become increasingly easier for those who do identify.

Kate Mikolajewski is a solicitor at Clyde & Co

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