If any of my grandmother's three daughters were going to have a gay son, it was only natural that it would be my mother.
My aunts were married young, and pregnant not long afterwards — not unlike my grandmother, who tied the knot at 14.
But convention just wasn't for my mother. She had things to do, and plenty of flower-brothers and sisters to do them with. I wasn't born until she was 30, after an impromptu San Francisco summer or two, and I was raised by her and my stepfather.
As the youngest of the three daughters, and as the one that started having children the latest, she always had the smallest family roll call on holidays. Three members instead of four — and later, as my cousins had children, three members instead of at least six. I was enough child for my mother, she'd have no others, and I wasn't about to expand our family's branch at the age of 11.
Flashing forward to 25, I'm still not quite ready, and still not as straight as my cousins. So, in true "my-mother" fashion, convention has hit the fan.
My own impromptu summer took me, not to San Francisco, but to Tampa Bay. My boyfriend and I (that's us in the photo above) left our Ohio home and moved into a three-bedroom in Florida with his father, his stepmother, his stepbrothers and his mother — his father's ex-wife. And her little dog, too.
Most of us weren't blood relations. But I can tell you, we were a family by day one-and-a-half. That's a tight fit.
Since then we've moved out, but not on. My boyfriend's father has changed my flat tires (on a bridge — twice), fed me, and even tucked me in when I've fallen asleep on his couch. And when my mother comes to visit and lectures my boyfriend, next to his father who's lecturing me, for our car upkeep or lack of phone calls, aren't they both our parents? Aren't we all, in some way, family?
The family I found myself growing up in, and the family that my boyfriend and I have created in our would-be marriage, are just two examples of modern families. Eneth Santiago, a 39-year-old mother of two, offers another.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2010.