Family Pride: Jenny and Mary

Kingfield couple Jenny Simmonds and Mary Gustafson were not quite high school sweethearts, but they were pretty close.

"We actually met on a soccer field in high school" in 1985, Simmonds said.

Close friends in high school and into college, they started dating towards the end of their college careers.

"I pretty much had a job just to pay my phone bill," Simmonds laughed.

Having been together for over 19 years, Simmonds said that it was painful to talk to their seven-year-old son Carter about last month's vote in the state legislature to put the same-sex-marriage-banning constitutional amendment on the 20112 ballot. 

"Carter had always assumed that we're legally married," she said. "I was so upset that we had to tell him that, in fact, we're not."

It's these kinds of moments, Gustafson said, that make having a support network of LGBT families invaluable.

"They just know the challenges and positives of being a same-sex family," she said. "You can talk about finding acceptance, or not, and they get it."

"We have a lot of straight friends, and I feel really accepted" by them, Simmonds said.

But same-sex couples, she added, "know what it's like to walk that journey."

At least for now, Carter and his five-year-old brother Charlie don't seem to see that journey as the biggest deal in the world. Carter said that he has a classmate who also has gay parents.

"No, it doesn't," said Charlie when asked if having two mommies makes him feel different from classmates with straight parents.

Getting the recliner he's sitting in to extend its built-in footrest seems to be a slightly more significant for him as he squirms aroudn in the chair's plush embrace.