Gratitude for Moms

In our family, we have two dads. So when Mother’s Day comes around every year, our children’s teachers always ask how we handle it in our home.

 We love moms, we tell them with an earnest smile. And away our daughters go, making beautiful cards, plant holders, and other tzochkes to celebrate moms. Their latest crafts adorn our fridge and clutter our bureau, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

It can be confusing, I suppose. How do we observe this day? After all, our daughters were born to us via surrogacy. Lindsay and Dawn—the women who gave them life—are not their “moms” in a traditional sense: we—my partner and I—are their parents. We care for them day in and day out, buying their clothes, feeding them, nurturing them, holding them when they need comfort, encouraging them to assert their independence, selecting their schools and taking them there each day; driving them to swimming lessons, gymnastics, play dates, after school activities, taking them to annual check-ups, loving them each and every moment. The stuff that parents do.

So our daughters don’t have a “mom” in the usual sense of the word.

But their two dads love and adore the women who brought them into the world, who cared for them with exquisite tenderness as they grew underneath their hearts. We are grateful each day for the beauty and generosity of these women, without whom we would be two dads without children to stir our souls to sing in gratitude each waking moment of our days.

We pray we’ve set a good example for daughters to love, respect—even revere—their moms: to look to them as role models, to value their opinions, to respect the choices they’ve made, to adore the fabulous women they are. Nothing makes us prouder than hearing how much they appreciate and love these women who gave them life. Their moms.

Lindsay and Dawn are not moms in the traditional sense, but on this Mothers Day—and each day—our daughters and their dads give thanks for them. For all the women in every family on this vast earth, for giving us life, for sustaining us, for enabling us to reach this moment, today, we say, “Thank you.”