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Ozzie and Harriet Are Dead

New Family Narratives in a Postmodern World

 

Adria E. Schwartz

 

 

According to the 2000 Census, less than one-quarter of the households in the United States resemble Ozzie and Harriet's television family of the 1950s, also known as the “traditional” psychoanalytic family: mother, father, and their biological children (Schmitt, 2001). Today we cohabit or “partner,” live in single-parent homes, extended families, blended stepfamilies. Among these configurations, gay and lesbian families are proliferating exponentially. Psychoanalytic theory has yet to take these families seriously. Lesbian and gay families especially are rarely written about, and we have yet to acknowledge fully the implications of their proliferation.

Our children are growing up in a postmodern world, and that is our world as well. It is a world increasingly based on resistance to identity, a questioning of the dichotomous binary categories of male and female, homo- and heterosexuality, that constrain sexual practice and gender performance (Rose, 1986). The postmodern world recognizes the social construction of gender and its interface with the body (Goldner, 1991). The post-modern family, a family formed often by alternate forms of conception (AFC) as well as adoption, formal and informal, impels us to reconceive our notions of what it is to be a mother or father and to question whether the gendering of parenthood is relevant to our understanding of development at all.

This essay was inspired partly by a recent period in which I attended a variety of Bar Mitzvah ceremonies in the New York area. The Bar and Bat Mitzvah rituals mark the Jewish child's entrance into the world of adult religious responsibility. It is an appropriate starting point, in that these rituals, occurring as they did in the late 1990s, also mark the coming of age of one of the earliest cohorts of children born to openly proclaimed lesbian- and gay-identified and alternatively conceived families of origin in the United States.

Lesbians have always raised children, of course. But those families consisted mostly of woman who had birthed children within the heterosexual families that they later left to form new ones. There have always been “Boston families,” if I might expand on Faderman's (1993) concept of a “Boston Marriage,” families such as Anna Freud's and Dorothy Burlingham's in which women raised children together without having a defined sexual identity (Peters, 1985). But these “Bar Mitzvahs,” these children of whom I speak, were birthed and adopted into same-sex parented families, or single-parent families, by choice.

Attending these ceremonies crystallized, in a moving and palpable form, questions with which I have been grappling for the past 15 years: Who and what is a mother? Need the construct be gendered? Can a child have two mothers? What issues might arise between these mothers? And what of the fathers, or the sperm donors, known or unknown? Let me take you on quick tour of these families:

• Barry was adopted from South America at the age of 14 months by his moms, both of whom had been married to men before beginning their relationship. Rachel is the legal adoptive mom, Michaela is a full coparent. Barry refers to Rachel as Mom and to Michaela by her nickname, Mikki.

• Gabriel had been the product of one of the first legal two-parent same-sex adoptions in the state of New York. Also present at Gabriel's ceremony and given an aliyah (honor at the reading of the Torah) was his biological father, a gay-identified man who had donated his sperm and agreed to acknowledge paternity. Known as the donor, but not as dad, Chris sees Gabriel once or twice a year for a weekend visit.

• Eli's two moms separated after two decades of partnership. Eli spends almost equal time with each of his moms, although his biological mom assumes the “bottom line” accountability of the residential parent. Each of the two mothers has a new partner. In this family, the sperm donor is unknown. All of the extended families of both parents, East Coast and West, attended this Bar Mitzvah including the lesbian-identified sister of one of the parents who is also raising a son. Hence, one of Eli's first cousins is also the son of a lesbian mom.

• Howard was adopted at birth by his bisexually-identified mom and was raised for the most part in a single-parent household. But Howard's “real family” consists of his mom, her old boyfriend Robert, and two additional female parenting figures, very much present in his life. With a lesser degree of consciousness and presence, there are also the shadow bio-parents of his birth.

• The final Bar Mitzvah of this particular year was Brian, born of alternative insemination through an unknown donor, to a hetero-sexually-identified woman who raised him as a single parent for the first seven years of his life until she married Marvin. Brian is very attached to Marvin and thinks of him as his dad, rather than the sperm donor.

How are these families discussed in training? How does psychoanalysis discuss families with adopted children, multicultural families, a family where one parent is the legal or socially sanctioned parent and the other is not? How are primal fantasies discussed in which the parents were of the same sex, where the putative father was referred to as a donor, known or unknown? When I think about the people and families that I actually see in my office, I find little or no mention of them in the majority of formal meetings I attend or papers that I read (Patterson, 2001).

New Families: New Narratives

Given the varied configurations that characterize more and more of today's families — including many same-sex families — a reconsideration of psychoanalytic theory and practice is long past due. The so-called traditional family may still exist: Harriet may still be in the kitchen baking her cookies; hardworking, dependable Ozzie may be off to the office; and they may spend the after-dinner hour chuckling over the antics of Ricky and David, the fun-loving, harmlessly mischievous kids they have conceived and raised together. But these days, in the United States, Ozzie and Harriet are the nontraditional family. Aside from the number of children being raised in heterosexually-identified families that have experienced divorce, living in blended stepfamilies, or in single-parent households, there are an estimated 6 to 10 million lesbian and gay parents in the United States. These gay- and lesbian-identified parents are the fathers and mothers of an estimated 14 million children throughout the country, including those conceived within a heterosexual union (Buell, 2001).

Psychoanalytic theory in its origins was radical in many ways, most especially for the naming of infantile sexuality and the elucidation of what came to be known and later challenged by feminists, gender and queer theorists, and postmodernists, among others, as the theory of psychosexual development. Freud struggled brilliantly, but unsuccessfully, within the confines of his theory, to explain the differences between the sexes, processes of identity formation and gendering, and sexual orientation in its broadest form, all of which relied ultimately for resolution, on the Oedipus complex.

Postmodern culture is much more at ease with ambiguity and a continuum of genders, sexualities, and familial arrangements. Relational theories in particular have the capacity to address today's postmodern family.

These theories take a significant step away from a drive-centered focus of the child subject to an appreciation of the subjectivity of the parenting ones (Benjamin, 1988). They recognize that internalized object relations are a function of the child in multiple relations to the significant others around her. A child's internal representations are of her relational patterns, cumulative interactive histories with significant others: a series of repetitive interactive events that are mutually derived and subjectively constructed (Stern, 1989). These representations are a function of both objective events and subjective experiences. A relational perspective allows for the possibility of a system of caretaking figures whose gender, sexual orientation, or biological relation to their offspring cannot or should not be taken for granted. Thus, reproductive technology has taken the Nature out of Mother in a way that motherhood is no longer bound to simple biology (Schwartz, 1994). There are genetic mothers, gestational mothers, adoptive mothers. Is there a “real mother” when, for example, one woman donates her ova to another who becomes pregnant through in vitro fertilization? If that gestational mother gives the child up for adoption, or raises it with another woman, who is the “real” mother? Is there a real mother? If biology no longer allows for a simple definition of Mother, can gender? Can a man be a mother? The answers are neither simple nor obvious.

The reconstruction of motherhood implies the reconstruction of families as well.¹ Mothering no longer rests within the confines of a heterosexual matrix, nor is it bounded by a gender-binaried foundation.² Many children today have a number of people in their lives who nurture and care for them and with whom they have consistent and repeated interactions in a form that they will internalize as maternal parental representations. The deconstruction of gendered motherhood allows one to envision a new parenting subject within relational theories. This is a more conditional conception of parenting that transcends gender and assumes mutual subjectivity (Benjamin, 1988).

Stern (1985, 1989), Beebe (1986), Bowlby (1988), and others tried to integrate infant observation with psychoanalytic theories of attachment and development. Their work is implicitly dependent on the assumption of a single caretaking (female) mother. As yet this work does not refer to the actual families in which our children live: children who have multiple caretakers, multiple moms of both genders. Thus, the use of gendered parental terms to identify either biologically based kinship or roles within families seems less relevant in new family narratives. In fact, the true meaning and relevance of the terms “mother” or “father” are nominally problematic in same-sex parented families.

Triangles Obsolete

The oedipal triangle lies at the cusp of classical psychoanalytic theory as it formulated psychosexual, moral, and ego development. Boys were said to compete with and ultimately identify with their fathers and their fathers' gender role, and little girls abandon their mothers as primary love objects in search of the inevitably superior phallus (Freud, 1925). The successful resolution of the oedipal phase renders one at peace with one's gender, heterosexually inclined, and emotionally ready to procreate.

The oedipal conflict traces the vicissitudes of desire and identification. Others see it as reifying heterosexuality (Butler, 1990). From the latter perspective, oedipal dynamics are more about power than about sexuality; more about the power of gender privilege implicit in jealousy and gender envy. Triangular dynamics, the swirling eddy of jealousies and alliances, can operate in a much more complicated field of emotions.

I have previously suggested (Schwartz, 1986) the term “triangulation” as an alternative to discussions of the Oedipal stage, in recognition of the latter's lack of applicability in same-sex and single-parent families. In addition, Oedipal language underestimates the effects of triangulation vis-à-vis gender and embodied sexuality in the period referred to as preoedipal. I have come to question, however, whether triangulation adequately represents the internalized relations of children at all. Given the absent biological parent in same-sex parented families, the primary constellation consists of a minimum of four people rather than three. In lesbian-parented families, the absent biological parent is the sperm donor. In gay male-parented families, it is the biological mother. In heterosexual families with an infertile parent, it may be either. In these and in adoptive families, the biological parents are a shadow carrying the child's genetic history. The shadow is difficult to see. Put a spotlight on it and it disappears, yet its presence lingers behind evanescently.

What is there of significant psychological import in the shadow of the absent parent(s)? The child of a friend used to refer to her sperm donor as the “donut.” The sperm donor as shadow member of a family carries with it the ambiguity of a donut, where in looking at the hole it is unclear whether there is or is not something missing. There are, after all, all different kinds of donuts.

When the notion of a sperm donor is introduced into the creation of a family, this promotes a paradoxical construction and deconstruction of the father. He both does and does not exist. He is both real and imagined (Ehrensaft, 2000, p. 391). How the “donut” is introduced, and how it is carried internally and externally within a same-sex parented family, may vary for different members of the family. Without more detailed clinical or empirical evidence, one cannot say that the sperm donor is necessarily a significant figure in a young child's early life (Crespi, 2001). Yet it is reasonable to assume that conscious and unconscious fantasies most likely exist around a sperm donor or biological father, whether known or unknown, acknowledged as whole object (bio father) or part object (donated sperm) (Ehrensaft, 2000).³

In fact, the fantasies around alternative forms of conception may resemble those families with adopted children. Adopted children have at least three or four parents: two birth parents and one or two adoptive parent(s). Like birth and biological parents in adoptive families, these biological parents, sperm donors, gestational and genetic moms in same-sex parented families can exist as psychic shadows. One important distinction between adopted and AFC children is that issues of the child's abandonment and rejection are not intrinsic in the case of children conceived of reproductive technologies. When such issues exist, they may present in a subtle and less clearly articulated way, such as fantasies of remuneration for the sale of sperm or ova.

There are shadow figures that arise with adoptions as well. These will depend on the child's ability to integrate his or her biological birth history, known and fantasized, with the current internalized and actual familial constellation. For example, a young adopted boy, whose treatment I supervised, had night fears about the “shadow people” who sometimes haunted him at night. He feared they might come take him away. Concretely, the “shadow people” were a function of actual shadows reflected off his Venetian blinds. Treatment revealed, however, that his fantasy reflected both his wish and his fears that he might be reclaimed by his biological parents.

Adopted children have to deal with their shadow families of origin and express their uncertainties about them in the issues of abandonment or rejection. Adoption challenges their identities and may evoke feelings of displacement, being lost or in an unexplained exile from a nebulous somewhere. Adopted children often contend with feeling “different.” They might feel different from their adoptive families physically, in temperament, or intellectual goodness of fit. But this may be the case in any family. Freud (1909) noted that most latency-aged children develop fantasies about having been adopted and that they are heir to another different set of imagined superior parents. This family romance is an expression of every child's ambivalence toward his or her parents and a harkening back to an earlier time in childhood when parents were more firmly idealized (Brinich, 1990).

Adoption into a gay- or lesbian-identified family might, at first glance, be seen as an additional Stressor for a child already having to deal with the trauma of putative rejection. In same-sex parented families, many with cross-cultural, transracial adoptions, that “difference” is starkly apparent.

Same-sex couples and single parents-to-be are often conflicted, unsure as to whether they want to or “should” add to the potential stress of any child growing up by introducing yet another “difference.” Although the most comprehensive data pertaining to children raised in same-sex parented families do not deal specifically with adoption. Research shows (Patterson, 2001) that being raised in a same-sex-parented family has no harmful effects on the child (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2000).

Gay- and lesbian-identified parents, however, even more than heterosexually identified adoptive parents, have to prove themselves in a way that biological parents do not (Glazer, 1998). They must analyze and be prepared to defend their readiness and motivation to parent. For gays, lesbians, and same-sex couples, this process can exacerbate internalized homophobia.

The “Real” Mom Problem

Directly stated, can a child have two “real” mothers? Children, having no preconceptions as to how families are structured, accept their own family as the norm until they realize otherwise. Children in preschool settings, for instance, will often meet the news that a classmate has two moms with, “Wow, you're lucky. I wish I had two moms!” (Wendy McKenna, 2001, personal communication). In my experience, clinical and personal, the “real mom” issue is one between the parents, not between parents and child. This issue is illustrative of the ways in which one can begin to think meaningfully about new family narratives, and how, as clinicians and theoreticians, we might be better able to listen and understand.

The issue of the real mother is particularly salient in families composed of two lesbian-identified mothers, where one is the “bio” mother and the other not. There are some situations in which both mothers can claim to be biological mothers (in which one partner donates her egg to the other, and the child is conceived through in vitro fertilization), but the number of lesbian couples doing this is still too small to draw any meaningful clinical impressions about the relationships between these parents. In families where “real mom” difficulties arise, one parent gives birth to, and most likely nurses a child, leaving the other parent to contend with feelings of envy, exclusion, and insecurity about her baby or toddler's attachment. When both women have an intense desire to conceive, or one woman is unable to conceive, these issues may be compounded even further.

In my clinical experience with these couples, I have come to question the effect of birthing and nursing on the bonds between mothers and child, that is, between birth mom and child, coparent and child, and the bond between the mothers themselves. In work with lesbian couples, the nonnursing mom may complain of feeling excluded from the primary dyad. She may complain of having the baby, toddler, or three- or four-year-old reject them at times when certain forms of comforting were required. She may complain of never really being able to “get in” in the same way that the birthing and nursing mom can.

In my work with Vicki these issues became apparent. She and Margaret were a couple whose struggles span two issues that may arise in same-sex parented families: competition between moms and the exacerbation of that competition when one mom is the birthing and nursing parent. Vicki was an artist who worked both at home and as a consultant outside the home. Margaret was a part-time academic, again working both at home and outside.

Margaret used alternative insemination through an anonymous donor to conceive their son. She had promised Vicki they would share parenting equally, just as they had shared in selecting the criteria for donor selection, the insemination process, and Josh's last name. After Josh was born, Vicki wanted very much to use a breast pump to facilitate a sympathetic lactation in order to share both the nursing responsibilities and the nursing experience. Margaret balked, and became adamant in her disapproval of the project. Despite her intellectual belief in the project, emotionally she was not able to relinquish the primary maternal field or share it equally with Vicki. She “confessed” that “deep down” she believed that a child can have only one “real” mother, and that was going to be her. Vicki, according to Margaret, had the brilliant career, one with which she could never successfully compete, despite her own marked accomplishments. This essential motherhood was the one thing Margaret could claim as her own.

Vicki capitulated to Margaret's wishes reluctantly but without much resistance. She had always struggled with feeling that she was not a “real girl.” In fact, some lesbians who have grown up feeling “not female like mother” have a much more difficult time envisaging themselves carrying and birthing a baby. Their feeling of not being a “real girl” is based on a de-identification with mother, often begun during the rapprochement stage. It continues on throughout childhood and is again evoked with intensity during adolescence. This de-identification develops partially as a function of perceived gender privilege in a household, coupled with a depressed or narcissistic mother where maternal rejection and or neglect is often confused with gender (Schwartz, 1986, 1998).

Consequently, Vicki did not fight more effectively for equal participation in the nursing process because of her unconscious conviction that she was unable to do so. How could she be a “real mom” if she was not a “real girl?”⁴ As Josh grew older, Vicki faded into the background whenever she was asked to by either Margaret or her son. Because both moms sometimes worked outside the home, Josh quickly learned that he could exercise control over what must have appeared to him as their random comings and goings. He did so by strongly exercising his preferences for which mom was to do what and when. Given Margaret's desire to be the preferred mother and Vicki's insecurities about her ability to be a mother at all, Josh controlled both moms in a way that led Vicki to become increasingly estranged and critical of Margaret's parenting while Margaret grew increasingly angry and resentful and withholding of affection. The relationships between mothers and son became more skewed by Josh's frequent and strong preferences for Mommy Margaret over Mommy Vicki: at bedtime, bath time, on the way to preschool. Vicki was profoundly upset at Josh's apparent preference for her partner at crucial moments. But how could it be otherwise when she so often colluded with the asymmetry?

In heterosexual couples, it is not uncommon for fathers to feel excluded from the mother-infant dyad. A father might experience deep feelings of abandonment by his spouse or exclusion from the dyad. This may evoke rivalrous rage and feelings of worthlessness (Donna Bassin, personal communication). In some heterosexually identified families, moms and dads are less likely to compete with each other's parental roles. Traditionally, the months of earliest infancy were ceded to mothers, especially nursing moms, with fathers not really moving closer until the child becomes a toddler (Armelini, 2001). That is now changing as fathers become more involved earlier. Competition between heterosexual parents continues to be mitigated by gender roles, however, in which it is expected that moms and dads will have different kinds of relationships with their children.

In same-sex couples, gender roles create different kinds of dilemmas. For example, when both partners in a lesbian couple wish to birth a child, there is a question as to who will do so first. Aside from practical considerations such as age or whose career might be better able to incorporate a pregnancy and maternity leave, these decisions involve identifications that can facilitate or impede the progress toward pregnancy (Glazer, 2001).

Vicki wanted very much to birth a baby. Margaret, however, went first, ostensibly because she was already in her mid-30s, five or six years older than Vicki. It was also the case that Vicki couldn't imagine actually being pregnant and bringing a child to term. She had recurrent dreams of hairy and deformed babies long before she ever seriously contemplated becoming a mother. At the time, these dreams seemed to represent both her own sense of deformity and monstrousness, herself as the abject object of her parents' physical and emotional abuse, and in part, an expression of her internalized homophobia (Butler, 1995; Herek, 1998). In fact, when Vicki first came into treatment, despite being a prominent “out” artist she claimed to actually hate lesbians. She assumed that there was something essentially wrong with them, a developmental arrest perhaps, in which they deviated from a normal heterosexual course. She expressed no desire to change her sexuality, but rather seemed resigned to her defect and had an unconscious presumption that she would ultimately be punished, most likely by dying from AIDS.

Vicki's previously noted conviction that she was “not a real girl,” her de-identification with her mother-as-female, coupled with her internalized homophobia, left her — as it does with many gay men and lesbians — uncertain about her identity and eroded her confidence as a mother. As Vicki's analysis progressed, however, she announced playfully, after seeing the film Junior, “If Arnold Schwarzenegger can become pregnant, I guess I can, too.” She decided to choose the same unknown donor as Margaret, so that Josh would have a biologically related sibling. This practice has become increasingly more common as lesbian and gay parents seek to create larger families and seek to bind children biologically in a world that still holds chosen families suspect.

Vicki, after a devastating miscarriage, birthed a son who nurses voraciously, smiles constantly, and whose love is a constant reassurance to Vicki that she can be a “real mom” and a good mom at that. Nonetheless, Vicki still struggles with feelings of illegitimacy. She lives in constant dread that something awful will befall one or both of her children by way of illness, accident, or malevolence. She worried about this with Josh, but the fears have increased exponentially with the birth of her second son. Her analysis has revealed that Vicki's fears are due to lingering doubts that she and Margaret, as lesbians, are truly entitled to the happy family that they seem to have created. In Vicki and Margaret's family, their partnership was essentially sound, loving, and aspiring toward a fundamental noncompetitiveness and equality. Their difficulties arose out of their insecurities about mothering, in Vicki's case about competence and legitimacy, in Margaret's about its ability to be authentically shared.

Issues of asymmetry in early attachment and, consequently, of jealousy, envy, exclusion, and competition might arise more frequently in lesbian couples in which there is one biological and nursing mom than in lesbian couples where an infant is bottle-fed. Competition between lesbian moms can begin here and extend through middle and late childhood, with the nonbiological mom feeling always a little less than, not quite equal to, the biological mom in the child's eyes. This fear, of course, may be exacerbated by the attitudes toward the nonbiological mother's extended family or surrounding culture.⁵ How the two mothers handle this asymmetry, should it exist, depends in part on the internalized maternal representations that each of the mothers carry on both the conscious and unconscious ground of their partnership.

Conclusion

When psychoanalytic clinicians and theoreticians recognize the limitations of the oedipal triangle they may more accurately recognize families as they exist today. These families have forced a rethinking of our notions of identification and internalization as well as our notions of internal representations and self states (Bromberg, 1998).

Each parenting person forms a unique set of attachments and internalized relational representations that changes and develops over time (Loewald, 1973). Each parent is a parent in her particularity. Difference need not be read hierarchically. There is “no real mom,” no “real father” because the very concept of the real parent is in itself problematic.

New family narratives reveal multiple internal parental relations changing over time in tune with changing developmental needs, changing family dynamics, and a changing culture. Triangles have become obsolete. Today's families live in a queer and diverse universe of new shapes, new dynamics, and complexity.⁶

References

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¹ For an extensive discussion of a new family discourse, see Weston (1991).

² The use of gendered parent terms to distinguish either biologically-based kinship or roles within families is becoming increasingly less relevant in new family narratives. The terms “mother” or “father” are obviously problematic in same-sex parented families but are also becoming less relevant in single-parent families in which children may be mothered by multiple caretakers within and without the extended family, and the single mom may be the “father” as well.

³ In my clinical and supervisory practice, these fantasies (if they exist) do not appear to be problematic for young children. This finding, or rather the lack thereof, was corroborated by April Martin (1993), in The Lesbian and Gay Parenting Handbook: Creating and Raising Our families, one of the first and still central references on gay and lesbian parenting.

⁴ For an interesting case of a lesbian struggling with infertility coupled with her feelings of not being a “real woman” see Bassin (2001).

⁵ Let us not forget that that without benefit of a second-parent adoption, the coparent has no standing in health or educational institutions — those institutions most crucial to her child's well-being.

⁶ Queer: “All people who are attracted to people of the same sex or whose bodies or sexual desires do not fit the dominant standard of gender and/or sexuality.” See Beemayne and Eliason (1996, p. 5). Diversity refers to the postmodern critique of universality as it appears in all theory and concomitantly to our increasing sensitivity to difference.