Motherhood is often conflated with womanhood, as well as a very particular idea of what that woman should look like. 

We see it everywhere, from Mother’s Day gift displays that focus on flowers, chocolates, and wine, to rally signs that focus on “a woman’s right to choose.” But there are plenty of people who are not women who adopt or birth children, and some of those people still choose to go by “mom.”

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When it comes to nonbinary parents, many of us are still trying to find the right names to be called by our children. Whether it’s words they’ve made up themselves, abbreviations and variations on the word “parent,” portmanteaus of gendered terms, or words borrowed from other cultures, there are many options out there. But there are also plenty of nonbinary and gender diverse parents who choose to use traditional terms, seeking to remove their relationship to traditional gender roles. 

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Pregnancy beyond the binary

Cat didn’t know that nonbinary was a thing until late in zir 20s. “I didn’t feel at home in [my] gender, but wasn’t a different gender. Wasn’t female and wasn’t male, and then there was one time I just read the word nonbinary and a definition and was like, ‘Oh, well, that’s me.’ And it felt nice to know that I wasn’t the only one. I hadn’t made it up.” While ze knew zir identity before becoming pregnant, it wasn’t until several years later that ze took the next step and updated zir pronouns.

Going into pregnancy, Cat was worried about how it would feel. “Beforehand, I was worried that it would make me feel feminine, which would have felt wrong. But it didn’t feel feminine for me, it felt different from outside-imposed gender roles.” Ze notes that ze had an awful experience during pregnancy for reasons unrelated to gender, enduring life-threatening complications that required bed rest and juggling nursing school at the same time. “I do kind of wonder to a certain extent if it’d been normal if I would have felt more gender discomfort instead of just, ‘This is awful,’ and ‘Just let me make it through this pregnancy alive.’”

Charlotte* is genderqueer, but that part of their identity doesn’t come up explicitly in her home life. Charlotte noted that in general, her gender identity isn’t relevant to their marriage to a cisgender man, and in part that’s because neither of them meet the expectations placed on binary, cisgender norms. “I’m the one who knows how to lay tile and grout it and replace batteries in cars and stuff like that, and he doesn’t have the foggiest idea how to do those things. He loves shopping and is very fashion conscious, and I hate shopping.”

However, while Charlotte was used to varying their presentation between butch and femme leaning at times, Charlotte’s pregnancy challenged how she felt in her own mind and body. “One thing about my gender journey is I was stunned by just how much my body changed during the whole pregnancy, post-pregnancy, breastfeeding thing, and what hormones do to you, physically, but also emotionally and mentally.” While Cat’s focus was pulled away from ideas of gender to focus on zir health, for Charlotte the experience affected her identity on a deeper level.

“It was really hard for me between the time I first got pregnant until they were about five years old, because my body and my mind felt foreign to me as it was dominated by all these female hormones that made me much more womanly than I’d ever been in my life before.”

The New Mr. Mom

Both Cat and Charlotte chose to continue to be known as “mom” rather than find an alternate title that might be more disconnected from a gender. Despite having very different life experiences and family dynamics, both found that sticking with “mom” felt right, but was also easier in our world. But their own definition of “mom” seemed to come more from who they were to their family than anything to do with their gender identity.

For Charlotte, she says that being called mom “always felt natural to me.” Their experience with pregnancy and hormones in the years that followed came to define Charlotte’s life, and with that came the definition of “mom.” “There was never a question for me because mom felt completely who I was during that period of my life.”

While Charlotte’s experience of gender around pregnancy might have helped to make “mom” feel like the natural choice, there’s also a social standing to the idea of “mom.” That was reflected in their experience when her kids started to push boundaries.

“Both of the kids went through a phase where they experimented with trying to call me [by my first name]. They were testing to see what I would do. I wouldn’t usually answer them, or I was like, ‘What did you call me?’ They’d say ‘Well, that’s your name. Why can’t I call you that?’ I said, ‘You can, but there are two people in the world who get to call me ‘mom’ and you’re one of the two. So, why would you want to give up that privilege?”’

Ultimately, Charlotte finds that for their children, gender doesn’t really come into who she is. “I often will dress in sort of very butch ways and they never have noted it, and some days I dress very femme and they’ve never commented on the differences or distinctions. For them, it’s just mom, and that’s who she is.”

For Cat, ze characterized the decision to use “mom” in part by saying “I’m just lazy.” But there was a social component there, too. “I wasn’t out to my [extended] family as nonbinary at the time that [my child] was born, or to [many people] outside my closest friends. It was my thing… It didn’t really affect anybody else.”

But just as Charlotte’s children identify the concept of “mom” with who Charlotte is more than their gender, Cat’s child defines “mom” as who Cat is. “There are parts of femininity that I am fine with. [My child] doesn’t expect gender roles from me. She’s not expecting, you know, the 50s stay-at-home mom stereotype. She’s expecting me, with short hair and baggy clothes and weird taste in shirts. So that’s her concept of what a mom is as far as she’s concerned.”

But ze is keen to highlight that there’s definitely a difference between zir child calling zir “mom” and someone else assuming the title for zir or seeing zir as a woman. “I’ve been this way since she was born, so that’s just her concept of me. Whereas if someone is calling me a woman, they’re attaching a whole bunch of concepts and connotations to me that are not applicable.” When it’s coming from someone other than Cat’s child, there’s a lot more discomfort with the term: “People assume that I’m Mom. I think it’s weird. You know I’m [my child’s] parent. You didn’t know anything past that point. I don’t necessarily appreciate that.”

Being mom and being nonbinary has led to some fun moments between Cat and zir child when gender affirmation comes in strange ways. “Sometimes when she’s mad at me, she calls me Mr. Mom and Mr. Mommy. And even if she’s annoyed at me sometimes, it just makes me really happy. And sometimes she’ll call me Dad because she’s being pissy, and I’ll remind her that I’m fine with that. Like it’s as accurate as Mom is to a certain extent. It makes her annoyed. You know that’s my relationship with [my child]. I am her mom.”

Looking to the future, Cat can see a time when ze might not use “mom”, as they plan to adopt more children in the future. “When we adopt, I do plan on those children probably calling me like, Ren for a nickname for parent or something like that. But part of that is also allowing space and respect for whatever familial relationships they’ve had in the past and not trying to encroach upon that, as well as my gender identity.”

While people might try to impose ideas of exactly what a mom should be (especially in our current political climate), there’s never been a single way to be a mom. It isn’t defined by being a 1950s-style housewife, and it isn’t defined by the act of giving birth. As our understanding of gender and gender diverse people grows, it has become more than evident that our idea of parental roles and what it means to be “mom” doesn’t need to be defined by gender, either. 

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