Lynne Bryant's Blog

This post is goodbye, for now. My blog has served its purpose and it is a good thing to know when it’s time to stop. Mothering While Queer helped me look back and make peace with those early years of sorting out my identity as a lesbian mother.

Happy-Ever-After

I’m happy to report that the baby I was pregnant with at the end of my last blog post will—unbelievably—turn thirty this year. She’s a wonderful woman. Although my relationship with her other mom did not work out, I did eventually find my...

“It was an accident,” says no pregnant lesbian ever. The lesbian mother does not coo into her baby’s ear, “Honey, you were mama’s little surprise.” While getting pregnant may not have much to do with mothering, the act IS a necessary pre-requisite for someone in the having-a-baby equation. In my previous heterosexual world, it was simple. If I had sex without using contraception, there was a strong probability I’d get knocked up.

A Queer Perspective on Getting Pregnant

I don’t pretend to speak f...

There’s this thing I think about when I have an intense desire to run away. Not sure where I picked it up, but it works for me. If you’re going to leave something—a relationship, a family, a job, a place, a whole way of life—you’ll know you’re ready to exit when you have an idea of what you’re moving TOWARD and not just what you’re running FROM. Because—ala Jon Kabat-Zinn—wherever you go, there you are.

Leaving Mississippi

I had to leave Mississippi to survive. After the custody hearing, I bega...

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” -David Foster Wallace

It is the summer of 1985 and gossip in my small community buzzes like the fat, lazy bumblebees sipping nectar from the flowers blooming all over Mississippi. Suddenly, it seems as if my whole life is on display. According to my newly hired attorney, there are rumors I am being followed. I spend a lot of time vacillating between fear and excitement, hiding my car or hers. I avoid being in public with the...

First Christmas out of my box and unwrapped.

I didn’t know during the chaotic part of my life from 1984 through 1986, that I was not safe to embrace who I was becoming. I stubbornly wanted to forge my own way. Break some of the rules I’d been following. When I look back on those years, it’s the pain of not belonging that I remember most.

A Waste of a WomanMy world was in total upheaval. My sense of self? Utterly devastated. I tried to squish myself back into the box I’d been in. No luck. I trie...

It’s hard to describe the explosion when all of my competing selves crashed into each other in the summer of 1984.

“I was 24 years old and playing racquetball with my identity.”

Each serve of the ball had me trying out another part of myself. The new parts collided with a loud thwack against the walls I’d grown up surrounded by. In the racquetball court, sound is heightened, senses are heightened, and sometimes, the ball hits you in the ass.

Here’s a young woman who fits nicely into the mommy ...

After reading the title of my blog, mothering while queer, my oldest daughter asked, “Mom, why queer? Isn’t that, like, a mean, derogatory thing to call someone?”

This is my first child, born in 1983, a decade before my other two children, during a much different part of my mothering process. She relates differently to the term queer than the other two, born in 1990 and 1993. They’re all millennials, but their life experiences—and mine—over that 10-year period, make a big difference. A bit of qu...

And so, it began…

Mississippi Origins

I was born in 1959, in a small-town hospital in northeast Mississippi. We lived out in the country, so I went to a rural school called New Hope for twelve years—the same school my mother had attended back in the 1930s and 40s. I’ve never known why the community was called New Hope. New hope for what? Cooler weather? Less mosquitoes? Maybe some church thing.

Speaking of church. I grew up in the Southern Baptist church; there every time the doors were...