Lesbian Family Life Cycle

The Lesbian Family Life Cycle

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1995 by Suzanne Slater

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

The Free Press

A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

Printed in the United States of America

printing number

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Slater, Suzanne

The lesbian family life cycle/Suzanne Slater.

p.  cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-02-920895-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-0292-0895-3

eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0614-3

1. Lesbian couples.  2. Lesbian mothers.  3. Life cycle, Human. 4. Lesbians—Family relationships.  I. Title.

HQ75.5.S65 1995

306.85′08′6643—dc20   95-3610

CIP

Contents

PART ONE: ENDURING REALITIES OF LESBIAN FAMILY LIFE

1. Lesbian Families

2. A Model of the Lesbian Family Life Cycle

3. Persistent Stressors in Lesbian Couples’ Lives

4. Lesbian Couples’ Strengths and Coping Mechanisms

5. Lesbian Families with Children

PART TWO: STAGES OF THE LESBIAN FAMILY LIFE CYCLE

6. Stage One: Formation of the Couple

7. Stage Two: Ongoing Couplehood

8. Stage Three: The Middle Years

9. Stage Four: Generativity

10. Stage Five: Lesbian Couples over Sixty-Five

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Enduring Realities of Lesbian Family Life

Lesbian Families

It’s May 12th, and I’m up early to be ready for two noteworthy events. I drive to the office to meet with Caroline, a forty-five-year-old professor who has prepared for a year to make tonight’s disclosure to her parents.* She is uncharacteristically anxious and in need of our connection today. Her eyes meet mine intently and frequently—a connection she seldom allows herself. I ask if she feels ready for tonight, and we begin to discuss how she’ll get herself to break into the small talk and begin. Her focus drifts to her desire to take care of her parents,, and we begin to sound like paramedics planning triage at the scene of a disaster. I remind her she doesn’t need to take care of all three of them, and that they will all survive. I tell her, too, of what a gift her honesty is to her parents, and we acknowledge they may not agree. When I ask her to rehearse by telling me how she came to this decision, she talks about living a lie, about it being impossible to share anything meaningful with her parents without this disclosure. She tells me of her joy with her lover, quickly adding that maybe she’llgo easy on the word joy.

Later that day, I dress for the wedding of my lover’s niece. She, too, has spent a year planning for this day. We arrive at the house to find the bridesmaids already dressed, the wine opened early, and the jumpy, anxious bride. Her working-class parents h ave poured their life savings into their only daughter’s wedding, and they can be heard telling guests that it was all worth it to make Nicole’s special day perfect. From the horsedrawn carriage to the six hundred dollars wedding cake, they have used this ritual to convey their love and their welcome to the new life she begins today. At the reception, we stand and applaud the entrance of the new Mr. and Mrs. Robert Jennings, and the bride unself-consciously proclaims her joy.

A week later, Nicole visits us to show us pictures of her special day. She lets slip the amount of money she received and asks if we can use any of the couple’s duplicate appliances. She tells us she is relieved that the wedding is over; now her life can get back to normal.

The day after that I see Caroline again. She tells me she hadn’t been able to do it; the visit came and went without any disclosure. Instead, amid great self-blame, she had sent a coming-out letter to her parents the day before this appointment. We struggle to retrieve her self-esteem, and we talk of what a huge moment passed in silence at that lonely mailbox. Contrasting the exuberance of Nicole’s wedding with the utter void in which my client acknowledged whom she loved, I cannot keep myself from intervening. At my urging, Caroline agrees to gather her friends to celebrate the passage she has finally negotiated. Three long weeks of complete silence from her parents follow her letter; her agony and fear are palpable. So much for her life getting back to normal.

Lesbians are creating families, often broadening and reworking the very concept of family to include their own special—if Lesbian couples are claiming their status as complete and valid families. One- and two-parent lesbian families with children defy the notion that their families are incomplete or illegitimate groupings.¹ Unpartnered lesbians are claiming their closest friends and their own ex-lovers as their adult families and are developing ways of life that respect and nurture these precious kinship bonds. Because of this rich diversity, a book such as this one (which focuses specifically on lesbian couple relationships) addresses but one of many lesbian family forms and, while nontraditional by heterosexual standards, leaves far more unique constellations to be discussed by other authors.

Lesbian couplings have in all likelihood existed for generations.² Because every previous generation of lesbians faced tremendous dangers for revealing their sexual identity, however, many of these relationships remained invisible to most or all outsiders. Cut off from their hidden predecessors, each new generation of lesbians must therefore start from scratch, discovering for themselves the joys and stresses of lesbian family life.

Social Support Versus Social Exclusion

Society’s support of family life is so constant and pervasive that it is scarcely even noticed by many of the families who receive it. Heterosexual couples from identical racial backgrounds who have children are held up as prototypical American families and go through life with the culture’s assistance and congratulations. The social rituals devised to affirm key moments in family development—from weddings and baby showers to anniversary heterosexual families through the key passages of family life. Member families are able to anticipate the moments designated by the culture as major milestones and are invited into oft-repeated traditions of family responses to these events.³ These social messages are conveyed through virtually every aspect of social interaction and the mass media. Television continually depicts images of normal heterosexual family life, as do books, theater, dance, art, music, and children’s games. Even greeting cards predominantly feature the experiences of heterosexual families confronting the socially prescribed transitions of family life.⁴

Joan left extra time for browsing in the card store,, knowing she would have to search for an anniversary card that would be at all appropriate. Twenty minutes into the task,, she had located only cards with men and women pictured prominently on the cards, or pictures of men’s and women’s hands displaying their wedding rings. Inside, the words husband and wife disqualified even more of the cards; there was nothing she could buy for Eileen. All she wanted was a card expressing a couple’s love that didn’t exclude her by announcing the heterosexual identity of the couple. It seemed so simple. Discouraged,, she left the store., wondering where she thought she was going: The store down the street would not be any different.

The supportive relationship between society and its member families hinges on two essential points of agreement. First, society at large must agree that a particular group of assembled individuals in fact constitutes a family unit. Second, the family and society must agree about how family life will proceed. When this shared vision exists, society invites families to participate in a vast array of rituals and supports.

As surely as heterosexual families receive social validation and support, lesbian families are powerfully excluded from this sense of membership and approval. Formal rejection of lesbian families includes laws against homosexuality in general, or specifically against lesbians getting married; rescinding of custody rights to known lesbian mothers; and legally sanctioned discrimination against gay people in housing, employment, and other fundamental aspects of daily life. Lesbians (and other non-heterosexually identified people) also encounter a myriad of everyday examples of deliberate exclusion. The concept of family membership in everything from rates and privileges offered by HMOs, to family memberships and family events offered through recreational and social clubs, to workplace-provided benefit plans conforms to socially prescribed views of what constitutes a family. Lesbians are deliberately excluded from the vast majority of these opportunities because of the shared social assumption that all-female groupings are not and cannot be families.

Anne and Claudia, got their daughter, Mary, settled into her cabin at camp and helped her learn the schedule of events for the week ahead. They heard one of the other parents teasingly draw their own daughter’s attention to a large sign hanging in the back of the cabin: Sunday is ‘Dear Mom and Dad’ day. Rest hour will be extended thirty minutes to write your postcards home. Anne said nothing, as she wearily thought about how the struggles never end. She didn’t want to go remind the camp directors that not all kids live with their mothers and fathers. Once again, though, her child had been made to feel uncomfortably different. Camp had hardly begun, yet Mary was already just a bit left out.

Lesbian families are inundated with social rejection as others ignore these families’ existence by pretending all families are heterosexual and through specific and forcible refusal to grant basic rights to all lesbian families. The resulting contrast between the experiences of heterosexual and lesbian families is usually profound. Heterosexual families enjoy a well-mapped-out pathway for their life together, complete with reinforcements in moments of accomplishment and support in predictable times of family stress. Lesbian families struggle to survive without these fundamental supports, lacking both the social reinforcers in managing challenges or periods of transition and sufficient access to other lesbians’ accumulated wisdom on how to chart a family’s life paths.

Life Cycle Models for Heterosexual Families

Because social images of the stages of heterosexual family life are presented so pervasively, few people need formal instruction in how families look and function over time. The average school child could articulate the ordering of the major events in heterosexual family life: a wedding, childbirth, the children reaching school age, and so on. Nonetheless, these general understandings have been formally encoded by anthropologists and sociologists, as well as more recently by family therapists in the form of family life cycle models.

The importance of mapping out the expectable progression of family life over time hinges on the fact that families can be powerfully encouraged to see themselves as anything from fully healthy and normal to utterly deviant, depending in large part on the responses they receive from the surrounding culture. Generally understood conceptions of family life offer selected families a view of themselves as similar to others and as part of the accepted social fabric. Welcomed families are offered social support during times of inevitable stress and are encouraged to view their difficulties as normal, temporary, and survivable. Further, mainstream families enjoy models of normal family life that provide advance information about likely future stresses and moments of accomplishment, easing transitions and powerfully reassuring the family of its membership in good standing among other, similar families. By offering families a window into what they and their neighbors expect, these models forge crucial and supportive social connections.⁵

Like many other minority families, lesbian families are excluded from this network of social support. The stress that results creates many of lesbian families’ most difficult problems, and genuine social inclusion could eliminate much of the burden these families carry. In other words, much of the stress that lesbian families experience comes not from unique aspects of their family life but from avoidable problems that social conditions create, and for which there are obvious social alternatives. Some of the most painful manifestations of these problems do not necessarily require unique, lesbian-oriented solutions; instead, they could be alleviated by the same uncomplicated validation routinely provided for heterosexual families.

Chris was glad to run into Janet at the pediatrician’s office. They hadn’t seen each other in the year and a half since they had been in an aerobics class for pregnant women. Janet discussed how hard the first year of parenting had been for her and her husband and commented on the great support they’d received from the new parents support group their obstetrician had recommended. It was great to hear from other couples going through the same struggles, Janet said. Chris felt envy and anger. The first year had been just as hard for her and Susan, but no one had suggested the group to them.

Benefits of Developing a Lesbian Family Life Cycle Map

No comprehensive family life cycle model has yet been articulated for lesbian families. While some writers have usefully proposed particular stages common to lesbian relationships, these models are not sequential and do not extend throughout the course of the entire family life cycle.⁶

Because so few positive images of lesbian family life exist within the mainstream culture, these families may actually need life cycle models far more than their heterosexual counterparts do. Charting lesbian family life can communicate to lesbian partners that their relationships—like other couplings—change and grow over time. Family life cycle models can provide this recognition of the family’s momentum, interrupting the damaging impression that relationships stagnate during periods of stress and transition.⁷

If lesbians do not chart their own generalizable progressions through family life, then heterosexual life cycle models will continue to be the only ones we have. Far from accurately describing family life for all heterosexual people, existing models have been criticized for holding white, male-dominated middle-class experience up as an example for all families. Feminist family therapists have powerfully exposed the sexist underpinnings of mainstream perceptions of normal family life, and they have particularly targeted their own profession in their critique.⁸ Laird, for example, charges family therapy with sexism, observing that women’s stories, like women’s rituals, have been confined, for the most part, to a private rather than a public world, as have women themselves.⁹ In the process, women’s essential and varied contributions to family life become obscured, and their roles continue to be portrayed as supportive or ancillary within patriarchal, male-centered family groupings.¹⁰

Families of color have also been largely excluded from the construction of models of normal family life, despite an increasing body of work on racial and ethnic variations among families.¹¹ By reducing these families to the status of a variation of family life, central, normative kinship ties are relegated to secondary status because they do not mirror traditional white notions. Varying family constellations, intergenerational ties, patterns of autonomy and interdependence, involvements in chosen social communities, and other differences are lost when white heterosexual family life is elevated to the position of the universal standard.¹²

Even progressive evaluations of current conceptions of supposedly generic family life fall short of dismantling the underlying heterosexism of these theories. Carter and McGoldrick’s revised work on the changing reality of the family life cycle¹³ barely addresses lesbians. Similarly, the Women’s Project in Family Therapy specifically describes family life as inherently functioning to provide a structure for the relationship between the male and female partners presumed to head the family as they approach their assumed task of raising children. While these authors call on therapists to consider multiple contexts in evaluating the functioning of any given family unit, they do not name sexual orientation as one of the contexts to be considered.¹⁴

The failure of these otherwise progressive clinicians to recognize the exclusion of lesbians from their definitions of family reflects the effectiveness of our culture’s efforts to teach heterosexism. Despite their honest attempts to analyze the political and oppressive foundations of social conceptions of family life, heterosexist underpinnings remain unchallenged even by the authors most receptive to more expansive views of normal family constellations. While some of these authors are beginning to include information on lesbians in their work,¹⁵ these particularities still are not yet integrated into their primary theses concerning family life.

Insufficiently challenged, conventional social and professional images of family life present lesbian families—like other families from nondominant social groups—as if they are inherently and fundamentally deviant. If lesbians describe their family lives for themselves instead of depending on inappropriate models, however, a very different perspective can emerge. As lesbian couples identify their own transitions and moments of particular success in family life, the points of intersection between similar families will become clear. Demonstrating that the lives of these families also evolve over time, new life cycle models can foster lesbians’ confidence in their own family’s strengths and capacities (and free them from inevitably pathologizing comparisons to heterosexual family life cycle models). In addition, lesbian families can use their newfound common knowledge of lesbian family life to validate their own relationship’s momentum, to select future directions, and to recognize their relational evolution.

Family life cycle models can also offer an effective rebuttal to the social message that lesbian couples cannot form families. (This invalidating image results from many people’s insistence that the two women are simply friends, not partners, and therefore are not moving along any family life cycle at all.) As oppression serves to cut lesbians off from predecessors, peers, and role models, lesbian individuals and families are especially vulnerable to overpersonalizing any apparent deficit and attributing it to their lesbian identity itself.¹⁶ In this vacuum of information and connection to other lesbians, couples experience elevated levels of ongoing stress. Society encourages the partners to attribute this duress to the inherent failings of lesbian couple relationships themselves,¹⁷ and to downplay the impact of the homophobia they encounter on a daily basis. Lesbian family life cycle models can positively reframe efforts to thrive in the midst of this socially imposed isolation and finally credit couples for their creative—rather than pathological—responses to externally imposed obstacles.

Even lesbian families that are particularly hidden socially can benefit greatly from the charting of normal lesbian family life. Such models can provide these couples with coveted information about how other lesbians are constructing their lives, allowing the couples to recognize their own experience in the gathered descriptions. This simple act can powerfully support isolated lesbian families and help them positively connote their own experience of family life.

Rita and Stacy stood outside the café for twenty minutes before getting up the nerve to walk down the street and into the lesbian bookstore. Someone could see them go in, or they could run into someone inside the store that they didn’t expect to see. They hated this nervousness, but couldn’t give up the only chance they allowed themselves to be around other lesbians and books about lesbian life. They bought a few books each time, since they couldn’t risk coming very often. At home, they would pore over the books, discussing and comparing their lives to the depictions they had read.

For all of the compelling benefits of articulating common lesbian family experience, a note of caution is also needed. In the absence of ready-made models, lesbians have turned to themselves, creating rich and varied family lives outside of the constrictions of typical heterosexual patterns. The very act of generalizing about lesbians’ lives excludes some women’s experience from the discussion, creating new (albeit wider) parameters of normal versus abnormal ways of being. The last thing lesbian families need is yet another source—this time perhaps from within their own community—telling them that their lives are atypical or off-course.

In addition, unlike many other minority groups, lesbians do not all share common racial, ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds. No single model can accurately generalize about a subgroup of lesbians that contains such profound areas of diversity. A variety of authors from diverse backgrounds must contribute to this task. My own identity as a WASP, middle-class, coupled lesbian therapist in her late thirties, living in a well-established lesbian community, necessarily both informs and deforms the material that follows.

Moreover, where lesbian couples satisfied with their relational patterns find that a life cycle model contrasts with their own experience, it is crucial that they continue to validate the family life they have created. In this way, our models can expand as we encounter additional successful adaptations by particular families.

The Inapplicability of Heterosexual Life Cycle Models to Lesbian Families

Heterosexual family life cycle models have very little to say about couple relationships.¹⁸ The authors of these models assume a rather speedy arrival of children after the wedding, and frame every subsequent nodal event occurring for the couple almost purely in terms of their roles as parents. Families without children will simply not find their experience highlighted in any further stage of the model. Parenting families move through the stage of becoming parents and on to transformation of the family system in adolescence. For example, Carter and McGoldrick describe this transition as the family moves from a unit that protects and nurtures young children to a preparation center for the adolescent’s approaching adulthood. Next the family moves into the launching children and moving on stage, where the authors suggest that the children’s adulthood forces a renewed focus on the couple relationship—a task assumed to be challenging after years of diminished attention to this dyad. Finally the authors describe the partners’ old age, in which the couple’s return to a focus on their own relationship is mitigated by their presumed access to both children and grandchildren.¹⁹

Are we to believe that couples’ roles as lovers and partners apart from parenting quickly become irrelevant as the family life cycle progresses? Must parenting partners de-emphasize the further development of their romantic connection in the service of supporting their children’s growth? Many lesbians resist diminishing their focus on their couple relationships over time. Both because they are women (and hence tend to be relationally oriented) and because their couple relationships cost them so much on a daily basis, lesbians tend to maintain high expectations of these relationships. Frequently deprived of full connection to their extended families, lesbians may particularly look to their lovers for most or all of their family connection. Also, because many lesbian couples do not parent children, the couple relationship retains its central place in the lesbian family life cycle.

As a result, lesbian couples may provide an illuminating example of the dynamics of ongoing couple relationships. Their typically vigilant attention to their relationships allows them both to inform models of lesbian family life and to contribute to this neglected focus within heterosexual family life cycle perspectives. This and other differences between lesbian and heterosexual family life, however, require that specifically lesbian family life cycle models be developed. While all couples share some basic motivations and general hoped-for connections, lesbian family life differs from heterosexual norms in several defining ways.

First, existing life cycle frameworks assume the existence of a heterosexual couple at the apex of the family, without examination of this bias. This couple is presumed to be part of a multigenerational family network whose mutual and dependable support flexibly shifts its focus and form to fit various stages across the family life cycle.²⁰ Carter and McGoldrick make this explicit: Our aim is to provide a view of the life cycle in terms of the intergenerational connectedness in the family. We believe this to be one of our greatest human resources.²¹ They base their view on the assumption that the couple will both be linked to older generations of the family and create future generations through parenting.

This premise cannot be central to a model of lesbian family life; many lesbians’ families of origin severely limit or cut off those relationships upon learning of their daughter’s sexual identity, and many lesbian couples do not parent children. In addition, the model’s assumption of intergenerational family involvement presumes that partners receive guidance in ways of family life from their parents and consider using those parents as models for their own adult roles. Few lesbians, however, receive such usable guidance. The family of origin rarely views it as their task to train the young lesbian adult in the ways of establishing a [lesbian] family life.²²

Second, the heterosexual family life cycle map is based on the assumption that family ties are created through either blood or marriage. Such a model has no application to a group that is legally barred from marriage. Lesbians form families based purely on personal (and socially unsanctioned) selection of family members and mutual agreement by the couple that from this point forward they will constitute a family. Lesbians use broader criteria for family formation than do heterosexuals, and they often may consider friends and ex-lovers to be genuine family members.²³

Michelle and Sarah knew clearly who would be standing next to them during their commitment ceremony. Under the sacred Jewish canopy (or Choopa) would be the rabbi, the couple’s closest loved ones, and the couple themselves. They had chosen Michelle’s former lover, Sarah’s sister, and Nina and Joy, two of the couple’s oldest friends. This was their family, chosen long ago and made up of the women they trusted most in the world.

Existing family life cycle models also assume that family-of-origin members will share a common group identity. Families within particular ethnic, racial, religious, and other groups all share these special identities, although members do at times depart from family tradition in their religious affiliation. Although more than one family member may adopt a homosexual identity, lesbians cannot assume shared group identity with their parents, their siblings, or their own children.²⁴ This inherent and stigmatized difference between a lesbian and her family of origin frequently has a powerful effect on her adult experience.

Finally, current family life cycle models are child centered. While a substantial (and growing) number of