What Does Queering Parenting Look Like?

AJ realizing that they can fit inside the cabinet. That makes it so much easier to choose a snack!

It starts with defining what the norm is. We are told from birth and reminded through toys, teachers, and romcoms that there is only one kind of acceptable love. Or at least, it's the love we should all be aspiring to. A man and woman, most likely white, touch hands at the grocery store, look into each other's eyes, knowing they were meant to be together. They get married and have two and a half kids and a dog. They outsource their children's care to a nanny or grandparent with too much free time. If you're Black, single, poor, or even gay, you may have deviated a bit, but you're still following the same script...unless you are intentional about doing something different.

The general idea is that there are specific roles based on gender assigned at birth. One parent, usually the man or more-masculine-leaning person, is responsible for making the money, and any strenuous or dirty labor like cutting the grass or taking out the trash. The other parent, usually a woman or more-feminine-leaning person, coordinates the family's lives while keeping the household running. The children are voiceless beings, meant to follow the parents' every command without a thought.

When I decided to become a parent, I knew I wanted to do things differently. I didn't want to replicate the authoritarian parenting style I'd grown up with. I planned to give birth without a partner, so I had to figure out how to balance working with spending time with my child. I was knees-deep in the farming world at the time, so when I envisioned my child's life, it was running around open fields, knowing animals by name, and pretending in a mud kitchen. I wanted something different from the family in front of their suburban house with a white picket fence in their rigid roles.

I had wonderful, beautiful intentions. But intentions are only as strong as the will to fight to make them a reality. My values were tested almost immediately. As I navigated divorce paperwork and moved from house to house, I was building a life on unstable ground. First, I was in the house I co-owned with my ex, then a temporary apartment, then finally the first home I purchased solely in my name. Unfortunately, I lost my job in less than a year of the home purchase, sold that new home, and moved in with my mother. Through it all, I was preparing for family court to solidify custody of my child, and begging Medicaid to stop just escalating my child's file and actually approve them.

It was overwhelming, and I have several gray hairs to prove it.

But in the chaos, I realized that I couldn't wait for stability to start parenting intentionally. I had to learn how to queer my parenting in the middle of a storm.

Much of my queer parenting journey was inner child work to see what it was about my own childhood that I liked and what parts left me wanting more. I read books like Redefining Rich by Shannon Hayes and Raising Free People by Akilah S. Richards. I listened to every podcast and YouTube video I could, trying to figure out how to not mess up my kid.

Through my research and reflection, queer parenting became about building new scripts in real-time while rejecting old ones. It's about dismantling the dominance-based hierarchy between adult and child, and nurturing a child's soul rather than managing their behavior. It's creating family structures that extend beyond blood relatives and being okay with not knowing it all but committed to learning more on the job. Most importantly, it's learning to do this work while the ground beneath you is still shaking.

How has your parenting evolved over the years? What lessons did you learn while navigating your own storms that helped you do things differently?