Rewriting the Legal Family: Beyond Exclusivity to a Care-Based Standard

Abstract

The immediate family in which I grew up began with two adults and their two biological sons. During my childhood, however, it included (at various times) two households, shared custody, lesbian mothers, heterosexual stepparents, a foster child, and three stepsiblings, all in the same small town. I have ex-step-grandparents. A typical day when I was ten might have begun in the home of my mother or my father, who shared equal custody of my brother and me. If that day began at my mother's house, we would have risen early so that my mother, a teacher, could head to work across the river. My mother's female partner, Lisa, who was one of our three parents, would have driven my brother, me, and our foster brother to my father's house across town. There, because my father did not have to go to work until later, we would eat breakfast and board the bus to school. After school we would head back to my mother's house and stay with a neighbor until my mother or Lisa got home. If we were staying at my father's house that week, our foster brother (who lived with my mother) would be dropped off in the morning to join us for breakfast and, in the evening, my father would pick us up from my mother's after he got off of work.