Personally, not having a dad never affected me because having two mothers meant two parents. The role of a “father” seemed optional, so I didn’t understand why people cared so much about the conventional family structure. My moms gave me a normal childhood experience, and our family functioned like everyone else’s.

Same-sex parents aren’t really different from the traditional “mother-father” unit.

My moms didn’t tell me the difficulties they faced as same-sex parents until later in life. As a child, I hated government offices because of the amount of time each visit demanded. Later on, though, I realized that those long hours were because of extra obstacles that my moms had to jump through to be seen as my legal parents. One time, the restlessness had settled in so much that seven-year-old me yelled at the front desk worker, “She’s literally my mom, okay.”