My parents took me to my first Mardi Gras in 1996, when I was three years old. My father bundled me onto his shoulders and held my tiny hands above my head. Later on, it became a family joke that it was that very moment that turned me gay. Personally, I think it was the first time I ever saw Katherine Moennig topless on The L Word – but that’s not something I discuss with my family.
Back then, my parents were happily married with two children and a dog. It was a peaceful childhood, undisturbed by the struggles of minorities, and untouched by the queer community a few suburbs over. I had never met a gay person – that I knew of – and I had no idea what LGBTQ meant.
I’d never heard of half the labels that people would soon be lining up to stick on me. The most controversial label I’d ever encountered was 98% fat free.
As I grew up, though, life began to feel like a long procession of people lining up to stick labels on us, beginning before we’ve even taken our first breath.
Five years ago, I rocked up to the maternity ward to give birth to a surprise baby. With my pink hair in pigtails and facial piercings gleaming under the hospital lights, the first thing they did was set me up with an official identity bracelet. Now anyone who cared to look would know that I was a 19-year-old single expectant mother with gestational diabetes and a pesky penicillin allergy.
About two seconds after my child slid screaming into the world, the same nurse fitted him with tiny white plastic strip around his chubby pink ankle containing his surname, gender, and weight. It was official: a single female aged 19 had given birth to a healthy boy weighing exactly 2.89 kilograms via emergency Caesarean. At roughly one minute old, the world was already starting to put labels all over my baby.
And so, I became the lesbian teenage mum to what looked like a slightly squashed, pale purple potato. Luckily, I had that new motherhood blindness to how strange newborns really look, so I thought he was perfect. After a few weeks, he eventually came to resemble a tiny human – and I fell headlong into gooey, mushy, new-mother love with him.
Soon, though, it became clear that not everyone was as thrilled with my surprise arrival as I was.
Every time I left the house with my bundle of screaming, wriggling joy, avoiding awkward interactions was like walking through an unexploded minefield. People wondered if I was his nanny – perhaps the parents were a bit alternative? Some assumed I was his rebellious older sister, or perhaps a weird cousin. I was asked multiple times a day where my husband was, or if I was making some extra money babysitting. People practically threw their backs out checking for any hint of a sparkle on my left hand.
I found myself answering the same questions over and over again.
"Yes, I had him I was a teenager. No, there’s no father. Yes, I’m gay. No, I don’t introduce him to my girlfriends. Yes, my mother does a lot of the work helping me raise him. No, I don’t get child support. Yes, I’m still working – I graduated university last year. No, I’m not worried he’s going to turn out gay. Yes, he dressed himself in that tutu. No, he likes his hair long. I’ll take him to get it cut when he asks me to. Yes, parenting is hard. Yes, I do get asked that all the time."
One morning as I walked him into preschool, his little friend Madeline pointed at me and loudly asked her mother who I was. Her mother smiled at me and said, "That’s River’s mummy, remember?"
Madeline walked up to me, looked me up and down, and then, pulling on one of my bright blue pigtails, said, "But you don’t look like a Mummy."
Her mother was mortified, and explained to her three-year-old daughter that everyone looks different, which is what makes them special. Parents come in all shapes and sizes and ages, she said.
"And colours," Madeline pointed out helpfully, before turning to me and saying, "You’re a very pretty Mummy. You look like a mermaid." With that, she asked if she could play with my "underwater hair".
It only took two seconds for a three-year-old girl to learn what a lot of people still don’t know – that it’s okay to be different.
It’s okay to have a baby in your teens, in your 20s, in your 50s. It’s okay to be single or happily married or just seeing where life takes you. It’s okay to adopt or use IVF or decide that you don’t want to be a parent and you’d rather hang out with your nieces and nephews on the weekend. It’s okay to be male or female or both or neither. It’s okay to be gay or straight or experimenting or just going with the flow.
And that’s why my son will always be on my shoulders as I march down Oxford Street with my gay, straight, trans, and non-binary friends. He will see families with two mothers and families with no mothers. He’ll see drag queens and dancers and celebrities and activists and friends. He’ll know what it means to take pride and joy in just being who you are.
When I was a child, my knowledge of Mardi Gras began and ended with the fact that half a street was closed down so that bare-breasted women and glittery men could parade around singing and dancing.
Pearl-clutching parents had earnest, well-meaning conversations with me about the dangers of taking my four-year-old to Mardi Gras. You know there will be drag queens there, they told me. He’s going to see men kissing other men and women kissing other women.
But that’s not what he’ll remember. He will see two fathers marching with their adopted children sitting on their shoulders. Supportive parents of queer children. Lesbian mothers. Straight allies with gay parents or siblings or cousins or grandparents. People who understand that love, not blood, makes a family.
The Sydney Mardi Gras is many things. It’s a celebration of pride. It’s a show of gratitude to the 78ers. It’s an excuse to dance like nobody’s watching.
And it’s a place where rainbow babies like mine get to see lots of other families that look just like theirs.
