No Kid Has "Two Dads”

Michie · 2025-10-08T09:10:21-0500

Anytime you see a child with two dads, you know mom is missing

This was one of the most disturbing paperswe’d seen in a while.

The author, a gay man who used a surrogate and egg donor to acquire a child, was joking about his daughter calling him “mommy dad” and his partner being annoyed that it must be a stage the child was going through.

“Mommy” is both the near-universal term for mother as well as children’s oft-spoken first words. That’s not coincidental. It’s indicative of the primal yearning that children have for their mother from infancy through adulthood. Yet this man, who from every indication is a caring father, cannot bring himself to admit the possibility that there is something he cannot give to his child. This dad seems more concerned with his daughter validating his choices and “queer” identity than he is with validating his daughter’s deep-seated emotional needs:

In addition to all the official and informal names that have emerged to define and contain me over the years, I now also go by the name Mommy Dad—my two-year-old daughter started calling me that about a month ago. This is probably a daycare influence, although it is questionable whether ‘mommy dad’ is a response and, if so, to what. The teachers are proud that they have a two-dad family. One of them, let’s call her Lieke, never misses a chance for a teaching moment so she keeps reminding the group that Greta heeft twee papa’s (Greta has two daddies). We are both exotic and normal, orients with a Dutch twist, and I suspect that making me Mommy Dad is an act of resistance on Greta’s part.
Wherever mommy dad comes from, my husband is slightly annoyed by this development, forcing me, who also happens to be the pushover dad, to arbitrate between me, my new name, and Greta’s artful trick to normalize our relationalities. My husband rolls his eyes, then I go: ‘This is probably just a phase—she’ll grow out of it.’

It should come as no surprise that the conditions within which children are made, between a man and a woman, are also the ideal conditions within which to raise children. Children need and long for both maternal and paternal love. His little daughter was made for the love of her mother; it’s not something she needs to grow out of.

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