Description:
In the foreword to Women in Love, new mother Linda Villarosa describes "the proverbial moment of truth," when, leaving home one day with her baby in the stroller, an older woman smiled and said, "Don't you live three doors up? You live with the woman who wears the earring in her nose." How easy it would have been to nod and walk on, letting the neighbors think that her lover and coparent, Vickie, was just a roommate. But that would have been "to deny the reality of our family ... erase all the nights Vickie has shaken off sleep to bring me the baby to nurse, blunt the tears of joy she shed in the delivery room." Eventually Villarosa brought herself to say, "The woman with the nose ring is our baby's other mother," and her neighbor replied simply, "Oh, you're lesbians, isn't that nice." This is one of the many happy endings in this book, a celebration of lesbian families. Brief profiles accompany photographs of quietly heroic women and their strong, accepting children. In an earlier form, the project was rejected by Mothering Magazine as lacking "angst and drama," but in a world of intolerance, small pockets of happiness deserve to be brought to light. --Regina Marler
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