New Memoir Highlights Nonbiological Motherhood

She Looks Just Like You(Originally published as my Mombian newspaper column.)

Amie Klempnauer Miller and her partner Jane, “fully endowed with the lesbian love of process,” spent 10 of their first 18 years together talking about whether to become parents. Once they did, they spent another two years trying to get Miller pregnant before they decided that Jane might have better luck.

She did, setting Miller on her own quest to discover what it means to be a nonbiological lesbian mother. Miller chronicles that journey in She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Nonbiological Lesbian) Motherhood (Beacon, 2010), a warm, insightful, and gently humorous addition to the small number of memoirs about LGBT families.

The book is an expansion of several essays, including one in Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All, ed. Harlyn Aizley (Beacon, 2006), the only other book devoted to nonbiological lesbian parents. The longer solo format, however, gives Miller space to explore further not only what it means to be a nonbiological lesbian mom, but what it means to be a parent, period.

Miller begins with the process of searching for an anonymous donor and trying to inseminate—first her, then Jane—but does not make the process a central focus of her tale, as do so many media depictions of lesbian parenthood. Pregnancy, the anxieties of future parents, and the changes to their lives during the first year of parenthood form the heart of the story, along with Miller’s ongoing desire to discover her place as a parent.

“My inner guy is coming out of the closet,” she writes of her behavior during Jane’s pregnancy. “I feel urgently, irrationally protective of Jane. . . . I don’t feel like I somehow need to mimic the paternal role, but yet it seem to be finding and claiming me.”

She explains, “I feel more at home among the dads because I have never thought of myself as a particularly good woman. I have never regretted being female nor am I even remotely butch; I’m just not very good at girl stuff.”

Miller browses parenting Web sites and finds that the sections for new moms, geared towards pregnant women, do not apply to her. She tries the dad sections and still feels like an outsider, “in limbo between being a mom and not being a mom and being a dad and not being a dad.”

This may seem lesbian specific, but Miller finds a touch of the universal, reflecting, “Maybe the experience of the unpregnant partner, whatever the gender, follows a predictable pattern. It’s just that most of the unpregnant partners in the world are men.”

Throughout much of the book, in fact, Miller offers her insights on matters common to many people expecting their first child: getting the house ready, taking one last vacation as a child-free couple, wondering whether one will be a good parent.

She discusses her mixed feelings about becoming a stay-at-home mom, wanting to be there for her child while also exploring a career change, but worrying that her mind will atrophy and she won’t be pulling her weight to support the household. Stay-at-home parents of all orientations will empathize.

Miller points out, however, that an additional motivation to have one of them stay home is because they are lesbians. They want “to create a world for [our baby], at least for a while, in which families come in all shapes and sizes and configurations. . . . On some level, I think that we can transmit those messages better than anyone else, no matter how inclusive they are trying to be.”

When their daughter is born, Miller experiences the commonalities of many new parents: the sleepless nights, the concerns with feeding, diapers, and infant ailments. She is captivated by the glorious yet puzzling new being who has entered their lives, but does not paint a rose-colored portrait of instantly assuming a parental role. “It makes sense to me now that so many books about parenthood cover the first year of the child’s life,” she observes. “It takes that long to grow the heart and soul of a parent.”

She also tells of situations non-LGBT parents do not face: going through a second-parent adoption to become her daughter’s second legal parent, searching for an LGBT-inclusive day care, and how parenthood means coming out to people with whom one wouldn’t normally bother to mention sexual orientation.

Miller describes with sometimes painful honesty the strains that new parenthood puts on her relationship with Jane, driven by sleeplessness, post-pregnancy hormones, and a readjustment to new routines and new roles. She eventually realizes that the answer is not to try and rediscover who they were, but “to discover who we are, together, as parents.” They seem to have succeeded—they are still together.

She Looks Just Like You is a touching and heartfelt story of family creation—in all senses of the word. Miller has managed to find a thoughtful balance between illuminating the things that set nonbiological lesbian parents apart with the things that bring all parents together.

“I always feel a difference between our family and straight families, one of nuance more than category,” she writes. By sharing her experience as a nonbiological lesbian mom, while also exploring universal truths about parenthood, she captures that nuance perfectly. Parents and prospective parents, both LGBT and not, will find much to enjoy.

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3 thoughts on “New Memoir Highlights Nonbiological Motherhood”

  1. Thank you for this inspiring review. As the daughter of lesbians and the mother of an adopted three-year old, I’m excited to read this new memoir!

    –Melissa Hart

  2. Pingback: 20 questions for: Amie Klempnauer Miller (1 of 2) at Lesbian Dad

  3. My sister and her partner have a child and I think my sister could relate to She Looks Just Like You. She was the non-expecting parent and had to go through the adoption process as well. Not everyone in her partner’s family knows about their family life either, making their family get-togethers slightly awkward. I will suggest the book to her. Thanks!

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