More Than a Blue Sky

More Than a Blue Sky: On Being a Queer Parent Researcher and “Uncomfortable Reflexivity” Sonja Mackenzie (bio) the rainy, dull gray week— on top of a historic stormy season— was nearly over. It had been a long haul— sickness, house isolation, and the dragging-on reality of the UK winter was in my body. My bones. I ached for light. We closed the week with a meal together as we usually do now that we are a transnational family— one parent and one child each in the UK and the United States. Meals are daily practice in our home when we live in the same country, the same physical home, but now that we span two continents we share one meal a week over video chat, laptop perched atop a cake stand topped off with the old rattan placemats of my childhood. A strange form for a Victoria sponge but nothing outside pandemic normal. It is a highlight of my week. Today had seen my two children on the floor, trading secrets for strong muscles and the perfect press-up from across the world. A parade of dog tricks in our garden amid vivid blooms, fruit trees in transition, and the streaming sunlight of my family in California. Laughter. A relief. The rays of light shone through the screen, a bright, joy-filled family conversation to end this week, perhaps this era. My daughter turned the camera on the blue sky. Not a cloud, not a streak of interruption. Blue brilliance. “Ohh!! Don’t show me that! I need that blue sky more than you know!” I shrieked in delight. [End Page 176] “Almost as much as I need a dad. . . .” My son put the fork down in his rice, shifting in his seat next to me. He had slipped this into our perfect moment with no malice. Silence. From sun to dad— it seemed a world away, and yet perhaps these were both parts of the fabric of life for each of us, elusive necessities. A dad— in a queer two-mum family with a donor. A dad, claimed as essential by a pre-adolescent boy among boys— a class of boys at his English prep school that he had not known until recently. “Well, I had a dad and still felt I needed one.” I piped in, breaking the silence, reaching for something as the queer activist parent who strives— possibly a bit too hard— for the complicated, if not the subversive, in all things parenting. I was aiming to illustrate what we have long discussed, and indeed, embodied, over the course of his family life— that forms of kinship are socially constructed; that dads, mothers, aunts— these are all social roles, patterned in part by gender norms and compulsory heterosexuality. “How come?” “He wasn’t really involved, didn’t do much, so, well. . . .” My voice trailed off. “Well, my dad is off being an artist, doing who knows what. And here I am.” My son— apparently, he now has a father. His donor is indeed an artist. After a minute, my daughter broke the collective pause, matter of factly— “Well, I don’t need a dad.” And yet, words faded away and with them our parental and big sisterly lives and who-needs-a-dad sentimentality. It seemed no coincidence that on the heels of the British prep school version of heteronormativity and masculinity he was newly exposed to— a version infused with intense over-determined notions of class that family is not just who you are but who you (boys in particular) can (and cannot) become— now was the time for my son to need a dad more than the bright sun in midwinter. This comment, this hearkening to life of a dad by a boy who has none, who knows he doesn’t— had come to bear most recently with the jabs of “lesbos,” “your dad’s left you!” and “say goodbye to your mum and dad”— the latter spoken by a teacher in front of a child and his two mums, as if speaking it would make it come to be. There had been “two-mom boy” fashioned as a nickname by one particularly

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