Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [51]
Good boundaries are important here too. While your kids are certainly entitled to express an opinion about the way you choose to run your life, they don’t get to dictate it. The flip side of this is that you owe it to them to help prevent their lives from being unduly impacted by a lifestyle they never chose. Dossie willingly agreed to maintain a discreet closet about her lesbian partner when her daughter’s junior high school friends came to visit; her daughter got to come out to her friends about her mom at her own pace. Well, nobody ever said parenthood—especially slutty parenthood—was going to be easy.
Your Lovers’ Kids
When your lovers have kids, you are involved with those kids too—one friend of ours refers to the many kids he helped his lovers raise as his “practice kids,” helping him learn parenting skills for the child of his own that came along later.
You’ll need to make decisions together about what to tell the kids about your relationships, and you need to learn what decisions are conventional in your lovers’ families. It may not matter whether younger children know or understand that some of the connections in their families are sexual and others are not. But all adults in families with children have a responsibility to make a connection with the kids we come in contact with, and to foster our own children’s connections with our friends and lovers.
Single sluts with no previous connection to children may find themselves in a position of needing to learn how to deal with children in their extended family.
Fact of life: Everyone around children will eventually need to set limits with them. There may be some challenges as you work to reconcile your own limits with the habits and styles of a family that was working just fine before you arrived in it. Expressing your needs can be an opportunity for the kids to learn that different adults have different needs, that Jane can nap through a rousing game of Inside Tag whereas Jean needs an hour of quiet.
It may be that you find yourself disliking one of your lover’s kids. Perhaps something about this particular child pushes your buttons: they may remind you of your horrible older brother or maybe even your young self—often the things that annoy us most about someone else are the things we dislike about ourselves or our histories. Or the child may be angry at you, or dislike you, for reasons entirely beyond your control: perhaps you are “replacing” a beloved parent or other adult who has been lost to death or divorce. Whatever the reason for this problem, you are the adult here and it is your responsibility to find a way to solve it. Resolution will undoubtedly take some time, a fair amount of energy, and a great deal of patience, but we believe it will be worth it, for you and your lover and the kids.
Early in Janet’s relationship with her spouse E, there was a lot of friction between him and her young adult son, mostly over issues that will sound familiar to any stepparent: housekeeping, noise levels, courtesy. Then, she recalls, “We were visiting my mother for a few days, and the two of them were escaping the domestic whirlwind out in the back yard. E expressed sympathy about a difficult personal situation my son was encountering. They had a beer together and really talked, from the heart, for the first time—and suddenly E could see my son the way I see him, as a socially awkward young man, not always too aware of the physical realities around him, but with a huge heart and a lot to give. From that evening on, they’ve had no trouble working together on normal household stuff and have in fact become good friends.”
When you establish a positive relationship with the children in your environment, they will respond by developing a positive relationship with you. We know of ex-lovers who have maintained close friendships over