by WorldTribune Staff, August 25, 2017
A woman who was raised by her mother and her mother’s lesbian partner said that she “ached every day for a dad.”
“I grew up surrounded by women who said they didn’t need or want a man,” Heather Barwick wrote in an essay for The Federalist.
“Yet, as a little girl, I so desperately wanted a daddy. It is a strange and confusing thing to walk around with this deep-down unquenchable ache for a father, for a man, in a community that says that men are unnecessary.”
Barwick, a wife and mother of four children, said that she loves her gay mother and gay people in general but that “the nature of the same-sex relationship” is what caused her to write the essay about why she does not support gay marriage.
“Gay marriage doesn’t just redefine marriage, but also parenting,” Barwick wrote. “It promotes and normalizes a family structure that necessarily denies us something precious and foundational. It denies us something we need and long for, while at the same time tells us that we don’t need what we naturally crave. That we will be okay. But we’re not. We’re hurting.
“My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad. I loved my mom’s partner, but another mom could never have replaced the father I lost.”
The traditional man-woman marriage and family “can break down and cause kids to suffer,” said Barwick, through “divorce, abandonment, infidelity, abuse, death, etc.”
“But by and large, the best and most successful family structure is one in which kids are being raised by both their mother and father,” she said.
Barwick wrote that children of divorce can note how the divorce affected them, or adopted kids may yearn to know their biological parents, but children of same-sex parents do not have that “same voice.”
“It’s not just me,” said Barwick. “There are so many of us. Many of us are too scared to speak up and tell you about our hurt and pain, because for whatever reason it feels like you’re not listening. That you don’t want to hear.”
“If we say we are hurting because we were raised by same-sex parents, we are either ignored or labeled a hater,” she wrote.
At the end of her essay, Barwick appealed to the gay community and its apparent tolerance and openness to diverse ideas, stating, “I know this is a hard conversation. But we need to talk about it. If anyone can talk about hard things, it’s us. You taught me that.”
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Woman raised by lesbians tells gay community: ‘I ached every day … we need to talk about it’ added by World Tribune on
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