Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Boychick’s Bookshelf! In this series, I review children’s books of interest to parents who want to raise children free from and opposed to kyriarchy. These reviews will focus on books which showcase stories and lives beyond the dominant culture of white straight middle-class families, or which contain explicitly anti-kyriarchy messages (anti-racism, anti-ableism, anti-sexism, anti-heterosexism, anti-cissexism, anti-violence, anti-colonialization, and so on).

I thought it fitting to start this series with a book that, when it was born 21 years ago, created a controversy for its seemingly simple message that families come in many different configurations.

Heather Has Two Mommies

The Story

Heather’s favorite number is two. She has two pets, two arms, and two mommies: Mama Jane and Mama Kate. When Heather starts preschool at three years old, she realizes that other people have daddies and she doesn’t, which starts a conversation about who is in all the other children’s families. The teacher suggests everyone draw a picture of their family, and declares “Each family is special.”

The art is simple black and white (pencil or charcoal drawings, I’d guess) in a realistic style, with contributions from a five year old for the family drawings.

Intended Audience

Heather Has Two Mommies is not just for children with two mothers, although they might especially appreciate seeing a family that looks like theirs (or more so than most books). However, it is very obviously written by and for liberal/crunchy white families. Heather and her mothers are white, most of her classmates are white, and the children’s family portraits were all drawn by the same little girl (I suspect a black or Latino child’s self portrait, like David’s or Juan’s, would not be identical what a white child would draw — but I don’t know). The telling of Heather’s conception (with explicit references to doctor-assisted conception, and sperm, “womb”, and vagina), and home birth (attended by “a special nurse called a mid-wife”) might limit the appeal to families who adopted, birthed in a hospital, or grew by some other means. And while I giggle appreciatively at Mama Kate’s shirt in one frame, which declares “NO NUKES”, it communicates a very particular cultural affiliation that might put off some readers.

Changes in the telling

Perhaps the most obvious fail in Heather Has Two Mommies is the definition of a womb: “A womb is a special place inside a woman where babies grow.” In reading to the Boychick, we drop the special and add the very-important some: “A womb is a place inside some women where babies grow.” I don’t believe that kids are too simple to understand complexities like some, especially given that the topic of the book is that some kids have two mommies, some kids have one, and some kids don’t have any.

I also change around the retelling of Heather’s conception and birth a bit, not because I have a problem with the explicitness, but rather because it bugs me that it doesn’t go far enough. I replace “sperm” with the more accurate “semen” in “[the doctor] put some sperm in Jane’s vagina”, change “egg” to “ovum”, and add “and she didn’t get her period!” on the page about the early signs of Jane’s pregnancy. The Man downplays the “mid-wife”‘s role in the birth, and we’re both annoyed we can’t flip Jane over into a better position than “sitting in bed”.

Overall, however, especially given the length of the book, it requires relatively little on-the-fly rewriting to make it palatable to us.

Right on!

Things Heather Has Two Mommies gets right: the message of diversity of families, that “the most important thing about a family is that all the people in it love each other”¹. Shows families with same-sex parents, single parents, adoptive parents, and step parents. Class of six contains two children of color. One child’s “[brother] uses a wheelchair”, and the family portrait includes a picture of him in his chair, albeit in the background.

But does it appeal? The Boychick’s take

I was surprised how much the Boychick likes this book. Since it was one of his first non-board books, I was not expecting him to sit through it, considering its rather excessive length. But he not only sits through it all, he sometimes requests it multiple times in a row, and still be engaged by it. Perhaps this is because we acquired Heather Has Two Mommies around the time we started talking about sending him to preschool — for the first week after we bought it, he referred to it as “the room book”, a reference, I assume, to the “play group” room Heather goes to. Summary: The Boychick approves.

Buy it, Consider it, Skip it, or Compost it?

Consider it. The old-fashioned art and cultural references, the cissexism, and the explicit conception and birth descriptions mean Heather Has Two Mommies won’t appeal to everyone, but mostly it’s a story that’s held up remarkably well in the 21 years since its first publication.

Your Take

Have you read Heather Has Two Mommies? What do you think, and what do your kids think? Would you consider acquiring it now? Are there other books with similar messages you prefer?