Exceptional, Defined: How One Local Parent Overcame His 'Gay Dad Guilt'

‘Not typical,’ sure…but also, ‘outstanding.’ As this Westchester father battles his ‘gay dad guilt,’ his daughter unwittingly reminds him that he may just need a shift in perspective.

“Does it ever make you sad not to have a mom?”

I looked into the eyes of my 4-year-old daughter, Sutton. It’s a question I’d always wanted to ask her, but I’d never come right out and said the words before.

“Yeah,” she said, pouting.

At her age, she’s already perfected her pout to the point where I often can’t tell the difference between the fake one and the real one. I realized instantly what I’d done wrong. The way I asked the question made it sound like “yes” was the answer I was looking for. If I’d asked instead, “Isn’t it awesome that our family has two dads?” she probably would’ve said yes to that, too.

To any undergrad psychology student, it would’ve come across as classic projecting. I was the one who was sad, after all; I want to give my daughter everything, but one thing I’ll never be able to provide her is a female parent, and we live in a world that’s constantly reminding her how awesome moms are. They’re in books she reads, TV shows she watches, in virtually every family we know. But she’ll never have one herself, and I’m left wondering if that worries her as much as it does me.

It goes back to the moment midway through my husband’s and my surrogacy when we learned our fetuses’ sexes. “It’s a boy… and a girl!” Everyone cheered when we told them, insisting we’d hit the jackpot. No one but me seemed concerned that we would be a family made up of three-fourths dudes. I was convinced the one little girl would feel left out.

That was the kickoff of what I call my gay dad guilt. Every self-doubt I had about becoming a father reverberated through my brain. How will you do her hair? How will you explain menstruation to her? The right-wingers are right. She deserves a mom!

From early on, my husband and I have done our best to expose our daughter to what we consider positive female role models—aunts and friends, Madeline and Matilda. Any fears we had that she would resent or reject her gender were unfounded. It was just the opposite. She embraced everything girly without the slightest nudge from us. She picked out the pinkest and frilliest dresses to wear and would make me redo her pigtails over and over until I got them just right. It turned out I didn’t need to teach her how to be a girl. Instead, she was teaching me.

Then I noticed a strange habit emerging. Once she learned to count, Sutton started using her new skill to tally up the number of boys and girls in every group she encountered. “Aunt Kathy and Uncle Larry have four girls in their family,” she informed us after a visit to her cousins’ house. “Uncle Larry is the only boy.” When we’d have friends over for a visit, she’d walk around sorting everyone silently by gender, to see where the majority lay in any particular group.

“Six boys, eight girls,” she’d report.

One day, my son and I were watching a video of the Muppets. “Daddy,” Sutton said, “there aren’t a lot of girl Muppets.”

I realized she was right. Other than Miss Piggy and the lesser-seen Janice, the Muppets are pretty much a sausage fest. In that instant, I found my mission in life. I owed it to my daughter to change the Muppet gender balance, if only for her. “Let’s make our own Muppet!” I cheered. I grabbed some crayons, and the two of us sat down with our imaginations. Soon, we’d designed a blue-faced, pink-shoed, stripey-bodied creature who Sutton dubbed Rosada.