Hey everybody! I'm new here. I was wondering if you could help me out, I'm in the process of writing a book, and one of the main characters is a 19-year-old-girl who was put up for adoption soon after she was born, and was adopted by a lesbian couple. While I am entirely in favor of equal rights for homosexuals and I hope the day comes when they are no longer discriminated against, I unfortunately don't actually know any homosexuals personally, so I'm concerned that my portrayal of certain details about this character and her family could be wildly inaccurate without me realizing. I've tried to find information online, but the information I've found is limited and inconsistent, so I thought I'd try asking people directly. I would like to know two things: 1: What do gay couples do regarding last names? Currently I have it that both of her mothers kept their last names, which are Meyer and Cohen, and gave their adoptive daughter the last name Meyer-Cohen. Is this realistic? If not, what would you recommend? 2: What should this 19-year-old girl call her two adoptive mothers? The usual answers I saw online were "Mommy" and "Mama", which I *kinda* suspect wouldn't apply to a 19-year-old girl. I appreciate any help you can offer on this subject
When I get married, I plan to conjoin my last name with hers. Also, I do call my mom mama. And if I'm feeling spoiled, I call her mommy. But if I'm talking about her to other people, I call her mom.
Hmmm, may I ask the 'character' of your main character. The reason is because if this is a drama, and your main character is a teenager going through a lot. It is very common for kids in this situation to push away from their parents. Especially with step parents and adopted parents in isnt uncommon for them to take to refering to them by their first name. So I would say to really consider the relationships first. Another thing to consider is that she will not usually be refering to them as any name in person. The majority of the time conversation recognition is made by eye contact, not name. Which is why many families do perfectly fine with usually the same name. Some families even say that they can tell who their children is talking to just by instinct. That would most likely be what my family would be like because I would be perfectly fine with my children refering to us by different versions, great. But I wont tell them to only call me a specific name, and him another.
Thanks for your input! This character is on very good terms with her adoptive parents, and we don't actually see her talking to her parents in modern day. In actuality, she's something of a posthumous character. She dies very soon in the story, as do her parents (this is a post-apocalyptic fantasy novel which starts just before the apocalypse) but she has a significant influence after her death and is shown a lot in memories of her best friend. She mentions her parents in the first chapter when talking to that friend, and obviously I need to work out how she'd refer to them to her friend. Most of the interaction we'd see her have with her parents would be in flashbacks later in the story, the most significant of which take place when she's in the 1st and 3rd grades.
Here's what I've come up with so far: Emily Meyer-Cohen's adoptive parents are named May Meyer and Gabriella Cohen, and she refers to them as May and Gabby when talking about them to other people, but calls them "Mom" and "Mama" respectively when talking directly to them. I'm pretty comfortable with that first bit, but this second bit, why they chose to keep their individual last names when they got married, I'm a bit unsure about: May and Gabriella kept their last names because they were married and proud of it, and they embraced the "Mrs." title; to them it said "we're married women, and we aren't any different from women who are married to men." When they went to open a bank account or spoke with an insurance company, they wanted the same dignified last-name-basis that other clients had. As I said, I'm a bit iffy about that, I'm worried it's unrealistic.
When I was in high school one of my best friends was a girl adopted by a lesbian couple. She called them by their first names if they were together with her, or she called them "mom" if only one was present. Her parents weren't married (since it's banned in Ohio, obviously), so they had different last names, but honestly, you can do it however you want. Gay marriage is still in it's infancy, realistically, and there aren't any real traditions established yet. Each couple is going to do it their own way until enough time has passed for a trend to develop. That's just my two cents though.
