I Practiced Coming Out a Hundred Times. Nobody Mentioned the Pediatrician.
- Gay Moms Club
- Apr 14
- 2 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
I did not actually practice coming out a hundred times.
What I mean is: I spent years preparing for the dramatic version. The sit-down conversation. The carefully chosen words. The moment where someone who loves you either rises to meet you or doesn't, and either way, you've done the thing. I was ready for that. I had rehearsed it in my body, if not in actual sentences.
I was not ready for the pediatrician's front desk at 8:45 on a Tuesday morning, with a sick kid on my hip, a clipboard in my hand, and a woman cheerfully asking me to list the child's mother and father.
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Nobody warns you about those moments.
Not the well-meaning books about coming out; not the friends you made in your twenties while you were still trying to piece yourself together; not even the community you found, eventually, after a lot of wrong turns. Nobody sits you down and says: You will be doing this forever, in the most mundane possible settings, with no time to prepare and no emotional bandwidth to spare.
This is the part nobody told us about.
The administrative coming out.
You’re allowed to have a script for moments like these.
Coming out doesn’t have to be spontaneous and heartfelt every single time. It can just be a sentence you've already decided on, that you pull out when you need it, that costs you basically nothing because you already did the work of figuring out the words.
“He has two moms.”
That's it. That's the whole script. You can build from there or stop there, and it works either way.
There are still days when you're tired, when the form is long, when the kid is sick, and you just write whatever gets you through intake. Those days are fine; you are not failing at visibility. You are parenting.
The thing about queer parenthood is that it constantly resets the clock. Even when you're out, settled, and comfortable in your community, it's easy to forget that the world hasn't caught up.
So yes, you came out a hundred times before this. You'll come out a hundred more. You just didn't know you'd be doing it while also looking for your insurance card.
JOIN GAY MOMS CLUB
Gay Moms Club is a welcoming online community for LGBTQ+ moms who want real connection, honest conversations, and friendships that fit into real life.
You shouldn’t have to explain your family before you can make a friend.
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