“Parenting isn’t easy, when done correctly,” one of my moms once told me. As somebody who is not (as far as I know) a parent, I can only ruminate on the challenges I watched my moms endure in raising my sister and me, but it seems to be an accurate observation. Though, to be fair, this is coming from the woman who, when I was twelve, told me that sex was very painful until you were thirty-five. (You’re welcome for that tip, by the way.) At the time, Terry—my biological mom—didn’t mention the additional challenges LGBT parents face, but she didn’t need to—we were all pointedly aware of what those challenges are.

Terry was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2000. MS is devastating autoimmune disease that ravages those bodies of those it infects. As part of her MS symptoms, Terry experiences bouts of raw, intense pain in the frontal lobes of her brain—her “zingers,” as she has come to refer to them. “A little piece of hell,” is how Jackie, my non-biological mom (or “Short Mom”), describes the episodes of pain.

The following passage from my book, My Two Moms, is set in 2006 in the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics’ emergency room, when we all learned, first hand, what this legal disfranchisement meant for our family:

Terry had been seized by her zingers, unable to talk and jerking violently from all the sensory stimulation of the emergency room—the bright lights and loud doctors amplifying and worsening her deteriorating condition. Worse, the senior doctor on staff refused to listen to Jackie, insisting on an emergency MRI looking for a stroke that Jackie knew wasn’t happening.

The law said Jackie was a stranger, and he treated her like one. She was just the woman who had brought the patient in. Jackie knew exactly what was happening and knew exactly what Terry needed. She asked the senior doctor to call the neurologist with whom she had communicated only half an hour earlier and who had the drugs to calm Terry’s raging pain. He refused to make the call, and Jackie lacked the legal authority to do anything about it.

To put this in perspective, she says today that the pain she suffered that night was worse—far worse—than the trauma she endured in giving birth to Zebby, an event during which surgeons conducted an emergency C-section without complete anesthesia. That night in the ER, my mom recalls, was the most painful of her life.

I’m not an angry person, and it’s not my style to hold a grudge. But if my moms had been married, if Jackie had had the authority she needed, they could have stopped Terry’s pain. And they weren’t married because—and only because—some people have used the law to inflict their morality on families like mine.

As Terry withered on an ER table deep within the University of Iowa Hospital, once again, in the eyes of the law, the woman by her side was only a stranger.

Although we made it through that dark time without incurring any lasting damage, the memories of that painful evening will never fade.

And, today, it’s an interesting place to find oneself. To have brought children in to this world fully knowing that you did not have the legal protections and social standing enjoyed by straight couples and then turn around and protest that the lack of protections is harming your family smacks, at first blush, of cognitive dissonance. This was a reality that, at times, I found difficult to reconcile.

Upon further evaluation, however, I’ve realized that this “dissonance” is present in every single parental-child unit: it’s the striking juxtaposition of selflessness that is required to actually be an effective parent and selfishness that is required to bring those kids in to a world that is at times cruel, hellish and brutal in the first place. This isn’t a phenomenon isolated to so-called “gay” families. It’s a universal truth experienced by all who bring babies in to the world.

And if we accept that the world is indeed, at times, a dangerous place, and if American social conservatives are, indeed, so interested in protecting families and ensuring that children are growing up in healthy, wholesome homes, they ought to take some advice from their conservative friends across the Atlantic. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron on the legalization of same-sex marriage: “Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us, that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other. So I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative, I support gay marriage because I am a conservative.”

Parenting may not be easy, but this issue really is that simple.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.