Zach Wahls Speaks About Family

Zach Wahls, the 19-year-old son of a lesbian couple from Iowa, has become an internet sensation after speaking in defense of gay marriage.

The engineering student took to the floor of Iowa House on Tuesday, delivering a speech against the proposal to ban same-sex marriage in the US state. Such a ban requires changing Iowa’s state constitution. Read more: http://www.lesbilicious.co.uk/campaigns-politics/son%e2%80%99s-impassioned-defense-of-gay-marriage-goes-viral/#ixzz1D8oY9Uq0

I’ll see if I can’t get my 18 year old son to slow down from the college life he’s loving long enough to share his response to this video. My partner and I shared joint custody with my son’s mother and he grew up in our home half of his life. My partner’s daughter also grew up here half of the time. Perhaps she’ll stumble upon this post and share her thoughts.

After his 18th birthday, I thought it was important for him to know that he was no longer bound by law to move back and forth between his mother’s house and ours. I wondered what that might mean when he came back for occasional weekend and for holidays. Would he decide to spend more of his time at his mother’s?

Before he came home that first weekend, he called and asked, “Whose weekend is it?”

Don’t misunderstand me. Joint custody is by no means the preferred way of raising children. Honestly, I hate sharing them. I know they hate having to keep up with their stuff in two households. But not far into it, I realized if these things were worst that happened to them growing up, things wouldn’t turn out all that bad. We’re almost there, and I believe it’s safe to say things turned out pretty damn well.

Families come in sorts of configurations. The key to making them work remains the same no matter how they are configured. That key is love.

The only reason why I’m reluctant to ask his younger brother and sister to respond is because I’d rather wait until they are adults to put them in a public spotlight on this issue. Other than that, I bet they’d put their family up against anyone else’s anytime.