So, I was waiting to post in the new polygamy thread until I got home, but I see it has been closed. So, I will say what I wanted to here.
My daughter has three parents and is doing quite well. She is bright, learns quickly and seems to get along with other kids well. She sees that we all love each other very much and doesn’t seem the least bit harmed. Generally when people say that poly people should not expose kids to their life style I think that those people are ones whose opinion I do not value.
I became poly because my sterile husband wanted kids. I had no problem before that having sex only with him. I opened myself to the possibility of loving someone else because I loved him and wanted to make him happy. I have been with my husband for 19 years and with Kelly for mearly six years. We are all in this for the long haul.
Now my daughter has three parents. As far as she is concerned this is the right way. I am very lucky, I can see many advantages: Three parents to pay attention and love, one parent to stay at home and yet we are still a two income family, three adults to bring in new ideas and teach our child, two can go out and have a romantic dinner and still leave our daughter with a caring parent, or for that matter stay home and have sex while the third cares for her.
The only disadvantages are from narrow minded bigots, and I have never in my life allowed them to tell me how to live my life and I am not going to start now.
If your happy, why do you care what anyone thinks? Are there people telling you how to live your life? Obviously everyone isn’t going to agree which is their right, but why let it bother you?
It doesn’t offend me or bother me, but I guess I must be a little too conventional for me to do it for the baby thing. But I can sort of see the whole two guy thing, like the movie Bandits.
This is a little off topic, but did anyone see the documentary, Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family? Not exactly like your situation because both men were bisexual. But it worked for them and she had a child with each man. I missed the last 10 minutes of the movie and didn’t see how it ended.
I don’t really care either way about whether you’re polyamorous, but you “became poly” to conceive a child?
You are aware that there are other methods, right? Maybe you’re just a big fan of the story of Abraham and Hagar, but it seems rather peculiar to me to welcome another lover into your home, permanently, in order to get pregnant.
Besides, doesn’t this rather go against the polyamorous community’s usual claims (which I don’t necessarily doubt) that polyamory is something analogous to a sexual orientation?
Well, I did not form the normal poly claims and so I can’t speak to them. I do know that neither my husband nor I are very jealous of the other’s attention. I wanted a child conceived in love, and was not much interested in trying technology, at least until I tried a slightly less medical way.
And my first relationship outside of my marriage was not permanent, nor intended to be. Unfortunately, I did not get pregnant, or at least stay pregnant for over a month;I missed one period; my periods are very regular.The second and present relationship just seemed to happen, and the pregnancy part was quite a pleasant surprise. I would never have gotten involved with someone though had I not let myself be open to the possibility.
Wait a minute and back up here. You have no problem having sex with your sterile husband, but wanted sex with someone else? Or do you mean you have no problem just having sex with the fertile guy? I would love to hear the men’s side of this. Then again-no, I wouldn’t.
Who is Kelly? Are you female? You must be, if you wanted to get pregnant. If you’re a man who wants to get pregnant, poly anything is the least of your worries.
How old is said child? Is she in public or private school–that is, not home schooled? How does she explain things to others–in her own words? The fact that she is bright is irrelevant, really. And lots of kids have 3 parents–fosters, divorced, gay couples with surrogates etc. 3 parents is not unusual. I know a woman (poor thing) with 3 mothers in law.
I do not share your “open mindedness”–here’s a question for you: when your daughter wants to date or marry–what system will be emphasized in your home? Just curious. You can raise her any legal way you want to, but dont’ be surprised or upset if she doesn’t choose to follow your path.
KellyM is a woman too. Haven’t you been paying attention?
(Granted that she possesses the reproductive apparatus more traditionally associated with being male, and is the bio-parent of the child to whom the OP refers, we have been over all this ground quite thoroughly before.)
I have to admit I don’t get this, either. I actually understand the poly lifestyle to a certain degree as a sexual orientation kind of thing (as Excalibre points out), but I don’t get it for the purposes of having a child. If you adopted a child, it would be just as much a part of your husband as this child is, so what is the point of bringing someone else in, and not just taking that route? And although I agree that all the reproductive technology can be a little off putting, it seems a lot less fraught with possible life complications than the three-way parenting/marital relationships.
While I appreciate that you are all in it for the long haul, and I can see the advantages you speak of, I just wonder if there is more to the story than what you are telling. It seems like a huge reversal of lifestyle for a problem that could solved in much less emotionally complicated ways.
One other thing…have you thought about issues with custody legalities? How would that work, say, if you & your husband were divorced? Would he have any rights to custody, since it isn’t technically his child? Whose child IS she, from a legal perspective?
Exactly. It’s simply false to say that lee “became poly” in order to conceive a child, when conceiving a child doesn’t require becoming poly. There are other, normal ways to do so, either through technology or just through opening your home to a needy child. I’m just confused here - it seems to me that lee entered a polyamorous relationship because she wanted to; one member of a marriage being sterile is pretty common, and it doesn’t normally lead to polyamory. I just find it puzzling that lee is trying to justify it with her husband’s medical problems. If you don’t think it’s wrong, there’s no reason to justify it anyway. And this explanation doesn’t really explain anything.
Is this fundamentally so different from someone’s wanting to get married so that they can have a child? Many people’s decisions about relationships and marriage are strongly influenced by their desires concerning parenthood. I don’t see that much difference between somebody’s saying “I wanted to be a mother, so I decided to start looking for a guy I could love and marry and have a child with” and saying “My infertile husband and I wanted to be parents, so we decided to start looking for somebody we could love and share our marriage with and have a child with”.
In any case, it sounds as though the original intention of lee and her husband was just to have a temporary third partner until she got pregnant. That didn’t work out as planned, and then the committed poly relationship that they now have with KellyM was something that “just happened”, as lee said, independently of the parenthood issue.
It does sound potentially confusing under the circumstances. Maybe a better way of putting it would be that lee “first seriously considered a poly relationship as a way to conceive a child, but ended up forming a committed poly relationship for other reasons as well”? At least, that’s the impression I got from lee’s posts, but I can’t speak for exactly what she meant.
Of course, although I’m not sure I’d describe those as more “normal” than polyamory. They’re certainly more conventional and more usual, at least in modern society, but humans have been practicing polyamorous relationships for a hell of a long time—probably at least as long as they’ve been practicing adoption, and certainly much longer than they’ve been using modern fertility technology.
But knowing what you know about the SDMB, would *you come here to vent about the foibles of your poly relationship with your sterile husband and transgendered partner?
I meant that it’s not normal in the sense that it’s not the norm. It’s rather far from the norm.
And have humans practicing polyamory for a long time? Because I’m not familiar with any other society that practices anything akin to what we now call “polyamory”. If you count traditional polygamous practices under “polyamory”, then you can make that argument, but it strikes me as quite a stretch to suggest that, since men in many cultures can have more than one wife, that what lee and KellyM do is, cross-culturally, common or ordinary. I’m placing no judgment upon it, and in fact I tend to think that our modern society is way frickin’ better than most primitive cultures (here I depart from many of my fellow lefties, of course.) But I don’t think it’s fair to say that polyamory in our modern sense is historically common. Not based on what I know about the subject, that is. (And I’m aware of one tribe, apparently in Tibet, that practices polyandry in a very limited manner, but we can certainly agree that that’s very unusual from an anthropological perspective.)
In Himalayan India, too but it’s pretty much dead (you would have to go somewhere really remote to find it). It had to do with land division and absolutely nothing to do with modern polyamory. The oldest son was the only one who married so that tracts of land held by the family wouldn’t be divided (agriculturally viable land being limited) amongst too many claimants. The surplus of marriageable women became Buddhist nuns. I don’t think modern polyamory has much to do with land division, myself.
I would like to point out that I never said it was not any of these things (which I am saying only because you made this statement after quoting my post, and I do not want anyone to get the wrong idea about what I was trying to say).