I grew up in an “atypical” family. My parents were friends and confidants to my sister and me, often referring to themselves as our co-passengers — those who reached the earth a bit earlier than we did. Whenever life threw curveballs at us, we sat down, talked, decided, and then tried to transform the stress into a symphony that only we understood. I often found it amusing when my peers gawked at how our household functioned, for no conversation was off limits, and for our aspirations, there were no limits. As a young woman, when I interact with friends and peers, now fully cognisant of how this is not the norm, I try being the friend who is a blotting paper, who listens sans judgement, who speaks sans filters, and who gives emotionally. That is my way of honouring the atypical upbringing that moulded me.
So, I read, in awe, the judgment of the Kerala High Court granting five-month-old Zabiya Zahhad the dignity of calling her parents “Parents”, without any gender association. I revelled in what our law now recognises as atypical families. Zabiya’s parents, a trans man and a trans woman, petitioned that Zabiya’s birth certificate should not refer to the gendered identities of the parents as mother and father, as the “mother” on the birth certificate is leading the life of a male, and the “father”, the life of a female. The HC, while observing that this was a rare and exceptional case, also invoked the SC’s 2022 observation where it said, “Such manifestations of love and of families may not be typical but they are as real as their traditional counterparts”.
The HC also reiterated, “Familial relationships may take the form of domestic, unmarried partnerships or queer relationships. A household may be a single-parent household for any number of reasons. Similarly, the guardians and caretakers (who traditionally occupy the roles of the ‘mother’ and the ‘father’) of children may change with remarriage, adoption, or fostering.” While reading and appreciating this progressive march of the law, I wondered whether, as a society, we let our parents be parents, without the burden of the gender binary. Despite the generation gap, we presume that our parents must occupy the moral high ground of standing by their ward in distress, of being the sacrificial elder who prioritises their ward’s well-being above their own. In this process, we forget to accept their mistakes. We tend to deprive them of human fallibility.
When we look past the gender binary, we realise that the gendered mental load that our parents carry is not just theirs, but ours too. The expectations that we as a seemingly “progressive generation” are imposing on our parents are also gender-tinted. We become complicit in the march of the gendered household norms when we sit and discuss finances with our fathers, while expecting our mothers to fend for our nutrition.
It does not stop here. While ruminating endlessly on this in my own atypical family, I have come to accept and realise that blood is not the thickest of all, love is. And if love flows through a family I’ve borrowed, I will embrace it, for I know that partnerships and families, whether traditional or atypical, should just be a manifestation of love, not duty.
The binary is not just one we impose; it is also one we expect. When we grow up looking at life in black and white, allowing the greys to only stand out as aberrations, we forget that the beauty of living and loving is in the VIBGYOR. For my friends who are living together as a family without any vows; for those raising their kids as a single parent; for those choosing not to raise kids; for those wanting to raise kids but not being supported by biology; for myself being raised now with a strong solo parent (perforce, as I lost a parent) raising two fiercely independent daughters; all I see is how beautiful the spectrum is beyond the binary.
Our traditional counterparts may seem normal to us, but the euphoria of knowing you are loved and you can love without borders, legal or emotional, is empowering. The moment you look beyond the binary is the moment the rainbow appears, and you get to choose the colours.
The writer is an officer of the Indian Revenue Service (Income Tax). The views expressed are personal
