My daughter has two mums. I'm her other mother

At three, my daughter Evie is already an outlier. 

She has Māori heritage, a phobia of lawn mowers, and a rare condition called resting bradycardia — which means her heart beats slower than usual when she's asleep.

She also has two mums: my partner Jessie and me.

Jessie is Evie's birth mum, her biological mum, and I am… well, I'm the vocabulary problem.

Whenever our trio ventures out, strangers approach us with earnest curiosity.

"Two mums!" they exclaim, gesturing toward Evie. "Isn't she lucky?"

Without fail, the question that follows is always the same: "What does she call you?"

'The Mummies'

When Evie was a toddler, she called us "The Mummies", which was odd but surprisingly efficient. Like we were a small corporation.

"The Mummies!" she would yell from her cot. "The Mummies come now!"

As she grew older, and her language became less bureaucratic, she started calling us Mummy Kate and Mummy Jessie.

Then, recently, she upgraded me to Big Fella.

So, things are evolving.

Her mum, absolutely, but not her real mum.

The feeling is reinforced by questions I'm asked in public: "So, whose daughter is she?", "I'm sorry, what do you mean she has two mums? Who's her dad?", "Don't you want to have your own someday?"

Even though I am Evie's favourite — I am, after all, the fun mum — I can't shake the feeling that when it comes to serious mothering, I'm the spare. Her back-up mum.

Her mum with an asterisk.

When our first round of IVF failed (my eggs were "antique"), we decided Jessie would carry. The decision made sense, anyway, since Jessie has a consistently low stress meter and a high pain tolerance.

At our first meeting with the specialist, she referred to Jessie as "Mum" and me as "the non-carrying mother", which she later abbreviated on paper to TNC ("the non-carrier").

The implication, often, is that Jessie is Evie's Mum, and I am Evie's other mother. Her non-bio mum. Her non-carrying mum. The mum who is always defined by what she isn't.

A year later, after 10 hours in labour, the only thing Jessie had delivered was exasperation — along with a brief speech, mid-contraction, in which she politely requested "a little less talking, please".

When our midwife clocked off and the night nurse tagged in, she turned to Jessie with ill-timed enthusiasm and said, "I'm so glad you've got your mum here to support you!"

Jessie was in too much pain to notice or care.

"Behind every great mum is another mum," I said.

Later, while Jessie slept, I sat by her bed with Evie swaddled against my chest. At some point, a cleaner came to fill the soap and empty the bin. She smiled at the sleeping Evie, then at Jessie, then at me.

"Aunty?" she said.

I nodded.

I was exhausted, and she seemed so pleased with the three of us — I didn't have the heart to tell her.

Evie's birth certificate

When Evie was four weeks old, I registered her birth with the Queensland Government. I chose the "Bluey" package, which included a commemorative birth certificate with a full-colour print of the Heeler family.

When the certificate arrived in the mail a few weeks later, it listed Jessie as Evie's "mother" and me as her "parent". It was a punch in the gut. To be honest, I don't know what I expected. Mum A and Mum B? Just parent and parent, perhaps? Chilli and Bandit?

In fact, in 2022, when I applied for parental leave, the HR system offered two options only: maternity leave (for the child's birth mother) and paternity leave (for the child's father).

I called HR to ask which box I should tick.

Was "fun non-birth mum" too niche?

HR escalated the matter to the diversity committee, who immediately emailed HR back — instructing them to add "partner leave" to the entitlements.

Later, the payroll coordinator emailed to apologise.

"The system is ancient," she said.

At our day care, we are the only two-mum family

Last year, on Father's Day, Evie came home from day care with a blue hand-painted car and a note that read, "I wheelie love you, Dad". Tucked into a wooden frame was a laminated photo of Evie in a suit and tie, grinning at the camera.

Jessie and I laughed.

Did day care, in a temporary lapse, forget that Evie doesn't have a dad? Or did they not want her to feel excluded during art and craft? Knowing Evie, she probably declared she was leading the activity and that was the end of that.

Evie knows she has two mums.

And so does her best friend Huxley, who once left school in tears over the injustice.

"Evie has two mums," he cried. "And I only have one. That's NOT fair."

I'm not Evie's father or her donor. I'm not her biological mother.

Even though I didn't carry Evie or birth her, I'm her mum.

Once, when Evie was still brand new, I took her to a local cafe, planning (ambitiously) to read and grade student essays while she slept. Instead, she screamed and kicked and tried — rather impressively — to backflip herself onto the floor. I was changing her nappy on my lap and struggling to pour expressed milk into a bottle when two women approached me.

"You've got your hands full with her," the first woman said.

I nodded. Here we go, I thought.

"She's beautiful," the other woman said. "She looks just like you."

Evie, in fact, looks nothing like me.

But to be honest, I don't look like my mum, either.

Kate Cantrell is an Australian writer and academic. She lives on the unceded lands of the Yuggera, Ugarapul, and Jagera peoples.