Listening to a young child scream is hard enough. Try raising two, teaching Dartmouth classes, changing the world as a same-sex couple in rural America and giving a phone interview while listening to your children scream and eat cat food in the background.
That was how Annelise Orleck and Alexis Jetter spent a Tuesday afternoon this week.
Orleck is a professor in the history department who lives in the Upper Valley with her partner of 14 years, Jetter, a journalist and sometimes-professor here.
Lately, much of their time and attention have been focused on their daughter Evann, three and a half, and Raphael, nine months, who were both born through artificial insemination to Jetter and Orleck, respectively.
Also important is the passage of the civil union bill that their entire family has actively sought to promote in Vermont.
Civil Unions
The civil union bill is not the same as gay marriage. This is something that Jetter makes clear from the beginning.
She is speaking about the controversial bill which has passed the Vermont house of representatives and is currently before the state senate, which gives gay and lesbian couples the rights and responsibilities of married couples within the state. It is considered the most far-reaching piece of legislation in terms of gay and lesbian domestic partnership in the United States.
The bill requires same-sex couples to register for a license and certification ceremony, similar to marriage, and for breakups to be handled in Family Court, similar to divorce.
Jetter and Orleck, along with their children, testified in front of the Vermont House and Senate Judiciary Committees in defense of the bill last month.
Even so, Jetter, who has written and spoken about the issue for Ms. magazine and Vermont Public Radio, for which she is a commentator, laments the gap between the bill and a true gay marriage law.
"Civil union is a narrow construct of the Vermont legislature," she said. "It's not gay marriage. Because it's not gay marriage, we don't get federal benefits," she added. Were her partner to die, she would not inherit social security benefits, which she said is important when raising a family.
Moreover, benefits afforded by the civil union act are lost outside the state. This means that if Orleck were to fall ill or get into an accident and rushed to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, Jetter would not have any legal say in her care, or even allowed rights of visitation.
Jetter and Orleck, though, have directed their hopes for the bill away from their own relationship and toward the next generation.
"[The bill] has less to do with our coupledom, than it has to do with our family. We have a young son. We have a little girl," Jetter said.
Protection rights of their young son and daughter are of the utmost concern for them, rather than whatever "stamp of approval" the state may grant, in the words of Jetter.
"We never wanted [a stamp of approval], we never needed that," she adds. "All we're really asking is for the state to stay out of our lives."
Raising Children
It is obvious that Orleck and Jetter are hugely devoted to their children.
On the witness stand in front of the state legislature, they proudly placed their children on their laps, but the children almost kept the women out of the debate.
"[We had to] make the decision to be political as mothers, and as members of a family," Jetter said.
They said they did not want to expose their children to bigotry and hatred, or to be perceived as using their children for political gain, but at the same time, were keen to be active in the movement to create a better world for them.
"On balance, we decided to do this, and we were going to do it as a family," Jetter said, deciding that the children were still young enough so that any words of bigotry or discrimination would not harm the children to excess.
And so far, their child raising experience has been great.
"We're a pretty regular family that wants the best for our kids," Orleck said.
Brimming with pride, Jetter and Orleck described the inspiring degree to which Evann accepted her two mothers as natural and familiar.
However, when discrimination does appear, "the pain is different and deeper," said Jetter.
"Our lives have taught us that people will treat us differently and to some extent I embrace that. I want to be different, I don't want to be like everyone else," she adds. "But not at the cost of making my children targets."
In an article which appeared in Harper's Bazaar in 1996, Jetter wrote that having children was both the most radical and conventional thing she has ever done.
It was conventional because people on the street would see the children and talk to them, assuming they were a part of a traditional family.
But with the eyes of the children upon them, they were compelled to correct misstatements about the existence of husbands, thereby radicalizing them and the people with whom they came into contact.
On the whole, Orleck describes raising a family as "a wonderful experience."
She said she loves the natural beauty of the Upper Valley and the supportive community members here.
To Dartmouth
The decision to move from New York to the Upper Valley and a Dartmouth professorship position in 1990 was not an easy one.
"We had an enormous number of reservations about moving here," Jetter said because of concerns over the possibility of rural homophobia.
Fortunately, their fears proved to be unfounded, except for an isolated incident in which a Boston landlord changed his mind and refused to lease a house to them after discovering they were a same-sex couple.
"We have been welcomed and embraced and made to feel very much a part of this community," Jetter said. "My experience here has been lovely."
Orleck calls Dartmouth a very "couple-oriented culture," where many social situations are organized for couples, not single people, which made it easier for them to "fit into [the] wonderful social network."
Although they often found themselves as the only non-heterosexual couple in many events they attended, they also joined a tight community of gay and lesbian friends on the faculty and staff.
"I would describe Dartmouth as a much more complex place than it has been portrayed in the national media," Orleck said, commenting on Dartmouth's reputation of rampant conservativeness.
She described the faculty as being not only more progressive than the rest of New Hampshire, but also more than the College student body.
"The student culture has been considerably more difficult," she said.
Jetter added that compared to the rest of the faculty, she and Orleck were very similar. She listed being white, middle class and from the Tristate area as factors that made bonding with others here relatively easy.
"The truth is, if we were black, if we were poor ... we might have had a much harder time acclimating here," she said. "We're not so different from a lot of the other faculty at Dartmouth."
