Valentine's 2010: #5

When I was younger, my family used to go to a retreat called Adoptive Family Camping Weekend at Camp Sloane in Connecticut. I always enjoyed going there, and I have fond memories of camping with my sister - invading tents, shooting water guns filled with bug spray and rubbing charcoal all over our bodies. To us, the place was a lush oasis away from the city. There didn't seem to be anything unusual about it because, as children, we didn't really have any conception of what "ordinary" meant.

But Adoptive Family Camping Weekend was anything but ordinary. It was a place for different families - ones like mine. A place where no one would be surprised to be introduced to a woman, her partner, her black son and her Chinese daughter. No two families there were alike.

For my parents, it was a place where the person you loved was not judged, but celebrated. When they met, almost 20 years ago, they were both single parents who had just recently adopted children. They fell in love and built my family together. They were both women, but that didn't matter. Though they did not see themselves as out of the ordinary, the world certainly did.

When New York began to recognize all out-of-state marriages, however, things started to change. And, during spring break of my freshman year, we took a trip to Toronto, where gay marriage has been legal since 2005.

I brought my guitar and sat in the back of the minivan writing love songs. Very few people have the honor to perform at their parents' wedding, and my hands trembled on the fret board as my moms shared their vows.

My younger brother, who was 7 at the time, was the ring-bearer, and he took his job very seriously. Even though the room was almost empty, he marched determinedly down the aisle, the rings perched atop a folded blanky in his hand.

The love between our parents is a mighty and stable force in our lives, and is something that my brother - as my sister and I have done before him - will find he can always rely on.

I don't know if that's ordinary, but it's certainly special.