Adventures in (queer) parenting
Staying Power: On Queerness, Inheritances, and the Families We Choose
by Zena Sharman
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2026
$24.95 / 9781834050164
Reviewed by Carellin Brooks
*
At the beginning of Staying Power, Zena Sharman describes her mother’s history. She does so not because her mother is the subject of this book, although her mom’s story of repressed memory, childhood sexual abuse, and experiments she believes were performed on her as a child is harrowing enough. Sharman’s goal in situating her mother at the beginning is literal—it’s where the author came from, after all—but also asks a telling question. In the wake of broken familial bonds and chosen single mothering, how can Sharman ever become someone’s parent herself?
The answer comes in fits and starts throughout this memoir-in-essays. Sharman falls in love, gets married (her union to a well-known butch about town is heralded as a tongue-in-cheek “East Vancouver Royal Wedding”), and watches from afar as her indefatigable mother at last sickens and dies. Sharman’s grief, keen and deeply felt, proves too much for her and her spouse to negotiate together. Soon the couple’s eight years as a celebrated queer duo end not with a bang but with a whimper.
Not long afterwards Sharman (The Care We Dream Of) is in another relationship, this time with a non-binary person who is planning to have children with close friends, a lesbian couple. Does Sharman want in? Not exactly, but she is falling hard for Riley, her new lover. Could she ever really be a proper parent? Given her history, Sharman has her doubts.
This book is candid about all kinds of things: the social cost of gender-open parenting (raising a child without gendered pronouns until they are old enough to decide for themselves), the ache of her broken marriage, and most of all, Sharman’s own ambivalence about her ability and desire to take care of small human beings. Relocating from Vancouver to the cheaper real estate of Vancouver Island provokes a full-on panic: Sharman relates her terrifying doubt and desire to retreat to the world she knows. “‘I’ve decided that I can’t move here,’ I said, my voice clipped. ‘I’m going to figure out a way to keep my apartment in the city.’”
In the end, she relents, but in the house where Sharman, her lover, and their co-parents eventually relocate, Sharman does demand, and receive, a priceless gift: the “room of one’s own” described as necessary to women writers by Virginia Woolf in her famous essay of the same name. In this house of competing demands, strewn toys, ever-boisterous mealtimes, and common space, hers is the only room allotted to a single person, and the only one with a door she alone can close against everyone else. It’s also here that the author works on the memoir that will eventually become Staying Power.
It was fun to read about another iteration of alternative queer parenting: my own early parenting group twenty-six years ago consisted of myself, the baby’s father, my long-distance girlfriend, and the woman who would soon become my (short-lived) spouse. I had a second child while in a relationship with another man who didn’t want to be a father, so I used donor sperm. As my children grew up, my romantic relationships with these other adults frayed and broke, but their bonds with my daughters never did.
Sharman reflects on how “We live openly as a four-parent family and have supportive relatives, friends, teachers, and child care providers. We are unfailingly kind, polite and grateful to them—always grateful. It is genuine: We feel thankful when people are nice to us and don’t treat us like freaks.” Indeed. The straight world I’d mostly ignored until then became mine once I had kids: the daycare, the school, the Mommy and Me play group where my eldest, already an iconoclast, spent the half-hour playing with the parked strollers. Like Sharman, I negotiated this unfamiliar territory with the help of supportive others, and like her, I was grateful.
Social acceptance is a nice perk, true, but the reactions of one’s own children to being in an alternative family matter more. In the bathroom with their two-and-a-half year old twins, Sharman has a moment of doubt when, in a game of pretend, one asks her if she is their mama:
I’m not a mama, but it feels cruel to say no. Having four parents in our family isn’t enough to completely assuage the fear that I am harming my children by refusing them a mother. Maybe a moment of pretending is insurance against a lifetime of denying them something more essential.
f I have one wish for this book, it’s for more focus on queer parenting. For sure, discovering one’s sexual identity as a femme is intricately co-connected with gender and childhood experiences, which in turn inform parenting decisions. Being raised by a mom grappling with her own recovered memories of trauma does also feed into a person’s childrearing. So does the grief of losing that mom in adulthood, a grief Sharman describes with tender attention. But the subject of this book seems to be how Sharman came to parenthood almost accidentally, then decided to stay. An essay considering Internet celebrity’s effects on queer marriage, the history of same-sex marriage in Canada and Sharman’s own experience as one half of a queer power couple—“My former spouse and I fell in love when Instagram was brand new and TikTok hadn’t been invented yet,” Sharman notes—seems off topic. Another, about her mother’s and her relationships to femininity and 9 to 5, with Dolly Parton, feels similarly like a sideline. An essay tracing the author’s love story with Riley studs the text with faux personal ads to describe Sharman’s emotional landscape, an initially interesting idea that quickly comes to seem forced.
These are small lapses in a book that is otherwise to be commended for its honesty and clarity in covering tough topics. “Riley and I have three kids now,” writes Sharman. “I’m not their mother, but close enough.” A fitting statement for this unabashedly queer view of life, loves, and the bringing up of the generation to come.
[Editor’s note: in support of her book, Zena Sharman will be reading at events in Vancouver (March 4), Victoria (March 11), Duncan (March 12), and Nanaimo (March 13).]
*
Carellin Brooks has one adult non-binary child and one teenage daughter. She lives in Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Brooks’ book of poetry, Learned, was reviewed in BCR by Linda Rogers. She has reviewed recent books by Wendy Donawa, Eva Kolacz, Chalene Knight, Catherine Owen, Erin Steele, Jes Battis, Jen Currin, Daniel Zomparelli, Dina Del Bucchia, Mx. Sly, Debbie Bateman, Michael V. Smith, Buffy Cram, and Maryanna Gabriel for BCR.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster