Can gay dads be mothers too? This family says yes.

In an essay exploring what it means to “mother” a child, gay dad Richard Just tells the story of his young daughter who decided that his husband was her mom.

Just wrote in The Washington Post about doing everything they could to instill family pride in their two daughters, but for their three-and-a-half-year-old, “none of these preventive measures had seemed to soften the blow of realizing that every other kid she knew had a mom.”

Related: Being a queer stepmom is not at all what I thought it’d be. It’s better.

The unique bond I have forged with my stepsons would not have been possible any other way.

Then came the moment she decided she would call Just’s husband “mommy.”

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“Almost as quickly as she had become fixated on not having a mother, her funk seemed to lift,” Just wrote, “and she was back to being the energetic, funny, smart kid we had always known.”

From there, however, Just struggled with how strongly they should endorse this decision: “Was it okay to let her bend reality this way? Wasn’t this too big a concession to heteronormativity? Shouldn’t we teach our kids to be proud that they are part of an LGBT family, rather than letting them sweep those differences under the rug?”

His husband, on the other hand, proudly embraced the new title, determined to go with the flow of whatever his daughter needed. As time went on, Just’s daughter became more dedicated to the idea and began insisting that her other dad not only be called “mommy” but use she/her pronouns. She even began calling him “she-mother” at times, “a title my husband delighted in,” Just said.

The experience led Just to begin questioning what makes someone a mother.

“If a mother is simply a woman who is raising a child, then, no, our daughters do not have one. But are women really the only people who can be maternal? Why can’t the roles that were historically assigned to mothers be fulfilled by parents — or loved ones — of any kind?”

He decried the endless gender stereotypes associated with parenting – like “Mommy and Me” classes that not only isolate gay and nonbinary parents but also implicitly tell straight men not to “function too much like a stereotypical mom,” according to Just.

He just concluded his essay by realizing that his daughter has taught him a profound lesson: “That she has everything she needs—including those attributes that society has normally treated as the provenance of mothers—right here in her two-dad family.”

He then thanked her for “challenging me to rethink labels that I never imagined I would question.”

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