The Most Surprising Thing About Being A Poly Parent

The most surprising thing about being a poly parent is that my kid, age seven, doesn’t appear to have noticed.

To be clear, he has noticed that he has three parents. As far as I can tell, he’s observed his school and generalized that the number of parents children have is drawn from a uniform distribution between 1 and 4. Fictional children always have two parents, but fictional children also tend to have superpowers and be anthropomorphic animals. He doesn’t seem to have drawn many inferences from any of these breaks from realism.

But the fact that his parents have romantic relationships outside the triad? Nothing.

I have tried questioning him on this subject. “So, you notice how I kiss some people? And I don’t kiss other people?” I said. And then he looked at me in baffled silence for thirty seconds and returned to telling me about his fanmade My Singing Monsters monsters.

But I guess I should look at it from his perspective. I and my kid’s other parents have a lot of friends, so he interacts with an enormous number of adults. He pays attention to some information about them—whether they have children of their own for him to play with, whether they want to talk to him, how often he sees them, the quality of toys they own, whether they’re interested in Minecraft.

But whether his parents are dating them? Why would he care about that? My kid doesn’t pay attention to which adults are dating, for the same reason that he doesn’t pay attention to which adults are playing tabletop RPG campaigns together or participating in the same book group. All that is strictly an adult business.

To be sure, if he cared to he could notice that some pairs of adults are more likely to kiss, or to sleep over at each other’s houses, or to disappear for an hour for “a boring adult conversation.” But that’s almost completely irrelevant to his interests. He’s familiar with romance as a plot trope in fiction, but romance in children’s movies is so stylized that it bears no resemblance to what adults he knows do. Sleepovers and strategic disappearances aren’t part of children’s movie romance arcs, and no one he knows is singing love duets or falling in love at first sight or breaking magical curses. You might think kissing is an area of overlap, but children’s movies have very little kissing in them!

From my kid’s perspective, non-parental adults enter and leave his life in an inscrutable fashion. “One of my parents has started dating Alice” is indistinguishable from “Alice is in the Bay Area on vacation” or “Alice decided that she likes kids” or for that matter “one of my parents befriended Alice in a platonic way.” “One of my parents has broken up with Alice” is indistinguishable from “Alice is busy at work” or “Alice moved away” or “my parents and Alice just fell out of touch for unclear reasons.” Once again, very important to the adults but irrelevant to the kids.

Presumably at some point my kid will notice that his parents date lots of people. At the very least, a teenager is going to have takes about his parents’ partners, and probably many of those takes will be “eww! Parents having sex!” But it was surprising to me how long it’s taking my kid to care.