Over the past few years, my group of friends has changed as several of us have had babies. The way we socialize has changed. The way we date has changed. The way we inhabit our spaces and Montreal as a whole, the city where we live, has changed.

Having children is a choice that has traditionally been reserved for straight, cisgender couples. When my own child, Joah, was first born, I found it jarring to be asked what it was like to “now” have a family. I hadn’t been thinking of this new, exciting, tiny person in my life as dismissing or negating all of my other close relationships, including the non-conjugal and non-biological ones—the family I already had. 

I wanted to shift that perception, to offer a counter-narrative, by depicting very different images of parenting—not just queer parenting, but parenting outside the gender binary and outside ...