Though I am in a non-traditional marriage, my wife and I have fallen into traditional family roles. Kristi is more traditionally masculine than I am, so people usually assume that I carried our kids. Then people get even more confused because Brooks looks so much like Kristi and Bennett resembles me mostly because we both have curly hair. People who are more familiar with fertility treatment ask if one of them is my biological child and one is Kristi's. People are surprised that I didn't carry them and that Bennett is not my biological child.
As for our family structure, I play the more traditional mom/wife role, and Kristi plays the more traditional dad/husband role. I do not believe in these norms, but this is how people see our family. I do most of the grocery shopping, preparing of meals, making lunches, cleaning, etc. Kristi does the yard work, fixes all the things, puts together the furniture, etc.
I'm not sure how kids decide what they are going to call their parents, but I have to assume that it has something to do with what they hear other kids saying and what they hear in shows and read in books. We never told Bennett and Brooks what to call us. Somewhere between when they were one and two, they started calling me mom and they called Kristi a lot of different things from mom to da to daddy.
I was reading Steam Train Dream Train to Bennett before bed one night when he was around two. There are parts of the book that refer to mom train and dad train, which we change to da train, because that’s what they mostly called Kristi. Before I even said mom or da, Bennett pointed to the train and said, “That’s you Mom or that’s you Da.” He had already interpreted our world by gender and when he saw feminine characteristics on a train, he connected that train to me and the more “masculine” trains he associated with his da, which he interpreted like dad.
Now at five years old, Brooks and Bennett have been consistently calling me "mom" and Kristi "da" since they were around two years old. The kids in their class know they have two moms, and they know what Bennett and Brooks call us. My hope is that we are normalizing queer family structures for these young people, so we can slowly help change the narrative of what a family is.