To the Editor: Re “The Pernicious Myth of Maternal Instinct,” by Chelsea Conaboy (Opinion guest essay, Aug. 28): My husband and I are two dads who raised a boy and a girl from birth to adulthood in small-town America.
As gay dads, we got to pull back the curtain of the assumptions about maternal instinct. I showed up at the Mommy and Me music classes, the P.T.A.
meetings and the informal klatches waiting at school for the kids at 3 p.m. When our kids came to us as newborns, I worried that we, as two men, might not be as naturally nurturing or “motherly” as a woman would be.
But observing the many moms in action, I was disabused of that fear. The range of parenting was huge. Quite a few moms were not particularly “maternal” at all.