A Decade of Change: The Blickhan’s story

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East parents Mary Chris Blickhan and Tami Greenburg knew there was no blueprint for their marriage ceremony.

Their marriage process had already gone atypically. In 2002, they exchanged rings in a church only accompanied by each other, the pastor and their one-year-old son, Ben. In 2014, they notified their closest friends to meet in Iowa, one of 32 states in which gay marriage was legal, for a quick wedding that would be held in the private room of a restaurant. They were back in Kansas City the next morning for their son’s soccer game.

Three months later, a friend organized a ceremonial wedding celebration at the Firestone building in downtown Kansas City. It was the closest thing to a wedding they’d had yet. Invitations were sent out, inscribed with Ghandi’s ‘What barrier is there that love cannot break?,’ Mary Chris and Tami wore white and the minister married his first ever gay couple.

“We have our marriage certificate framed on our office wall,” Tami said. “A lot of married couples don’t have that but we’re not taking this for granted.’”

They remember the amount of guests who approached them at their reception — saying how powerful the ceremony was. That there was a deepness to their marriage that doesn’t come from a couple of 25-year-olds. The minister told them even on his last day alive, he would remember their wedding.

But for most of their lives, Tami and Mary Chris were the first gay parents to do anything. When their now-senior son Ben was starting kindergarten, a Catholic school turned their family away for directly contradicting with Catholic teachings.

When Mary Chris and Tami were going through the second parent adoption — giving Mary Chris parental rights to their two kids, Ben and now-sophomore Alex, since Tami carried both biologically — the family court commissioner refused to hear their case. Had they come before the judge, he said he wouldn’t listen. Mary Chris, Tami and the family and friends who came along waited in the lobby as their attorney scrambled to find a judge who would listen.

“The world was different then, and I think that’s difficult for current Shawnee Mission East students to understand, that the world was so different not that long ago,” Mary Chris said.

Before they could go through with artificial insemination — birth by a sperm donor — a therapist had to approve and a doctor had to agree. It made them think what other parents had to be approved to start their family. It reminded them other parents didn’t need to go through half of the same steps.

In 2012, Tami switched jobs from a national organization to a local one whose health care company refused to provide it to a non-legalized married couple. After having stayed home with their two boys, Mary Chris went back to work solely for the purpose of acquiring health insurance for the family. Had they been a legally recognized married couple, insurance never would have been a problem.

“It was frustrating to be discriminated against in that way,” Mary Chris said. “Because other families didn’t have to deal with that problem because their marriages were legal. Ours, there was no way of making it legal.”

But they’ve never adopted a sense of victimhood around their relationship. Since they’ve felt overwhelmingly supported, they don’t give too much thought to the inconveniences — like avoiding saying the word ‘wife’ to strangers or pretending they were sisters on a family vacation to South Africa. They feel they stand as an example to humanize gay marriage to those who have only ever considered it a concept.

“Over the years there’s been a number of people who would hypothetically say something like, ‘We totally don’t support gay marriage, but we love Tami and Mary Chris.’” Tami said. “I think that’s what changes people’s minds in history, you get to know the people and they’re not much different than you.”

And they’re adamant about never having tried to change anybody’s opinion. They’re not militant, trying to live their lives and raise their children, in peaceful coexistence.

“I really do think our relationship has become more common in the last decade,” Mary Chris said. “But the most important thing about our lives is our boys.”

They put everything into raising their boys because in a two-mom household, there is nothing unintentional about bringing children into the family. No one gets accidentally pregnant in a gay family, Tami said. When they had their two boys, Mary Chris and Tami felt they had been a combination of brave and naive. They had no anticipation of all the problems that would come up but, neither does any parent, they reminded themselves.

“It’s been the best journey of our lives being parents together,” Mary Chris said.

In an attempt to be supportive, people had told the Tami and Mary Chris that it didn’t matter the boys wouldn’t have a dad. But according to Tami, it does matter. It matters because their family dynamic makes them who they are. Having a dad is not a requirement, nor necessarily a law. And she hopes Ben and Alex have benefitted by being in this family.

“We’re trying to do our best, like all parents are trying to do their best. It’s just more complicated in our family,” Tami said. “It’s different. It’d be wrong to not describe it as different, but it’s good.”