BOSTON GLOBE PROFILES SON OF WOMEN IN FIRST MASS. SSM

Having lived together for 27 years and having been the first gay couple to obtain a license to marry in Massachusetts, Marcia Hams and Susan Shepherd were standing in front of a minister at the First Church in Cambridge May 23, and, at long last, they were declaring in public the love they had been told cannot exist.

Alongside them was their son, Peter, who is 24, a senior at Merrimack College, and after all the years of political posturing and the months of wrangling about the Supreme Judicial Court decision, the ceremony seemed blissfully spiritual.

A day later, sitting at the kitchen table of the home in Cambridge where he's now living with his mothers, he described what it was like to grow from boyhood to manhood as the son of lesbians and to attend the wedding of his mothers. With gay marriage in its third week here, some attention has been focused on the impact on children and on the subtleties and complexities in the unusual family model that Peter Hams has lived with since infancy.

"It felt cool to be reminded how much they love each other," he said about the wedding of his mothers, "but at the same time, I was troubled, too, because I wondered: In a world with so many problems, why is everybody making a damn fuss because two people love each other? My mothers are not giving guns to terrorists, and they're not selling drugs to kids, and they're certainly not destroying the sanctity of anything, and so the thought occurred to me -- what the hell is wrong with people?" ...

Peter's playmates, too young to be taught to hate, were indifferent to his family's dissimilitude, and so was Peter.

"I never questioned it. I had two moms who loved me, and because my friends thought it was fine and my parents thought it was fine, then I thought it was fine. It wasn't a problem."

That would change. Before Peter left for his first day at kindergarten, Marcia and Sue felt obliged to acquaint him with bigotry.

"He'd been living in a loving family," says Marcia, "a happy kid who hadn't seen hostility. We couldn't send him off naive, and so we had to introduce the idea that he might come across people who would think we were not a good family."

"OK, so we tell him other people have moms and dads," says Sue, "and suddenly you're into the birds-and-bees thing. So, where does he come from? Other kids are told, oh, mom and dad got married and had a baby, but we had to tell him, that's not the way it worked here, buddy."

Where's my dad?
At 6, when Peter asked about his father, he was told his father was a good man but lived far away.

That was not the truth, and it didn't satisfy Peter.

"It was not that I didn't like my family, but my friends had fathers in normal families, and I wondered where mine was."

Again, Marcia and Sue sat down with Peter, and this time they told him that his biological father was a friend of the family who worked at GE and was well known to Peter.

"It was a relief. I'd hung out at his house and he was awesome, so it was, well, OK, sure, cool, you know, like not a big deal, whatever.

"At first, I thought maybe he'd be a huge part of my life, but I realized that my two moms and me, that had always been my family, and that would continue to be my family. Marcia's my biological mother, and that bond is unbelievable, and Sue has been there my whole life and has raised me as much as my mom did. When my mom was at work, Sue was with me, and when Sue was at work, Mom was with me. So, I was lucky, because a lot of kids don't have two parents who love them."

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