Sarah Kate Ellis and her spouse, Kristen Ellis-Henderson, have been bored with not seeing their family represented in youngsters’s books, so the 2 moms determined to do one thing about it.
In March, they printed “All Moms,” a children’ e-book that celebrates all several types of moms and exhibits that households don’t should contain a husband, spouse and little one.
“We actually have been particular about together with so many households and forms of households in this e-book, as a result of oftentimes, our children really feel omitted of the dialog, and they can’t see themselves, and this was a possibility to allow them to see themselves and be pleased with their family,” Ellis, who can also be the president and CEO of LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD, mentioned.
Ellis and Ellis-Henderson are each proud mother and father to their 13-year-old youngsters, who have been there when they wrote the e-book and an lively a part of the method.
“We wrote it on our eating room desk and they have been in and round and had feedback and provided concepts and strategies,” Ellis mentioned. “So they’re very a lot part of this e-book as properly.”
When their youngsters have been rising up, the authors recalled, there was a e-book that their youngsters would immediately gravitate to referred to as “Mommy, Mama, and Me.” This was the one e-book they had that confirmed a family with two moms, they mentioned, and their children couldn’t get sufficient of it.
To Ellis, it confirmed that “illustration issues so deeply and so a lot for all of us.”
So the ladies wished to contribute their own work so that different future households wouldn’t have such restricted assets to inventory their bookshelves or dwelling libraries.
The duo first co-authored their 2015 memoir “Times Two: Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made.” The autobiography talked about their experiences being pregnant on the identical time, and it gave readers a glimpse of what fashionable households may appear to be.
But nonetheless, they wished to create one thing for youths.
In 2021, Ellis-Henderson — who’s the founding father of the all-female rock band Antigone Rising — got here up with the concept for “All Moms” when she began to consider a track that completely described the “close-knit group” they lived in.
“I’ve all the time had this track kind of bouncing round in my head about our neighborhood and how one can look out the window and you’ll see all several types of folks strolling by the home,” she mentioned.
Some of these individuals who handed by her hand-crafted it into their e-book.
“Loads of the characters in the e-book are primarily based on actual folks that dwell in the neighborhood,” Ellis-Henderson mentioned.
With Ellis’ assist, the couple was in a position to remodel the track right into a youngsters’s e-book.
In December, Ellis hit again at extra LGBTQ books being banned from faculty libraries when she began the social media marketing campaign Books Not Bans.
“We noticed an actual pattern to silencing LGBTQ voices, and so we wished to attract consideration to that,” Ellis mentioned
The two moms are hoping this Pride Month will assist LGBTQ children really feel extra seen than ever earlier than.
“My largest want for Pride this month is that our children really feel protected and beloved, and that’s common,” Ellis mentioned. “We can cease letting folks divide us and notice that united we’re right here to guard our children, and to like them, assist them develop and study. That’s common for all of us.”
