Two Moms, Two Babies, One Family Local moms Diane Srivastava and Tania Zulkoskey talk about exploding the mother myth, social justice and parenting twins. What’s the lowdown on you? Tania: By trade, I am a social worker working as a counsellor on relationships, LGBTQ, trauma, parenting, stress and fertility issues, with a real passion for social justice. After traveling around the world for a year with my wife, we embarked on our greatest and latest adventure of having children. Although we planned on having two children in two ovens, we never imagined that it would end up being two buns in one oven. Unexpectedly, I had twins. Thank goodness my wife breast-fed too! Diane: Mother of two 22-month-old babies, married to Tania, by profession an ecologist and university professor. [Editor’s note: Diane was named one the top six scientists in Canada by Parliament last summer.] When we discovered that Tania was going to have twins, we decided we needed to both be at home with the babies for a year to give them the individual attention needed for attachment. Plus, I was on an induced lactation program to help breastfeed the twins. In fact, I was planning to have our second child until we discovered Tania was carrying twins. The irony is, had I carried our second child, we would have automatically been entitled to two EI-supported parental leaves even if the children had been born on the same day. Yet because both children came from one pregnancy, we were only entitled to one parental leave between the two of us (that I took, Tania took unpaid leave). We and other twin parents have argued that this is unfair—kids need parental care no matter which womb they came from—and the flagship case for our combined legal fight is currently at the federal level. How did your respective careers come about? Tania: I had always wanted to be a social worker because of my values of social justice, feminism and a belief in humanity. [To me,] social work has the most holistic perspective of the helping professions since it considers both the person and their environment. And having a private practice as a therapist allows me to work independently and flexibly around child care. I divide my work week between my private practice and social work.
Photographed by AG Photography | Gina Spanos | www.ginaspanos.com
Diane: The usual way in academia: passion, ambition and hard work. Ecology is the perfect discipline for me, because it fulfils both heart and head. I have always been motivated by the need to conserve species and the environment, but I thrive on the intellectual challenge of untangling how nature works. Like most academics, I spent fifteen years in post secondary education and postdoctoral positions before landing a faculty job, but the journey was as rewarding as the endpoint. >>> May 2011
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