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LENS

‘My Moms Never Tried to Hide the Fact That We Were a Family’

Katie Swanger set out to celebrate her family by photographing her two mothers and the men who have become her brothers.

Marty, left, and Angie, Katie Swanger’s two mothers, reading in bed on a Sunday morning.

Katie Swanger once proudly told her friends on the school bus that she had two moms who loved each other just like their moms and dads did. That was after she eagerly told her nursery school classmates that you do not need both a man and a woman to make a baby.

“I remember wanting to share it with everyone when I was younger, because you’re not born thinking having two moms is weird or socially strange,” Katie, 23, said. “It’s what you learn over time.”

Unfortunately, that’s what she discovered. She soon stopped talking about her parents with classmates in the conservative, mostly white Hartford, Conn., suburb where she was raised. By junior high school, she begged her mothers for only one to show up for parent-teacher conferences. But her mom Marty and her mom Angie both attended every one of them. When they did, Marty, who gave birth to Katie through in vitro fertilization, recalled, “Katie would walk far ahead or far behind” them, but never by their side.

“My moms never tried to hide the fact that we were a family,” Katie said. “And I think that was really important to them. They didn’t want me to think that I should be ashamed in any way.”

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Katie Swanger with her mothers, Marty and Angie.

She began talking about her family when she enrolled in a more diverse and artsy magnet high school in Hartford, as she saw attitudes toward same-sex marriages changing. She hesitated telling her first boyfriend about her parents, but when she finally did, she said it was “no big deal.”

While studying photography at Lesley University, she began photographing her family, which included her two mothers — Angie, a recently retired human resource director at a nonprofit, and Marty, an administrator overseeing residential programs for the Connecticut State Department of Developmental Services. Katie had become comfortable with being open about her parents.

“Telling my story is my way of standing up for my family’, she said.

By then the family had grown to include Derek, whom Marty met in 2003 when he was 17, and David, whom she met in 2013. Both are African-American men in their 30s.

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Katie lying down with Marty as her mother took a break from cleaning.
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Angie getting arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest in Hartford.
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From left, Derek, Marty, Angie, Katie and David sit for a family portrait.

Marty had been supervising a teenage pregnancy education program in which high school students taught fifth and sixth graders. She started giving one of the high school students — Derek — a ride home, and grew close to him and his mother, Kim. A few years later, when his mother found out she had cancer, Marty, who is a registered nurse, accompanied Derek to every medical appointment and then stayed at his house to help care for his mother in her final weeks. Before dying, Kim asked Marty to look after Derek.

“Marty was with us every step of the way — literally in the room with my mom when she passed away,” Derek, said. “Marty showing up for me when my mom was sick definitely made her family.”

Derek, by then 23, was never adopted by Angie and Marty, but they have been close and shared every family event, he said, including celebrating the birth of his daughter, Kimaya, this month. He also became an older brother to Katie.

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Marty washing dishes.
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Angie and Marty at the hospital after Marty was brought to the ER with breathing trouble.
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Katie and her brother, David, shoveling snow.

In 2013, Marty attended an alumni program at Yale, where a group of former inmates talked about a prison hospice program they were involved with. She had worked as a prison guard while going to school and was moved by one story in particular. Afterward she talked with the former inmate, David, and they started meeting, with Marty helping him adjust to life on the outside. David moved in with the couple for about a year, and Marty taught him to drive. He now drives a beer delivery truck and is off probation.

Derek, now 31, appreciates the complexity of Katie’s photographic project and its interrelated themes.

“She captured the beauty and the oddity of her experience, and has a real way of capturing the tenderness in our family unit — two lesbian women, a child born of artificial insemination and then two black men,” he said. “That shows the complexity of having a chosen family other than the one we’re born into. We are not all in white shirts and Oxford shoes with a Labrador — that’s not who we are.”

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Derek and Marty while on a family vacation.
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Angie checking on Marty’s sunflowers growing in the basement.
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David getting a haircut and catching up with his barber in Waterbury, Conn.
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Angie gives Marty a kiss.
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Marty waiting for her car to be towed after it broke down.
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A portrait of Katie taken by Marty.Credit...Courtesy of Katie Swanger

Follow @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Katie Swanger is on Instagram. You can also find Lens on Facebook and Instagram.

James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, joined The Times as a photographer in 1992 after years of freelancing for the newspaper and hundreds of other publications. More about James Estrin

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