Celebrating Pride: Lesbian Couple Takes Their Toddlers To Pride Parade

OAK PARK, IL — Aubrey and Ellen Parker have been to Chicago's Pride Parade before, but this is the first year the couple is taking their two infant children. Although Owen, 2, and Alec, 5 months old, may not remember the parade, it's a pretty big milestone for their mothers.

The two women met in 2005 while they were studying pre-law and pre-medicine respectively at Creighton College. They lived on the same floor and started out as acquaintances, hardly aware that they would be married by 2013. The Parkers — then named Aubrey Parlet and Ellen Klocker — maintained a long-distance relationship while Ellen studied medicine in Nebraska and Aubrey finished law school in Chicago. The pair entered a civil union in Illinois in 2012 and were married in Iowa the following year. They then merged their names to Parker, a way of giving their children a name that melded together as seamlessly as their family would.

Both Aubrey and Ellen knew they wanted to be pregnant, but they wanted their children to be genetically related. The women used the same sperm donor for both children. On May 14, 2015, Aubrey gave birth to a boy, Owen. Ellen gave birth to Alec, a girl, on Jan. 26, 2017. Two hours after Alec was born, the couple closed on their house in Oak Park. Aubrey said, "Oak Park is a very diverse, welcome community, so we felt that our family would be comfortable.”

She added, "We've met all of our neighbors and they're just excited to have a young family in the neighborhood. I don't think we're different than any other young family." In fact, the biggest challenge the Parkers face is perhaps is that the women have to juggle being mothers to infant children with demanding careers that also focus on children. Aubrey works as a divorce and family law attorney at Beermann Pritikin Mirabelli Swerdlove LLP. Ellen is the Chief Resident of Pediatrics at Loyola University.

Aubrey Parker said her favorite part of working in divorce and family law is helping families with surrogacy and adoption. She's helped bring her share of other LGBTQIA families together. She said,“It's always more exciting to me to create a new family rather than take apart a family.”

As one half of a married couple who created their own happy family, that's a subject that's near and dear to her heart. At the parade this year, she said their son Owen will likely be wearing a shirt that reads, "I'm the treasure at the end of the rainbow."

A valuable treasure and a long and beautiful rainbow indeed.