[USA] "Same-sex parents finding greater acceptance" by Gloria Hochman

'Where's the mom in this family?" puzzled 10-year-old Megan asked a few years ago as she glanced around the breakfast table. She had slept over in the Center City home of her friend Ashley and seemed to have just noticed that Ashley's mother was missing. Without skipping a beat, Ashley's 12-year-old brother, Scott, piped up, "Oh, we keep her in the closet!"

Mark Woodland and his partner, David Blum, just smiled. Woodland, a gynecologist, and Blum, a lawyer, who have been partners for 25 years, adopted their son and daughter when the children were infants. Now, Ashley is 12 and her brother nearly 15.

From the start, they lived on a mid-city block heavily populated with young families, and the children had no trouble making friends. Both were educated at St. Peter's School at Third and Lombard Streets; now Scott takes a train every day to the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, where he is in his first year of high school. Their fathers' dreams for them mirror those of most parents. "We want them to be good kids and to be contributors to society, to have rewarding, successful lives that are meaningful to them," Woodland says.

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