Elise Schreier works in complex claims at The Hartford insurance company. But that’s just her day job. At night, she blogs about a subject near to her heart and her home: same-sex parenting.
“We struggled with infertility for a number of years. At the same time, we were fostering. We realized that getting pregnant was not going to happen for us,” Schreier said of herself and her wife, Andrea Schreier, who works in a nursing home. “We had the opportunity to adopt our three children that we had been fostering. It just fell into place in a different way than we anticipated.”
Schreier, 30, of Newington, is a regular blogger at www.ctworkingmoms.com, a website by and for working mothers in Connecticut. Schreier also has her own blog, www.2mommies2be.wordpress.com, and did an interview on the subject for another website, http://www.itsconceivablenow.com.
The itsconceivablenow.com interview got the attention of producers on “The Ricki Lake Show.” Schreier, Andrea and their three children will appear on that show on Thursday, Feb. 21.
“We’ve got a six-minute segment on the show, as the face of the typical gay family,” Schreier, 30, said. “They latched on to our story. It’s a feel-good story.”
The children the women adopted in April 2012 — a 6-year-old boy and two girls, ages 3 and 2 — are African-American biological siblings from Connecticut.
Schreier’s segment on “Ricki Lake” was taped on Jan. 17. It is about six minutes long. Schreier said. She and Andrea talk about infertility, fostering and adoption, and share stories with Lake about “the sort of things that come up when you’re a gay parent.”
Rebecca DiLiberto, the producer of The Ricki Lake Show, said other guests that day are Dan Bucatinsky, star of ABC’s “Scandal” and author of “Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?”; TV personality Rosie O’Donnell, with her new baby, comedian Anthony Szpak and Noah St. John, whose spoken piece about his two moms won NPR’s “Snap Judgment” performance of the year.
Michelle Noehren of Glastonbury, has one child and works at the state’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women. Noehren said she started ctworkingmoms in summer 2011 “to create a safe, nonjudgmental, compasionate environment for working moms. Noehren’s site has 24 bloggers, who are allowed to write about whatever they want except partisan politics.
Schreier’s blog postings on ctworkingmoms.com sometimes discuss specifically gay issues. However, most of her posts address parenting issues in general. For example, in one recent post, “True Confessions,” she wrote “I am a good mom, but I’ve never said anything about perfect. Good moms and perfect moms are two totally different things. Kind of like horses and … unicorns.”
Schreier said she likes blogging at ctworkingmoms because “you get such a variety of experiences.”
“There are moms of teens, a grandma, who’s all been-there-done-that, moms like me who have adopted, gay families, traditional families,” Schreier said. “It’s a virtual cup of coffee, a place for moms to sit down and be real.”
Schreier got onto “The Ricki Lake Show” just under the wire. Twentieth Television, the show’s distributor, has decided not to renew the show for a second season. It will end its run in September. The cancellation was attributed to a glut in the daytime talk-show market, which has shows starring such big names as Jeff Probst, Katie Couric and Steve Harvey.
THE RICKI LAKE SHOW with special guest Elise Schreier will be shown Thursday, Feb. 21, at 10 a.m., on WTIC Fox CT. Details: www.therickilakeshow.com.
