Done Performing My Family for Content Online and Off

I just spent two hours trying to renew my daughters' passports.Two hours in a government office that smells like defeated dreams and industrial cleaner, standing at a counter across from a woman who keeps looking at her supervisor like I'm a problem she wasn't trained to solve."Mother's name?"There is no mother."I'm sorry, but we need a mother's name for the application."There. Is. No. Mother.She blinks at me. Then at my daughters, who are sitting on plastic chairs swinging their legs, oblivious to the fact that the bureaucratic machinery of an entire country doesn't have a checkbox for their existence.The supervisor comes over. Middle-aged man, kind eyes, genuinely trying to help. He looks at the form. He looks at me. He looks at my daughters."So... you're the father?"Yes."And there's no mother?"Correct."But someone gave birth to them."A surrogate. In Kenya. Seven years ago. We have all the legal documents. Court orders. Birth certificates. Everything you need.He nods slowly, still trying to compute. "And your... wife?"My husband. He's at work.More nodding. More computing. The system is buffering.What he can do, it turns out, is call someone else. Who calls someone else. Who eventually decides that yes, we can leave the mother's name blank,...