Mombian was born the way so many resources areーbecause the founder couldn’t find anything out there like it.
When Dana Rudolph was staying at home as a mom to her baby son in the early 2000s, LGBTQ parenting resources were scarce. She and her wife couldn’t legally marry even though they had been a couple for a decade before Rudolph’s partner gave birth to their son using Rudolph’s egg through reciprocal IVF.
Under state law, only Rudolph’s partner would have been the legal parent, but with the help of a gay lawyer, Rudolph and her partner in 2003 became the second reciprocal IVF couple in New Jersey to get a pre-birth parentage order naming the genetic mom a legal parent, too.
After leaving her job in online services to stay home, she “wanted to do something to keep [her] professional skills warm” and a couple of years after the birth of her son “blogging was just starting to come up on people’s horizons.” She considered a few topics for her blog, including cooking, but decided that parenting would be easiest while her days were already full of parenting.
“Most importantly, there was nothing out there at the time that was speaking to LGBTQ parents in this way,” says Rudolph. She decided to fill that gap in 2005 with Mombian.com, a website that speaks to lesbian parents and all LGBTQ parents. There, she blogs about LGBTQ parenting news, publishes compilations of LGBTQ parenting resources, and reviews books with LGBTQ representation.
Since launching Mombian, Rudolph has also started the annual LGBTQ Families Day on the first weekday in June and the Mombian newspaper column that runs in LGBTQ newspapers like Bay Windows, Washington Blade, and Windy City Times. The award-winning website recently launched a comprehensive database of LGBTQ children’s books and other media.
While Rudolph did return to other work in 2012, she retired last summer and has no plans of slowing down with Mombian anytime soon. She wants to grow the new database with the help of her now-teenage son who does data entry work for her.
Rudolph, legally married to her wife in Massachusetts since 2006 and still living there, has an eclectic collection of knowledge and hobbies, from her undergrad degree from Wellesley College in Astronomy and Medieval/Renaissance Studies to her black belt in taekwondo.
