When I was a small child, my mother used to say sometimes, “The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and people who don’t have children never get to know what it’s like.”
I took it as the greatest compliment that she so loved my brother and me, and loved being our mother, that she thought so highly of that emotional experience.
When I was growing up, there was an article in Time magazine about homosexuality which said, “It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such, it deserves no glamorization, no rationalization, and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.”
Living in that world, I was sad as I began to think that I might be gay.
When I was a teenager, my mother would say, “The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and people who don’t have children never get to know what it’s like.”
And that made me intensely anxious.
I thought, I think I’m gay, but I want to have children. But I think I’m gay, but I want to have children.
I felt myself banging back and forth. At some point I decided that children were the primary thing and that I was going to change. I read an ad in the back of New York magazine for sexual-surrogacy therapy, and I went for a kind of training to transform myself into somebody else.
It was a very peculiar experience. It involved doing so-called exercises with women who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else. My particular favorite was a buxom, blond southern woman, who eventually admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliac and had taken this job after she got into trouble down at the morgue. I made progress; I got over my fear of sex with women.
But when I was in my early twenties, I decided that this was not all going as planned and that I really was gay.
I told people that I was.
And my mother said, “The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world. And if you don’t have children, you’ll never get to know what it’s like.”
Having first been touched and then been made anxious, I was now made angry by this statement, and I said, “I’m gay, and I’m not going to have children, and I am who I am, and I want you to stop saying that.”
Years afterwards, in 2001, I met John, who is the love of my life. And shortly after we met, he told me that he had been a sperm donor for some lesbian friends.
I said, “You have children?”
And he said, “No. They have children, and I was the donor for them.”
A few weeks later, we were out at the Minnesota State Fair, and we ran into Tammy and Laura and their toddler, Oliver. I looked at them with fascination, and I thought, How amazing that Tammy and Laura are gay and they have a child, and that John is gay and in some sense at least has a child.
Oliver had been told that he should call John “Donor Dad.” Having a rough time pronouncing that, he came up with “Doughnut Dad.”
So I looked at them all, and I thought, There’s Doughnut Dad. There’s his moms. There’s me. Who are we all to one another?
A year later John told me that Tammy and Laura had asked him to be a donor again, and they produced Lucy.
So now there were two of these children, and we knew them a little bit and saw them from time to time and were warmly disposed toward them. And John said he’d promised to be in their lives when they were grown up if they particularly wanted him to be.
The idea of having children in some unusual arrangement was not entirely novel to me. I had some years earlier been at a dinner with my closest friend from college, Blaine, who lived in Texas and had recently separated from her husband.
When I asked if she had any regrets, she said, “Only about not being a mother.”
I said, and meant it, “You’d be the best mother in the world. And if you ever decided that you wanted to have a child, I’d be so honored to be the father.”
I assumed that it was just a statement in passing, since she was beautiful and beloved and had lines of men eager to court her. But on my fortieth birthday she appeared in New York for a surprise party that John and my father and stepmother had organized. We went out to dinner the next day and realized that we really did want to follow through with this plan.
I wasn’t ready to tell John right away. When I did tell him, he was angry about it.
I said, “John, how can you be angry at me? You have Oliver and Lucy, and now there’ll be this other arrangement.”
He said, “I was a donor for Oliver and Lucy, and you’re setting out to have a child of whom you will be the acknowledged father and who will have your last name.”
We struggled with it for quite a while.
And then John, whose kindness usually carries the day, said, “If this is what you really need to do, then go ahead and do it.”
Soon thereafter he asked me to marry him.
It was 2006, and gay marriage was pretty new. I had never been a big fan of gay marriage. I thought everyone should have the right to marry, though it didn’t particularly preoccupy me. But after he proposed, we began planning a wedding. I thought he had gone along with what I wanted to do and I would go along with what he wanted to do.
We ended up getting married in the English countryside, and we had a beautiful wedding. I found that though our commitment had seemed to me to be permanent and declared and established before that, the experience of having hundreds of friends gathered together, witnessing our love, shored it up and strengthened it and gave it a new depth and resonance I had never imagined nor anticipated.
I found the fact that we were celebrating our love in a ceremony that echoed, in some sense, the one my parents had had, and the ones my grandparents had had, and the ones that presumably went back generation upon generation, exalted the feeling between us, and it was very joyful.
Blaine was there, three months pregnant with our child, and John ventured that we had had the first gay shotgun wedding.
So six months later, our daughter, Little Blaine, was born. I was in the room when she was delivered, and I was the first person to hold her. Blaine by now had a partner, Richard, who was also to be a significant part of the picture.
I had such a disorienting feeling of suddenly being changed.
I thought, I’m a father now. I’m a father.
It was as though someone had told me that I was still myself and also a shooting star.
I held her. And I then had to go down into the basement of the hospital to sign the certificate for her birth, where, given that Blaine and I were not married, I was advised to get a paternity test before I signed for any love child.
I said, “You have no idea the planning that was behind this.”
John held her, and we all were enraptured, as one is by the birth of children, because it’s so much stranger than even intergalactic travel that someone wasn’t there and now all of a sudden she is.
But when John and I got back to New York, I kept feeling as though I was being highly supportive of something Blaine had done, rather than as though it were something I had done. And yet I found myself thinking of this child all the time.
John fell in love with Little Blaine. He fell in love with Big Blaine. We were all in love with one another. We were trying to understand how everything fit together.
Sometime later I said to John, “Don’t you think it would be nice for us to have a child also, a sibling for Little Blaine, whom she might love to have in her life and who might grow up in our house all the time?”
John did not think that would be lovely. And so we had a year in which I kept saying how wonderful it would be and acting as the cheerleader for the cause. And through that year John kept resisting and being unsure.
Finally my birthday rolled around again, and he said, “Your present is upstairs.”
We went upstairs, and there was an antique cradle tied up with a bow.
He said, “If it’s a boy, can we name him George, after my grandpa?”
We then had to figure out how we were going to produce such a child.
So we found an egg donor, and we began the process of trying to find a surrogate.
We got together with Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy one night, and Laura said to John, “You gave us our children, and I’ll never be able to thank you enough for that. But I could show you how much you mean to us by being your surrogate.”
She offered to carry our child.
She got pregnant on the second IVF protocol. And nine months after that, George was born. We called Big Blaine and Little Blaine and everyone else in our circle. And we held him and we wondered at him.
Then we came home, and we sent out birth announcements. The announcement included a picture of John and me holding George.
Many friends said, “I loved that picture. I hung it on my refrigerator.”
But one of John’s cousins wrote back and said, “Your lifestyle is against our Christian values. We wish to have no further contact.”
I thought that world, the Time magazine world of my childhood, was still there and still going strong. And it made me very sad.
But meanwhile we had spent many, many hours with Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy through that whole pregnancy, and we had all fallen in love—I think again, anew, more deeply—with one another.
And when Oliver and Lucy learned that Little Blaine called us “Daddy and Papa John,” they said they’d like to call us Daddy and Papa, too.
I suddenly found that in contemplating two children we seemed to have four.
In the period that followed that, I kept thinking about the angry cousin and what she’d said.
I thought, It’s not really a question of our kind of love being as good as, or better than, or less good than anyone else’s love. It’s simply another kind of love that we found as six parents of four children in three states.
And I thought that just as species diversity is essential to keep the planet functional, so there’s a need for a diversity of love to sustain the ecosphere of kindness, and that anyone who rejected any bit of the love in the world was acting from a position of folly.
About six months ago, we went to a game park, and I climbed up with George on a stand, from which you could view some animals below.
I held his hand, and I said, “We’re going to go back down the steps now. Go very carefully.”
I took one step, and I slipped, and I fell all the way down the flight of stairs, pulling him along behind me.
I remember when it happened thinking that I really didn’t care whether I had broken my arm or my leg, as long as I hadn’t injured my child. It turned out that I hadn’t.
When I realized it, I suddenly thought, The love you have for your children is like no other feeling. And until you have children, you’ll never know.
I thought how even in the periods when my mother’s saying that made me anxious or made me angry, that it was her saying it so persistently that had caused me to pursue a family, even under such complicated and difficult and elaborate circumstances. And it had led me finally to the greatest joys of my life.
ANDREW SOLOMON is a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and writes and lectures on politics, psychology, and the arts. He is the author of Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World, the New York Times bestseller Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and myriad other awards), and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of many awards, including the 2001 National Book Award). His TED Talks have garnered over 20 million views. Solomon’s work is published in twenty-four languages. He lives in New York and London with his husband and son but also has a larger post-nuclear family.
This story was told on November 14, 2012, at The Great Hall of The Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was Around the Bend: Stories of Coming Home. Director: Catherine Burns.
