Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood by Eric Rosswood

Author:Eric Rosswood [Rosswood, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780882825151
Publisher: New Horizon Press
Published: 2016-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Kevin Wakelin

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

When I was a kid, I knew I wanted to have lots of children one day—or so my parents have often said. But truth be told, I actually do have vague memories of making such a declaration to my family on numerous occasions. I imagined a whole soccer team of kids with me as the doting dad. Fortunately, my folks never stood in the way of my unsubstantiated declarations, despite occasional dismissive eyeball rolls. My life has been one constant adventure of stepping out of the box, marching to my own beat and following my heart—maturing only by making every mistake there is to make. I’ve always loved kids, loved being a kid and still am a kid at heart.

By the time the real subject of whether or not to have children rolled around—back in 2000—there were many new opportunities for my then-partner and I to explore, including adoption and surrogacy. A number of trailblazers had already forged a path before us, but we definitely felt like a part of the new, emerging trend of visible alternative families.

Fortunately, we had done our fair share of footloose and fancy-free partying in our twenties. To be young, free, single and gay in San Francisco in the 1990s was hardly torturous. Throw in perfect synchronicity with the booming dot-com bubble around us and the fun times got even more interesting. With those days behind us, we happily sold our home in the heart of the Castro District and moved out to the East Bay suburbs into a spacious, single-family house with a yard, trees and room to grow—the perfect place to raise a family. There was no white picket fence but, within a year, I built one.

We had originally looked at adoption and went to many open house events for various agencies. Unfortunately, we were often the only gay couple in attendance. Many of the stories people shared revolved around infertility, which didn’t apply to us, and the language used by the facilitators was not inclusive to same-sex couples. We asked about statistics on gay couples, but the answers we got back were always ambiguous. I know things have gotten better now, but back in the early 2000s, reaching out to same-sex couples was still a new thing for adoption agencies. So at the time, adoption just didn’t seem like a good fit for us.

We changed course and began looking into gestational surrogacy, an expensive process involving an egg donor, a surrogate, our sperm, numerous doctors and many more attorneys. We ultimately found it to be the right choice for us, because it seemed like we could have more control over the process. We could be in charge of the timing, the people we interacted with and a lot of the genetics. The one thing that was left to Mother Nature was the sex of the child. Everything else was rather engineered. We decided to move forward with surrogacy, knowing that we had a better stake in the game.

Picking an egg donor was probably the hardest part.

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