My friend, Thomas, sent me this interesting article about modern-day family structures, especially in San Francisco. It is a well-written, thought-provoking piece, and I thought I would share it.
We do know one thing. There are only a few key ingredients that work every single time. They are: stability, deep love, laughter, honest communication, solid boundaries, human kindness, balance and chocolate ice cream. That's about it. There is only the impulse to love and connect and carry on. And maybe, now and then, a good hot bath.
I think that is a list to live by, no matter the nature of your relationship:
- Stability
- Deep Love
- Laughter
- Honest Communication
- Solid Boundaries
- Human Kindness
- Balance
- Chocolate Ice Cream
Here's the article in its entirety for your reading pleasure:
My Baby Has Rainbow Hair
Gay parents, solo moms, sperm-swappin' friends. It's alternative-family bliss! Or is it?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, April 12, 2006
I have a friend who has a very young and beautiful son with a woman to whom he is not married or even dating and with whom he has never actually had sex because he is quite perfectly in love with someone else and she is quite perfectly single and, well, it's sort of out of the question.
My friend, however, he has good sperm. He is, as they say, good breedstock. This seems to be the general consensus. He is light and luminous and strong and tall and beautiful and his apparent spermal excellence is evidenced by the fact that the mother of their happy beautiful child would very much like to have another child using another dose of the high-quality DNA of my friend. And so would, he tells me, two other women.
It is a proposal he is quite modestly and humbly considering, given how my friend is open hearted and generous and also because he has been, to his peaceful dismay, only requested to act as casual and hush-hush (but still wonderful) part-time quasi-parent with his first child. Such is the way.
It is a situation that, as you might imagine, creates all manner of curious parenting dynamics and intriguing emotional conflicts, messy and wonderful and strange. And my friend is, of course, far from alone.
This is San Francisco. This is what you do. Modern twists on the staid ol' family format are much more accepted and expected in this glorious liberal bubble of progress and experimentation, and few people raise an eyebrow when they hear of happily unusual breeding practices that casually flaunt traditional pseudo-Christian 50-percent-divorce-rate nuclear family values.
I know unmarried, fortysomething women who very much want babies and who have yet to meet the right guy and so have naturally considered the semi-creepy world of sperm banks or asking friends or maybe posting something unusual on Craigslist. I know kinky polyamorous couples who are working toward babydom, on their own terms, multiple lovers intact. I know of lesbian couples who've adopted boy babies and gay male couples who've adopted girl babies and straight couples who've adopted baffled toddlers from China.
I know of all types of couples -- gay, straight and in between -- who've brought in surrogate mothers or sperm-donatin' friends and swapped eggs and semen and vials and tubes and syringes and fertilization tips and laughter and cocktails and it's all good and happy and progressive until someone loses a zygote.
Such giddy rearrangement of the traditional family pieces is a terrific and good thing, overall, despite (or perhaps exactly because of) how much consternation and pain such reconfiguration induces in the vicious religious right. Because the fact is, by almost any measure, the traditional, man-woman, Christian family configuration has been an abject failure, an utter embarrassment to time and culture and the art of favorable statistics. Oh yes it has.
Show me a single scientific experiment where fully 50 percent of the results turn out negative and induce collapse and emotional breakdown and childhood therapy and Xanax and alcoholism and screaming, and I'll show you a scientist who will quickly scrap the whole thing and start all over. Which is not to say it's not one hell of a lot of wicked fun to try anyway, should you be wired that way. You just gotta know your odds.
But then it appears the quirky alt-family options aren't exactly gilded slabs of congenial bliss, either. Seems a funny thing happened on the way to the alternative family: People still have issues. People still have just a tremendous number of hang-ups and emotional dramas regarding family and babies and who the hell gets to shape and mold and influence the consciousness of another human life. Go figure.
This is what we're learning: It does not matter if you're Christian or gay or bi, Mormon or neocon or a rainbow-colored leather-clad bear with hair where your legs used to be. Issues arise. Emotions tumble forth. There is, apparently, no perfect way. There is no ideal family structure and quit pointing to your Bible before you hurt yourself -- rule No. 1 in all matters reproductive: Never trust musty dogmatic mythology written by angry old men who never had sex. Duh.
We do know one thing. There are only a few key ingredients that work every single time. They are: stability, deep love, laughter, honest communication, solid boundaries, human kindness, balance and chocolate ice cream. That's about it. There is only the impulse to love and connect and carry on. And maybe, now and then, a good hot bath.
For awhile, my friend was troubled by the fact that he was supposed to be close with his child and help take care of him and celebrate their love, and yet has been instructed not to tell anyone he's the father because, well, the mother had issues (they later revised this plan after realizing that hiding such significant details from this child would only screw him up and induce resentment and possibly turn him Republican, so they invented a bed-time story telling of his charmed birth and his loving community and how they all lived happily ever after).
Then again, a wonderful lesbian couple I know used the sperm of a gay friend to become pregnant and have given birth, only to suffer a major falling-out with the donor, and now he wants access to the kid, which violates the spirit of their agreement and hence he and the couple hate each other and no one's the slightest bit happy.
It can get convoluted. Sperm-bank kids may never know a thing like a father exists or that mom was just too, um, "unique" to find a mate. Spouses of egg or sperm donors can become crazy-jealous that their lover shared such intimate genetics with another, and hence marriages get ruined and relationships get tangled and none of this even touches on what happens when the kid comes of age and wants to know what the hell is going on -- and by the way, Where's Dad?
For every success story in the alternative-family sphere, there's a debilitating wrinkle. It is perhaps no better -- or worse -- than traditional structures. But for every major falling-out and nasty emotional entanglement, there's a mad success story resulting in a glorious kid (or three) who will be raised with a funky and fresh perspective on family and parenting which, oh my God, we so desperately need in this culture right now that we might as well be in a desert pleading for water.
It would seem there is no escaping the human drama. It would seem there is no way around personal issues of life and sperm and DNA and pulse. You may thump your revisionist Bible, you may cite your lopsided studies, you may wave your freak flags high, but the truth is, we are here on this planet to work toward the new. We are here to adapt and evolve and try to clue into the Mystery. And playing with reproduction and family structure is one hell of an often glorious, often tortuous way to do exactly that. What, you thought we were all done? Not even close.
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