why we wanted to be parents and grow our family
J: We had talked about wanting a big family early on. So many conversations over 5 years about everything. How we were raised, what we wanted to pass on, what we wanted our lives to look like, and logistics of course – timing and donors and what kind of parents we wanted to be - and it finally came down to spontaneously buying sperm on a New Year’s Eve sale!
D: Having kids and a family with kids was something I always knew I wanted but being a parent feels like a different conversation. Being a parent is a role that I was so excited to have, a relationship that I was so confident I wanted and would like and would be good at.
I loved the idea of parenting. The act of parenting, and what that meant. What were the skills, experiences, tools, that I would bring to this parenting role and relationship? I had awesome support from my parents and continue to have an amazing supportive relationship with them, and I wanted to have that kind of relationship but as the parent.
J: It wasn’t easy to get there. Turns out when you can’t accidentally get pregnant, it’s very hard to know when the right time is to have a baby. Some conversations left us feeling like we wanted different enough things that we might not work out. Some made us scared about how much work our relationship required in order to feel ready. And then we went to therapy. And we committed and recommitted to working on us because we both felt growth from it and in that time, we learned how to communicate. We both had life changing revelations about productive conflict and intimacy. I always knew I wanted a big family but there was work I needed to do to get there. To interrogate my anger, my boundaries, my fears and insecurities. Turns out, having ways to process these things opens up a lot of space in your heart for other people. I started reparenting myself in ways I needed and letting my partner help too. We learned about co-regulating, which feels like a very queer and ecological form of intimacy.
D: When we got to the point of building our family, I felt ready. I had done so much work on myself and Joe and I had done so much work on our relationship it felt like we were ready to support and raise someone else and bring someone else into this world we were building.
This seems a little silly, but also feels true—when I am training other folks on facilitation, I often reference the simplest definition of the term; “to facilitate: to make easy”. I trusted us and our relationship and our families and community to be able to support another person in all the ways--physical, emotional, social, intellectual. To provide safe, trusted loving space for another person to learn and grow and experiment and be.
J: And then we kind of took a leap of faith. We were worried about timing if it took a while, us getting older, our parents getting older, not having enough money, not feeling settled enough. All the things. But we wanted to share a baby with our families. We wanted to share this experience together. We wanted to experience the world through the eyes of a child.
D: We got to a point in our relationship where we liked imagining doing all the things we were doing—camping, hiking, going to the market, cooking breakfast, hanging out with other family members—with a kid around. We were building them into our lives in our imaginations and it felt good and exciting and possible.
J: We wanted to build a family OUR way and raise a young person to be free and fierce and kind and love soil and birds and... Someone who would grow up thinking critically and expansively about gender and race and their place in the world.
D: I always loved the idea of being surrounded by a big family and community—friends ten years older than me and ten years younger than me, mentees, housemates, siblings, cousins, parents, niblings, students. Having a kid was another person to add, another form of relationship to practice and experience, and something that we knew we both wanted.
-Joe and Danny
