Modern Families

Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship

Joshua Gamson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479843251

A personal, intimate account of the extraordinary ways that today’s families are being created. From adoption and assisted reproduction, to gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families, the stories in Modern Families explain how individuals make unconventional families by accessing a broad range of technological, medical and legal choices that expand our definitions of parenting and kinship. Joshua Gamson introduces us to a child with two mothers, made with one mother’s egg and the sperm of a man none of them has ever met; another born in Ethiopia, delivered by his natural grandmother to an orphanage after both his parents died in close succession, and then to the arms of his mother, who is raising him solo. These tales are deeply personal and political. The process of forming these families involved jumping tremendous hurdles—social conventions, legal and medical institutions—with heightened intention and inventiveness, within and across multiple inequities and privileges. Yet each of these families, however they came to be, shares the same universal joys that all families share. A companion for all those who choose to navigate the world of modern kinship, Modern Families provides a “fascinating look at the remarkable range of experiences that is broadening the very idea of family” ( Booklist ).

■ 1 ■

Reba, Live!

Just after New Year’s in 2004, I had a dream that my college girlfriend Tamar was having a baby. It was a dream without much originality, just a string of clips from those birth scenes you see on TV medical shows: woman being wheeled, screaming, down the green halls of a hospital; calm, concerned face of doctor, saying things like “Just breathe” and “Blah-blah, stat!”; hospital room, sounds of baby cries, close-up of euphoric face of a woman, now mother, cooing and gazing into the face of a swaddled infant, now gurgling. The only difference was that the woman was Tamar, her freckled cheeks ruddy, her red hair matted with sweat.

A bloodless, simple birth in which bliss erases pain: it was as if even my dreams were required to acknowledge how far the reality of childbirth was from my reach. After all, it takes an awful lot of work to have a baby when, if you’re a male couple like me and Richard, you’re missing two of the three crucial elements. An extra penis is nice but not exactly needed.

After my coffee, I gave Tamar a call. We hadn’t spoken in about a year, but I told her about the dream and asked her if something was going on, if she and her husband were maybe on the way to a baby.

“Nah,” she said. “Andy and I decided we don’t want kids. We have so many kids around us, godchildren and friends’ kids. We like it this way, where they go home afterwards.” I suggested that maybe the dream was metaphorical, probably about work or something, and we talked about various projects she was doing that could reasonably be likened to giving birth. Tamar was always something of a go-getter, and by now she was a pricey consultant to various conservation and sustainable-development nonprofits. Between trips to the Amazon, she was writing her first screenplay, the story of a big-city venture capitalist who loses her mother, inherits a farm and its family secrets, and then has to fight against everyone she thought she loved to save it. Tamar was giving birth to a lot of things.

Curious, I returned later to the question of actual kids. “I only have one regret,” Tamar said. “I kind of wanted to experience pregnancy and childbirth. I was born into this body, you know, and I feel like I’m missing the chance to experience one of the most amazing things you can do in this kind of body.” It is in Tamar’s character to see the amazing side of what others suggest culminates in something a lot like shitting a watermelon. She has also been a feminist since childhood; she once organized a speculum party in her dorm room, in which she and her friends earnestly examined and appreciated their vaginas. Plus, she has a taste for emotional intensity.

“So you’re saying you’d like to be pregnant and give birth to a child but not raise it,” I summarized.

“Exactly,” she said.

“Have I got a deal for you,” I said.

I was four-fifths joking. Richard and I had just recently settled an argument about kid having that had lasted about four years and followed us from Manhattan to Oakland. We were both pretty sure we wanted kids. I’d grown up assuming I’d be a father, aged into the assumption that being gay meant I would not, and made the best of my freedom and semioutsider status. Years of other people’s activism,1 along with the rapid mainstreaming and heightened visibility of much gay life,2 had undercut that assumption, and fatherhood had become imaginable again.

Richard had come around a similar circle, but that was where our similarities ended. He was the child of a postal-worker father and a mother who had worked as a secretary and a Walmart cashier; I was the child of two academics. He’d majored in biology at Stanford, a subject for which, as a critical-thinking political science major at Swarthmore, I’d required a tutor. When he’d finally taken off enough time to have a hobby, Richard had chosen genealogy. Now he wanted some genetic tie to a family lineage and thought that adoption, nice as it was, left too much unpredictable. He had done plenty of life saving in his time as an ER doctor and did not feel compelled to do more of it in order to have a family. I had nothing against breeding and felt as deserving of biological offspring as any straight person but was creeped out by the catalog-shopping and rent-a-womb aspects of surrogacy, which seemed to combine crass commercialism and a male sense of entitlement to female bodies. We’d concluded that our jointly held fantasy would be an intimate version of procreation—called “collaborative reproduction” in the assisted reproduction world, I later learned—with eggs from a relative and a friend or acquaintance to carry and give birth to a child. One of us would make deposits to a sperm bank, and then if we later decided to have another child, the other one would take his turn. We knew it was ludicrous, but it was clarifying nonetheless to have a vision. I told some of this to Tamar.

“I’ll mull it over,” she said. I figured she was kidding.

■ ■ ■

Tamar was turning forty that summer, and her husband, Andy, sent me a request to put together a page for a book he’d be giving her at the party in rural Virginia. Hoping for a few old photos, I prevailed on my mother to dig through a box of memorabilia I’d stowed at my parents’ house on Martha’s Vineyard. I had in mind perhaps a photo from our graduation, when my Grandpa Sam had taken one look at Tamar—a fair-skinned, ginger Jew born in Israel—and declared in full voice, to no one in particular, “She’s not Jewish. She’s Irish.” Or maybe a snapshot from that same summer, when she and some friends and I had done mushrooms on the Vineyard and swooned at the awesome motion of individual grains of sand. My mother could find no photos but sent instead a package that included a long letter from Tamar, written over the winter break at the height of our romance, and a pile of stuff from her late mother, Nancy, also known as Duke.

Duke was a twice-married accomplished developmental psychologist, a brilliant academic, a powerhouse, and a total kook. She talked to people of all ages, including toddlers, as if they were peers. She was tiny, loyal, and willful. Her boundaries were unusual. Once, as boyfriend and girlfriend on a college-break visit to Green Bay, where Duke taught, Tamar and I took separate showers; Duke expressed concern about our relationship. She shared with her children the details of her sex life and expected nothing less in return. I’d come to love her, warily, and to admire her. In April 1986, she was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer, and she died just a few months later, of cerebrospinal fluid cancer, at forty-six. The last time I spoke with Duke, she was on a heavy morphine drip. I was on my bed in the teensy apartment in the North End of Boston I shared with two roommates. “Joshie,” she said, interrupting her own stream-of-consciousness good-bye, “remember this: you will have a guardian angel.” As guardian angels go, you could do a lot worse.

In the package my mother forwarded were several articles Duke had sent me, one on “the psychological paradoxes of intimacy over the life cycle,” another on being a Jewish militant atheist, another called “Beyond Oil of Olay: Bag Balm and Other Forms of Feminine Protection,” and one called “Still Life with Dogs,” about a two-week bout with the flu, which begins, “I might be dying.” Also inside was an invited address on Judaism and feminism to the American Psychological Association in August 1985. In it, Duke quotes the midrashim on Genesis that Tamar and her sister wrote for a college class they’d taken together. Tamar, then nineteen, had written of the separation of male and female in the creation story and their reconciliation through the improbable pregnancies of Sarah (pregnant at ninety with Isaac) and Rebecca (barren for twenty years, only to give birth to twins Jacob and Esau). The logic of the interpretation wasn’t easy to follow, but Tamar, Duke reported, “caused pregnancy to represent in symbol that which it is in biological fact, a unification of independent beings who require each other for the creation of new life.” Tamar had also deemed the least likely births the most spiritually significant.

Tucked between two of Duke’s articles was a letter she’d sent me, dated “The Sixth Night of Chanukah, 5746; 12 December 1986,” printed on dot matrix. She wrote at length about her writing life, her complex relationship to Jews even as she toiled “isolated among the goyim,” and the weather. “Now, briefly and gently, to family feelings,” she then continued. Tamar and I had broken up a few months earlier—an event that boiled down, though no one including myself knew it yet, to gayness tugging at my pants leg. “Yes, Joshie, you found a place of your own in my heart a long time ago,” Duke said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t miss seeing you and Tamar together. She’s right, you know, to think of separation as a sort of death; the French say, partir, c’est mourir un peu, and I agree. But I also believe there can be a new life after such deaths. But here’s a question for you, Joshie: What are you going to do now?” From across the distance of years and dimensions, the question was spooky, but spookier still was a sentence I found hovering a paragraph before. “When I think about what ‘might have been’ between Tamar and you,” Duke wrote, “it is more often in terms of the large collection of baby items we have squirreled away in our minds for the first grandchild, for which you and Tamar looked like the most likely and most welcome candidates.”

I made a copy of the letter and pasted the original onto a page for Tamar’s birthday book.

■ ■ ■

When I’d begun to accept a gay identity in my early twenties, I hadn’t entirely let go of my childhood assumption that one day I’d be a parent, but I’d certainly back-burnered it. When people put on sympathetic faces and told me how sad it was that I wouldn’t have kids, I became snidely assertive. “As far as I know, my sperm are the same as before I was gay,” I’d sniff. “But then, I’m not very good with science.” Really, though, back then I had no idea whether or how it was going to happen, now that I was probably not going to be romantically involved with women. Somewhere in the back of my head I knew technology was making things easier, but I didn’t think that applied to me. I had some good lesbian friends with a baby, but as far as I knew they’d used a sperm-filled turkey baster. Not an option. I’d heard about “test tube babies” since the late 1970s, but that sounded too science-fictiony—the name “Baby M” didn’t help—like a soft-core version of cloning. Anyway, I had a gay adolescence to progress through, a degree to finish, a body and heart to discover, a movement to join, an outsider identity to inhabit, and wild oats to sow.

By the time I’d met Richard in the late 1990s, when I was a professor with sown oats and an integrated gay identity, the technology for creating biological offspring without hetero sex had become more advanced and familiar. Over the course of a couple of decades, in fact, assisted reproduction had gone, in the journalist Liza Mundy’s words, from “an oddball, fringe technology to being perhaps the most socially influential reproductive technology of the twenty-first century.”3 That technology seemed intended for others but available to me, which in itself held appeal: the tools of heterosexual pronatalism would be adapted for subversive queer family making.

Subverting heteronormativity might be one possibility, but assisted reproduction also came with dynamics that could hardly be called subversive. What brought assisted reproduction out of the oddball fringe was primarily a commercial industry that, once the technology was in place, successfully cashed in on the desires, and often desperation, of people who would prefer to have children through heterosexual intercourse but were having trouble doing so. Given the costs of assisted reproduction, the fertility industry was built largely on selling services to relatively well-off people, accentuating what some scholars call “reproductive stratification,” in which, as the science studies researcher Charis Thompson puts it, the “haves and have-nots of [assisted reproduction technologies] are increasingly the socioeconomic haves and have-nots of society in general.”4 If Duke’s what-might-have-been was going to become my what-might-be, it was most likely going to be in relation to commercialized reproduction, which joins “profound parental love” with “cold-blooded business truths,” in which children are “desired, loved, celebrated, wanted, and obtained in a relentlessly commercialized process,”5 and which facilitates the creation of some queer families even as it reinforces the distance between haves and have-nots.

I grew up enjoying the pleasures of commerce but suspicious of its amorality and wary of its manipulations. We were not allowed any toys that were advertised on television, and in my alternative high school and socialist-Zionist summer camp, it was assumed that commercials were capitalist propaganda; I’d kept my excitement about occasional McDonald’s visits and trips to the shopping mall mostly quiet. But here I was, thirty years later, banging at the gates of a commercial industry. If we did want to make a family through biological procreation, we’d just have to enter the fertility marketplace. We’d have to treat a baby at least something like a commodity. We’d have to outsource to others the parts of the process we weren’t equipped to provide, and probably pay for them.

At a personal level, that seemed manageable, but the bigger picture—the building of something so intimate as family through commercial exchanges—was disquieting. Egg donation, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy might reasonably be seen as quintessential examples of the encroachment of a market mentality into aspects of intimate life that had previously been insulated from commercial forces. For instance, in The Outsourced Self, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild details what she calls the “outsourcing” of intimacy, a “strange new emotional capitalism” in which the market has become present “in our bedrooms, at our breakfast tables, in our love lives, entangled in our deepest joys and sorrows.”6 Chief among her examples is surrogacy, in which “a person can now legally purchase an egg from one continent, sperm from another, and implant it in a ‘womb for rent’ in yet another.”7 She describes a couple who, turning to a surrogacy clinic in India, “saw their relationship with the surrogate as a mutually beneficial transaction” and “imagined themselves as outsourcers paying a stranger to provide a professionally supervised service,” establishing with the gestational carrier “the sort of relationship one might establish with an obstetrician or dentist.”8 She describes an Indian surrogate who, “instructed to remain emotionally detached from her clients, her babies, and even from her womb” while doing “an extraordinarily personal thing,” entered transactions that were “cursory, businesslike, and spanned differences in language, culture, ethnicity, nation, and, most of all, social class.”9

Was that what we were choosing to do? I wondered. I was choosing, it seemed, to turn conception and childbirth into commercial exchanges, alienating myself, my partner, and the women involved from our bodies and our babies, replacing the personal and the attached with the impersonal and detached. This would be true even as I was setting out, with willing collaborators, to do something beautiful. This would be true even as I was participating in the radical transformation of kinship.

■ ■ ■

In my discussions with Tamar, it became quickly clear that she was not interested in getting pregnant with her own eggs. A genetic connection, she reasoned, would muddy the family waters and make it emotionally harder for her, and anyway she was getting old enough that a pregnancy via insemination wasn’t very likely to take. We asked several people to consider donating eggs and somehow managed to get a yes from a person close to us. I’ll call her Jane. Like Tamar, Jane was an intimate and a peer, from the same social class as the rest of us; at her request, her part of the story stays her own.

I took on a role a bit like that of a general contractor. Tamar, for her part, came to our ongoing conversations with lists of discussion topics. She wanted to know how we would feel about paying her, so that she could treat the experience at least partially as a job. Payment would help mark the boundary between a parental and nonparental relationship to the baby, which all of us involved wanted and needed; the terms of commerce, it turned out, were not just intrusions to be resisted. This arrangement sat well with Richard, who does not enjoy being indebted. My parents had already offered some financial help, which I’d rationalized to myself as gay reparations but knew was simply class advantage, and would be happy to see it go to Tamar, for whom my mother had served as a kind of surrogate mom after Tamar’s own mother died.

Tamar also wanted to know how we would feel about our child making annual visits, without us, to her and Andy in Virginia, which even then I saw as a much-needed annual adult vacation for me and Richard. She wanted to know how we would feel about her breast-feeding, at least for the first week or two.

“I don’t see why not,” I said. “I guess what we’re supposed to consider is the attachment you’ll form to one another, which could make separating really hard.” I’d been reading a lot of surrogacy websites.

Tamar paused. “I’m not worried about getting attached to this baby,” she said. She had clearly already thought this one through. “I want to feel attached to this baby. I hope you want that, too.” It was exactly what I wanted, in fact, the opposite of the conventional surrogacy-industry wisdom, which saw a carrier’s emotional attachment to the child she was carrying as the first step toward her decision to screw over the intended parents and keep the kid. Given the supposed health benefits of breast milk,10 Tamar added, her proposed plan after we took the baby home would be to pump her breasts for the first six weeks and FedEx the milk to California.

“You drive a hard bargain,” I told her. I had the sense that she had already investigated the best place to purchase dry ice and packing foam. I kne...