Co-parenting

When we started this journey, one of the options we looked at was co-parenting. We have a good friend - who we trust implicitly and love dearly - who had a good friend who also wanted a child. This friend of a friend - we'll call her mother - wasn't in a relationship and had come out of some bad ones. She was hitting late thirties and felt that she wasn't going to find a strong, lasting relationship in time to have a child - that whole biological clock thing. So we started talking. After six months of getting to know each other we learned that a friend of a friend - no matter how good the first friend - isn't always a good choice for group parenthood.

In an ideal world the process would have worked like this:

a) we have the baby - using a turkey baster or a fertility clinic or a big bottle of vodka (we hadn't really nailed that down). Yah baby!

b) the mother would be the primary care giver for the first three years though we would have a significant say in the child rearing practices. Yah diaper changing!

c) after three years we would share the parenting equally. Yah learning to talk!

We loved this option as it obviously gave us a child without a lot of hassle, it felt good the idea of raising a child in a community and we weren't so keen on having a newborn that we wanted full custody for the first three years. Babies are great, but neither one of us felt that strong maternal urge to raise a child from infancy.

We spent six months talking with our potential co-parent, getting to know her, understanding her parenting style, creating child-raising scenarios and as much as possible without actually having a kid around, trying to understand how we would all work as co-parents. The first few months were bliss - it felt like such a progressive solution. It felt like not only were we going to bring a child into the world but we were going to expose it to two very different, rich lifestyles and the wisdom of three - not two - parents. It was raising a child within a community.

Then I started talking with my mother friends. And then reality started to creep in.

- what happens if the mother finds a man that we don't like?
- how financially responsible for this child will we be and what happens if the mother decides she wants full responsibility forever - would we be paying for a child without ever seeing them?
- we never *really* clicked well with the mother, would we learn to like her?
- what if we all have different parenting styles once the child is born and hate each other?
- what if we move?
- what if she moves?

And the questions kept on coming. And coming. Along with the doubt.

We found multiple examples of lesbian couples and a male friend having children and sharing responsibility but we could not find one single example of two gay men and a woman sharing a child from infancy. There were not a lot of shining beacons to guide us in the process.

We took off for a long weekend a couple of months back and decided that we needed to make a decision and either commit or move on and with everything on the table it just didn't feel good anymore as an option.