Jerry Mahoney felt a punch in the gut at Modern Family’s mockery of how his children were conceived.
Originally appeared at Mommy Man, Adventures of a Gay Superdad
I guess there’s one episode of “Modern Family” I won’t be showing my kids after all.
In an episode from February of this year, Mitchell, Cam, Phil and Claire all got really drunk, and Claire came up with a crazy proposition. What if she donated an egg, Cam fertilized it and a surrogate carried the baby? Then her gay brother and his partner could have a child who was related to both of them. It sounded so beautiful.
It was all very familiar to me, because my partner Drew and I had the exact same idea a few years ago. We debated it and dismissed it, but then Drew’s sister Susie came to us independently with the same suggestion. What if she gave us her eggs? Hmm… what if?
On “Modern Family”, the notion didn’t seem so perfect once everyone had sobered up. They decided not to go through with it.
As for Drew and me, our twins will be two and a half years old this Friday. They were conceived using Susie’s eggs and my sperm and were carried by a surrogate.
I always knew the decision Drew and I made (not to mention Susie) wouldn’t be right for everyone. So why, when it wasn’t right for a group of fake people on a TV show, did it feel like such a punch in the gut?
As the episode, titled “Aunt Mommy”, unfolded, the characters used words like “creepy”, “inbred” and “freak show”. I turned to Drew and said, “They’re talking about us.”
It’s hard to accept that anyone might judge our family because of the way we created it. Harder still to see that judgment coming from such a progressive, gay-positive TV show.
And it hurt.
We never get reactions like that when we tell people our story. It doesn’t matter if they’re close friends or complete strangers. They always remark about how wonderful it is, how moved they are by Susie’s gift and how lucky they think our kids are. That’s what they say to our faces, at least. Who knows how they really feel?
I will say that there was nothing that came up on “Modern Family” that we didn’t ponder ourselves before we decided to have kids in our nontraditional way. And, given more than 22 minutes to ponder the topic, our soul-searching ran a lot deeper. We went through all the same emotions and fears – Was this creepy? Was it fair to Susie? To Drew? To the kids? Drew’s own brother told us that having a baby with Susie’s eggs would be “effed up”. That alone almost made us reconsider.
We kept talking about it, though. We wrote Susie a heartfelt letter laying all our feelings bare. We flew her out to LA to have therapy with us. We obsessively dissected every angle of the scenario we were creating:
Would Drew feel like less of a dad because we used my sperm and not his?
Would Susie have trouble watching us raise a child she was biologically bonded to?
Would the kids feel that Susie was their mom and Drew their uncle, because that’s what biology seemed to suggest?
How would the world see us? Would people be uncomfortable with our story or, worse, with our kids?
I wish I could say that talking everything through brought us complete clarity, and that’s why we decided to go ahead and make our babies together. But that’s not true. We knew that making a baby this way would be messy, that we were venturing into uncharted territory. We feared we were doing the wrong thing.
We also thought there would be something very special about our family. We liked knowing that we could someday tell our kids the unique, incredible story of how they were born. We imagined how special they’d feel knowing what Aunt Susie had done for them, how wonderful it would be to create life out of such a pure gift of love.
Drew’s brother came around eventually. Susie convinced us that she was emotionally prepared for what lay ahead. And in the end, with our families’ support, I guess we rolled the dice.
As a result, there are two tiny human beings who live in my house. They fight and cry. They sing songs from their dads’ 80s mixes and songs they’ve made up in their heads. They pour yogurt in their hair. They make us laugh. They cost a fortune. They’d eat cupcakes 24 hours a day if we let them. They hug and kiss and say, “I love you.” They’re ours.
And they wouldn’t be here if not for my love for Drew, and Susie’s love for her brother.
That doesn’t make the doubts go away. In some ways, it makes them worse.
Every day, I feel guilty that Susie doesn’t get to be our kids’ mommy. I see bits of her in our children – their features and their personalities – and I feel like she deserves more than our arrangement provides her. I struggle wondering about the pain she must feel when she says goodbye to them, when Drew and I make different parenting choices than she would and about the tiny sting she must feel when the kids call her “Aunt”.
I feel bad for Drew, too, like I got something that he didn’t get, a bond he might not feel quite as strongly as I do. I worry that the kids will treat us differently when they’re old enough to understand how they came into the world. I fear that they’ll view Drew as less of a dad.
I fear for my kids, too. Have we doomed them to being outsiders, anomalies of nature the world will never fully appreciate or understand?
These aren’t issues we addressed and resolved. They aren’t emotions that will ever go away. They’ll be with us forever. It’s the path we chose, and a bit of ambiguity was part of the deal.
I don’t know how my family will evolve over the next 5 or 10 years or how my kids will feel as they grow up. But I know they’ll always be loved. If there’s one thing I can do, it’s to make sure they know that.
… and also, to do my best to educate everyone else. As long as anyone out there thinks we’re “creepy” or a “freak show”, I need to keep sharing our story. (Say what you will, but we’re not inbred. Susie isn’t even my sister-in-law, let alone my sister. Drew and I aren’t legally married. Thanks, Prop 8.)
My family may not seem normal to everyone else, but it’s our normal, and if it wasn’t how we were, we wouldn’t be us. I never have a moment of regret for how our kids came into the world. I’m grateful for it every day. We’re not perfect, and at times things still get a little messy, but we’re a family.
I guess, in the end, a post-Modern one.
Photo courtesy of Jerry Mahoney
I was so glad to find your site! With a super late comment, i watched this episode in reruns just now. I’m hetero, but honestly, I ended up at your site, because I thought THEY were so being weird and overreactive. I idly googled a few terms to see if others found their reactions bizarre. Cam’s sperm with Claire’s eggs is not creepy at all in my book! And it gives families like yours (which would be a real family even without a biological bond) a biological connection. (And perhaps, given how screwed up the courts seem to be about… Read more »
Family isn’t a biological term. Keep rocking, dude.
Confession: I thought that episode was funny at the time, but now I see my ignorance. After reading this, I’m going to talk to my gay roommate (who I watched it with) and make sure he knows that, whatever choices he should make in the future, I’ve got his back.
Thanks for the enlightenment.
I take it that you and your partner are gay. Are you normal? Sure, you are. That should answer whatever question you may have had concerning your family. I know a straight couple. The woman couldn’t have children and had adopted a boy and girl. Her first husband died and when her children grew up, she found another man to share her life with. He didn’t have any children and wanted children of his own. He donated his sperm and his sister in law was artificially inseminated so his wife could have a biological link to the child as well.… Read more »
Jerry – Your family is beautiful and a shining example of just how incorrect that plot line of Modern Family was.
I’m happy that you get to enjoy the experience of being parents. I have never been one to believe that biology MADE you a parent. I know plenty of biological parents who are not involved in their childrens life as a parent and don’t expect to be regarded as the parent and really (IMO) have no argument for claiming to be the parent. Moms & dads are the ones who raise the children. On that note, I love Modern Family and I had mixed feelings about that episode. I agreed that it would creepy if it had been the brother… Read more »
I agreed that it would creepy if it had been the brother and sister sharing DNA to make a baby, considering that they would be intentionally exposing the unborn child to unnecessary risk of genetic abnormalities. I can’t swear to perfect memory of the Modern Family episode, but if it mirrored the situation described in the original post, and in similar arrangements that I’ve heard of, opposite sex siblings who donate so their sibling can conceive don’t combine their respective gametes. They donate either sperm or egg so that their sibling’s partner can be combined to conceive a child. Thus,… Read more »
I mangled this part: “They donate either sperm or egg so that their sibling’s partner can be combined to conceive a child”
I meant “sibling’s partner’s gametes”. To use the Modern Family example, the arrangement would be Claire’s eggs being fertilized by Cam’s sperm in vitro, then carried by Claire who would be both egg donor and surrogate. Claire’s brother (Mitchell) would still be biologically related to his and Cam’s child, and while it’s not normal in the “typical” sense of the word, there would be nothing inbred or incestuous about it.
Yes, I think you got it. I was saying I think it is fine if its the unrelated gay parent whose sperm/egg is combined with the sister/brother(‘s) dna to make the baby. On the Modern Family episode, they discussed it as mixing the two semen samples together so that no one would know which parent was the father. (In the example given on MF, the other gay couple was of mixed race and it was easy to see which parent was the father.)
I’d have to see the episode again, but my recollection was that the mixing semen together thing was only something they referred to that other gay couple doing with an unrelated egg donor, not what the plan would be for themselves if Claire was involved. Even if it was, though, that would just add to the disappointment of yet another tv show misrepresenting how donation and surrogacy actually work.
Honestly, the whole time I watched that episode, I thought they were going to have another reversal: look at the idea and say, oh yeah, that IS a good one! I was confused when they ended still deciding not too. And I think what your sister did for your family is beautiful. Honestly, lots of women do it for their sisters I think, and I don’t see how the fact that she did it for her brother instead changes anything. A good friend of mine has always been an adamant “no children” girl, but recently learned her oldest sister may… Read more »
As a father to twin girls who were conceived with donor gametes, that episode rubbed me wrong, too. I didn’t mind that they ended up rejecting the idea, but they did so for stereotypical “creepy” reasons that bear little or no resemblance to what people actually in that situation go through. It was reminiscent of how in TV and movies, sperm donor plot lines always revolve around the hilarity of how that obviously means the donor would have sex with the would-be mother, and how he’d be like a second father, etc. No single show does huge damage, but collectively,… Read more »
It’s really disappointing that Modern Family told that story in the way that they did. I would have expected a bit more from them. It’s a shame that all families aren’t accepted equally in our society.
On the other hand, thanks for sharing your story and I wish you all the best. 🙂
Oh HECK yeah. My family and person are normal-to-me, and the subject of talk shows to a lot of other people. The fear that I am way beyond the pale, too far from center, comes around sometimes. I have had to think a lot about the value of the edges, and that each dot on some giant mythical scatter chart is one of us, a person, even the most remarkable, as much as the ordinary.