Poet, novelist, and biographer Brad Gooch turns his pen towards his own family in this insightful memoir. Gooch, who lost his first partner to AIDS and came to parenthood in his sixties, had two boys with his husband Paul, but this is more than just a story of family creation. Instead, it looks more broadly at parenting and its impact on his relationships with Paul, each of their sons, and his own parents, offering a textured picture of family.
Gooch actually begins the story long before becoming a parent, first telling us about starting a relationship with Paul and about his evolving relationship with his own parents. Becoming parents themselves was not immediately on the two men’s agenda. “We came to be married and to have kids more at the speed of tortoises than hares,” Gooch writes. “Much of the drama was in the slow logic of figuring out how and why.”
They ultimately did so, and became parents in 2015 and 2018, with the help of two different surrogates and an egg donor. Gooch shares about the process each time, but puts his emphasis on what happened after the boys arrived and he and Paul became Daddy and Papa. He finds meaning in the everyday moments of family life, choosing his examples with care to create a compelling narrative that both shines a light on his specific family and speaks to universals of parenthood. Part of the story, too, takes us through his experience parenting two young children in New York City during the COVID pandemic; having lived through the AIDS crisis, he writes, “I was old enough now to think of apocalypse in the plural.”
He also looks at how his family handled challenges specific to LGBTQ parents, such as needing to explain our family structure and identities to both strangers and our children themselves; considering whether and how to connect with surrogates, donors, and donor siblings; and finding other families like ours. And the book weaves in a surprising discovery (which I won’t spoil) about his own origins, offering more food for thought on the meanings of family and connection.
Many parenting narratives show how children change; this one, more than many, shows how parenting changes parents, too, forcing us to acknowledge fears, face obstacles, embrace the unexpected, and discover new parts of ourselves. It’s beautifully written and highly recommended.
