Andrew Solomon: My Post-Nuclear Family

Summary

Summary of "Andrew Solomon: My Post-Nuclear Family" – The Moth Podcast

Introduction

In the episode titled "Andrew Solomon: My Post-Nuclear Family," featured on The Moth podcast and released on May 13, 2014, Andrew Solomon shares his deeply personal journey of self-discovery, acceptance, and the unconventional path he took to build his family. This story, told live in New York in 2012 under the theme "Stories of Coming Home," delves into themes of identity, love, societal expectations, and the redefinition of what it means to be a family.

Early Life and Internal Conflict

Andrew Solomon begins by reflecting on his mother's profound belief in the unparalleled love parents have for their children. She often emphasized, "the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world and people who don't have children never get to know what it's like" ([02:44]).

Growing up, Solomon was influenced by negative societal perceptions of homosexuality. He cites a Time magazine article that derogatorily described homosexuality as "nothing but a pathetic second-rate substitute for life, a pitiable flight from existence" ([02:44]). This external stigma intensified his internal struggle as he began to question his own sexuality while desiring to have children. He recounts the anxiety this caused, stating, "I think I'm gay, but I want to have children" ([02:44]).

Journey to Acceptance

In an attempt to reconcile his desires with societal expectations, Solomon sought out sexual surrogacy therapy. He describes this period as "a very peculiar experience" ([02:44]), highlighting the unconventional nature of the therapists he encountered. Despite his efforts to change, Solomon ultimately embraced his true self, admitting, "I really was gay" ([02:44]).

Meeting John marked a significant turning point in Solomon’s life. John revealed that he had been a sperm donor for lesbian friends, introducing children into Solomon's life indirectly. Solomon reflects on this complex web of relationships, pondering, "Who are we all to one another?" ([02:44]).

Building the Family

Solomon's relationship with John deepened, leading to their marriage and the birth of their daughter, Blaine. He narrates the emotional moment of holding his daughter for the first time: "I was the first person to hold her. I had such a disorienting feeling of suddenly being changed" ([02:44]). This transformative experience solidified his identity as a father, intertwining his personal and familial loves.

Desiring to expand their family, Solomon and John navigated the challenges of surrogacy and donor arrangements. Solomon shares the collaborative relationships they formed with Tammy and Laura, individuals who had previously received children through John’s sperm donation. Through these connections, the couple welcomed a son, George, into their lives, fostering a blended family across three states ([02:44]).

Challenges and Societal Reactions

Despite their happiness, Solomon and John faced societal opposition. Solomon recounts receiving a harsh response from a cousin who stated, "your lifestyle is against our Christian values. We wish to have no further contact" ([02:44]). This rejection echoed the prejudices he faced in his youth, highlighting the persistent challenges of societal acceptance.

Undeterred, Solomon emphasizes the importance of diverse expressions of love and family. He philosophizes, "there's a need for a diversity of love to sustain the ecosphere of kindness. And that anyone who rejected any bit of the love in the world was acting in a foolish way and from a position of folly" ([02:44]). This perspective underscores his belief in the intrinsic value of all forms of love and family structures.

Philosophical Insights

A poignant moment in Solomon’s narrative occurs when he experiences a near-accident with his daughter Blaine. Falling down stairs with George, he reflects, "the love you have for your children is like no other feeling ... until you have children, you'll never know" ([02:44]). This incident crystallizes his understanding of parental love as both unique and universal, transcending societal labels and expectations.

Conclusion

Andrew Solomon’s story on The Moth encapsulates a heartfelt exploration of identity, love, and the evolving definition of family. Through his candid recounting of personal struggles and triumphs, Solomon invites listeners to reconsider traditional notions of family and embrace the rich diversity of love that defines human connections. His journey from internal conflict to the creation of a "post-nuclear family" serves as an inspiring testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the boundless forms that love can take.

Notable Quotes

• "The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world and people who don't have children never get to know what it's like." – Andrew Solomon ([02:44])
• "I'm gay and I'm not going to have children, and I am who I am, and I want you to stop saying that." – Andrew Solomon ([02:44])
• "We're going to go back down the steps now, go very carefully." – Andrew Solomon ([02:44])
• "There's a need for a diversity of love to sustain the ecosphere of kindness." – Andrew Solomon ([02:44])

Final Thoughts

Andrew Solomon’s narrative is a profound exploration of personal identity intertwined with societal expectations. By sharing his story, Solomon not only illuminates his own path to creating a loving, non-traditional family but also advocates for broader acceptance and understanding of diverse family structures. His reflections offer valuable insights into the complexities of love, identity, and the essence of what it means to come home.

Transcript

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[Dan Kennedy]

Will go far welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. The story you're about to hear is by Andrew Solomon, one of our favorite storytellers here at the Moth, and this story was told live in New York in 2012. The theme of the night was Stories of coming Home.

[Andrew Solomon]

When I was a small child, my mother used to sometimes say, the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world and people who don't have children never get to know what it's like. And I took it as the greatest compliment that she so loved my brother and me and so loved being our mother, and that she thought so highly of that emotional experience. At the time that I was growing up, there was an article in Time magazine about homosexuality which said, it is nothing but a pathetic second rate substitute for life, a pitiable flight from existence, and deserves no glorification as anything other than a pernicious sickness. Reading that and living in that world, I was sad as I began to think that I might be gay. And when I was a teenager, my mother would say, the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and people who don't have children never get to know it. And it made me intensely anxious. I thought, I think I'm gay, but I want to have children, but I think I'm gay, but I want to have children. And I felt myself banging back and forth. And at some point I decided that children were the primary thing and that I was going to change. And I read an ad in the back of New York magazine for sexual surrogacy therapy, and I went for a kind of training to change myself into somebody else. It was a very peculiar experience. It involved women who were not exactly prostitutes, but who were also not exactly anything else. My particular favorite was a buxom, blonde southern woman who eventually admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliac and had taken this job after she got in trouble down at the morgue. When I was in my early 20s, I decided that this had not all gone as planned and that I really was gay. And I told people that I was. And my mother said, the love you have for your children is unlike any other emotion in the world. And if you don't have children, you'll never know. And having first been touched and then been made anxious, I was now made angry by this statement. And I said, I'm gay and I'm not going to have children, and I am who I am, and I want you to stop saying that. Many Years afterwards, in 2001, I met John, who is the love of my life, and he told me shortly after we met that he actually had been the sperm donor for some lesbian friends. And I said, you have children? And he said, no, they have children, and I was the donor for them. A few weeks later, we were out at the Minnesota State Fair and we ran into Tammy and Laura and their toddler Oliver. And I looked at them with fascination and I thought, how amazing that Tammy and Laura were gay and they had children and that John was gay and in some sense at least had a child. Oliver had been told that he should call John Donor dad, but having a rough time pronouncing that, he came up with Donut Dad. So I looked at that and I thought, there's Donut dad, there's me. Who are we all to one another? A year later, John told me that Tammy and Laura had asked him to be a donor again, and they produced Lucy. So now there were two of these children, and we knew them a little bit and saw them from time to time and were warmly disposed toward them. And John said he'd promised to be in their lives when they were grown up if they particularly wanted him to be. The idea of having children in some unusual arrangement was not entirely novel to me. I had, some years earlier, been at a dinner with my closest friend from college who lived at the other end of the country, and she had recently separated from her husband. And when I asked whether she had any regrets, she said, only about not being a mother. And I said, and meant it, you'd be the best mother in the world, and if you ever decided that you wanted to have a child, I'd be so honored to be the father. I said that assuming since she was beautiful and beloved and had lines of men eager to meet her and be with her, I assumed that it was just a statement in passing. But on my 40th birthday, she appeared in New York for a surprise party that John and my father and stepmother had organized. And we went out to dinner the next day and realized that we really did want to follow through with this plan. I wasn't ready to tell John right away. And then when I did tell him, he was angry about it. And I said, john, how can you be angry at me? You have Oliver and Lucy, and now there'll be this other arrangement. And he said, I was a donor for Oliver and Lucy, and you're setting out to have a child of whom you will be the acknowledged father and who will have your last name. And we struggled with it for quite a while. And then John, whose kindness usually carries the day, said, if this is what you really need to do, then go ahead and do it. And soon thereafter, he asked me to marry him. I had never been a big fan of gay marriage. I thought everyone should have the right, but it didn't particularly preoccupy me. But after he proposed, we began planning a wedding, and I thought he had gotten along with what I wanted to do, and I would go along with what he wanted to do. And we ended up getting married in the English countryside, and we had a beautiful wedding. And I found that though our commitment had seemed to me to be permanent and declared and established before that, that the experience of having all of these hundreds of friends gathered together, witnessing our love, shorted up and strengthened it and gave it a new depth and gave it a new resonance that I had never imagined or anticipated. And I found the fact that we were celebrating that love in a ceremony that echoed, in some sense, the one my parents had had and the ones my grandparents had had and. And the ones that presumably went back generation upon generation, exalted the feeling between us. And it was very joyful. Blaine was there three months pregnant with our child, and John ventured that we had had the first gay shotgun wedding. So six months later, our daughter, little Blaine, was born. And I was in the room when she was delivered, and I was the first person to hold her. And I had such a disorienting feeling of suddenly being changed. I thought, I'm a father now. I'm a father. It was as though someone had told me that I was still myself and also a shooting star. And I held her. And I then had to go down into the basement of the hospital to sign the certificate for her birth, where I was advised to get a paternity test before I signed for any love child. And I said, you have no idea the planning that was behind this. And John held her. And we all, I think, were enraptured, as one is, by the birth of children, because it's so much stranger than even intergalactic travel, that someone wasn't there, and now, all of a sudden, they are. But when John and I got back to New York, I kept feeling, in a way, as though I was being highly supportive of something Blaine had done rather than as though it was something I had done. And yet I found myself thinking of this child all the time. John fell in love with Blaney. He fell in love with Blaine. We were all in love with one another. We were trying to understand how everything fit together. And sometime later, I said to John, don't you think it would be nice for us to have a child, also a sibling for Blaney, who she might love to have in her life and who might grow up in our house all the time? John did not think that would be lovely. And so we had a year in which I kept saying how wonderful it would be and acting as the cheerleader for the cause and through that year, John kept resisting and being unsure. And then finally my birthday rolled around again, and he said, you present is upstairs. And we went upstairs, and there was an antique cradle tied up with a bow. And he said, if it's a boy, can we name him George, after my grandpa? We then had to figure out how we were going to produce such a child. So we found an egg donor. And we were in the process of trying to find a surrogate, and we got together with Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy one night, and Laura said to John, you gave us our children, and I'll never be able to thank you enough for that, but I could show you how much you mean to us by being your surrogate. And so she offered to carry our child. And she got pregnant on the second IVF protocol. And nine months after that, George was born, and we held him in our arms. We called Blaine and Blaney and everyone else in our circle, and we held him and we wondered at him. And then we came home and we sent out birth announcements. And the birth announcement included a picture of John and me holding George. And many friends said, I loved that picture. I hung it on my refrigerator. But one of John's cousins wrote back and said, your lifestyle is against our Christian values. We wish to have no further contact. And I thought that world, the Time magazine world of my childhood, it was still there and it was still going strong, and it made me very sad. But in the meanwhile, we had spent a lot of time with Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy through that whole process. And we had all fallen in love, I think, again, anew more deeply with one another. And when Oliver and Lucy learned that little Blaine called us Daddy and Papa John, they said they'd like to call us Daddy and Papa, too. And I suddenly found that in contemplating two children, we seemed to have four in the period that followed that I kept thinking about the angry cousin and what he'd said. And I thought, it's not really a question of our kind of love being as good as or better than or less good than anyone else's love. It's simply another kind of love that we found as five parents of four children in three states. And I thought that just as species diversity is essential to keep the planet in place, so there's a need for a diversity of love to sustain the ecosphere of kindness. And that anyone who rejected any bit of the love in the world was acting in a foolish way and from a position of folly. About six months ago, we had gone to a park and I had climbed up on a stand with George, from which you could view some animals below, and I held his hand and I said, we're going to go back down the steps now, go very carefully. And I took one step and I slipped and I fell all the way down the flight of stairs, pulling him along behind me. And I remember when it happened thinking that I really didn't care whether I had broken my arm or my leg, as long as I hadn't injured my child. It turned out that I hadn't. And when I felt it, I suddenly thought, the love you have for your children is like no other feeling, and until you have children, you'll never know. And I thought how even in the periods when my mother sang that made me anxious or made me angry that it was her saying it so persistently that had caused me to pursue a family even under such complicated and difficult and elaborate circumstances, and that had led me finally to the greatest joys of my life. Thank you.

[Dan Kennedy]

Andrew Solomon is a writer and lecturer on psychology, politics and the arts. He won the National Book Award for the Noonday Demon, An Atlas of Depression and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Far from the Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. His books are published in 24 languages.

[Citrus Lane Advertiser]

This podcast is brought to you by Citruslane.com, the award winning service that helps parents discover the best products for their children. Each month you'll receive a box filled with four or five products, toys, books, care products and goodies, each hand picked based on your child's age, stage and preferences. To try Citrus Lane today and get 50% off your first month, visit citruslane.com.

[Dan Kennedy]

Themoth Hey, a reminder for our listeners in Michigan, the Moth main stage is coming to East Lansing, Michigan. That's going to be Wednesday, May 28th. For tickets and for a list of all of our tour stops that are coming up, just visit themoth.org Our podcast.

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Host, Dan Kennedy is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit. Available now.

[Dan Kennedy]

Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast Audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by Pete Prx, the Public Radio Exchange helping make Public Radio more [e-mail].