02: Picture Perfect: A single dad’s journey to fatherhood

Tony Lilios always imagined himself as a father. When he was younger, the picture he had in head included a wife, a few kids, and a white picket fence. Then he came out as gay and had to totally re-think his family image. It took him almost 20 years, but finally Tony got a family that brings him so much love. And he couldn’t have done it without the help of two very special women.

Episode transcript is below. Transcripts may not appear in their final form.

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Julia Winston: In the year that I've been producing this podcast, and since I created the word refamulating, I've been seeing it everywhere! Here are some real examples: 

I celebrated a friend who had a baby on her own because she hadn’t met a partner to do it with. She’s so courageous. She’s refamulating!

When a group of friends bought a plot of land to build a compound for family and friends, I thought holy shit - they’re living the dream! 

A colleague told me about how her father acknowledged his lifetime of alcoholism and expressed a desire to heal old wounds. As I thought about how much was changing in her family dynamic, I thought “wow, that’s also refamulating.” 

My friend’s transgender spouse was legally recognized as their baby’s parent, yay!, but part of me was pissed that they had to go through that process in the first place. But hey, that’s refamulating. 

Refamulating is a lot of things. When you’re breaking new ground, it stretches you, which is uncomfortable, but it can also be really exciting. Often, it’s all happening at the same time. Change can be intense, man! 

I’ve been feeling that through the process of becoming a fairy godmother. And now, there’s another thing. Recently I started dating a woman - which is kinda new for me - and I realized that for the first time in my life I’m not entering a relationship with some pre-written story about where it’s supposed to go. This is my latest version of refamulating. 

Ditching expectations is often the first step in refamulating. This was definitely true for Tony Lillios. For a lot of his life, he had a crystal clear image of how his future would unfold.  

Tony: If I was a painter, I could paint this painting. Like I feel like I have a specific white picket fence and house In my mind it must be like eight is enough or something like that where I got this image or something. there was definitely a spouse, a woman, uh, a wife. But yeah, I wanted a lot of kids. Um, I enjoyed being in a larger family and so I imagined having four kids of my own. Lliving somewhere, just like recreating what I knew. 

Julia Winston: What Tony knew, was a mom, a dad, a gaggle of kids, and a lot of love. And most of that picture was possible for Tony- except one part. The wife. 

Tony: When I first  came to terms with being gay,  I felt like my life just exploded. Like it was like a tornado, a hurricane, tornado came through and obliterated my life. Like all the pieces of papers of my lives, all the photo albums were just strewn up on the lawn and just destroyed. 

Julia Winston: I’m Julia Winston and this is refamulating, a podcast that gets curious about different ways to make a family. 

In this episode, we're going to tell the story of Tony and how he created a different picture, one that doesn't include a white picket fence or a wife, but is absolutely perfect for him.   

Tony: I grew up in suburban Connecticut and I always like to qualify, not like suburban Connecticut, like suburban New York City, Connecticut, but like middle of the state. Just, you know, plain old, middle class, uh, America. I was the youngest of four kids,  uh, with immigrant parents. One from Greece, one from Brazil.. I was the accident, I was an oops child, a five year gap to my siblings. Born and raised in the same house my whole childhood. Um, and very kind of average, wonderfully average.

Julia Winston: In his early 20s, Tony started to see his white picket fence picture come into focus when he fell in love with a woman named Mimi. He’d known her since high school and after college they both ended up in San Francisco. That's when he started courting her. He would send her gifts and poems…but she didn’t know who they were from.

Tony: That culminated into us a blind meeting at the, the Carnelian Room at the top of the Bank of America building.  where I was sitting there when I back to the room and in comes Mimi. So I needed some big transition from like friends to something more. Um, and she, you know, walks in and it's this huge, like, Oh my God, it's you, Tony. I can't believe it. I thought it was this person and that person. And Oh my gosh, I'm so glad it wasn't that guy because all my, it just kept going on and on. And then  finally I was like. Are you happy it's me?  There's this kind of this like magic moment. Oh my god. Yes um, and so Mimi and I dated for five years, um, she was um, really We were just so connected.

And  at some point there, there is, um,  a part of me that discovered I had an attraction to men.  which kind of blindsided me because  I never thought of myself as gay. Um, when I was a kid, gay was Liberace or Elton John. And, um, I don't feel like what I see kind of projected at me. But then I had this other thing of where I was attracted to men. Now as a 20 something, I'm like, oh, that means gay. I think I know what that means, or bi. And so I started to explore that. 

Julia Winston: At first, the way he explored was online. This was in the 90s, and American Online, otherwise known as AOL was brand new. 

One of the features of AOL was chatrooms - where me and my teenage friends were pretending to be porn stars while in real life were actually eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches our moms had cut the crusts off of.

But Tony, because he was an adult, was participating in chat rooms as himself.

Tony: And there were all these rooms for M4M San Francisco, M4M LA, M4M this. I was like, member to member? Like, what is this? And I would drop into these rooms, and I was like, oh my gosh!  These are gay people, like, chatting up in these rooms, like, what?  This is so crazy, like, what?

Julia: gay people! 

Tony: They're gay people, and they're organized, and I found myself,  Enraptured, engaged, deep in the wormhole of these conversations with these people. And, but I'm not gay, I'm just like, captivated. Um, and I ended up in, with this one person, Norman, having months long conversations. Hours a day, you know, hundred dollars, hundreds of dollars a month of bills because of these online chats. Um, that eventually led to You know what, we should actually just meet up, because I think there's nothing here, it's no big deal, this is just some weird obsession, let's just like, meet, realize there's nothing here for me, like, I'm, I'm not gay, and we can just put this one to bed and move on. 

We meet up,  and fireworks explode, and quite the opposite happens, and when you meet someone like that from the inside out, like, we were, there was, like, the physical attraction was built on this emotional, kind of intellectual, rich depth, inside out kind of connection that, you know, he could have been anybody and of course fireworks would have happened. 

Julia: So fireworks are exploding with Norman, but what does this mean for Mimi?

Tony: it led to a couple months of me trying to figure out how to navigate this or what to do and eventually  came out to Mimi, my girlfriend. And.  In all of it's mess and confusion and uncertainty of what it meant of  how to step forward. And she was willing and able to walk with me for months at first.

It was hard to be authentic to what I was discovering and to be in a relationship with her. It just felt like I was just crushing her. And she was willing to stand there for me, for herself, but eventually it became a, I need space to just  get messy and figure this out on my own and to walk my path.  And, um,  and I love you to pieces and I need to do this for myself.  It was heartbreaking. 

You know that phrase when you feel like your heart's getting ripped out?  Um,  not until that moment did I ever know what that really felt like. Like it literally felt like  I was just, my heart, I loved her so much. And to just have that like, but it can't be right now and just to rip it out. I just, I could feel the pain in my chest of how hard, um,  This decision was for me, and how necessary it was at the same time. We stayed apart for, didn't communicate for maybe a year or maybe even two years before we could kind of come back together and, you know, find a new way to kind of engage.

That led to me going on a real long, deep journey. Heart  blasting open, mind blasting open, journey of,  you know, literally the white picket fence view was just kind of obliterated and Wizard of Oz style, just tornado ripping it apart. And here I am. What am I left with?  The whole future is ripped to shreds. I have no idea what's coming next. Um, and that vision of not only the white picket fence goes away, the wife goes away, the kids go away. There's that, that whole future is just, um, gone  

Julia Winston: Tony and Norman dated for a year. While it was a very important relationship for him, eventually it ran its course. Once he was single again, Tony was figuring out how to date and pursue people as a gay man. 

Tony: I'm in my 30s now dating. But this is still new to me, so I still have kind of a teenager y view of things. Like, it's very kind of, um, shallow. You know, it's very like, ooh, you're fun, and you're attractive, and like, whee! And, but I'm a 30 year old acting like a 17 year old, you know? It's like it's, or a 14 year old, you know? It's just, it, I wasn't sorting for a partner to co parent with at that point.  In my 40s I did start moving out of that phase and like who could I really be with and who could I spend my life with and who might want to have kids. And I found it really challenging. I felt like there was a lot of people that I would meet that would talk a good talk.  Oh, I love kids. I've always wanted kids. And then, meanwhile, you look at their actions, and you're like, that doesn't really seem consistent with, like, what a parent in my mind looks like. And so, I would get judgy about it, of like, you seem like a high risk, like, I don't know what you would be like as a parent, because everything you, not everything you do, but a lot of your behaviors and your habits seem to be not around settling down and home oriented. Um, and so, I started to kind of lose  faith that I could find somebody that was both gay and wanting to settle down and have a family. I thought I was really  not the only one, but it was like slim pickins and  at the rate I'm going, it does not feel like I'm going to find somebody that's going to do this with me.

Julia Winston: The searching and yearning Tony experienced as he got older really hits home for me. Each passing year that I’m single, I get to know myself better and I feel clearer and clearer about who I am and what I want. But as I expand and grow, the pool of possible partners seems to shrink. 

This was Tony’s frustration in dating as well. 

But after a decade of dating and not finding a partner who wanted kids, something started to shift as he watched his friends have kids. 

Tony: Having folks ahead of me, That were starting nontraditional families really moved the needle. Specifically there are two gay men that I know that were single gay men that had Children of their own  and seeing them. And even though we weren't close, just the fact that I had contact with them and I could see them and I could go to dinner once every four or five months like it was like, Oh, this is how this works. That's like a possibility I can see.  

And then also my friend Thursday. That's her name. Thursday was a single mom and adopted a kid and she allowed me to kind of take care of her son, uh, for days on end at times where I developed this. Not only do I want kids, but I can do this. Like, not only is she trusting me with her child, like, I'm actually doing the things, like, I'm, like, being a dad right now, like, I can do this, and those little gifts of responsibility were, man, she's like, thank you for babysitting my child so I can go to work, and I'm like, no, thank you, because you've given me an embodied experience to know, to give me increased confidence that I got this, I can do this too. 

Julia Winston: So he was seeing single parents raising kids on their own, and loving it. And at the same time, he was hearing from married friends that having a partner isn’t always better.

Tony: There were those whisperings of these couples that I just love from the outside. They seem these, these great straight couples. And meanwhile, when you have, you know, conversations over, you know, kitchen, side by side, when with one of them, I can specifically think of one woman who would say, you know,  when my husband's away on business.  It kind of runs pretty nicely here. Like I kind of like the temporary single parent thing where it's just things are a lot smoother. We get to, you know, and there was this like, like I love my husband. Absolutely. Do we love being together? Yes. But there was also this side of, it's actually awesome and different being a single parent when, and I was like, that opened a door for me of, oh, like what if it was like that all the time? And then,   that could actually be pretty great.

Um, and that led me to a realization at some point that there was a possibility that I could actually have kids on my own and that would be enough. So there was a sense of. You know, I'd have to make up, if I didn't have a wife, I had a partner, I was a gay man raising kids in a partnership, okay, that's not as great, but, uh, you know, we can compensate and make it happen.  There was a shift at some point, and I don't even, can't even put the pieces exactly together, but there was a sense of. Oh my gosh, as long as there's love, I have so much love to give. I have so much to provide. I have so much like wanting to bring to the world in, in, in terms of starting a family. Um, I was like, I can do this on my own. Like I really saw this future of this is totally different, way off road now and.  , this is different and awesome, like this will be great.

Julia Winston: When we come back, Tony tries to have a baby. 

Julia Winston: When Tony was 41, he was finally ready to be a dad. For him, the first step was restructuring his life a little bit, to make space for kids.

Tony: I moved to Lake Tahoe on my own saying I'm no longer trying to meet anybody, so let me get myself outta San Francisco where dating and shiny things are everywhere. I'm doing this on my own, let me prioritize that.  move up into the mountains on my own, get a house with extra bedrooms so that I'm building and manifesting this future. So, and, and it started to feel natural.

So at first, I was thinking of adoption, um, for various reasons.  One of the reasons that took me out of adoption is that the narrative I was getting was that in terms of pecking order, single gay dad is not on the top of the pile.  And so I was like, wow, this is gonna be a challenge. And um, you know, I just had the story of, oh my gosh, this is gonna just take years and years and years. 

Thankfully, and just how pieces fell into place, um,  uh, professionally, uh, came into some money. We sold a portion of our company. I had more money than I had had in the past. And the opportunity to, to pursue surrogacy was available.

Julia Winston: And what do you need to have a baby via egg donation and surrogacy? A lot of money. The cost ranges depending on the surrogate and their location, plus the cost of drugs, clinic visits, hospital stays, travel expenses and agency and legal fees. Sometimes intended parents even pay for the surrogate’s groceries. 

Most people end up spending between 100 and 175 thousand dollars for one pregnancy.

Once he knew he could afford it, Tony set out to find the right egg donor and surrogate.

Tony: I found an agency to have to find an egg donor and an agency to find a surrogate. So those are two separate agencies.  Um, and with the egg donor, it was a lot about  Finding someone, and I was coached to this for some reason, and I probably still like that I was coached this way, is to find someone who kind of looks like you. You know, if they're, if they look really different, you're going to constantly be asked questions about your wife, of why is her, what's her ethnicity, and why is she, you know, why is your kid a mixture of things.

So the more that the egg donor looks like you, the less questions there are going to be, and it just makes it easier.  Seemed reasonable to me. So, um, so there was someone, I was looking for someone like me and it was like, like online dating, like swiping. You're literally looking at a picture book with pictures and like basic stats. 

Julia: Truly, just like Tinder.

Tony: I remember sending something to my sister like,  Oh my gosh, it's so weird that the surrogates have this weird selection bias that they're all kind of short. They're all like five, four or five, five.  My sister was like, Dude, that's the average height of women, just for the record. I had no idea! I was like, they're all really short!  Um, and then it came down to meeting a few and finding chemistry. And meanwhile, I'm in conversations with another agency to find a surrogate.

Julia: And they found him one.

Tony: I remember as I drove up to the restaurant to meet her, I thought, man, if this at all feels transactional, I'm out of here. If this feels extractive, like here's my money, I want you to do this for me. Like, like any kind of back alley kind of feeling to this, I'm like, dude, this is not, I'm not into it. And I got quite the opposite connection with her. She's a mom of her own son. She  Was like, I love giving life and bringing  the experience of bringing my son in the world was amazing. And she's like, you know, those people on TV that you have way too many kids and you know, they really can't support all those kids. And you're like, what are you doing? She's like, I get that. Like I have that feeling, but I have this responsibility filter on of like, don't do that because you can't support them. So, um, and so she, When she came into being of like, oh, there's a thing called surrogacy where you can help others start their family. She was like, Whoa, sign me up. I could do this. 

Julia Winston: Tony leaves that lunch knowing this is the woman who will be his surrogate. 

So now he has an egg donor and a surrogate, and it’s time to start the IVF process. Tony has the easiest job. He gives a sample, and he’s done. But the women had a much more intense process. 

Tony: The egg donor in the surrogates have to take repeated drugs, injectable drugs, over a several week period of time to get them on cycle with each other. So they're trying to get the two of them on cycle so they are ovulating at the right time. And they're painful injections. They're self administered day after day for weeks to get into it. This is a non trivial thing.  Um, and then when the doctor deems like the hormone levels are all right and everyone's ready,  the egg donor goes into the office and they do a collection of, of the eggs and she was not under, she was kind of given some drugs to be, um, to reduce the pain a little bit, but it was, it's a painful and uncomfortable experience for her.

They extract the eggs, they fertilize the eggs and they put them and in a petri dish, essentially for days watching how they grow.  And as they grow, the IVF clinic decides this one looks good. This one growing in a way that I just qualitatively think is a good egg. And they pick that, the surrogate will come in,  they implant, um, the egg.  into, uh, the surrogate at that moment. And I'm sitting by her side and that's like,  in the world of IVF, that's like, Oh my God,  like she's pregnant.  Um, and so it was an emotional moment and it's like, there it is. The egg goes in, it comes in the lining, gets sucked in and And for the next,  I think, 10 days, you're kind of holding your breath, um, to see how it's all going to go with hormone levels and tests and see if it's being rejected or accepted. 

The first ones didn't take, you know, and when it doesn't take, you start all over again, and here we go, um, from scratch. Uh, and this was This happened several times. I'm not going to walk you through all the gory details, but there were multiple cycles involved.

I thought it was going to be, um, linear, like very straightforward. You find an agency and you pay some money and make it all happen and it all kind of unfolds  according to plan, and it can often be very bumpy. 

Julia Winston: Like many people who do IVF, it doesn't happen the first time. This was the case for me and my egg daddies too. We only had three embryos, and the first two didn’t result in a viable pregnancy. Thankfully the third one stuck, but it took us a full year to get there. 

Tony’s process took two years, but finally his surrogate gets pregnant. And Tony is in full on supportive partner mode:

Tony: I  go to all the pregnancy, all the OB appointments with her.  They would keep forgetting like, oh, yeah, you're not married. Are you and yeah, we're not married and you know. Sometimes we were kind of a little sheepish about her being a surrogate, uh, that wasn't kind of like waved on a flag. Um,  I can't remember exactly how we fully navigated that, but it was, it was somewhat elusive. And I always kind of left her to decide how she wanted to present  the situation, because I was in her town where this was happening. So, it was her world to kind of, her cards to play.  very supportive. Her parents are very supportive of this process.

Her son was like right in there with it. It was just beautiful. And she just got, you know, more and more pregnant. 

Julia: Were you ever, um, worried or feel concerned that there would be some level of attachment between the donor or the surrogate and the, the kids that you would have to deal with later?

Tony: I was concerned  mostly on the surrogate side thinking, she's been with this child for nine months, that there would be a real heart attachment. I, I was concerned on that point. And, you know, you can say stories all day long, but you've never done this before. So how do you know? You know, I, it's hard to trust her, what she says, you know? And so there is a leap of faith. Um, she was clear at some point in the process where she said, had it been her  own egg, it absolutely she would feel attached, but because it was someone else's egg, she felt very clear the whole time that this is for the sake of another. This isn't my child. This is something I'm doing for the sake, for someone else. So that never got mixed with her is the way she explained it to me.  

Julia: that's, uh, that resonates actually. I, as an egg donor who's not carry.  . I don't feel concerned about getting attached because I'm not growing a baby in my body. Yeah. But if I was, if I was, I, I don't, I would, I would say no if I was asked to carry a child, because I do think that that would be a different experience. Mm-hmm. , so I understand what she meant by that. Yeah. 

Tony: Early on before this ever happened. I had been asked to be a sperm donor for various women, and I did say no because I was afraid of attachment. And now the answer is, um, a wholehearted yes if I were to be asked again.  

Julia Winston: As the due date of his first child approached, Tony moved to the surrogate's town. For three weeks he and a friend posted up at a hotel, waiting for the baby to come and brainstorming names. Finally, the surrogate was induced. 

Tony: I was there in the room for the delivery,  um, mom, her mom was in the room  and  she was just such a trooper, such a champ. You see, um, women giving birth as a man, uh, in movies all the time and it's so theatrical  and  To be living, this is, this is the real deal. This is, um,  her really going through the pain and bringing this child into the world and  it was so rich with emotion and passion and, um, and out  came my child and then the, he, the doctor picks up  my child backwards and  Both of us were convinced that she was going to be a girl, but when he held up my child backwards, you could see these two kind of massive ball sacks hanging down. And we're like, Oh, I can't believe it. It's a boy. I, we totally had it wrong. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And he turns her around and it turns out it's just her labia were just so swollen it looked like testicles from behind. We're like, it is a girl. Ah, there's like,  you're killing us. 

Julia: Okay, here’s where I insert a very heartfelt apology to Tony’s daughter. I love this story, AND I would hate it if my own dad was telling it. But anyway, it’s a girl! And tony is like…

Tony: oh my gosh,  get over here. Cut the umbilical cord.  Cut the umbilical cord and, and just  took my shirt off and just had my daughter just laying on my chest and just that skin to skin, skin to skin connection was just,  you know, and they were like, Oh, let us clean her up. And I'm like, are you kidding me? You can't take this child off my chest  now. I'm like, I'm just like,  you can just feel this like attachment, just this like her getting folded into my chest. It was just an amazing  connection that was just like, oh,  it was just, I can still feel what that felt like  to have her laying there.

And I remember just turning my head looking at the surrogate, just repeatedly just going Thank you.  Thank you.  It was, um, it was  unbelievable, uh, to be in that space to like, oh my God, like this actually is happening. I, I was.  Overwhelmed. Um,  and uh,  it was beautiful. That moment lasted.  It felt like forever. both of us were just  in tears that like,  my gosh, we like got here. Like, I can't believe in all the twists and turns were so many reasons to punch out and give up.  We arrived at this point.

Julia Winston: Tony’s dream has finally come true, he’s a father.

He hangs out at the hospital for a few days, learning how to care for a newborn, and then he heads back to Lake Tahoe with a new child in tow. 

Tony: So I was totally immersed in my own world of like, oh, new dad and all these pieces and poop and food and formula and this and that. So she pumped a little bit. So we have that. But, oh no,  the surrogate's milk is out now. So  when is she going to get more milk to me, and we have freezers and the whole system lined up, and I check in with her and she, no response, and eventually I get in contact with her mom, and her mom tells me the story that she's back in the hospital, um, she's like on IV antibiotics, and she bled so much and got an infection from the pregnancy, that um, she's got a blood infection called sepsis. 

Julia: Maternal sepsis is rare, but it’s also the second leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths. So Tony’s surrogate was suddenly facing a potentially fatal complication.

Tony: And it's touch and go. I'm like,  uh, I can't even like wrestle how to deal with this. Like it's far away. I'm in this like new dad, emotion, wrestle, love  everything, like love all the emotions. And wow. And this, like, she's like fighting for her life, you know, two hours away from me. Um, and it was, uh, There was really nothing for me to do, um, and so I just kind of just checked in on the regular to see how she was doing and she came out okay. On the other side was weak for a little while. 

And the most amazing thing happened  to three months later, one of our check ins that, you know, we're constantly sending photos and I'm telling her stories of what's going on with my daughter  and she goes, yeah, like, let's talk about number two.  And I'm like, what are you talking about, girl?

She's like, you know, you wanted more than one kid. Um, I'm up for having a second.  I'm like, are you delirious? Like, have you thought about this? Like, do you, like, do you remember what just happened two months ago? And she goes, yeah, I'm really. I'm up for it. It won't happen again. We know what to look for. It'll be better. Um, and I really want to do this.  And I was like, if you're in, I'm in, let's go. And so the started yet another process to have number two.

Julia Winston: There were some embryos leftover from the first pregnancy, so Tony and the surrogate go through another few rounds of implantation. But nothing sticks. After a few cycles, he goes back to the egg donor to see if she would do another retrieval. 

Tony: And she's like, I've been waiting for you to ask me for my eggs. You know, I wanted to give it. I didn't want to be forthright and say, yes, I will. But I've been waiting for you to ask. And I was like, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, so she did another egg retrieval.

Julia Winston: Another round of sticking herself with needles, being hormonal, and a painful extraction. But these new eggs do eventually lead to a pregnancy for the surrogate. This time, a son. With an actual ball sack to prove it. 

Tony: And how did the second pregnancy feel, especially with the knowledge that the surrogate got so sick after the first birth. 

Tony: Yeah, there was more kid gloves going on. I was listening more intently during, um, checkups with the O. B. I was much more like making sure the doctors and Uh, you know, nearby and nurse knows what's going on and it's really paying attention.

I just had a higher degree of, um, attendance and with all that,  when my son was ready to come,  the doctor was not in the hospital, he was at his office like 10 minutes away. My son's popping out all by himself. I'm telling the nurse, like, huh, can you get in here? She's like, yeah, just in a minute. I'm like, no, his head is like about to land on the table. She's like, oh my gosh. And so nurse played doctor. I played nurse. And suddenly we're delivering a child without a doctor. And I'm like, did you not get the memo that we're worried about this pregnancy? Um, and so he just came out like that. He just like got shot out black and blue head, you know, face. It was a very aggressive quick, uh, delivery. 

Julia: This time, there are no health complications. The surrogate is healthy, Tony's son is healthy. And finally, his family is complete.

Julia Winston: Tony's kids are now 8 and 10 years old. They all still live in Lake Tahoe, and have the kind of busy life you'd expect a family with two kids and a working parent to have. 

Julia: Tell me a little more about your your sort of day to day life. Yeah, where do you get support and help and what does the flow look like? 

Tony: Yeah.  Once I had a second child, I got an au pair. An au pair is a  A person from a foreign country that comes on a special visa, a J 1 visa. They come here for a cultural exchange for one to two years. They live with you. They can only do child care related things. And once I got two kids, I was like, man, I cannot do this on my own with a babysitter here and there.

When I travel, finding care on the road, it was just, it was, it was too much.  And then it turned into Wow, here's a female presence in my life that is absent in the house and my daughter gets this like female Guidance and energy and, you know, essentially a surrogate parent and she gets a revolving door of different parents, different styles and, and for every age, I felt like I picked a different au pair.

I'm on my seventh au pair. Now, each one of them had their own style, their own personality, and I invited that into the house, um, and encourage them to bring their own,  you know, whatever it was like, bring that into the house and, uh, yeah. You know, every morning during the week, the school week, they're up often before my au pairs up often before me starting to prep lunches for kids at school and breakfast  They help out with you know, doing the laundry and getting Things organized.

Julia Winston: The au pair is a necessary second set of hands for Tony. But when it comes to parenting and making decisions, he's still on his own. Which most of the time, he likes. 

Tony: There isn't a whole lot of, well, what do you think is best? I don't wanna do this. There isn't a discussion, um, kind of going on with two parents around. It's like, we wanna travel through Europe this summer. Uh, you know, three nights every place somewhere we will backpack through Europe. We're just doing it. My kids just kind of follow along and we just, you know, we're the merry, uh, campers.

The hard parts of being a single parent is  when this, when you're  not really sure. When you find yourself second guessing and approach and you'd love a qualified invested  second opinion. Um, you can get those from other people, but no one knows your child, like  a parent. And so I feel,  um, out on a limb sometimes with some of my decisions. I worry that I'm making  Not a wrong decision, but a less than savory decision about, and it can be as small as like corrective behavior or, you know, school choices or parenting styles. Like I just, there isn't anyone really checking my work  and, and that's fine at times until it's not, and I would get insecure about something and I'm not so sure about something like I worry about the teenage years.

I imagine the teen years can be frothy and confusing. Man, a second pair would be so nice to have in those moments, I'm sure.

I more often think than I think most parents.  You know, I'm one bus hit away from those car kids being alone. Um, so I'm the last man standing and um,  it scares me sometimes. It influences the activities I do,  the way I engage with those activities. It's real. Um, I think about  my  health, my, you know, how I could be gone at any moment and what that scenario looks like way more active than people with two parents. Um, that's top of mind, probably compounded by the fact I'm older.  

An imagined challenge that is kind of funny given, uh, to me by a friend is that, you know, as a child of single parents, they never see the arguments. They never see the discussions. And this single parent would actually role play with me.   a crisis, or not crisis, but distress. So she would actively engage with a, a discussion, a debate with me in front of her child so that her child could see how that, how that mechanism works, um, . And so I was like, oh, that's kinda interesting. Like  that's important to model and, and show your kids. So I think there's challenges of, oh, there's certain things your kid doesn't see.

Julia: we have such deep programming of the shoulds and supposed tos. Mm-hmm. , like, you should have a partner, you're supposed to be married before you have kids. All this stuff. Was that with you at any point at this or at this by this point? Was that stuff still with you on some level or had you completely shed the shoulds and the supposed tos?

Tony: In all honesty, I think it never leaves. I think it's always there in some degree. Um, and it, uh,   and, uh, yeah, it rears its head every once in a while,  way less strong. But the shoulds and the, and the, you know,  what's supposed to happen, um, it's just been baked in so hard. It's baked in by the media. It's baked in what you see your friends having. And so it's, it's always  there a little bit. And it surprises me sometimes.   and the other side, I'll say it's sometimes it surprises me of how amazing it is to be a single dad rocking it and loving like, we're doing this  like, it's like,  like giddy. I like pinch myself. And so, so it's, I'm not trying to be like doom and gloomy, but it, to be honest, um,  it's always there and, and decreasing, uh, volume.

Julia Winston: When Tony came out his entire perspective about starting a family was turned on its head. He spent the next 20 years slowly creating his own definition of family. 

Often, that looked like venturing into the unknown. He chose to walk away from Mimi and the white picket fence, because he knew he needed something else, even though he didn't know what that would look like. He spent six figures and two years trying to conceive his first kid, never knowing if the science would work out in his favor.  

And after he became a single dad, he was once again faced with another unknown in his refamulating journey: the very thing it took him so long to write off - sharing it all with a partner.

Tony: I set off on this path to do this on my own. During this path,  I met a person who lives in Florida.  And I started casually dating them, you know, not that we were even like dating. It was just like, you know, I'm being a parent, I'm doing this on my own. And, you know, let's like, have some fun weekends here and there, you know?  He had no aspirations of being a parent ever and not now. When my daughter was born, something got ignited in him. And in us of this possibility that, oh wow, maybe  I could be around kids. Maybe I could spend more of my time around Tony and a child.

His friends were like, you need to run. Like, you should run now. Like, if this guy wants kids, it's gonna be all about the kids and you're never gonna be seen. And they had all kinds of stories of why he should run. But he didn't. And when my daughter was born, he just fell in love. You could just see the sensitivity and the  Just the care, the deep care he just developed instantaneously.

He's a big hearted guy. Um, and so the  visits from Florida increased over time. I didn't consider myself really dating him, but I was like, I'm just busy being dad, you know, and I'm, and now here comes a second one. And I'm just like, I'm just doing my family stuff and he would kind of show up at times. 

And it kind of started to escalate over time. Like, he would show up more and more. Um, and I started to fall more and more in love with him. Watching him, like, love on these kids more and more. So, five years ago, he moved in. Um, and  he's here full time now with  me and the kids. And  While I don't consider him a parent, he is absolutely like a loving adult in the house and, and does a lot of care and help with the kids, but not quite like a parent. Like, he's not all the way in there. Um,  and. It's beautiful. It's like non traditional and kind of quirky and sometimes hard to explain, like, No, he's not their dad, but he's my partner, and yeah, we live together. Like, just,  that's, you know, every year at school there's like this explanation of who he is and how we are. Um, but it seems to work, and there isn't an insufficiency.  Other people look in like, you should be getting married, and you should do this, and blah blah blah, and he needs to be in that photo.  And honestly, it kind of works for us, and everyone's happy. 

Julia: This is refamulating. 

Tony: Absolutely. 

Julia Winston: It's been nearly a decade since Tony teamed up with the egg donor and surrogate. But the time he spent with these women, the sacrifices they made, and the gifts they gave him, are honored everyday in his family’s home. 

Tony: Because  I'm a single dad. I describe it as having an empty chair at the table. There's clearly no mom present. And so I am happy, I love filling that with these two,  they're the heroes of the story. Like nothing happens without them and. Um, to memorialize that, to really like ground that in the house. Um, I commissioned a piece of art when my daughter was born, uh, by an artist I really liked to, to essentially paint our family story and our, you know, how this came to be.  

this painting is probably six, seven feet wide. It sits on our mantel over our fireplace in the living room, and it's massive. And the surrogate and the egg donor are on the ends, the left and right, and they are all the way front and cen not center, but they're all the way pulled to the front. They're, they're the showcase of the piece, and it's all about them, and, and Asp, and really bringing out parts of their character. You know, the artist worked from photographs to really Capture them. 

And me and the kids are kind of set back in the center because we're a result of, of their amazing gifts and their love. Um,  and  in that picture, there are symbols all over my parents, my dad's as a sailboat, my mom as a butterfly,  a backdrop of Lake Tahoe where we live now. And it sits there as a reminder on a daily basis of the gift  that these two women provided for us that is,  um, so deep.  Um,  so meaningful  and I feel it so deeply because I feel like I'm a person who always tries to provide that in the world. And to get this monumental gift from these two twice over, um, it's just overwhelming. It's so beautiful.

Julia Winston: Tony always pictured a family portrait hanging on his mantel, he just never knew what it would look like. In his early years, it featured a wife and a white picket fence. And then for many years it was painfully blank. 

The painting that hangs in his living room now tells a beautifully original story of a family with love and teamwork at the center. 

And though he didn’t paint this portrait himself, Tony was always the one holding the paintbrush. 

The family he created may not be what he envisioned, yet it’s everything he ever wanted.