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.

00: Becoming Fairy Godmother: Egg donation and creating a new kind of family

Two years ago Julia Winston was asked to help a gay couple start a family by donating her eggs. At the time, she was 38, single, and had no idea if she’d start her own family. Sometimes that made her feel insecure, so the opportunity to donate her eggs allowed her to help create a family, just not the one she imagined in her head. Since the donation, she’s gone through an emotional transformation that opened her eyes to all the different ways a family can look. 

This episode originally aired on Terrible Thanks for Asking, hosted by Nora McInerny.

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

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Nora McInerny: What does family mean to you? 

Each of us will answer that question a little differently- maybe you consider the people you live in the same home with as your family. Maybe you widen that circle and include aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins. Maybe family are the friends you've chosen who have stood by you through everything, when the people you share blood with didn't. 

When I was growing up, my family was a massive Irish Catholic conglomerate spanning the upper midwest. I have – and this is not exaggeration – FIFTY FIRST COUSINS! And so many other forms of cousins that if you share even one strand of DNA with me, or if you grew up alongside me, I was told you were my cousin or my uncle or my aunt.

Family to me was always expansive, but I still assumed as a kid that my own family would be pretty nuclear. I’d marry a man. We’d have kids. Those kids would be cousins with my siblings’ kids. We’d become grandparents, and then we’d die and maybe someone would name a kid after us someday? 

And I was kind of right and also kind of wrong.

I was married, he died. I was a single mom for a little bit. Then I blended families with my current husband, his kids, my kid and a surprise new baby. My first husband’s mother is a grandmother to all of these kids. Both my mothers in law have lunch together and don’t invite me!! Our kids don’t say step or half sibling, they just say sibling. Because our oldest was born when I was 18 but I didn’t meet him until he was 14…my husband calls me a “late in life teen mom.” 

And all of my kids mostly call me Nora, which is very funny to me. 

But you can only have a blended family when two other families disintegrate, and ¾ of our kids know what it’s like to have a family they loved…and a family they love now. 

Our family is more expansive that I thought it ever would be, and even though meeting new people often means a five-minute rundown of the backstory with time for Q&A…our family is unique in the fact that it’s not unique at all. 

A third of adults, ages 25 to 50, live with a spouse and kids. A generation ago that number used to be 70 percent. 

Family is changing. People are staying single longer, having children has become a choice for many people, not a thing they feel they have to do. And queer people have more opportunities to have kids using science and outside help. 

All of this freedom to do something different means that many of us are asking ourselves the question I asked at the beginning: 

what does family look like for you? 

Exactly two years ago, on April 2, 2022, Julia Winston logged onto a Zoom call with a psychologist. Julia was sitting at the kitchen table at her home in Austin, TX. The psychologist was in her office in a different state. They'd never met before, and Julia was talking to this specific psychologist because she was trying to figure out what family would look like for her.

Therapist: How do you picture this? Like, you know, what role do you think you would have? 

Julia: Well, we talked about that and we came up with a role. We came up with a title, which is the Fairy Godmother. 

Therapist: Yeah. Only thing is, I don't know if you have magic. 

Julia:  Oh, I have magic. 

Therapist: You do? Because that's very helpful for children.

Julia: I've got magic. I love that, yeah. 

Nora: Three months before this session, two male friends of Julia's reached out and asked her a favor. They wanted to start a family and they were looking for an egg donor. they asked Julia and....she said yes. She would be their fairy godmother. 

The technical term for her role is “known egg donor”. Julia’s friends – who she calls The Egg Daddies – want to use her eggs and their sperm to make embryos via In Vitro Fertilization. The embryos will be implanted into a surrogate, a woman who has agreed to carry the children she has no genetic tie to. This sounds so strange and technical, I know. The Egg Daddies don’t want Julia to be a mom, but they do want Julia to know their children, to be available for questions and to just be another adult who loves them. 

It’s not a relationship we really have a term for. We have aunts. Uncles. Cousins. But an adult who gave their DNA to make sure you could be born? That doesn't parent you? Fairy Godmother was the term that felt right. 

At the time, Julia was 37. She was single and didn't have children of her own. She'd frozen some eggs a few years prior, in case she did want to get pregnant one day, but her own desires for a family were still a little fuzzy. She could give these men a huge gift…and… be part of a family, without carrying the baby or filling a parental role.

Julia: I love the idea of, of having an extended wacky family. I mean, I just think to me, that's a very comfortable, uh, place. And, um, I mean, I felt a lot of joy when I was considering this, doing this, because that was actually one thing I imagined. And I just laughed so much because I was like, wow, I've gone from worrying that maybe I'll never have any kids to like, what if I have like a bunch of kids, like what if Aaron and Dan have multiple kids from my eggs and then I have kids, I mean, that would just be incredible and that my body wouldn't even have to go through you know, all the things to have multiple kids. So that possibility is actually very exciting to me. Not that it wouldn't have complications as every family does, but I fully trust that I would be able to meet any complications that came up. 

Nora: Saying yes to the egg daddies was easy for Julia. Two years before they reached out, she  went through a big break up in her mid 30s. The man she thought she would marry and have kids with wasn’t in her life anymore…and as she mourned the loss of that relationship, she also mourned the loss of the story she’d always told herself: that she’d get married and have kids before she turned 40. 

Then, the pandemic started, as Julia sat alone in her house she thought a lot about that story. She realized for her, kids weren't a priority, finding the right partner was. So when the egg daddies reached out in early 2022, she saw a new story being presented, and she loved her role in it.

But this process is not as simple as just saying yes, you may have my eggs.

That yes kicks off a medical process that begins with meeting with this psychologist, whose job is to evaluate Julia to see if Julia is psychologically prepared to donate her eggs to these men. Because donating eggs will make the Egg Daddies into parents. But not Julia. 

Julia: I would love to be a person who can be deeply caring for the child and to develop a relationship with a child and be able to provide answers about where do you come from? Why are you the way that you are? To be a safe space for them to go. I think that I could actually play that role better if I wasn't, you know, directly parenting them. And I think that's a really special, that to me, if I had a presence like that in my life, wow. Actually I did. My dad's, my dad's love of his life, my dad's partner really became that for me. And I know what it's, I know how to be that. Like I know how to play that role because I received it and I was so lucky. 

Nora McInerny:  The love of Julia’s dad's life was named Mitchell. And today on Terrible, Thanks For Asking, Julia tells us what it took to become the Fairy Godmother she is today. 

Julia grew up in what she considered a nuclear household in the 80s and 90s in Austin, Texas. A mom. A dad. A little sister, Molly, who is four years younger than her.

Julia: And I remember at age seven, just being really confused about what was going on and feeling the intense emotions in my household.

Like, I remember my mom crying in her room alone and my dad laying on the couch downstairs facing away from us. Like, in my memory, He's laying on the couch with his back facing towards our bedrooms and the rest of the house. And I just remember kind of going from my mom's room downstairs to where my dad was laying on the couch, just understanding that something big was happening and that change was coming, but I didn't really know what it meant.

And my mom said, your dad and I are getting... a divorce. And I think I asked why, like, what does it mean? And she said, ask your father. And so I went and asked him and I don't remember what they said. I was so young, but I just remember the visual of her crying alone in her room and him turned away from us on the couch.And of me somewhere in the middle, feeling like. What's happening? And I also remember them both telling me very clearly that they loved me and that I didn't do anything wrong.

Nora: Julia’s parents split custody. Her mom stayed in their house, and Julia and her sister went back and forth from their mom’s house to their dad’s apartment.

Julia: every other weekend and every Wednesday we would go hang with my dad at his apartment. Um, And I hated his apartment because I just wanted him to be back at home. And he was in this little dinky apartment with like, popcorn ceiling apartment and um, my sister and I shared a room, which I obviously hated. And I just remember, you know, there being a lot of just discomfort. like learning how to pack and like trying to make decisions about like what do you take, what do you keep, having pets at both houses.

And it went on like this for a few years. I just remember having this, this feeling that whole time. Like there was something I didn't know. There was some lurking truth and I felt it swirling around me. But I just didn't know what it was, but something fell off to me and at the time I did not totally equate that feeling of something being off with the fact that my dad was hanging out a lot with this guy who looked like a Ken doll. I was like, who is this dude?

We had like a dinky little like speed boat, fishing boat on the lake and we would go to the lake on the weekends. And my dad, you know, brought friends and there was always this guy named Mitchell who had blue eyes and blonde hair. And he has this like. Really fun, like chuckle. And he was just like tanning gorgeous. And like my dad seemed to just hang out with him a lot and I, but I didn't know who he was. And I was like, why are you here And so I thought it was kind of weird. And then my dad, um. I, at some point he moved into a new house.  There were four bedrooms upstairs and he had a room, Mitchell moved in with him. And then my sister and I had our rooms. And again, I was like, why is this guy here all the time? Like why does he live with us? And so this was happening. It was just like part of my everyday life was just like my dad and his roommate. And like, this was totally a trend in the 90s of, uh, you know, when, when there weren't a lot of resources at that time, like books and, and other types of resources for parents to have the talk with their kids about like dad is gay.I don't I don't know how it became like 100 percent clear to me, but it was like, uh, It's almost like at the end of it You know like the usual suspects when like suddenly you look back and all of the pieces came together like it's Kaiser Susie Like ah, my dad is gay! It's Mitchell!

Nora McInerny:  Aha! Julia's parents got divorced because her dad is gay. Mitchell isn’t just a handsome Ken doll who loves to chuckle. He’s her Dad's BOYFRIEND! 

Julia: We didn't really like each other. I was like, really aggravated by this person's presence. Cause I just, for, for those years, I, I just was like, who are you? Like, why are you here all the time? I don't care if you're handsome, get away. Like, I don't get it. And he had this like very sparkly, twinkly personality, but like it kind of annoyed me because, um, he was just always giggling, you know, I was like, why are you laughing at?

Like, it's just like, why are you laughing? And I think that, like, we kind of had like a little bit of a nemesis relationship for a while. Because I was very messy and I, I was a very messy kid and Mitchell was a very clean man. And I would like drop my towels on the ground and like leave cups everywhere, which I still do.

And I don't drop my towel anymore, but I definitely leave glasses all over the house, which Mitchell would fucking hate. But I just like left my stuff everywhere. I think that, like, maybe when the nemesis relationship began, it was when I felt judged by Mitchell. Like, he would glare at me, and then I would feel, like, really defensive, and he'd say something, like, Pick up your towel and I was kind of sitting there like who the hell are you to tell me to pick up my towel? This is my dad's house. Get out. You know, I was like it was a it was a power struggle between us.

Nora McInerny: It’s not just a power struggle. It’s the 90s, and like Julia mentioned earlier, we weren't really talking about how to be in a blended family, and in 90s Texas we definitely weren’t talking much about a blended family where dad has a boyfriend. 

Which means Julia’s dad and mom weren't really communicating with their kids about Mitchell's role in the family. 

Julia: Whenever there was like a function where my family came that Mitchell and my dad came together And that was when I understood that they were a couple or that was when I started perceiving them to be a couple It was probably my bat mitzvah Like there was a big event and in my you know in my life and my family really rallied together and in family photos It was my dad and Mitchell. 

when we started going on family vacations together, um, which we did from a very young age, like every year we would go to Mexico together or Hawaii or, you know, some kind of vacation and they would, yeah, they, they, we would always go together and it was my dad and Mitchell were like the, you know, the parent, parental figures. he was there and, um, and he felt part of the family. 

In middle school, I just, yeah, I started hanging out with, like, an alternative crowd. I was kind of feeling out with my new friends, like, are they safe? And it turns out that they were, like, I, I just got the sense that they were, like, the kids I was hanging out with, like, one, one girl, her, she had a single mom. And they were poor and they had, they just did things differently. And, um, I felt really safe and comfortable with her because I felt like she was sort of also, um, her family operated in a different way than what we saw around us as the sort of, like, gold star standard of families.

And I don't know, we like smoked cigarettes together and like we were just naughty and I remember one day when we were being naughty just telling them that my dad is gay and, and, and I think I was nervous to see what their response was, but when I felt accepted and in fact they thought it was cool, I started seeing Mitchell differently. When my friends accepted my family and my dad as being gay, I suddenly felt safe and relaxed enough to see him beyond just this like threat of Like whatever threat I saw him as it softened when I came out about my family to some friends and I started seeing him differently and then I think Because I started seeing him differently, I started acting differently towards him.

And we were able to just joke and laugh with each other. And that very organically over the years developed into a really cool camaraderie.  

And... And really when things, um, when things really started to solidify between us, it was in high school when I would get in trouble. I was constantly grounded in high school. I was just like, I just was a bit of a wild child and I loved boys. I loved partying. I loved, you know, all these things that my parents really did not want me to love. And Mitchell seemed to sort of like laugh with me and accept me for that. And I saw that and I was like, Oh, not only do I feel safe about Mitchell, but I feel safe with him to be my full self.

When, when, when we really, really like locked in and developed trust, it was when I got grounded for something for like, you know, something I did that was involved probably drinking or something. I got grounded and Mitchell sort of like came in to talk to me and he really related to me. He met me where I was at. And as a teenager who was like constantly rebelling against her parents, he sort of stepped in. And. Assumed this new different role that they couldn't which was like, hey, I'm here. I'm listening. Like what really happened? Like you must be so frustrated Hey, let me try to convince your dad that like to like go easy on you. And then I was like, yeah

And then from that point we started developing more memories together. Like he, we would go running together sometimes cause he was an avid runner and cyclist and he taught me how to run.   

Nora McInerny: The thing about being a parent is that you can only be so cool. Mitchell was VERY cool in part because he had the best role of all the adults in Julia’s life: mom and dad were parenting, running businesses and dealing with the fallout of their divorce. 

But Mitchell didn’t have all that baggage. And he didn’t have his own kids. He got to bring just himself to this relationship, and all he wanted was to have a good relationship with the kids he lived with on Wednesday nights and every other weekend. 

And that’s what he did. Consistently and competently and humbly. Until Julia left  the nest and headed to college. 

It’s 2002 and Julia is a freshman at American University in DC. When Julia left for college, she didn’t bring the shame about her family that she’s carried through her childhood in Texas. She loved that her family was different, that they were alternative, and she was proud to talk about them with her new friends. 

Julia: I remember talking to my dad on the phone when I was at college in Washington, D. C. and like, being excited to talk to Mitchell in the background. And like, I would hear his little twinkly voice and be like, wait, let me say hi to Mitchell.

I remember my freshman year, Mitchell was the one who told me that our dog, Raja, had died. And I was just crying and, you know, it was really clear to me with some distance what a family we were. And so he came to Washington, DC for work occasionally. And because that's where I went to college, we would hang out together. We would go to lunch. We really got to know each other, you know, as, as sort of as people, as adults. Um, I had a boyfriend my sophomore year of college and my dad and Mitchell came to visit and that was the first time that like we went, they took us to dinner and it was the first time I like went out onto a meal with, with a boyfriend, uh, or with like a, you know, someone I was dating with my dad and Mitchell and that the guy I was dating like really loved them. And I was like, Oh my God, cool. Like to see my dad and his partner, um, being seen as a couple by the person I was dating was like another new, it was a new moment of, of like deepening my understanding of who Mitchell was to me and to us.

and then I studied abroad in Prague my junior year of college and my dad and Mitchell and Molly came to visit me. we had like a really wonderful time together. And I remember one night we had appetizers and wine at my dad and Mitchell's like hotel and I brought all my best friends. who are still to this day like some of my best friends in the world, my best friends from college. And we all had wine and cheese and we laughed together and they got to know him and everyone I was close friends with fell in love with Mitchell.

And again, just like when I was a kid, an adolescent, when I saw Mitchell through the eyes of my friends, I saw how cool he was and I cherished him. He wasn't like a dad. He, that's the thing. He was, he was something different than anything I could have ever imagined. He was, he was just this special adult in my life who was cool, who didn't discipline me, who was handsome, who was successful, who was, um, Really independent but also like so loving and who my dad adored and who was adventurous and He was cool. 

Nora McInerny: This is why it was easy for Julia to say yes to being a Fairy Godmother. And this is why Mitchell came up in that evaluation Julia had with the psychologist. Because as Julia thought about what it would mean to be a Fairy Godmother, Mitchell's face appeared. His laugh. His Dimple. His magnetism. How he made her feel special and seen and safe…because he didn’t worry about her in the same way her parents did. 

He was an important adult, but not a parent. He enforced the rules, but he didn't make the big parenting decisions. He loved Julia, he showed up for her, and he let her be herself. 

It’s the kind of love that stays with you. The kind of love we’d be lucky to receive, or to give. And if Julia could, she’d have called Mitchell right after she agreed to step into the role he’d stepped into in 1992.

Julia: the summer between my junior and senior years of college,  I was spending the summer in Austin and And my sister and I were hanging out at the house and Mitchell, my dad was running errands and Mitchell was gardening in the front yard. And he, I heard him shout like, like he'd been hurt. He was like, panting and holding his side and clearly something was hurting him.

And, and my sister and I were like, oh my God, like, are you okay? What happened? And he goes, I don't know. I just turned and it feels like something snapped in my side. And we were like, oh no. And so my dad was gone. So I drove him to the hospital because he was in a lot of pain.

I was very nervous. I was like, what's going on here? And then my dad came and met us at the hospital and he was like, you guys go home. So my sister and I went home and I remember we looked at each other and we were like, I hope he's okay. You know, like that seems kind of like that's that's scary. Um, my dad and Mitchell came home and they said that there was something they needed to run tests. They found something kind of on his side and I remember feeling nervous and there was a part of me that's always been very intuitive and um, And since I was a child, I've actually, like, had visions, um, and, and sometimes gotten the sense, a sense of, of when things are serious. 

Um, and as a kid, in fact, I remembered looking at Mitchell and trying to imagine him as an old man. And I couldn't, I could never picture him as an old man. I would try, I would like furrow my brow and stare at him and try to see him as an old man, and I couldn't do it. And I remember in this moment when we got back from the hospital, thinking about that. And I had this weird feeling like, What if Mitchell's really sick?

Nora: Mitchell was really sick. The doctors found a tumor on his kidney. The tumor was  cancer. And the end of the summer, Mitchell started cancer treatment and Julia went back to college. 

I was fully confident that Mitchell was going to be fine. And because he was so strong and he was so positive. I lived my senior year of college with the story that Mitchell was going to be okay. Um, and every time I went home, he was deteriorating. We, you know, he's losing weight. He's, he's, um, he's looking pale. His energy is low.

By the spring, um, there's a photo that I remember of this trip. We went to Hawaii, and it was Mitchell's last trip to the beach. He loved the beach, and it was his last trip, and he was in a wheelchair. And I still thought he would be okay. I still thought he would beat it. And, yeah, there's a picture of me standing behind him in his wheelchair, at the beach, and sort of windblown, tan Mitchell for the last time.

Nora McInerny:  Mitchell died a few months later, at home, with his parents, Julia's dad, and Julia at his side. He would never be an old man.

But his love transformed Julia. It expanded her, and expanded her definition of family. And 15 years after he died, Julia would carry the torch of Mitchell’s love…and expand that definition even further. 

JULIA: When I said yes to the egg daddies...I knew that there would be a lot of unknowns with my role as Fairy Godmother, and I was okay with that ambiguity. But one question I felt I had to answer was what would this mean for my family? 

Any kids the egg daddies had would not be my children. Which meant they definitely wouldn’t be my parents' grandchildren. So how would I explain this to them? 

My parents and my sister are some of my favorite people. I love our family, and they have always supported me. But when I decided to donate my eggs, I knew it might be hard for them to wrap their heads around. 

I was raised with the story that I would grow up, get married and have kids, just like my parents did before me and their parents did before them. Even though my dad came out and my parents split up, this was still the default story. And that's really no fault of their own- they got married and had kids, and expected my sister and I would do the same. There was an assumption they'd be grandparents, and I knew my mom especially wanted that. 

I also think some of this has to do with being Jewish, because there's this trauma response that we must create new generations of our family, that otherwise we’ll die out as a people. 

All of these expectations were swirling around my head and my heart as my gut knew that donating my eggs was exactly what I wanted to do. 

I started recording voice memos of myself as I processed all of the questions I had and the changes I was going through. I was also checking in regularly with producer Claire McInerny to talk about all of this.

In the first few weeks of the egg donation process, I recorded this on the way to one of my first doctor appointments. 

Julia VM: How much do you owe your family in this decision, and how much is the decision purely yours? I think boils down to that question. How much do you owe to your family? How much is it your body? when the psychologist was talking to me about this and she said, you're, but who's your family? Is it your mom, your dad and your sister? Is it this family you're helping to create? Who is your family? When you become an adult, if you're not getting married and having kids of your own, who is your family? 

Julia: When I finally told my family, the reactions were mixed. My dad was pretty understanding, he wasn't surprised I was feeling called to do this. My mom and sister were a little worried I'd be too attached to the kids. My mom had a lot of questions about my involvement and her possible involvement. 

These questions are valid...but also, it showed me that it would take time for them to really accept this choice. 

While I was grappling with how this decision was shaking up my family of origin, I was also beginning the medical process of donating my eggs. Not the eggs I’d frozen before – I kept those for me. But I went through the whole egg retrieval process all over again, this time for them.

Julia VM: All the while, gumballs fill my ovaries, and I'm a little hormonal, a little emotional. 

Julia: This is a voice memo I recorded after the trigger shot I took leading up to my retrieval. This is the final big push of hormones.  

Julia VM: It feels like a weird time. I feel, I don't feel like a victim. I don't feel like it's not bad. It's just weird and intense. And maybe one day when I listen to this, I'll... be able to understand what was true. I don't know. Maybe it's just hormone, but something intense and powerful is happening and I hope that it's for a bigger reason. I hope this has meaning. I hope what I'm doing has meaning. Maybe that's the deepest truth is just this like real hope there is actually a meaning here that it's leading to something that I'll be able to hang my hat on. I guess the only way to find out is to live it.

Julia: So I lived it. It’s been almost two years since the retrieval, and hearing this voice memo makes me emotional ... I feel so brave for doing this. I want to hug that past version of myself, and tell her it does mean something. 

My egg retrieval went smoothly, and the egg daddies ended up with three embryos made from my eggs. In the following months they found a surrogate and started the process of IVF, and I would get periodic updates.

The first embryo is implanted. She loses the pregnancy a few weeks later. 

A couple months after that, the second one goes in. This one also doesn't take. 

The egg daddies live in a different state than me. So I wasn't seeing them during the IVF process, I was just trying to support them from afar- and it kind of felt like my first test as Fairy Godmother. Should I check in with them or wait for them to reach out? 

After the second embryo transfer failed, we only had one chance left, and I started thinking about the reality that they might not have kids. That even though I'd donated my eggs, I may never get to actually be a Fairy Godmother to any children. This thought made me sad, but I realized that either way, my mindset was forever changed. 

Julia: This whole process helped me confront my deepest insecurity: being single. I was approaching 40 and still hadn’t met a romantic partner. Stepping into this alternative role as a Fairy Godmother helped me realize I could look at my single life in a new way too. I didn’t have to follow the traditional script I had been given about kids. So why couldn’t I do the same for partnership?

The more I embraced this way of thinking about being single, the more I encountered others who felt the same way.

I started recording some of the conversations I was having with friends about this topic because it made me feel better and better about the path I was taking. 

One day, my friend Daniel and I were on a walk, and he brought up how this looks in his life.

Daniel: Well, I come from a family where it seemed, it, the narrative was that long term partnership was the norm, and it was ideal, and it was likely to lead to happiness. So basically, I was at this family reunion. And at some point, looking around the room at a dinner one night, I realized at least half people, half of the people, even in the older generations, were either never in a long term romantic partnership or no longer in one.

And it occurred to me that this narrative about like, long term romantic partnership being the norm was false. At least 50 percent of people weren't there and that it certainly wasn't the key to happiness. As demonstrated by the number of people who had gotten divorced and the number of people who had never been married that were perfectly happy. And somehow this narrative keeps getting perpetuated through the generations, even though it never... Is it this way? Uh, yeah, sure. Even though it may have never been true that it was the norm, and it may have never been true that it was the most... Direct line to meaning or happiness in life. 

No one just wants to figure out a way, no one wants to figure out a way to articulate the counter narrative.

Julia: What is the counter narrative? 

Daniel: The counter narrative is that a happy, meaningful life is accessible to you regardless of relationship status. No matter what your age is. And that there are a plethora of relationship structures and relationship pathways. Um, and that being in a long term romantic relationship, Oh, no, that's it. Um, being in a long term romantic relationship is hard. At some point, it may make you happy, and at some point, it may make you sad. It's 

Julia: not the solution to life. It is not the solution to life. It's not the silver bullet to a fulfilling life. Yeah. 

As I was getting more and more comfortable with living an alternative life, the egg daddies were still trying to conceive.

In spring 2023, almost a year after my egg retrieval procedure, after two failed attempts to transfer embryos into the surrogate…it came down to one last embryo. One last chance to make the egg daddies into actual daddies. We were all nervous and emotional. Because If this one didn't work, I worried my age would prevent me from being able to donate again. 

By this time, I had been talking to producer Claire McInerny a lot because we were going to make a story about my egg donation. 

One day in May, the egg daddies reached out, and the first call I made was to Claire. 

Claire: Tell me about the call you got a few days ago. 

Julia: I got a text from the egg daddies on Friday asking if I had a moment to chat and I honestly I was really nervous at first because I was like, shit, are they going to tell me that we like, we lost the baby? Like that it's actually like pregnancy didn't, didn't take after all. Um, and given the track record, like that wouldn't have been a huge shock. Um, So I was like, yeah, and my heart's pounding. And then, uh, they were like, we're going to FaceTime you. And I was like, Oh, this seems like maybe like, what is this good?

I don't know. And so I got a FaceTime from them and just like, I saw their faces and they looked like they had these like bewildered smiles on their faces. They were like, we're leaving the first ultrasound appointment, and we got to hear the heartbeat. And I was like, oh my god, amazing. And they, and then they said, there were two heartbeats. Twins.

Julia: All of a sudden, we went from maybe zero babies - to two babies. Instead of hypotheticals I had something real to wrap my head around. Two babies, with my DNA, would be born in  a matter of months. I was actually going to be a Fairy Godmother....and I still didn't know what that would look like. 

Claire: Do you have any fantasies about what your life as a Fairy Godmother will look like? 

Julia: There's not a lot formed around my fantasies, but there, there are pieces. I envision holding both of these babies, and, I have questions. I guess it's hard for me to allow my fantasies to take root until I know kind of like what the egg daddies want because I want to be really respectful and mindful of what the parents of these children want. And so I haven't really been letting myself fantasize that much, but I, you know, like in one version of my fantasy is like, I'm there when they're b orn and like we get to bond. But in another version of my fantasy is like, We're establishing the distance early on because that's, because I'm not their parents and I'm not, I'm not a parent. And so in that version of reality, I'm celebrating from afar with my loved ones. And, um, when I get to meet them, it's like this joyous, amazing, like occasion

yeah, I don't want to overstep and I also don't want to burden the egg daddies with my questions about it. Um, I feel like an, I feel like it's sort of like a, a go between where like, I want to share this exciting news with my parents, but I, you know, I think that like, it's kind of sad for them because like, it's not their, they're not going to be grandparents. So what are they going to be? Are they going to be anything? And I don't want to pressure the egg daddies with those questions right now, but I also feel this like pressure to, to let my parents know and to set expectations with them. Because if I just deliver the news without framing it in some way, then I don't, I know they're not going to know how to take it. And I want to help to guide their emotional response based on what. What they can expect from the role that that none of us knows what it means, you know, like we, we don't know. 

Julia: A month later, I traveled to visit the egg daddies so we could all celebrate the news of the pregnancy together. Going into that trip, I felt like it was time to try and define some details of what to expect as a known donor, and how I could prepare my mom for the news that the surrogate was pregnant.

This a voice memo I took during that trip:

Julia: I had dinner with the egg daddies the other night. Uh, where we are in the process is that the surrogate is, um, in her first trimester. And one of the biggest questions that has really been on my mind since that time and since it started feeling more real is just like, what does this mean for my parents?  

Um. I, of course, still don't really know what it means for me, but I'm okay with that. I really feel like I can handle and even a welcoming of the mystery of all of that. But what I have struggled with a little bit is just wanting to be able to share this news with my parents in a way that also gives them some understanding of what it means for them.

So what does it mean? Uh, that's just been on my mind a lot because I, um, this is probably a lot for them to take in, especially my mom. Uh, because she has wanted to be a grandmother basically since I was born. 

So, at dinner... Um, I brought this up and I, I brought it up in a way that felt good. I wanted to disarm them. I wanted to let them know that they don't need to worry or feel pressured, um, about my questions about my parents. 

I've talked to friends who are queer couples who have used donors to start a family and, you know, ask them what would they, how would they want to talk about that? And um, and what it kind of boiled down to was just sharing that I still have not shared this news with one of my parents, with my mom.And when I do that, I want to also deliver with it with a little bit of, uh, guidance about what it means.

And it was such a wonderful conversation. It just really deepened my level of connection and trust with the egg daddies and this feeling that we're, we're a team and that we are figuring it out together. Um, really what we kind of decided was like, wouldn't it be great for you guys to meet my parents and meet my family before there are children in the picture so that you're establishing some kind of familiarity. And um, and then when I sort of put that on the table, they were like, when's the best time to visit Austin? And I was so tickled. And so I think we're going to do that. And I really love, I'm loving this idea of bringing the egg daddies together with my family so that they get, as they said, a front row seat to see where half the d n a of their future children are coming from.

Julia: A few months later, they came to Austin and met my family. It was a social visit, nothing specific was decided about what life would look like once the twins arrived, but it was so special to see my parents interacting with these two men. I'd spent months worried and anxious about how this choice would change my family dynamics. I grappled a lot with the fact that my deep desire to help these men have a family was creating disappointment for my mom. 

But during their visit, she showed up. My dad hosted a BBQ at his house and most of my family came to meet the egg daddies. It was awkward at times, but really beautiful to see everyone trying. They knew this was important to me, and even if they didn't understand it, they were there. 

Of course...one person was missing. Mitchell.

He's been gone from our family for many years now, but that day I thought about him a lot as I looked around the BBQ. My dad and his new husband, happy. The egg daddies were about to be fathers, and were giddy with anticipation. My mom and her husband were curious and kind as she sat on the couch chatting with them.

This random assortment of people were standing together chatting because of me. I am part of the egg daddies family now, and I'm also still part of my family of origin. There was no wedding, but there will be children. I'm creating my own family, in my own way, and I'm still writing that story. 

The beginning of this episode ended with Mitchell's death.

So it's only fitting that we end this entire story with a birth. 

The twins were born in January 2024. At the time of recording this, I still haven't met them. The egg daddies are knee deep in juggling two newborns with the rest of their lives, but I get updates. 

I'm still figuring out what this role will be, and some days I wish I had someone to ask for advice. And the first person I would call if I could, would be Mitchell.

Claire: What do you think Mitchell would think about all of this? 

Julia: I would love to hear What he would have to say about what i'm doing now, which is like i've donated my eggs to a gay couple I'm, i'm continuing a cycle I'm, like continuing a family story in a way Um by playing this role i'm, you know, i'm i'm enabling, um, another gay family a gay couple to to have a family with children and I'm helping them to do that. And, and my role. I'm going to be the fairy godmother to these children. I hope to be like an angel to them. And I hope that I can be an angel on earth, a living angel. I hope I, you know, I hope I'm not just like a... A memory or a ghost or an apparition or a sort of outline of a figure who once was. I want to be a living source of love and, um, and, and sparkliness to the children who were going to come into the world through, you know, um, in part, um, because of some eggs that formed in my body that I donated. And I want to be, uh, I want to be a magical source of joy in their lives, just like Mitchell was in my life.

Julia: Somewhere in that 2-year process of becoming a Fairy Godmother, I made up a new word: refamulating. I felt like I needed a way to explain this process of ditching old ideas around family and formulating new ones. I wanted to talk to other people who are doing family differently, and a podcast felt like the perfect way to do it.

That’s how Refamulating was born. 

Nora: Refamulating is the newest show from Feelings Co. It's been in the works for over a year, and it's the kind of storytelling we like to do here at Terrible Thanks for Asking. Nuanced explorations of a topic that can be thorny or complicated and always very human.  

Julia: I, Julia Winston, am the host, and I’m so excited to share with you all the stories we’ve been working on. 

Claire: I’m Claire McInerny, and I’m the producer of Refamulating. If you go over to our feed right now, we have two episodes waiting for you. 

Julia: The first is about my family of origin. I interviewed my mom, dad and sister about what it meant for us to refamulate after my dad came out,There’s also an episode about a man named Tony, who spent decades on his path to becoming a dad, and got there with the help of two very special women.

The rest of season 1 includes stories about being a surrogate, how a blended family created new titles for the parents, the rise in communal living AND choosing to not have children.