Archives: Ralph Lewis

Thinking about Family

Ralph Lewis 12.15.2010 4:24 PM

In the time since I began blogging on Family Scholars, I’ve thought a lot about why I, and many other gay people I know, have such a different view about what family is than a lot of the people who post here. So I decided to write a little bit about a time in my life long ago.

—————————————–

Cary’s mother Charlene had a busy 1950. That spring, she turned 18, married her boyfriend, and graduated from high school in Carrier, OK. Come summer, the two of them moved 15 miles east to the larger town of Enid to start married life and give birth to Cary. Charlene’s husband got a job in the local Sears warehouse, and she took in neighbors’ kids to make ends meet.

Charlene’s idea of motherhood included making a huge breakfast for the whole family every morning – eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausage, toast — and insisting that everyone, her husband, Cary and the three other children who came later, finish everything she served. By the time Cary was a teenager, he began to go into the bathroom right afterwards and throw it all up.

The summer Cary turned 15, he met Joe, another teenager three years his senior, at a church picnic. To anyone looking on, Cary and Joe became best friends, but alone, and to each other, they were something more. After a few years though, Joe got cold feet about what this was, and married a woman and left Enid for good. Hurt and stunned, Cary tried to emulate Joe by getting married himself. Within a couple of months, he realized that he couldn’t do this and split with his wife. After the divorce, a fight with his parents spilled all the details about Joe, leading Cary into his ’61 Chevy and the road west to California. Once he was living in San Francisco, he refused to have anything but Coca-cola before noon. And he and his parents never spoke again.

I moved to San Francisco in 1980, determined at 21 to live in America’s gay Mecca. It was there that I met Cary one Saturday afternoon at the local bridge club. The club was a street front operation with worn carpets and folding tables that trembled when the cable cars lurched by outside on California Street. After the game ended and I stood nearby awkwardly, he casually invited me to his apartment later for dinner and cards with some bridge-playing friends. We discovered that each of us was an aggressive player at the table and it suited us. Soon we began driving to tournaments all over northern California, to odd little towns like Yuba City or Salinas. At night after the sessions would end, we would head to small town gay bars to laugh and drink and talk about the hands we had played and all the strange people who somehow loved the game as much as we did. I fell in love for the first time, and in the way of all first loves, I cradled the physical things I imagined I alone could see — the way he held his stomach when he laughed, even the way his fingers swooped a hand of cards off the table and spread them open like a dancer’s fan. After a year, we moved into a tiny apartment in the Tenderloin together to set up house. Friends came over on weekends for big dinners we made in our doll house sized kitchen. Bridge games began then lasted almost all night. I felt like I was home.

I had always hoped that the first man I loved this much I would stay with forever, but I turned out to be wrong. Cary was a bohemian, and I wanted a house and a yard, and eventually these different futures clashed.  After five years together, I moved back into an apartment of my own.

Cary started getting sick in the fall of ’88, two years after we had broken up. There were no treatments available then for HIV, and he declined quickly. Within a year, his doctor was telling him to get his affairs in order.

Together with his close friend Sally, I took care of Cary as he slowly became bedridden and needed more help just to get through the day. On a Sunday night in February of ‘90, he was having trouble breathing and his ankles were swollen big as balloons, so I drove him, slumped against the other side of the car, to Ward 86, the then-busy AIDS unit at San Francisco General Hospital.

As we waited to check in, he spoke to me with a galloping breath that sounded like he had just finished a marathon. “Whatever happens,” he said, “promise me you will never speak to my family.”

“Okay. I promise,” I said. Please don’t die yet, I thought.

But two days later on Valentine’s Day, the unit nurse called a few hours before dawn, telling me it was time to come over. When I arrived, Cary was thrashing and moaning, eyes closed in a half-coma, drowning from the KS lesions that now overwhelmed his lungs. Sally and I stood vigil for a few hours, but as it became clear his time was imminent, I told Sally I couldn’t watch the last breaths.

I went downstairs to the hospital lobby. I saw the pay phones near the tall glass entry doors. I called my parents.

“Mom, it’s Ralph. I’m at the hospital with Cary……he’s about to die.” My voice trailed off to tears.

“Oh, honey, that’s too bad,” she said. There was a short silence. “I’m so sorry for his family.”

I stood there, phone in hand, and my tears stopped for a moment. I wished I hadn’t called. I hung up and walked to my car in the parking lot. It was 7am. I made my way onto Highway 101, then over the Bay Bridge towards a friend’s house in Oakland to wait for Sally’s call. The rising sun and the tears half-blinded me as I drove east along with the rest of the rush hour traffic. A slow song played on the radio I knew I would recognize forever.


Posted in Aging, Disability, Death, Dying, General | 11 Comments (Comments are Closed)

Adult Desires vs. Children’s Needs

Ralph Lewis 12.03.2010 2:28 PM

I’m glad that my introductory post last month generated so much discussion. A couple of threads were left dangling, though, and I hope to continue some of those in my next few posts. Heather, in particular, raised some good and tough questions that I’ll get into later.

Several people wrote about how being donor-conceived creates a permanent burden for a child and asked (or doubted) whether my partner and I had considered the depth of that burden in making the decision to go ahead with donation and surrogacy. At first I crafted a personal answer — about how I grew up, the values I absorbed from my parents and my community about the reasons and requirements for parenting, and how my adult experiences shaped my views about the tradeoffs between living with challenges versus living in Normal Town with the Cleavers. I wrote about why I thought it was not only okay, but a good idea, to raise children, especially our children, with two Dads.

But I kept running up against a wall: there is no way I can prove that there’s no harm in what we’re doing. But then again, neither can either other couple, especially those who have qualities that don’t match an arbitrary “ideal.” So I decided to speak about something else, something I realize I’ve left unsaid.

I haven’t spoken about how having children has made me a better person – less selfish and more loving. Is that irrelevant to my feeling about having them, I wonder? Inappropriate to admit? Something I should hide? I have made comments about our parenting that speak as if it were solely a sacrifice, and that everything that matters, all that matters, is the welfare of our children.  Someone from the outside might think we were trying to live a life of personal asceticism, with our children’s welfare the only subject of concern.

I look around me, and see the families in my neighborhood, my synagogue, and my town. I look at my parents and their friends, the people I grew up knowing. I think of my father’s father (the only grandparent I knew), and his stories of Poland, coming to New York, migrating to Mississippi, where he married and had five children. Why did all these people have kids? Certainly, up to my parents’ time, having children was considered an obligation, aided by the absence of any medicalized birth control. That dynamic may still hold true for some today.

But I see and have heard a common thread while observing and listening: the extent to which people behave according to a belief that having children helps fold themselves as well as their children into a community, a folding that has the capacity to benefit all.

I see how people who have children have an opportunity for more involvement in the groups of which they are a part (selfishly, because they want their kids to do well in those groups too). People who have children have the chance to bond with their extended family and other parents for mutual assistance. People who have children may find more meaning in their lives through their connections with their children. And people whose lives have meaning are more likely to be involved in activities that affect more than just their own life, but the ongoing life of the communities that will hold their children, and the generations after them.

My kids play with other kids on our block. I spend time with other parents on my block, and we help each other with each other’s kids. When my kids are a bit older, they will be part of the youth program at our synagogue where the same dynamic involving parents and children will play out across a larger swath of people. This is precisely the same as it was for my parents, and as it is today for the heterosexual and same-sex families around me. As parents, we find meaning in the ways in which we contribute to the world around us, ways that include our children as a vehicle.

I’ve read a phrase on this blog quite a few times: adult desires vs. children’s needs, and accepted through my silence its implicit premise – that somehow it is close to automatic that adult desires by their very name are likely to be vulgar and selfish. I would call many of these “desires” adult needs, and fulfilling them is crucial to a society full of individuals who contribute to the continuation of the values that most of us hold dear.

The decision to have kids should have their well-being and development as primary concerns, but they are not the only concerns. It’s okay to have the decision to have kids be also about adult needs and thus community needs as well. All of these needs are important.


Posted in Childbearing, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood | 36 Comments (Comments are Closed)

Surrogacy and Parenting

Ralph Lewis 11.12.2010 12:22 PM

Hello everyone! Elizabeth has kindly offered me a guest blogging spot here on Family Scholars. I think there’s great value in people with widely differing views about family issues engaging each other directly, and I appreciate the opportunity to be part of that here.

Some background on me and my reasons for writing:

Even on the night of my first date with my now-partner back in 2003, we each talked about our desire to have children. As we told each other the obligatory stories of our upbringing and how we had ended up in New York City, we talked about the kind of parenting we had had and the kind of parents we hoped we might become.

My partner was born and raised in northwest Iowa. His mother, pregnant at a young age, married his father briefly in order that she could live in a conservative community as a divorced mother rather than as a single one. His father was present during a couple of short periods later in his childhood, but his current whereabouts are unknown, and my partner has no interest in finding him. I was born in Tennessee, the youngest of three kids, but my mother died shortly after my birth. Soon after, my father married a widow with two children whose husband had died around the same time. I grew up knowing this blended family as my family. These two backgrounds, along with our adult lives as gay men, in which we created support systems for ourselves that were largely filled with people we weren’t biologically related to, strongly affected how we came to think about the word “family.”

After two years of dating, my partner and I solemnized our commitment (we called it getting married) and moved from our small apartment to a house in the suburbs. It wasn’t long before we began thinking about how to start our family. We had heard of surrogacy, and liked the idea behind it, but only began studying it after attending a regional gay families conference and speaking to some other same-sex couples in our small town who had young children born with the help of an egg donor and a surrogate.

In the end, we chose surrogacy because we wanted our children to have a biological connection with one of us, and vice-versa. We wanted our connection with our children to begin with conception, and continue through pregnancy and birth. We had friends who had adopted children, but their experiences didn’t speak to us in the way that those of our friends who went through surrogacy did.

Within a few months of selecting a lawyer, a clinic, and an egg donor agency, we were faced with choices about a donor and a surrogate. As we progressed through the process, we experienced the surreal mix of commercialization and intimacy that runs throughout the fertility business. We eventually spoke to three women who were interested in being a surrogate for us before we found someone we clicked with and wanted to work with. Our egg donor search was shorter. After we read our donor’s profile, and went through the subsequent information gathering and checking process, we felt certain that she was the person we wanted to be the genetic mother of our kid(s).

It took over two years from when we began in earnest until the day our twins were born. In that time, we dealt with not only our surrogate and her family, but our egg donor’s agent, our surrogate’s GP and ob/gyn, both women’s lawyers, the fertility clinic, and the out-of-town hospital where the births took place. It was complicated, stressful, expensive, and, at times, uncertain. In between the many practical considerations, there was sometimes the glint of half-buried moral issues that we could see and would discuss by ourselves late at night. Despite all that, and just as most heterosexual couples describe, the birth and its aftermath, the plunge into total responsibility for these two young lives, was and continues to be, one of the most humbling and spiritual experiences of our lives.

Our kids are now 2 ½ years old. My partner and I are Daddy and Papa. They have friends who have a Momma and a Mommy, and they’re also learning that many kids have a mommy and a daddy. Over time, of course, they will learn that actually most kids have a mommy and a daddy. We talk about different kinds of families and we read to them about families in very simple terms in children’s books that we have. Using someone else’s terminology, we are “normalizing” their experience. We will be raising them with no secrets about any of the circumstances of their birth, though. The stories about their origin that we tell them will let them know that people we call family may or may not be biologically related. These stories are a stepping stone from the stories we were told as we grew up, stories that reflected our parents’ histories, values, and judgments, just as our stories reflect ours. Everyone’s family story is such a compendium that evolves over generations. There is no one family story.

We know a lot about our egg donor, even though we’ve never met her in person. We will tell them about her over time, and they will have the option to contact her when we think they are old enough to make that decision. We still talk with our surrogate and her family every few months, and have seen her a few times since the twins’ birth. We’ve remained friends with her and expect that to continue.

I’ve heard the statement that being without one biological parent leaves an ontological hole. I don’t think anyone, or any kind of parent, can prevent their children from facing the basic ontological crises that are fundamental to human life. Those crises come in different forms and at different points in life for different people. I don’t even aspire to prevent them for our kids. What I hope to do is equip them to shoulder those challenges, through empathy, modeling, Jewish education, and simple honesty. I hope to avoid the lies and deception that I often see described by donor-conceived people in how their families communicated with them. Biology matters, and knowing the truth about it in your life is vital.

I have two goals in posting here. One is that I’d like to try and find common ground between those of us who have children through gamete donation and/or surrogacy, and those who view the industry as unethical and its users as complicit. The other is that I’d like to be the best father that I can, and one way I can do that is to help in the examination of what it means to be donor-conceived – unknowing participants, like my children, in this new frontier. How do we integrate their truths into the fabric of all of our lives? What do the new and increasing possibilities of technical reproduction mean for all of us? I want to think about how best to mold these new technologies to our human requirements, ethics, and needs, and live with the changes associated with what looks to be their ongoing presence.


Posted in Fatherhood, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood | 51 Comments (Comments are Closed)