The Observer - PollenTree.com Review
Meet the co-parents
The definition of family has changed in recent years, now co-parenting is rewriting it completely. These mothers and fathers have relationships based on legal agreements and counselling rather than dates, romance and sex. But they all have one thing in common: the desire to have a child.
It's supper-time in the Morgan household and three-year-old Zaide is pushing his food round his plate with a baby spoon. When he finally takes a mouthful, he howls that it's too hot and too spicy. Instantly the adults round the table – his "tummy mummy" Sabrina Morgan, his "mum" Kirsty Slack and his daddy, Kam Wong – jump up to help. It's a familiar scene to any of us who've had tears at the tea table. It's just in this case, three people have stepped up to the plate. It is utterly astonishing watching them, not because they are all gay and all devoted to their son – nothing new in that – but because they met on the internet in order to create him.
Sabrina wanted a baby, but was a single gay woman. Kam wanted a baby, but was – is – in love with Martin, a man who didn't want a child in his life 24/7. (Martin is very much part of Zaide's life now, though.) And Kirsty wanted a child, too, but didn't want to carry one. All of them were a piece short of the jigsaw. So while Sabrina and Kirsty met in the conventional way, Kam and Sabrina – Zaide's biological parents – went on to the internet to find each other with the sole intention of having a child. With Zaide about to turn four, in January they are going to try for a second child.
"Co-parenting" through the initial use of the internet – basically finding a parent online – is fast becoming a trend. The various introduction websites, operating just like internet dating sites, are reporting rocketing numbers of users, with London coming within the top three cities after New York and Los Angeles. Even for the most liberal, it takes a certain recalibration of ideas. Co-parenting is not only about the gay community wanting to experience parenthood: heterosexual men and women are also signing up to websites, mostly as a result of feeling that time is running out and that parenthood with a "co-parent" rather than a real "love" who may never materialise is better than no parenthood at all.
There's the obvious conservative what's-the-world-coming-to? reaction (and boy, did I get a lot of that while researching this piece). This is based on the idea that a child conceived not out of love or traditional togetherness, but out of the so-called "selfishness" of two otherwise unconnected parents, is somehow born into moral bankruptcy and therefore doomed.
As Sabrina says: "They think you're going to bring children into this warped world where there is no real love, no real morality, that it's not natural, not right – and then you say to them: 'Hang on a minute, you're divorced. What difference does it make? Just because we don't sleep with Kam, it doesn't mean we don't love and respect him as a man and as the father of our son.'"
There is also despair at the sociology of it: the skewed role the internet plays in our lives these days. Many of us work too hard, meet too few people, leave it late to have a family in the conventional way, look for love online, and now, as a natural consequence, we are looking for a "co-parent" online, too.
Isn't it all just a tragic consequence of alienation and loneliness?
And then there's the practical: how the hell do you choose a parent on the internet and then make it work through all the years of middle-of-the-night temperatures, and school plays at inconvenient times, and pickups and dentist's appointments and discipline issues and the money and the education and, frankly, the stress? It's bad enough choosing an au pair on Gumtree, when, after weeks of tedious trawling and due diligence, your wonderful "pick" is more Miss Trunchbull than Mary Poppins. Wouldn't the risk of hitching up with a psycho or Mr or Ms Weird, or a person who turns out – later on – to have a vile temper or a lousy romantic partner be less attractive than simply getting pregnant and going it alone? (Or in the case of a man, choosing a surrogate?)
The general rules of the business are these: always get to know your "co-parent" for at least a year before trying; go into family counselling or see a therapist together; draw up a parenting agreement (while not a legal document, it is helpful for a court were things to go wrong, and vital for addressing key issues such as health, education, money, discipline, name on the birth certificate); talk to a lawyer; integrate a potential co-parent into your wider circle of family and friends and meet theirs; be honest and upfront about your hopes and feelings. Always use artificial insemination and do so with a third party – either a GP or at a fertility clinic.
Kam, Sabrina and Kirsty have clear boundaries for their parenting agreement. Kam takes Zaide every other weekend, comes for dinner on a Wednesday, doesn't financially contribute to Zaide's life with his mothers but is responsible for saving for his education. The three are constantly in touch and admit that because of the six-year delay, by the time Zaide arrived they were already best friends. "I cried every month when I didn't get pregnant," says Sabrina. "I said to Kam: 'You don't have to stay on this journey with me,' but he never once abandoned me."
You could easily have chosen another more fertile woman, I say to Kam. After all, you weren't romantically invested in the partnership and you didn't "owe" her anything: "But she was the right one," he says simply, "and I wanted to stick with her." And then there came Kirsty, three years in to their co-parenting courtship: "I was worried I wouldn't fit into the picture," remembers Kirsty, "but when I met Kam I liked him immediately. We're very similar and now we often gang up on Sabrina!"
For most of their years of trying, they had used DIY insemination, with Kam turning up when required. It was an embarrassing palaver until they all got so used to the routine of it that they became blasé. But by 2009, when their first attempt at IVF was successful, Sabrina, Kirsty and Kam had the beginnings of their new and unusual family.
It's a blustery day in Soho when I meet Patrick Harrison, founder of PollenTree, one of the most successful British co-parenting sites. As we sip our orange juice in a hotel bar – much like, I imagine, how prospective co-parents would first meet – the irony is not lost on us that we are both deeply conventional in our own family set-ups while discussing others that are anything but.
Harrison, an ex-lawyer and web entrepreneur, along with his wife, also an ex-lawyer, got drawn into running a free co-parenting site two years ago after a single, middle-aged female friend desperate for a baby revealed she was going to attempt to get pregnant through casual sex. PollenTree started small, almost as an experiment, but grew so rapidly that Harrison and his wife can hardly keep up and will have to start charging at some point in order to keep improving the service. They currently have 8,500 registered with the site.
The site runs the whole gamut of introductions: co-parenting, egg donation, sperm donation – but it's the co-parenting that's growing the fastest. "We live in this urbanised society," says Harrison. "People are working long hours; the chances of meeting people are getting more limited. The dating apps are pretty shallow. We are surrounded by people and yet we are alone. That's what modern society is. Maybe it's because we are on the internet too much."
I raise an eyebrow. "Yes," he nods, realising why. "That's the irony of all ironies, isn't it?" The internet and our online-focused lives take away potential partners, only to source them for us again in some other form.
"If you have found somebody you love and you've had your kids, it's easy to take all that for granted. But a lot of people don't have that, and there are many reasons why people don't. You can't blame them. People say they find themselves in this situation because they have been doing things they feel they were supposed to do, like being good at their profession and contributing to society. Having a family gets put on the back burner."
PollenTree is big on protection: screening male profiles where there is no photograph and not much information and where there is a blanket targeting of random women (always a giveaway, apparently); deleting the profiles of very young women; monitoring activity. "People think the internet is anonymous," says Harrison, "but of course it isn't. I don't want to give away too much, but we have ways of making sure the site is safe."
According to Harrison, co-parenting must not be seen as the domain of the ageing female or the man who wants to spread his genes around: "The usual story for men," says Harrison, "is that they reach a point where they think: 'I have nothing to show for my life. I want a child; I want to be a dad.'"
This happened to Justin (not his real name), who, like Kam, is a gay professional in a civil partnership. His partner, like Kam's Martin, is supportive. Justin has waited a long time to find his co-parenting match. "Initially the response was a little disappointing," he remembers gloomily. "You think: 'Is it the way I look? Have I been too demanding?'" Knowing a bit about fertility, he stipulated that his potential co-parent must be no older than 38: "I was hedging my bets… You have no idea how other people will respond to you." One potential co- parent in her mid-30s admitted to having had anorexia, which he accepted, but then she went cold on him: "I think I was too full on."
After a rather solemn period when he was "disenfranchised" by the whole business of finding somebody, not to mention rather disheartened by the negative reactions of some of his most liberal friends when they heard what he was planning to embark on, he now thinks he might have found "the one". She is an academic in her 30s who is currently unattached. "We're looking to formally commit to each other, probably in the early part of 2014," he tells me. "After that we will set about composing a parenting agreement. Once that has been drawn up, probably in the second half of 2014, we'll set about trying for conception via artificial insemination each month."
As Justin takes me through his first "date" with his new potential co-parent, I can't help feeling appalled by the magnitude of what faces them. It reminds me of something Kirsty Slack said: "Imagine how much we must want this, to go through what we have to go through." In Justin's case, they had their first "date" at the V&A, both of them overwhelmed while simultaneously trying to appear interested in the artefacts. In the end Justin couldn't stand it and acknowledged the elephant in the room. Things became a little easier, but there were still embarrassing moments, such as when their salads were somehow served on the same plate and they sat, forced into unnatural intimacy, eating "like the dogs in Lady and The Tramp". But anyway, awkward start aside, it's looking hopeful.
"You do have to go on instinct," says Justin. "Nothing is guaranteed. That baby isn't here until it's here. One thing she said to me really made me think: 'We are going to be connected for the rest of our lives.'"
"The real issue of co-parenting is: 'Are the child's needs being met?'" says Dr Carol Burniston, a clinical child psychologist. "And whether," she continues, "amid all the cerebral activity of planning this child, you have actually taken into account a little person who may also have views, and that their views will need to be taken into consideration. There are babies born with far less planning. With divorced parenting, there can be quite a lot of animosity. Co-parenting can be a good thing as long as there is an acceptance that it's not just about the parents."
Around Kirsty and Sabrina's London flat there are photographs everywhere, all designed to give Zaide a sense of his own history. They laugh about how there has never been a cross word among them; how when Zaide needs to blow his nose, often all three of them will present him with a tissue; how Sabrina teases Kam for dressing Zaide in fleece; how Kam feels protective over Kirsty in her role as non-biological mum.
Zaide will start school next September: "When children are young, they think their lives are normal," says Dr Burniston. "When they get older, potentially there could be some bullying, but it's about how everybody handles it, and it is about the message they give the child. As long as that child is supported and that the teachers support the child, too."
There is little doubt that Zaide may encounter more prejudice than my little boy who is the same age, but looking at Zaide now, surrounded by all this love and commitment, there isn't any difference at all. And anyway, when it works as well as this, what's wrong with difference?
"I think all three of us understand that we're not expecting to walk into the world and find that everybody is going to go: 'Wey hey, look at that great family!'" says Sabrina, "but we do want to be respected." Her eyes fill with tears. They tip down on to her cheeks. "I can't believe we have been so lucky," she says. "I'm just so proud of us all that we are making it work."
The definition of family has changed in recent years, now co-parenting is rewriting it completely. These mothers and fathers have relationships based on legal agreements and counselling rather than dates, romance and sex. But they all have one thing in common: the desire to have a child.
It's supper-time in the Morgan household and three-year-old Zaide is pushing his food round his plate with a baby spoon. When he finally takes a mouthful, he howls that it's too hot and too spicy. Instantly the adults round the table – his "tummy mummy" Sabrina Morgan, his "mum" Kirsty Slack and his daddy, Kam Wong – jump up to help. It's a familiar scene to any of us who've had tears at the tea table. It's just in this case, three people have stepped up to the plate. It is utterly astonishing watching them, not because they are all gay and all devoted to their son – nothing new in that – but because they met on the internet in order to create him.
Sabrina wanted a baby, but was a single gay woman. Kam wanted a baby, but was – is – in love with Martin, a man who didn't want a child in his life 24/7. (Martin is very much part of Zaide's life now, though.) And Kirsty wanted a child, too, but didn't want to carry one. All of them were a piece short of the jigsaw. So while Sabrina and Kirsty met in the conventional way, Kam and Sabrina – Zaide's biological parents – went on to the internet to find each other with the sole intention of having a child. With Zaide about to turn four, in January they are going to try for a second child.
"Co-parenting" through the initial use of the internet – basically finding a parent online – is fast becoming a trend. The various introduction websites, operating just like internet dating sites, are reporting rocketing numbers of users, with London coming within the top three cities after New York and Los Angeles. Even for the most liberal, it takes a certain recalibration of ideas. Co-parenting is not only about the gay community wanting to experience parenthood: heterosexual men and women are also signing up to websites, mostly as a result of feeling that time is running out and that parenthood with a "co-parent" rather than a real "love" who may never materialise is better than no parenthood at all.
There's the obvious conservative what's-the-world-coming-to? reaction (and boy, did I get a lot of that while researching this piece). This is based on the idea that a child conceived not out of love or traditional togetherness, but out of the so-called "selfishness" of two otherwise unconnected parents, is somehow born into moral bankruptcy and therefore doomed.
As Sabrina says: "They think you're going to bring children into this warped world where there is no real love, no real morality, that it's not natural, not right – and then you say to them: 'Hang on a minute, you're divorced. What difference does it make? Just because we don't sleep with Kam, it doesn't mean we don't love and respect him as a man and as the father of our son.'"
There is also despair at the sociology of it: the skewed role the internet plays in our lives these days. Many of us work too hard, meet too few people, leave it late to have a family in the conventional way, look for love online, and now, as a natural consequence, we are looking for a "co-parent" online, too.
Isn't it all just a tragic consequence of alienation and loneliness?
And then there's the practical: how the hell do you choose a parent on the internet and then make it work through all the years of middle-of-the-night temperatures, and school plays at inconvenient times, and pickups and dentist's appointments and discipline issues and the money and the education and, frankly, the stress? It's bad enough choosing an au pair on Gumtree, when, after weeks of tedious trawling and due diligence, your wonderful "pick" is more Miss Trunchbull than Mary Poppins. Wouldn't the risk of hitching up with a psycho or Mr or Ms Weird, or a person who turns out – later on – to have a vile temper or a lousy romantic partner be less attractive than simply getting pregnant and going it alone? (Or in the case of a man, choosing a surrogate?)
The general rules of the business are these: always get to know your "co-parent" for at least a year before trying; go into family counselling or see a therapist together; draw up a parenting agreement (while not a legal document, it is helpful for a court were things to go wrong, and vital for addressing key issues such as health, education, money, discipline, name on the birth certificate); talk to a lawyer; integrate a potential co-parent into your wider circle of family and friends and meet theirs; be honest and upfront about your hopes and feelings. Always use artificial insemination and do so with a third party – either a GP or at a fertility clinic.
Kam, Sabrina and Kirsty have clear boundaries for their parenting agreement. Kam takes Zaide every other weekend, comes for dinner on a Wednesday, doesn't financially contribute to Zaide's life with his mothers but is responsible for saving for his education. The three are constantly in touch and admit that because of the six-year delay, by the time Zaide arrived they were already best friends. "I cried every month when I didn't get pregnant," says Sabrina. "I said to Kam: 'You don't have to stay on this journey with me,' but he never once abandoned me."
You could easily have chosen another more fertile woman, I say to Kam. After all, you weren't romantically invested in the partnership and you didn't "owe" her anything: "But she was the right one," he says simply, "and I wanted to stick with her." And then there came Kirsty, three years in to their co-parenting courtship: "I was worried I wouldn't fit into the picture," remembers Kirsty, "but when I met Kam I liked him immediately. We're very similar and now we often gang up on Sabrina!"
For most of their years of trying, they had used DIY insemination, with Kam turning up when required. It was an embarrassing palaver until they all got so used to the routine of it that they became blasé. But by 2009, when their first attempt at IVF was successful, Sabrina, Kirsty and Kam had the beginnings of their new and unusual family.
It's a blustery day in Soho when I meet Patrick Harrison, founder of PollenTree, one of the most successful British co-parenting sites. As we sip our orange juice in a hotel bar – much like, I imagine, how prospective co-parents would first meet – the irony is not lost on us that we are both deeply conventional in our own family set-ups while discussing others that are anything but.
Harrison, an ex-lawyer and web entrepreneur, along with his wife, also an ex-lawyer, got drawn into running a free co-parenting site two years ago after a single, middle-aged female friend desperate for a baby revealed she was going to attempt to get pregnant through casual sex. PollenTree started small, almost as an experiment, but grew so rapidly that Harrison and his wife can hardly keep up and will have to start charging at some point in order to keep improving the service. They currently have 8,500 registered with the site.
The site runs the whole gamut of introductions: co-parenting, egg donation, sperm donation – but it's the co-parenting that's growing the fastest. "We live in this urbanised society," says Harrison. "People are working long hours; the chances of meeting people are getting more limited. The dating apps are pretty shallow. We are surrounded by people and yet we are alone. That's what modern society is. Maybe it's because we are on the internet too much."
I raise an eyebrow. "Yes," he nods, realising why. "That's the irony of all ironies, isn't it?" The internet and our online-focused lives take away potential partners, only to source them for us again in some other form.
"If you have found somebody you love and you've had your kids, it's easy to take all that for granted. But a lot of people don't have that, and there are many reasons why people don't. You can't blame them. People say they find themselves in this situation because they have been doing things they feel they were supposed to do, like being good at their profession and contributing to society. Having a family gets put on the back burner."
PollenTree is big on protection: screening male profiles where there is no photograph and not much information and where there is a blanket targeting of random women (always a giveaway, apparently); deleting the profiles of very young women; monitoring activity. "People think the internet is anonymous," says Harrison, "but of course it isn't. I don't want to give away too much, but we have ways of making sure the site is safe."
According to Harrison, co-parenting must not be seen as the domain of the ageing female or the man who wants to spread his genes around: "The usual story for men," says Harrison, "is that they reach a point where they think: 'I have nothing to show for my life. I want a child; I want to be a dad.'"
This happened to Justin (not his real name), who, like Kam, is a gay professional in a civil partnership. His partner, like Kam's Martin, is supportive. Justin has waited a long time to find his co-parenting match. "Initially the response was a little disappointing," he remembers gloomily. "You think: 'Is it the way I look? Have I been too demanding?'" Knowing a bit about fertility, he stipulated that his potential co-parent must be no older than 38: "I was hedging my bets… You have no idea how other people will respond to you." One potential co- parent in her mid-30s admitted to having had anorexia, which he accepted, but then she went cold on him: "I think I was too full on."
After a rather solemn period when he was "disenfranchised" by the whole business of finding somebody, not to mention rather disheartened by the negative reactions of some of his most liberal friends when they heard what he was planning to embark on, he now thinks he might have found "the one". She is an academic in her 30s who is currently unattached. "We're looking to formally commit to each other, probably in the early part of 2014," he tells me. "After that we will set about composing a parenting agreement. Once that has been drawn up, probably in the second half of 2014, we'll set about trying for conception via artificial insemination each month."
As Justin takes me through his first "date" with his new potential co-parent, I can't help feeling appalled by the magnitude of what faces them. It reminds me of something Kirsty Slack said: "Imagine how much we must want this, to go through what we have to go through." In Justin's case, they had their first "date" at the V&A, both of them overwhelmed while simultaneously trying to appear interested in the artefacts. In the end Justin couldn't stand it and acknowledged the elephant in the room. Things became a little easier, but there were still embarrassing moments, such as when their salads were somehow served on the same plate and they sat, forced into unnatural intimacy, eating "like the dogs in Lady and The Tramp". But anyway, awkward start aside, it's looking hopeful.
"You do have to go on instinct," says Justin. "Nothing is guaranteed. That baby isn't here until it's here. One thing she said to me really made me think: 'We are going to be connected for the rest of our lives.'"
"The real issue of co-parenting is: 'Are the child's needs being met?'" says Dr Carol Burniston, a clinical child psychologist. "And whether," she continues, "amid all the cerebral activity of planning this child, you have actually taken into account a little person who may also have views, and that their views will need to be taken into consideration. There are babies born with far less planning. With divorced parenting, there can be quite a lot of animosity. Co-parenting can be a good thing as long as there is an acceptance that it's not just about the parents."
Around Kirsty and Sabrina's London flat there are photographs everywhere, all designed to give Zaide a sense of his own history. They laugh about how there has never been a cross word among them; how when Zaide needs to blow his nose, often all three of them will present him with a tissue; how Sabrina teases Kam for dressing Zaide in fleece; how Kam feels protective over Kirsty in her role as non-biological mum.
Zaide will start school next September: "When children are young, they think their lives are normal," says Dr Burniston. "When they get older, potentially there could be some bullying, but it's about how everybody handles it, and it is about the message they give the child. As long as that child is supported and that the teachers support the child, too."
There is little doubt that Zaide may encounter more prejudice than my little boy who is the same age, but looking at Zaide now, surrounded by all this love and commitment, there isn't any difference at all. And anyway, when it works as well as this, what's wrong with difference?
"I think all three of us understand that we're not expecting to walk into the world and find that everybody is going to go: 'Wey hey, look at that great family!'" says Sabrina, "but we do want to be respected." Her eyes fill with tears. They tip down on to her cheeks. "I can't believe we have been so lucky," she says. "I'm just so proud of us all that we are making it work."