Lessons in Parenting From a Salmon
Why have kids, anyway? It’s a question that’s been on my mind as I get ready for yet another bout of fertility treatment. I’ve managed to log an impressive if doomed record of “trying”: two artificial inseminations, three rounds of IVF, 11 embryos, one pregnancy, one miscarriage, zero children. It’s strange that after all that, I still find myself gearing up for another round. I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand what is making me act in such an irrational way—squandering my energy and resources and seeking out physical and emotional risks for something that will likely never happen. But lately a couple books have helped me think about the pursuit of parenthood in new ways. It’s probably not an accident that they are written by queer or gay men whose path to parenthood has been similarly mediated by reproductive technology and defined by deferral. Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood is an utterly unique contribution to the often predictable genre of infertility and parenting lit. Written by Joseph Osmundson, a professor of microbiology, it begins with an immersive account of reproduction from the perspective of a female salmon. A salmon mother swims thousands of miles against the current to spawn, and then guards her nest until she dies. After her death, she nourishes her children with her decomposing body. Of her thousands of fertilized eggs, perhaps one or two, perhaps none, will survive to become adult fish capable of spawning the next generation. The whole system is bizarre enough to make IVF injections and egg donor ads seem normal. In Osmundson’s telling, it’s also beautiful—a fluid vision of “translucent tails and pink yolk sacs,” and a moving metaphor for maternal endurance and sustenance against the odds. “A mother doesn’t let her children go hungry,” he writes. “This is one way I’d like to be a mother.” Salmon reproduction provides a structure for Osmundson’s own “experiment in queer parenthood,” from his lifelong yearnings for pregnancy to his life-changing journey through sperm donation, embryo creation, and family reimagining with two lesbian friends. His story is told in four parts—“Fry,” “Salt Water,” “Humpy,” and “Hatch”—that map his life onto stages of a salmon life cycle. (A fry is a young salmon that has just emerged from its nest—hence the phrase small fry. Humpy is a nickname for a male pink salmon; they develop a small hump during their spawning migration.)This whole-life-cycle framing allows Osmundson to take a capacious perspective on the conception and care of progeny, seeing it not simply as an adult rite of passage but as a life-defining desire that begins in childhood and continues far beyond the limits of legal or literal parenthood. The awe-inspiring reproductive drive of the salmon also allows him to express an unapologetic urgency about procreation that cuts through common clichés and ambivalences about when, whether, or how to have kids. “We are human animals,” he writes. “The purpose of an animal is to mate and make more animals. If biology has desire, this is its root.… We human animals render things so complicated; we hide desires even from ourselves.”This is not to say that the desire to be a parent is universal—it clearly is not—or that the human complications aren’t real. Osmundson writes about them with palpable poignancy. In addition to dealing with the particular challenges facing queer people who want to procreate, Osmundson faces some systemic struggles common to millions of potential parents, regardless of their sexuality. His list of difficulties includes “money, my lack of a uterus, the ethics of surrogacy, the adoption-industrial complex.… I don’t own a home … my car is a two-door … climate change and American politics have only gotten worse; did you know adoptions can cost $100,000 out of pocket?” Osmundson and his friends make a plan in which he will provide sperm, one woman will provide an egg, her partner will carry the baby, and they will all share the parenting. It’s not a simple scenario, and they face the further complexities of figuring out the role of genes and culture in an interracial family (Osmundson is white, while one of his potential co-parents is Indonesian), as well as the uncertainties of building a family in which two parents are romantic partners and one is not. The stakes of working it all out are high. Osmundson feels like it might be his only chance at parenthood; he can’t afford to have a child on his own. Spawning Season is, among other things, a deeply personal exploration of “situational infertility,” the voluntary or involuntary lack of children due to external factors. Whatever the various causes of our plummeting birth rate, the crushing costs of parenthood are clearly not helping. Neither is the bleakness of the political landscape, as the U.S. government makes reproductive health care more dangerous and queer families more precarious, defunds education and childcare at home, and bombs children abroad. In some ways, the situationally infertile are not so different from endangered salmon whose reproductive efforts are thwarted by dammed rivers or warming oceans. Osmundson takes a wild narrative risk that allows him to express lyrical tenderness, protectiveness, laughter, hope, and loss—a full range of parental feeling.It’s rare to read a well-researched nonfiction narrative that blends fascinating specialized knowledge with sharp political critique and a moving, gripping personal story. It’s even more rare to read one that is unafraid to move beyond nonfiction into the realm of fantasy. “Critical fabulation” is a technique used by scholars like Saidiya Hartman to flesh out historical narratives where the surviving records fail us, imagining the experience or interiority of people whose lives have been lost to time. Osmundson experiments instead with a kind of “uncritical fabulation,” giving himself permission to conjure up an imaginary fish-child friend called Fry—a dream child hovering somewhere between potential and real, salmon and human, who expands the narrative into what-might-have-been or what-might-be, alongside what is and was.Fry first appears a few pages into the book and recurs throughout, a daughter figure whom Osmundson longs for, cares for, talks with, carries in a Ziploc bag full of water, introduces to some of his trusted friends, and goes to the beach with. Sharing Fry with us is a wild narrative risk that pays off, allowing him to express lyrical tenderness, protectiveness, laughter, hope, and loss—a full range of parental feeling—even and especially when suspense is submerged in heartbreak and it looks like his real-world child will never actually come to be. If Spawning Season dramatizes the near-impossibility of parenthood in a world of material limitations, the biographer Brad Gooch’s Good Morning Moon conjures an enchanted world seemingly free of constraints. It is a memoir of gay fatherhood infused with children’s literature that sometimes reads like a “happily ever after” fairy tale, with any shadow of suspense dispelled at the beginning. Unlike Osmundson’s book, which keeps us wondering where his journey toward parenthood will end, Gooch informs us at the outset that he and his husband have two sons and are happy. The book is thus less a quest narrative than an ode to joy: “I’ve never believed all happy families were alike. I’ve been wanting … to voice our happiness.” The apt first epigraph, self-deprecating yet proud, is courtesy of Frank O’Hara: “Happiness, the least and best of human attainments.”Gooch and his husband, Paul, had children late, in their fifties and sixties. (I’m obviously delighted for them, but as a woman who is approaching my fertility clinic’s age cutoff, I couldn’t help remembering the time I saw a headline about a septuagenarian celebrity father and wailed to a friend, “I just want to have my first child before Mick Jagger has his ninth!”) Gooch was an only child from the midcentury suburbs, emotionally distant from his parents. For him, as for many in his generation, being gay meant leaving traditional family decisively behind to live a nontraditional life in the city. Marriage and children were not legally options for most of his adult life, and would not have been appealing to him even if they were. Paul, 12 years younger and a Baptist minister, was close to his large and lively family of origin and interested in building a family of his own.Eventually, after over a decade together, the couple decided to have children via a Stanford-educated egg donor and two decidedly non-Stanford-educated surrogates. Osmundson wrestles with the ethical complexities involved in assisted reproductive technology, and surrogacy can be especially fraught, as relatively wealthy parents pay poorer women to provide an immense, intimate, and dangerous service. But Gooch and his husband were able to move beyond what Gooch calls the “moral awkwardness” of surrogacy by focusing on the undeniable rightness of the children who result from it, encouraged by the experience of friends who had already been through the process: “Paul excised those doubts decisively on the afternoon we left the playground where my friend’s son was playing. ‘If you look at him, you could never think that this was anything but right,’ he said, truly articulating the nub.”In a way, the entire book is devoted to articulating the doubt-defying truth of the rightness of children, especially his own. Gooch’s sons, Walter and Glenn, are lovingly evoked, a study in contrasts as siblings inevitably are, Walter suffused with the meditative spirituality of Rumi (about whom Brad was writing when he arrived) and Glenn with the lively spirit of Keith Haring (Gooch dedicated his biography of Haring to him). Gooch revels in the gentle gifts of being the quieter, older, “indoor” parent—the father mostly likely to read with his sons or console them in the wake of bad dreams. Meanwhile Paul is the comparatively youthfully exuberant “outdoor” parent, swinging his sons up on his shoulders or challenging them to a game of paddle tennis. Both fathers are doting and devoted. When Walter asks Gooch, “What is the biggest thing that happened to you in your life?” the answer is obvious: “Having you kids.”Osmundson brings soup to a friend who has just given birth, and reflects, “Everyone belonged to everyone.… There are many ways to have a child together.” At times, some of the privileged parenting problems in the book are hard to empathize with—for example when Gooch writes about the stresses that come with having two full-time nannies—and I wish that the women who carried and helped to raise the boys were depicted more fully. But overall I was enthralled by the literary snapshot of “Papa Paul, Walter, Glenn, Dad Brad.” Gooch’s ode to his family is irresistibly bright.Happiness is satisfying but can be narratively flat. Good Morning Moon avoids this problem with an unexpected swerve: Like countless twenty-first-century Americans, Gooch takes a DNA test and discovers that his family of origin is not what he thought it was. His discovery has implications beyond the personal, reminding us that even the most hyper-conventional, heteronormative families are far from straightforward. As Stephanie Coontz argued in The Way We Never Were, the much-revered and reviled 1950s-style “traditional family” barely if ever existed. Perhaps every family is nontraditional in its own way.At the end of Spawning Season, Osmundson calls us to think about having children beyond the narrow bounds of the nuclear family. He brings soup to a friend who has just given birth, then sits with her and her partner and their baby and reflects, “Everyone belonged to everyone.… There are many ways to have a child together.” His vision reminded me of the ubiquitous James Baldwin quote that “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.” Baldwin, the eldest child of nine, who carried his baby siblings on his hip, wrote a book for his nephew, and advocated for millions of children he never met, lived out this principle. I’m not sure what my future holds, but especially in this celebratory season of Father’s Day and Pride, this is the version of family I’m holding close.