Online since June 1997!

The Fathers that Bind

29-Jul-03 -- I had advertised for the extra room I have to rent in my apartment in Park Slope, a gay-friendly and particularly child-friendly area of Brooklyn.  As always, I advertise that I'm a gay father with a child.  A young man, Darren, is starting work as a teaching fellow here in New York City.  He emailed me that while he is not gay, he is the son of a gay father, and that he was interested in seeing the room in any event.  When we met we talked about his being from the Northwest.  I thought of a few of gay dad couples that I had met over the years from the Seattle area, both of which I knew lived in the Seattle suburb of Redmond.  Having never been to Redmond or Seattle, I thought this was such a coincidence last year when I met the couple with two daughters in Provincetown for Family Week, that I had tried to put them in touch with each other. 

As Darren was telling me his father and his father's partner lived "sort of east" of Seattle the word "Redmond" was forming at his lips and I asked if he knew Mark Neeley, a gay dad who I had met at my first gay parenting conference in Minneapolis in 1996.  Mark has three kids and was living in Virginia at the time that I met him.  He had brought his two sons to Minneapolis, as his daughter was just an infant at the time.  I even have footage of us together and our three kids playing lakeside in Minnesota after the conference was over.  Mark later moved to the Seattle area and now one of his sons is living with him and his partner. 

For some reason I remembered Mark telling me in chats and emails that his partner, Steve, had a son.  Darren of course was floored, as was I, when he told me that Mark was his father's partner!!  They have been together about five years!  So of course Darren knows all of Mark's kids in what is sort of a "Brady Bunch" of a family.  Mark's other son and daughter still live in Virginia with their mother most of the time, but they often go to Seattle and spend time with their father and his partner, including spending most summers there.

Apparently Steve, Mark's partner, had come out when Darren was about 16, and Darren, his father and Darren's sister are close.  Darren has family in the New York City area and the demand for teachers here was something that attracted him.  More coincidentally, Darren is a teaching fellow in a part of Brooklyn that a West Coast friend I met online is teaching in and that same neighborhood is where my daughter's mother lives.  My daughter is going into sixth grade, which is the grade that Darren is going to be teaching, but as I have primary custody of my daughter, she goes to school in my area.

Would more coincidences be possible?  Well, my father's ancestors are from the Washington/Oregon area, which is also where my daughter's mother's ancestors are from.  My ex-wife was the first interracially adopted person in the state of Oregon and Darren's sister is interracially adopted.

So of course I had Darren call his father and Mark to tell them that he was calling from my home and later I spoke to Mark about the incredible coincidences and we caught up on each other's lives.  It pays to stay in touch with people!