Having a Baby with My Gay Best Friend – WWYD?

[pehkis]

Hi all,

Long-time lurker, first-time poster – be gentle!

I’m in my mid-30s, single, and have always wanted to be a mum. My best friend (let’s call him J) is gay, also single, and has always wanted to be a dad. We’ve been friends since uni, practically family at this point, and recently we started seriously discussing co-parenting.

We’re both financially stable, live in the same city, and have very similar parenting values. We’d do 50/50 custody, raise the baby together but in separate homes, and aim for a really amicable, supportive co-parenting relationship. We wouldn’t be romantically involved (obviously), but we’re incredibly close, trust each other completely, and neither of us wants to wait around hoping to meet ‘the one’ just to start a family.

Has anyone done this? Any co-parenting experiences, good or bad? Am I being naïve thinking this could work without a partner in the traditional sense? Also, any practical/legal considerations I should be thinking about?

Would love to hear thoughts – handhold and tough love both welcome!

I'm talking about very traditional societies where these things have been going on for thousands of years. Not "mums parking their babies at nursery to go back to work in the City". Subsistence farmers.

I find this thread so depressing and unimaginative. I mentioned upthread that I know a family with this arrangement or very similar. I don't at all think my children have an inherently better family set up, though it's more traditional. Dd's friend has four involved parents negotiating life in her best interests, and grandparents, aunts/uncles too. Yes she has two homes but I see none of this "splitting her life" angst. She is a teenager now and does seem to spend a lot of time at her dad's but there's no angst about that like there might be with an e - it's like she's popped round to grandma's or other neutral place. I do think you need a lot of ground rules in place but that's easier to navigate from a neutral starting point. Collective mumsnet wisdom used to be that it was not divorce that damaged children but acrimony. Now there seems to be a campaign against 50-50 set ups but without much science behind it as far as I can see. OK you might need special arrangements in the newborn phase but that doesn't seem to be a reason to ditch the whole idea. Lots of parents are doing shared parental leave now. It's only one pov that primary carer is best.

How would it work if either of you met someone and wanted to move, or got a great job opportunity and had to move, or wanted to move closer to family? Or one can afford to move closer to a better school? You wouldn't be able to do that and neither would your friend unless either of you were happy to not see your child much.

Also if neither of you could live together and have different lifestyles - will it bug you if he raises the child to be super tidy like him and your child then prefers his neat home to your cluttered one? Or if he meets a partner and can afford a better lifestyle for your child - and your child prefers their home, or their partner? Or likewise with you? What happens if one of you meets a partner and has a second child and the other doesn't? If you don't like their partner who'll also have your child 50:50.

Being friends doesn't translate to being great coparents particularly if you don't have many similarities or shared values for raising a child. Which neither of you would know until baby as you'll never live together.

These are things you can't control when you have a baby in a relationship that doesn't work out. But to choose it voluntarily needs to be a more carefully considered decision. It's not just the legal aspects, it's the emotional aspects as friendship isn't terribly binding or long lasting but a baby is.

Longest lurker ever I don’t think I’m unimaginative, I grew up having to move between two homes, often when I just wanted to curl up in one and definitely didn’t want to be moved. Maybe it depends on the child’s personality but from my own first hand experience, despite having committed, loving parents, who tried really hard, I didn’t really feel settled at either and was always counting down to the next handover.

What age were you when this happened or were you born into it like the poster is suggesting?
Just wondering if this makes any difference

When would you intend 50/50 between parents/homes to start?

Are you aware of the "fourth trimester" (the period after birth where the newborn instinctively needs to be with mother, usually around 3 months)? Do you wish to breastfeed? These things would make 50/50 residency really difficult from the start... not to mention, as others have said, how you will feel emotionally (in part driven by hormones) if you are away from your newborn 50% of the time. I didn't leave my first child overnight (through choice) until he was over 12 months old.

How much scope would there be to change the 50/50 plan in the early days if you found you couldn't tolerate leaving your baby? I'd worry that it would be a potential recipe for post natal depression and/or relationship breakdown.

Do you intend to return to work full or part time after maternity leave? And what happens if you find you struggle to leave your child (or indeed, if you had to work part time due to your child having unexpected additional needs down the line)... would your friend pay some expenses/maintenance if you went part time? And/or (just realised I should be fair with the hypotheticals here!) would you contribute if your friend dropped his hours?

Aside from the above concerns... as long as you are going into it with your eyes wide open from all perspectives (legal, financial, trust, friendship) I think I'd be open to the idea... but you do need to be really, brutally honest with yourselves and each other about how you see everything working. This will sound horribly patronising, but I'll say it anyway... the idea of a baby can be a rose tinted romantic idea, but the reality is unpredictable, truly hard work and something that tests the very best of relationships... of course there are positives too, however you need a plan for dealing with the negatives/difficult stuff in order to truly make the most of the positives. You'll have 18+ years of being tied to/committed to a relationship in some form with your friend, so much easier to talk frankly now (even if it causes some friction) than go into this blindly and have a huge breakdown further down the line.

In those societies babies are habitually carried in wraps, though, they stay with the mother and are fed on demand. The wrap allows her to work while being with the baby. Older babies, starting to be mobile and to take solid food, yes you’re right, but the mother and breastfed dependent baby are a dyad in almost all societies (ours probably less than nearly every other, especially in the US where the maternity leave is so woeful).

It’s hardly ideal though is it? It’s all about the adults wants though.

All births are about the adults" wants unless you consider unplanned pregnancy a more desirable starting point. I do think you need a rock solid plan and a commitment as firm as marriage, but without the romantic aspects. As for 2 homes though, I dunno, I just can't see it as a deal breaker, but i am envisaging them very close by. Plenty of people have something about their home circumstances and imagine how their lives might have been different but parents don't often rule themselves out of parenthood on the back of it. I think you have to look at the whole package and decide honestly if it's a good environment for child rearing. I also think people dismissing marriage breakdown etc as "at least they didn't intend it" as weird. You knew it was a statistical possibility, not that remote, but hoped for the best. That's what we all do.

Not always - I've lived and worked in a society where even quite young babies are babysat in the house, not the fields.

YY.

I didn't have time to post properly earlier, but for lots of human history, wetnursing and the nursing of multiple children by multiple mothers, has been really common. People do it so they can get back to work. People do it because mothers die (and for most of human history, death during childbirth is common).

It is really important for infants to bond securely with people. It is not crucial for that person to be the birth mother.

Of course it's important for the OP to think about the practicalities of what she's doing and about her emotions. But an awful lot of this thread is really insultingly rude and if I were her, I would be feeling absolutely terrible by now. I do think it is actively cruel - it's well over the line from 'genuine concern about a potential child' and into 'I'm going to make someone feel bad because I've forgotten there's a human being reading these posts'.

I think yes it will work but you'll have to reconsider living arrangements.

You'd need a pair of houses both terrace or semi detached and an open door internally between them.

If you are going to put a child through 50/50 it has to be as easy as possible.

The other thing you can do is nesting and the child has a main home and you and your friend come and live in the child's home 50/50.

Otherwise no.

I'd look into how this would psychologically affect your child. This also seems to be for selfish reasons too. You're doing it because YOU want a child, not because it'd be best for the child. You'd be starting off on the back foot.
Everyone knows that the best environment for a child is living in the same house with two parents who are in a loving relationship.

'Randomers' who have successfully done it themselves

Well of course they're going to say that their decisions haven't fucked up their children, aren't they? It's the children's feelings about this sort of set-up which are relevant.

It's the children's feelings about this sort of set-up which are relevant.

It is. But you have no idea what those are, or what those might be so I'm not sure why you're trying so hard to make out this is going to traumatise this child so much