Forever Dads

Tony Zimbardi-LeMons

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Forever Dads

Tony Zimbardi-LeMons

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Forever Dads: Forever Dads: Forever Dads: Forever Dads: A Gay Couple’s JourneyA Gay Couple’s JourneyA Gay Couple’s JourneyA Gay Couple’s Journey

to Fatherhoodto Fatherhoodto Fatherhoodto Fatherhood

© 2010 Tony Zimbardi-LeMons © 2010 Cover Artwork by Dan Santiago © 2010 Cover Photo by David J. Dowling

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written

permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a

newspaper, magazine, or journal.

ISBN: 978-0-9830355-0-3

Creative House International Press, Inc. CreativeHousePress.com

Forever Dads

Tony Zimbardi-LeMons

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This book is dedicated to my husband, Antonio and our sons Erik and John, my fellow travelers on this journey. Together, the four of us made the dream of a forever

family, a reality. I love you all so very much.

Forever Dads

Tony Zimbardi-LeMons

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Grateful acknowledgment is made to my former editor at Frontiers Magazine, Korina Jochim for her support,

encouragement and incredible writing tips to a guy who had never put stories to paper before. Thank you!

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Introduction My Husband, Antonio Le Mons and I met when we were both just past forty. During one of our early dates we discussed the idea of having kids. We both shared that it had been a thought when we were younger men, but the timing had not been right and at this stage of the game, we were a little long in the tooth for fatherhood. But as they say, “Man plans; God laughs.” You’ll read in the opening essay, “The Conception,” how I now blame “Tivo,” that magical thing called a DVR for our current state of being, fatherhood. In one weekend Tivo had recorded three documentaries on gay parenting all by itself and our lives were never the same. I call that an ‘Angel moment.’ Speaking of Angels, right around the same time, I had been writing features (mostly pop-psychology articles) geared toward gay men for Frontiers Magazine distributed throughout northern and southern California while writing similar pieces for Genre, A&U: Arts & Understanding and other periodicals while maintaining a full time psychotherapy practice. Frontiers sent out a call to all its writers looking for someone to write an already named column for gay dads called ‘Bringing Up Gayby,” a take-off on the title of the old Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant classic, “Bringing Up Baby.” Antonio and I had just began our ‘parenting classes’ a requirement for Foster-Adoption here in the state of California and I jumped at the chance to tell our story from the very beginning. I was contacted by the

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woman who would become my editor, at Frontiers, Korina Jochim and a column was born which ran from the middle of 2006 until early 2009. Korina was instrumental in helping me set the tone of those early columns and in helping understand how to bring our story to life. Korina, I will be forever grateful. Gay men of my generation grew up never dreaming that either marriage or parenthood, the idea of a real, honest to God family, would be possible; so I don’t even think it ever crossed our minds. During my lifetime, the gay community has achieved incredible advances and I’m so grateful to have benefited from the LGBT heroes who paved the way for Antonio and I to have our ‘forever family.’ Therefore, I also dedicate this book to young gay men and lesbians today who have the option to begin dreaming and realizing right now, the creation of their own forever families.

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The Conception Last fall my partner Antonio and I got TiVo, and our lives have never been the same. We discovered that we can type in keywords like “gay” or “lesbian,” and it will search over 600 channels and record every bad gay movie, documentary, and sitcom ever conceived. One lazy October morning, we were hanging out in bed and clicked to the “Now Playing” list. We were surprised to find that three documentaries on gay parenting had been recorded. Two hours later, recovering from having wept our way through “Daddy and Papa”, the last of the three, I looked over at Antonio through puffy, swollen eyes and said, “I feel like Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire—those kids had me at ‘Papa.’” Antonio asked, “Are you trying to tell me we have something we need to discuss?” In Daddy and Papa all of the couples profiled happened to be interracial, like Antonio and me. And all of the adopted children in the documentary were little African-American boys, whose fate I viewed similarly to that of little girls in China: children whose futures are not highly valued by the larger culture. This also happened to be the week after the widely reported news story of George Bush’s ‘Drug Czar,’ Bill Bennett’s saying in an interview, “I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could … abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Between that story and our three

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documentaries, I think we both felt we wanted to make a difference. Now I have to confess, I’m not as altruistic as all of this sounds. Before I begin to share our journey to gay parenthood with you, I must also confess that I have been a man who never even really liked children; I had always felt that the closest I would ever get to being called “Daddy” would be by dating guys half my age once I hit 40. That never happened, but both Antonio and Daddy & Papa did. Two days after the documentary, we’re sitting down on the sofa in the den for our biweekly “relationship check-in,” which we have done since moving in together (what can I say, we’re both therapists—we talk everything through, and I mean everything). “You do know that this will change every aspect of our current lives?” Antonio asked. “ “Yes,” I replied. “You do know it’s going to cost a lot of money, conceivably reducing the amount of money we’ll have for fancy vacations and fine dining?” Again, yes. “What is your personal motivation for wanting to do this?” he asked. I looked him in the eye and said, “I love you, I have a great life, a great career, but I find I’m asking myself daily, ‘What am I going to do with the next 20 years of my life before

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retirement to give it some sense of meaning?’ I just feel in my heart that I’ve found the answer.” “Me, too,” he said, and then his eyes welled up a little, he took my hand, and he smiled right at me and asked, “So, how do we get this ball rolling?”