We met on Gaydar (remember that?) in 2009. I sent Aaron a funny emoji and a lovely online chat started between us. We were both living in Dublin at the time and decided to meet up for our first date that evening. Two days later Aaron asked me out - to this day he says I asked him out, but we both know the truth… Aaron asked!

Within 2 weeks, we were both aware that this relationship was growing into something special, but we both were afraid to say the ‘L word’ for fear of messing things up! Butterflies were a constant every time that we saw each other. Anyway, we eventually did find a way to get the L word out there and that changed everything.

We moved to Toronto, where we now live, in 2011. We come back to Ireland as much as we can, and really miss not being able to travel home these days. In 2016, we came back to Ireland to get married, surrounded by our friends and family. Ireland had just enacted the legislation that confirmed the result of the Marriage referendum and it really felt that we were part of something special, a new, open inclusive Ireland. We assumed that any legislation that was passed in relation to the referendum would cover any children we might have, sadly we were very wrong about that.

We first started to explore the idea of having children shortly after we moved to Canada. Here there are comprehensive laws that cover Assisted Human Reproduction. These include laws relating to surrogacy where the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in the journey i.e. the egg/sperm donor, the Intended Parents and the surrogate are defined. Canadian surrogacy laws allow for the parentage of the child to be dealt with before a child is conceived. Because of this, there is a strong, open, inclusive culture of altruistic surrogacy here in Canada.

We were pretty confident when we started our journey to parenthood that it would be smooth and relatively stress free. We were very wrong about that too. We ended up having two IVF based surrogacy journeys. Our first journey didn’t work out and we lost all of our embryos. To this day we don’t really know the exact reasons why this happened. Needless to say, we were devastated. Here we were an Irish couple, far from our family and home, trying to come to terms with our dream of parenthood being taken from us, before we even started.

Over the course of a couple of months we regrouped and found the energy to start a new IVF and surrogacy journey. On our second journey we met a woman who was willing to invest in our dream as much as we were. While we had a few medical bumps along the way, we now have 2 children thanks to her incredible unselfishness. Our children are a boy called Jake and his younger sister Abby, who was born in early 2020. Both are incredibly sociable children. They love life, especially when they are in a playground! Hearing them call us Dada (Jay) and Daddy (Aaron) is something special. Watching them figure the world out is also an incredible thing, they literally develop new skills everyday and being able to witness that is just fantastic.

In Canada, we live in a kind of bubble. We never have to question our status as a family. Society and our government have viewed us as the parents of our children from before they were born. We have never had to explain ourselves, fill in a ‘special’ form or get into a complicated explanation with some government official about our status as parents. We are ‘just’ parents. END OF.

Sadly Ireland treats us in a totally different way. We didn’t realise how different things were here until we applied for an Irish passport on behalf of our oldest child. Because Jake has 2 dads listed on the birth cert, the Irish passport office couldn’t process our application in the normal way. Lots of very private questions were asked about his genetic origins and why his mother wasn’t around to co-sign his passport application. We literally were stunned as we’d never had to deal with anything like. We eventually got his passport. However, our story, that of a simple application for a passport by the son of an Irish dad, literally made headlines in all the Irish newspapers and TV. Sadly, as nothing has changed in Ireland in the intervening period, there’s every chance that we will have to go through the exact same stuff when we come to renew his passport in a few years.

We would like to think that some day we would have the option to come back to Ireland. However, if we were to do that now, we would be relinquishing so many of the rights our family and our children have in Canada. That’s something we are not willing to do, so we’re staying put.