Bob Collins
The concept of “family” is constantly changing and perhaps one day in the future the idea of a three-parent household won’t seem so exquisitely unusual.
But Zeke Hausfather and Avary Kent, and their friend David Jay are unusual, which is why they ended up on the public radio program, Here & Now today.
They are co-parenting Octavia, biologically born to Zeke and Avary, but they wanted their friend, David, to be a legal part of her upbringing.
“We knew as entrepreneurs and people who value our careers and multifaceted parts of our lives, that when we decided to have a child, that we would want support, and we would want to be part of a larger community in that effort — not only to help us, but also to help our daughter, or at that point future child, have access and exposure to lots of different points of view and lots of really incredible people that we know,” Avary said on the broadcast.
David wanted kids but his partner didn’t.
“And so what I said to her was, ‘Look, I am gonna find a way to have kids in my life,” he said. “If our relationship can be flexible, if we can each have the room to do what we need to do, then I’ll find a way to have kids in my life and you can make your own decision about whether or not you wanna have kids.’ And what we wound up realizing was, it makes a lot of sense for me to be a co-parent, and for her to be a person in the child’s life, but not to be primarily, you know, bottle-feeding at 4 a.m.”
They divide the night into two shifts. Avary and Zeke took one; David takes the other.
“So we get a lot better rested and we also get to spend a lot more time together as a couple. You know, in some ways I think it’s really good for our relationship,” Zeke says.
Third-parent adoption is legal in California.
“We are, as far as we know, the first set of parents to take advantage of this law which includes a straight couple, and definitely the first to include an asexual, but we know that what we are doing is not without legacy,” David wrote on Medium.com.
Octavia was born in late August.
He says it’s difficult juggling three sets of grandparents, but so far, they’re low on regrets.
