Andi and John Gay Dads

Welcome to my diary of a gay dad. Just in case this is your first view to my blog, a small introduction for you. We are a family living life here in ‘The Shires’ of England. My name is Andi and my civil partner is John. We have five children between the ages of 4 and 7 years old.

We are pretty much like any other family really! For the fact that we are two men, that is irrelevant. We chose to become a family with the help of surrogacy. We looked at surrogacy at home, but decided to go abroad and use clinics in India, Thailand and finally Nepal on the roof of the world.

Given last minute changes (for us) in the surrogacy laws of India, Thailand and Nepal, we were among the very last people to go through this process in all three countries!

We were assisted in our plight with three different women who came forward to be our surrogates! They did need to prove to us that they were single and making this decision for themselves. This we requested so that we knew that any payments made to them were solely for them to help enrich and improve their own personal situations and that of their own immediate children / families. We found out later in our third pregnancy that the agency and clinic in Nepal had lied to us and that the surrogate (Susheila) was in fact married. That upset us as we did not know if her husband had in any way coerced her into this kind gesture purely for financial gain! Our egg donors were completely separate to our choice of surrogates!

Certain things we tried to control as best we could, other things just happened and our ability to control them was just not possible.

My book, telling our true life family saga called ‘Eighteen Moons’ tells the story of my eight months stranded alone in India with two small babies, up against the bureaucracy of both the Indian and UK authorities and then our five month struggle in Thailand after surrogacy had been criminalised and finally five months spent in Kathmandu, Nepal, waiting on UK passports, just post the devastating earthquake in 2015. Available on Amazon by simply searching Eighteen Moons.

As extraordinary as the story was, it is a 100% non fiction account of what my family went through to ultimately become the loving family that we are today!

My diary of a gay dad very much shows you who we are now and is also eighteen months in the making at this juncture, I can also add that my second book ‘Thirteen Moons More’ (an edit of this very diary blog) tells the story of our family life in that fledgling year, just before the three youngest of our crew joined their sisters at ‘Big School’. Also available on Amazon.

Our story continues as always here at andiwebb.net I thank you for reading!