If you’re part of a two-mom family, like mine, that had kids through donor insemination, you may have had trouble finding books that explain to your young children how they came to be. A new Kickstarter project hopes to add to that small list.
In Zak’s Safari, by Christy Tyner, a young boy’s plan to take the reader on a safari is spoiled by rain, so he leads a tour of his family instead. Thus begins an age-appropriate explanation of his moms’ relationship, donor insemination, and what makes a family. My own 11-year-old donor-conceived son (my touchstone on kids books) really liked it, although he recognized that it’s meant for younger kids (roughly four to eight years old).
Zak tells us that his moms met, fell in love, and wanted to have a baby. To create a baby, he says, one needs two things: an egg and a sperm. Most women’s bodies make eggs, and most men’s bodies make sperm, he explains (“most” leaving room for cisgender people with fertility challenges as well as transgender people).
Families with a mom and a dad already have the egg and sperm, those with two dads have the sperm, and those with two moms have the eggs, Zak says. Two dads might “ask a friend for her help to make their baby,” he notes (though I wish he’d mentioned that a womb is a necessary third component). Two moms might ask a “special friend” to give them some of his sperm. His moms, in contrast, “got their sperm from a place called a sperm bank.” Many “really wonderful men” called donors give their sperm to the bank to help families like his. “I have a donor!” he says, and we can sense the exuberance in his voice.
He then tells us that a woman at the sperm bank helped his mothers look through a book to decide on a donor — not incorrect exactly, but old fashioned, as most sperm banks seem to use online databases these days.
Zak explains further that the sperm and egg carry “secret instructions” that indicate what the person will look like. His parents put the sperm into one mom’s body, and the sperm swam until it found the waiting egg. “Smart sperm, right?” he asks. [Update: Tyner tells me she’s reflected on that line after reading my review, and has removed it from the book.]
Hmm. Compare the explanation in Cory Silverberg’s all-inclusive What Makes a Baby
Still, I love the emphasis in Zak’s Safari that having a donor is a cool, positive thing, rather than the negative lack of a dad. We sense Zak’s self-confidence when he tells us he’s happy to have some of his donor’s “awesome” genes. If this focus on the positive things about having donor means stressing the sperm’s smarts here, I can live with it (assuming the child already knows from his moms that he gets good things from them, too).
The rest of the book shows us some of the everyday things they do as a family, from having dinner together to going on nature hikes. It reinforces the idea that love makes a family — and that we should celebrate both our similarities to and differences from other families. The book ends on an upbeat note, with the family enjoying themselves on a roller coaster, a metaphor for the adventure of family life. It’s a nice change from the sometimes saccharine endings of picture books about families.
Tyner herself lives with her wife and their two donor-conceived children in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a master’s degree in instructional design, and published her first book, Mama Midwife: A Birth Adventure
The illustrations, by Ciaee Ching, are both sweet and dynamic. In self-published books, the illustrations are often a weak point, but not so here. They’re equal to just about anything I’ve seen from major publishers. She’s drawn one mom as dark skinned and the other mom and son lighter, but not too pale, a reminder that our families do indeed come in many shades.
For two-mom families that used donor insemination, I prefer Zak’s Safari to the older Before You Were Born: Our Wish for a Baby, by Janice Grimes, which I mentioned back in 2006. Before You Were Born is actually a series of similar books for various family structures, including ones with two moms, two dads, single moms, and single dads, using donor sperm, donor eggs, donor embryos, frozen embryos, and surrogates. To keep costs low, the illustrations are the same for every book, showing a gender-neutral anthropomorphic bear as the parent, who tells the child about his/her conception and birth. While I understand the reason for the generic illustrations, they don’t work in harmony with the text as well as those of Zak. I also think kids will really like Zak’s kid’s-eye narration. Nevertheless, the range of family types covered in Grimes’ series is impressive, and worth checking out if one of them matches yours (or a friend’s). And Silverberg’s book remains the standard for an explanation of reproduction and family creation that leaves room for all genders and family types.
Read Zak’s Safari in full online during its Kickstarter campaign (through November), and back the campaign to help bring it to our shelves. It’s a worthwhile addition to the books for and about two-mom families, and deserves to make it to press.