Meet Gareth

Location: Brighton, UK

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Hello,
My name is Gareth. I live in Brighton which is on the south coast of England. I am 44 years old and work as a self employed community pharmacist.
My embryos will be created in June 2023 in Toronto and will all be gene tested.

Becoming a dad is so important to me.

Everyone has their own story and I will tell you mine. I won’t embellish the story to try win hearts or put a positive spin on it. I will just tell you the truth so you can see who I really am. Openness from the very start.

I grew up in Northern England amongst very beautiful meadows, woods and streams. I always had at least one pet golden retriever by my side but grew up an only child. My mother suffered postnatal depression, which she didn’t recover from, and as result she had no more children. My father worked a lot of long hours as an optician in the nearby towns and this meant he rarely was there for me. I think I got my emotions from my mother and my academic side from my father. Sadly this meant there was an imbalance in the household. However, even as a teenager, I dreamed of the life I would one day have if I stayed strong and worked hard and one day met the right guy and built a family of my own. I knew I was gay from about ten years old but with my parents being the way they were I consciously chose to not tell them while I still lived at home. I moved out, when I was eighteen years old, across the Irish Sea to Dublin. Here I got myself into Trinity College Medical School. In Dublin I experienced the start of my life finally when my first relationship there welcomed me into a very big Irish family. I experienced the warmth and love of many siblings, the love for their parents and spent a lot of time with all the grandchildren. Babysitting them, playing with them and going on lots of trips made me realise how much I enjoyed children in my life. Something I had never experienced before. I moved back to Brighton in the UK to finish off my studying in pharmacy and I am still good friends with my first long-term Irish partner. I met Barry, my second longterm boyfriend, a year later. Barry is from Thunder Bay in Canada.

I had a nanny when I was 7 years old. She entered my life just when I needed her and was like a big sister. She left to live in Canada after seven months and I visited her for a month when I was 9 years old and then again when I was 15. That is when I fell in love with Canada. Canadians are the best people in the world & I knew from then that was where my heart was and I do intend to emigrate to Canada eventually. Spending a lot of long weekends at her family’s log cabin on a lake in Ontario really let me find and ground myself. My best memories are making a raft with old plastic drums, learning to water ski, catching a 3 foot long pike and sitting around the campfire. Oh, and a group of bears surrounded the car when we went to the rubbish dump. Magical, magical memories.

So when I met Barry we did lots of trips to Canada together. We did separate about 7 years ago but we are still really good friends and support each other in every way possible. Barry is very excited about the journey I am embarking on and he would be the person I would trust most in this world with my kids.

My mother died in 2017 when the two large hurricanes hit the Caribbean. My parents emigrated there a few years after I left for Ireland. Her ashes presently sit next to me in a butterfly urn as I write this. I believe my parents gave up on the idea of grandchildren when I came out to them at 19 years old. It was something my father particularly struggled with and ultimately made us grow apart. Surrogacy was not something that was really an option back then and with my mother being particularly emotionally frail, I didn’t want to bring a child into that environment. I’m telling you this, because now, my paternal instincts are in overdrive. Since my mothers passing I now realise I can experience a loving parental-child relationship from a new perspective. The time wouldn’t have been right before now. I needed to find myself, build my “chosen” family and become financially secure.

The daily dream of becoming a father has made me remember all the wonderful positives of my childhood that I wished to share again. A spark of the process I hadn’t really known about. Laying in long grassy meadows and watching the clouds, walking miles along disused railways, building dams in the streams, camping amongst the hay bales, looking for caterpillars in the nettles while picking (and eating) wild blackberries and flying my flexifoil kite on really windy days on the high hill where I lived. These were as exciting to me then as they are to me now. I did them mostly on my own before, as my parents were distracted, but I cannot wait to do them with my kids and give them amazing memories of our time together.

My father’s side of the family are here in England and I visit them regularly. Christmas is the main time we all get together and chat. My cousins are now all having children too and are growing up loving the countryside like I did. When they see me, they can’t stop hugging me and wanting to sit on my knee. I think they might have overheard that I was looking at having my own kids because they kept poking my tummy and saying donut baby after I had eaten some Timbits (we just got Tim Hortons here!). I really, really am looking forward to the day I can actually tell all of them and get my family excited with the ultrasound scans.

I think my kids will be empathic, intelligent and kind as I am pretty sure these are qualities they will pick up from myself. The adventures and experiences I will take us on will make them realise how to love everyone for who they are regardless of their ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, social backgrounds etc.

My choice for schooling would be for them to attend a public school (not a private school like I went to). This way they will meet the whole cross section of society and realise how they fit into the world. If they need any extra schooling then I am pretty sure I can help in that department or get them an after school tutor. But, for me, the welfare of my kids is absolutely paramount. I feel the child being seen daily by teachers at a public school would ensure they are being monitored for their wellbeing. The same goes for the child’s healthcare. I will have an emergency backup private plan for us but the National Health Service (free health service) in the UK is amazing and my kids physical and emotional health would be looked after. I do not feel private doctors protected me as a child and as a result I want my kids to be visibly part of the system (something I wasn’t).

The last few places in the world I wish to visit such as Australia, New Zealand, China, Western Canada and the west coast of America are places I wish to visit with my kids. Every year since I have been 8 years old I have travelled. Mainly to the USA, Caribbean, Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany, Andorra, Italy, Monaco, Sri Lanka, Thailand the Netherlands and especially cruises! I think a regular summer drive down to EuroDisney in Paris will become a tradition for us. I always wanted to do the Disney cruise too!

Pets will be an integral part of our family too. Currently I share a cat with Barry. I had three golden retrievers growing up and I think it would be so important for my kids to love animals and see them for having beautiful souls too. Once I find that someone who can help me start my family and I am walking down Brighton seafront with kids by my side, or being carried, I think a goldendoodle will also be on my vision board.

About me:
I absolutely love Sci-fi, especially StarTrek with its positive messages and role models.
On my days off in Summer I spend all my time gardening and enjoying the long warm nights amongst the vegetables and fruits I grow. During the winter months I experiment with new cooking and baking recipes.
I have always been very conscious of looking after the planet. To complement my solar panels, ground source heat pump and grey water recycling system I just installed a Tesla battery to try make my home totally self sufficient. I have done this as I want to leave a better world for the future generations.
Musically, I sing a lot as I am in a lot of local musical theatre productions and there’s always something playing in the background. I have started to appreciate other genres such as opera too and my favourite singer is Alfie Boe (maybe not as popular in Canada yet).
I am very D.I.Y. savvy being able to see it all in my head first. A task would have to be a very skilled one for me to employ someone else to do it.
I am also a qualified fitness instructor, pilates instructor and Reiki masseur and regularly practice mindfulness and meditation to ground myself into the “now” (either breathing, writing things down or listening to depths of sounds around me).

So for me, when I become a dad, the best really is to come. My journey is all fired up and ready to start. I did have both an egg donor and a surrogate but sadly due to medical reasons they both could not proceed. This really was a blow to me, one after the other, and I went through the same range of emotions and recovery I think would be felt in a miscarriage when you’ve dreamt of the baby and suddenly it all changes. I have a gap in my life now that will only be filled with the joy of children.

So for now, just for now, I try to keep my heart controlled, until my embryos once again grow and I get to meet them.

I am hoping to meet a surrogate who would welcome really good communication from the very start and would be open to contact and updates throughout the child’s life. Ideally being a friend to us both for life.

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