Meet Our Intended Parents
Meet Josh & Adonis
Location: Montreal. QC
We are a married gay couple living in Montreal, Quebec. Josh is originally from Indiana in the US and Adonis is from Cuba. We’ve both been Canadian citizens for many years. We met in Montreal, where we own a home. We’ve managed to a have house with a backyard in a family-friendly neighbourhood and to create a good environment to welcome a child.We have been together for four years and wanted to ensure our relationship was really solid before approaching the process of having a child. We can say with confidence have a very strong, deep bond that has gotten us through many hard and joyous times together and we know we will be good parents. We have dreamed of having a child together for at least 4 years, and for many more years before that individually, but it wasn’t until the last year that we had the home, financial means as well as career and location stability for it to be possible.
Our jobs: Josh is a linguist working for a First Nations (Native American) community whose language he learned, making dictionaries and language resources for purposes of language preservation and teaching. Adonis is working for Sleep Country Canada (Dormez-Vous) selling beds and mattresses and such items. Josh’s dad is now 85 and as an American he is allowed to stay with us most of the year. Adonis’s family is in Cuba except one niece or made it to Florida.
Surrogate Relationship: When we imagine the relationship with our Surrogate, we imagine a relationship like a friendship, someone we can call and talk with regularly and exchange our feelings and experiences, during and after the surrogacy process. We have had a very positive relationship with our wonderful egg donor, whom Josh met in person, and the woman who helps us create a family will forever hold a place of honour in our hearts. After the birth of our child, we hope to stay in touch. We hope to nourish a friendship with our surrogate. We don’t speak to our friends every day but we keep in touch with them regularly and tell each other about the important events in our lives. Friendship is not something that can be forced; it has to evolve naturally, but it is our strong hope that a friendship will be born of this process along with the baby. But we also respect if you want to maintain a healthy distance. It’s the personal choice of the surrogate.
Support After Birth: When this baby is born, our plans are that Josh will take at least a year off work and take care of the baby. As of 2024 in Quebec, if there are two dads, one will be entitled to the same parental leave as a mother (about 50 weeks) and the other will have 5 weeks (like any other father under Quebec law), and there are about 20 weeks that are classified as “parental”—they can be divided between both parents as they see fit. Josh’s career as a linguist who works primarily at home is more amenable to allowing this kind of break, but both of us will have significant time off to spend with the baby. We will also have Josh’s dad and numerous close friends who are parents who live on our street who can help us.
You may want some more information about us, in terms of who we are and our personalities and so forth. There is a lot we can say, but here are a few more notes about us:
Hobbies, Interests and Personality: In terms of our hobbies and interests, we both love cooking, but different things. Adonis makes Cuban classics like fricasé, arroz congri and ropa vieja. Josh makes a range of North American dishes like stews, roast cabbage and sausage, Cajun/New Orleans food, and a lot of Italian recipes. Josh often cooks using a collection of handwritten recipes his mother left him. We also love travelling, camping, enjoying the nature that Canada offers, kayaking and hiking. Josh has a sailing license and loves being on the water and in nature. We are active, fun-loving people. We also have a lot of humour in our house. Adonis is very funny and likes more sweet and silly jokes and irony. Neither Josh nor Adonis has a mean sense of humour, but Josh is more deadpan.
Movies/TV Shows: As for movies and series we like, Adonis likes action and romantic comedy movies, not so much drama. For example, he recently watched The Lost City with Sandra Bullock, The Greatest Showman (which Adonis loved for the songs and the struggle of the characters), Spanish comedies with Carmen Machi such as Honeymoon with my Mother, Emily in Paris, Manifest, Money Heist, The Lincoln Lawyer and Cuban movies like Un Rey en la Habana (a King in Habana) and Habana Blues. Josh likes a lot of history and drama movies, and European movies. Some movies and series he likes are Prime Suspect, Downton Abbey, Bloodline, Babylon Berlin. When he was a child he loved Labyrinth, the Muppets and all the classic 80s and 90s shows.
Reading and visual arts: Josh is the one most into reading books, although we read together sometimes. Josh’s mother was an English major and his dad is a journalist and public fiction writer, and Josh did a BA in French literature, so our house is full of many of the classics of American, British and French literature, with a focus on 18th, 19th and early 20th century classics. He also reads traditional Dene stories in the original language. We have read some Cuban literature. We love the theatre in all three languages and regularly go to festivals and live shows. We are friends with a Quebec film actress who lives across the street and invites us to viewings of her movies.
Languages: We speak English, French, Spanish and Denesųłiné (Josh only), a First Nations language from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and NWT) as well as Italian. We actively maintain the first four every day. Josh speaks English and Denesųłiné for his job as a linguist working for a First Nation; Adonis and Josh speak French in social and other interactions in Montreal, and we mostly speak English and Spanish at home. We look forward to our child being at least trilingual: bilingual at home learning his or her English and Cuban heritage while learning French in school as the language of instruction, and having in-depth knowledge of First Nations history and perspectives, and hopefully some Dene language. Canada is a culturally rich and complex country between Anglophone, Francophone, First Nations and immigrant perspectives, and we hope to give our child some empathy and interest into all of these perspectives.
Letter To Future Surrogate
If you are reading this it is because you are considering being a surrogate. First of all we would like to say that your gift has the potential to change our lives completely. Thank you for being a surrogate. We reached this process after a long journey of getting ready to be parents. We are a gay couple living in Montreal, Quebec, but we came from very different places. Josh came of age in the late 90s/early 2000s in small-town Indiana, from a loving family but in a place where he didn’t have equal rights or safety as a gay man (things had yet to change in the US). He studied French and decided to immigrate to Montreal, Quebec. Besides having more personal freedom, Josh was drawn Canada because of his love of nature, camping, hiking, etc., and linguistics, both French and First Nations languages, which he studied there. Adonis was born and raised in Santa Clara, Cuba, and came to Canada to find the freedom and economic possibility to build a decent life. Having came of age in Cuba’s “special period”, a time of intense deprivation in the 1990s when even finding food was hard, it was difficult to dream of anything, let alone becoming a gay dad. For years after arriving in Canada, Adonis sent money to Cuba to pay for a live-in-caregiver for his grandmother, who passed away at age 104, and for his sister and nieces’ food security, so it was hard to build a lot of savings in Canada. Slowly we studied, built careers and gained economic stability. We met and fell in love in Montreal. Josh is a linguist working for a First Nations community whose language he learned, making dictionaries and language resources for purposes of language preservation and teaching. Adonis works for Sleep Country Canada (Dormez-Vous) selling beds and mattresses. Josh’s dad, his last living relative since he is an only child, is now 85 and lives with us most of the year. Adonis’s family is mostly in Cuba except for one niece in Florida. We always wanted to have a child together. For us, the pinnacle of happiness is those happy everyday family moments such as parents and their child enjoy: cooking together, watching a silly kids’ movie or walking around a park looking at trees and animals. But we never allowed ourselves to seriously dream of a surrogacy journey because it was cost prohibitive. Finally in recent years we were able to buy a house with a backyard in a family-friendly neighbourhood and have created a good environment to welcome a child, and it has at last become economically feasible to do this. So here we are, pursuing our chance at being dads at ages 42 and 45 respectively, a bit later than we hoped but still with lots of energy. We would be greatly honoured if you would give us the gift of being our surrogate to give us a chance at building a family. Thank you for considering us. In love and hope, Josh & Adonis.
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