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The Idea of Co-parenting Emerges

  The idea of co-parenting had not occurred to me suddenly. There was no alternative-approach-to-parenting lightbulb that flicked on over my head one afternoon. However, settling on it as a serious consideration for my own life did emerge somewhat out of the blue, but I'll come to that later.  I was already familiar with the concept of co-parenting - two of my closest friends were co-parenting, one of whom I lived with, along with the child in question for half the week. I’d seen first hand how well it could work, how much more individual freedom the parents seemed to have than other parents I’d seen in more traditional set-ups. The difference was, those friends hadn’t planned on entering a co-parenting relationship in advance, it had happened in a far more unpredicted fashion. In my teens there hadn’t been a lot of consideration about parenting, I was still being parented myself at that age. By my twenties, in the noughties, I still didn’t feel like an adult to any great deg...
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First Test Results - January 2024

  The clinic rang me early the next day. As the phone vibrated my stomach dropped several inches and I felt blood swiftly vacating my head. Up until this moment I had felt perfectly relaxed. After all, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to have a baby, and this was just a routine test to see if it was even possible, but now, in this moment, it became clear that I’d been suppressing the truth of how significant this was. The course of my life was potentially going to be permanently altered by whatever the person on the other end of the line had to say. “Mr Greenwood? Is this a good time to speak?” “Hi, yes, yes it is”. Over the next 30 seconds he confirmed that my results were perfectly healthy and normal, in fact, I had slightly above average results. At the risk of sounding smug, my sperm count and their performance levels were putting many of my peers to shame. I knew my motivational words to the sample pot would do the trick. The man on the phone rattled through the results so q...
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The Semen Sample - January 2024

6.8 miles by bike feels like a bit of a chore at the best of times, but when it’s a drizzly January morning, this feeling is only enhanced. Especially when you’re fairly confident that the route through the outer reaches of Bristolian suburbia won’t exactly be a bucolic landscape to ride through. That said, I’d heard rumours that there was a Tesco Extra on-route which I could drop into on the way home, and who isn’t excited by those massive supermarkets, so big they include a mezzanine level for clothing? I had booked a semen test, the cheapest one I could find, a couple of weeks after Christmas. It was my first concrete step towards becoming a co-parent. All of my thoughts of potential fatherhood up to this point had felt somewhat academic until I knew whether I was physically capable of actually producing offspring. I felt relaxed about the concept of the test - ejaculating into a test tube wasn’t going to be an issue - not that it was a sexual fantasy of mine or anything, it just...
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Introduction to the blog

Hello.  This is a blog about my quest to become a platonic co-parent (aka an elective co-parent) with my friend, starting in the year 2024. It documents every step of the process, and is a mix of documentation of the events, and the feelings it conjured up. I started this blog for a couple of reasons. Firstly, when me and my friend first began discussing the idea of co-parenting together, I did some digging online in the hope of finding some guidance or advice from other people who had been through the co-parenting process. I couldn’t find any at all (admittedly I only spent about 45 minutes looking, before getting distracted by videos of people discovering old cars in garages on Youtube). This made me think that if we did go down this co-parenting path, I could document our experiences and maybe help out future prospective co-parents who were in my current situation. The second reason for starting this blog came hot on the heels of the first reason. What if the blog became an in...
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