"When you see the children smile, everything takes on a whole new dimension," says Michal. He and his partner Vladimír are raising two sons and a daughter
Let me start by asking, how long have you been together?
Vláďa: 11 years and we have known each other pretty well for that time.
Michal: We've had our share of crises, but that doesn't happen anymore. It hasn't happened for a long time before the kids. Before our first daughter Eliska came into the world, we were focused on work and on ourselves, but once we started having a family, everything changed. Unnecessary conflicts and worries were completely eliminated.
Is it true that an 11-year relationship doesn't last on its own, you both had to and still have to work hard at it?
Michal: Yes, but as I said, we had one major crisis after three years, which we somehow overcame and then there were no more deep crises. Sometimes we got caught up in something, but mostly it was things around our business together.
Vlad: We're still pursuing our dreams and that's somehow fulfilling and building our relationship. We still have goals that we're both looking forward to and that's how we move our relationship forward so it's not boring and stereotypical, which is a relationship killer.
Why do you think there are all sorts of prejudices about gay men in the form that their relationships don't last, that gay men are fickle and promiscuous, etc.? Do you have a secret recipe for a happy relationship?
Michal: First of all, as a gay community we judge ourselves unnecessarily too critically. Yes, there are definitely people who are fickle and have changed a bunch of partners, but on the other hand, look at straight men. I have a lot of friends who are in their 40s who don't have a family, a relationship, have changed 50 partners and no one judges them, whereas in our community it's talked about as some kind of rule. I think in every community there are people like that and poppies, and maybe in our community people like us aren't seen as much, but we have a lot of people like that around us. They just don't show up anywhere and they're not even on social media. Yet they have long term relationships and are wonderful people who would be the envy of any heterosexual couple.
Michal: If I had to pick out a few pieces of advice, I would say tolerance is definitely important, meaning that people should respect each other's needs and interests in some way. We met Vlada when he was 19 years old. I'm 13 years older, so I went into this with the idea that I'm starting with a guy who is somehow unrebelieving and anything can happen and it will depend on what his head allows him to do. It worked. We all just work with who we are and I don't think our community should be unnecessarily stigmatized by being somehow inferior.
Exactly. Gay couples in love who have long-term relationships tend to be more closeted. Those couples where it doesn't work out usually have a need to show themselves.
Michal: It's the same with children. A lot of people are writing to us in the context of what's been happening in the House now, saying that we're setting an example and that it doesn't work so well for heterosexual families either. I have to laugh at that. Generally, there are just families where it works better and where it works worse. No one can say that if one heterosexual family with children works great, the other one will work too, and the same cannot be said for us. There's no point in generalizing. Everyone is somehow and everywhere they work somehow. Nowhere is it guaranteed that the two won't break up and the child won't stay in some in-between world. Even more so, I think it's wrong that same-sex parenting isn't legislated because God forbid we break up. In that case, there are no legal means in the Czech Republic to deal with what happens to the children. Everyone is left with biological children and the family is torn apart, whereas if we were to function in a normal marriage, there are some obligations we have to each other and to the children.
With three children, their lives have changed dramatically, but they both experience incredible joyPhoto: Foto: se souhlasem Juana Calderóna
After how long of a relationship did you start thinking about having children?
Vláďa: It was about three years after the beginning of our relationship. I pushed it a lot in the beginning because I am a trained teacher and I love children. I have a sister 10 years younger than me, so I spent my whole childhood with her. But in this respect, the Czech Republic was not a very smooth road at all, but about five years ago, we came across the Vaníček boys (Dva Tátové, ed.) and the whole thing took off.
Michal: When Vláďa started talking about children shortly after the beginning of our relationship, I didn't take it too seriously considering his age, but I was happy to have such a person next to me because I thought it would be nice to have a family one day. After that we started doing business together, traveling a lot and it faded into other activities and responsibilities. After about five years, the subject came up again and we were still a bit floundering and not sure what path to take. We had friends who offered, but we turned that down. We also had a bunch of lesbians that we could have worked things out with, but it was all tricky and if anything happened we could have lost the kids. Then the Vanilla boys came along and that's when things started to move.
Were you inspired by them?
Michal: We were already looking for a way out at that time, but the fact that the boys started to become visible and Vláďa knows them, it was a magnet for us. We contacted them and I must say they were very open. They weren't that well known and famous yet, so they had space and gave us time. We met up a couple of times, they showed us one of the routes and we followed their path for a while.
Vlad: We got in touch with an American surrogacy agency a couple of times that they recommended, but it fell apart after about a month. We were on the verge of signing a contract, but it didn't work out in the end. Subsequently, we were supposed to wait for our contact at the agency to set up a new one, but in the end something happened that wasn't planned and everything worked out. We met the right person in the right place and just made a baby the normal way with a woman in our area.
How did your relationship change after the arrival of your first child?
Vlad: I can say for me that it definitely made us more close and added more responsibility to the relationship. Currently it's not just about the two of us anymore, but there are other people whose lives we will be influencing until at least 18. It's sped up time tremendously, but unfortunately we have less time to just be together, so we value our time together more now.
Michal: We each have less time to ourselves. I'm a bit selfish to say I miss it because everyone needs to crawl into a corner sometimes, read a book, have a glass of wine, go for a run and all of that has disappeared from life at the moment, but it's one of the things you're happy to sacrifice for your kids. Life became more joyful with children. Plus, our family expanded to include my mom and her kids. We visit each other often and were even planning a vacation together if the coronavirus hadn't come along. All of a sudden, we gained another branch of the family, so it's definitely an enrichment for us. But while I've started to care more about my surroundings than myself, a change that many may find uncomfortable, it's not. When you see the kids smile, it takes on a whole new dimension.
Your first child was Elishka, how long did it take to decide to have another child? I don't suppose you planned on twins?
Michal: We said from the beginning that we wanted two children. Eliška also looked at one point like she might be twins, but in the end she wasn't. Then somehow we arbitrarily came to the conclusion that we wanted another one and there was a second child. However, after one ultrasound we found out there were two, which was a huge joy at first, but then I started thinking all this crap about our small apartment, small car, and how we were actually going to do it. Fortunately, those worries soon passed.
The children were probably the first thing you dealt with between you, but when was the moment that you told your family and the neighbourhood and what was their reaction?
Michal: With Vladek it was quite spontaneous and the family accepted it very well. My mom was a bit more reserved about it because she saw us as two boys and she had a bit of prejudice and distorted ideas about these relationships. You could see that she was happy to have a grandchild, but on the other hand she had some absurd ideas about how we would cope and whether we could imagine everything. Clearly, we could imagine everything or we wouldn't have gone into it. We hadn't put our kids in the back seat of the car, so we had done a lot of planning and knew what we were getting into. When our first daughter, Elisha, was born, all my mom's fears were replaced by overwhelming joy. Both families took it very well. With Eliška we broke the news pretty early, but with the boys we kept a lid on it a little longer and said we would wait until at least the third month. No one had any resistance to it, just concerns about having a company and a job. With the twins, the concern disappeared because everyone saw how well we were handling Eliza.
You mentioned the important thing, which is that you didn't have the baby in the back seat of the car, which is the case for all gay couples who have to plan long and thoroughly to conceive a child. In the process, they usually think pretty hard about whether they really want a baby. Do you think gay parents are more responsible from this perspective, since conception doesn't happen to them by so-called "accident"?
Michal: Again, I'll come back to what I said. There are a lot of heterosexual couples who plan, try, but then their family may not work out great. Then there are definitely couples who meet in a club somewhere, have a baby two months later and end up with a happy family. We all function differently and it's about the symbiosis of those people. We're just as likely to get it right as heterosexual couples.
Vlad: I have to say that all the gay couples who have children and we know each other are really great and responsible. I think that they should present themselves more externally and they should do more outreach. They're mostly reasonable people who know what they're doing.
Michal: Honestly, I have to say that we don't even have heterosexual couples around us who have any social problems or family problems. So I come back again and again to the fact that I wouldn't divide society. Problems can occur with anyone. That brings me to the point that it's not very well thought out in the Czech Republic. It was really nice to see how they have it in America, where everybody has to pass psychological tests, get to know the family, the surrogate has to have a family background and meet a million other things. There were hundreds of questions that we had to go through and suddenly we started to realize things that we hadn't thought about before. What happens when a baby is born sick? What happens if we both get killed on the plane and the kids are left behind? What happens if one of us is killed? We could be here for three hours before we discuss it, whereas when someone starts dealing with a child in our country, no one discusses these things with them, but if it was enacted here and there was an agency that could work around it, they could prepare couples for everything and that would make it less likely that some disaster would happen.
There was a recent debate in the House of Commons on marriage for all, which passed to the next reading. There, too, there were interesting arguments in relation to child rearing. Have you been following that?
Michael: We are certainly talking about it and we support marriage for all, but unfortunately I have to say that I feel a little bit guilty that we are not personally more involved in it. But given the lives we live, it's impossible for us. Anyway, we have been watching this and have welcomed the fact that it has been moved on to the next government, where, given the preferences that are now emerging and the positions of the parties at the forefront, it is more likely to pass under the new government. And if it doesn't pass, our status is clear. We think it would be stupid and that the company is not thinking through the implications and making life unnecessarily difficult for a lot of people. There are children from rainbow families and there are a lot of them and if this goes through, it will make their lives easier. If, God forbid, it came to the point where they declared it illegal to have a gay child, we'd just pack up and move out. By the way, this was one of the questions we were asked in America, what would happen if the legal system changed in your country and your status was illegal at that point. These are things that just don't occur to you alone.
Opponents of raising children by homosexuals often argue that children will not have either a male or female role model, what would you say to that argument?
Michal: I'd probably record them for a week at my house, where sometimes there are more women than men. Take how many marriages are divorced in the Czech Republic and how many children live in alternate care and if that doesn't bother anyone, I don't know... Of course, it could happen that that element will be missing, but from my own experience I know that girls, friends, mothers, grandmothers help us to look after them, and moreover, Eliska and the boys will see their mother, so I don't see a problem with that. If I was in a heterosexual relationship and going on long business trips or working on a boat somewhere, the male element wouldn't be at home either and no one would address it, so why is it being addressed the other way around? We already have older children who grew up in same-sex relationships and are not affected in any way. It's simply a matter of how the parents approach parenting.
Vlad: If you are a heterosexual or homosexual couple and you let your children grow up like wood in the forest, anything can happen. That's why we consulted a psychologist about how to proceed and how to behave when Eliška's other children start asking questions and she starts to deal with it herself. We are looking for information from people who have older children and have already experienced this, see for example the Vanicek boys. We try to predict and prevent everything. But again, it's exactly the same as if you have a child who is a bit harder to learn. You can't let him learn on his own, but you have to look for ways to help him as much as possible. While we don't have a disorder, we feel that the social perceptions around us can be something that Eliska and the boys can run into from time to time, so we try to consult with people who are more experienced and smarter than we are about these things.
With the current developments and people becoming more and more open about these issues, do you think your children could realistically encounter any problems at all?
Michal: We think definitely not in Prague. We think that nobody is dealing with it in Prague. If we lived in a village somewhere in northern Moravia, maybe it could happen, but I'm not worried about it here. We want to be prepared in spite of that. We want Eliška and the boys to be able to work with it and understand that it's not a problem. In the course of life, children will encounter different pitfalls, but we think it won't be a problem because we don't see cases around us where it would be a problem.
Even before the children were born, you must have had to look for a nursery or a paediatrician, and even in those cases you didn't experience any problem with being rejected as two dads, for example?
Michal: We of course say everywhere that we are two dads and that we will pick up both of them. It can be sorted out and treated legally. To be honest, I would be very surprised if someone told me that we would not be accepted just because we are two dads. First of all, I wouldn't even want to go there because I don't want to go to any ignorant people, but secondly it would honestly really surprise me. We have to say that we haven't really encountered it, but if we felt any animosity, we wouldn't embarrass the person in question and would go elsewhere.
Are you considering expanding the family in any way in the future?
Vláďa: Originally we planned to have two children and when they grow up and it's possible, we would adopt one more and make a nice life for him, but now there are three, which means that we will wait for a while, because for now it's quite a merry-go-round. But I'm happy, and originally I imagined it would be much worse.
Michal: Exactly. Never say never. Like 15 years ago I would have told you I wasn't going to have a family and suddenly here it is, but now I wouldn't plan another child just yet. I think we're pretty well loaded. (laughs)
