Jerry Mahoney

This is a great series for kids and even adults will have fun with it. Jerry Mahoney has taken 4 of the most well-known and beloved fairy tales then turned their world upside down using the sibling relationship between Maddie and her step-brother Holden.

Maddie loves fairytales while Holden just loves to pick them apart; sounds like a pretty normal sibling relationship. Best of all these books are full of humor, adventure and enough entertainment to make all kids, whether they are more of a Maddie or a Holden, happy.

The first book uses Cinderella, then Beauty & the Beast, Aladdin is third and finally Snow White. You should read them in order because little bits from the previous story will show up and you won’t fully enjoy it if you haven’t already trekked through the story. I didn’t realize that when I read Beauty & the Beast so there were things mentioned in the book from the story in Cinderella I didn’t get.

Even though I couldn’t appreciate the full context of who these characters are after whatever they went through in the first book I still enjoyed it. There really is lots of humor and as a parent reading this trying to decide if it’d be appropriate for my kids (which it completely is by the way) I found myself laughing quite often. The 80s references from a kids confused about that decade were cute, I’m not old enough to have been aware of that stuff having spent my formative years in the 90s but even I still know who the Eurythmics are and also believe that yes 80s bands were weird. The description of her parents acting like middle-aged puppy love was adorable and something I aspire to so my own kids can have their freak out moments.

Beauty & the Beast is hands down one of my favorite fairytales but as an adult and having my degree in Psychology I can’t help wondering why no one has pointed out that she was essentially kidnapped and underwent Stockholm Syndrome – something this book touches upon in a completely irreverent way. Not to mention most of the time the story seems to be taking place in a French ‘like’ village yet everyone speaks English.

What makes these books so special isn’t just the fun the author had with the stories but the heartwarming and beautiful lessons he portrays through them which sometimes gets lost in the frenzy for the latest Blu Ray edition, Doll from Mattel, Clothing from Disney’s line, etc. These stories really were meant to teach us something and the over commercialization has weeded that; thankfully Mahoney’s version are reminding us once more the importance of books over merchandise.… (meer)

Mommy Man is a story about the making of a family. It is, for the most part, a funny and touching book and I thoroughly enjoyed almost all of it. There are a few times in the story where the author seems to look for instances of homophobia that aren't really there so that he can make a point or make a political sort of statement, and then mention how the person wasn't discriminating after his lifestyle choices after all. I'm not sure if it's because of how those sections were written or if it because for the most part he was defending himself from slights that were imagined, but it took me out of the story a bit. Many families do go through this type of discrimination,but his family did not, and the story did not need the extra drama added to it. The story was beautiful on its own because of the struggles they overcame to become parents and the cast of characters that made it possible.… (meer)

As I picked up this book and started reading the Prologue a word popped-out at me: "pioneers". (p.ix "In fact, someone even told us we were pioneers"). The person who told soon-to-be parents Jerry Mahoney and Drew Tappon was "Wes", head of the surrogacy agency Rainbow Extensions. Mahoney picks up on it two more times in the book, the last time on the last page: "Outside, Drew pulled our minivan up to the patient loading zone. 'Pioneers', I thought. 'In a Honda Odyssey!'

But were they pioneers? Well, not exactly. In a situation 13 years earlier in mid-2000 that played out very closely to the one in this memoir, a surrogate named Shauna bore male twins to the great Broadway actor BD Wong of M Butterfly fame and his partner Richie. Richie's sister had, in fact, supplied the ova which were fertilized by Wong's sperm. Wong wrote about his gay surrogacy experience in the nail-biter "Following Foo (the electronic adventures of the Chestnut Man)" published in 2003.

Unfortunately, the birth of the two male twins didn't turn out quite as well for BD and Richie as it did for Jerry and Drew and Sister Susie.

Twins Boaz and Jackson Foo were born 28 May 2000 but they had what is known as Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (vascular networks shared, one is the donor (Boaz) who passes his blood to the recipient (Jackson). Boaz was born first, extremely anemic, and did not survive. He had given everything he had to his brother.

The ordeal that followed makes for a riveting reading experience as University of California, San Francisco nurses and doctors attempted to save Jackson who, at birth, was about half the size of a normal-size book. They succeeded.

One sad fact came out of BD-Richie's pioneering surrogacy, they split up after Jackson was born. In fact, Richie was absent a good deal of the time when the drama played out at UCSF, he in New York City and BD in San Francisco. I can only guess that Richie felt left out, so to speak. Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about and have no inside knowledge of the BD-Richie relationship.

I was delighted that my reading of Mommy Man gave me some insight into their situation after all these years. The greatly useful lesson that came out of Mommy Man was that the TOTAL involvement of BOTH partners in the process makes for a much better family relationship in the end. Drew, the other dad, was there 100% of the time, participating in every aspect, every decision, every high, every low, every laugh, every cry.

In a surrogacy such as this where the sister one of the partners supplies the ova, there IS biological involvement of both partners with the resulting offspring. It all has to do with mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which is the female DNA that is passed on unchanged to her children of both sexes. (Y-DNA is the male equivalent, passed from father ONLY to male offspring).

Susie and Drew's mother, Mrs. Tappon, passed mtDNA to BOTH of them. Her daughter, Susie, in turn, passed mitochondrial DNA to her offspring (Bennett and Sutton) and so on. However, only female offspring pass mtDNA on to their daughters, the mtDNA of the father is NOT passed on to his children. Thus, TA-DA, Drew shares mtDNA with both twins (as does Richie with Jackson Foo Wong).

Jerry said it right: "A little kid [Bennett and/or Sutton] who was biologically related to both Drew and me."

I suggest that if you are interested in a touching gay surrogacy story read "Following Foo"...if you can plow through the tons of dropped names in the book.… (meer)