FAMILY MATTERS

One of the things I love about Ben is that from day one I said: ‘If you don’t want children, then I’m not for you,’” recalls Joshua Penn, 34, of his first date with fellow Sydneysider Benjamin Palmer, 37, after meeting at a friend’s birthday dinner some nine years earlier. “I’m extremely close to my family and it’s a non-negotiable for me,” Penn continues, “‘so if that’s not something you want, then I won’t go on a second date with you.’”

“This was right at the start,” says his now husband of seven years, laughing. “It’s something I’d always wanted,” adds Palmer, “but I’d never really met anyone on that same path. And obviously, at that stage, I hadn’t looked into the depths of how that would happen.”

Flash forward to 2021, and their family now includes three-year-old son Brooklyn and four-month-old daughter Blake, both carried by the same surrogate in the US. Theirs is an exceptionally personal and highly emotional story, shared in the hope that their experience will help others on their parenthood journey. The pair knew that no stage of this process would be easy, but what they hadn’t anticipated was that their daughter would be born on the other side of the world in the middle of a global pandemic.

But let’s start at the beginning, while Palmer was in advertising in Sydney. “Coming from New York, it’s much more common over there,” reflects Penn, now co-owner of Belinda International. “There were two men pushing prams all the time where I was living.”