I just spent two hours trying to renew my daughters' passports.Two hours in a government office that smells like defeated dreams and industrial cleaner, standing at a counter across from a woman who keeps looking at her supervisor like I'm a problem she wasn't trained to solve."Mother's name?"There is no mother."I'm sorry, but we need a mother's name for the application."There. Is. No. Mother.She blinks at me. Then at my daughters, who are sitting on plastic chairs swinging their legs, oblivious to the fact that the bureaucratic machinery of an entire country doesn't have a checkbox for their existence.The supervisor comes over. Middle-aged man, kind eyes, genuinely trying to help. He looks at the form. He looks at me. He looks at my daughters."So... you're the father?"Yes."And there's no mother?"Correct."But someone gave birth to them."A surrogate. In Kenya. Seven years ago. We have all the legal documents. Court orders. Birth certificates. Everything you need.He nods slowly, still trying to compute. "And your... wife?"My husband. He's at work.More nodding. More computing. The system is buffering.What he can do, it turns out, is call someone else. Who calls someone else. Who eventually decides that yes, we can leave the mother's name blank, but we'll need additional documentation proving that I am, in fact, allowed to have these children.Seven years into this. Seven years of being their father. And the system still doesn't know what to do with us.The 47th TimeThe hospital when they were born: "Where's the mother?" Surrogate. "But where is she?" Kenya. "So when is she coming?" She's not.Their first pediatrician appointment: "Mother's medical history?" Egg donor. We don't have it. "We really need the mother's..." There is no mother in the way you're asking.School registration: "Mother or guardian?" Father. "Yes, but we need..." I AM the guardian.Every form. Every institution. Every system built on the assumption that families look one way and one way only.You don't just "get through it" and move on. You keep living it. Every bureaucrat. Every form. Every person who looks at you with that very specific cocktail of confusion, pity, and inconvenience.I used to smile through it. I used to patiently explain. I used to treat every interaction like an opportunity to educate someone about modern families.Now I'm just tired.The girls are thriving. The system is the problem.StrandedWhen my daughters were born, I was desperate and alone.Alone in Mombasa, Kenya, where I'd traveled from the Middle East for the surrogacy. I'd gone through five embryo transfers. Four failed. Each one felt like proof that maybe I wasn't supposed to be a father.Then on April 19, 2018, I got the email: "Test results. Positive. Congrats."On November 30, 2018, my daughters Stella and Mia were born. I'd flown there with my mother. I held them for the first time and thought: This is it.I had no idea I'd be stuck there for the next two and a half months.The Canadian High Commission in Nairobi told me my daughters weren't Canadian citizens."The one generation rule," they explained. "You were born outside Canada. Your children were born outside Canada. They don't automatically qualify for citizenship."I was born in Italy. Came to Canada when I was five. I'm Canadian. I've lived there my entire life.But because I wasn't born there, my daughters born in Kenya weren't either.And they weren't Kenyan either. The surrogate wasn't biologically related to them. The egg donor was Indian. I'm Italian-Canadian.My daughters were stateless.I sat in a hotel room in Mombasa with two newborns and no way to get them home. The Canadian government said I could apply for permanent resident status and sponsor them. Six to twelve months, they said. Maybe longer.I'd left my life in the Middle East. My job. My apartment. Everything. I'd planned to be back in Canada within weeks.Instead, I was stuck in Kenya with two infants, burning through savings, trying not to panic.I posted about it online. The media picked it up. The attention worked. Someone at Immigration Canada decided to process temporary resident visas. Fast.Two and a half months after Stella and Mia were born, I finally brought them home. The flight was 36 hours. I was exhausted. My daughters were perfect.And I was done pretending the system worked.From Survival to PerformanceI started The Dad Diaries before the girls were born because I couldn't find anyone else telling this story. Single gay man. Surrogacy. The legal nightmare. The bureaucratic chaos.I needed community. And you showed up. You carried me when I couldn't carry myself.But somewhere along the way, it shifted.The algorithm started rewarding vulnerability. Brands started reaching out. The engagement metrics became a feedback loop: share more, grow faster, monetize better.I kept sharing. Because it worked. Because people cared. Because it felt like purpose.Until I looked up one day and realized: I'm not sharing because I need community anymore. I'm sharing because the content calendar demands it.From "I need to tell this story to survive" to "I need to perform this story to stay relevant."My Daughters Are Seven NowThey're old enough to notice when I'm filming. When I'm talking about them on a podcast. When someone stops us in public because they recognize us from social media.They think it's normal. Because it's been their whole lives.And that's the problem.My daughters are not content. Not unless they choose to be. And they can't choose. They're seven. They can't consent to a digital footprint they didn't ask for. They can't consent to their entire childhood being documented, analyzed, and monetized.I made that choice when they were babies. When I was desperate. When I needed to believe that sharing our story mattered.But they're not babies anymore.Every time I post about them, I'm making a decision about their privacy that they'll have to live with for the rest of their lives.I used to think I was protecting them by controlling the narrative. Now I realize: the most protective thing I can do is stop creating a narrative altogether.This is their life. Not content.The Brand ScriptHere's what working with brands looks like:They send you a script. You read it on camera. You post it. They pay you.Except the script is never quite right. It's written by someone who's never met you, selling a product you may or may not actually use, in a voice that sounds nothing like yours.So you adjust it. You make it "authentic." You find a way to say what they want you to say while sounding like yourself.And if you do it well enough, people don't even notice it's an ad.I've sold cleaning products I don't use. Parenting apps I don't need. Subscription boxes I never asked for. All because they paid well and I convinced myself it was fine as long as I "believed in the brand."But here's the truth: I didn't believe in most of them. I believed in the check.Every time I posted one of those scripts, I felt a little more hollow. A little more like I was selling access to my family for engagement metrics.The worst part? It worked. People bought the products. Brands came back for more. The algorithm rewarded the performance.Until I realized: I'm not building anything real here. I'm just feeding a machine that doesn't care about me or my family. It cares about clicks.So I'm done.If I work with a brand now, it's because I actually use it and believe in it. And I'll say exactly what I think, not what a marketing deck tells me to say.No more scripts. No more performing. No more campaigns just because they pay.And if that ends opportunities? Good. I don't want them.What I'm Building InsteadRight now, that looks like Between the Covers. A magazine I actually believe in. Not because it's mine. Because it's real. Because it publishes the kind of raw, honest, systemic-critique writing that I wish I'd read when I was alone in Kenya trying to get my daughters home.I'm trying to expand it internationally. Marbella. Dubai. Maybe beyond. I have no idea if this works or crashes spectacularly.But if I'm going to talk about reinvention, I need to actually fucking live it.I've done this before. I left the Middle East. I became a father through surrogacy in a country that didn't have a legal framework for it. I spent two and a half months fighting two governments just to bring my daughters home. I rebuilt my entire identity from scratch.Now I'm doing it again. And this time, I'm not performing it for content. I'm just doing it.If it works, great. If it doesn't, at least I tried something that felt true instead of something that felt profitable.What I'm Done WithI'm tired of explaining my family to strangers who think they're entitled to an explanation.I'm tired of performing vulnerability as a content strategy.I'm tired of pretending that systems built for straight families work for us if we just try hard enough.I'm tired of making brands look inclusive by letting them use my family as proof they care about diversity.I'm tired of feeding parasocial relationships with people who think they know me because they've watched my life unfold online.I'm tired of being grateful for the bare minimum.And I'm done.Here's What's ChangingThe Dad Diaries can't exist the way it used to. So let me be clear:My daughters are off-limits. If they show up here, it's because I chose to share something specific, not because the algorithm demanded content.My marriage is off-limits. My relationship with my husband is not performance material. What we share privately stays private.I will not be answering questions about my family just to feed a parasocial relationship I built when I was desperate and alone.That's not an apology. That's a boundary.From now on, this is about me navigating life in real time. Reinvention. Risk. Expansion. Failure. Trying to build something real in a landscape designed to make us all perform.Maybe this tanks my career. Maybe it's the beginning of something more honest. I genuinely don't know.What I do know is this: I'm walking into 2026 with clarity, boundaries, and zero interest in performing for systems that were never built for people like me anyway.The TruthI don't regret what I shared. The community I found saved me. The people who reached out, who told me my story helped them feel less alone—that mattered. That was real.But I'm not that person anymore.I'm not desperate. I'm not alone. I'm not trying to prove that my family deserves to exist.We exist. We're thriving. And we don't owe anyone access to that.I'm tired of shrinking. I'm tired of explaining. I'm tired of making myself digestible.So I'm not doing it anymore.Welcome to the new Dad Diaries. It's going to be a hell of a ride.
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