Lessons in Parenting From a Salmon

Joseph Osmundson’s “Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood” is an utterly unique contribution to the often predictable genre of infertility and parenting lit.

Why have kids, anyway? It’s a question that’s been on my mind as I get ready for yet another bout of fertility treatment. I’ve managed to log an impressive if doomed record of “trying”: two artificial inseminations, three rounds of IVF, 11 embryos, one pregnancy, one miscarriage, zero children. It’s strange that after all that, I still find myself gearing up for another round.

I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand what is making me act in such an irrational way—squandering my energy and resources and seeking out physical and emotional risks for something that will likely never happen. But lately a couple books have helped me think about the pursuit of parenthood in new ways. It’s probably not an accident that they are written by queer or gay men whose path to parenthood has been similarly mediated by reproductive technology and defined by deferral.

Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood is an utterly unique contribution to the often predictable genre of infertility and parenting lit. Written by Joseph Osmundson, a professor of microbiology, it begins with an immersive account of reproduction from the perspective of a female salmon. A salmon mother swims thousands of miles against the current to spawn, and then guards her nest until she dies. After her death, she nourishes her children with her decomposing body. Of her thousands of fertilized eggs, perhaps one or two, perhaps none, will survive to become adult fish capable of spawning the next generation. The whole system is bizarre enough to make IVF injections and egg donor ads seem normal. In Osmundson’s telling, it’s also beautiful—a fluid vision of “translucent tails and pink yolk sacs,” and a moving metaphor for maternal endurance and sustenance against the odds. “A mother doesn’t let her children go hungry,” he writes. “This is one way I’d like to be a mother.”

Salmon reproduction provides a structure for Osmundson’s own “experiment in queer parenthood,” from his lifelong yearnings for pregnancy to his life-changing journey through sperm donation, embryo creation, and family reimagining with two lesbian friends. His story is told in four parts—“Fry,” “Salt Water,” “Humpy,” and “Hatch”—that map his life onto stages of a salmon life cycle. (A fry is a young salmon that has just emerged from its nest—hence the phrase small fry. Humpy is a nickname for a male pink salmon; they develop a small hump during their spawning migration.)

This whole-life-cycle framing allows Osmundson to take a capacious perspective on the conception and care of progeny, seeing it not simply as an adult rite of passage but as a life-defining desire that begins in childhood and continues far beyond the limits of legal or literal parenthood. The awe-inspiring reproductive drive of the salmon also allows him to express an unapologetic urgency about procreation that cuts through common clichés and........

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