Oliver had been told that he should call John donor dad but having. Having a rough time pronouncing that he came up with Joe not down. That story and more coming up next on the Moth Radio Hour from the Public Radio Exchange p r x dot org right after this. Live from n.p.r. News in Washington I'm nor rom the Senate Judiciary Committee now says there will be a public hearing Thursday to hear testimony from Christine blazin Forte although Ford's attorney still wants to negotiate who will question her and who will testify the committee says neither is negotiable Ford has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault in an encounter more than 30 years ago Dick Durbin of Illinois is the number 2 Senate Democrat he told A.B.C.'s This Week Without more witnesses than Ford and Cavanagh it's going to be difficult to thoroughly explore the incident and terms of direct evidence probably not the only alleged to have underlined the alleged eyewitness the smirk judge has said he quote has no recollection no close quote of what occurred that evening and the Republicans refused to even put him on the witness list Cavanagh is also expected to testify he's denied the accusation immigration advocates are decrying a trump administration proposal to limit access to green cards for immigrants who seek public aid N.P.R.'s Mary Kennedy reports the administration says the plan is meant to promote self-sufficiency the potential change could leave many immigrant families with difficult choices between for going public assistance or risking their chances at a green card it's being slammed by advocates like the National Immigration Law Center which sent the plan could make immigrant families afraid to get help it added the change could worsen hunger and leave health problems unaddressed United We Dream Action an immigrant youth led network described as an all out attack on poor working families and the a.c.l.u. Called it a quote new attempt to keep immigrants out of our country and attack people with disabilities the Department of Homeland Security officially announced the proposal on Saturday and said it would help protect American taxpayers American city n.p.r. News Washington d.c. Environmental advocates are raising concerns about coal ash in the Cape Fear River near Wilmington North Carol. China but Jason Dobro end of member station w.n. Save reports and Duke Energy says its tests show the river has not been polluted floodwaters from Hurricane Florence breached dames that hold back waste water reservoirs a Duke Energy sudden power plant on Sunday Duke said water tests were clean we've got quite news to share we have released and national water testing results the 7th straight charges from Aqua one like in Wellington have not on the Cape Fear River but those tests are done at Duke's own facilities environmental advocates and state regulators will report their tests later this week for n.p.r. News I'm Jason dobro and in Wilmington golfer Tiger Woods won the Tour Championship in Atlanta today that is his 1st title in more than 5 years since then he's had 4 surgeries on his lower back that left fans wondering if he'd ever play again this is n.p.r. News from Washington. Swiss voters have rejected legislative proposals that would have ensured food sources were more ethical and sustainable and given more aid to farmers Teri Schultz reports the Swiss government opposed the measures warning that race prices voters rejected the fair food and food sovereignty initiatives by more than 60 percent eat the fair food initiative would have required all Swiss food to come from sustainable sources and ruled out factory farms in g.m. Most it promoted locally grown seasonal produce and aims to reduce waste requiring more detailed labeling for consumers the other measure would have provided more government aid for family farms banning imports of foreign food that do not meet Swiss standards on conditions for both workers and animals it would have imposed higher tariffs on those goods that were imported raising prices this was government maintains the measures could be counterproductive prompting citizens to shop in neighboring countries and ultimately drive down demand for domestic food for n.p.r. News I'm Terry Schultz u.s. Officials are rejecting Iran's claim that a country allied with the United States was responsible for yesterday's attack on an Iranian military parade but killed $25.00 people Iran's President Hassan Rouhani did not identify the country Nikki Haley the u.s. Ambassador to the u.n. Told c.n.n. Rouhani has oppressed his people for a long time and the Iranian people have been protesting the military the u.n. General Assembly meets this week President Trump is a New York to attend he'll speak to the gathering on Tuesday the president is expected to stress his commitment to America 1st I'm sure Rahm and p.r. News in Washington support for n.p.r. Comes from n.p.r. Stations other contributors include Carnegie Corporation of New York supporting innovations in education democratic and Gage Ment's and the advancements of international peace and security more information is available online at Carnegie dot org. Empirics this is the last radio hour I'm Jay Allison producer of this show and in this hour we present a live Martha vent held for the annual Morfe members show in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City the theme of the night was around the bend stories of coming home the 1st story to be is. When I was a small child my mother used to sometimes say the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world and people who don't have children never get to know what it's like and I took it is the greatest compliment that she's so loved my brother and me and so love being our mother and that she thought so highly of that emotional experience at the time that I was growing up there was an article in Time magazine about homosexuality which said it is nothing but a pathetic 2nd great substitute for a life pitiable flight from existence and deserves no glorification as anything other than a pernicious sickness reading match and living in that world I was sad as I began to think that I might be gay and when I was a teenager my mother would say the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world and people who don't have children never get to know what. And it made me intensely anxious I thought I think I'm gay but I want to have children but I think I'm gay but I want to have children and I felt myself back and forth and at some point I decided that children were the primary thing and that I was going to change and I read an ad in the back of New York magazine for sexual surrogacy therapy and I went for a kind of training to change myself into somebody else it was a very peculiar experience it involved women who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else. My particular favorite was a buxom blonde Southern woman who have entered the admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliac and it taking this job after she got in trouble down at the morgue. When I was in my early twenty's I decided that this had not all gone as planned and that I really was gay and I told people that I was and my mother said the love you had for your children is unlike any other emotion in the world and if you don't have children you'll never know and having 1st been touched and then been made anxious I was now made angry by this statement and I said I'm gay and I'm not going to have children and I am who I am and I want you to stop saying that many years afterwards in 2001 I met John who is the love of my life and he told me shortly after we met that he actually had been the sperm donor for some lesbian friends and I said you have children and he said no they have children and I was the donor afford them. A few weeks later we were out at the Minnesota State Fair and we ran into Tammy and Laura and their toddler Oliver and I looked at them with fascination and I thought how amazing that Tammy and Laura were Carrie and they had children and that John was gay and in some sense at least had a child Oliver had been told that he should call John donor dad but having. Having a rough time pronouncing that he came up with don't not that I. So I looked at that and I thought there's donor there's me who are we all to one another a year later John told me that Tammy and Laura had asked him to be a donor again and they produced Lucy So now there were 2 of these children and we knew them a little bit and saw them from time to time and were warmly disposed towards them and John said he'd promised to be in their lives when they were grown up if they particularly wanted him to be. The idea of having children in some unusual arrangement was not entirely novel to me I had some years earlier been at it dinner with my closest friend from college who lived at the other end of the country and she had recently separated from her husband and when I asked whether she had any regrets she said only about not being a mother and I said and meant it you'd be the best mother in the world and if you ever decided that you wanted to have a child I'd be so honored to be the father I said that assuming since she was beautiful and beloved and had lines of men eager to meet her and be with her I assume that it was just a statement in passing but on my 40th birthday she appeared in New York for a surprise party that John and my father and stepmother had organized and we went out to dinner the next day and realized that we really did want to follow through with this plan I wasn't ready to tell John right away and then when I did tell him he was angry about it and I said John how can you be angry at me you have all of our lives see and now they'll be this other arrangement and he said I was a donor for all of her and Lucy and George setting out to have a child of whom you will be the acknowledged father and you will have your last name and we struggled with it for quite a while and then John whose kindness usually carries the day said if this is what you really need to do then go ahead and do it and soon thereafter he asked me to marry him I had never been a big fan of gay marriage I thought everyone should have the right but it didn't particularly preoccupy me. But after he proposed we began planning a wedding and I thought he had gone along with what I wanted to do and I would go along with what he wanted to do and we ended up getting married in the English countryside and we had a beautiful wedding and I found that there were commitment it seemed to me to be permanent and declared and established before that that the experience of having all of these hundreds of friends gathered together witnessing our love shored up and strengthened it and gave it a new depth and gave it a new residence that I had never imagined or anticipated and I found the fact that we were celebrating that love in a ceremony that echoed in some sense the one my parents would have the and the ones my grandparents had had and the ones that presumably went back generation upon generation exulted the feeling between us and it was very joyful Blain was there 3 months pregnant with our child and John ventured that we had had the 1st gay shotgun wedding. So 6 months later our daughter our little Blaine was born and I was in the room when she was delivered and I was the 1st person to hold her and I had such a disorienting feeling of suddenly of suddenly being changed I thought I'm a father now I'm a father it was as though someone had told me that I was still myself and also a shooting star. And I held her and I then had to go down into the basement of the hospital to sign the certificate for her birth where I was advised to get a paternity test before I signed for any love child and I said you have no idea the planning that was behind this. And John held her and we all I think were enraptured as one is by the birth of children because it's so much stranger than even intergalactic travel that someone wasn't there and now all of a sudden they are but when John and I got back to New York I kept feeling in a way is the way I was being highly supportive of something Blaine had done rather than as though it was something I had done and yet I found myself thinking of this child all the time John fell in love with laning he fell in love with Blaine we were all in love with one another we were trying to understand how everything fit together and some time later I said to John don't you think it would be nice for us to have a child also a sibling for Blaney who she might love to to have in her life and who might grow up in our house all the time John did not think that would be lovely. And so we had a year in which I kept saying how wonderful it would be and acting as the cheerleader for the cause and through that year John kept resisting and being unsure and then finally my birthday rolled around again and he said your present is upstairs and we went up stairs and there was an antique cradle tied up with a bow and he said if it's a boy can we name him George after my grandpa. We then had to figure out how we were going to produce such a child I. So we found an egg donor and we were in the process of trying to find a surrogate and we got together with Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy one night and Laura said to John you gave us our children and I'll never be able to thank you enough for that but I could show you how much you mean to us by being your surrogate and so she offered to carry our child and she got pregnant on the 2nd I.V.'s protocol and 9 months after that George was born and we held him in our arms we called Ling and Laney and everyone else in our circle and we held him and we wondered at him and then we came home and we sent out birth announcements and the birth announcement included a picture of John and me holding George and many friends said I love that picture I hung it on my refrigerator but one of John's cousins wrote back and said Your lifestyle is against our Christian values we wish to have no further contact and I thought that world the Time magazine world of my childhood it was still there and it was still going strong and it made me very sad but in the meanwhile we had spent a lot of time with Tammy and Laura and Oliver and Lucy through that whole process and we had all fallen in love I think again a new more deeply with one another and when Oliver and Lucy learned that little Blaine called us daddy and Papa John they said they'd like to call us daddy and papa too and I suddenly found that in contemplating 2 children we seemed to have 4. In the period that followed that I kept thinking about the angry cousin and what he had said and I thought it's not really a question of our kind of love being as good as or better than or less good than anyone else's love it's simply another kind of love that we found as 5 parents of 4 children in 3 states. And I thought that just as species diversity is essential to keep the to keep the planet in place so there's a need for a diversity of love to sustain the eco spear of kindness and that anyone who rejected any bit of the love in the world was acting in a foolish if we wish way and from a position of falling about 6 months ago we had gone to a park and I climbed up on a stand with George from which you could view some animals below and I held his hand and I said we're going to go back down the steps now go very carefully and I took one step and I slipped and I fell all the way down the flight of stairs pulling him along behind me. And I remember when it happened thinking that I really didn't care whether I had broken my arm or my leg as long as I hadn't injured my child turned out that I hadn't and when I felt that I suddenly thought. The love you have for your children is like no other feeling and until you have children you'll never know and I thought how even in the periods when I mother saying that made me anxious or made me angry that it was her saying it so persistently that had caused me to pursue a family even under such complicated and difficult and elaborate circumstances and that had let me finally to the greatest joys of my life Thank you Farai. Are you that was Solomon thank you Andrew is the author of the books far from the Tree Parents Children and the search for identity and the Noonday Demon which won the 2001 National Book Award. To share any of the stories you hear on the Moth Radio Hour go to the mosque dot org where you can stream the stories for free and send a link to your friends and family. Will be back in a moment with a story about a nightmarish event in Apartment living. Support for them all comes from Home Advisor matching homeowners and Home Improvement professionals for a variety of home projects from minor repairs to major remodels homeowners can read reviews about local pros and book appointments online at Home Advisor dot com The Martha Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole Massachusetts and presented by p.r. X. . 2 2 2 6 this is the Moth Radio Hour from p.r. X m j Allison our next story contains some disturbing subject matter and may not be appropriate for children or squeamish adults from the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York City here's Rica. Thank you. I was living in the parlor apartment of a beautiful brownstone in Harlem surrounded by all this old grand furniture left to me by my grandmother when she passed away when I realized actually I want to live in Brooklyn. I decided to move to Brooklyn because that's where so many of my friends lived and that's where I found most of my work was I'm a cellist So I went to see the 1st apartment I found and when I walked in I said I'll take it but I won't stay long. It was what a realtor would describe as charming but the only word that came to my mind was tiny. So I decided it might be a good place to live for a little while it might segue into something better down the line so I packed all of my grandmother's things into storage and I took my cello and my music and my books and my bed and I moved into this apartment in Prospect Heights and I loved living there my career was going great touring making records I kind of fell in and out of love and I even managed to have some extraordinary dinner parties in a small small space and then about 2 and a half years into living in this apartment early on a Sunday morning during a terrible heat wave in June I got a call that you hope to never receive the man on the other end of the line called to tell me that my younger brother had just died he was found dead in his bed that morning I don't recall exactly what happened to the phone but I remembered I couldn't get her in or out and I thought I might throw up but the air wasn't coming and I called my best friend to try and tell her what happened but the words wouldn't form I was absolutely devastated. My younger brother lived in England and it was decided that he would be cremated week and a half later on a Friday at 2 pm in England my father and I both New Yorkers realize we wouldn't be able to get there in time for the cremation and we live rather far from each other here in the city but both agreed that we each wanted to be outside and in the elements when this event happened when my brother was cremated and so the Thursday night before this event I was eager to get to bed anticipating a very emotional following day so I fell fast asleep and then suddenly I awoke in the middle of the night because there was a leak from upstairs dripping into my bed and it would hit the mattress and splatter all over and it woke me up and I was so focused on my little brother Nico that I thought it doesn't even matter I rolled over and went right back to sleep but then I was woken again because it was coming down at a faster clip and hitting the bed and getting all over me so finally I thought Ok I better go talk to my