Two dads from Tennessee have talked about how they went from being a couple to having five kids in a matter of days.
Newsweek talked to PJ and Thomas McKay, who post on Instagram as @pjandthomas. They said they “always knew” they wanted to have kids and had even chosen names for them two weeks into dating.
We knew we wanted to have a family one day, even though this was a bit of a “cart before the horse” move. “We just had to decide how to do it,” PJ McKay, 38, said.
This Instagram video by Thomas and PJ McKay has been seen over 10 million times. It shows how their lives “changed forever” when they became foster parents.
The caption said that the couple’s family changed “overnight,” but they also said that they had been foster parents since July 2019, when they took in three brothers. They officially adopted these children in 2021.
“They opened our eyes to an entirely different world, one where things we previously cared so much about suddenly didn’t seem as important anymore,” PJ McKay told the magazine. The Chattanooga, Tennessee, couple said they thought about many ways to become parents, such as surrogacy and private adoption.
The McKays were interested in foster care after talking with many agencies on Zoom and being accepted into several adoption programs.
Friends who had been foster parents and talked about the good and hard parts of the job inspired the couple to take in kids who needed a home.
Thomas McKay, 33, said, “Right now there are over 9,000 children in the foster care system in Tennessee alone, so the state is in desperate need of good foster homes.”This shows how badly their state needs foster parents.
When the McKays took care of their three kids, Allan, Riah, and Anna, who were 4, 2, and 1 years old at the time, their lives turned upside down.
“In any way, we had never raised kids before.” Thomas McKay said, “I had never even changed a diaper.”
He said: “Then suddenly our children came to live with us, and we were changing diapers on three kids while making three meals and snacks for five people [every day], and everything was different.”
The couple had worries about their ability to handle the chaos in their first week as foster parents. “The first week was tough, and we wondered if we were in over our heads.” “What did we do?” The question “What if we can’t handle this?” kept going through our minds that week, PJ McKay said.
Even though they were scared at first, the McKays quickly got used to their new jobs. Foster care classes helped them get to know their new family of five, and their sisters who have kids helped them open up to them.
“It had only been a week, but it became our new normal, and we couldn’t imagine our house and our life without them in it,” Thomas McKay said. “We settled into our roles as foster dads, and it just felt right.”
After three weeks of living with the McKays, the kids were moved to a kinship placement, which is when a child stays with a relative or someone they have a close bond with instead of foster parents who are not related to them.
In the end, the kids moved back in with the McKays for good.
“We know that doesn’t always happen in foster care placements, so we feel extremely fortunate in that regard,” they said. “When our adoption day came, it just felt like a formality, which it technically was, because the love had been there all along.”
PJ and Thomas McKay also said that each stage of childhood brought new challenges and fun, but that their lives were fuller than ever with their nine, seven, and six-year-old children.
“Everything seems brighter now like we’re seeing life with more color and dimension,” they said. “Our family is bigger than it was before, but it feels complete and like it was always supposed to be this way.”