Pip and Shell’s Story

"I (Pip) was about six months pregnant with Violet when we got together. Violet was donor conceived when Pip was in a previous civil partnership. We moved in together a month before Violet was born and Shell was at the birth and every day since. Pip is Mummy and Shell is Other Mummy, or Om for short.

We both wanted to get involved in this project because of the political climate at the time and the resistance to schools teaching about families like ours. We want the project to give hope to LGBT+ people to have a bigger family if they want to and show that families come in all different guises. We should celebrate difference. We’re proud of our little unit, of our daughter and the love we have for each other, and we wanted to share that. So it was political. At the same time Shell was going through the adoption process and we wanted to be able to mark her becoming officially Violet’s Om with a picture of our family.This photo shows that we’re as normal and crazy as the next lot. Being three, Violet wasn’t really playing ball when Allie came to photograph us. So looking at the picture and our family, above all it’s about unconditional love.

For Shell it took a long time for her to call Violet her daughter because she came late to the party. Stepping up to the challenge and owning the role of being a parent is a massive achievement for her. For Pip juggling full time work over four days a week with childcare and making time for friends and family as well as being relatively early on in a relationship has been a massive balancing act. But in a way we felt like being so newly together made us more resilient to some of the challenges we faced and made us stronger as a couple."