Despite having a successful career in Toronto, Canadian Jennie Guay felt like her life was stagnant. She moved to London 10 years ago to broaden her horizons and landed a top six-figure salary job in finance and although worked long hours, kept up the work hard play hard mentality - with plenty of bottomless brunches and holidays with her friends.
She had always considered herself straight, but as she opened up to a new world in the capital, Jennie had a 'lightbulb moment' when she began dating women after switching her Tinder profile preference. She met her now-wife on the dating app and became a stepmum to her two children shortly after.
Fast-forward six years, Jennie, 36, is spending tens of thousands of pounds on becoming a biological mother. Now living in the Cheshire countryside, she has become a children's book author wanting to push narratives around blended and diverse families into the mainstream.
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"I was never that person who thought I was anything else other than heterosexual. I never had any experiences in that regard. I just thought 'I'm straight' and that's it," Jennie recalls to The Mirror about her sexuality this Manchester Pride weekend.
"I have an incredibly loving family and a great support system so it wasn't about them not accepting, but the more distance I had from my family and my friends and the people who had known me my whole life, and from the person that you create younger in life, the more freedom I had to really come to understand who I was in my entirety."
As she met more and more people through her work and personal life, Jennie felt like she was open to new possibilities and started to date both men and women.
But the more she dated women, she knew she had to change her Tinder preference.
"That's when the door was unlocked - I was like, 'this is absolutely who I am'," Jennie explains.
"The moment that I started dating only women was really when I was certain that it was the path for me - it was a lightbulb moment like a penny dropped.
"I'm like, 'wow, this is why my personal life hasn't been working'. Because I've been going after the wrong things and I've been looking in the wrong places. And that was because I didn't know who I was.
"I wasn't confident enough to really delve into myself before.
"And I think that's really common with most people. You get into a routine in life - with your job, with your friends and your family - and you just don't take a step back and think 'this is why I've just been feeling content rather than fulfilled'."
After a few years of enjoying single life, she met millionaire businesswoman Sam White in 2016, and formed an instant connection.
As Sam, 47, had two children, aged nine and six, from a previous marriage, Jennie became their stepmum - a role that she takes very seriously and one she took on after much consideration.
"I was never that girl who dreamed of her wedding and having a family and all that kind of stuff - I was very career orientated, very much about exploring the world in general," she says.
"But when I was first introduced to the kids, we connected right away and I just felt like we were a unit. Imagining not being all together as a unit seems almost unfathomable now.
"Being a parent in any capacity is very privileged.
"I wasn't going to play a role in their lives until we knew for certain that we were going to be together forever and that was important to me because I come from a very stable household and I wanted to be able to provide the exact same thing for them."
Jennie, after not being allowed to work flexibly from home, had to leave her London job in 2018 when she moved to Cheshire with the family - which could be set to expand in the next year with a newborn.
The couple, who married in Cornwall this summer, are spending tens of thousands of pounds undergoing IVF with an expert clinic in Los Angeles - with successful results so far.
They were able to choose the sperm they wanted, discovering everything they wanted to know about the male donor - from his medical history to his education.
Jennie, who didn't realise how gruelling IVF would be, argues there needs to be more conversation around the process for both straight and LGBTQ+ people wanting children of their own.
"There is a lot of hush hush around IVF, which I find bizarre," she continues.
"I'm fascinated by the science behind it but I was not expecting there to be that many medications and needles.
"I'd have to inject myself with different medications every day so it was different to what I anticipated but my body responded well, so we're really happy."
She adds: "For me to become a biological mother is really exciting but I already see myself as a mother to our children so that will never change."
Jennie stumbled upon the idea of writing her own children's book, Howie Blend - which is a collection of short stories about blended families and diverse backgrounds - when she was shopping for a birthday present for one of their kids' friends.
She struggled to find anything in bookstores that represented their reality - which looks the same for many families.
"I found it incredibly jarring," Jennie, who is performing a reading of her book at GRUB's special Pride Family Fridays event today, remembers.
"I was like, 'I need to change this.'
"It's not just the experience of my family or for my children, it's going to be the experience of millions of other children and families out there.
"There is a huge portion of society that, including heteronormative families, that are divorced and in blended dynamics.
"But most of what you see in terms of children's television and books is centred on that nuclear family.
"That's not to say that it's not changing and and that's not to say that it doesn't exist, but these are not mainstream shows or books.
"I really had to search for something that reflected our everyday."
Regardless of whether Jennie and Sam receive any criticism for the way they are raising children, she says she doesn't live in fear of being her true self.
"I am certain that people have thoughts about it, but they are certainly not people that we would engage with," Jennie says.
"Nor do I have any interest in engaging with uneducated people like that.
"It has never crossed my mind to be careful with my words or try to hide our family - absolutely not.
"If anything, it should be people who have a negative or bigoted opinion about it that should be hiding."
You can purchase Howie Blend: Playdate Adventures with Family and Friends from Amazon, WHSmith or Waterstones. For more information on the GRUB Manchester Pride event today, head here.
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