The family of eight, and their two dogs, in the living room.
Photo: Lacey Land
Most evenings at their Forest Hills home, Sara, Billy Jack, Xanthi, and their five children eat dinner together at a long wooden table in the dining room. Then Sara puts the children to bed — a somewhat elaborate routine that can take her an hour — while the two dads walk the dogs. Before going to sleep, they check in with one another, often over glasses of wine in the living room. Looking at the three 30-somethings chatting comfortably on the couch, it would be easy to assume that they’re a throuple. But then Billy Jack and Xanthi head upstairs to their bedroom and Sara to hers.
Neither Sara nor Billy Jack Brawner, now 34 and 35 years old, could have imagined this arrangement when they began dating 14 years ago at Colorado Christian University. After graduating in 2012, they did what most of their classmates were doing: They got married right away and moved back to Texas to be near their families, eventually settling in a house that Billy Jack built at the end of his parents’ driveway. There they expanded their family, adopting four kids from foster care after years of infertility and a pregnancy loss, and eventually having a biological child of their own. That house is where it looked like they would stay until Billy Jack’s job as an art director brought the couple and their five kids to Waco in 2016. There, for the first time, Billy Jack and Sara were on their own as a family and finally began to confront something he told her before they got married: He had been attracted to men his whole life. But the conversation was terrifying for both of them, so they pushed it off and went through the motions of marriage.
Then, in 2019, Billy Jack met Xanthi Toupoyannis, a 39-year-old advertising executive, on a work trip. What started as DMs on Instagram grew into an IRL relationship with occasional meetups on Billy Jack’s work trips. That went on for about six months, until the pandemic stalled travel and work and forced Billy Jack and Sara to finally face the fact that he was gay. Sara accepted that divorce didn’t have to mean the implosion of their family, and Billy Jack came clean to her about Xanthi. Their marriage was over, but they didn’t want to split up. Instead, in the spring of 2021, they moved to be with Xanthi in New York.
Their five-story rental in Forest Hills, where they’ve lived the past three years, is quite large — even bigger than any of the houses the family had in Texas. It has seven bedrooms, enough for each of the kids to have their own room, although two of the boys, 12-year-old Billy (short for Billy Jack IV) and Jones, who is 8, prefer to share one. All that space means everyone has somewhere to be alone. Because it’s Forest Hills, there’s a front yard and a backyard too — room for the kids and dogs to run free — along with a basement and an attic, which the kids affectionately call the “dad-tic,” since it was originally meant for Billy Jack and Xanthi. The kitchen is large enough for the adults to cook dinner without children being underfoot, something that Xanthi required when they were looking for places to live.
The three parents: Billy Jack, Xanthi, and Sara (from left to right).
Photo: Courtesy the subjects
Before Forest Hills, they had tried living apart. During their first year in New York, Sara and the kids were in a three-bedroom on the Upper West Side and Billy Jack and Xanthi in his two-bedroom in the West Village. Sara, who was a stay-at-home mom then, welcomed the chance to live alone with the kids. She also thought Billy Jack and Xanthi needed to live together, apart from her, to develop their relationship. But after six months of uptown-downtown commuting, the couple moved uptown to be closer to the kids. “I was transitioning out of the world we grew up in, which is very patriarchal, and realizing that Sara and I should figure out how to share the responsibility of parenthood better than what we’d done in the past,” Billy Jack says. But even though he and Xanthi were able to be more involved in day-to-day parenting, paying two rents started to seem reckless.
When their leases came to a close in the fall of 2022, they decided to move in together. All three adults wanted to stay in Manhattan. But finding an affordable five-plus-bedroom in the borough proved impossible. Billy Jack took the search to Queens and quickly found a five-story townhouse in Forest Hills Gardens for half their Manhattan rent. Sara and Xanthi rejected the house on principle. “I looked at it on a map and was like, ‘That’s JFK,’” Xanthi says. Then they were turned down on an offer for a Harlem townhouse, and he begrudgingly agreed to visit the neighborhood. “When I saw the cobblestone streets and green spaces, I fell in love immediately,” he says. After some more convincing, Sara got on board too. The family moved into the seven-bedroom house that November.
The family playing a game on the same table where they eat dinner together most nights.
Photo: Courtesy the subjects
From left: Eight pairs of shoes line the front hallway. Photo: Courtesy of the subjectsChildren’s art projects and a basketball sit alongside decor items like an amber glass French press and design books. Photo: Courtesy of the subjects
From top: Eight pairs of shoes line the front hallway. Photo: Courtesy of the subjectsChildren’s art projects and a basketball sit alongside decor ite…
From top: Eight pairs of shoes line the front hallway. Photo: Courtesy of the subjectsChildren’s art projects and a basketball sit alongside decor items like an amber glass French press and design books. Photo: Courtesy of the subjects
It’s clear a family with kids lives here (one tell I saw: the handmade sign welcoming Xanthi home from a business trip), but the space also looks like something out of a shelter magazine, with a modular bubble sofa where they spend most of their time and accent pieces like leather sling chairs and fluted lamps. There are other signs of the children, who range in age from 8 to 14, but the common spaces are well organized and tidy, with the smallest hint of mess being a line of shoes at the front door.
The biggest difference in living together is the shift in Xanthi’s role: He’s gone from being the “fun uncle” who took them out for meals and excursions to becoming another co-parent alongside Billy Jack and Sara. “They both allowed me to parent to the fullest extent, which is why it works: I feel like a genuine dad, and the kids see me that way too,” says Xanthi. The three keep daily child-care duties fairly ad hoc, texting in a group chat all day about who is free for afterschool pickup and dinner duty, which varies since Xanthi’s job is hybrid, Billy Jack works freelance, and Sara has a part-time job. But between the three of them, Xanthi is the most organized, and he’s instituted some new systems. He set up an account for bills, which covers rent, groceries, other family expenses, and housekeeping. The dads contribute $10,000 to that account monthly in addition to depositing the state checks for their adopted children. Xanthi also instituted a system for chores, which the children didn’t have before. “Sara and I came from a background where we were more coddled, and Xanthi has always been quite independent, so he sometimes gives our kids more credit than we do,” Billy Jack says. These shifts didn’t always come naturally (Sara sometimes has to leave the room while the kids clean to avoid stepping in), but the adults agree that having three parents instead of two is worth it. “It creates more capacity. It feels like we have so much to give our kids,” Sara says. On any given day one child might have a school dance, another a field trip, and a third soccer practice, but between the three of them, they can figure it out without feeling stretched too thin. “I tell people a lot: ‘If there’s any way you can swing it, I would recommend three parents.’”
For Sara, the move to New York was also the first time she could focus on her passions outside of being a wife and parent. She’s been on some dates and began working outside the house for the first time since having children, taking on part-time jobs to pay for personal expenses like manicures or dinners out with friends. She also participated in a training program with Second City and plans to pursue a career as a writer. “I’m so glad that I have my family, but it doesn’t feel like my whole identity anymore,” she says.
The family in front of their Forest Hills home.
Photo: Courtesy the subjects
But for now, their great Forest Hills idyll has to come to an end. Last fall, after 40 years, their landlord decided to sell the house. In retrospect, it was the push the family needed: Their rent went up $1,000 a month last year, and they knew it was financially irresponsible to continue renting. Buying in the city was quickly off the table (it’s hard enough to find a seven-bedroom in the city, let alone one for under several million), but when they expanded their search, the adults realized they had some competing priorities. Sara wanted to be as close to the city as possible, but Xanthi cared more about having a big house, and none of them wanted to be somewhere that was conservative or had bad schools. As in searches past, there wasn’t a single place that met all of these qualifications, so finding a house they could afford and liked meant moving further than anyone hoped for: Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a roughly three-hour drive away.
Sara was the last to get onboard; she even thought about living on her own so as to not leave the city, but she couldn’t imagine forfeiting their existing arrangement, knowing how good it is for their children. She also knows this setup isn’t permanent. All three parents imagine a more flexible arrangement when their children are grown — likely one where Sara returns to the city, the dads live in their own house, and the kids can move between the two homes freely. But for now, co-parenting under one roof is their best version of normal. Recently, Sara explained, one of the children mentioned that, when he’s older, he plans to live in a house next to the three of them. “That’s how our kids see us: a package deal,” she says. “Even if it’s shocking to other people, it’s the most normal thing to them, and I absolutely love that.”