Karen Tautges Malinak watches her herd of 20 goats from the kitchen window as she waits for her family to arrive. It’s a clear summer day in Independence, Minnesota—population 3,644, half an hour outside Minneapolis. She holds a pink coffee mug in her hands. “Moms make everything better,” it reads.
Karen’s life revolves around her farm, which is also the home base for her goat soap business, Rapha Farms. It’s easier for her family to visit her here than it is for her to leave the goats. As we lean against her cluttered kitchen counter, Karen, who is 58, tucks her bobbed silver hair behind an ear and checks the time. “They should be here soon,” she says, her vowels drawn out by her native Minnesota accent. I feel as if I’m in some sort of rural sitcom: I’m due to meet each of Karen’s four daughters, four sons-in-law, and 12 grandchildren over the next two days. Although I’ve spoken to many of them on the phone, I have a strange feeling that almost anyone could walk through the door.
Adding to the strangeness, Karen and her husband Dave only recently moved to this farm. Because their workshop remains under construction, the soap-making happens wherever there’s space. The living room is filled with racks of finished bars, labeled by scent: tea tree, lilac, lemongrass. Silicon molds cover a long table, and vats of essential oils line the walls. The small kitchen is stacked high with hand blenders; taped to the floor is a sign that says “Poop buckets here.” (One of the joys of working with goats.) There is no room for furniture, hardly space to walk. Where, then, to put the family that will soon arrive?
As if on cue, a driveway sensor chimes: Karen’s daughter Michelle, along with her husband and two sons, pulls in. Highlighter shimmers on Michelle’s cheekbones. Her boys, aged 9 and 7, hop out of the car and hand over gifts: a jigsaw puzzle for Dave and a handmade condolence card for Karen. The day before, Karen had to put down Angel, her elderly Maltese.
Karen pins the card on her refrigerator, beneath a photo of three other grandsons—boys who Michelle, her husband, and her sons have never actually met. That’s because Michelle and her brood aren’t, exactly, Karen’s real family. In fact, none of the people I’m supposed to meet on this visit have any blood relation to Karen. They are families she found online and “adopted” as a surrogate grandmother in the lonely years after her own biological daughters turned her away.
Karen and Michelle met in November 2023 on a Facebook group called Surrogate Grandparents USA, a place where older and younger Americans connect over a mutual need for family. Many of the posts read like tiny, tragic personal ads:
“We want grandparents who want to have pizza nights with us, attend baseball and basketball games, have ice cream dates, take bike rides, just genuinely have fun with us and our boys.”
“My children need more than just me to love them. I can’t be their mama, daddy, aunt, uncle, grandma and grandpa forever! We joke about it, but it’s true and it sits as a pit in my stomach.”
“One lonely grandma here. I would love to share affection and attention with a nearby family.”
Donna Skora, a 68-year-old retired paralegal from Summerfield, Florida, created Surrogate Grandparents USA in 2015. “Everybody needs some kind of support system, emotionally,” she tells me. Some members of the group have lost loved ones, while others have never had families of their own. But what the group really represents, Donna says, is a refuge for the estranged. “I realized it was a growing problem, not only in the United States but worldwide.” Scrolling through the messages only confirms this: Many of the posters report being the victims—or initiators—of estrangement.
Today, around 27 percent of American adults have cut off contact with a family member—one of the highest estrangement rates in the world. And it seems to be on the rise, according to Joshua Coleman, the psychologist and author of the buzzy 2021 book Rules of Estrangement. “Online support groups, Instagram influencers, TikTok influencers,” Coleman says, “all are huge contributors to this phenomenon.” While estrangement has always existed—abuse and divorce are common causes, as are disagreements over money, religion, sexual orientation, and politics—“never before was it characterized as a pathway to personal growth and identity the way it is today,” he says. But just as social media can lead to alienation, it can also bring people together. After all, Coleman runs his own private Facebook group for estranged parents and grandparents.
I’ll be the first to say it: Facebook? Yes. It might seem lame to younger generations, but Facebook, whose monthly user base comprises a third of the human population, remains a behemoth. It also remains one of the better places online to form and maintain genuine connections. Many of us have been on Facebook for decades, using our real names, checking on our real relatives, posting photos from our real lives, and “friending” our real friends.
Surrogate Grandparents USA attracted a mere 30 members in its first six months. The group was only as useful as its size—the more members there were, the easier it’d be to find matches. So Donna posted dozens of free ads and contacted local TV stations. By 2019, the group had 3,700 members. Today, it has more than 11,000.
Karen has two biological daughters. When she divorced their dad in 2019, the eldest, then a college student, cut Karen out of her life. The dad had autism and a brain injury—the older daughter felt Karen had an obligation to him. Karen, meanwhile, felt emotionally abused in the relationship. “She sided with him,” Karen says. Four years later, in 2023, Karen’s younger daughter, with her older sister’s help, left too. The split was a heartbreaking final dissolution, Karen’s family of four whittled to two: Karen and Dave, her second husband. “I stopped sleeping for a month,” Karen says. “It was devastating.”
But, soon enough, she figured she needed to move on. “I knew I had gotten through it before,” she says. “I’m not going to live my life being sad, and there are people out there who want relationships with people like me.” That’s when she found Surrogate Grandparents USA.
Karen lurked on the group for six months before deciding to post a message. “I’d love a mother/daughter relationship, and we are hoping for grandkids,” she wrote. “We have a goat farm … so lots of fun for kids.” The premise didn’t feel so strange to Karen. As a girl, she’d been taken under the wing of her childless next-door neighbors. They took her to a lakeside cabin each summer and bought her presents—a bike, jewelry, glass animals. When they died, Karen inherited the majority of their estate. So why couldn’t something similar happen again? Karen added a selfie to her Facebook post, along with a photo of her and the goats. Ten women responded.
One was Michelle. Michelle’s sisters had recommended the group to her—their mother had died six years earlier, and Michelle didn’t have family nearby. She longed for someone to watch her boys’ sports games or take them out to dinner. For a few years, she had watched as Facebook posts flooded in. Nobody was ever located nearby. Until Karen.
Connecting was, Karen says, “almost like online dating.” They DM’d first, before progressing to texting, calling, and finally arranging to meet up IRL. The group’s moderators encourage people to vet prospective surrogates. Michelle didn’t do that, though she did browse Karen’s social media. It was, needless to say, goat-heavy.
They met at a Panera Bread for lunch. Michelle was eager for Karen to like her—the stakes felt high. “I literally had pink eye at the time,” Michelle says, “and I was like, ‘I’m not this ugly, I promise.’” With the holidays on the horizon, they felt the absence of their loved ones. “We both cried at some point,” Michelle says.
Biological families often have a sense of obligation to spend time together, as well as a lifetime of shared experiences. Not so with surrogate grandparents and their surrogate adult children, who need to become actual friends. Karen and Michelle bonded over their loss and their shared faith as Christians but didn’t involve the boys until they were mutually serious about pursuing the connection. It, indeed, became serious. Karen’s pink coffee mug? A Mother’s Day gift from Michelle.
After introductions, Karen, Michelle, and I suggest moving outside. The kids complain about the bugs that hum up from Karen’s lawn. “I’m not an outside person,” announces the 9-year-old, who wears a shirt with bearded dragons on it. Karen had warned me that these “city kids” are a little less rough-and-tumble than some of her other surrogate grandchildren. I suspect the boys are being dramatic.
Michelle says that her sisters, who live far away, would also benefit from surrogate grandparents like Karen and Dave, and she hopes they find their own matches. (As she tells me this, I swipe a mosquito off my arm.) Michelle and Dave have connected over their love of Naked and Afraid, and Karen and Dave watch the boys’ soccer games. (I swat a blood sucker from a sliver of bare ankle.) They all celebrated one of the boys’ birthdays recently with a trip to a malt shop, where they split two family-size portions of fries. (I slap a monstrous bug as it lands on my forehead. Listen to the children, I note, for they are wise.) I can tell there’s a real relationship developing between Karen and this family. When we go back inside, Karen hands the brothers a basket of soap samples. “There’s watermelon this time,” she says, and the 6-year-old squeals. That’s the parting ritual, it seems. Michelle and her family say their goodbyes and head out.
Next up in the rotating door of surrogate families: a woman named MeLea and her three sons. I know, it’s a lot of names to remember. And they all sound sort of similar. Three of Karen’s surrogate daughters have M names: Michelle, MeLea, and Meghan. It’s become a bit of a joke between her and Dave: “You know, it really makes me angry that you named them all starting with the letter M,” he likes to say. Karen maintains a spreadsheet with the ages, birthdays, and interests of a dozen surrogate grandkids ranging in age from 1 to 13.
MeLea is supposed to meet us at Karen’s house, but she gets busy and asks us to come to her place instead. As we pull up, MeLea’s father-in-law stands outside. He’s there helping the family with some home-improvement tasks. I wonder if this biological grandparent feels weird about encountering a surrogate. He raises a hand. “I’ve been using your soap,” he says to Karen, in a gruff but approving tone, as we make our way inside.
MeLea’s three boys, ages 2, 4, and 7, are a cyclone of energy, showing off their rock and feather collections, playing nonsense songs on a toy guitar, plucking daisies from the yard to present to us. The youngest appears in the doorway without pants on. MeLea, who wears a tank top that shows off her lanky frame and tattoos, seems unfazed.
MeLea and Karen swap church gossip over glasses of lemonade. They first met through their congregation: When a mutual friend heard about Karen’s forays into the Facebook group, she encouraged Karen to reach out to MeLea, whose mother had died of lung cancer. Their surrogate process was fairly seamless. MeLea had known Karen’s youngest biological daughter and had prayed for them when the two became estranged.
At the kitchen table, the conversation turns to goats and soap. Karen talks wearily about the hundreds of bars she still has to make for upcoming farmers’ markets. MeLea asks how she came up with the company name, Rapha Farms. Karen tells her the word means “healing” in Hebrew—fitting for a soap that could soothe eczema with its lactic acid but also because she started the business for her youngest daughter, who survived childhood brain cancer.
As with any family tale, there’s always more to the story. At 8, Karen’s daughter underwent surgery and radiation. When she lost her hair from chemo, Karen shaved her head too. The family adopted Angel the dog to keep her daughter company. Her daughter suffered brain damage from the tumor removal, but the cancer went into remission. Then, at 12, she fell in love with a pair of goats and told her mom that she wanted to be a farmer. Karen was skeptical—goats? Really? They lived in the suburbs of Minnetonka then, but her daughter’s excitement won her over, so they built stalls in their garage for two goats. It was winter, and their hands cramped in the cold as mother and daughter slowly learned how to milk. They fell in love with it. By the next year, they had moved to the country and taken up goat farming full-time. Karen hoped she could teach her daughter how to run the business, imagining she might have limited career opportunities. Karen incorporated goat-tending into a homeschooling plan.
For years, Karen’s daughter made soap, helped with the goats, and manned farmers’ market tables. Then she turned 18 and got a boyfriend. She quit her job with Rapha Farms a few days after her 19th birthday and, not long after that, moved out of Karen’s house. She got married in 2023. Karen was not invited. “I honestly don’t understand what happened between us,” Karen wrote in a Rapha Farms Instagram post congratulating the couple. Karen calls this complicated family history her “soap opera.”
This year, Karen’s goats had a lot of kids—yes, that’s the technical term—and MeLea asks if she needed to wean them. No, Karen says, the mother goats do that themselves, kicking away their grown-up progeny when they try to nurse. The only exception was Lucy, one of the first two goats she got with her biological daughter, and the mascot for Rapha Farms. “She was the best mom ever,” Karen says. “The other moms would reject their kids, and Lucy would nurse her kids until they didn’t want to nurse anymore.”
When we go to leave, MeLea’s boys groan and ask Karen for hugs. They wave dramatically as they hang from the play structure on the front lawn. I catch my forehead in the reflection of Karen’s rearview mirror—the bug bite has blown up to the exact size and shape of an egg. I’m amazed that the kids didn’t say anything about it. “They’re so sweet,” Karen says once we’re on the road. She seems filled up by the interaction.
Not everyone sees this situation as Karen does. When MeLea first talked to Karen about becoming a surrogate grandparent, she wanted her sister, Tanya, to be involved too. (That’s not her real name; she spoke to me under the condition that I use a pseudonym.) Tanya was skeptical—and she wasn’t looking for a new mother. The sisters’ mom died only 40 days after being diagnosed with cancer; there had been so little time to process it. “I don’t view Karen as my mom, because my mom’s dead,” Tanya tells me at dinner one night. “MeLea brought it up to me, and I thought she was nuts.” She and her six kids have spent time with Karen, but Tanya feels put off by the situation. “An arranged marriage is how I view it,” she says.
Of course, even among those who willingly join Surrogate Grandparents USA, there are hazards. One prospective grandma from Missouri told me about four failed surrogate families. She’d been ghosted, hit up for money, and dumped. Another surrogate grandma had a relationship with two girls that got complicated after their parents split. She didn’t agree with all of the parenting choices but didn’t feel like she could say anything. “As a surrogate grandparent, you have no history or relationship with the parents,” she said. “That’s a very unnatural grandparent relationship.” Out of a sense of duty, she continued picking the girls up from school once a week and hosting them for sleepovers at her house, feeling more like nanny than granny.
The Facebook group also hasn’t given its founder, Donna, all she’d hoped. When I asked about the founding date of Surrogate Grandparents USA, Donna knew it off the top of her head: The group is the same age as her grandson, whom she has never met. Her son and daughter-in-law cut off contact with Donna’s side of the family when he was born. “We were totally blacked out of their lives completely,” she told me over Zoom from her home in Florida, where she lives with her dog, cats, and husband. Donna gesticulated with her remarkably long nails when she spoke, a stark contrast to her short, white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Now retired, her days are spent riding electric bikes around her senior living community, kayaking, and moderating Surrogate Grandparents USA. Still, she thinks about her grandson daily. “The pain and the grief is so tremendous,” she said. The Facebook group is a way to commemorate him, though every login is a reminder of her loss.
Donna created another Facebook group, which is part open letter to her grandson, part chronicle of her experience as an estranged grandparent. She has written to her grandson about how he was a third cousin of Bob Dylan, sent him wishes for a happy Easter. She wrote letters about how his parents were keeping the family apart and attached an image of a $25 check written out to her son, which he had ripped up and returned. The content is incredibly personal, like encountering someone’s diary, but the group is public—how else would her grandson find it someday?
Donna doesn’t necessarily want to find a surrogate adult child—she has a biological daughter with whom she’s close. What Donna wants is a substitute for the grandson she never met. First, Donna found a family nearby, but she ended things when the parents began asking her for gifts and trips (which has since become a stated no-no in the group’s rules). After that, Donna and her husband connected with a mother and daughter who lived on Long Island. The four met at an amusement park in Orlando and grabbed dinner. For a while after, they talked on the phone and checked in over FaceTime, but the distance became difficult. Donna told me she’d be open to connecting with another surrogate family but wasn’t, at the moment, actively looking.
Donna often sees people come to the group too fresh from the pain of estrangement or loss. “Some people are going through an emotional time, so they want an overnight fix,” she said. “This is not an overnight fix.”
Tanya’s take is that it would never be a fix. She explains that her sister MeLea is trusting—and, perhaps, has a right to be, considering she knew Karen from real life—but Tanya has questions. She thinks Karen and Dave are “super kind,” she says, but is wary about the other side of the story. “I wish I could sit down with her daughters and be like, ‘What did you see? What did you hear? What was it that broke that relationship for you to the point where you felt like there was no repairing?’” (Karen’s daughters didn’t want to speak with me on the record.) And then there’s the question of what might happen if Karen’s daughters came back into her life. Karen still expresses frustration and sadness about her daughters and keeps up with their whereabouts through mutual friends. When Angel the dog died, Karen texted her youngest daughter the news—but used a new number and posed as a family friend. “With that reaction, I question if the door is really shut,” Tanya says. For her part, Karen considers Tanya part of the surrogate family and seems to be patiently waiting for her to come around.
After dinner, Tanya and I drive separately to her house. I pull up cautiously because her kids—four boys and two girls—are flying down the slanted driveway on bikes and scooters. “Put a helmet on,” Tanya’s husband calls to them from his fold-out chair. All of the kids have pierced ears. “We’re raising the last generation of feral children,” Tanya jokes. We sit in the driveway; they give no invitation to go inside.
“Why are you getting interviewed?” one of the boys asks his parents.
I explain that I’m writing a story about how Karen had met lots of different families and—I hesitate. Will Tanya be upset if I used the g-word? Grandma.
Tanya jumps in: “Lexi is doing a piece on families that aren’t related biologically, don’t have the same bloodlines, but they create relationships and stay together long-term, just like if they were biological families.”
“So what exactly would that mean?” one kid asks.
“That she would be our grandma,” another kid says in response.
“No,” Tanya says. “When I say ‘grandma,’ it means something to me. It means something in my heart, like how I feel about my mom. And so I don’t want to put those expectations on it—and, you know, that’s kind of where I want to leave it.”
The kids are not ready to leave it. “So by her terms, we would be grandkids?”
“Maybe,” Tanya says, with some exasperation. “You should ask her.” To Tanya, a biological grandma, bonded by blood and stories, feels truer than whatever Karen can be to them. I wonder if her kids feel the same way. Possibly, they just want a grandma.
Karen has just finished mixing goat-milk shampoo when Meghan—the fourth surrogate daughter—arrives at the farm with her husband and their 4-year-old son, Owen. Karen wears a shirt that reads “Promoted to Grandma.” Meghan’s light brown hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail. She closes her eyes and takes a deep whiff. “It smells so good in here,” she says.
Owen, who wears jean shorts and a Minnesota Twins baseball jersey, sticks out his hand to me. It’s cute and earnest, like he’s a tiny businessman. “What’s your name?” he asks, gazing at me with enormous blue eyes. I respond, but he’s off to do something else before I can ask him anything in return. Owen has autism, so his parents have been teaching him appropriate ways to greet people. But, being a kid, his interest shifts quickly.
All of us move to Karen’s office upstairs. It’s crowded with supplies and—somehow—more bars of soap, but it has more space than the living room and decidedly fewer bugs than outside. Like Michelle’s sons, Owen also loves the soap. He lights up when Karen offers him samples and places each bar one by one into a paper bag.
When Meghan and Karen met through the Facebook group in late 2023, Karen was in the midst of moving to her farm in Independence. She seemed overwhelmed by the process, so Meghan offered to help her and Dave prep their old home for sale. Meghan’s husband is a contractor and didn’t mind lending a hand too. Karen and Dave took them up on it and paid them for their time. Meghan and her husband even came over to the house while Karen and Dave were off on vacation and painted the whole basement.
Despite the way she dove headlong into Karen’s life (and home), Meghan had been careful about selecting a surrogate grandparent online. She and her husband have battled substance abuse and were still adjusting to their sober lives. “Since we got clean and moved, we don’t hang out with anybody,” she says. “We’re very particular on who we let into our lives. They were pretty much the first outsiders we’ve hung out with.”
When Meghan got pregnant with Owen, she was still using. “When I gave birth, we took him home to a homeless shelter because we had nowhere to go,” she says. Her biological mother didn’t offer help or a place to stay. It was the end of that relationship. “After going through what I’ve gone through, I know that estrangement can come in many, many forms,” she says, which is why she wasn’t worried when she learned about Karen’s biological daughters. She and Karen bonded over their interest in holistic health and natural living, which has been a focus for Meghan since getting sober. Because Karen’s ex-husband had autism, she also had some insights into Meghan’s experiences.
Meghan and her husband got married at City Hall in the spring; Karen and Dave were their witnesses. Meghan insisted it be a quick, informal affair, but Karen still made her a bouquet with red and white roses. I imagined Karen by Meghan’s side—there for Meghan even though she hadn’t been invited to her own daughters’ weddings.
Back in Karen’s office, 4-year-old Owen asks me an important question: “Do you have pepperoni?” I do not. But Karen does. Owen grabs her by the hand to lead her to the kitchen. He leads her out of the room at other times too, so she can show him where to get a power strip to plug into an electrical outlet (he loves outlets), or because he wants to check out her vacuum, or because he wants her to help him find Dave. He seems as comfortable with her as any grandchild would be with a grandparent.
Pretty soon, Karen, Meghan, Owen, and I head outside. Bugs be damned, I’m eager to meet the goats. Dave joins us as we feed them mushy bananas out of soap molds, then he takes me inside the goat pen. Owen follows us at first but gets overwhelmed when the goats surround him. I can’t blame him: The biggest goat, Buddy, weighs 230 pounds.
Dave tells me how, two years ago, Lucy—their goat mascot and “best mom ever”—got pneumonia. Parasites took advantage of her weakened immune system, and she died. Karen and Dave were devastated to lose one of their original goats. Then something strange happened. Lucy had been the herd’s queen. The other goats relied on her to know when it was time to feed, what path to take through the pasture, when they should go into heat for breeding. After she died, the goats stood out screaming in the field as night fell. No one had told them how to get home. Without their mother, they were lost. All this time later, a queen hasn’t stepped up to take Lucy’s place. As we talk, a doe rams into a boy goat that has a swath of my linen pant leg in its mouth. That doe seems to be coming into her own, I note. “Maybe she’ll be the new queen,” Dave says. Only time will tell if she has what it takes, and if the herd will accept her as their new mother.
Several weeks after my trip to Minnesota, Karen calls to say that she’s in touch with her youngest daughter again. Her daughter’s brain cancer has returned. Karen’s voice shakes; patients with this diagnosis tend to live five years, maybe less. She wants to help her daughter through treatment, but her daughter has only agreed to communicate by phone.
Karen’s surrogate children and grandchildren tried to be there for her. Michelle brought her coffee at the farmer’s market. MeLea and Tanya took her to the county fair with the kids. They felt Karen’s pain. But this raised old questions: Would they lose their new relationship if Karen’s “real” daughters reconnected?
When Karen got the news of the diagnosis, she hired more workers for the farm so she could drop everything for her daughter. She waited for a call that never came; her daughter stopped responding. As months passed without her daughter asking for help, Karen was left with an open calendar. “I guess that will free up more time for the grandkids,” she tells me, forcing brightness into her tone.
That ends up being true for some of her surrogate families, but not for others. By the fall, Karen drifts apart from Meghan. Though Meghan seems to want a real connection, Karen tells me that her husband “drops lots of hints about wanting handouts, and that was getting old.” Meanwhile, MeLea and Tanya argue regularly—in the way sisters do, about the kind of family wounds that go back lifetimes. They go for stretches without speaking to each other. “They both have called me crying,” Karen says. “MeLea says her mom would’ve fixed it.” And Karen wants to; she’s trying.
At Thanksgiving, about a year after she first posted about herself in Surrogate Grandparents USA, Karen posts a different kind of photo, this one to the Rapha Farms feed. In it, she gathers around a banquet table with MeLea’s and Michelle’s families. The adults had met before, but this is the first time the kids have gotten together. Everyone is dressed comfortably in sweatshirts and jeans. MeLea’s youngest son splays half asleep in his father’s arms, Michelle’s eldest son smiles and poses with his arm around Karen. They look like a family.
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