The Surrogate Grandmother: Chosen Family on a Goat Farm

From her kitchen window, 58-year-old Karen Tautges Malinak keeps an eye on her herd of 20 goats while she waits for her guests to arrive. It’s a bright, clear summer day in Independence, Minnesota—a tiny town of just 3,644 people, a 30-minute drive outside Minneapolis. Her hands curl around a faded pink coffee mug emblazoned with the words: “Moms make everything better.”

Karen’s life centers on this farm, which also doubles as the home base for her goat soap business, Rapha Farms. It’s far easier for guests to travel to her than for her to leave her goats unattended. As we lean against her cluttered kitchen counter, Karen tucks her short silver bob behind one ear and checks the clock. “They should be here soon,” she says, her vowels stretched long by her native Minnesota accent. The whole scene feels like a cozy rural sitcom: over the next two days, I’m set to meet Karen’s four “daughters,” four sons-in-law, and 12 grandchildren. Though I’ve spoken to most over the phone, I half expect any stranger to walk through the door—because none of these people are Karen’s biological kin.

Adding to the unusual vibe, Karen and her husband Dave only recently moved to this property. Their soap-making workshop is still under construction, so production happens wherever there’s open space. The living room is stacked high with racks of finished soap bars, labeled by scent: tea tree, lilac, lemongrass. Silicone molds cover the dining table, and vats of essential oils line every empty wall. The tiny kitchen is piled high with hand blenders, and a hand-taped sign on the floor marks the spot: “Poop buckets here.” (One of the messy joys of goat farming.) There’s barely room to walk, let alone fit extra furniture for visiting guests. So where will everyone stay?

As if on cue, the driveway sensor chimes. Karen’s daughter Michelle, her husband, and their two young boys pull into the lot. Highlighter shimmers across Michelle’s cheekbones; her 9- and 7-year-old sons hop out of the car clutching gifts: a jigsaw puzzle for Dave, and a handmade condolence card for Karen. The day before, Karen had to euthanize Angel, her elderly Maltese.

Karen pins the card to her refrigerator, tucking it beneath a photo of three other grandsons that Michelle and her family have never actually met. That’s because Michelle and her brood are not, technically, Karen’s real family. In fact, none of the people I’m here to meet share any blood relation to Karen. They are families she found online and “adopted” as their surrogate grandmother, during the lonely years after her own biological daughters cut her off.

Karen and Michelle first connected in November 2023 in a Facebook group called Surrogate Grandparents USA, a space where older and younger Americans build connections around their shared need for more family. Many of the group’s posts read like quiet, tragic personal ads:

“We want grandparents who want to have pizza nights with us, attend our boys’ baseball and basketball games, go for ice cream dates and bike rides—just genuinely have fun with our family.”

“My kids 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 like 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, founded Surrogate Grandparents USA in 2015. “Everybody needs some kind of emotional support system,” she told me. Some members have lost loved ones, others never built biological families of their own—but the group is first and foremost a refuge for people estranged from their blood relatives. “I realized it was a growing problem, not only in the United States but worldwide.” Scrolling through the group’s messages confirms this: most posters report being either the victims or the initiators of family estrangement.

Today, around 27% of American adults have cut off contact with at least one family member—one of the highest estrangement rates in the world. And according to psychologist Joshua Coleman, author of the widely discussed 2021 book Rules of Estrangement, that number is rising. “Online support groups, Instagram influencers, TikTok influencers—all are huge contributors to this phenomenon,” Coleman says. While estrangement has always existed (common causes include abuse, divorce, and conflicts 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 explains. But just as social media can push families apart, it can also bring new ones together. Coleman even runs his own private Facebook group for estranged parents and grandparents.

Let’s be honest: Facebook feels outdated to younger generations, right? But with a third of the global population logging in monthly, it remains a social media behemoth—and one of the only online spaces where most people use their real names, connect with actual friends and family, and share unfiltered photos from their real lives. That makes it surprisingly perfect for building genuine, long-term connections.

Surrogate Grandparents USA attracted only 30 members in its first six months. The group’s usefulness depended on its size: more members meant more potential local matches. So Donna posted dozens of free ads across the platform and reached out to local TV stations. By 2019, the group had 3,700 members. Today, it counts more than 11,000.

Karen has two biological daughters of her own. When she divorced their father in 2019, her eldest daughter—then a college student—cut Karen out of her life. Karen’s ex had autism and a brain injury; the older daughter believed Karen had a lifelong obligation to stay with him. Karen, meanwhile, says she endured years of emotional abuse in the marriage. “She sided with him,” Karen says. Four years later, in 2023, Karen’s younger daughter also left, with her older sister’s help. What was once a family of four shrank to just two: Karen and Dave, her second husband. “I stopped sleeping for a month,” Karen says. “It was devastating.”

But she soon decided she needed to move forward. “I knew I had gotten through hard things before,” she says. “I wasn’t 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 in the group for six months before working up the courage to post her own introduction. “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.” This premise never felt strange to Karen. As a child, she’d been taken under the wing of her childless next-door neighbors, who brought her to a lakeside cabin every summer and bought her gifts: a bike, jewelry, glass animals. When they died, Karen inherited most of their estate. So why couldn’t she pass that same kindness on to a new generation? She added a selfie and a photo of her with her goats to the post. Ten women responded.

One was Michelle. Michelle’s sisters had recommended the group to her; their own mother had died six years earlier, and Michelle had no extended family living nearby. She longed for someone who could attend her boys’ sports games and take them out for dinner. For years, she’d scrolled the group’s posts, but no one ever lived close enough. Until Karen.

Karen says matching with Michelle felt “almost like online dating.” They started with DMs, moved to texting and calls, then finally planned an in-person meeting. Group moderators encourage members to vet potential matches, so Michelle browsed Karen’s social media first— which, unsurprisingly, was almost entirely goats.

They met for lunch at Panera Bread. Michelle was desperate for Karen to like her; the stakes felt high. “I literally had pink eye at the time,” Michelle laughs. “And I was like, ‘I’m not this ugly, I promise.’” Both were raw from the loss of the family they’d once had, and at one point during the meal, they both cried.

Biological families often gather out of obligation, bound by decades of shared history. Surrogate grandparents and their chosen adult children have to build real friendship from scratch. Karen and Michelle bonded over their shared grief and Christian faith, and didn’t introduce the boys until both were sure they wanted to commit to the connection. It quickly became serious. That pink coffee mug Karen holds? It’s a Mother’s Day gift from Michelle.

After introductions, we head outside. The boys complain about mosquitoes swarming up from the lawn. “I’m not an outside person,” announces the 9-year-old, wearing a shirt printed with bearded dragons. Karen had warned me these “city kids” are a little less comfortable with rough farm life than her other surrogate grandchildren. I suspect they’re being dramatic—until I’m swatting bugs off my arm, then my ankle, then a huge one lands straight on my forehead. I make a mental note: listen to the kids, they know what they’re talking about. Even so, it’s clear the bond between Karen and this family is real. When we head back inside, Karen hands the boys a basket of soap samples. “Got watermelon this time,” she says, and the 7-year-old squeals. It’s their little goodbye ritual, and Michelle and her family head out.

Next up is another surrogate daughter, MeLea, and her three boys. It’s not a coincidence that three of Karen’s surrogate daughters have names starting with M: Michelle, MeLea, Meghan. It’s become a running joke with her and Dave: “I can’t believe you named all of them starting with M,” he teases. Karen keeps a detailed spreadsheet with the ages, birthdays, and hobbies of a dozen surrogate grandkids, ranging from 1 to 13 years old.

MeLea was supposed to meet us at the farm, but she got swamped with work and asks us to come to her house instead. When we pull up, MeLea’s biological father-in-law is standing outside helping with home renovations. I wonder if he feels awkward about a surrogate grandmother joining the family, but he waves and calls out to Karen: “I’ve been using your soap,” he says, gruff but approving, as we head inside.

MeLea’s three boys, ages 2, 4, and 7, are a tornado of energy: showing off their rock and feather collections, playing off-key songs on a toy guitar, picking daisies from the yard to give us. The youngest walks in the doorway with no pants on, and MeLea—lean, tattooed, in a tank top—doesn’t even bat an eye.

Over lemonade, Karen and MeLea swap church gossip. They were first connected through their congregation: a mutual friend heard Karen had joined the Facebook surrogate group, and suggested she reach out to MeLea, whose mom had died of lung cancer. The match clicked almost immediately. MeLea had known Karen’s younger biological daughter for years, and had prayed for the whole family when they became estranged.

Sitting at the kitchen table, the conversation turns to goats and soap. Karen mentions she still has hundreds of bars to make for upcoming farmers markets. MeLea asks how she came up with the name Rapha Farms. Karen explains the word means “healing” in Hebrew. It fits two ways: the goat milk lactic acid soothes eczema, but she also started the business for her youngest biological daughter, who survived childhood brain cancer.

The full backstory of the farm goes back decades: When her daughter was 8, she had surgery and radiation to remove the tumor. When chemo made her hair fall out, Karen shaved her own head in solidarity. They adopted Angel the dog to keep her company. The cancer went into remission, but the tumor removal left her with permanent brain damage. When she was 12, she fell in love with goats and told Karen she wanted to be a farmer. Karen was skeptical—they lived in the Minnetonka suburbs, after all—but her daughter’s excitement won her over. They built stalls in their garage for two goats, and that winter, they learned to milk together, their hands cramping from the cold. They both fell in love with the work. By the next year, they moved out to the country and became full-time goat farmers. Karen homeschooled her daughter, wove goat care into the curriculum, and built the soap business hoping her daughter could run it one day, since she figured career opportunities might be limited for her after the brain damage.

For years, her daughter made soap, cared for the goats, and ran the Rapha Farms booth at farmers markets. Then she turned 18, got a boyfriend, quit the business a few days after her 19th birthday, moved out, and got married in 2023. Karen wasn’t invited. “I honestly don’t understand what happened between us,” Karen wrote in an Instagram post on Rapha Farms’ account congratulating the couple. Karen calls this tangled family history her “personal soap opera.”

This year, Karen’s goats had a lot of new baby kids, and MeLea asks if she has to wean them. Karen says no—mother goats do that on their own, kicking their grown kids away when they try to nurse. The only exception was Lucy, one of the original two goats she got with her biological daughter, and Rapha Farms’ mascot. “She was the best mom ever,” Karen says. “Other moms would reject their kids, but Lucy would nurse hers until they didn’t want to nurse anymore.”

When we leave, MeLea’s boys beg Karen for hugs, waving wildly from the playground structure on their front lawn. I catch my forehead in Karen’s rearview mirror—my bug bite has swollen up to the exact size and shape of a chicken egg. I’m shocked the kids didn’t say anything. “They’re so sweet,” Karen says as we drive off, full from the visit.

Not everyone sees this arrangement the same way. When MeLea first started talking to Karen about being a surrogate grandma, she asked her sister Tanya (who asked to use a pseudonym for this story) to join in. Tanya was skeptical—she never wanted a new mom. The sisters lost their mom just 40 days after her cancer diagnosis; they never had time to process the grief. “I don’t see Karen as my mom, because my mom is dead,” Tanya tells me over dinner. “When MeLea brought it up, I thought she was crazy.” She and her six kids have spent time with Karen, but Tanya still feels put off by the whole idea. “I see it like an arranged marriage,” she says.

Even for people who join the group willingly, there are pitfalls. A prospective surrogate grandma from Missouri told me about four failed matches: she’d been ghosted, asked for money, and dumped without explanation. Another surrogate grandma built a relationship with two girls that fell apart after their parents split. She disagreed with some of their parenting choices but felt she had no right to speak up. “As a surrogate grandparent, you don’t have the shared history with the parents that biological grandparents have,” she said. “It’s a very unnatural relationship.” Out of a sense of duty, she still picked the girls up from school once a week and hosted sleepovers, feeling more like a nanny than a grandma.

The group hasn’t given founder Donna everything she hoped for, either. When I asked when she founded it, she answered immediately: the group is exactly the same age as her grandson, who she has never met. Her son and daughter-in-law cut off all contact with Donna’s side of the family when he was born. “We were completely erased from their lives,” she told me over Zoom from her Florida home, where she lives with her dog, cats, and husband. She gestures with her long painted nails, a contrast to her short white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Now retired, she spends her days riding electric bikes around her senior community, kayaking, and moderating the group. Still, she thinks about her grandson every day. “The pain and grief are so big,” she said. The group is a way to honor him, but every time she logs on, it’s a reminder of what she lost.

Donna started another public Facebook group, half open letter to her grandson, half chronicle of life as an estranged grandparent. She’s written to him about being third cousin to Bob Dylan, sent him Easter wishes, explained how his parents cut the family off, and even posted a photo of a $25 check she wrote her son that he ripped up and sent back. It’s incredibly intimate, like reading someone’s diary, but she keeps it public—how else will her grandson find it one day?

Donna doesn’t actually want a surrogate adult child for herself; she has a biological daughter she’s close to. What she wants is a replacement for the grandson she never got to know. First, she matched with a local family, but ended things when the parents started asking her for expensive gifts and trips (that’s now explicitly against the group rules). After that, she and her husband connected with a mother and daughter from Long Island. They met at an Orlando amusement park, got dinner, talked on the phone and FaceTimed for a while, but the distance made it hard to keep going. Donna says she’s open to another match, but isn’t actively looking right now.

Donna often sees people join the group right after they’ve been through the pain of estrangement or loss, desperate for a quick fix. “Some people are going through such an emotional time, they want this to fix everything overnight,” she said. “This isn’t an overnight fix.”

Tanya agrees that it can never be a fix for that kind of grief. She says MeLea is a trusting person, and had a pre-existing connection to Karen, so that works for her, but she has questions. She says Karen and Dave are “incredibly kind,” but she wonders what the other side of the story is. “I wish I could sit down with Karen's biological daughters and ask: What did you see? What did you experience? What broke your relationship so badly you felt it could never be fixed?” (Karen's daughters declined to speak on the record for this story.) She also wonders what would happen if Karen's daughters ever came back into her life. Karen still keeps up with their lives through mutual friends, and when Angel died, she texted the news to her younger daughter from a new number, pretending to be a family friend. “That reaction makes me wonder if the door is really fully closed,” Tanya says. For her part, Karen considers Tanya part of her chosen family and is waiting patiently for her to come around.

After dinner, Tanya and I drive