There are so many ways to bring a human life into this cursed world and if you’re old and gay, like I am, they’re all extremely expensive and physically draining. But sometimes after 3.5 years, seven IUIs, lots of crying, gallons and gallons of blood drawn from your tender veins, tons of money thrown into an endless abyss, and one major deviation from the original plan — you finally get pregnant. It’s not how you thought it would go. You’re not even the pregnant one! But pregnant someone now is, and shall continue to be.
In this new AF+ column “Baby Steps,” I’ll be sharing the process of this pregnancy from the perspective of me, The One Who Is Not Pregnant. In this first edition we’ll be going back in time to bring you up to speed — how the hell did we get pregnant? We’re at 27 weeks as I write this intro — perhaps a little late to start a pregnancy column but listen, I had anxiety! In future columns I’ll be sharing more about the joys and triumphs and tragedies of the past 27 weeks as well as new joys and dilemmas that occur in real time.
I’m really super eager to hear from all of you, too — your questions, advice, thoughts, concerns and your own personal stories — there aren’t many places where queers are talking to each other about these things and there’s so much to talk about and think about! Let me know if this column topic interests you really let me know anything at all.
Today I’ll be switching back and forth between my narrative of what occurred and a conversation my roommate Gretchen reluctantly agreed to participate in.
I’ve always wanted kids…
I don’t know why, but I’ve always wanted kids, it’s one of the only things I’ve ever really been sure of. After years of waiting for the perfect time — when I’d have the financial stability, mental serenity and work/life balance necessary to make it work — I realized the perfect time would never come. Then there was a pandemic, and I was rapidly approaching the end of my fertility window.
So, in July 2021, at the tender age of 39, I told my girlfriend of several months, Gretchen, that I was starting the process of trying to get pregnant. (We’d been best friends for two years prior to dating, jsyk.) Gretchen wasn’t sure if she wanted to have kids. She’d just gotten sober and was processing a lot of life choices and concepts and just generally did not feel ready to commit to doing that with me, which was of course totally reasonable!
Riese: What were your thoughts on human reproduction prior to me declaring my intention to get pregnant?
Gretchen: Well, I’ve always known and dreamt of being a mother. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had my baby dolls, and I thought, “I want to do this for the rest of my life.”
Riese: Did you have baby dolls?
Gretchen: I had dinosaurs.
Riese: So what you’re saying is that before our conversation, you had not thought seriously or whimsically at all about being a parent.
Gretchen: Correct. As a kid, I wasn’t interested in feeding or wheeling a fake baby around. Girls would be like, “do you want to play house?” And I was just like, “I mean—”
Riese: “I already live in a house.”
Gretchen: “Not really.”
Riese: “My mom does that all day, and she’s really unhappy.”
Gretchen: Exactly. So I never had baby dolls, and to be honest, I’ve never really thought about being a parent.
The Process of Getting Pregnant Via IUI
I began my journey in July of 2021 with rapidly mutating start-up Kindbody, a fertility clinic located in Los Angeles’s own Century City Mall. I chose Kindbody ‘cause I could book an appointment online and it took my insurance. It has exactly the vibe and color scheme you’d expect from a fertility clinic hoping to entice downwardly mobile millennial girlboss customers with freezer-ready eggs: pale pinks, creams, yellows and golds; vaguely inspirational framed posters from Target; baskets of Kind Bars, etc.
The first step with Kindbody was an in-clinic new patient consultation to discuss my health and the process. They counted my follicles (fantastic) and took my blood to test my AMH levels (fine). There were more blood tests, a mandatory out-of-pocket “therapy session” about donor sperm, and an optional (out-of-pocket) genetic carrier screening that was definitely not optional. I tested posi for carrying genes for three of the 280+ conditions I was tested for, thus limiting my pool of potential sperm donors to donors who’d been tested for the same things I was tested for. Some donors at the three banks Kindbody worked with — California Cryobank, Fairfax Cryobank and Seattle Sperm Bank — hadn’t been tested for anything at all. Ultimately I had around 20 guys to choose from when it came time to choose.
I ordered two vials ($2.3k) from a donor I chose because he was tall, got good grades, and didn’t have any mental illness or seasonal allergies in his family. (Because I have a lot of both already.)
My First IUI
My AFC numbers were good enough for me to try an IUI round without Clomid (a medication that stimulates egg production), but I did use the HCG shot that triggered the ovaries to release an egg at the right moment for the IUI. Two weeks later — on Valentine’s Day of 2022 — I found out that I was pregnant! And terrified! And so was Gretchen.
My first ultrasound was normal. Gretchen came with me to my eight-week ultrasound and, well…. I wrote about this experience in How to Survive a Miscarriage By Marathoning 168 Episodes of Survivor.
Gretchen: The miscarriage was really interesting for me… which sounds like an insane thing to say!
Riese: “Your miscarriage was really healing for me.”
Gretchen: I think about the moment at the doctor’s office, when they were looking for the heartbeat, and — you know when everything stops, and you’re realizing the worst thing ever is happening to you? They couldn’t find the heartbeat. I basically blacked out, but I remember them handing the wand thing over to another doctor.
Riese: And everyone got really quiet.
Gretchen: That moment was uniquely horrible for you in a way that I’ll never understand because I’ve never had a miscarriage. But for me, who didn’t even know how involved I was going to be, if I even wanted a kid, all of a sudden that moment, that’s all I wanted, is to find a heartbeat.
Then I didn’t walk out of the office thinking, “Oh, yeah. I can’t wait to be pregnant soon,” or, “I can’t wait to be a parent.” But I did think, “Oh, that’s interesting that I felt that way.” I really don’t know how to describe it. It’s just that I had hopes onto this that I didn’t even know that I had.
Riese: In that moment, you realized that you wanted it to work. You were like, “we’ll try again,” which was our first first “we.”
Gretchen: Right. But I was like, “I’ll push that feeling aside.” I still wasn’t sure, I wanted more time to think about if it was what i wanted or not.
Post-Miscarriage: A Lot of Waiting and a Lot Of IUIs
After the D+C in March, I had to wait a few months for my AMH levels to go down to a place where we could try again. Between June 2022 and February 2023, I did five more IUis. I did medicated cycles and my body responded well to the meds, producing so many eggs they worried about multiples. Each cycle cost around $3k for the IUI, sperm and meds. But none of ‘em worked.
In February of 2023, I had another counseling session with Kindbody, and they advised me to switch to IVF, which costs around $30k a cycle, an amount of money that I simply did not have access to. So I left with a lot of pamphlets about loans and a lot of feelings about how cost-prohibitive this whole thing is.
Gretchen Steps Up to Bat
By this point, Gretchen was officially in, and her brother was on board to be a donor so we could both have little bits of ourselves in the mix. So we got an appointment at a really good fertility clinic in June of 2023 — for $30k a cycle we wanted the best doctor in the universe.. We also wanted the doctor to look at Gretchen’s situation to see if she could carry. She had no desire to be pregnant, but we just wanted to see all of our options.
But that summer a bunch of mental health stuff happened with me and we ended up canceling and then delaying the appointment until early 2024. At this point, she was 39 and I was 42 — not a huge age gap overall, but significant years when it comes to fertility. The doctor’s verdict was that if I wanted to carry, IVF was the only option and we had to start immediately. Gretchen, on the other hand, could give IUIs a shot. Ultimately, we made a financial decision to go forward with Gretchen as the carrier.
Gretchen: This still isn’t my ideal scenario, but I knew my chances were better to have a healthy kid. And at the end of the day, that’s what I wanted.
Riese: It was tough because I’d been very attached to the idea of having a genetic relationship to the kid.
Gretchen: Yes, right. Because of your Dad.
Riese: Right, he’s dead and I wanted a piece of him to live on through the child. My brother wasn’t able to be our sperm donor. So that meant there was no way for me to have that. Although I was starting to think — do I really wanna give all of this to a kid? I have like 50 syndromes, multiple mental health issues. I have every skin disease that exists. I mean my seasonal allergies are really bad!
Gretchen: Right.
Riese: But yeah, despite all that — I wanted a little piece of my Dad to live on.
Gretchen: Yeah, and I said, “What about a big piece of me?”
Riese: I decided to settle for you.
Gretchen: That’s what people are doing. They’re settling for me.
Gretchen’s IUI Journey
Gretchen’s insurance is the actual worst (Oxford United Healthcare, for anybody who can commiserate) and basically the only place we could go was…. drumroll… Kindbody! They’d shut down their mall location and moved everyone to Santa Monica. Everyone who worked there was always so incredibly nice but they were also all clearly overbooked. It was chaos.
The genetic test she took wasn’t even the same one I took, but she tested positive for more things than I had, thus eliminating even more potential donors from the pool. But also, the sperm market had gotten really bananas!
Gretchen: Here’s the thing about the old sperm market — sperm is flying off the shelves!
Riese: California Cryobank had doubled the cost of sperm since I’d tried, so now it was over $2k a vial, plus shipping.
Gretchen: You think you’ve picked somebody, then your doctor takes 5 to 20 business days to get back to you about it. During the process, it felt really frustrating to me because straight people just go out there, have sex with whoever, and then they have that baby. And the baby is what the baby is!
Riese: Some of the things that they test you for felt like eugenics to me, like they are deciding for us things that I don’t think are their decisions to make! Like can’t it be up to us if we want to take that “risk” or not? Anyhow — we ended up with like five dudes to choose from. We chose a man who is 6’7′ and was a musician and also athletic.
Gretchen’s first IUI cycle, in February of 2024, didn’t work. She did the first cycle unmedicated, but we decided to maximize our chances by taking Clomid for the second cycle, in April. She got the IUI the week we moved in together. Two weeks later, she got a migraine — generally the sign that her period was around the corner — and she cancelled her follow-up appointment at Kindbody. A few days later, I followed up with Gretchen to ask about the arrival of her period and….
LOL Gretchen’s Pregnant!
Riese: And you didn’t tell me!
Gretchen: I got nervous. I hid the pregnancy test.
Riese: Yeah I was like, “So, um, did you get your period?” and you went, “I’m pregnant,” and then you ran into your office.
Gretchen: I didn’t really know how to tell you, as evidenced by the fact I said, “pregnant,” and then ran away. I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked. It’s so funny because you think that only shock happens when you have sex with a random guy at a bar, and then a couple of weeks later, “Oh, shit.” That was the intent, was for me to get pregnant, and I still was shocked.
Riese: After that, we didn’t tell anyone. I tried not to think about it because I was just so, so, so scared that it wasn’t going to last. But then you wouldn’t go to the doctor to get it confirmed!
Gretchen: So here’s the thing. I don’t believe in doctors that much. Okay? I don’t trust them. I think, “Where are you getting this information,” because I can also surf the web.
Riese: They did go to medical school.
Gretchen: Sure. Right, right. Yeah. I did too. It’s called WebMD.
Riese: Oh, you got a PhD in WebMD?
Gretchen: I’m joking. Look, I believe in medicine, science —
Riese: Dinosaurs, the Big Bang.
Gretchen: Yeah. Let’s get on the right level here. I got vaccinated. We’re fine.
Riese: Gretchen just gets a lot of surprise medical bills so she likes to avoid the doctor. But I was really interested in going to the doctor to get a confirmation.
Gretchen: I said, “I have a stick, and it says I’m pregnant. And I don’t have my period. Sounds pregnant to me!”
Riese: That was difficult for me because I’d had a missed miscarriage, when I thought I was still pregnant but the baby had already died inside me. Which I didn’t even know was a thing before it happened to me. So I was so nervous to not have your pregnancy confirmed. I didn’t realize how rare missed miscarriages are though. I just didn’t want to get too excited or invested or tell anybody or anything.
Gretchen: Also we call the baby “banana.”
Riese: Right because you call me a top banana.
Gretchen: No I call you a tall banana.
Riese: Right, so we call the baby “banana.” This is an important thing to know.
Finally at nine weeks, Gretchen made an appointment at Kindbody and we went in to have the pregnancy confirmed. By that point we’d already downloaded the ‘What to Expect” app but did we really know what to expect when we were expecting?
Gretchen: For some reason there were a bunch of people in the office at Kindbody. Everyone piled in, ecstatic.
Riese: Yeah, there were like seven doctors there. I’m like, “Where were you guys when we were calling about this bill?”
Gretchen: They walk in full of joy and we weren’t smiling. We weren’t reacting.
Riese: To them — we were here nine weeks after an IUI and you didn’t have your period so obviously you were pregnant, but they were so confused from the beginning why we weren’t 100% convinced that we were pregnant. They’re like, “So you skipped your two week appointment?”
Gretchen: I said, “Yes, sure. Yes, I did. Thank you so much for asking. I did skip that appointment.” And then they said, “Okay.”
Riese: I was like “Why is everyone excited? They haven’t done the ultrasound yet! Don’t they wanna be sure the kid is still kicking before getting so excited?”
Gretchen: We were both sitting there so solemn, like this was a funeral. They’re doing the ultrasound. They looked. You can see the baby. “It’s a baby.” They’re pointing to it. They’re smiling at me. They’re looking at Riese or smiling at Riese. Waiting for a reaction.
Riese: Finally, you asked, thank God. You were like, “So there’s a heartbeat?” They’re like, “Oh, yeah. Of course.” And I was like, “You could’ve led with that. Why didn’t you tell us that?”
Gretchen: Because no one else is thinking, “My baby may have flat-lined in my stomach.”
Riese: We were relieved. I mean, most of my friends who’ve had kids have also had miscarriages. So I just think there’s miscarriages everywhere, and it’s so common. It was normal for us to be worried.
Gretchen: It was really hard for me to picture a reality where this worked, and it was healthy. I had been fully prepped for everything to be a disaster and had absolutely no response when they were like, “Couldn’t be greater. Looks clear as a bell. It just is perfect.”
Riese: Yeah. So we went to Trader Joe’s and got a treat to celebrate.
Learning To Sacrifice Ourselves For The Child
After that appointment, I told Laneia and she told her best friend Molly but nobody else in the world knew. But our desire to keep it to ourselves for the first 16 weeks met a formidable test very early on.
Gretchen: Okay, I love the movie Twister. It is arguably the best film of all time, and I think Drew would agree—
Riese: I’m sure she would agree, yeah. Positive.
Gretchen: Twister is peak cinema. When I heard there was going to be a sequel, I was ecstatic. When I heard you could see the sequel and wind could blow at you, you could feel the rain literally in 4D on you, I thought I was born to see Twisters 4D in theaters. This was my calling.
Riese: Yeah, for sure.
Gretchen: And we got tickets. I told everybody I knew. It was more exciting than honestly the pregnancy. I was like, “I’m going to see Twisters 4D.” It’s like, “This is everything that I’ve ever imagined and hoped for and dreamed when I was a little kid.” When we talked about what we wanted as little people?
Riese: For you it wasn’t baby dolls and dreaming of motherhood, it was wanting to see Twisters 4D.
Gretchen: Yeah. People want to be mothers. I wanted to see fucking Twisters 4D in cinema. And we got tickets, and my friend, Molly, said to me, because I was bragging to her and everybody I’ve ever met that I’m seeing this, she said, “Are you sure you can go, because you’re pregnant?”
Riese: And then we had to look it up online, and it turned out—
Gretchen: I could not go. Apparently, pregnant women shouldn’t be jostled in the seat.
Riese: It’s absurd. Big Cinema…
Gretchen: So yeah, I had to cancel.
Riese: So then our group chat of our friends were like, “Gretchen, how was Twisters 4D??!” and I was like, “Oh, she had to work late. We ended up not being able to go,” which would never happen. You do always have to work late and miss things because of that, but there’s no way we wouldn’t have bought tickets to go another day if that had happened.
Gretchen: Nothing would have stopped me.
Riese: Nothing would’ve stopped you.
Gretchen: Luckily, they didn’t press on it hard, but that felt like a real moment of dishonesty.
Riese: Yeah, it felt like lying.
Gretchen: Also, one where I truly learned what it is to be a parent, because you have to be selfless. Sometimes, you have to miss the best moment of your life.
Riese: You have to give up on your dreams.
Gretchen: You have to give up on your dreams. Whatever you were dreaming, you have to give that up now.
Riese: Exactly.
Gretchen: You have a kid, and life is hard. You have to stop having wants in your own life.
Riese: You’ll still have wants and your own life when the kid is born!
Gretchen: Right. But I’ll never have Twisters 4D.
Please comment and let me know if there’s anything specific you wanna see in this column or really anything at all! I know comments have been sparse these days but I have a dream maybe we could turn that all around starting here and now! Are you pregnant? Have you ever been pregnant? Have you ever seen a pregnant person or Twisters 4-D? Tell me how you got pregnant! Tell us everything!