I’m Queer, Single, Uncertain About Kids, and Freezing My Eggs

All-year round icicle Christmas lights. The rainbow kind. Stained wood floors and tables. Flowers picked from just outside. The tatted barista whistling at a Snow White caliber overtop French music unrecognizable to Shazam. Stucco walls covered in local art that surprises and delights. Sipping my latte while I submit receipts for Pregnyl, Menopur, Gonal-F, and the rest of the crew. It’s a Friday morning in late May before the work rush.

The company I’ve worked at for over four years added a benefit of reimbursement up to $10,000 (highly taxed) for egg freezing. Nearly 32, this idea had been humming in the back of my mind, but I wasn’t ready to commit to the cost. Even with this new coverage, and only going for one retrieval cycle, it came to $6,000 out of pocket (plus $625 annually to store), 19 self-injections and seven visits downtown. I’m not even certain that I want to have a kid.

With three serious adult relationships in my rearview, I’m a single, queer woman living in San Francisco. This year, apparently, I celebrated Pride by giving myself more assurance I could start a family and have my own gene-sharing tot, regardless of my future partner. I’m not alone in that quest. This elective, pricey procedure is on the rise in the U.S. It’s a pain and a privilege.

I recently learned the word “interdigitate” from a surgeon. It means “to interlock the fingers of two clasped hands.” That felt like what I did with myself. I held my own damn hand. Lighting a candle and injecting yourself in the abdomen every night for two weeks for your potential future family feels like you’re holding your own hand.

Romanticize your life, they say.

When I finish my shots, I treat myself to a long shower and some peanut butter Quadratinis. It’s my version of a lollipop at the doctor.

Parent yourself first, I say.

It feels like the hardest choice in the world. On the one hand, I want to be this TikTok mom, her kid adorably drawing out their awake time together, “Do you love my heart bro? Do you love my eyes bro? Goodniiiiiight bro.” On the other hand, I find myself tired managing my own simple life — work, exercise, cleaning my apartment, laundry, seeing friends, traveling some, doing my taxes, going to the dentist, cultivating hobbies. The 24/7 of it all, with kids, is unimaginable.

I’ve heard an idea that builds on “you can’t have it all.” It goes, “you can’t have it all at the same time.” So, the question becomes: What do I want to prioritize and when?

Legs crossed. Blundstone twitching. Waiting to be called for blood work. I turned the pages of the quote book. Those always feel cheesy. The elevator music of books. But this one stuck with me. From the last line of Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison wrote, “If you surrender to the air, you can ride it.”

But what if the air is thick with the particles of patriarchy and it’s smokey as hell? How do I know what’s real to me when the air I breathe isn’t mine?

People like to assert, “if it’s not a hell yes, then it’s a no,” especially when it comes to romance. It feels truer for having kids. Because you can’t take that back. But is “hell yes” a fair bar?

There’s a mountain of factors to weigh and the need to come to peace with a lot of uncertainties. Whose sperm? Whose love? How do you feel about being pregnant and birthing? Then there’s the risk of miscarriage. Of postpartum. Identity whiplash. Emotional bandwidth. Not knowing what the future holds in terms of access to water and vegetables and human rights and a breathable outdoors. The fear of getting isolated and nuclear even if you want to be a village. And then there’s holding your palms open to hope and joy and the teeny tiny feet that can usher in more hope and more joy than you ever thought possible (that’s what they say!).

There are books to help you think through the subject. I’ve started So When Are You Having Kids? By Jordan Davidson. I plan to read The Baby Decision by Merle A. Bombardieri. I’m sure there are many more. Sound off in the comments.

I do think there’s this extra layer of questions when you’re queer. And being a later-in-life queer means my zigging & zagging got delayed. But at least I can bring some certainty to the fertility side of things with egg freezing. Finding your life partner can’t be timed. Sometimes it’s loving and learning and loving again and learning again and loving again, and, and, and biological clocks just don’t give a shit.

“You’ll feel a little pressure,” the nurse says, just before the transvaginal ultrasound probe. I was tempted to make a joke about the vaginal, biological, societal pressure triad, but didn’t know how to land it. Still don’t.

Flash forward to the morning of the retrieval. Alarm went off at 5:45. I touched water to my lips but didn’t swallow (recovering rule-follower). Got in a Lyft and made it to the clinic by 6:35 a.m. A fuschia mask-wearing, eye-smiling woman greeted me with, “big day!!!!” I was brought to the side of the floor I’d never been to before. The serious side. I was greeted by more smiling eyes, escorted to my curtained off “room” and asked to change into my gown, the socks with the sticky bottoms, and a gorgeous blue hairnet.

“Take off your watch and jewelry. Empty your bladder.”

My nurse went through the paperwork, I signed that I wanted “full code” if something went wrong, and she hooked me up to the IV. The anesthesiologist came in to talk through the plan. I learned a low dose of fentanyl would be used. I asked about it, because I heard the girl in the “room” over asking and because I recently watched Dopesick on Hulu so opioid addiction was on my mind. She said there was another option, but it’s not as good. I said, give me the fentanyl, just don’t send me home with any. My doctor stopped by to introduce herself.

I was walked to the OR, weighed, then directed to put my butt into the hole on the table. There were a bunch of people walking around me, introducing themselves, making sure I could identify my name, birthday, and social security. There were tubes moving around. A mask was placed over my mouth. It tasted like purple, and I coughed. Simultaneously, two people manipulated my feet into the stirrups. My gown slid open, and I felt grossly exposed. In my mind I was saying, I don’t want to do this anymore, but that was never vocalized. Next thing I knew, I was in my “room” again and Cool Nurse asked if I wanted a straw for my Coke. I woke feeling blissed out. But then I went to scoot myself up on the bed, and it was excruciating. Like a nervy knife.

After snacking on my sleeve of Ritz, my doctor walked back in and asked how I was feeling. She said it went really well and flipped a sheet of paper to reveal my big number in blue sharpie. Comparison is the thief of joy. But it made me laugh. I felt like I was on a gameshow.

About 75% of the eggs you retrieve get fertilized. The more you retrieve, the more pain you feel. Twenty-four hours post-retrieval, I was carrying 10-pounds in water weight. It hurt to sit and to sit up. It felt like my giant enlarged ovaries were compressing my spine. Heat pads, all the Tylenol, and rewatching Insecure made it bearable. I’m so lucky I got enough eggs on round one to feel good about never doing this again. I’m so lucky I was not a patient at Yale Fertility Clinic, the centerpiece of the new podcast, The Retrievals, about the ~200 women given saline instead of fentanyl during their procedure. To experience the best case scenario and deeply wish to never go through it again makes you really feel for these patients, some of whom were alert enough to drive during the retrieval. Beyond the acute deception, their pain was repeatedly dismissed. This is a tale as old as time, and still, listening to their personal accounts rocked me.

Sixty hours post-op, my body was almost back to baseline. I took a shower and blasted The Dip to help reset. I got out, wrapped myself in a towel, and swayed. My eyes burned. I felt hot tears form. Mirrors steamed over. The warm hug of my tiny bathroom. Upbeat blues filled my pores. A slideshow sprinted across my mind. Some new characters. My trip to New York. The faces of love lost. Like I was in a jacuzzi kaleidoscope of my life, past, present, future. Like I was drowning, and surrendering to it felt sweet. Heels thumping into the bathmat. My estrogen levels were skyhigh from the hormone injections. I let it all wash over me. Let myself feel the way life happens to you. Not in a sad way. In a trusting way. My body reminding me that it’s got me. I think that’s what fancy folks would call a “somatic experience.” In the same way that touching grass and an open sky of stars can place you in your body and make you feel full. So can steamy small compartments. Big feels come in all-sized boxes.

About a week after the retrieval, on the Muni ride home, the car was packed with Giants fans commuting back from the game. An older woman with a cap covered in decades worth of pins met eyes with another swagged-out rider, “Sucks we didn’t win, but that was an exciting game.” She replied, “I want it all though.” The cap queen said, “Of course you do. You’re a woman.”

In Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar, Column #71, she advises someone torn on this very topic: to have a child or to not have a child. She says, “I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

We can’t have it all at the same time. Feeling grief doesn’t mean you made a wrong decision. It means you made a decision.

I’m back in the rainbow-lit coffeeshop, trying to metabolize the experience and figure out if it has tipped me one way or another. The truth is I still have a million existential questions and tactical knots to ponder. Like what is my purpose on this earth and does anyone have a template kid budget I can tool around with. But now, the rush to answers has become a little less rushy. And that’s really something for this zig-zagging me.

Carry on. Question on. Love on. Whatever you choose, know I’m saluting you from the shore.

EXCERPT: In “Thin Skin,” Jenn Shapland Considers What It Means to Live a Childfree Queer Life

The following piece is an excerpt from an essay in Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland, which is out today from Pantheon.

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Childfreedom

Adrienne Rich radicalized me. Reading through my annotations in Of Woman Born, I can see my anger materializing, my life shifting direction under my feet. I was in my early twenties when I read the book in a grad school class alongside a viral Atlantic article by Anne- Marie Slaughter called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” with a picture of a baby in a briefcase at the top. The professor assigned the essay thinking it was uncontroversial. Slaughter makes an economic point: women still face discrimination in the workplace. But I was livid. I sat in my chair sweating, an until-now-unformulated rage boiling up from my stomach. I raised my hand and asked, “What if I don’t want the baby or the briefcase? Why is that all?” This was not the conversation we were meant to be having. Aren’t there other things beyond careerism, work within a narrowly defined framework of productivity? Other relationships to nourish and cherish besides a legal spouse and dependents?

I was in a heady moment, reading Rich and Audre Lorde and bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa for the first time and trying to choose the life of a queer woman, despite the strictly heteronormative storybook community in which I was raised, despite my lifelong training. I was reading sentences like, “Institutionalized motherhood demands of women maternal ‘instinct’ rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realization, relation to others rather than the creation of self.” I wanted self-realization. I wanted to create myself. What did that look like?

My desire began to shift again. Suddenly I longed to be old. More than anything in the world, I wanted to grow up, to be not a messy twentysomething but a woman in her sixties, her seventies, with long gray hair, wrinkled and worn and leathery skinned. I wanted to be a woman from whom nothing was expected. Again I didn’t articulate what lay behind that desire, but now I see a connection to the pregnancy fantasy. Pregnant or old, I would be momentarily enough. I was onto something here. Without really being able to know what I was embarking on, I sensed that between pregnancy (that moment of female omnipotence, godliness, Virgin Mary holiness) and old womanhood (when a woman is free of the expectation to bear, to make herself desirable for a man) lies a gulf of life unknown. An undiscovered country. Another planet.

By twenty-eight, when I’d found my footing as a queer woman and a partner who knew she didn’t want kids, I grew more certain I wanted a different life than the one I’d been raised to imagine. I was certain this was something I could make for myself. Whatever loss I felt in knowing I wouldn’t— oops!— find myself pregnant one day (barring a violent encounter), I had to grieve it early. I knew immediately that I would never be a “natural” mother. Having kids as a queer woman is an endeavor that requires planning, determination, and in most cases a large financial investment. Being queer made it easier for me to say no.

At the same juncture where I found certainty, most of my friends and peers, even those who had long vowed never to have kids, gradually became uncertain. They didn’t want kids, exactly, but they voiced concern they might someday regret not having them. Might miss out. One by one I watched my friends fall like dominoes. Seeing this hurt. I thought we were on a path together, the group of friends I had made in grad school, at the bookstore, at writing residencies. They all wanted to be writers or scholars or artists. Now it seemed that my friends had been doing what I was doing on the way to being mothers. What I had believed was a life we were all creating together was just a phase for them. As if, suddenly, the life I was building wasn’t enough. A creative or intellectual life doesn’t exclude the possibility of a life with kids; having kids just makes it a hell of a lot harder. Hadn’t they seen the numbers? Why were they making their lives harder? Why were they leaving me behind?

Like women in the 1970s and ’80s, some millennials are “delaying” having children or choosing not to have them at all, an anomaly the media obsesses over. Silly millennials, with their plants and pets and roommates and gig-economy jobs without benefits! They’ll get around to it eventually. Viral tweets like “PLANTS. ARE. THE. NEW. PETS. / PETS. ARE. THE. NEW. KIDS.” seem to have been interpreted by the media as a cry for help. Millennials, they said, are the saddest generation, graduating into a recession, and now look! They can’t buy houses or have kids or anything. Articles about the declining birth rates in 2019 and 2020 seemed designed to encourage us all to get on board, to get our shit together so we could finally “start a family.” But I wonder if the millennials were onto something.

In 2021, preliminary CDC data states that the birth rate went back up for those ages twenty-five to forty-four. And if my Instagram feed of late is any indication, the campaign to shepherd us all back into the isolated, politically convenient container of the nuclear family is working. But for anyone out there in my generation who has their doubts, who is curious about alternatives, there’s still time for us to do something different.

I read an editorial in The New York Times about why it’s okay, even ethical, not to want to have children. The essay’s main argument, told through a variety of anecdotes about childless people, is that the world is unfit for children.

In other words, it would be wrong to bring a child into this broken world.

In other words, this argument against having children is speaking on behalf of children who have not been born.

This same logic pervades some environmental arguments against procreation. In another Times piece a few weeks later, I read that couples are making their choice not to have kids a political stance on climate. They know that having kids now will negatively impact future generations, so they are making a sacrifice.

For whom?

For the children.

This is exactly the logic of the antiabortion movement, the so-called pro-life. Unborn humans are where we should focus our political energy. Why can’t we not want children for ourselves? I don’t want them for my own sake. Not because I think kids are terrible— it’s not about them!— but because I want my own life. Not because the world isn’t good enough for them, but because they actively make the current problems of the world I live in worse, with the pitter-patter of their little carbon footprints. It’s not the future I’m trying to preserve or protect. It’s now. It’s me. It’s my life.

Saying this, writing the words, feels like breaking a taboo. I sit at my desk and watch through the window for the lighted torches and pitchforks to march toward the front door. Refusing motherhood is at once a failure and a crime. The deep- down guilt of it. Like abortion, the crime is stopping something that never started, ending a life before it begins. Thwarting possibility, potential, unfulfilled futures. But no one talks about the possibility, the potential, the futures thwarted by having kids. Eileen Myles writes, “I think women are supposed to open their legs to time and let it pass through them.”

When I watch my friends become mothers I feel a terrible loss. When my friends stay with disappointing boyfriends and say they just want to get married someday and have kids someday, I’m bereft. When the best minds of my generation spend all their savings on IVF treatments, only to lose each precious embryo and say that now they will never have a life that feels complete, I long to tell them: Darlings, we are free! Throw out your syringes, thaw your eggs, scramble them! You are enough! You are a whole person, on your own, without the baby, without the husband. It makes sense that a person raised as a girl wouldn’t think of themself as whole or complete on their own. The foundation of our culture is the idea that they aren’t. I can see how important it is to them, the baby. How badly they want it. And when they get the baby, I see their joy. Usually on Instagram, because they no longer have time to talk or text. I rarely hear from them much again, as they are, presumably, swept up by the tide of blissful selflessness, or the onslaught of unpaid labor under bad reproductive working conditions. Why does having a baby feel so important, so necessary, to them? Is it truly what they want, or is it what they’ve been made to feel will fulfill them? No one can answer this question objectively.

Of course, I’m getting carried away. I cannot voice any of these concerns. I can’t respond to someone’s ultrasound photo with a screed about the way the motherhood mandate oppresses us or the ramifications for the climate. (I can’t even mention that posting an ultrasound photo is in direct contradiction with their professed political stance on abortion!) Not only am I not supposed to voice my anger or my disappointment, but I’m supposed to be thrilled. I’m supposed to treat this as an unmitigated source of joy for their life and mine. No other decision a person can make demands such reverence, such unconditional positive regard. I am talking not about the child itself but about the decision to have it. In her novel Either/Or, Elif Batuman writes,

Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked why any particular person had had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as blasphemy— as if you were saying they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was as if there was no way to ask what the plan had been, without implying that someone should be dead.

All I can think about as I describe my own anger, frustration, and disappointment at the millennial pandemic baby boom’s coinciding with the dismantling of Roe during the sixth great extinction is what my pregnant friends, my mother friends, will think reading this. How it will make them think I hate their kid, that I don’t support them.

If you go far enough down the road questioning the value of having kids in an era of environmental and social collapse, things get pretty dark. On the website StopHavingKids.org, you will find a list of reasons not to have kids, each accompanied by its own terrible and detailed graphic. A crying, shirtless child beside a bleeding, one-eyed dog behind bars: “Existing Life in Need of Help.” A person breastfeeding a child while working on a laptop with a phone pressed to their shoulder, on the floor of a room strewn with toys: “Parenthood Regret.” (My favorite of these graphics comes on the page for childfreedom, labeled “No Kids Due to Circumstances.” It pictures a naked person on a leather sofa reading a book, with a stack of pancakes beside her.) The home page states, in all caps: “THERE IS AN UNCONSCIONABLE AMOUNT OF NEEDLESS SUFFERING AND DEATH IN THE WORLD. BIRTH SERVES AS THE CATALYST FOR IT ALL.”

Most of the ideas on the website derive from the arguments of anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar, who writes, “Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence.” Benatar emphasizes that choosing to have a child denies agency to that child, because you have decided for them that they should exist. His philosophy centers around the desire to prevent suffering. Because all human life contains suffering, the only way to prevent it for others is not to create more humans. Funny how this extreme argument for childlessness is still somehow centered around the children themselves, their hypothetical lives.

A more palatable, less human-centered version of this position comes from Les Knight, who founded the Voluntary Human Extinction movement. His bid for humans to “live long and die out” has proven to be a balm to many similarly minded people who are horrified at the losses to other species and ecosystems human consumption has wrought. But even the gentle humor in his slogan “Thank You for Not Breeding,” or in the Center for Biological Diversity’s free condoms featuring endangered species that say things like “For the sake of the horned lizard  .  .  . slow down, love wizard,” can have an ominous echo for those familiar with the history of forced sterilization in the U.S.

Childlessness hasn’t always been possible for everyone, and it continues to be impossible for many. For most people with uteruses around the world, their default status is involuntary motherhood. (“Nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended,” according to a United Nations Population Fund report. Unsafe abortions resulting from unwanted pregnancies are one of the leading causes of maternal deaths.) The ability not to have children throbs at the center of U.S. politics, and decades of Republican strategy went into bringing down Roe. As Angela Davis wrote in Women, Race and Class in 1981, “women’s desire to control their reproductive system is probably as old as human history itself.”

Long before Roe, before the birth control movement, white American women found a way to decrease the number of babies they were having. In the late nineteenth century, a steep decline in the white birth rate “implied that women were substantially curtailing their sexual activity,” writes Davis. This was not something to be celebrated. Instead “the specter of race suicide was raised in official circles.” Naturally, then-president Theodore Roosevelt freaked out and declared that “race purity must be maintained.” Davis writes, “In his State of the Union message that year Roosevelt admonished the wellborn white women who engaged in ‘willful sterility— the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race suicide.’ ” The president linked women’s ability to say no to forced motherhood with anti-nationalism and aligned the nation with whiteness. The presumptive caretaking that women took on extended farther than their own families. Now they were tasked with maintaining the birth rate for their (white) nation.

The birth control movement took Roosevelt’s warning to heart. As Davis describes, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger went on to “define ‘the chief issue of birth control’ as ‘more children from the fit, less from the unfit.’ ” In order to get powerful people on their side, they had to frame birth control as a way to elevate the lives of white women while “controlling the population” of people of color. In addition to wanting to increase the number of white pregnant women, groups of people viewed as nonwhite or “inferior” for other reasons (as Sanger horrendously put it, “morons, mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, and dope fiends”) posed a threat, flooding the market with workers who might eventually rise up against the powerful. Population control was a more palatable idea for the state and for the general populace than people with uteruses’ having control over their bodies.

So popular were these ideas in the early twentieth century that “by 1932 the Eugenics Society could boast that at least twenty-six states had passed compulsory sterilization laws and that thousands of ‘unfit’ persons had already been surgically prevented from reproducing,” writes Davis. Rather than granting more agency to people with uteruses to decide if and when to have children, the federal government intervened directly with their bodies for decades. In a single year, 1972, the U.S. government paid for somewhere “between 100,000 and 200,000 sterilizations.” (For comparison, in the twelve years of Hitler’s reign, 250,000 sterilizations were carried out in Nazi Germany.) In America, sterilizations focused on lower-class people and people of color, in particular Native American women. “By 1976 some 24% of all Indian women of childbearing age had been sterilized,” writes Davis.

As with the antiabortion movement, forced sterilization sought to control certain groups of people and to prevent their continued existence. The legacies of these policies are still with us, and they inform the medical establishment, policy debates about choice, and the impervious motherhood mandate. “While women of color are urged, at every turn, to become permanently infertile, white women enjoying prosperous economic conditions are urged, by the same forces, to reproduce themselves,” Davis writes. Perhaps the pressure I feel to reproduce comes from whiteness itself.

Reprogenetics technologies like IVF often involve embryo selection, when a parent chooses which embryo to implant from their own or from a set of donors’. Sociologist Dorothy Roberts quotes an ad for an IVF clinic in The New York Times Magazine that offers “Doctoral Donors with advanced degrees and numerous other donors with special accomplishments and talents.” Craigslist ads solicit egg donors, “specifying ‘WE HAVE A VERY HIGH DEMAND FOR JEWISH, EAST INDIAN, MIDDLE EASTERN, ASIAN, ITALIAN, and BLONDE DONORS.’ ” Roberts describes this as a form of “benign eugenic thinking.” It allows parents to choose trait markers like sex, race, and ability—the very categories that stratify our society. How benign can that be? She writes, “Fertility clinics’ use of race in genetic selection procedures may help to reinforce the erroneous belief that race is a biological classification that can be determined genetically or that genetic traits occur in human beings according to their race.” However, race is “an invented social grouping,” not a genetic or biological category. Those who have children because they want someone who looks like them, who has their eyes, their features, and those who choose the gender of their children are engaging in a form of eugenic thinking not unlike the mentality that gave rise to forced sterilization. Those who had “good” childhoods and want to bring “good” people into the world, people like them, people who will act and vote like them, are also engaging in this type of thinking. They want to control who gets to exist. What do they mean by “good”? What work is “good” doing here?

If the birth control movement privileged population control over the empowerment of people with uteruses, and if IVF has its own sinister set of implications, what alternatives might grant full personhood, and the ability to control their own reproductive capacities, to people with uteruses? In her book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis considers the radical possibility of wages for pregnancy. After outlining ways that the international surrogacy industry and the various groups that mobilize against it impact surrogates, she arrives at a desire for “incentives to practice real surrogacy, more surrogacy: more mutual aid.” Increasing and bolstering the industry of gestation and childbirth, she argues, and paying more people to be pregnant, could ultimately diminish the “supremacy of ‘biological parents’ ” in favor of communal families and “nongenetic investments” in future generations. All of this sounds, to me, fantastic, if a bit vaguely imagined. At the same time, it reveals the flattening effect of capital: everything becomes a way for some to be bought and sold, others to buy and sell.

I’m all for pregnancy and parenthood in a different world from ours. In a world where pregnant people have care, support, where moms aren’t totally on their own. Where having babies isn’t the be-all, end-all of a woman’s existence, the only route to human fulfillment. Where we live in a sustainable society that can support new members of its population without exploiting the resources of other countries and species. Lewis asks, what if we looked at pregnancy, gestation, and birth as the labors they are? Surrogate mothers who have been paid to carry and deliver babies “retroactively reimagine their prior pregnancies as undervalued services.” Only then can they see the difference in how their role is “valued.” Putting pregnancy into the context of capitalism—the context in which it already exists—makes clear that child production and care are forms of labor that merit compensation. We would not have a workforce without pregnancy. But then, I keep asking: Why must we have a workforce?

The unborn child is a hypothetical, a thing not real or true, a Schrödinger’s cat who can’t matter but who has so much power, more power than most uterus-having people to choose their own lives. Abortion bans make it clear how radical this idea— the full personhood of people with uteruses— still is. Regardless of the health of the pregnant person, their desires or needs, and the circumstances by which they became pregnant, antiabortion activists value the embryo over the pregnant person. “If a man chooses to put his sperm inside a woman,” writes Myles, “inside her it must stay. It’s like she’s Tupperware.” Her value lies in the life she could possibly contain. The expectation to caretake begins in the womb, when a fit mother is scrutinized for how well she eats, how she cares for the life within her. I see this same expectation at work throughout my life. I could have a hysterectomy and my painful periods and migraines might cease, but I know how difficult it is to convince a doctor to do this. It is seen as a last resort because, more than a person living my life, I am primarily a woman of childbearing years. Even if I tell them I do not want children. I am a vessel, a machine to be optimized, Tupperware, not a living being who deserves care, deserves to experience less pain because I exist unto myself.

I choose my body. I choose my life. Still, when asked if my partner and I plan to have kids, I am made to feel a unique combination of disappointment and condescending knowingness—“Oh, give it a few years. You’ll change your mind.” I make a crack about our three cats, falling on my sword, and try to move on. This kind of comment is coming from a place of love. The person just wants us to be happy, and they believe that kids are the way to happiness. Perhaps they believe that since we aren’t straight, we should especially be inclined to have kids, to have a “normal” family. But what if my happiness, my family, is a life they’ve never envisioned, never known or considered? After reading the opening pages of my first book, which is about the queer life of writer Carson McCullers, my grandma told me on the phone, “I like it, but I don’t know anything about that life.”

A few years ago, an artist I met in Wyoming had the gall to tell me that having kids was the most meaningful, nay, the only meaningful, thing a person could do in life. Several others agreed with him. Do they realize, I wondered idly, not aloud, that in casual conversation they have called my full humanity (the fullness of my humanity) into question? That by choosing not to have kids, in their equation, I have willingly forgone an experience—the experience!—that makes me human and complete? And legitimate and generous and sustaining? Do they understand that by saying genetic parenthood is the only route to a full and meaningful life, they eject queers and trans people and single people and sterile people and anyone who doesn’t choose what they chose from the spectrum of humanity, of full human experience? Do they have any idea what they’re saying, when they casually suggest it matters more than anything else they’ve ever done, anything I could ever do?

It’s an odd flip: what is technically a purely biological function is now seen as the one authentic higher human experience you can subject yourself to in pursuit of purpose. As with the idea of career as a path to fulfillment, this turns a form of labor into a peak experience, an identity and life-defining aspiration.

To treat motherhood as a peak life experience is a form of gatekeeping that excludes those who parent but cannot be pregnant from accessing a “full” life. It excludes anyone without a functioning uterus, and it defines those who have one as fundamentally unfulfilled unless they make use of it. My friend Tara has been single for a long time, despite wanting a partner. She went to a baby shower and had to endure friends and mothers swooningly repeating the phrase “From maidenhood to motherhood!” Where was she in that conception of womanhood? Nonexistent. “How can I be the only one in the room who notices this?” Tara asked me. I understand the desire not to miss out on a fundamental human experience. The longing for completism. But I also know that no life is complete, and every life is complete. Sorry, fellow millennials. There aren’t metrics here, ways to optimize and perfect. Life is on its own terms. I suspect this is a queer sensibility, or one brought to me by choosing a queer life. I had to give up all the things I learned to want, the legible futures that would make my life “complete.”

The alternative to finding meaning through children is far scarier, but to me more exciting. If having children is what humans have done since the beginning of time, if for most of human history motherhood has been involuntary, perhaps it’s high time to try absolutely anything else at all. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti writes, “In a life in which there is no child, no one knows anything about your life’s meaning. They might suspect it doesn’t have one— no centre it is built around. Your life’s value is invisible. . . . How wonderful to tread an invisible path, where what matters most can hardly be seen.” Defining your own path can be terrifying. And it can be seen as threatening to those who have chosen the route that is most visible, that is considered normal. It is also lonely, I am finding. Lonelier by the year.

The English language doesn’t have a word for people who don’t have children. In the past, researchers used the word “childless,” but people without children found that term a bit dire, so they changed it to the more optimistic “childfree.” Subjects in studies of childfree cis women from 2003 and 2019 express longing for “a positive feminine identity separate from motherhood.” This suggests that there is no term that embodies a woman’s life without motherhood. What, I ask, is the term for a man who doesn’t become a father? I think we just call him a man. “Man” and “woman” are equally fraught terms, pigeonholing people into genders that may or may not fit their identities. For the childless, the childfree, the issue remains: Why must we be defined, named for what we do not have, what we do not want, what never enters the picture? Get this child out of here!

In recent studies of the childfree, you find people who had very happy childhoods and people who had unhappy ones. The subjects attest that they value their freedom above all: the freedom to choose, to decide how to spend their time. To eat pancakes in the nude, say. Some seek to preserve the intimacy they have with a partner by not introducing another person into the relationship. Others enjoy solitude. Some prefer to devote their time to other relationships with family or friends. Having kids, the cliché goes, changes everything. Often those who don’t have kids simply did not want everything to change, like me—I built my life this way on purpose. I had the privilege to do so. I look at my life and I don’t want everything to change. Many fear a “loss of the self ” with motherhood, having witnessed it in other mothers around them. If I were to lose myself, I’d lose one of the major bodies of source material for my writing. To have a baby and keep writing about my life would require a type of compartmentalization, of boundaries I’ve never been capable of maintaining. I say this not from experience but from having watched others attempt it.

When asked about their “long- term satisfaction” with the choice not to have kids, childfree people’s reports are “overwhelmingly positive.” No regrets, some said. No second thoughts, others said. “Phenomenal.” “More than satisfying— it’s just been great.” They report their lives as “superlative.” How obnoxious, this satisfaction! Surely there must be some underlying deep- down disappointments or more people would be doing it.

I braced myself when I got to the section of the study on negative outcomes. Here come the regrets! All the big looming fears that we will be let down by our lives without kids! In fact, participants noted only two negative outcomes: “Otherness in Community” and “Difficulty or Loss in Friendships with Parenting Women.” Feelings of otherness and exclusion arose for those who took part in religious groups or extended families that did not accept their choice. And many of the subjects lost friends to motherhood, as I have. The studies are imperfect, focusing on straight, white, cis women. More research is needed beyond these studies to understand childlessness, childfreedom as a choice, as a community, as a manifestation of agency and a way of living. But the negative outcomes stick with me. The things that stigmatize this choice—being cast out by your community, losing your female friendships—are the very same things the witch hunts threatened.

On phone calls with two of my friends about why they wanted to have kids, they each informed me, un expectedly, that they were now currently pregnant, one with her second child, the other with her first. During the calls, listening to their reasons and asking occasional follow-up questions, I found myself rolling my forearms along my desk with a small, spiky blue rubber ball that I use to break up the tension in my muscles from typing. After we had talked through her reasons, my friend asked what was new with me. Suddenly my big, beautiful, happy, full life shrank before my eyes. “The tulips are coming up,” I croaked. What’s the point of living? What’s the point of me? I’m not growing a tiny lizard inside me who will become a whole person and take over my entire life course. What could I say to match that, to show we were still aligned? None of my projects, including this book, seemed to rival the scope of hers.

This is what the institution of motherhood does. It makes anything I do—climb Mount Everest, find a cure for diabetes—small by comparison. Less meaningful, less generous, less self-sacrificing. When I called my parents to tell them I was a finalist for the National Book Award, they followed it up by telling me someone I went to high school with had just had a baby. I can see how a single conversation like that might push me to change my mind, if all the circumstances of my life were different. Out of—what? Competition? A desire to keep up? To stay aligned?

Hours later, I rolled up my sleeve and saw purpling bruises all along the outside of my forearm. The tulips are a great joy in my life right now. The fact that a dirty old bulb goes underground all frozen winter and then in late February, when the hours of daylight increase, decides it’s time to poke a green shoot out of the ground and fill my bleak late-winter serotonin-deprived heart with hope? Talk about the miracle of life! I read a whole book on seeds and I still have no idea how a bulb brings a plant to life.

The cultural fear or rejection of barrenness, of childlessness, reminds me of the way some people react to the desert landscape. They assume that it’s blank, lifeless, that nothing grows here. But if you know what you’re looking at, it’s a really life-affirming place.

I wonder what would change if procreation were just a weird hobby, like ceramics or CrossFit, instead of the ultimate key to human significance. Child rearing narrows to a pretty specialized interest set: education, human development, youth athletics. It feels desperate to make a pregnancy, a child, your last bid for meaning in this life. I mean, what if it doesn’t pan out? What if your kid is terrible, like We Need to Talk About Kevin bad? But it also makes sense. We are alienated from our labor, we are exploited, so work does not provide meaning or value. Where else can meaning and value come from? If not work, it must be kids. What other values, what other sources of meaning, could there be? This is my question. I want to see more people trying to answer it. Why does it bother me so much that everyone is having babies, why does it get under my skin? Because each time one of them gets pregnant or says they felt the call to motherhood arise within them, I feel my personhood diminishing. I feel I am less of a person in their eyes. Having kids is still the default, the norm—even for queer people now. To normalize not having kids would require that we normalize abortion (not to mention make it legal everywhere), normalize infertility, normalize singledom, normalize eldercare, normalize healthcare for bodies with uteruses, normalize healthcare, period.

When people with kids say that I’ll change my mind, that eventually I’ll see, they are presuming the fact of my regret, that without kids I’ll miss out. They clearly haven’t read any of the studies. (Imagine if I responded to the next friend’s announcement of pregnancy with “Oh, give it time. You’ll change your mind.”) The common desire on the part of those who have kids to pressure others into having them isn’t doing them any favors. It makes the whole thing seem an awful lot like a cult. A multilevel marketing scheme at best. What darksided queer theorist Lee Edelman called “the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism.” But in the concern over what one might miss out on without kids, I wonder if they consider what they miss when they have them.

When you take children out of the equation, it costs much less to have a life. Children are part of the system that entrenches us in capitalist striving and labor production and endless competition. Children and wealth accumulation are in a positive feedback loop. If you don’t have kids, you need to earn far less: a smaller living space; fewer mouths to feed, medical bills, clothes; no childcare, schooling. I’m not saving for anyone’s college tuition. Our culture would have this as my irresponsibility. Always the emphasis is on some future moment. Capitalism defines the realm of home and family as separate from the realm of work, while hiding the fact that the home is meant only as a place to prepare oneself for more work. What if the home could be something more than a recovery zone or a realm of reproduction? What if life could be something more? Take away that one element, the child, and the possible paths are utterly different.

I know my writing requires solitude, long stretches to think deeply, space and time, and a kid removes solitude from the picture. With Chelsea I can have my solitude and our love, and this is so much more than I dreamed, so much more than “enough” or “it all.” Nurturing as a practice is still there—in how I care for myself, my cats, my tomato plants. But it’s only one part, not all-consuming. I can put it away if I want to, go in my room and ignore the meows and demands for attention and do no real harm to anyone. The cats don’t need me at all times and neither do the plants, and I can choose the times (especially with noise-canceling headphones and a closed door). I can grow and change and have moods and not scar anyone. I don’t need to make anyone understand the extent of my sacrifice.

I could follow this statement the way many childless people do, by reassuring the audience and myself of my love for children. I could say, Don’t get me wrong, I love kids! I just don’t want kids of my own. I adore being an auntie! I’m the godmother to my friends’ kids! I love to babysit! Kids are wonderful! But then I’d be pantomiming the idea of womanhood as child-oriented, child-loving at all costs. I’d be reaffirming, reinscribing, the idea of a good woman, a fit woman, as one who cares for children. I think this idea is damaging, toxic. I want to see beyond it.

Da Brat Is Pregnant!!!

Feature images of Da Brat, who is pregnant, with her wife Jesseca Harris-Dupart, via Da Brat’s Instagram. Taken by Artez La’Mon Noel

Da Brat is pregnant! The rapper and her wife, Jesseca “Judy” Harris-Dupart, announced today that their family is growing by one more!! Harris-Dupart is also a mother of three prior to their relationship, and this will be the couple’s first child together. “I just thought it wasn’t in the cards for me,” said Da Brat. “I’ve had a great career, a full life. I felt like, because I didn’t get pregnant earlier on, then it just wasn’t going to happen.”

Da Brat shared the good news via an interview with People Magazine, but also on her personal Instagram, where she wished everyone “BLESSINGS all 2023 ❤️❤️❤️” also thanked her fertility clinic, Hope Fertility in the metro-Atlanta area.

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I don’t know that I’ve seen someone shout out their fertility clinic in their IG pregnancy announcement before? But I am so here for it! Every queer family’s journey to pregnancy looks different, but for so many, finding caring and loving fertility specialists who’ll be in lockstep with you throughout the peaks and valleys — that is indispensable. And Da Brat and Harris-Dupart know something about that. Following her egg retrieval procedure, Harris-Dupart experienced major health complications. Close followers of Autostraddle’s celesbian Vapid Fluff coverage may remember that Da Brat and Harris-Dupart soft launched a pregnancy announcement around this time last year, with Da Brat making a hand heart around her wife’s stomach. Da Brat also faced her own complications, undergoing surgery to remove fibroids (Black people with uteruses are two to three times more likely than their white counterparts to develop uterine fibroids) and polyps prior to her embryo transfer procedure.

The couple also had a miscarriage in their pregnancy journey. “I had never been so excited about something that I didn’t even know I wanted,” said Da Brat to People. “I fell in love with the idea and then it was all snatched away from me.”

The couple joked “there’s a lot of stuff we learned about women over the age of 40″ throughout this process, but as someone who’s had so many queer people I love look to expand their families in their mid-to-late 30s and over the age of 40 — do to a lot of factors, queer people are often starting their families later in life — I find their honesty to be so heartening. I can only hope it makes a lot of people feel seen today, a lighthouse as they keep wading through such vulnerable and intimate journeys of their own. This pregnancy announcement, more than just a celebration of joy, is going to make so many people feel less alone in an medical system that can be so isolating, and so very straight.

There’s also so much happiness to be had! The Grammy-nominated rapper has surprised herself, “Everything makes me cry. If someone wins American Idol, I cry. I’m like, I’m tougher than that!”

The couple chose an old school gangster-inspired pregnancy photoshoot for People magazine both as a nod to hip hop — listen, rappers have a long history of posing as gangsters of decades past — and a purposeful queering of gender expectations (my words, not theirs),  “I think people are going to be shocked!” Da Brat told People. “I love it!”

Da Brat’s been a masc-presenting performer for what feels like my entire life — Funkdafied was a staple of my childhood, and “What Chu Like” went platinum at my Middle School dances — but the rapper only officially came out in 2020. “It’s way different now than it was before,” she told People. “When I came out I was like, ‘Damn, if I knew it was going to be this nice and loving I’d have probably come out a long time ago!” As a ‘90s kid raised on a steady diet hip hop and BET, it’s enough to inspire a thug tear.

Da Brat credits her wife for “inspiring me,” saying that she wanted “to scream it from the mountaintops that I found somebody that I am totally in love with and I don’t want to hide it anymore.”

On behalf of everyone at Autostraddle, we are wishing Da Brat, Jesseca Harris-Dupart, and their three children an absolutely spectacular time together as they grow their family, in love.

Needing To Abort Due To a Life-Limiting Fetal Diagnosis Was Heartbreaking Enough Already

Torre hadn’t always wanted to have kids — she was, after all, once a ‘90s punk rock teen who believed procreation was a self-serving planet-destroying impulse — but she began feeling the pull to parent in her 20s, and by her late 30s, her biological clock was ticking hard. Still, she didn’t feel financially or emotionally ready to parent alone. But then she met Oshin — they were a customer at the bougie pet store in Portland where Torre worked — fell in love, moved in together during the pandemic, realized they both wanted to be parents, and began the arduous process that is Trying to Conceive as a Queer Person. There were fertility drugs and a difficult and expensive search for a sperm donor who was, like Oshin, Armenian; and concerns that at the age of 40, it’d be difficult to conceive. But after four rounds of IUI, Torre and Oshin got the good news in December of 2021: They were pregnant!

“I was shocked and in disbelief but oh so happy,” Torre remembers. She was with her family in Denver when she got the news, and immediately told her Mom and sister. They decided to nickname the baby ‘Angelfish,’ an idea that’d come to Torre’s Mom in a dream she’d had about her daughter being pregnant a few years prior. By the time they made their pregnancy announcement on social media at 12 weeks, most of Torre’s close friends already knew.

“The room felt like it was shrinking.”

Three days after making that announcement, Torre and Oshin were beaming, expectant parents at a doctor’s appointment. Their sonographer had just taken an ultrasound, and they were taking pictures of it and sending it to their friends along with recordings of their baby’s heartbeat when the doctor entered the room and began: “Unfortunately…”

“My heart started pounding, I could barely hear what she was saying,” Torre recalls. “Something about the nuchal translucency being the wrong measurement. The room felt like it was shrinking. I tried to keep breathing. Oshin gripped my hand.”

The doctor explained there was a good chance the baby had chromosomal issues, and they could wait it out or do additional testing. They opted for a blood test and a chorionic villus sampling (CVS) biopsy, a prenatal test that takes a tissue sample from the tissue that will become the placenta.

Trisomy 18, or Edwards Syndrome, occurs in around 1 out of every 2,500 pregnancies and is caused by an error that happens during sperm or egg formation. Abnormal chromosome segregation (division of DNA) during formation of sperm or egg leads to a sperm or egg with two copies of chromosome 18 instead of one, thus creating an embryo with three copies of that chromosome. It’s a random and unpredictable event that a parent can’t cause or control, but chromosomal abnormalities are more likely to occur in parents of advanced age.

95% of trisomy 18 fetuses don’t survive full term. Genetically abnormal pregnancies typically end in early miscarriage, and of those that are diagnosed later in pregnancy in utero — typically around 12 weeks — 85% will not survive and instead will lead to a later miscarriage, intrauterine demise, or a stillborn birth. Of those who make it to delivery, only 50% survive two weeks, and under 5-10% survive past their first year.

But living with trisomy 18 isn’t easy, as it causes severe abnormalities in nearly every organ system. Children born with trisomy 18 generally struggle to breathe or eat and typically present with severe heart, gastrointestinal, and neurological defects, as well as significant developmental delays.

Rarely, doctors may offer potentially life-extending treatments like cardiac surgery to trisomy 18 babies, but infants with trisomy 18 are less likely than other babies to survive these surgeries. Because of the degree of lethality, most doctors recommend no intensive intervention and only supportive comfort care for infants born with trisomy 18.

After consulting with their medical team, Torre and Oshin chose to terminate the pregnancy. “As gut wrenching as it was, we felt that the least suffering for our Angelfish, Oshin, and me would come from saying goodbye,” she remembers.

After waiting a week due to pandemic staffing shortages, Torre had a fully sedated dilation and evacuation (D&E) at 15 weeks. “I woke up feeling deeply changed, to my core,” Torre says. “This type of grief is so intangible and crazy-making.” She felt blessed to have such a supportive partner and community. Her doctor provided resources, she saw a counselor, and her mother flew out to help her in the immediate aftermath.

When Your Only Option Is No Option At All

Choosing to terminate a planned pregnancy due to a life-limiting fetal diagnosis isn’t easy, especially for queer families or others struggling with infertility who have put significant financial resources and time into the process. But following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, termination won’t be an option at all for many parents and may impact whether parents in those states even try to conceive at all.

While the conversation around abortion rights tends to focus on unwanted pregnancies and those that pose a threat to the mother’s physical health, life-limiting diagnoses are a less-discussed reason a parent may require abortion care — and may need to do so later in their pregnancy.

Even before the Supreme Court’s devastating decision in June of 2022, it was already difficult-to-impossible for many people to terminate pregnancies due to “incompatible with life” prognoses for the fetus — it’s expensive, rarely covered by insurance, and already required travel and jumping through multiple hoops for those living in areas with heavily restricted abortions. In some states, doctors are prohibited from informing their patients that termination is an option, leaving parents to simply wait for what will likely be a miscarriage or stillbirth, while others will do their own research and elect to travel out-of-state to receive an abortion.

“It’s traumatic enough to have to end your baby’s life,” writes Kelcey of her trisomy 18 baby on Shout Your Abortion. “I still felt guilt and shame for the choice that I made. Having to go out of state and stay in a strange place, having so little support and the stigma attached made it so much worse.”

“Carrying a pregnancy for weeks knowing it’s not viable and needs to be terminated is brutal.”

Confirming a life-limiting fetal diagnosis — defined as “lethal fetal conditions as well as others for which there is little to no prospect of long-term ex utero survival without severe morbidity or extremely poor quality of life, and for which there is no cure,” which includes a multitude of cardiac defects as well as trisomy 18 and trisomy 13 (Patau Syndrome) — can take time.

The first diagnostic tests are available at 10-13 weeks, and confirmatory tests and results can take a few more. The worst case scenario is one in which a parent lacks insurance coverage for genetic testing and can’t afford the out-of-pocket fee and therefore doesn’t get a diagnosis until their 20-week ultrasound — but any scenario will put many parents in a terrifying time crunch, depending on their home state’s specific restrictions. Abortion providers in states like New Mexico, on the border with Texas, are already seeing incredibly long wait times for appointments, if a parent is able to get an appointment at all.

“Abortions are safer the earlier they happen in a pregnancy,” Dr. Elizabeth Rubin, a board-certified OB/GYN in Oregon who was one of Torre’s doctors, explained to me. “So what they’re doing is taking someone who already has a heartbreaking diagnosis, already is going through hell, and slapping an extra dose of unsafe onto it — adding unnecessary time pressure, schedule/travel stress, shaming and morbidity to a safe procedure — and adding to their recovery time. And honestly, really f*cking with their mental health.”

Another hopeful mother on SYA shares a story where, despite living in California; due to limited options from her local Catholic-controlled healthcare system and a totally-booked Planned Parenthood, wasn’t able to terminate her trisomy 18 baby until just shy of 22 weeks, after a friend of a friend called in a favor to the dean of her local medical school. “Carrying a pregnancy for weeks knowing it’s not viable and needs to be terminated is brutal,” she writes. “In those weeks I had no choice, I didn’t have the healthcare I needed.”

If forced to endure an excessive wait time or unable to abort at all, parents will likely miscarry. “It sucks to get the option of a D+E under controlled circumstances taken away from you,” Dr. Rubin explained, “and instead you have a miscarriage at home in your bathroom and then have to go to the hospital and have a D+C for the placenta. Like, that sucks! And it doesn’t have to be that way! That can be predicted and avoided.”

“Patients deserve the chance to know their options.”

When such a condition is diagnosed, doctors are advised to engage in Perinatal Palliative Consultation, a care strategy that focuses on “ameliorating suffering and honoring patient values,” presenting options including either terminating the pregnancy or continuing with it and then developing a post-birth care plan where one must choose priorities such as life prolongation or comfort.

“One of the most important parts of medicine, especially in gynecology, is shared decision-making,” Dr. Rubin told me. “Patients deserve the chance to know their options and think them through — that’s actually part of the grieving process.”

“I’ve seen families who have said, I love my child and want to do everything I can to help her live,” doctor Thomas Collins told Stanford Medicine, “and other, similar families who love their kids just as much who have said ‘In our family that is not living; it’s torture.’”

“We could not protect our daughter from trisomy 18, but we could shield her from any pain or agony that would come with it,” wrote Allison Chang, a then-medical student at Harvard, in an essay about her trisomy 18 experience. Chang recalled her relatively humane, while still traumatizing, experience terminating her pregnancy in Massachusetts, compared to what her friend endured in Missouri, which included a hefty price tag and being “vaguely awake” during the procedure.

Different Choices for Different Parents

For “pro-life” parents, the path forward is clear-cut in a different direction. “We decided that if our son’s death was impending, we would not be the one to set that date,” writes the founder of Abel Speaks, a non-profit providing support for parents who’ve chosen to carry a child with a life-limiting diagnosis, in a video about the organization. “While losing Abel was tragic, the real tragedy would’ve been if we’d kept ourselves from truly loving Abel during the time when we did have him.”

Organizations and Instagram accounts like Abel Speaks emphasize that God has a plan for every life and that life doesn’t need to be long to have value. Their social media feeds solicit prayers for the passing of tiny humans who lived briefly and for pregnant couples (somehow exclusively photographed in grassy meadows) to have safe and smooth deliveries and a chance to meet their baby alive. They’re confident not only in God’s plan but in the existence of heaven and God’s readiness to accept and cherish their infant after its imminent passing. Many want the chance to Baptize their baby before the end of its life.

Abel Speaks is a window into a culture with very different values than my own and a religion very different from my own (I’m Jewish). Still, I can understand their perspective and appreciate their right to make decisions in accordance with their values. I’d even say that reading their stories did open my mind to another way of approaching a diagnosis like this, although it wouldn’t change the decision I’d make in their shoes, and I don’t think their religious or cultural beliefs should impact what choices are available to me or other parents with life-limiting fetal diagnosis.

That said, it’s not only religious and anti-choice parents who choose to keep a baby with a life-limiting diagnosis; some parents may choose to continue the pregnancy for other reasons, like that they feel they’ll have more closure being able to hold their baby than they would after a D&E. That, too, should be a choice, Dr. Rubin echoed: “Even for patients who decide they want to carry the pregnancy for as long as it lasts, or deliver, knowing that a doctor thinks an abortion is a reasonable alternative is important,” Dr. Rubin told me. “It also helps them to understand the gravity of the disease and their blamelessness, that this is not their fault.”

In this way, the life-limiting diagnosis debate illuminates precisely why choice is so important: Different parents have different values, priorities, and circumstances that lead them to make different decisions.

Pregnant people who don’t need to work may have more room in their lives for a pregnancy with such a difficult prognosis than those who need to be more pragmatic about their time off. People over 40 trying for their first child may know that termination is actually the option more likely to enable them to have a healthy baby, whereas a younger pregnant person might not feel that urgency. Parents who’ve already endured the trauma of a stillbirth may be more inclined to do what they can to prevent another.

The “best case scenario” for a child with trisomy 18 — living past that first year or longer, as famously has been true for Rick Santorum’s daughter Bella — is often still untenable for parents who, in a country starved of social services and health care, don’t have the time, financial resources, or health insurance to support a child who requires full-time care, or who already have children with special needs.

Instagram accounts like TFMR (terminating for medical reasons) Mamas offer support and visibility to parents who’ve had to terminate for a medical reason, who often feel ostracized from spaces for grieving a baby loss. This May, they held the first ever TFMR Awareness Day. Just over a month later, they were, posting in response to the Roe v. Wade overturning: “Having to navigate unnecessary barriers to the essential care that we need at this time creates so much extra distress on top of the unbearable heartbreak that TFMR parents are already trying to cope with… You don’t deserve this, our future TFMR parents don’t deserve this, I’m so sorry this is happening in 2022!”

“Since Roe v Wade was overturned I have been cycling through my own experience and just can’t fathom what it would have been like if, on top of our absolutely heart-crushing situation, I then had to worry about legalities and having to travel to have my procedure done,” Torre says. “I am really lucky to be living in a state where my right to an abortion is protected. Going back into trying again is already nerve-wracking, let alone having to worry about what I would do, or be allowed to do, if something goes wrong in future pregnancies.”

For patients pursuing fertility in states where abortion isn’t available, they will have to make a plan ahead of time for the possibility of a life-limiting diagnosis. This could mean paying out-of-pocket for a Cell-Free DNA screening earlier in pregnancy or even electing (the much more expensive option of) IVF rather than IUI because preimplantation genetic testing can examine the embryos prior to transfer for a range of genetic problems.

“These laws weren’t written by doctors, so they’re not written in ways that actually reflect medicine,” Dr. Rubin told me. “No one’s saying we could list the situations in which, say, a neurosurgeon could operate. Whomst amongst us could say we understand neurosurgery well enough to write legislation that determines when you can operate on a spine or a brain tumor? But because this involves pregnancy, they somehow think this should be something that everybody gets to weigh in on? And that lawmakers understand, even though they’re not doctors? There’s nothing I can think of in medicine quite like this.”

Michelle Tea’s Queer Pregnancy Memoir Is for Everyone — Not Just People Who Want To Become Parents

Like many queer people coming of age over the last 20 years, Michelle Tea’s work has been integral to my becoming. Growing up with an alcoholic parent as a queer, gender non-conforming person involved in my local punk scene and community organizing work, Tea’s work over the years has made me feel less alone, less angry, and much more equipped to handle whatever gets thrown at me as a result of my identity or the trauma I experienced as a young person. In a weird way, it always felt like because of our age difference, Tea’s books came out right around the time I was entering a stage in my life where I desperately needed to read them. And the timing of the release of her new memoir, Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility, is no different.

For most of my life, I was convinced that some day, somehow, I’d be a parent. I talked about it with my friends and my parents, and when I started getting deeper and deeper into my twenties, I sought out partners who felt the same way. After failed relationship after failed relationship and many years in the classroom, I started to feel uncertainty about both the possibility of becoming a parent and my desire to raise a child in the first place. Now, in my early thirties and in the most stable relationship I’ve ever been in, I’ve mostly decided that parenthood isn’t something I want to pursue, though the ambivalence that has washed over the whole thing over the last few years sometimes pushes me into the “I guess it’s possible” zone once in a while. To my surprise, Tea’s journey actually begins in a similar state of ambivalence some months after she turned 40-years-old.

At that point, the ambivalence quickly turned into a decision to give getting pregnant a try: “From where I stood, deep into my fortieth year on earth, my remaining eggs hobbling down my fallopian tubes each month, tennis balls wedged onto their walkers, it seemed like having a kid was the only adventure I hadn’t undertaken.”

With the help of her friends, her sister, and some internet research, Tea devises a plan to inseminate herself at home. She contacts a young drag queen named Quentin, a friend-of-a-friend who is “dying to give his sperm away,” to ask him to be part of the process. She enlists the help of her close friend Rhonda to make sure the sperm makes it to its final destination. Eventually, she falls in love with Orson — the person who she will eventually co-parent with — and they become part of the process, too.

The quartet tries and fails to get Tea pregnant, and as she gets deeper and deeper into the process of trying to conceive, she realizes that the decree she believed in at the beginning of it all, of accepting whatever happens — pregnancy or not — is a lot harder to accept than she initially thought. After another unfruitful home insemination attempt, she says, “I had started this getting-pregnant project determined to graciously accept any inability to actually have a baby, but the feelings that accompany the surge of blood in my underwear are not so mild.”

The frustration of the failed inseminations leads Tea to enlist the help of a fertility specialist, who finds she has fibroids in her uterus and that her eggs aren’t very viable for insemination. Orson, however, still in their early thirties, has plenty of viable eggs, and the couple decides to get Tea pregnant using Orson’s eggs and Quentin’s sperm. Much like the at-home insemination process before it, the processes of IVF and embryo transfer prove to be similarly difficult, but their resolve to have a child only gets stronger and stronger.

Written in the present tense, we are given a front row seat to these three years that Tea and Orson (and their friends and their families) spent consumed with the hopes of them eventually becoming parents. Tea narrates the ups and downs of the process with her trademark humor and doesn’t shy away from giving us all of the gory, sad, disappointing, and heart-wrenching details that became parts of their paths to parenthood. Along the way, she reminds us how deeply heterocentric the birth industry is from the doctors’ intake forms only listing the possibility of women birthing children with husbands to the prenatal yoga class instructors who refer to everyone’s partners as male. She provides us with a heavy dosage of education on the subjects of insemination, IVF, and childbirth, but it never feels overwhelming. In the parts of the story that are the most devastating, Tea’s faith in the universe and in the world around her shines through her writing to show us how courage and resilience are powerful tools we should utilize in the face of any hardships we may encounter, whether they’re related to Tea’s journey here or not.

As with all of her other work, Knocking Myself Up is, of course, extremely queer — and not just because Tea is or just in the cast of past lovers and friends who show up in the narrative — but also in the way Tea approaches the memories of this journey overall. There are several instances in the text where she ruminates on the power of our chosen communities, of showing up for your people no matter what they need. She is constantly calling on her friends and her younger sister to ask for advice, to get guidance, and just to crowdsource opinions of what she should do or shouldn’t do. Sure, close friendship isn’t a hallmark of queerness, but as Tea shows in these ruminations, we often think about our friends as being as inextricable as our blood relatives, and Tea treats them as such throughout both the course of her journey and this memoir she’s written about it. The people she holds (or held) dearest are written about in the highest and sweetest regard, and it’s obvious that her faith in their abilities to take care of one another helps buoy her spirit in the most difficult parts of this journey.

These meditations on community make it clear that just as the original plan for at-home conception took a team of people she loves to complete, Tea knows that it will also take a team of people to help her and Orson raise their child — and that’s a good thing. In every way, Tea’s journey to parenthood already upends the ways people think about conception and about the people who want to conceive, and the reflections on the importance of delegitimizing the structure of the nuclear family in favor of a queerer, more open kind of family life provide another important and emotional layer to this already evocative narrative.

Some might see the subject of this book and think it’s simply not for them, but taken as a whole, Tea’s work here absolutely transcends any expectations someone could possibly have simply by looking at the description. She didn’t necessarily change my mind about parenthood, and I know that is not her intention here either. Tea’s insights offer much, much more than that. She provides us with new and powerful perspectives on not only childbirth and parenthood but on our understandings of our lives, of our bodies, of friendship and romance, and of the possibilities and potential for change that exists within us all. Like all of Tea’s best work, Knocking Myself Up embraces all of the joys and miseries and miracles that are part of existing in this world as a human being and gives us an opportunity to bask in that enfolding along with her. No matter what your stance is on the subject or who you want to grow up to be, every single person who decides to join Tea on this journey through reading this book will definitely learn something new about themselves and the lives they lead by the end of it.

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Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility is out now.

How To Survive a Miscarriage by Marathoning 168 Episodes of “Survivor”

feature art by Demetria

One thing you have in common with every contestant on the classic CBS reality television competition program Survivor is that you are not pregnant.

Like you, some of these people were once pregnant, although not quite as recently as you were. Some of them have in fact given birth in the past, as evidenced by children they reference by name and who sometimes appear, as grown adults, in late-season challenges.

You do the math in your head to figure out how old they were when they had their children, which is another way of saying how much better they did it than you did, how much earlier they got their shit together, how much higher their chances of success were. This is math you do as often and as casually as you once calculated your daily caloric intake, a math that is similarly second nature and punishing.

Did they get their shit together earlier than you, though? Did they decide to have children, these sturdy mothers in sensible shorts stranded on an island, their skin leathered by the unyielding sun, their legs and arms pockmarked with mosquito bites? Did they plan on it? Or did it just happen, as it so often does for couples for whom having sex with each other can result in a pregnancy, even if they didn’t mean it to? Would you have gotten pregnant earlier if that was the kind of sex you’d been having?

For most gay people, pregnancy doesn’t happen incidentally. It’s a deliberate choice. There is a pressure to not make said choice until you are “ready,” until you have all your financial and logistical and relationship ducks in a row.

When you eventually decided to go ahead with trying to get pregnant at the age of 40, it was not, ultimately, because your life was in a “ready” place, it was because you realized it would never be.

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Your miscarriage happened eight weeks in. So, obviously, things could have been worse. Eight weeks is early. You remind yourself of this while you lie on your couch watching five grown adults stand on narrow logs in the ocean for six straight hours, competing for a can of Mountain Dew and a stack of Oreo cookies. They wince and pinch their eyes shut in the boiling sunlight, their legs ache and throb and cramp and the world spins madly on and you lost your baby, or whatever it was, you lost your little miracle.

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This is how you found out that you were having a miscarriage: your girlfriend held your hand and a nurse slipped a wand inside you and within moments you both knew, from the nurse’s soft concern, the gentle wonder of her eyes above her mask, that something was wrong. Before saying anything to you she asked your OB/GYN very quietly to take a look, passing off the wand like a baton.

At the first ultrasound, at five weeks, almost immediately the nurse had said “everything is progressing nicely,” but at this one, the nurse and the doctor were silent for way too long for everything to be progressing nicely.

You had hopefully imagined hearing “well, there’s the heartbeat!” for so long, and now here you were in the moment where you’d most hoped to hear those words but there were no words. Instead you just laid there, your girlfriend’s squeeze of your hand growing increasingly intense, somebody say ‘there’s the heartbeat’ somebody point out the heartbeat

So by the time the doctor finally finally spoke, to tell you the baby had stopped developing, you both already knew.

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Your fertility clinic is in a massive three-level open-air shopping mall in Los Angeles, down the mosaic-tiled, desert-flora-dotted walkway from Nordstrom and across from a gourmet pudding shop called Pudu Pudu.

You had convinced your girlfriend that the best way to celebrate a successful eight week ultrasound would be, logically based on location, a trip to Pudu Pudu. You and your heartbeat would enjoy gluten-free wild blueberry pudding with edible blossoms, coconut crunch, a dusting of turmeric, fresh orange filets, local organic milk, cocoa.

“But if there’s no heartbeat, we never eat pudding again,” you told her.

There was no heartbeat and you have not eaten pudding again.

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Pudu Pudu has been empty every time you’ve passed it (which is many times, you haven’t been to the mall this much since the summer you worked at GapKids), just like your uterus is now. Empty. Or; emptying.

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On the TV, two teams line up and take turns drinking glasses of cow’s blood mixed with cow’s milk. When they finish their glass they open their red mouths wide, bloody milk dripping down their chins, drying into the cracks of their parched lips.

That line from that song is stuck in your weary head: if you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding.

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You had been haunted by the possibility of miscarriage. Not just haunted, something more dramatic than haunted, like the kind of haunted where you tell ghost stories every night.

On the day of your five-week ultrasound, you’d read a miscarriage story on your instagram feed moments before the nurse entered the room. Between five and eight weeks, two more miscarriage stories had been told on your instagram feed — your feed is mostly queer people with uteruses between the ages of 30 and 45, so — and you read and re-read all three and you cried for all of them.

You’d then sought out every miscarriage essay on Autostraddle, re-read them each several times. You also re-read a few birth essays, to balance it out.

In the week leading up to your second ultrasound, you’d read a horrific photoessay on The Cut about a miscarriage that was so visceral and painful and horrible that you could think of little else between the moment of reading it and the moment of your own miscarriage.

But mostly what that essay did was inform you that it was possible to have a missed miscarriage; that this late in the game you could still think you were pregnant when in fact you were not, that you could be exhausted and nauseous and have breasts that are 2x bigger than normal despite the fetus having already clocked out of the whole charade, that the whole story could be over while you’re just sitting there looking at your little pregnancy app, look we made it to blueberry week!!!

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The first thing you did, still prone on the table after your miscarriage ultrasound, was delete The Pregnancy App.

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One thing the first eight seasons of Survivor have in common with the “October 2022 Babies!!!” message boards on The Pregnancy App is that there are no lesbians. There would’ve been one lesbian on the message boards (you) but you didn’t want to post anything until you heard a heartbeat.

You imagined that’s what would’ve made you feel more connected to these women with their husbands and their previous pregnancies and their worn-through womanhood and their seeming comfort with their own bodies – a heartbeat. You weren’t sure, though. You might have just continued to lurk. Maybe you’d never learn their language, even with a heartbeat.

When lesbians finally arrive on Survivor in Season 9, they are not mothers and they do not win.

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At the clinic, after you’d put your pants back on, you and your girlfriend transitioned to sitting in chairs at a crescent-shaped wooden table against the wall. You and your girlfriend sat on one side in your masks and the doctor sat on the other. Something inside me is dead, you thought to yourself as the doctor Explained Your Options.

Every Option sounded bad. You chose D&C, a procedure in which you’d get knocked out and then they’d suck the death out of you. Your girlfriend nodded in agreement that this was the best Option of the Offered Options.

I just want it out, you said, your hands on the cemetery of your stomach. Then you and your girlfriend went to her car in the mall parking lot to cry.

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Three days later you returned to the clinic at seven A.M. to put on a gown and participate in what felt like an endless conversational prelude to your eventual release from consciousness atop an exam table in a sliver of a room where the procedure would take place.

You woke up from the anesthesia in a different room, wearing a gown, a flood of blood between your legs, soaking the paper you’d been positioned atop. You asked your girlfriend if she could get you a cappuccino from Eataly, because again, this was all happening at the mall.

Then your girlfriend took you home, and you wanted to watch a television show that would suck you in and also not feature pregnancy or babies or, for that matter, the concept of parenthood at all. You also preferred to avoid the concept of marriage or dating, because people who date and marry on television often have conversations about starting a family. You wanted to watch a show where nobody was starting a family.

And so you decided to watch Survivor, a show you had not seen since its very first season aired in 2000.

You begin with Season Two. They are stranded in the Australian Outback, and nobody has a baby.

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Aside from various medical professionals and a Pressed Juice customer service representative, you’d only told two (2) people about the pregnancy, and you’d wondered if you were being over-cautious or too superstitious, keeping it so close.

It felt like lying not to tell anyone so you mostly avoided everyone. You had it planned out: at 12 weeks you could tell your family, at 16 weeks you could tell your friends, at 24 weeks you could tell the world. It felt like a long time to keep a secret but you were halfway to 16 already!

Sometimes you’d start to type out the text and then stop yourself. Remind yourself that it was just a little while more and then you could tell your Mom the good news, then you could tell your friends where you’d been, what you were doing. There was also something about typing “I’m pregnant” that made you feel like you were misgendering yourself, a feeling you weren’t pregnant long enough to fully unpack.

Now that you’ve lost the pregnancy, you’re relieved you’d not told anybody, because now there are less people in the world who might believe you are pregnant even though you are not. You tell one (1) of the two people about the miscarriage about an hour after the miscarriage ultrasound. Then you tell all of your coworkers about the pregnancy and the miscarriage in one fell swoop as an explanation of your whereabouts.

The second person you’d told incidentally texts you good news about someone else’s baby on the day of your miscarriage and you don’t know how to respond to their good news with your bad news, so you don’t say anything. She is one of those people who senses things without you having to say them out loud so the next day you wonder if maybe you could get away with telling her telepathically. A few days later she asks gently about how your ultrasound went and then you tell her that actually it is bleeding out of you as we speak, as we live and breathe, as on your television two women pad desperately with their bare feet on a wet rotating log until one loses her grip and plunges into a watery pit.

You have a pillow on your lap and a laptop atop the pillow and you are working and bleeding and watching Survivor.

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On the television, a man is tending the fire when the smoke knocks him out and he falls face first into the flames, awakens, screams, tears into the nearby ocean. When he lifts his arms, you can see the skin of his palms and wrists peeling off like rice paper. He screams. You bleed. You burned the skin off your hand once too, so this is relatable content. You wonder if he will have bruises forever, like you do, or if he will remember to apply the anti-scarring cream, as you did not.

You were suddenly so good at doing things like that once you got pregnant, though. “Self-care” or whatever, because duh, it wasn’t self-care anymore, it was baby-care. All the practices that have eluded you your entire life: giving up weed entirely, minimal medication, going to bed on time, ending your workday after 8 hours of work, eating three balanced meals, taking your vitamins — you did them all! And gladly! And how!!!

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Another thing you have in common with the contestants of Survivor is that your stomach hurts and you are bleeding.

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When the doctors said you would bleed for 7-10 days you thought “I think we could knock this out in five,” but you could not, in fact, knock it out in five. By day five the blood is maybe a dark cherry color, with no signs of slowing down. It feels gross, although maybe not as gross as the people on your TV who haven’t showered or brushed their teeth in 36 days.

You haven’t bought pads since the 90s, and it looks like they all come with wings now. On the TV, sunburnt humans in Reebok t-shirts tear into palm fronds and coconuts and taro roots, and you clip the wings off the pads so they’ll fit into your boxer briefs.

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It is only at your girlfriend’s apartment that you watch anything besides Survivor.

I’m sorry I didn’t know this was about this, your girlfriend says during a movie where a girl gets pregnant.

Everything is about this, you say. Everything is about this except Survivor.

The next day you have sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and potato chips and fresh raspberries and you do a jigsaw puzzle of an astronaut in front of a rainbow and you watch, together, an entire season of Survivor.

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I can honestly say I’m not sure my body has ever fully recovered, said the 40-year-old mother-of-two who won Survivor’s second season in an interview about her time on Survivor. This seems to be a main component of the game: watching bodies shrink as bones emerge.

You lie on your couch reading this interview on your phone with your tiny dog at your feet in a pile of blankets. On the TV, the castaways compete for who can hold their breath underwater the longest.

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The only way you can imagine feeling better about this all happening is to be pregnant again, but first you have to stop bleeding out the first pregnancy and then you have to get your period back and then you have to get your HcG levels back down and then you have to wait another month after that to begin a process that will turn out to involve things like “rapid-fire disappointment” and “a lot of money.”

You hate this. You have always hated having a period, having a body, and it has been tough to expect so much from your own. You hate having your blood drawn and now you feel like you are always going to the mall to get your blood drawn.

Are you ready to try again? When do you want to try again? These words. Everybody knows what they mean. Everybody knows what “trying” means. Of course you will try again! You want it now! You want to get back into the game!

Fire represents life in this game, when your fire’s out, so are you

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When a contestant is voted off, the journey ends. All those weeks have passed, and they are no closer to the one million dollars than they were yesterday, or three days ago, or let’s just say hypothetically eight weeks ago, or nine months ago, or ten years ago.

Maybe they’ll return to a future season of Survivor, get another chance to apply what they learned (or didn’t) the first time. Maybe they won’t. You don’t get any store credit, nothing for time served. You have to start back at the beginning.

Once you’re voted off the island, you can eat whatever you want, finally, all the soft cheese and unpasteurized juice your little heart desires, which is nice, but feeling close to something bigger felt nice too, even if it was often physically uncomfortable.

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A sense of purpose. A sense of every day getting closer to something you’d wanted all your life. You hadn’t let yourself want it because you hated wanting things you couldn’t have, because you were 40 and so far hadn’t achieved or acquired any of the things you’d hoped to by now.

But then before you knew it, you had it! This one thing, of all the fucking things, was gonna be your sole easy win. You got pregnant on your first IUI. Something was growing inside of you and it wasn’t another mental illness or stomach problem, it was a human, a dream, a life.

A miracle. Your little miracle.

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Bring me your torch

Hold Us in the Light

Content warning: pregnancy & pregnancy loss.

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The first Jewish holiday that my wife and I spent together was Passover of 2018. We weren’t wives yet, we were still dating long distance Portland to Oakland, but like good lesbians we had fallen for each other quickly and wanted to spend as much time together as possible. At that point in my life I hardly practiced my religion anymore aside from the occasional major holiday. But no matter how far I veered in practice, my Judaism was always a huge part of me. Introducing Jamie to the traditions I was raised in and the community that shares that with me felt like sharing a slice of my childhood, of what grew me as a human.

We were having a small but mighty group of queers over, some Jewish and some not. Jamie and I both love hosting friends, and we’ve been known to go to great lengths to make things feel special. Jamie worked her flower arranging and table-setting magic. I sewed a quirky afikomen cover and set out the seder plate. We prepared a proper Passover feast — I made brisket and homemade gefilte fish like my mom always did. Jamie made a very delicious first batch of matzoh ball soup, an initiation in its own rite. When our friends arrived we all cozied up around the table, shoulder to shoulder. We lit the candles and read from our homemade feminist haggadah zine, and said many prayers over many glasses of wine. Our dog Isaac hung out loyally around the table, cleaning up crumbs of matzoh as they fell. When it was time to look for the hidden afikomen, people began searching excitedly under couch cushions and in random drawers, filling that big old room with belly laughs. Later, when everyone had left and the dishes were mostly done, Jamie and I curled up in each other under the covers, exhausted but enjoying that buzz of a really great night. The kind that leaves your cheeks sore from smiling.

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When the pandemic first came around, when we began our quarantine thinking it would be two weeks, then two months, then finally realized it would actually be indefinite, something odd began to happen in our house. I started regularly craving something I hadn’t really craved in a long time. I wanted to be surrounded by ritual, specifically Jewish ritual, after many years of moving away from those very same traditions. It wasn’t just Shabbat dinner every week with my wife, though we clung to that one immediately. It was listening to Hebrew songs, to different shuls across the country doing Shabbat services over FaceTime to empty congregation halls. It was Zoom Passover with friends and Zoom Rosh Hashanah with my family. Those days were marked by a particular anxiety that held a tight grip on me, and the comforting lulls of the prayers somehow gave me some room to breathe.

For us, the hardest part of the pandemic was postponing our journey towards parenthood. We had worked extra hard — as all queer conceiving people do — just to get to the point of trying. I would be turning 40 in July and we had already waited longer than we felt comfortable with. There were blood tests, period tracking, ovulation tracking, having to wait another cycle to get this test or that test, coordinating with the sperm bank and our doctor. And of course we needed to have the money to allow us to try. After all of that, when we were just on the brink, Covid brought our plans to an immediate halt. Every month that went by had us feeling farther away from our dreams of becoming parents.

Meanwhile, the restaurant where I was a chef had all but shut down, and the entire season of weddings Jamie was scheduled to photograph were canceling one by one. So we stayed home, which we were lucky enough to do, diving hard into nesting as two Cancers are already prone to do. By summer Jamie and I had fallen into a sweet rhythm, making breakfast together in the mornings and spending our days coworking in our tiny cottage in North Portland. The dog and cat grew so used to having us home that they showed genuine disappointment when we would leave to grab groceries. On warm afternoons we worked in the garden, dirt-stained and sore from all the bending over, then made elaborate meals with our harvests. Jamie tackled the art of fresh pasta, and I perfected my homemade pizza dough.

Quietly accompanying us throughout all of that was the dull, persistent pain of missing the baby we wanted so badly. Jamie and I are both born parents. We are the aunties who spoil our niblings as much as possible, the two moms who threw our dog Isaac a Bark Mitzvah on his 13th birthday. Over the years we’ve looked on longingly as our friends grew their families, hoping our time would come soon. I’ve watched as my wife — the baby whisperer — has calmed those crying babies, and envisioned her calming and comforting our own child, knowing how safe they’d feel in her arms.

As my 40th birthday approached, our longing shifted to determination. Who knows how long this pandemic will last, we thought. We can’t put our life and dreams on hold forever. We thought about how many babies had been made accidentally this year by people who didn’t have to rely on science, didn’t have to buy sperm from the internet. We were reminded of the resiliency of birthing people and babies — how babies had forever been made during the most stressful and scariest of times, during war and famine and pandemics too. So we decided to try.

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Queer baby making is as much magic as it is math and science. The math is everywhere, since everything has to be so planned out. The magic you have to remember to sprinkle in throughout the process. The evening we went in for our IUI, our box of frozen sperm sat waiting in the car for us to take to the doctor, while inside, we lit several candles on an altar my wife had put together. We closed our eyes and held hands and I sang the shehecheyanu, the blessing we say to give thanks before doing something new for the very first time.

We fell in love with our baby the minute we knew she was growing inside of me. We aren’t the type of people who can stay unattached to anything for too long. In Judaism there are superstitions surrounding unborn babies — we don’t buy things for them ahead of time, we don’t even say the usual mazal tov when someone is pregnant, we say b’shaha tova, “in a good hour,” until the baby is alive and well in the world. Because I had subscribed to these superstitions for so long, I thought I would be more quiet about our pregnancy. But I wanted to shout it from the rooftops, we were so ecstatic. We shared the news early with our loved ones because we needed their joy as much as they needed ours. We daydreamed about taking our baby to the coast and all the other beautiful places that are so important to us. We had names picked out, and in the evenings we scoured the internet for nursery furniture. Our world became centered around “when the baby’s here,” because we’re Jamie and Risa and that’s just how we are. We were already deeply in love with our newest family member. We called her Birdie.

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And now, everything is broken. Three weeks ago we found out that our baby, who would have been 17 weeks gestation, had quietly died inside of me — and I had no idea.

The thing about miscarriage is that the word itself does no justice to the great tragedy that it is. It is often told in such a clean and tidy story that there is not even a mention of blood. But I am here to tell you that there is nothing clean and tidy about miscarriage. Miscarriage is more blood than you can ever imagine, for so long that I wondered many times if I was dying. It is laboring and having contractions for hours knowing that at the end we would not be walking away with our baby. It’s my wife staring at me in the ER, taking in every gory scene with palpable fear in her eyes that she might lose me too. At midnight on November 26, as we were fumbling to grab our things and get to the ER, I saw a glimpse of Jamie through the open bathroom door as I breathed through a contraction which ended with something bigger passing through me. I had just birthed our dead baby while squatting on our toilet, surrounded by blood and fear.

I knew that miscarriage was common, but I had no idea that 1 in 4 pregnancies ended in one. That made me feel slightly less alone, until I learned how incredibly uncommon it is to miscarry in the second trimester like we did. Only about 2% of miscarriages happen that far along, which made me feel even more alone. I didn’t know how consuming the grief would be, or that for weeks after I would have such strong phantom pains in my vagina from all the bleeding and passing of tissues that I would be scared to use the bathroom. Miscarriage is an invisible reminder of all the dreams that will never come to fruition, and sometimes simply breathing under the weight of it is the most I can manage.

In a brief moment of respite throughout that long night in the ER, Jamie was able to leave the hospital quickly to cover the blood-stained seat in our Subaru, and clean the bathroom in our home. She wiped the blood from the toilet and floor, and threw away the stained bath mat and towels, the physical reminders of what had taken place there. In the dark, early hours of the morning, while I lay in the hospital stable and preparing for surgery, she gently wrapped our baby Birdie in her hands and held her to her heart. This part breaks me most of all. The grace my wife showed me by sparing me having to come home to that scene. And the tender love she gave to our daughter, from both of us, showing her how deeply missed she already was, saying hello and goodbye to her at the same time.

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Judaism is not a religion that shies away from darkness. The stories of our most horrifying and challenging times are retold over and over again, year after year. We are constantly reminded of all that we’ve overcome, of our resiliency. Maybe that’s part of why I feel so pulled to tell my story: the generational prayer that with every telling I will feel a renewed layer of strength or hope or trust — or any number of the things I lost in the aftermath of losing Birdie. That we will forever be reminded of how brave we were just to make it through these days.

There are very few things I know anymore, but I do know this: Birdie will always be a part of our Hanukkah story. We will think of her with each candle we light on our Hanukkiah, not just this year but for always, and we will hold her in our hearts as the flames grow brighter each night. I know that I will sing the prayers and be comforted by the familiar cadences and words, and that I will close my eyes, letting them wash over me, cleansing me in the way that I so desperately need. I know that I will dive into cooking and will make huge batches of latkes that will stain the house with the smell of fried potatoes. I know that I will make little packages of Hanukkah treats to deliver to my friends who we miss so much during this holiday, because caring for my community brings me such joy (and it’s not Hanukkah without latkes and the applesauce versus sour cream debate). My wife and I are even giving presents for the first time this year, because we want to spoil the shit out of each other in the wake of the hell we are currently surviving. I told Jamie that I’ll be making sufganiyot — the jelly-filled doughnuts so special to Hanukkah — even if it’s just for the two of us. I want to be bathed in all the familiar tastes and sounds and smells. I want it to bring us moments of solace even if they are met with moments of sadness.

Hanukkah is taught to us as the Festival of Lights. It emerges in the darkest, shortest days of the year providing a reprieve with its celebration of miracles. Growing up, we would always turn off all the lights before lighting the Hanukkiah, so we could see the flames more clearly against the dark of winter around us. And now my family is moving through a darkness like none we have ever experienced. As we mourn, so many friends and loved ones have told us that they are holding us in the light. I had never heard this expression before, but I feel it so viscerally now. I feel the warmth and the ease that it brings about. I feel it as we lean in harder to Hanukkah this year, not because Hanukkah is the most important or holy of Jewish holidays, but because we need every ounce of comfort we can find. Every parcel of light we can manage to hold alongside this deep darkness. Not that it will cure any of the pain, because nothing can do that. But because it will bring some temporary comfort so we can somehow, eventually, make our way through.

You Need Help: How Do I Explain Our Sperm Donor to a Five-Year-Old?

Q:

Hello! My wife and I have a one-year-old child. We used an anonymous sperm donor to create her. My five-year-old niece has recently learned that part of the genetic material from a man and a woman go together to create a baby. She told my sister “That’s not true. Aunt A and Aunt K were able to make a baby.” My sister didn’t know what to say and told her to ask us about it next time she sees us. What should we tell her?

A:

Hi, Mama A and Mama K!

Congratulations, first of all, on making it through the first year. Truly, it is a feat and I feel like straight parents and moms especially have really not been honest with the world about how dang hard it is to keep it together for the first year. It’s a wild, cute, rewarding, also terrible-at-times ride!

I hope you’re finally starting to catch up on sleep.

When you meet with your niece, please suggest your sister is in the room, too, because she may need to reinforce what you share and, also, it’ll be good for her to realize it’s not that complex to explain! Bonus for you two is that this will be great practice for when you have to explain this all to your own kiddo.

If your niece already knows enough about babymaking to know that “genetic material” goes together to create a baby, this should be fairly simple. Most child psychologists recommend talking about your sperm donor to your child at an early age, so your niece is definitely old enough. A cool thing about little kids is that they’re naturally inquisitive and able to process new information quickly. Unlike grown-ups who’ve already decided the sky is blue and the grass is green, kids are very open to new ideas that challenge their assumptions.

This is going to go great, I swear. Here are six tips to get you started in preparing for the convo:

Don’t romanticize your donor’s role in your baby-making story.

Don’t make up a fairy tale. Kids do best when we make things simple for them. Decide what you want to call the donor, which could just be “donor.” “Helper” is another kid-friendly option. Make a distinction between parent and helper/donor in your story and emphasize that you are the parents while expressing gratitude to your donor.

Keep the medical explanation simple and accurate.

As long as your sister is OK with it, it may be helpful to explain to kids in simple medical terms that you need an egg and a sperm to create a baby. You don’t need to go into the nitty-gritty details, but kids at age five can understand the idea that you need to mix two things together to get something else. You can explain that you both have eggs and wanted to have a baby, so you needed a helper to give you the sperm. If you can’t say, “sperm,” you might call the donor’s contribution a “seed” or talk about it in baking terms (“eggs” and “sugar,” etc). I personally think “sperm” and “egg” is less gross than “seed” or “sugar,” but whatever works for you and your sister.

Normalize the idea that families are created out of love.

This is a great time to talk about how families aren’t always related biologically, in general. Again, use simple terms, but reinforce that families come from love, not from “genetic material.” I assume your niece will one day play with your kid and it’s important that your niece comes away with a sense that your family is not less than her family. Also, this is just the truth. Families are bound by love and broken by the lack of it. This also helps normalize the idea of adoption, foster parents, step-relatives, and chosen families.

Be ready to answer personal questions.

Both your niece and your sister may have questions. Do your best, especially with your niece, to be open to more questions immediately when you talk or later after she’s thought more about it. Let her know that she can reach out to you (or to her mom). Kids don’t mean to ask rude questions. They’re truly curious about everything. So go in emotionally prepared for her to potentially say or ask something unintentionally hurtful. For example: commentary on “dads” or who the “real parents” are may come up. Correct gently and be as clear and direct as possible to help her understand.

Bring some picture books!

Kids often learn better through visual processing, so bring some colorful children’s books. I like What Makes a Baby by Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth to explain fertility and the classic Mommy Mama and Me by Leslea Newman to expose kids to affirming stories of two-mom families.

Don’t overthink it.

Act like it’s very chill and simple and hopefully, your sister will internalize this as well as your niece. Truly, I predict your niece will be totally fine with this info! She’ll just roll with it once she has the answer she seeks. It may take adult family members a little longer to become comfortable with how to talk about the lovely way you grew your family.

You’re such cool aunts! You’re going to do great!

How These Lesbian Couples Decided to Get Pregnant

“There’s no such thing as the perfect time.” That’s the sentiment I hear over and over again in talking to queer couples about deciding to have a baby.

For queer couples, deciding to get pregnant often involves a lot of planning, money, and time. And while there are more and more queer pregnancy resources out there, including fertility programs specifically geared toward LGBTQ parents, mainstream conversation around fertility and conception is still very heteronormative. So I spoke with five queer couples about their own decision-making processes about getting pregnant and the challenges they faced and lessons they learned along the way.

Note: There are many ways to have kids, but this article specifically focuses on queer people in long-term partnerships getting pregnant through IVF or IUI, and you can read about the differences between those processes here.

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If you have found yourself accidentally — perhaps with the help of a few drinks — talking about Serious Future plans like kids on date one or two, you’re not alone! There’s not an exact timeline for when it makes the most sense to broach the topic of children with a partner or potential partner, although one couple I spoke with did gently caution against doing it after getting engaged or married. Specifically, Orlando-based couple Julie (35) and Kaitlin (35), who have an 18-month-old baby, call out the Supergirl writers for having Maggie and Alex have this disagreement happen after they’d spent an entire season engaged to be married. If having kids or not having kids is going to be a major dealbreaker in a relationship, it’s good to get it out there before, you know, legally committing to someone via marriage.

While Julie and Kaitlin had talked ahead of time about wanting kids, it wasn’t until about two years after they got married that they started talking about the details:

We had multiple conversations over the next year and a half to two years. We found that planning to have a baby in this way is both a blessing and a curse. We are, in general, pretty thoughtful people, so we wanted to make sure we had a lot lined up before we started trying to have a kid: financial security, good jobs, a house. The unfortunate flip side of being so cautious is you can “responsible” your way to never actually starting the process, because there is always something in your life that isn’t perfect. We joke that there have never been two people who needed to have an “oops” moment more than we did. It was a difficult thing to realize that you couldn’t ever find the “perfect time,” just the “right time for us.” This isn’t to say we eventually just said: eff it! Let’s have a baby! But we looked at our life and thought: Ok, really how much more settled could we be?

Kelley (32) and Kelsey (31) in Brooklyn have been together for three-and-a-half years and had a conversation about kids just one month into dating… after seeing the musical Fun Home for Kelley’s birthday. During that conversation, Kelley expressed that she didn’t think she wanted to have kids. “Kelsey and I already felt pretty serious about each other, and that conversation was the first of many we’ve had since then about how we think we would be good co-parents together, but are not sure we want to have children.” Kelley says they have thankfully been on the same page about this decision and is upfront about some of their hesitations about starting a family, including the high cost.

All of the couples I spoke with noted that this is not a one-time conversation. There’s no magical Baby Talk where everything is decided and set in stone. Shannon (39) and Becca (32), who live in Rochester, NY, also had conversations about kids early on in their relationship, but they didn’t decide right away who would carry. “I was initially more willing to, but as we went through the process, we sort of unceremoniously shifted plans based on age and the roles we both play in our marriage,” Shannon says. The process came with other decisions to make, including a move from NYC to Rochester for more space and to save money (all of the couples stress the importance of talking about money during the process, because it gets expensive). Shannon oversaw selecting the sperm donor, because Becca didn’t want to be involved in that part of the process at all. Shannon also notes that miscarriage is still largely stigmatized, but especially for queer couples.

We never imagined how long it would take to get pregnant. The discussion around infertility in general is still stigmatized, and we were surprised to find common ground with cis straight couples that were dealing with similar issues. No one talks about the process, especially miscarriage: We had a chemical pregnancy during the IVF phase. Infertility can make you feel depressed, pissed, jealous and petty.

All of the couples I spoke to operated on different timelines in terms of how long the process took. Negotiations and changes happened along the way, as for Shannon and Becca, who had to switch from IUI treatment to IVF treatment for medical reasons. Their process took about two years, and they’re expecting on Christmas Day this year.

For Ava (39) and Julie (43) in Brooklyn, the process for their first kid, which started about three years into their 14-year relationship, took about four years from start to finish. But again, it wasn’t necessarily a perfectly linear process. Originally, they had decided that they would take turns getting pregnant with Julie going first since she was older, but after their first daughter was born, Julie wanted to be pregnant again, so they renegotiated.

And like there’s no magical Baby Talk, there’s no Magical Perfect Pregnancy Path. Expect changes and challenges. San Diego-based couple M (29) and A (36) are still in the process of getting pregnant after two initial IUI attempts, awaiting results for the second. They plan on taking turns carrying, and they also decided they wanted kids together very early on in their relationship. And their advice to new parents or parents-to-be is to couple the conversations about the actual process of getting pregnant with conversations about parenting approaches. For M, who is nonbinary, that meant talking upfront about how they would approach gender with their children.

M describes the decision to have kids with A as a “gut feeling” for them, although that of course isn’t the case for everyone. For Ava/Julie, Julie had been more certain going into the relationship that she wanted kids, while Ava, who was 24 when they started dating, hadn’t thought about it in concrete terms yet. “Once we started discussing it it felt like the right place to go in our lives together.”

Dakerri and Sondra in Nashville also had several conversations over a period of six months before deciding to have a baby together. They recommend that couples look into all applicable family laws when going through the process. For them, they decided to start a family before marriage equality had passed and they lived in a state where their marriage wasn’t legally recognized, adding another obstacle. On the fourth IUI attempt using an anonymous donor from a cryobank, they got pregnant, and they now have a three-year-old son. They also launched a vlog and online community called Two Mom Diaries during this process, which they used to document their journey and connect with other LGBTQ parents. Through it, they offer advice and family-building seminars to LGBTQ couples.

In addition to finding the right doctor and fertility clinic (multiple couples recommended asking upfront if the doctor has previous experience with LGBTQ parents), Ava also recommends finding a couples therapist that specializes in fertility. “No one can prepare for this process on their own, and communication techniques from a third party helps lay things out clearly in front of you so that you’re both able to deal with tough and often unpredictable issues,” she says. “The process can be overwhelming and takes endurance, so it’s important to be on the same page with your partner.”

Kaitlin/Julie in Orlando echo the therapist advice, saying that it’s a stressful and emotional time and that babies are never going to fix problems that might exist in a relationship. “We waited until we were in a really good place, as a couple, and it absolutely made the journey that much better and beautiful,” Kaitlin says. “Having a solid foundation helps when the baby comes, because when you are totally and completely exhausted and the baby wont sleep, has gas, is teething, or all of the above, it gets really fucking hard, and what holds you together is the deep love and respect you have for one another.”

Ultimate ’90s MRI: A Fertility Playlist

“So what kind of music do you listen to?” asks the cute, young radiology technician as she lowers me to the entrance of the machine. All the research I did before arriving at 6:45am on a Saturday for a pituitary MRI was failing me. I breezed right past all the other requests — “What year did you get your tattoos?” “When was the first day of your last menstrual cycle?” “Please remove all your clothing and jewelry” — so I’m pretty annoyed that music is what throws me off and makes me start to panic.

Musicals? Too weird. My favorite indie band? Too pretentious. Tegan and Sara? Too gay. C’mon Jennifer get it together!

“What are the options?” I ask, stalling for time.

“Oh, I’m just going to stream YouTube so it’s whatever you want. Most people say classical because they think they have to, but I don’t think that gets loud enough.”

I can tell that she wants to say that it’s too boring. No offense to Mozart, but I’m sure this woman’s day would go by a lot faster if she were pressing buttons to Beyoncé instead.

“How about ’90s?” I say. The tech beams at me. “That is a great choice.”

The music is fitting since my fertility journey began in August 1997 when I got my first period on the morning of my first day at a new school. At 12, I was a year younger than most of my classmates and one of the last (but thankfully not the last) of my friends to ride the crimson wave. I remember feeling relieved that it finally happened and somehow already resigned to this warped, serendipitous relationship with my body because of course it had to start on the first day at a new school. Music in the late ’90s saw the twilight of Top 40 hip-hop/R&B blend into the dawn of bubblegum/boyband pop with the dregs of alternative & grunge flickering like fireflies in between. The internet was picking up speed as a social tool. Life was changing, tastes were changing. It was clear that a big cultural shift was coming with the new millennium so, even though it was scary, I was happy to leave my childhood behind and face high school and the 2000s as a young woman.

“It won’t hurt that much because we use the IVs made for babies.”

I’m standing in a small waiting room, getting the rundown from the tech. Because they’re only looking at the pituitary gland, this scan uses gadolinium contrast to help differentiate between normal tissue and tumors or abnormalities. This requires an IV and I hate needles. The hospital I’m in is currently ranked in the top ten by US News & World Report. They’ve taken extra steps in patient comfort, including warming the hospital blankets, socks, and gown; using the smallest IV possible; and playing music through headphone earplugs to mask the noise of the machine. Despite these accommodations (and the full rundown I received from my mother, a nurse, the night before), I’m still nervous — but the casual “I do this a million times a day; it’s no big deal” tone of the tech is somehow reassuring. We’re the only two people in a five-chamber area: there’s a bathroom; a changing space containing multiple lockers, giving the whole thing a weird gym vibe; a control room with multiple computer monitors and large windows; the MRI room itself, and the waiting area that connects everything to the rest of the hospital.

One small prick later and my head is being placed into a futuristic-looking helmet device at the mouth of the MRI tube. The tech lets me know what will happen, how loud everything will be, and tells me I’ll be able to see her at all times once I am fully inside. She gives me a ball to squeeze in case I need to come out of the machine since I won’t be able to move. I let it rest on my stomach. I’m afraid I’ll absentmindedly grip it if I keep it in my hand. I’m committed to doing this so I tell myself I won’t need it and hope I am right. The last thing she does is put in earplugs that are wired to a microphone so we can communicate and I can listen to music. She does a quick mic check and I give her a thumbs-up as the machine whirls to life in a series of clanks and mild vibrations.

The doors close, the lights dim, and the test begins.

I started having terrible stomach aches in sixth grade. They were attributed to “growing pains.” When they worsened in high school, doctors said it was PMS and I’d just get used to it. The summer before my sophomore year of college, my mother found me deliriously trying to impale myself on the side of our claw foot bathtub because the pain was so bad I needed to cause a different, specific pain to focus on. I wanted to crack myself open. A few weeks later, I was finally diagnosed with severe gallstones. The surgery that followed was three hours longer than normal because the organ was so deteriorated and the stones were so plentiful. I was 19. I’d been actively passing gallstones on and off for eight years. I just got used to it.

19 was also around the age I started becoming paranoid about my fertility. It felt like one day I just woke up thoroughly convinced that I wouldn’t be able to have children. I obsessed over this idea to the point of having panic attacks. I told my school psychologist. I told my doctor. I begged to be sent to a fertility specialist. “Are you currently trying to get pregnant?” I was a full-time college student with a part-time job, single, not yet sexually active, my periods were always irregular, and I was desperately trying to convince myself that I wasn’t totally gay.

No, I wasn’t trying to get pregnant, but I wanted to have that option in the future!

Everyone brushed off my concerns. They told me I was being hysterical. They said I had time, told me to relax. So I stopped telling people about the panic attacks. Stopped asking to see doctors. Once again, I just got used to it.

“Alright. Are you ready for your Ultimate ‘90s MRI?!”

The tech is now behind the glass windows. I can see her blurry figure through a series of small, rectangular mirrors but mostly, what I see is my mouth — just lips and teeth — taking up one whole mirror by itself. I immediately think of the opening to Rocky Horror Picture Show and use all my energy to resist singing “Sweet Transvestite.” The image of Tim Curry in fishnets helps distract me from the fact that I’m currently jammed into a tube, being pressed on all sides, with a large cage on my head holding me in place. I’m the opposite of claustrophobic but this is still a bit much. I’m eager for the music to start and for it to all be over. The tech gives me a small countdown and then I hear some distant mouse clicks followed by the slow build of “Zombie” by the Cranberries.

“In your head, what’s in your head?”

In the mirror, I watch my lips stretch into a wide smile as that familiar, ironic, kismet warmth washes over me. Of course this is the song that’s playing as the MRI starts to whirl and explode around me.

My whole menstrual life, I never understood how my friends knew when their period was going to occur. I always felt like I missed a pivotal day of instruction. Some people said every 28 days, others said every 3.5 weeks exactly. I was never good at math and this was no exception; no formula ever gave me the right answer. I would just wake up and either be bleeding or not. I tracked my cycles with red dots in my planner. I watched as whole months went by with nothing, sometimes two in a row. The following year, I’d skip different months. Sometimes they’d start after three weeks, sometimes five. I couldn’t detect a pattern.

I was reassured that somehow this randomness was “normal” despite everyone else having a set schedule. I sought out a gynecologist in my 20s when I skipped six months in a row. No, I wasn’t pregnant. Yes, I was sure. Did I consider losing some weight? Have I thought about exercising more? Perhaps having sex with a man would help!

I went through a handful of doctors until I found one who seemed the right amount of concerned and also not totally perplexed at how someone could be having sex without contraception and not be at risk for pregnancy. I was prescribed progesterone to jump start my cycle when it didn’t happen on its own. I was again reassured that this was fine and “normal” and just something that can happen.

Doctors told me stress was the main factor. I was a full-time grad student working two jobs and volunteering. Stress was my daily operating system. “Once you graduate, your cycle will come back.” No one ever seemed interested in where it went. Since I still wasn’t trying to conceive, I still wasn’t allowed to see a fertility specialist — an appointment I couldn’t get (or pay for through insurance) without a referral. I had my first unassisted period in years during April of 2017, a month after I turned in my thesis. Maybe they were right. Maybe it was stress. I cried from relief. I called my girlfriend and my mom. But the next month, nothing. Nothing again until that October. As of writing, nothing since.

The MRI will be three sets of images: an overall brain scan, then isolations of the pituitary gland with and without contrast. The tech tells me how many minutes each series will take and checks in to see if I’m okay. Her voice sounds distant and tinny through the wires. The first series is the longest at six minutes. The Cranberries bleed into “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes. I press my tongue into the roof of my mouth to avoid both laughing and singing.

I have now accepted that this whole experience is going to be one of those moments where you get to feel like the star in the movie of your life. All I can think about is how I should make a playlist later. I’d never have picked this song but it’s kind of perfect. The loud vocals and repetitive chorus do a great job of pulling my attention from the increasingly terrifying clanks of the machine. They tell you MRIs are loud but that is an understatement. I now know what it feels like to be inside a drum. Without the music, it’d be unbearable. I can feel the sound in my bones and I’m only in the machine from the elbows up. If a noise or shift in movement starts to freak me out, I try to focus on the science of it all. They’re taking a picture of my brain! While it’s still in my head!! While I am alive!!! It’s confusing and scary but also kind of cool.

“…get it all out, what’s in my head
And I, I am feeling a little peculiar.”

Follicle-stimulating Hormone (FSH) and Lutenizing hormone (LH) are secreted by the pituitary gland to control ovulation. At the beginning of a cycle, most adult levels range between 5-20 mlU/ml. Mine tested at 1.4 and 1.2 respectively, levels that are considered “prepubertal.” As someone who went through puberty in all its awkward glory, I resent that term.

I learned about my pre-teen levels after going to a fertility clinic with my girlfriend to do some diagnostic work into having a baby. We want to have a baby. I, on paper at least, am trying to conceive so the keys to the fertility kingdom I had been denied for so long were finally dropped into my lap. It’s both momentous and anticlimactic, which is exactly how the first visit to our first fertility clinic felt. While the LGBTQ supports were in place, the rest of the experience was… not great. No one explained anything in detail, no one gave us any procedural outlines or expectations. I asked if I’d need to give blood on my first visit and was told no over the phone but when I arrived, they took 13 (!) tubes which is standard for a consultation.

Because of my disappearing periods, I’d need a four-part diagnostic treatment: give a lot of blood, give more blood on day one of my next period, get a trans-vaginal ultrasound on day three, and do an HSG test somewhere between days five and seven. I already survived giving blood so my anxiety settled on the transvaginal ultrasound. Doctors attempted to give me one in my teen years but I took one look at the massive device and shut that whole thing down. But this is different. I’m a grown-up now and I’m guessing childbirth will be way worse so I take a breath and began searching for any/all information I could get on what to expect.

It turns out that, for once, my fears were misguided: the ultrasound they attempted before was a 3D ultrasound which has a much larger wand with a significantly more bulbous end. The regular ultrasound lasted maybe three minutes and was completely painless; it felt no different than putting in a tampon, except there were more people involved and I was lying on a table.

Whatever relief I got from the ultrasound, however, was destroyed by the HSG test. The HSG — or hysterosalpingogram — is an x-ray of the uterus. That is all I was told by the fertility clinic beforehand. My ultrasound nurse mentioned that the HSG would be a speculum exam, as well, which took me by surprise. I was thinking it’d be x-ray-like CAT scan or what happens at an annual dentist visit. I was very, very wrong.

An HSG test uses a fluoroscope to take images of the uterus and fallopian tubes by injecting iodine via a catheter through the cervix. Absolutely none of this was ever communicated to me by any clinic staff. I raged around my apartment, phone in hand, shouting each horrible new discovery until my girlfriend banned me from Google for a few days.

“Don’t tell me ‘cause it hurts”

None of the sites I saw spelled it out plainly, so I will: IT HURTS. The speculum is larger than normal and, since the table you’re on is flat, it’s really painful. The catheter insertion felt like a more extreme and longer PAP smear. The speculum does get removed once everything is in place so that offered some relief and having the dye inserted was more awkward than anything (it feels like you’re peeing all over yourself, but colder). The cramps that followed days after were the worst I’ve ever experienced, requiring me to miss a day of work. The doctor who performed my HSG test was very kind and really angry that no one told me what to expect. She walked me through everything and, despite all the pain, I could tell she worked hard to keep my discomfort at a minimum. But it was still horrible. Every time I’ve had cramps since, my breath catches in remembrance.

Why is this level of bodily trauma continually expected from women who seek treatment?

The next song that plays during my MRI was No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak.” Crammed in that machine, I listen to the anguish in Gwen Stefani’s voice and feel gratitude that at least the MRI isn’t so bad. I wonder what else I won’t adequately be informed of until it’s already happening to me.

Seeking fertility help is daunting for everyone, but those issues are compounded for same-sex couples. Reproductive health in the U.S. is already a poorly taught, rarely-discussed subject so when you toss in the safety and comfort concerns of being lesbians, the whole thing feels extremely intimidating. Even though this is happening in 2018, there aren’t many resources discussing the gritty details of lesbian conception. I spent weeks scouring the internet and asking trusted queer spaces about where to go and what to expect.

According to most findings, when a person with a uterus loves another person with a uterus and they decide to have a baby, they just skip down to the fertility center, select some sperm from a catalog, and voilà: nine months later, there is a baby. I knew it wouldn’t be that easy for us but even ignoring the lesbian factor and just looking for information on the assisted conception process yielded little to nothing.

“Ain’t nothin’ but a heartache (tell me why)
Ain’t nothin’ but a mistake (tell me why)
… Yes I know it’s too late, but I want it that way” 

There are thousands of Mommy Blogs™ but where are the “I am interested in the idea of being a Mommy but we have to run some tests first” blogs? Even the limited material that is geared toward lesbians (who almost always need some type of medical intervention to procreate) assumes that all parties are perfectly fertile and without issue. What if they’re not? I found pieces relating to the trauma and grief of miscarriage. I read and read about the depression and isolation of infertility in all its shades, but nothing that showed a roadmap on how one got to that diagnosis. Everything seemed to occur either before or after where I was. Why is no one talking about during?

All of this rattles around in my head and I start to get overwhelmed. The tech announces that we’re on the second series and that she’s going to turn the music up for this part. There’s a brief moment of silence followed by a smooth “yeeeaaah” as the Backstreet Boys start to croon in my ears. I’m more of an *NSYNC girl myself but this song feels like a balm to my magnetized brain. I nearly tear up from the comfort. Yes, these issues are momentous and formidable but my frustrations are much easier to swallow when they’re sung in sweet five-part harmony. Bubblegum pop indeed.

We are now living in the future predicted in the ’90s (where you can download a pizza for the most part) but women’s health is still the Wild West. It’s bad for fat women. It’s worse for older women. It’s fatal for black women and trans women. Our symptoms and pain are dismissed by our peers, caretakers, and often ourselves — mostly due to the engrained patriarchal social constructs fed to us from conception. These numbers are even worse when it comes to maternal health where the U.S. ranks 47th in maternal mortality rate globally — the highest percentage of maternal deaths for any developed nation. This is especially stark given that maternal mortality is declining almost everywhere else in the world. So why am I doing this?

The technician announces that my exam is almost over and that she will be introducing the contrast now. A cold sensation will run down my arm like water but that is standard and nothing is leaking. She reminds me not to move. “People tend to freak out at this part. Just remember that you’re fine and this will just be another little weird thing.”

REM’s “Losing My Religion” is playing as I feel the icy gadolinium fingers stretch through my arm and across my body. Lying there, it feels as though I’m hearing this song for the first time. Perhaps it’s because I am choosing my confessions: I am an American woman and a lesbian and I am taking steps to have a baby, despite all the terrifying baggage that comes with it. I hope that in the grand-scheme of my life, this will just be another weird thing that got me from one point to another.

The exam ends and the tech helps me sit up. She explains the follow-up process, reminds me to hydrate, and lets me collect my things. As I’m leaving, she stops and asks me if I have trouble sleeping.

“I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind, I feel free now”

“Sometimes, but I think it’s mostly due to the stress and because my apartment is so dry. I didn’t sleep well last night but I assume that’s nerves.” I gesture to the viewing screens: “Can you see that somehow?”

“No, but I did see that you have a deviated septum. Most people mention it and it doesn’t look like your nose has been broken so I just wanted to be sure that you knew.”

We both laugh and lightness washed over me. I can see over her shoulders that the music is still on and the song playing is “Bittersweet Symphony” by the Verve. I smile warmly and thank her again. As I exit the hospital, the sun is shining and the song hums in my mind even though I didn’t actually hear it. Somehow it feels like the perfect ending — not quite the same as Reese Witherspoon driving off in a vintage jaguar in Cruel Intentions but it’s close enough. 🎈

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edited by Heather.

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What to Read When You’re Queer and Expecting: 6 Parenting Books That Smash The Patriarchy

When we were considering our parenting decisions as a queer couple, we found very few books that weren’t super heteronormative and cisnormative. Unfortunately, the quintessential What to Expect When You’re Expecting wasn’t written with queer moms, trans dads, non-binary parents and gestational carriers, and families that look like ours in mind. Popular parenting books tend to fall into “mom books” and “dad books.” We can certainly read those books and replace “dad” with “non-gestational carrier” and “mom” with “gestational carrier” in our minds as we get the essential info. Don’t we deserve better, though? Don’t we deserve something for us?

In response to an A+ member’s request, here are some books that queer the norm on parenting and family-making. To be honest, there still isn’t a lot out there and what is out there still isn’t inclusive of all of us. Even books written by and for gay dads and lesbian moms are primarily written with cis people in mind. That said, here are a few places to start if you’re looking for some queer parenting reading, with the caveat that I hope we get even better, more inclusive representation in the future! In fact, if you know of some new queer, fabulous and/or especially trans-centered parenting book, please let me know in the comments!

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1. The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians: How to Stay Sane and Care for Yourself from Pre-conception Through Birth, by Rachel Pepper

Waffle read this cover-to-cover. I did not because I barely read any pregnancy books. Neither of us identifies as a lesbian, but this at least falls a little closer to how we identify our relationship (very gay). This is the lesbian version of the quintessential guide to all things getting knocked up. It has a lot of practical info about fertility treatments, the process of pregnancy and labor, and lots of other really useful, practical info. It includes info on intersex children, personal stories of lesbian pregnancy, and practical advice for non-gestational carriers. It’s a little outdated in that it was last updated before same-gender marriage was recognized across the U.S., so some of the legal and partner stuff isn’t true anymore. The author, Rachel Pepper, also takes a very specific opinion on circumcision (no), natural childbirth (yes), and breastfeeding (hell yes), which may be helpful to you or not depending on your own beliefs. All that said, Waffle enjoyed it a bunch and tried to get me to read it many times.

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2. And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families, edited by Susan Goldberg and Chloë Brushwood Rose

This collection of personal essays includes stories from gay dads, lesbian moms, single parents, donors, and children of parents who have used donors explores the way that donor-created and surrogacy-created families queer and change the family structure. This isn’t a book with a lot of practical advice, but if you’re thinking about creating a family using a sperm donor or surrogate, it’s a good book to read to get some perspective on the complexity of DIY family-making choices.

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3. Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All edited by Harlyn Aizley

This is the other book that Waffle read cover-to-cover before we conceived. This compilation of personal essays focuses on the experiences of non-gestational lesbian parents, including Harlyn Aizley’s personal story. While Waffle doesn’t identify as a lesbian exactly, this book does include a great essay by Polly Pagenhart about identifying as a “lesbian dad” that really spoke to him. It also includes an essay from a queer step-mom, stories about breastfeeding and bonding jealousy, and other issues non-gestational lesbian parents might experience. If you’re the non-gestational carrier in your relationship and a book that focuses primarily on lesbian moms sounds like it’ll have some useful info for you, you might find something real and reassuring in this anthology!

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4. Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood: Firsthand Advice, Tips and Stories from Lesbian and Gay Couples, by Eric Rosswood

One of the few newer books on the market — Eric Rosswood, who is also the author of The Ultimate Guide for Gay Dads, organizes the book into five sections for same-gender couples: open adoption, foster care, surrogacy, assisted reproduction, and co-parenting. There are stories from same-gender parents woven throughout the book, as well as practical advice. As you can tell from the title, it focuses primarily on gay and lesbian couples.

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5. Subversive Motherhood: Orgasmic birth, genderqueer parenting, papas, trans parenting, Gynepunk, etc. by Maria Llopis

According to the description of the book, “Subversive motherhood is a book about motherhood as a sexual state, about pro-sex feminism and motherhood, about queer-trans-parenthood, about children’s sexuality, gender queer parenting, trans-hack-feminist parenting, about capitalism and motherhood, matriactivism, matriarchy and ecosex.” OK! I haven’t read this one but now I want to?

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6.Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag, by A. K. Summers

This fun graphic novel about Vee and Teek, a queer couple who decide to get pregnant, is dead serious about pregnancy real talk! Teek, who identifies as butch, gets pregnant and survives the cult of super-femme mommy-dom in a heteronormative world. I’d recommend it if you’re MOC, butch, or identify as a masculine person who wants to get pregnant. Do suspenders count as maternity clothing? I say, “Yes!”

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Obviously, there’s a large gap in books about trans gestational carriers and trans moms in queer relationships. Bisexual people get kind of smushed in with lesbian women in most of these books. They are overwhelmingly written by white authors. There is little to no queer intersection with disability, race, religion, class or other kinds of diverse identities and experiences many queer folks have.

There’s a lot more books, a lot more stories, that need to be written and shared. One day I envision a book that is truly inclusive of all pregnant people and all queer families. Until then, these books are still a refreshing change from the vast array of heteronormative options. I hope they’re helpful to you if you’re thinking about starting a queer family with your spouse or partner(s)!

The Might-Have-Been

The day I found out I was pregnant, I installed an app on my phone that guesstimated — in exclusively fruit and vegetable comparisons — the size of my might-be child. My pregnancy made it from the size of a sweet pea to the size of a blueberry, and during that time I kept a wire-bound journal with “Sweet Pea” written on the cover.

I was only pregnant for seven and a half weeks before my miscarriage. There was no body, no breath; there was no measurable part of a lifetime spent together. I’d only known there was life inside my body for three and a half weeks, and yet the experience seems to still have a heartbeat.

The loss fractured my life into two distinct timelines: what is and what might have been.

In my Might-Have-Been, this month sees me celebrating my child’s first birthday. Who can say what else would be different in the might-have-been. My one-year-old and I might be still living in California. My hair might still be brown and not bleached blonde. It’s impossible to know the full shape of the might-have-been, but for all of its fuzzy details there’s one that is always in focus. I would have had a child. That child would now be one.

I might still be married.

My wife and I had been trying for a year before I finally got pregnant, but despite all that trying, it still somehow took us by complete surprise. I was so accustomed to the disappointment of getting my period that when I was a few days late, I took the pregnancy test with divided attention, just before heading out for an appointment. I waited alone in the bathroom for the plastic stick to tell me what I already knew: I wasn’t pregnant, again. Instead, when the stick flashed PREGNANT, I gripped the side of the tub to keep from falling to my knees.

My wife was in her studio one room over, working on her music at the big wooden desk that was my Dad’s when I was little. He called it his “first piece of adult furniture.” I staggered into the studio and, hand shaking, held up the stick at her eye level.

She reeled. I reeled. We froze, eyes locked together in that tiny room in our rented Altadena home, and laughed like two people gone mad.

I got my bloodwork done right away — first to confirm the pregnancy, then a few more times to make sure things were moving along properly. I was in a constant state of awe as my body filled up with this you’re-totally-really-pregnant chemical called HCG. As the HCG number ballooned, it felt like my skin was getting thicker. I felt like a superhero.

“Did you know the baby is SPROUTING EYES right now???”

I said this to my wife (who, I’d correctly assumed, would delight in the insanity of the information) a day or two before we flew out to Wisconsin. At the time we both worked at A-Camp, an adult sleepaway camp for queer women and trans people of all genders; I run the camp as a co-director and she’d been coming for several years as a musical performer. This year was our second time at a new campsite and it was our biggest camp to date — a welcome distraction from the fact that eyes were sprouting inside of my body.

I brought my sweet pea notebook to Wisconsin. On the plane, I wrote letters to my blueberry-sized future baby.

Our first task onsite was unpacking camp supplies. I could open boxes, but not lift them. I told most people I’d hurt my back, but I had let a few of my closest friends in on the truth about the blueberry. It was on that first day that I started spotting.

Spotting is totally normal, I told myself (it is).
The baby is fine, I told myself (it wasn’t).

We’d spent $300 on groceries at Whole Foods on our way to the campsite so the blueberry would have organic grain bowls rather than a camp taco bar. My wife spent every free moment of those first three days ensuring I had water, food and anything else my body needed while I busied my mind with setting up the campsite and readying for 350 campers to arrive.

Months later, when we were in the throes of our divorce, I’d remember her hand-delivering me a hamburger while I sat surrounded by plastic bins sorting pens and pencils, and have to grip the side of the tub to keep from falling to my knees once more.

The morning after the campers arrived on the campsite, the spotting shifted. I was seeing red. Something was definitely wrong.

This being a camp that centered the experiences of queer women, of course I was surrounded by an Avenger-like team of Miscarriage Preparedness. One of my staff members was an OB/GYN; one of my roommates was experienced in handling trauma and crisis; there was a mother next door, and another staff member who’d lost several pregnancies herself. Out of the mere handful of people let into this experience, each one had a specialized skill set; each of those became a different support to hold both me and my wife up as things progressed.

That afternoon, my OB/GYN Avenger sat down with me privately, asking me detailed questions about how I was feeling, what I was seeing. She explained that she didn’t have the proper tools to make sure I was okay — it could be something that passed on its own, but there could be a blockage, and it was better to be safe. She calmly but firmly told me to look up nearby hospitals and make a plan for whenever I decided it was time to go to the ER. She calmly but firmly reminded me that she was there for anything I needed.

At first our plan was to wait until morning. There was a concert that night.

I walked down the stairs to the theater thinking, “I’m having a miscarriage right now.” Hundreds of sweet camper faces smiled as I passed them, blissfully unaware of everything swirling inside me.

I sat next to my wife.

The cramps got worse.

I started feeling dizzy.

“We have to go now,” I whispered. She didn’t hesitate — and she’s a classic hesitator.

It’s possible that my wife and I were never closer than we were that night. We moved as one being; we barely had to exchange words to communicate.

She grabbed the van keys and we stood up and walked out. Those who knew, knew.

At about 12:30am on May 20, 2017, we started the 90-minute drive to Madison, where I’d read there was a hospital ranked 19^th in the whole country. That felt worth the extra half hour, some kind of strange reassurance at a moment when everything felt wildly out of my control, when something I’d wanted so badly was escaping my body.

Another one of my Avengers texted me as the van pulled away: “I just wanted to let you know that I have been in this situation myself, as have so many women. And we are all of us riding with you.”

The pain in the van was the kind of pain where you can’t sit still. I hovered above my seat for a good portion of our journey. For other parts I pushed far back into my seat. I played the radio. I’m certain I couldn’t have heard Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” because it was May, but I have a memory of it anyway.

When we got to the ER, my wife dropped me at the entrance before parking. It felt like I’d already bled more in those two hours than I’d ever bled in my entire life. I ran to the bathroom before checking in. There was more blood, and one massive clot, the vision of which will be burned into my mind forever.

There it was, at the center of the blood clot: a cream-colored little sack, like a pearl. I remembered my OB/GYN Avenger asking me, “Have you seen anything that looked tan or beige?”

I hadn’t. Now I had. This was the blueberry. This was my baby. This was what I was writing letters to in my wire-bound notebook. I threw it away. I put on a new pad. I met my wife in the waiting room, and we checked in.

“What brings you here today?”

“I am having a miscarriage. This is my wife and we are having a miscarriage.”

We were suffering a loss so many miles from where either of us had ever called home, and we were also so afraid of how we might be spoken to or judged. To our surprise and relief, every doctor, nurse, EMT, and receptionist seemed to cradle both of us, equally, in their care. They were treating us, a queer couple, as two parents suffering a loss. They were earth-shatteringly gentle, looking us in the eyes, apologizing for our loss, and explaining every single step of the process.

They started with bloodwork and an ultrasound. The woman who administered the ultrasound told us both that she’d lost a pregnancy just two weeks before. Her husband had been traveling for work at the time. We shared a moment together; she understood.

“It seems to have been a complete loss,” the doctor who saw me next said. He explained that although “complete loss” can be hard to hear, it was actually good. It meant my body wasn’t having trouble releasing the thing it needed to release. He told me he was going to relieve some of my pain by manually removing more of the lining and excess blood. He was more gentle with me than any doctor I have ever had. I don’t remember his name, but I can still see his face: wavy brown hair, thin nose, defined jawline, kind brown eyes.

My wife sat by me, close to the head of my various hospital beds, for the entire four hours that we spent in that ER. She was quiet, mostly, checking in with me to see if there was anything I needed that she had the ability to bring to my bedside. I can’t remember if I asked for anything. Did we share skittles in the intake room? Did someone give her a cup of orange juice in the sonogram room? Did we nap together on one of the beds? I can’t remember.

Shortly before we were discharged, a nurse with short-cropped hair approached us. She said, “I know A-Camp. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

What she meant was: “I am queer like you. I see you. I am so sorry for your pain.”

The doctor gave us paperwork, a pamphlet about what to expect in the coming days, and a poem about losing a child that it took me two weeks to get up the courage to read. He told me that if I wanted to stay working at camp I could, but that I had to be sure to get more blood work done when we got back to Los Angeles. It was 6am.

My wife and I were still moving as one person. We looked at each other a lot, but didn’t talk much. We didn’t have to. We were sharing in loss, in support, in pain, in love.

We drove from the ER to the Holiday Inn in Madison. We were due back at camp for a live taping of our Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast at 3pm that afternoon. Most of the camp was set to come to see it.

We slept four and half hours and when we woke up we cried together, briefly, holding each other under the crisp, starched sheets. We joked about how much more comfortable our hotel bed was then our bed back at camp. We drove back in the van, quietly. Holding hands here and there. Her squeezing my arm, my leg as she looked out at the road.

We got back to the campsite around 1pm. I showered. She showered. She called our donor, who was a close friend, to tell him and his wife that we’d lost the pregnancy. The week before we left for camp had been Mother’s Day, and they’d left us flowers on our doorstep. My wife cried on the phone with them. They cried on the other end. The flowers had been so beautiful.

At 3pm, with a hospital bracelet still on my arm, we took the stage. We talked and laughed about our favorite show. In the episode we were discussing Buffy is in the hospital, and I joked with the audience that to fully immerse myself in the experience I had gone to the ER the night before — but not to worry, I was fine now.

So much of a public-facing partnership is routine, practiced. I am the one who rolls my eyes and laughs at my wife when she gets carried away with facts on dinosaurs or space; she is the one who nods intently at me as I talk about gender theory and makes fun of me when I get over-excited about Nightmare on Elm Street. We had practiced so much, but we hadn’t practiced this. It wasn’t part of our routine, but we leaned on each other and navigated it, somehow, in real time. As the room laughed and applauded, we warmed, and allowed ourselves to forget for a few moments.

We had been two, then almost three. Now, back as two, we moved as one.

We took a few months off before starting to try again so that my body could recalibrate. This time I was really going to do it right: I scheduled a year off of co-directing A-Camp to focus on our podcast and our future-baby. I began going to acupuncture and taking special herbs that tasted like dirt to help strengthen my cycle. I swam several times a week and, even though I knew it was crazy, chose to do my laps in the warmer pool for less temperature shock to my body. I didn’t drink much alcohol at all, and ate piles of greens and sweet potatoes.

Our last attempt was in January 2018, nearly nine years since we’d first gotten together and less than two years since we’d first started trying to make a family, which had been three years after we’d gotten married.

Seven weeks before we separated.

Before the miscarriage, it seemed entirely normal to call the eye-sprouter a baby — to write it tiny letters, even. After the loss, I committed fully to the narrative that it had not, in fact, ever been a baby.

But when my marriage began coming apart at the seams, it somehow became a baby again.

We kept working together on our podcast through all of it; one week after separating we hosted a sold-out Buffy prom in Los Angeles. My wife wore a tux and I wore a gown. Both of us had been hard at work in the weeks prior getting our outfits tailored without showing the other. The only other time we’d put so much care and secrecy into clothing was on our wedding night. The night of the prom, there was only one person in the room with us who knew that we were separating. It would be months before we would announce the split publicly.

I sometimes think about being on stage that rainy Wisconsin afternoon, the day after my miscarriage, my hospital bracelet a snug reminder of what, exactly, I’d been carrying, and what still felt impossible to lift. No one in the audience who laughed and cheered had any idea what we’d just been through, and how we were moving together through our pain. This was like that in some ways. We were still leaning on the warmth, the love in the room to lift us and to help move us forward. The shared laughter and the community were still lifting us. Now, though, there is no snug bracelet. There are no rings. We are no longer one.

If I hadn’t lost the baby — the baby — it would’ve become a cherry, a fig, a plum, a lemon, a peach. A sweet potato, a mango, an eggplant. A butternut squash, a Napa cabbage, a cantaloupe, a pumpkin, a watermelon. A human.

My due date was January 1st, 2018. This month, it would’ve turned one. Our baby would be one, now. I think about that a lot.

Bearing Life With and Alongside: On Masculinity, Pregnancy, and Medical Trauma

When my friends handed me a copy of Pregnant Butch, I propped my feet on my desk and knowingly nodded along to A.K. Summer’s account of this under-narrated life-phase. I’d been polling the masculine-of-center pregnant people Facebook groups for clothing recommendations and I tried many of the clothing hacks other masculine birth parents have used — I extended the jeans, I wore a belly band, I went casual. I ended up doing what the character in Pregnant Butch mostly did, which is buy bigger and bigger cheap men’s clothes until I was finally living only in unbuttoned flannel shirts, one very large sweatshirt, and track pants. My clothes were constantly ill-fitting — my thighs chafed, my pants both pinched my hips and slid down, and my t-shirts gapped at the bottom. I would stand in the baby consignment store down the street and gently touch the spandex stretch maternity jeans my straight and femme pregnant friends raved about because they were so comfortable. I longed for that comfort, but apparently not enough to just say fuck gender identity and put them on.

In defense of that chafed butch whose pants both pinched her lower hips and fell down when she walked, I am familiar with the plunge-off-the-diving board feeling that comes when I have to wear clothes that don’t fit within the range of my gender identity, and that visually cue others to interact with me in ways that feel foreign to me. Even without sliding into maternity jeggings, and despite how I had been game to stretch my comfort zone for the curious human experience of bearing and birthing new life into the world, the pregnancy pushed my sense of self and my body past its capacity.

Pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel feels a whole lot like an MS flare-up in the arms. One way MS has manifested in my body over the ten years I’ve been diagnosed is that when I get sick, I get REALLY sick. During the pregnant winter I started peeing each time I coughed — deep, terrible coughs — and started getting 2nd trimester contractions. At the doctor’s orders I laid in bed, trying to be perfectly still, while my daughter “read” books next to me and clanged toys about, waiting for her mother to rush home from a work trip. Most of the literature on Relapsing Remitting MS says that it’s perfectly fine for XX people to carry and birth babies. Some data even suggests that MS symptoms go into remission while pregnant. Ten years ago, when I was diagnosed with MS, I thought to myself: sounds lovely! I get a reprieve from symptoms and a baby. It was not a reprieve. At the time I didn’t care if how I was feeling was caused by MS or pregnancy — I wanted it to stop.

Now, at the end of this journey, I want to know how we are going to get collectively clear, in data and in community, on the collective cost of bearing life as targets of discrimination and violence. Does this seem like a curious, over-stated leap in thinking? Follow me into this darkened theatre.

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I was sitting in a plastic blue chair with numb arms, ragged breath, and feeling about three miles beyond what most people mean when they say “exhausted.” Newly diagnosed, I had dragged myself out of my house to hear amazing queer and transgender Black, Indigenous, and POC (BIPOC) poets because that’s the sort of thing that gives me the strength to stay alive during some real shit.

There’s an underground river flowing through every queer-of-color
community I’ve ever been a part of and kissed.
The underground river of kids who went away.

The girls and boys who got sick and tired, spent hours curled up sleeping.
an underground river swelling its banks
filling the river.

-excerpt of “dirty river girl,” Piepzna-Samarasinha. Bodymap, p.29

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s poem “dirty river girl” weaves through what it looks and feels like to spend days in bed, then shifts to talk about an actual polluted river that runs through Leah’s hometown of Worcester, MA, causing cancer and other diseases in the residents. Instead of cleaning up the river, the water is directed into concrete tubes, no longer visible to the residents as a river. The river is of the community, disappears people from the community through disease and death, and then, like sick people in our society, is physically hidden from view.

Leah talked about how the stress of racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and violence grind at our bodies via the systems we’re lodged in until so many of us, particularly BIPOC queer and trans people, are sick with “mysterious” autoimmune and other diseases. I didn’t know my way out of this disease, and I didn’t yet know how to survive it. I had been consumed with self-critique and chastisement — why couldn’t I power through it? What did I do to deserve this?

Eventually, “what did I do to deserve this?” turned into “what has caused this increase in autoimmune diseases in my community? What might have contributed to the way this disease manifested in my body? What of my past is lodged in my body — is it stuck there or can it move?” I don’t have answers to these questions, but they circulate and have structured how I am living my life.

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Three years after my C-section, my abdomen still aches every day.

The night I was transferred from the maternity ward to the ICU, I was handed off to a cruel and transphobic night nurse. She jabbed a long, thick needle into my inner elbow, and refused to reset it when I told her it was causing excruciating pain. Yanks on the sheets below me and on my body tugged at my infected incision. When I yelled she pretended not to hear, or implied that I was causing the harm myself. When she wheeled me down to have a CAT scan, she ran me into every wall and corner she could. She stopped my bed halfway into the elevator and let the doors open and close on my hospital bed a few times. I had a bag of fluid attached to the painful arm that hung on a rolling device while I rolled from one place to another — she refused to push it along, requiring me to hold onto it with the painful arm, with the abdominal incision, while having heart failure. When I let go because I couldn’t hold on anymore, the cord tugged at the needle until I reeled the tubes in and gained control of it again. Until I couldn’t hold on anymore and the pattern repeated over and over.

When we got to the CAT scan room a nice, professional, patient technician started asking me questions. Transphobic Night Nurse cut in, excited: “Oh Oh! I know, she’s a transsexual.” Suddenly, it clicked. The paranoia I walk around with all my life, that someone is treating me poorly because I look or act mannish, confirmed. Transphobic Night Nurse thought I was trans… something. I am trans, have dwelled on the transgender spectrum for twenty years, and have had words for that since I was 19. I’m not transsexual; even if I was, I don’t think her understanding and my understanding of that term are the same. She suddenly, gleefully, had a reason to share whatever words she was carrying around about me with another person. The hours of harsh treatment, the intentional harm she was causing, the withholding of appropriate medical care, made sense. I hadn’t experienced transphobic violence in that medicalized violence form before. But it’d experienced it in many others: in punches and pushes, through threats with weapons, or by being run off the road by cars while I was on foot.

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What landed me in the ICU post-birth is called Peripartum Cardiomyopathy (PPCM). Fluid filled my limbs and my organs; my stretched-out heart couldn’t push blood through my system fast enough. I had read the reports that Black maternal deaths, when shuffled through various items of data such as class, age, health, etc., could be chalked up to one primary contributor: the vigilance required to survive anti-Black racism. A year and a half after my birth, ProPublica came out with their in-depth report on maternal mortality in the U.S., which included a feature on Shalon Irving, a Black public health epidemiology researcher who studied how “structural inequality, trauma, and violence make people sick.” I went to their site to look a the interactive chart that includes as many images and stories as they could collect of women who had died of specific ailments during and after childbirth. I clicked through each one of the images of women who died of Peripartum Cardiomyopathy, predominantly Black women, tears streaming down my face.

By naming the connection I felt between my experience surviving Peripartum Cardiomyopathy and the deaths of Shalon Irving and the other Black women that died from Peripartum Cardiomyopathy, I’m not claiming that gender-based violence and the vigilance to survive as a white, visibly gender-non-conforming person in a transphobic world is on par with the vigilance required to endure racism and misogyny that Black women and Black trans & nonbinary people experience. I’m writing this because I recognized a shared experience of heart failure after birth but reckon with the racialized inequality resulting in the differences between their literal death and my survival. Hearing of her death, and then the interview with Shalon Irving’s mother about how Shalon kept contacting her doctors because she was concerned with her post-birth health, yet still died of PPCM, left me with an ongoing buzz in my ear: What the fuck are you going to do with your survival? Certainly not choke on the silence of it. That’s some bullshit.

Peripartum Cardiomyopathy isn’t “random”; it is clustered at higher rates in certain communities, just like MS is clustered into certain communities, but with a more rapidly fatal impact. “Why do so many people in my community have autoimmune diseases” now extends into “to what extent did MS contribute to PPCM; to what extent did the things that contributed to MS (for example, stress created by trauma and the vigilance of survival as a visibly gender-non-conforming person) also contribute to PPCM?”

When my personal birth story is told, including transphobic medical violence, it overlaps with and is woven into other people’s birth and medical treatment stories as a document of the conditions under which we are surviving. It is part of a collective story and requires a collective response, not just to support queer and trans people birthing, not just to organize for quality healthcare for queer and trans people, but to do so alongside and integrated with campaigns for racial equity in healthcare. For example, nurses and doctors not taking my pain seriously was a common thread in my struggles for the right care in the many weeks spent in two different hospitals. Is this phenomenon of not being read as “in pain” a result of not showing the signs of pain, or not being read as in pain because the person’s full humanity is not being registered? My midwife and wife had to consistently recommend nurses amend their pain scale when asking about my pain. In my opinion, a “10″ was dead, a “9″ was “almost dead.” A “5″ was “this fucking hurts.” Birth teams need to really reckon with this when setting pain scales — what’s the pain scale for a person who has been consistently targeted?

Queer and trans people and those that love us must push HARD on the medical community to really understand how trauma and violence impact health outcomes and demand that they get competent in treating us with respect at all phases of life. I also want to name how medical neglect and torture happen inside medical spaces so we can, in turn, move initiatives we know improve health outcomes for all targeted people — including queer people, trans people, Black people, and other people of color, poor people, and people with disabilities. To name my birth story and include the lopsided exposure to gender-based violence and racialized survival is to stand in my full dignity as a human with an experience; it is to do so with the hope that I can orient any feeling you may have about my personal harm toward transforming structural and institutional violence and discrimination through tangible actions.

Last week my kid told me her after-school teacher had called me Mama, and she needed my help telling her my name was Baba. I made sure to keep my shoulders square, to smile while I chatted with her teacher. I wanted my daughter to see what it looks like to feel so confident in advocating for yourself and your people that it can be joyful. I wanted her teacher to have the opportunity to join in our project of existence with kindness; she took that opportunity. The next day I slid into the tiny jack-hammered tube they call an MRI, where my anxiety bubbled to the surface and streamed down my cheeks in tears. Using the information that they magnetized out of my body they will count my lesions and prescribe new meds. I will jab the needle into my belly each morning. I will read Care Work and keep on doing what I am called here to do. Bearing life with and alongside.

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To learn more about racial justice and birth justice as they are intertwined with lesbian, queer, and trans justice, please check out:

Q/TPOC BirthWerk Project
Southern Birth Justice Project
The Doula Project
Black Women Birthing Justice
Strong Families Network

Like Rabbits

These drawings were done during the two year period that my wife, Sarah, and I were trying to get pregnant. So much has changed in my life since then. These doodles sat, almost forgotten, for almost a decade. When I pulled them out of storage, it was a window to a tough time I’d mostly forgotten.

I found the process of trying to get pregnant to be somewhat lonely. So, I’ve gone back and sorted these random sketches into a timeline with captions, in order to tell my version of the story: charting our journey, like rabbits, trying to make a baby.

It was not an easy road, but in the end, Sarah did get pregnant. In the years since these were originally drawn, we’ve been very busy raising the kids generated by this process. It’s been exhausting­­ — like they say, “All joy, no fun.” Despite all the emotional upheaval, we got our happy ending. I know not all couples are so lucky.

Aspiring Queer Mom Seeks Black Sperm Donor, Can’t Find Too Many

My wife and I have wanted kids since we were kids ourselves. I mean, I definitely have. I guess I can’t really speak for her, but she swears up and down she’s been baby crazy for as long as I have. When people say baby fever, I think they mean temperatures in the high 90s, but I’m talking 150 degrees Fahrenheit and rising since I was probably about seven — there was a small stint in my early childhood where I didn’t care for babies. There’s a video somewhere in my mother’s closet of me at age six and I’m leaning over my newborn brother’s crib and whispering “you smell like all the throw-up in this whole world.” But other than that brief hiccup, I’ve been all babies, all the time.

It’s not just babies, either. I’m an elementary school teacher; I spend my whole life hanging out with, and frequently, accidentally impersonating a bunch of ridiculous 4th grade boys. I have worked at two different summer camps, volunteered in countless preschools and after-school programs, and babysat for over 125 hours since 2015. My wife works at a library and wants to be a children’s librarian, and she babysits even more than I do, possibly because she is better at making sure we actually have the money to splurge on something before she goes out and buys it. The way we interjected ourselves into our Quaker meeting, and made ourselves known, was by volunteering monthly in the nursery and Sunday school (or, as Quakers call it, First Day School), and befriending every baby, child, and parent we could. It’s been over two years since we first began attending our meeting, and I’m still closest with the moms.

We’ve also known we wanted to start a family since long before we were married. We had a gazillion conversations where I expressed my fear that I was falling in love with her too quickly, that it was too easy to imagine a forever with her, a big family, and our own mini-menagerie somewhere green, and she would always say with so much gentle patience, “But we want the exact same things. That’s half the battle.” If the joke is that lesbians move in together after one date, what does it say about us that we revealed baby name ideas about a month after the first time she slept over? (We’ve changed our ideas a lot about this since then — Evangeline is off the table for now.) The last almost-two-years since we got legally married in July 2015 have been full of meticulous budgeting and planning for children, as well as conversations about how and how soon we could acquire them.

What I’m saying is: we’ve been ready for kids for a weirdly long time, for two millennials in their late twenties. And it just so happens that 2017 is the Year We Try to Get Pregnant.

Here’s what you have to wrap your head around when you’re a cis woman, married to another cis woman, and you want to have a baby that comes from one of your uteruses: it’s expensive, time-consuming, and more stressful than it has to be. Like, there are all these tests that you have to do that barely matter to people who can have babies without medical intervention. CMV status? Blood type? If I, like a majority of baby-seeking heterosexuals, wasn’t paying $900 a vial for sperm, I would not give a single fuck.

Oh, and yeah, you read that correctly. Nine hundred buckarinos for one single measly vial of sperm. And that’s just for one cycle. So that’s how much I have to shell out every single time an insemination doesn’t work and we have to try again. And that’s just for the sperm.

There’s also all the testing, for both me and her, and the actual insemination process itself. It would be really helpful if our insurance covered any of it, but lucky us, we just got rejected on account of us not really being eligible, despite meeting the standard our insurance company sent us in a letter last week: “six months of unprotected sex that does not result in pregnancy.” It’s probably not kosher to say so, but I’ve literally never had anything BUT unprotected sex, and still no baby. The insurance fiasco is rage for another day, though. Just focus on the part where this is getting really, really expensive, and we’re a public school teacher and a library worker. We’re doing pretty okay but we have pinched and saved to get to this point and it’s going to milk us for all we’ve got.

Of course, there is variation in price for sperm banks, so there are cheaper (and more expensive) options, and those are all well and great. If you happen to want white children from a white sperm donor. (Which I guess, most people do. White people always seem to be in some kind of vogue for no real reason that I can understand.)

I, however, am not white, and I don’t particularly want white kids. I’m actually a little horrified by the idea of buying white sperm to put inside my (albeit white) wife. If I had sperm it would not make white babies. I do not want to pay for white sperm. I want sperm from some anonymous guy that looks at least kind of like me, so that my kids look kind of like me, and can lay claim to the same heritage I do.

I was really worried about this for a while, and what my wife would think of my total refusal to bring more white children into this world. I still worry about it, actually. She is a pretty wonderful person, but it does mean she’s risking a lot of weird-ass comments from strangers for the rest of her life. On the other hand, at least the inevitable “oh, you’re so kind to adopt!” comments imply some kind of familial belonging. If our kids looked more like her, I’d be dealing with “are you the nanny?” for all eternity. But she says she’s cool with it. More than cool. She’s trying really hard to learn what it means for her to be a white parent of a black kid long before there’s even a hint of a fetus.

Then again, all my worries might mean nothing if I can’t get my hands on some damn black sperm.

Here’s my challenge to you: go to any sperm donor website. Go to the part of the website where you get to check out the donors and take a look around. (This part is very fun. One website tells you what their favorite animals are. So many of these people go out of their way to be specific as hell, and I just can’t imagine that this is a question that truly matters to anyone who is trying to get pregnant.) Usually, a website will have hundreds of donors to choose from, with a variety of interests, backgrounds, astrological signs, and favorite pets. Now let’s do something fun! In that little drop down menu where you choose the race of the sperm donor, click “black,” or even “African-American” if that’s what you fancy, and watch your dreams of little chubby black babies wither away to dust as “hundreds of donors” narrows suddenly down to, um, 11. Or sometimes four. One of the larger banks I know of has TWO up for offer.

“Does it really matter?” you might be wondering. “Can’t they just choose one of the four and get on with their life?”

Let me point you back up to the cost of a vial of sperm. When was the last time you rolled a pair of dice and paid $900 for it, after shelling out an additional $500-800 for the opportunity to roll the dice in the first place? I’m not here for that nonsense! You wouldn’t buy any old random blue car at the dealership just because your heart was set on blue and they only had two options, right?

That’s the part that really pisses me off. Variety matters when it comes to something important like, I don’t know, choosing the genetic material that will be an eternal part of your future child’s DNA. So why should white people invested in filling the world with more of members of the future minority of America be allowed to choose this white, brown-haired, blue-eyed Sagittarius from Milwaukee over the other, while I’m stuck with either the Scorpio chef or the Leo film student, both of which tested positive for two of the genetic diseases that my wife also tested positive for?

After several months of deliberation and desperate searching for a sperm bank with just the slightest hint of variety, by the way, we now have our hearts set on someone special. According to his profile, his dream lunch date would be with Octavia Butler and he did a project in school about police reform. Octavia Butler Police Reform, if you’re out there reading this, please know how much trouble we have gone through to ensure that you are the biological father of our children. At this current time, the insurance we were depending on is leaving us high and dry and it’s making this other rando’s $500 sperm a stronger possibility over your $900 sperm (is it gold? It better be gold)… so, like, if you ever do free samples, hit me up.

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: Remi is Here, Labor is Hard, and Mesh Undies Are Glorious

Remi burst into the world at 5:58 AM on September 1, 2016, weighing just under 7 lb, 3 oz and measuring 19.5 inches long. She’s incredible and smart and perfect and Waffle and I are deeply smitten.

For about three weeks before I went into labor, I’d been having pre-labor contractions in the evening. I’d go to bed and wake up to find the contractions had passed while I was sleeping. I had other pre-labor symptoms, too, including my bloody show, but none of them progressed to actual labor.

On the evening of August 30th around 9 p.m., a week and a half past my due date, I started feeling the familiar uterine cramps and lower back pain. I was scheduled to be admitted for an induction at 8 p.m. the next day and I’d somewhat given up hope that I’d go into labor spontaneously. However, these contractions seemed to be coming at more regular intervals than the pre-labor contractions I’d had in the past. I surreptitiously opened the contraction timer app on my phone and started monitoring.

After an hour, I spoke up. “Babe,” I said to Waffle, “I’m having contractions again. But they’re coming 15 minutes apart and they’re, like, 30-to-45 seconds long. This might be it.” I monitored for another hour and the contractions were still coming at regular intervals. We decided to go to bed right then in case it was the real deal. Labor was going to start the next day, anyway, whether Baby T. Rex came on their own or was coaxed out with Pitocin. Maybe Baby T. Rex was a procrastinator like me, waiting until the last possible second to avoid induction.

At 4:30 a.m., I woke up still having contractions. They were coming faster and stronger. I got up, went to the bathroom, and started timing. They were 10 minutes apart, then eight minutes. At 5:30 a.m., they were coming six or seven minutes apart and I decided to take a shower.

I heard Waffle come into the bathroom. “You alright?” he asked sleepily from the other side of the shower curtain.

“They’re coming faster now,” I said, “Like, six minutes apart.”

“OK.”

“OK.”

“So this is real?”

“I think maybe, yeah.”

I got out, dried off, and put on a loose-fitting black dress. Waffle was tense. His nervous concern was not well-masked by his forced smile. “I’m going to call Christy,” I said.

Christy, our doula, told us to call her when I thought I was in labor, because the plan was to do early labor at home. Christy gave me some tips for coping with the contractions. She said to call again when I couldn’t talk or walk through them. She said that Waffle might notice before I did when my mood shifted. Meanwhile, Christy worked on getting coverage so she or a backup doula could meet up with us. We were pretty far past my due date and of course it just happened to be a day when she had a bunch of appointments and commitments.

I turned on the TV. The contractions were regular, but not too painful at first. As they became stronger, I had the urge to stand up and walk them off. I began to have to actively breathe through them. I tried to remember what I could from our childbirth class. I used the door frame for support as I leaned into the tightness in my lower abdomen.

Waffle started loading our hospital bags into the car. He got me a heating pad. Every couple minutes he’d ask if I was OK. He followed me from room-to-room when I got up to walk. He was quietly panicking and not hiding it well.

Between 6:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m., the contractions progressed from six minutes apart to two minutes apart, lasting 60-90 seconds. I anticipated I’d stay in the five-minute range for longer. I assumed we’d have a few hours at home before I would go to the hospital. However, according to the literature I’d read, two minutes apart was more typical of active labor, when the cervix dilates from four to ten centimeters. Most hospitals want you to call when you’re five minutes or two minutes apart.

At 8 a.m., the contractions were still coming two minutes apart and they were more painful. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law had very quick labors and I wondered if I should be more concerned, if I was going to keep progressing this quickly. I couldn’t talk through the pain at this point and I felt like I couldn’t breathe each time a contraction crested. The lower back pain was becoming unbearable, even with a heating pad. I had to grip the couch or lean over a chair when I felt one coming. I told Waffle to call Christy.

Christy suggested I get in the shower for relief and that Waffle call the midwives. Waffle called the midwifery group and told them what was going on. I stripped off my dress and got in the shower, turned the water on scalding hot. I let the water run over me and leaned against the wall, moaning through the pain. Waffle said he could hear me from downstairs. The midwives instructed us to come to the maternity center. They seemed concerned that my contractions were already two minutes apart.

The five-minute car ride to the hospital maternity center was awful. I typically drive, but obviously I couldn’t. Waffle was stressed out. I was stressed out. I kept snapping at him to follow the GPS when he asked me for directions. Waffle thought I was going to give birth in the car. I assured him I wouldn’t as I gritted my teeth through a contraction.

I didn’t want to spend a long time laboring at the hospital. I would have stayed at home slightly longer if my contractions hadn’t progressed so quickly. Or if I could have waited long enough for Christy to make it to our house and coach me through the pain. But that’s not the hand we were dealt.

When I got to the maternity center, a nurse hooked me up to a monitor in their triage room. My cervix was only two centimeters dilated. Even though my contractions were two minutes apart, which is more typical of active labor, I was still in early labor. They could have sent me home. Since I was scheduled to be induced that night anyway, they decided to admit me. I was glad to be admitted. I couldn’t walk during the contractions and I had to hang off Waffle’s neck and lean into him and sway to get through them. I hoped things would continue to move quickly.

Christy met up with us at the hospital. Thank god. Having a doula was the best decision we made. She provided support to both of us and was an instantly calming influence on Waffle. She knew the hospital and was friendly with the staff. She had the experience of assisting with over 150 births and she’d seen most anything from home births to C-sections. She came up with ingenious ideas we wouldn’t have on our own, like making a sling out of a pillowcase to keep my hand with the IV out of the bathtub or wrapping the birthing ball in a bedsheet so it wouldn’t roll away. She suggested positions and helped me breathe through the pain and always, always listened to what we wanted.

When we had to make decisions about medical intervention, she talked through it with us and assured us we were doing what was best for us and for Remi. We both had a better labor experience because Christy was there. Waffle was an incredible support person in no small part because he had a support person in our doula.

I won’t go into the grisly blow-by-blow details of the rest of my early labor, partially because I don’t want to turn this into a fifty-thousand-word post. The contractions continued to be painful and long and one-to-two minutes apart, but my cervix was very slow to dilate. At 4 p.m., about eight hours since I’d been admitted, the midwife came to check my cervix and I’d just finally made it to four centimeters. I was laid out in the jacuzzi tub screaming through contractions and had been for a few hours at this point. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I was still so far from the finish line. Christy reminded me that each contraction was moving me forward as I turned onto my side in the tub and wailed into a makeshift hand towel pillow.

Five hours later, at 9 p.m., my cervix was finally seven centimeters dilated, making the beginning of the transition stage of active labor. The midwife assured me it would start moving faster now, as this stage usually lasts 15 minutes to an hour. However, two hours later, I was still at eight-and-a-half centimeters, curled into the fetal position on my left side and feeling unable to stand or move. I could barely talk between contractions. I continuously moaned and vocalized. (According to Waffle, the low moaning noises I made sounded like the theme from Jaws.) The pain never subsided, just gradually built into a ferocious stabbing pain and came back down to a moderate pain level for a minute or so in between. The back labor felt like a knife being twisted under my skin.

Over the course of the long day, I learned to breathe through the contractions, to keep my moans and sobs low and guttural, to conserve my energy as best I could in the minute or so of relief between contractions, to visualize the pain subsiding with each outward breath. The contractions were actually more painful earlier in the day, but my body was so worn down that each contraction felt more and more impossible. I’d been awake for almost 20 hours and working through very emotionally and physically intense contractions for almost 16. I was shaking and cold and exhausted. “I can’t do this,” I whisper-whimpered to Waffle.

I pride myself on having a high pain tolerance. I wasn’t nervous about pain during labor because I felt confident I could handle it. I had no idea how hard it would be. The pain, itself, would have been manageable on its own or for a shorter period of time. However, with relentless contractions coming two minutes apart for so long, it became torturous.

I’ve never before been pushed to my topmost limit, to the very edge of my physical threshold. I made noises that were pulled up from this primal, earthy place, that didn’t sound like they were actually coming from me. I grabbed Waffle’s hand and arm so hard I left bruises and dragged his skin off with my nails. I whimpered. I shrieked. I made sobbing noises, but I couldn’t cry. It was too much effort to cry and all my focus was on making it through the contractions. I kept chanting in my head, Just make it through this one. Just one more. Just one more. Just one more.

By 11 p.m., though, I felt like I couldn’t take one more. I dreaded each contraction as I felt it start to build. “You can do this,” Christy assured me, “Breathe through it. You’re doing great.” I kept breathing. I held Waffle’s hand. I took each contraction as it came because I didn’t have a choice. I felt like I might be in transition forever.

At this point, the midwife offered pain management options. I’d really wanted to have a natural birth, but my birth plan was always open to me changing my mind or things going differently. Part of me, the stubborn part, felt like I’d been doing this so long that I wanted to see it through to the end. The other part of me, the pragmatic part, knew I had hit a wall. Physically and emotionally, I didn’t want to keep going like this. I chose to have an epidural.

The epidural was instant relief. I was finally able to talk, to thank Waffle and check in with him. I realized we had barely spoken all day, not since my contractions became too painful to talk. I’d turned inward to this meditative place to deal with the pain. He was amazing throughout the labor. He knew I didn’t want to be talked to. I just needed him holding my hand or letting me hang onto him or letting him rub my back. While I laid and moaned in the jacuzzi tub for three hours, he poured warm water over my back with a cup. In all our years together, I’ve never felt so close to Waffle. I don’t like needing people and I’d never needed him as much as I did that day. I was vulnerable and literally naked (I ditched my hospital gown early on and never felt like putting it back on) and raw and exposed and I kept reaching for Waffle and he was right there every time. It is, hands down, the most intimate experience we’ve ever shared and that I’ve ever had with anyone.

Because of the epidural, I was finally able to get a couple of hours of rest. Though, between the endorphin high and being hooked up to a blood pressure monitor that went off every 30 minutes, I didn’t actually sleep. Waffle took a nap on a fold-out chair next to my bed.

The epidural slowed down my contractions and I still wasn’t fully dilated, so I opted to be administered Pitocin to strengthen my contractions. Pitocin is what they use to induce labor, so ironically, I’d avoided induction but still ended up needing Pitocin to augment labor. The Pitocin helped me dilate fully and then, finally, a full 24 hours since I’d woken up in labor, it was time to push.

I was still numb from the waist down because of the epidural. The nurse and midwife told me when to push because I couldn’t feel my contractions. The nurse put a mirror at the end of my bed so I could see the head crowning. It was surreal, seeing my body giving birth, but not being able to feel it, like having an out of body experience. It was strangely peaceful after a long day of difficult labor. It was beautiful, too, seeing the top of the head, the blood and everything else, and finally, witnessing the final push as Remi’s head emerged with the shoulders and body following closely behind. Waffle and I watched together, holding hands, as I birthed Remi into the world.

I’d prepared myself to not have an immediate emotional reaction to my baby. I know some people don’t feel intense feelings right away and that’s normal. I tend to not be very interested in babies, so I thought I might not react strongly. I was wrong. I loved her the moment I saw her, the moment I looked into her little face and saw her little nose that looks just like mine. The nurse put her on my chest immediately after birth. I held her close. “She’s perfect,” I said to Waffle, holding back tears.

Unfortunately, we only had a few minutes with Remi. Waffle never even got to hold her. She was having trouble breathing. She had meconium (baby poop) in her amniotic fluid and it was possible she’d inhaled meconium in utero. She was taken for tests and observation by special care.

We were moved to our postpartum room without her and not knowing if she was okay. As soon as my epidural wore off, I threw on some clothes and we went to see her. She looked awful. She’d aspirated meconium in utero and her respiratory rate was way too high. We couldn’t really touch her at first because we didn’t want to overstimulate her and she was hooked up to a bunch of machines. You could see her little diaphragm working hard with each breath.

She stayed in special care for the next 48 hours. We visited her every few hours and, when she was able to start eating, helped with her feedings.

Remi couldn’t figure out how to latch and my breastmilk was slow to come in (possibly because we’d been separated so early on), so we gave the OK for her to be fed formula. She started recovering quickly after that. She was well enough to stay in our room on Saturday.

On Sunday, we had to be discharged without her and she went back to special care. She was supposed to stay there for seven more days. However, Monday morning I got a phone call that she could finish her antibiotics at our pediatrician’s office and she could come home that very day.

Since then, she’s fully recovered. We’ve switched her off the formula and onto breast milk exclusively. I feed her every hour or two and Waffle and I tag-team childcare so that we can both get naps in here and there. Waffle’s got the magic touch for putting her to sleep. She is trying to lift her head already and has strong reflexes. She’s gaining weight and makes adorable noises and regularly tests our limits as new parents. I can’t believe she’s really here and I love her so much! She’s tough like her mom!

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5 Random Final Thoughts on Queer Baby-Making

1. Letting Go of Perfect Birth Plans

We knew that our birth plan could change at any time and I think that was the best way to approach birth. Almost every person I’ve talked to about their birth experience had a different experience than what they planned or hoped for. Labor and delivery are unpredictable. There are too many variables you can’t control.

However, I think having a strong support team is what made our birth experience feel empowering and positive, even though I didn’t labor the way I’d hoped to. Doulas aren’t always affordable. Childbirth education isn’t necessarily readily available for free. Not everyone can choose a midwife for their care. Not everyone has a supportive partner. I was lucky to have access to all these resources and support. I can totally see how some people get bullied into birth choices they don’t want or talked into medical interventions that are unnecessary.

I had a moment of self-defeat about choosing the epidural, but my doula reminded me that I did all the work and that I did what I needed to do to deliver my baby. “You did this,” she said. “It was all you. You are so strong.” By choosing midwives for my care, I avoided being pushed into other kinds of medical intervention like episiotomies or a C-section. There’s nothing wrong with having a C-section. I just didn’t want one unless medically necessary or if there were other options to try first. We were able to discuss our options for medical intervention with our doula and she gave us useful advice so we didn’t feel like we were making decisions in a panic.

Everything feels like a life or death decision in the moment, but it really isn’t. Epidural? Life or death. Formula? Life or death. Ultimately, you have to do what feels right to you, whether that’s a scheduled C-section or a home birth. It’s just hard to feel like you have autonomy when you are worried about your baby and dealing with a huge amount of stress and pain and uncertainty as new parents.

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2. Reflections from the Non-Gestational Waffle

by Waffle

The waiting game was just as awful as everyone said it would be. The constant stream of unsolicited advice was obnoxious. The stress of trying to figure out my time off in a country that places emphasis on job productivity and little value on family was, well, stressful. In the end though, I can confirm 100% that it was worth it. Kae asked me to jot down a few non-gestational parent notes so here goes!

This will not be new news to anyone who has read first hand accounts of support people during labor experiences but the most striking feeling during labor, for me, was helplessness. You constantly hear partners talking about their experience of feeling sorry for the gestational parent. THE STRUGGLE IS REAL FOLKS! I was sure I would feel bad for the pain that Kae would endure but I was totally unprepared for the magnitude of helplessness. While there were things I did through the labor that I am sure “helped” as much as anything can help during labor, for the most part I felt wholly useless.

There are no words to describe watching someone you love go through something so intense and painful while having no control over alleviating that pain. KaeLyn swears up and down that I was helpful but I truly felt like I was useless 90% of the time. It was much harder than anything I had anticipated. I will fully admit to crying out of hopelessness at one point shortly before the epidural was rolled out.

One word: doula. I like to joke that our doula saved our marriage. For real though, our doula saved my life. I feel super privileged to be in a position where we could, financially, use a doula and it was the right choice. I do straight up think KaeLyn would have murdered me had it not been for our fantastic doula. I was a panicked mess when we decided to take it to the hospital. I had zero real-world experience with labor and delivery and try as I might, I definitely lost my ever loving shit. I know I was driving Kae crazy but I couldn’t stop my fear from manifesting in obnoxious overbearing ways.

The mere presence of our doula gave me the calmness needed to properly support Kae. I didn’t have to worry about logistics like how to work the tub or where the hot packs lived and was able to be physically present for the labor. I was also able to follow the doula’s lead on pain management. I was at a loss on how to help KaeLyn manage the pain. I read books and researched methods to cope with contractions but most of them went flying out of my brain when the time came. The doula was great about making helpful suggestions of pain management and when something seemed to help a bit I was able to use those suggestions. It calmed me and made me feel empowered in a situation that was totally out of my control. I was able to sneak short food breaks without feeling like I was leaving my wife hanging. If you can, get a doula.

Once Kae had the epidural, it was nice to be able to enjoy the actual birth together. We were both able to physically watch our daughter being born and it was, hands down, the best experience of my life. KaeLyn makes perfect, beautiful, strong Baby T. Rexes. I must have told her she was amazing about one million times in the hours following Remi’s birth.

Perhaps the best thing was watching Kae fall in love with Remi. I was one of those parents that looks at the ultrasound photos and gloats about how cute the baby looks and how smart they will be based on their brain pics. I loved Remi from the first ultrasound about seven weeks in.

Watching Kae meet Remi and fall in love with our daughter was the best! I know she was unsure if she would love Remi immediately or if it would be a love that would develop over time but it was evident from the first moment she held Remi. I didn’t actually hold Remi due to the respiratory distress until she was almost a day old because I wanted Kae to have that experience and I don’t regret that decision for a minute. I love Remi unconditionally and we have a lifetime of hugs and cuddles to look forward to thanks to my amazing wife!

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3. I Stole This Underwear

I’d read in the mommy forums about the infamous postpartum mesh underwear they give you at the hospital for maternity pads. I fall squarely in the “love it!” camp. These undies are so stretchy and comfortable. They feel like nothing and provide absolutely no support and that is exactly what I wanted after pushing out a baby. I totally raided the hospital stash in my postpartum room so I could keep them in rotation at home.

I’m wearing them right now. I wish I could wear them forever.

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4. Things I’ve Googled in the Past Week:

• newborn won’t sleep on back
• meconium aspiration common
• formula spitting up gassy
• how much should a newborn eat
• bleeding from umbilical cord stump
• how to clip newborn nails
• tummy time when to start
• how to get breastmilk to come in faster

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5. Breast is Best(-ish) But Not for Rest

The formula that Remi was eating was giving her a lot of gas and stomach upset. She was spitting up after every feeding and, like, a lot of spit-up, sometimes hours after the feeding. I finally was able to get her to latch onto my breast the day before we were discharged from the hospital, but she preferred the bottle. I don’t blame her. My milk still wasn’t in and I wasn’t producing a lot of colostrum. The bottle is also just easier to get food and, therefore, satisfaction from. We decided to keep mixed feeding her, breast and formula. We followed the feeding schedule of the special care unit at the hospital, two ounces of formula every three hours and I topped her off with breastmilk if I could.

However, the spitting up and gassiness seemed to be more than what we thought was normal. We asked our pediatrician about it at our five-day check-up and she said the hospital was overfeeding her. She assured me my milk supply was enough and suggested going back to breastfeeding exclusively. So we started transitioning her off the formula. I have absolutely nothing against formula. I don’t think it’s wrong to formula feed. I do think it’s expensive and, for Remi, it didn’t seem to be working well.

Since we’ve switched her back to breastmilk, her stomach upset is a lot better. The first day was especially rough and there was a lot of crying and screaming as we took away the bottle gradually. Now, she’s totally transitioned back and seems satisfied with breastmilk. My milk is also coming in a lot faster and I have to pump a lot less now that she’s feeding regularly. The only downside is that breastmilk digests a lot faster than formula, so I’m feeding her on demand every hour or so, sometimes every half hour when she’s fussy, every two hours if I’m really lucky. That equals a really weird and unreliable sleep schedule.

Thankfully, all my breastfeeding anxiety was for naught. It isn’t my favorite thing and my nipples are constantly tender, but it’s working fine (after a slow start) and my body is cooperating. Remi is mostly cooperating.

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Thank y’all so much for the love and support you directed toward Waffle, Remi, and me over the course of this miniseries. It’s been a hell of a lot of fun sharing our experience in queer baby-making with you. Don’t worry. There will be more dispatches from parent-land in the future. Now, this exhausted queer mom is going to try to sneak in a nap.

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: The Seven Stages of Waiting (41 Weeks)

The Seven Stages of Waiting for Baby T. Rex

1. Terror (“What did we do?!”)
2. Excitement (So soon! OMG!)
3. Nervousness (SO soon OMG!!!)
4. Hope (Any day now!)
5. Disappointment (Any day now…?)
6. Frustration (ANY DAY NOW, YOU LITTLE POOP MONSTER!!!)
7. Resignation (Cool. Just going to be pregnant FOREVER, I guess…)

Well then. Here we are. According to Waffle’s pregnancy app, Baby T. Rex is now nine days old, which is weird because Remi is still very comfy and chillin’ in my uterus.

Waffle had to go back to work yesterday, having maxed out his two-week vacation allotment. I’ve officially used up three weeks of parental leave. Well-meaning and concerned friends and relatives keep asking if the baby is here yet and letting us know we’re overdue. We know. We swear we’re not hiding it from ya’ll. The baby is not here yet. We frankly can’t wait until Remi’s here, either. We’ll shout it to the world, we promise.

The reality is that a lot of first time preggers people give birth after their due date. Full-term is between 37-42 weeks. My midwife says 40 weeks, 3 days-5 days is average for first time pregnancies. Other sources I’ve read or heard say going past 41 weeks or even to 41.5 weeks is average for first-time pregnancies. Much like when we were trying to conceive, knowing the stats and averages didn’t bring us all that much comfort as we counted down to our due date.

By the time we got to August 20th, I just felt done, cooked, ready to pop. We didn’t think I’d go far past my due date because of my early gestational diabetes diagnosis, which we’d been warned might mean a bigger baby. I’d been having pre-labor signs since about 36 weeks. I was having irregular, but frequent Braxton Hicks contractions and some random contractions that were mildly painful. A week before my due date, the baby dropped deep down into my pelvis (also known as “lightening”). I was riding a clean burst of energy for a few days leading up to the due date. I just felt like I was ready.

Then August 20th came…and went.

This past Saturday, we hit 41 weeks and there was still no sign of Remi. Everyone has been like: “Get some sleep now.” “Enjoy your time together.” “Baby will be here soon.” “They’ll come when they’re ready.” All well-meaning advice, but quite frankly we just want this baby here. ASAP. We can’t sleep anyway because I can barely roll over and I have to propel myself out of bed to pee four times a night, which wakes Waffle up because he’s anxious that I’m going to go into labor. We’ve had over 11 years of enjoying our time together. I like Waffle’s face and vice versa, but…we’re good with staring at each other. And yes, of course we know the baby will come eventually, but it’s still frustrating!

Waiting is just frustrating. That’s just how waiting is, in general. Sometimes when you’re waiting or anxious about something, you just want people to empathize with your feelings, not try to fix you. Because there’s no way to fix it! I tell myself every day, “This is normal. This is fine. This is normal.” I still get frustrated when another day passes with no Baby T. Rex. That’s just how I’m feeling right now regardless of how logical it is. I know once Remi is here, we’ll forget about the stress and this will be a funny story to tell Remi when they’re older about how we were actually losing our ability to function and doing ridiculous things like vacuuming the ceiling and organizing the tupperware cabinet while waiting for them. Right now, though, I would like my body back and my baby in my arms.

My midwives generally don’t do a lot of medical intervention or recommend it, so they weren’t too worried about me going past 40 weeks. However, because we were overdue, we had a non-stress test and ultrasound on Friday, just to be sure everything was cool in my ute. Remi was super active for the non-stress test and all seems well in there. There were no contractions during the test, which I expected. All week, I’ve had contractions that come and go, as well as pelvic pain and cramps that feel like menstrual cramps, but they’ve never escalated in frequency or fallen into a discernable pattern.

We also found out Baby T is measuring at approximately 7 pounds, 6 ounces, which is very much in the normal range for birth weight, especially at 41 weeks! (I guess I managed my gestational diabetes too well.) Baby T. Rex looked quite content to just hang out head-down on the ultrasound, just wiggling their toes and flappin’ their baby lips and having a real chill time in there.

We’re both glad Baby T. Rex is healthy and my insides are in good shape, but we wish Remi would stop dragging their fetus feet and come meet us already. Is this because I’m perpetually late? Are they already taking after me?

Over the past week, I’ve tried some of the things that supposedly help trigger labor, but none of them have been particularly effective (and a lot are just myths). People keep recommending we get busy in the bedroom, but don’t realize that part of the trick to the sex-to-induce-labor advice is for your partner to have semen, which supposedly helps soften the cervix. (Also, between feeling like a beached whale whenever I’m horizontal and dealing with almost constant pelvic pain, my interest in getting frisky is about a negative two.)

Orgasm helps in that it releases oxytocin and can trigger stronger contractions, which I can confirm is true, but if you’re not ready to go into labor or already in labor, it’s just going to give you another false contraction. I also tried nipple stimulation, which works the same way that orgasm does, trying to simulate breastfeeding and trick my body into throwing out some more oxytocin to strengthen my contractions. Same result. More false contractions, no labor progression. I’m just not ready yet.

Every day, I’m drinking four steeped bags of uterus-toning red raspberry leaf tea and bouncing on my birthing ball. I’m taking walks and doing light exercise at home and taking naps and trying to stay healthy and rested. I’ve even tried acupuncture. I’ve lost hope that any of this is making a difference. My midwife reassured me there isn’t a super secret special trick to trigger labor. Remi is going to be born when they feel ready…hopefully some day before they’re off to college.

At this point, we have a plan to go to the birthing center to be induced if I don’t go into labor naturally by 41 weeks, 5 days (this Wednesday evening, with labor probably kicking in on Thursday). At first I wasn’t sure if I wanted to consider being induced until after 42 weeks, which my midwifes were open to. I can still change my mind, but I’m thinking more and more that it’s the right choice.

I don’t want to rush Remi before they’re ready, but I also don’t want to be pregnant for all eternity. Waffle and I both work and we don’t have unlimited time off or unlimited funds. We’re blessed to have a small savings to take some unpaid time off and I’m extremely lucky to have some paid time from my employer, but there’s a limit on how long we can sustain that. Remi seems healthy and fully-developed, so ultimately we’re ok with evicting them if they continue to be shy, especially when we’re coming close to 42 weeks. Of course, going to the hospital to be induced changes our whole birth plan, including where and when we meet our doula and our ability to work through early labor from the comfort of our home, but if that’s what it takes, I’m going to be flexible. Waffle and I are both still holding out a little sliver of hope that Remi will come on their own before then, but we’re not too optimistic.

I never thought I’d write a 41-week Countdown to Baby T. Rex. Our Leo/Virgo cusp baby is definitely moving into Virgo territory, whatever that means. (Mey? Cecelia?) Fingers crossed for us, folx. One way or another, Remi will be with us soon (if we don’t expire of despair and boredom before then). On the plus side, our house has never been so well-organized and writing this update is giving me something to pass the time and take my mind off the nagging cramping-that-is-not-contractions I’m enjoying today.

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Kae & Waffle’s Super Exciting and Romantic Two Weeks of Waiting

Monday, Aug 15th

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Excited, Nervous, Productive
• Waffle’s Mood: Excited, Nervous, Overwhelmed
• Distractions: Caught up on DVR’d shows, went to movies and saw Pete’s Dragon (so good!), take-out for lunch and dinner
• Chores: Took cat for a nail trim, Waffle washed baby clothes and picked up house, made his and hers to-do lists (to help us focus on what we actually can do right now), KaeLyn caught up on non-work work stuff
• Baby T. Stuff: Braxton Hicks contractions, pelvic pain, lots of movement

Tuesday, August 16th

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Excited, Nervous, Motivated
• Waffle’s Mood: Excited, Nervous, Motivated
• Distractions: Ice cream run, watched 2015 Macbeth on Amazon Prime, KaeLyn worked on an adult coloring book
• Chores: Organized and deep-cleaned bedroom for the first time in four years, Waffle put together bouncers, KaeLyn worked on to-do list, KaeLyn cleaned bathrooms, ran errands
• Baby T. Stuff: Dropped lower in pelvis, irregular contractions, back pain

Wednesday, August 17th

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Excited, Hopeful, Tired
• Waffle’s Mood: Excited, Hopeful, Restless
• Distractions: Ice cream run, Waffle printed pictures for baby book, used up old play credits at Dave and Buster’s, cheap lunch out, watched Zootopia at home
• Chores: Turned off chime and replaced batteries in dining room clock, dropped off Goodwill donations, Waffle did laundry and put away stuff in baby nursery, ran more errands
• Baby T. Stuff: Cramps, midwifery appointment (all is well, made an appointment for the following week, hoping not to have to keep it)

Thursday, August 18th

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Ready, Anxious, Hopeful
• Waffle’s Mood: Ready, Anxious, Restless
• Distractions: Picked up fancy salad for lunch, mid-day napped, watched Inside Out at home (“Bing Bong! Bing Bong!”)
• Chores: Stocked up on pet supplies and food, vacuumed upstairs, ran errands, mailed some packages, picked up house
• Baby T. Stuff: Lots of wiggling around, Braxton Hicks contractions, irregular back-to-front contractions, back pain

Friday, August 19th

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Ready, Hopeful
• Waffle’s Mood: Ready, Discouraged
• Distractions: Ice cream run, Waffle taught the cat a new trick, started Stranger Things even though KaeLyn was afraid it would be too scary (It wasn’t)
• Chores: Waffle did laundry, boxed up more Goodwill donations, picked up around the house
• Baby T. Stuff: Lower back pain, irregular contractions, pelvic pain

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Saturday, August 20th – DUE DATE!!!

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Cautiously hopeful
• Waffle’s Mood: Cautiously hopeful
• Distractions: Rochester Straddler #AutostraddleBrunch!, ice cream at the beach, clearance rack shopping for 9-12 month baby clothes, finished Stranger Things
• Chores: Picked up more pet supplies, random chores around the house, knocked some things off to-do lists, ran errands
• Baby T. Stuff: literally nothing happening except normal baby movements and pelvic pain

Sunday, August 21

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Disappointed, Hopeful
• Waffle’s Mood: Disappointed, Frustrated
• Distractions: Went to the movies and saw Bad Moms, ice cream and walk at the beach, watched like three hours of YouTube videos
• Chores: Chores, chores, and more chores (This house is clean.)
• Baby T. Stuff: Random-ass contractions, no other signs of labor

Monday, August 22

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Disappointed, Hopeful
• Waffle’s Mood: Disappointed, Frustrated, A lil’ angry
• Distractions: Made a pot roast together, got ingredients for some freezer meals
• Chores: Cleaned car interior, went grocery shopping, sorted tupperware and recycled anything that was really gross and old or didn’t have a lid, sorted through a random old bag of like 2,000 pieces of magnetic word poetry and removed all the weird stuff and “fuck” magnets and dirty words, reorganized the kitchen pantry top-to-bottom, vacuumed everything, lost all sense of chill
• Baby T. Stuff: Some mild contractions and cramping, baby moving around a lot

Tuesday, August 23

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Frustrated, Unmotivated, Unfocused
• Waffle’s Mood: Frustrated, A lil’ depressed
• Distractions: Ice cream run, started watching Worst Cooks in America: Season Three on Netflix, made a white lasagna and froze it
• Chores: KaeLyn picked and dried herbs from the front porch kitchen garden, packed and froze a bunch of chicken breasts, cleaned the bunny & wiggle bedroom/habitat, put away things in baby room, random chores and errands
• Baby T. Stuff: Same old contractions and cramping and pelvic pain, another day

Wednesday, August 24

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Disappointed, Cautiously hopeful
• Waffle’s Mood: Disappointed, Increasingly depressed
• Distractions: Finished Worst Cooks in America: Season Three on Netflix, took a nap, took a walk at Ontario Park and found a million Pokemon Go players there, Waffle made nightshade-free curry chicken, watched episodes of Face Off in bed, ordered a white garlic pizza
• Chores: Bare minimum household chores, totally done with to-do lists
• Baby T. Stuff: Midwifery appointment: had a cervical exam and found out I’m 50% effaced and baby is in +1 position which means…kind of nothing. Labor could happen any time or not for days. Agreed to plan to induce if labor doesn’t begin by mid-42nd week.

Thursday, August 25

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Tired, Bored, Very Ready
• Waffle’s Mood: Depressed, Frustrated, Bored
• Distractions: Greasy diner breakfast to get out of the house; played the Wizard of Oz game at Dave and Buster’s for, like, two hours; Waffle went clearance rack shopping for baby clothes at Kohl’s; randomly decided we needed to find a good deal on a new Crock Pot; started Hannibal: Season Three on Amazon Prime
• Chores: Went to the grocery store literally three times in one day, took a nap, household chores, dropped off seven+ year old mystery rolls of film at Walgreens to see what develops
• Baby T. Stuff: Started counting contractions that seemed to be coming every twenty minutes, horrible mid-back pain that made it impossible to lay down or sleep outside of a hot bath

Friday, August 26

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Bored, Defeated, Resigned to being pregnant forever
• Waffle’s Mood: Upset, Anxious about going back to work, Super frustrated
• Distractions: Watched more Hannibal, took a nap
• Chores: not much left to do
• Baby T. Stuff: Woke up feeling totally fine with minimal pain and lots of energy like it was four weeks ago almost, no contractions all day, went for ultrasound and non-stress test

Saturday, August 27th – 41 WEEKS OFFICIALLY

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Resigned to being pregnant forever, Feeling blank
• Waffle’s Mood: Anxious about going back to work, Defeated, Overwhelmed
• Distractions: Finished Hannibal: Season Three, took a nap, took a walk on the beach, had a ridiculous fight about nothing (dinner and who would decide what to eat and where, specifically)
• Chores: Not much left to do
• Baby T. Stuff: Cramps, irregular contractions, pelvic pain, endless nothingness

Sunday, August 28th

• KaeLyn’s Mood: Resigned to being pregnant forever, Emotionally preparing to be induced
• Waffle’s Mood: A little better after paying bills and figuring out a budget for unpaid leave time, Anxious about going back to work that night
• Distractions: KaeLyn worked on writing, Waffle read fanfic, Waffle’s sister and neice visited for a bit, went to the all-you-can-eat buffet for dinner (regrets)
• Chores: Not much left to do
• Baby T. Stuff: Bloated and crampy all day, lots of baby movements, few contractions

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4 Random Baby-Making Feelings I’m Currently Over-Processing

1. Goodbye, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen GD

My blood glucose numbers have been coming down into normal-ish range consistently since 36 weeks. That’s been really awesome. Because I was prediabetic before getting knocked up, I’m interested to see how my numbers will be after birth, when I’m completely done being preggers. I’m holding out some small hope that white rice can return to my life. You gotta’ understand that I literally ate white rice for the first year of my life for, like, every meal in Korea. Maybe I won’t eat a whole pint as a stand-alone entree in one sitting anymore, but I’d love to be able to have, like, a scoop with my entree. Is that asking too much?!

2. Things I’ve Googled This Week:

• labor signs cramps
• common early labor signs
• how to tell if you’re in early labor
• prelabor or labor contractions
• what do real contractions feel like
• best app for timing contractions
• first time mom average delivery date
• first time mom past due date
• past due should I induce or wait
• labor signs back pain
• how to induce labor naturally

3. Jeter’s Best Week Ever

Unlike his human parents, our cat has had the best two weeks ever. He’s just ecstatic that we’ve finally come to our senses and quit our jobs in order to be with him 24/7. We finally understand our role is to attend to his every need, give him cuddles and endless treats, and be available to him at all times. He’s just thrilled that we’ve been getting up earlier (out of circumstance and restless nights, not choice) and has taken to yelling in our faces every morning around 7:30/8:00 AM.

Jeter has a world of disappointment and confusion coming his way as soon as we come home with a new small human family member, so we’re trying to be extra kind to him. Even though he’s acting like a spoiled brat cat lately.

4. Virgo, Baby

We were anticipating a Leo/Virgo cusp baby, but we’re venturing clearly into Virgo territory now. In fact, it’s highly likely Remi will come into the world in September instead of August. A friend who was pregnant at the same time as me and whose due date was just five days before mine has an adorable baby who is now a little over three weeks old. Another friend whose due date is two weeks after mine is now looking like we might have babies closer in age. Due dates mean nothing, ya’ll. I mean, seriously, they don’t. They’re somewhat arbitrary and based on a 28-day menstrual cycle and only 5-10% of people give birth on their due date. We knew this and still put too much stock in our due date and ended up feeling disappointed.

But I digress. Anyway, baby Remi is going to be a Virgo and according to what I’ve read online, Virgo’s perfectionist tendencies play out in babies who are finicky eaters and know just what they like and don’t like. They like hands-on learning and playing with toys more than watching TV. They like routines and rules. I don’t know any other Virgo kids. Does that sound right to ya’ll who are Virgos? Time will tell! I wonder how a Virgo baby feels about being kicked out of the womb before they want to come out.

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: Saying Goodbye to Our Childfree Days and Queer-Friendly Baby Books (39 Weeks)

My parental leave at my day job started last week. Waffle’s two weeks time off officially started this past weekend. Now we’re just waiting for Baby T. Rex and finishing up some household projects and doing chores and running errands and relaxing. The relaxing is the hard part.

My due date is this Saturday, August 20th. We’d love for Remi to come any time now. They’re pretty much fully cooked and we’re ready (or as close to ready as you can be). First time babies are more likely to come late than early, so we may have quite a while to wait, but then again, one-to-two weeks is…not that far in the future.

I’m feeling a bit wistful and nostalgic as I realize this is our last childfree time together as a couple. In the future, we may take grown-up only dates and vacations, but we’ll always be parents from here on out. Our family of two will be a family of three.

Every time we do something, it feels meaningful. Our last childfree grocery shopping trip. Our last childfree walk down by Ontario beach. Our last childfree 1:00 AM Taco Bell run. Our last childfree fill-up at the gas station. Our last childfree movie night. Our last childfree change of our bedsheets. The cat’s last nail trim. I’m snacking on hummus right now and it could be my last childfree hummus snack.

Every time I’ve spent time with my friends and family over the past month, it’s probably been the last time I’ll see them before we have Remi. I feel like I have to hug everyone and tell them I’ll see them on the other side.

It feels like that, like we’re standing behind a maroon velvet curtain on opening night and everything is about to begin as soon as the rope is pulled. Everything is building to this moment. The lights will go up and this new scene that we’ve practiced for but never performed live will begin.

We’ll walk on-stage, step into the light, and become different people. Just like that.

However, it doesn’t feel like our life before Remi was lacking or less-than or “backstage.” There’s also a feeling of sadness, of saying goodbye to our lovely life before parenthood. I’d always imagined myself being childfree forever. Waffle hadn’t thought about kids for quite a while, since he committed to being with me.

We’ve had a really rich 11 years, some excruciatingly awful times and some extraordinarily beautiful times. We’re only in our thirties, but it feels like we’ve grown through several life stages with each other already. We have. From messy (emotionally and physically) college undergraduates to gainfully employed grown-ups, from protesting George W. Bush’s second inauguration to rooting for Hillary Clinton, from my college dorm room to owning a four-bedroom house. We’ve had two cats, five rats, three guinea pigs, and two bunnies as housemates and companions.

We had the years of reckless and insatiable lust, the years of emotionally abusive fighting and breaking up and immaturity, the years of regrounding and redefining ourselves as individuals, the long stretch between then and now of deep friendship and affection and healthy communication and loving support. A decade isn’t that long, but between your 20’s and 30’s, it can feel like forever.

We’ve worked hard and we’ve been lucky and we’ve benefited from middle-class privilege that allowed us to get to where we are today. These last few years, especially, we’ve finally been able to rise slightly above living paycheck-to-paycheck. We’ve been able to have grown-up experiences together, like our shared obsession with immersive theater and the money and time spent on travel and tickets to see as much of it as we can afford. We aren’t rich and we’re still frugal, but we’re definitely not struggling.

We’ve been able to do a lot as a couple, had a lot of time to figure out who we are as individuals and as a two-person family, and the privilege of relative economic security to nurture all of that. I think because of that, we’re ready to nurture this new (and also expensive) thing called Baby T. Rex.

The biggest difference between being in a relationship and being a parent is that your first priority becomes someone else. In a relationship, ideally, you’re still prioritizing yourself. You may choose to care for and put the needs of your partner(s) or relationship over your own needs sometimes, but in a healthy relationship, you’re still your own #1, your own ride-or-die. When it comes down to it, you have to love yourself first so you can love your partner(s). And you can always leave. You can always walk out the door if your needs aren’t being met in your relationship anymore.

As a parent, you are committing to care for another person in a way that is, honestly, much more intense than a romantic partner. If things get tough (and they probably will), you’re still a part of your child’s life and family. You don’t get to leave. To me, that’s an unbreakable bond. I know that’s not always how it is. I know parents don’t always support their children or put their children’s needs first. I know a lot of children have to walk away from toxic parents. But I don’t want to be like that. I see this as a lifelong commitment, no matter what. I’ve never made a commitment like this to anyone before. As a commitment-phobe, it’s a little terrifying to think about.

Still, I think there’s a difference between putting your child’s needs first and putting yourself last. I don’t plan to put my whole life outside of parenthood on hold. I want to include and prioritize Remi in my life, not make them my whole life. I think that is part of being a parent, too, modeling a healthy sense of self-worth and making time for myself and for Waffle and me as a couple so that we’re the best parents we can be to Baby T.

Of course, the first few weeks and months are going to be fiercely overwhelming and Remi will be, to a large extent, the alpha and omega of my life. Between caring for them and trying to adjust to a post-baby life and squeezing in sleep, it’s going to be Baby T. Rex time all the time.

As they get older, I’m sure we’ll want to do more things that are family friendly and allocate our time and funds towards things that benefit Baby T. Squeezing in a date night or couple-only time will be less frequent. However, Waffle and I both want to still do things and have things in common as a couple so that our whole relationship doesn’t become solely about Remi. That would be a big burden to put on a kid and a great way to lose touch with each other as friends and partners.

For now, right now, everything kind of is about Baby T. Rex. Every day when we wake up, we think, “This could be our last childfree day.” We’re trying to enjoy it, but we can’t help but be anxious for Remi to get born already. We’re here. We’re waiting. We’re ready to welcome Remi into our arms and get this show started.

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8 Random Baby-Making Things I’m Currently Over-Processing

1. Consensual Poking

One of my midwives suggested acupuncture as a way to get my body prepped and open for labor. I’d never received acupuncture before. I’m not particularly opposed to it, I just hadn’t had the need or made the time.

There’s a lovely little community acupuncture place near me that’s part of a national movement of acupuncture groups dedicated to providing affordable care in a group setting. There’s a sliding scale that allows almost anyone to enjoy care regardless of financial means.

It’s not as weird as it may sound. You receive treatment in a large, open, comfortable room where other people are also receiving treatment. Cell phones and talking is banned. Dim lights and peaceful music and soundscapes and large, comfy chairs make it a very peaceful and intimate environment, even though a stranger with needles in their arms and forehead is snoozing right next to you. The practitioner was very gentle and thoughtful about explaining everything she was doing since it was my first time.

Did it help open my oxytocin receptors? I don’t know. On a scale of 1-10, 1 being a total skeptic and 10 being a total believer, I’m about a 6 on natural medicine and health care. I can say it was enjoyable and I might go back again this week. It put me into a nice, deep sleep and I woke gently after about an hour, feeling refreshed. I don’t know that it helped augment my transition into labor, but it was a spectacular nap.

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2. Hatching a Birth Plan

Our birth plan is finally on paper! It’s pretty straightforward stuff and only one page.

The largest section is dedicated to ensuring our birth team knows Waffle isn’t going to be called “mom” and trying to let them know that she/her and he/him pronouns are both appropriate without making a big deal out of it. Or inviting awkward questions we don’t want to deal with while I’m in labor.

Our doula read it over and assured us it wasn’t written in a rude way. The first draft was admittedly kind of bitchy. We just really don’t want people bugging Waffle with inappropriate questions while we’re focusing on delivering a human baby through my cervix and into the world!

We kept in the part that was like, “Please ask questions about how to refer to Waffle if you have them, but don’t ask questions about Waffle’s gender identity, transition status, health history, or anything not pertinent to our birth process.” KTHX.

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3. Waffle’s Latest Obsessions: Board Books and Football Jerseys

Waffle has moved on to amassing cool board books and New York Giants baby gear. I’m totally on board with the board books. I’m a word nerd and all about a huge library for Remi and reading to them every damn day.

I honestly could care less about the American football stuff, in general. Technically, I grew up in a Buffalo Bills family, but I transitioned to the Giants for Waffle because…because I just don’t care all that much.

The Giants preseason just started and Waffle can’t wait to watch fall games with Remi. He’s hoping to indoctrinate them to be a Giants fan from Day One.

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4. Searching for a Friendly Pediatrician

On the list of things to do since the last column was finding a pediatrician. We couldn’t find anyone who specifically advertised LGBTQ-inclusive pediatrics in our city, nor did any of our friends have recommendations specific to LGBTQ-inclusivity, so we just picked a place near us that was accepting new patients and crossed our fingers.

Waffle actually got called in to work the evening of our prenatal appointment, so I went by myself. After we went over the basics like hours, staffing, afterhours care, etc., I took a deep breath and asked the question. “Do you have experience with LGBTQ families?”

The doctor quickly replied that they do and that they have many LGBT patients and parents, as well as staff. I was relieved, but still unsure if “LGBT” really meant “lesbian and gay” or if they really did understand bi and trans health and families, too. Before I could ask, she brought up that their staff had all recently attended a training on transgender identity and healthcare issues. OK, good sign!

I brought up that Remi will call Waffle “dad” and Remi will know him by a different name than his legal name (though he’s also fine with using his legal name). I was trying to get through it as quickly as possible, as this part of the conversation is often confusing for people and I just want to get to the part where it’s like, “Here are the names and pronouns Waffle uses. Everything is cool.” It’s also awkward to have this convo when Waffle isn’t around to speak for himself, but this was something he wanted me to cover at the prenatal appointment and he couldn’t be there.

About two minutes into my cautious ramble, the doctor chimed in, “So he’s genderfluid?” and I was like, “Yes! Similar to that!” and it was a huge relief that she even knew the word genderfluid and was comfortable with the concept of non-binary people. She wrote in both of Waffle’s first names and pronouns at the top of our intake form. Then I asked if they treat trans youth and she said they do and are supportive of things like puberty blockers. It was set!

Hopefully, we like the practice once we start going there regularly, but I’m feeling optimistic. I left feeling like 2016 is a pretty great time to be a queer parent.

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5. A Baby Book for Your Lil’ Queer Family

This baby book from BabyStepsBook that Waffle bought for Remi is pretty great at being inclusive. The cool thing about the designer who created and makes these books is that you can customize them for your family. You can get two mom pages or two dad pages or one page for a single parent. You can get pages for additional parents if you have more than two parents in your family. You can have the parent page customized to say “baba” or something gender neutral or whatever your kid will call you.

You can add pages for a donor or for adoption or IVF or a surrogate. You can order extra pages for pets and for human siblings. You can custom order pages for pretty much anything.

It’s not cheap because each book is handmade by the designer, but it’s great to find something that works for lots of different families and parents. Waffle is unofficially in charge of filling it out. We started putting pictures of us and the pets in this past weekend.

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6. Things I’ve Googled in the Past Week:

• too much amniotic fluid complications
• what is normal amniotic fluid level
• oxytocin acupuncture labor
• natural breastfeeding
• too much amniotic fluid natural birth
• tea tree oil safe third trimester
• nightshade free pasta sauce
• nightshade free salsa

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7. No (Night)Shade

So I, uh, have actually never written about this or even talked about it publicly before, but here goes! I have a skin/autoimmune (maybe? science is unclear) disease called hidradenitis suppurativa. I’ve had it since I was 12.

Basically, I’m very prone to boil-like abscesses and infections around apocrine sweat gland-bearing areas like my underarms and groin. Sometimes it’s extremely painful and it’s definitely embarrassing. I have a lot of scars from it and almost always have an active infection. Luckily, my partners over the years have been really understanding. It’s not contagious and it’s not a sexually transmitted infection. It’s just something that’s always made me feel really unsexy in my otherwise fairly positive relationship with my body. And it can be excruciatingly painful. At times, I have abscesses as large as a golf ball that make it difficult to walk or sit.

It’s not something I like to talk about and I mainly just deal with it on my own. Dermatologists don’t know a lot about it and there’s very little research on it. It’s chronic and uncurable. Doctors will typically just help you deal with the symptoms by prescribing antibiotics or surgery in serious cases. Neither of those things interest me. I’ve learned to manage it on my own, using natural remedies like tea tree oil, witch hazel, and drawing salve, as well as heat therapy, etc. Most people with HS deal with it on their own and share info with each other online.

Since I got knocked up, my inflammations have been out of control. It got so bad that I made a radical decision. I’d known for a few years that a good number of other people with HS have had success with elimination diets. One of the common triggers seemed to be nightshade vegetables: tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers. If you know anything about me, you know I LOVE HOT SAUCE and hot things, in general. I’m Korean, it’s in my blood! But I didn’t want to be in labor with a golf ball size lesion on my down-theres.

So I cut our nightshades and, well, I’ve never had a remission be so fast or last this long. I’m happy it worked, but SUPER SAD about peppers. I seem to be more sensitive to tomatoes than peppers, so once I’m fully healed post-partum, I’m going to experiment with adding peppers back in, but I think I’m off tomatoes forever. Sorry to the whole Italian side of my family!

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8. Super Bonus Third Tri Ultrasound

We had a bit of a scare late last week when our midwife was concerned I had too much amniotic fluid around Baby T. I was sent for an ultrasound the next day. She assured us we shouldn’t worry until we knew more. Of course, we worried. I mean, we tried not to, but it’s hard to resist the temptation of Google and that was a very bad idea.

What if I have to be induced? What if I can’t labor at home? What if we have to have a c-section? None of those things are off the table, if necessary, but I started feeling anxious that this delivery might be more stressful than I’d hoped.

Luckily, everything was fine and we got a bonus sneak peek at Remi. I admittedly still think ultrasound pictures all look the same (Am I a horrible person?), but Waffle just about died from love and joy looking at little Remi and their little hands.

I apparently don’t have extra fluid and Remi is weighing in under seven pounds. Maybe I was just bloated that day? Sometimes I think maybe the midwives don’t realize I have a nice amount of belly fluff just from being me. I’ve always carried my belly out front, so my tummy was rounded before we even put a baby in me. Either way, we’re relieved everything is cool and proceeding as planned.

One week to go! Any time now, Baby T. Rex. Seriously, now would be good, even. ANY. TIME. We’re all waiting for you!

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: The Non-Gestational Parent Perspective and My Enduring Love for Pickles (37 Weeks)

Since Waffle and I started this journey towards gestating a T. Rex, I feel like a lot of the attention has been on me. Medical providers look me in the eye at our appointments. Friends who are moms talk more to me than Waffle about baby stuff. Family on both sides inquire about how I’m doing, want to hear about my experiences. It makes sense. I’m the one going through a million weird physical changes and who has the most pressing health care needs and who spends 50% of my day emptying my bladder and who is writing about my experiences for Autostraddle. Quite frankly, I think Waffle is mostly happy to fly under the radar, but I think he also feels left out sometimes.

In our queer household, the addition of a child and the raising of children isn’t a “mom thing.” Baby-making isn’t even necessarily a “mom thing.” It’s just that I’m the one who’s able to carry. The decision was practical, not about gender roles. Waffle is just as much a part of the baby decisions we have made at every step of our process and he’s actually the one who’s most prepared to gush about baby clothes and toys and stuff. He’s the one who actually read the baby books.

Just as Waffle can’t understand all I’m going through as the gestational carrier, I can’t understand all he’s going through as the non-gestational and non-biological parent. To get a better perspective on Waffle’s experiences as a parent-to-be, I interviewed him about our pregnancy, from his perspective. I hope you enjoy this exclusive peek into my shy-boi-queer-dad’s brain space as we round the corner into IS THIS LABOR?! LAND.

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KaeLyn: OK, so I want to talk to you about your experience as the non-gestational, non-biological, non-genetic parent to Remi, which is obviously specific to us in some ways, but also a common experience for queer families that make babies through IUI. So I guess I’d just start with: what does it mean for you to be a non-gestational parent? How do you feel like your relationship to Remi is different than mine, if it is?

Waffle: Well, we both have the same arms. So I’m probably going to have a better relationship with Remi.

KaeLyn: Because you have T. Rex arms?

Waffle: Yes. We’re both the same species.

KaeLyn: What species am I?

Waffle: I’m not sure. Not a T. Rex.

KaeLyn: I could be a T. Rex.

Waffle: No, you’re a triceratops.

KaeLyn: No, triceratops are lesbians. What’re the bisexual dinosaurs?

Waffle: I don’t know, but your big-ass head is a triceratops.

KaeLyn: I do have a triceratops head.

Waffle: Also, you’re stubborn.

KaeLyn: Yeah…

Waffle: And you eat a lot of plants. You’re a triceratops.

KaeLyn: I guess I am… OK, moving on, do you ever feel like you get left out of the conversation around babies because I’m the carrier?

Waffle: I guess sometimes, but I’m anti-social so I don’t care.

KaeLyn: It doesn’t bother you that people focus so much on my right now?

Waffle: It is kind of about you right now. You’re pregnant. Remi isn’t here yet. I don’t know. I don’t need other people’s affirmations of my parenting potential.

KaeLyn: Do you feel like people treat you more like a “dad,” in a cisnormative way?

Waffle: Yeah. I don’t know how much that has to do with being [trans] so much as being the non-gestational parent. I think most non-gestational parents are treated like that, even if they are a mom or whatever.

KaeLyn: I know some of my lesbian friends who have kids [through pregnancy] feel like after they had the kids, their partner who was the gestational carrier gets treated like the “mom.” Like everyone wants to talk to their partner about parenting stuff and they feel like, I don’t know, like everything shifted and they get left out of the “mom club” and they become like the “other mom” vs. the “real mom.”

Waffle: Yeah, that’s a thing that happens.

KaeLyn: I just feel like there’s already a very a distinct difference in how people talk to me vs. how people talk to you. Like what kind of advice do you get from people?

Waffle: I don’t really.

KaeLyn: Next topic: I was super surprised that it mattered to me that Remi was Korean and that it mattered that they are biologically related to me. Just as an adoptee, I didn’t think that would be important, but once we decided to do IUI, it really was. And you were cool about that from the beginning.

Waffle: Yeah, it doesn’t matter to me.

KaeLyn: Why not?

Waffle: I’ll love Remi regardless and they’ll hopefully think I’m OK.

KaeLyn: Does it bother you that people will probably assume Remi’s adopted when you are out in public together without me? Or not your child?

Waffle: No, I don’t care what some stranger says.

KaeLyn: What are some of the challenging parts about being a non-gestational parent-to-be?

Waffle: I feel like you’re closer to Remi than I am right now.

KaeLyn: Because I’m physically carrying them?

Waffle: Yeah. Like for whatever reason, I haven’t been able to feel them kick externally as much. I don’t know if that’s just because they’re not as big as some other babies or because of how they’re positioned or what.

KaeLyn: I can feel them all the time, but it does seem like it’s harder for you to feel it.

Waffle: It is. I couldn’t feel them kick from the outside for a longer time than a lot of other people compared to friends or online or when most people seem to say they can feel them kick. It took a lot longer for me to feel it. I’ve only felt it a couple times.

KaeLyn: That’s not true. At least like a dozen.

Waffle: No. Definitely not.

KaeLyn: No?

Waffle: There’s been a lot of times where you’ve been like, “Can you feel it?” and me being like, “No.” It hasn’t been a ton. Definitely not a dozen.

KaeLyn: Really? That’s weird to me. I feel like you’ve felt it kick a lot.

Waffle: No, you’ve felt it kick a lot and I’ve said, “I don’t feel it. Nothing’s happening.”

KaeLyn: Does it make you feel jealous, like left out?

Waffle: Yeah, I guess it does.

KaeLyn: I know you used to say that Remi hated you…

Waffle: The jury’s still out on that one. [laughs]

KaeLyn: …because you couldn’t feel them kick for a long time. It’s funny because when they started kicking, I thought it felt so weird at first. I didn’t really like it so I was kind of negative about it until I got used to it. And meanwhile you wish you could feel it more.

Waffle: That’s been a little bit… I don’t know… sad.

KaeLyn: Yeah. I know you feel similarly about our decision that we both made to try to exclusively do breastfeeding at first.

Waffle: I’m sure I’ll appreciate it when I can sleep. [laughs]

KaeLyn: Ha. I’m open to mixed feeding or bottle feeding, but we both agreed it was best to try breastfeeding first. As you know I’m also super nervous about breastfeeding and that I’m going to be horrible at it and it’s going to be awful and painful.

Waffle: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with kids who aren’t breastfed. I think it’s perfectly fine to not breastfeed even if the reason is you just don’t have time or want to. But I do think… I have heard… it makes it harder if they get attached to a bottle very early to get them to go back to the breast. So I don’t want that to happen either. I’m looking forward to being able to feed them, too. And I can still get up and bring them to you for night feedings.

KaeLyn: It’s funny to feel like I have a closer physical relationship with them, which I agree I do, because I feel like you are more like emotionally bonded with Remi at this point than I am.

Waffle: That’s because we’re the same species.

KaeLyn: You fell in love from the moment we conceived, from the moment we saw that first ultrasound at seven weeks.

Waffle: Of course. You didn’t?

KaeLyn: Uh, I think you know I tried to keep more of an emotional distance for a while. Especially until we knew that it was going to stick. I don’t know if I’ll feel as strongly as you do until I actually meet them in-person. Even then, I don’t know if it will come right away.

Waffle: Yeah, I definitely love them already.

KaeLyn: What do you think is different for queer families or LGBTQ families where only one person is a gestational carrier? As compared to other situations where straight people might be in a similar position, like fertility issues or using a surrogate out of necessity or…?

Waffle: I think it’s more visible is a main difference.

KaeLyn: That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought about that. Like people will often assume that there was fertility treatment or adoption or something when they look at visibly queer couples like us?

Waffle: Yeah, a lot of straight people don’t tell other people if they’re having fertility issues.

KaeLyn: There’s more shame or stigma around it for straight people who can’t conceive.

Waffle: For us, though, people will just assume. The same way they’re maybe going to assume that Remi’s adopted because they won’t look like me. I think that’s the biggest difference, honestly.

KaeLyn: Is that why it doesn’t bother you that people are going to assume Remi is adopted?

Waffle: No, it doesn’t bother me because it doesn’t bother me. I’m never going to have biological children because I’m not willing to carry a child.

KaeLyn: Right, so you never imagined you’d have biological children. Like I didn’t either, but that’s for different reasons, because I’m adopted.

Waffle: Yeah.

KaeLyn: I mean, there are ways. There’s “two-mom” IVF.

Waffle: Yeah, no, I’m terrified of needles.

KaeLyn: [laughs]

Waffle: Like, a lot.

KaeLyn: I know, needles and snakes.

Waffle: Yeah, a snake holding a needle is my worst nightmare.

KaeLyn: I’m going to get a tattoo of a snake holding a needle.

Waffle: Don’t do it. We’ll get a divorce. I’m not kidding.

KaeLyn: What are your biggest fears about the pregnancy?

Waffle: BIRTH.

KaeLyn: Just “birth”? Can you be more specific? [laughs]

Waffle: It’s terrifying!

KaeLyn: Do you think you’re more scared about it than I am?

Waffle: Probably. Yeah. I get more scared than you about things in general. I have way more anxiety.

KaeLyn: I know. I like telling people we got the doula as much for you as for me, but it’s also totally true.

Waffle: Oh totally, yeah. We did. I will admit that. I don’t know what I’m doing. Babies are unpredictable and terrifying. I think I should probably be more scared of an actual baby and having to take care of it, but I don’t know… maybe that’s just like beyond the immediate fear realm. We haven’t gotten there yet.

KaeLyn: What’s one of your favorite things so far about being a parent to be?

Waffle: Shopping!

KaeLyn: You’ve been doing a lot of shopping.

Waffle: I stopped shopping for myself, though! Remi’s going to be the best-dressed kid, ever.

KaeLyn: If by best dressed, you mean, “dressed like a dinosaur,” then yes.

Waffle: No, not just that. They’re going to be very fashionable! Have you seen their little knit sneakers?

KaeLyn: Yes, I have. Many pairs.

Waffle: They need lots of colors and lots of choices for their three-month-old feet.

KaeLyn: I feel like you’re a very not cisnormative dad in that way, like you’ve been really engaged in the whole process with doctors appointments and everything and you are definitely more into the buying clothes and decorating the nursery than I’ve been.

Waffle: Oh, the nursery was so fun to decorate.

KaeLyn: Yeah, I thought you were going to say that was your favorite part.

Waffle: That was pretty great, too. I’m going to change my answer.

KaeLyn: It goes along with the shopping.

Waffle: My Etsy history has blown up with dino stuff. I have a whole checkbook category now that’s “baby” because I feel like I should start keeping track.

KaeLyn: Oh my gosh.

Waffle: Though I don’t think I want to know… to actually look at it.

KaeLyn: As a non-gestational parent-to-be, what do you see as your role in our pregnancy?

Waffle: To support you. You’re doing all the work. The least I can do is not be a douchebag.

KaeLyn: Do you feel like you’ve been good at not being a douchbag?

Waffle: Do you feel like I’ve been good at not being a douchebag?

KaeLyn: Most of the time! I think the only time I felt unsupported was when you got upset about me having breastfeeding anxiety. I think my feelings were valid. I think your feelings were valid, too, but…

Waffle: Well, that’s because I was sad.

KaeLyn: Yeah, after you explained it, it made sense to me. Because it’s like a bonding thing you wish you could have in some way, without actually breastfeeding because you don’t want to breastfeed at all. Are you still upset about the breastfeeding thing?

Waffle: No. I get where you’re coming from, too. I always have. It just makes me sad sometimes that I’m not going to be able to have that time with Remi in the beginning. I look forward to being able to feed them, too.

KaeLyn: How has it been supporting me?

Waffle: Not that hard. You’re pretty easy.

KaeLyn: I am pretty easy. You’ve always said that. [laughs] I feel like sometimes there’s like…and I’m sure it’s like this for straight parents, too or even when both parents are biologically related..like one person is still the carrier. I feel like there’s a huge disconnect between my experience and your experience.

Waffle: It’s different. It’s just going to be different regardless.

KaeLyn: There’s thing I can’t understand about your experience and things you definitely can’t understand about mine.

Waffle: Yeah, I agree with that.

KaeLyn: Especially in the beginning, I felt like I was spending more time thinking about the pregnancy. I probably wasn’t, but I just felt that way because I felt, like, the physical burden of being pregnant, if that makes sense?

Waffle: I think you underestimate the amount of time I spend thinking about Remi.

KaeLyn: I think I do, too. Are you looking forward to getting your bed back [because of my huge pregnancy pillow]?

Waffle: It hasn’t been that bad. If we didn’t have a king-sized bed, I imagine it’d be a lot worse.

KaeLyn: I know sometimes you get sad that you can’t get to me because of the pillow.

Waffle: Well, yeah, because you can’t spoon me.

KaeLyn: Yes, it’s hard for a little spoon with a Snoogle between us.

Waffle: Now I just have to little spoon the cat on my own.

KaeLyn: Big spoon the cat. He’s your little spoon.

Waffle: Oh yeah, now I have to big spoon the cat on my own. I used to be the middle of the sandwich. Now my back’s lonely.

KaeLyn: You’re an open face sandwich now.

Waffle: I know and I hate it.

KaeLyn: So here’s another question, I never imagined being pregnant, so a lot of this is really new and weird to me, but you always imagined having kids. Has it been what you thought it would be?

Waffle: I totally stopped imagining [having kids] when we got together. You put the squash on that real quick.

KaeLyn: Yeah. I appreciate that you respected that about me and didn’t try to change my mind. What was it like when I brought up being open to having a kid?

Waffle: I believe I refused to talk to you for a day and then I cried.

KaeLyn: You didn’t refuse to talk to me. You just acted really weird.

Waffle: I think I walked away from you. I didn’t know how serious you were being. I thought you’d change your mind or that you hadn’t really thought it through. I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

KaeLyn: Why do you think it took us so long to get from the “open to” conversation to actually trying to get pregnant?

Waffle: I don’t know. Maybe we weren’t ready.

KaeLyn: I don’t know if I was.

Waffle: I imagine you needed some time to get your head around it once we figured out what we were doing.

KaeLyn: I feel like you needed to process it less than me. Is that fair?

Waffle: I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t need to process it as much, but I… this is going to sound shitty… but I think I needed time to trust you. That you were really ready to do this.

KaeLyn: No, that’s not shitty. It’s honest.

Waffle: I had to trust you weren’t going to change your mind.

KaeLyn: What’s your advice for other non-gestational queer parents-to-be? What would you tell someone else if they wanted to know what to prepare for?

Waffle: Don’t prepare too much because it’s nothing like what you think. There’s a lot of things that’re surprising. I think luckily we didn’t, but I think a lot of people go in with a lot of expectations around babymaking.

KaeLyn: True.

Waffle: They’re all lies.

KaeLyn: Like that it’s going to be intimate or something?

Waffle: Yeah, especially that. It’s very clinical. Just prepare yourself for lots of and lots of letdown. [IUI] worked on the third time for us and that’s pretty good.

KaeLyn: Yeah, that’s average [for IUI].

Waffle: Average is good. I strive for average.

KaeLyn: I could tell you felt left out during fertility treatment, even though you were always physically right there with me and holding my hand and stuff.

Waffle: I was trying to be there as much as possible, but I felt like I wasn’t doing anything helpful. I still feel like that. I’m trying to support you, but you’re doing all the work. I still feel like I’m not doing anything a lot of the time.

KaeLyn: Do you think that’s why you focus on the nursery and stuff?

Waffle: Maybe. Maybe I just have a shopping problem, too.

KaeLyn: [laughs] What are you most excited about?

Waffle: Holding little Remi and looking at their face for hours. I want to look at their sleepy, little, dumb baby face for hours. I already love them so effin’ much.

KaeLyn: I know. You love their fetus pictures.

Waffle: Well yeah, they’re the cutest fetus ever. Did you see the one of their brain? They’re smarter than the average fetus.

KaeLyn: You’re putting a lot of expectations on Remi.

Waffle: They’re not expectations, just facts.

KaeLyn: What do you think about when you think about having a baby?

Waffle: Not. Sleeping.

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8 Random Baby-Making Feelings I’m Currently Over-Processing

1. Hard Femme and Boi-on-the-Go Diaper Bags

We made a packing list for our respective diaper bags this past weekend. We were going to share one diaper bag originally (the messenger style one). Then we realized that working opposite work schedules and having opposite baby-watching duties, it probably made sense for us to each have our own. Plus, I plan to also use mine as my purse so I don’t have to carry a million bags. One of our friends got me this very trendy and roomy diaper bag as a shower gift. I love the gold accents. It’s perfect!

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2. Fun New Game: Are These Contractions or Is This Labor?

The Braxton Hicks contractions started in full force this past week. I think I may have been having painless ones before, when my stomach got really hard for a few seconds every once in a while. Now they feel more like menstrual cramps and last a little longer and happen more often. It’s a reminder that labor is just around the corner. Eek!

They’re definitely just practice contractions because they’re irregular and don’t increase in intensity or come significantly closer together. It’s really unbelievable that by the time the next installment of this column comes around (39 weeks), I could have a baby. Or I could still be pregnant until week 41 or later. Baby T. Rex is coming soon! I just wish we knew when!

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3. Four Adorable Gifts for Remi That Made Us Absolutely Giddy

This is just a teeny-tiny sample of the amazing, funny, cute, ridiculous, awesome, and thoughtful gifts friends and family have given us. There’s no way we could give props to every single amazing and generous gift for Remi. This kid is already so spoiled and loved!

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4. Things I’ve Googled in the Past Week:

• korean newborn [image search]
• how long can false labor last
• gestational diabetes early or late birth
• what do contractions feel like
• questions for doula
• best newborn toys
• first time pregnancy carrying low
• braxton hicks or baby moving

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5. Function Over Fashion: Building My (Hard Femme) Nursing Wardrobe

I’ve tried not to buy a ton of maternity clothes because they’re fairly expensive and also because I already have plenty of non-maternity clothes that work well enough over my baby belly. I’ve been living in stretchy dresses all summer.

I’m planning to breastfeed, though, and I felt I needed some nursing basics for when I have to leave my house, at least until I get more comfortable breastfeeding in public and/or because other people are awkward about people with boobs in public. I picked up some really basic tanks and tops on sale from Motherhood Maternity.

I also wanted some functional and comfortable nursing bras, particularly one to pack in my hospital bag. My nursing bras aren’t even a little cute, but they’re damn comfy. I’ve been wearing them every day already just because they’re so soft and wide and generous. They don’t really support me the same way my regular underwire bras do (big boob problems). They also don’t completely smush me the way a sports bra does. It’s more like a slightly saggy uniboob situation and I’m feeling just fine about it. Comfort is my number one goal at this point.

If you’re wondering how nursing bras are different than regular bras, they either pull to the side or have clip-down cups that flip down for nursing. (I know that sounds like it could be sexy, but it’s very not.)

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6. The Library is Open: Waffle’s Latest Obsession, Inspired By My Mom

My mom is a retired first grade teacher and she started buying us children’s books with corresponding stuffed animals. Waffle became enamored with the concept and went on a spree of finding books and stuffed animals for Remi’s library. Here’s where we’re at so far between my mom and Waffle’s finds:

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7. The Privilege of Parenting

I’m seeing more and more of my queer community opting in to having kids and it’s great. I’m still hyper-aware that it’s a privilege to be able to make parenting decisions. There is no affirmative right to parent, though there should be. When I was working as a community organizer in the reproductive justice field, I became really passionate about the right to parent. We talk so often about the right not to parent, the rights of people to make their own decisions about abortion, birth control, etc. As we should. Those rights are being constantly threatened and they are vitally important.

We are much less comfortable, even in reproductive rights activism, with the idea of people having an affirmative right to parent. We get squirmish about the right of teen moms and parents to choose to parent, about incarcerated women and people’s rights to parent, about the rights of pregnant people who are recovering from addiction to parent, about poor people as parents. As we think about and talk about the rights of LGBTQ people to parent, we can’t forget that so-called “traditional family values” impact not just our rights, but those of many people who are considered “unfit” or “undesirable” as parents simply for being who they are or because of their life circumstances. It’s all related.

Adoption costs and fertility treatments are still not covered for many queer and/or trans people who want to parent. Surrogacy is still unprotected by law in many states. DIY insemination is still not protected by law in many states. It’s still just something that’s outside of many people’s financial means. Class, race, and economic discrimination still play a huge part in who is allowed to pursue parenting decisions in addition to sexual orientation and gender discrimination.

This column is often glib and cutesy and I don’t mean to be a downer, but as more and more of our LGBTQ communities move towards growing our families with children, I really believe we have to stay vigilant. We can’t let this become another way that queers get drawn into the mainstream heteronormative narrative. Being queer married and queer family-making still feels like a semi-radical act to me and I want it to stay that way, in large part by holding up the intersectional values that come with making and sustaining a queer family.

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8. Tiny Stomach, Tiny Appetite

Baby T. Rex is literally crushing my organs, including my stomach. I imagine this is what gastric bypass feels like (though, like, probably not). For the last couple weeks, I’ve rarely been interested in food, which is super unusual. I’m lucky I’m still on the diabetes diet or I’d probably forget to eat at all. I get full so quickly. Whenever Waffle asks me what I want to eat, I groan. Nothing sounds very good. Except pickles. I can still eat pickles any time of day.

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: Embracing Queer Family and Adorable Dino Couture (35 Weeks)

Our city has pride in July instead of June. This past Saturday was our Pride parade and festival and also the day I hit 35 weeks, exactly. I’ve been going to Rochester Pride since I moved here in 2006 and I’m usually participating in the Pride parade in some way, by walking with a group or organizing a walking unit or even volunteering on the judge’s panel.

This year, I wasn’t asked to judge and I didn’t plan on doing any walking. Knowing I’d be well into my third trimester during Pride week, I just didn’t know if my body would be up for it. I missed the parade for the first time ever since I’ve lived in Rochester. As it turns out, I’m surprisingly still very active and I probably would have been fine. Then again, I’m almost full-term and I didn’t want to risk going into early labor in the middle of the street. I do feel I missed the opportunity to paint my bump with rainbow paint and glitter and go full exhibitionist in a crop top and miniskirt. That woulda’ been a great picture for T. Rex’s baby book.

I spent all day at the Pride festival, instead. I staffed a table for my day job organization, the New York Civil Liberties Union (the New York affiliate of the ACLU) with my coworker, our intern, and Waffle (my patient and constant spousal volunteer). And I did get to wear a crop top. My bump was making my work t-shirt fit weird, so I took a page from the Team Autostraddle fashion playbook and cut it up into a tiny crop tank that worked perfectly with my high-waisted rainbow-splashed stretchy skirt and comfy-practical-but-not-cute-enough-to-show-off nursing bra.

Most folks in my real-life queer circle know I’m pregnant now because of the fact that I’m writing about it for the whole internet and also because I announced it on social media during my second trimester. Also, I finally look pregnant to the naked eye. I had about a million conversations about being knocked up, about queer child-raising, about queer baby-making, and about how cute I looked at Pride this year. And I loved it.

Most of the time, I don’t draw too much attention to my pregnancy. I don’t particularly enjoy questions from straight folks about how we got knocked up, unsolicited advice from straight cis women about birthing and parenting, or even compliments on my pregnant body/glow/belly and affirmations of what great parents Waffle and I will be. Most of these types of interactions come from a place of caring, some from naive curiosity, most all with good intentions. Still, it makes me uncomfortable (unless it’s coming from someone who is truly a good friend or close family member, which is a very different and welcome thing).

I feel like I have to put on an act or constantly make space for other people in these situations. My good friend who really gets me recently sent me this For Harriet article about Nigerian feminist author, Chimamanda Adichie, about how Adichie “went into hiding” during her pregnancy.

Adichie said:

I have some friends who probably don’t know I was pregnant or that I had a baby. I just feel like we live in an age when women are supposed to perform pregnancy.

It resonated deep. That’s the language I was looking for: performing pregnancy.

This is a real thing, people. I think all pregnant women feel this pressure, to be the right kind of pregnant woman, to make other people feel comfortable by answering invasive personal questions, to allow others to focus on our pregnant bodies instead of our brains/capabilities/whole selves, and finding the right balance of humble and maternal to satisfy what other people expect a mom-to-be…to be.

This becomes even more performative for anyone who is additionally othered by being a person of color, disabled, queer, transgender, gender non-binary, gender non-conforming, and so on. Now you’re not only a pregnant person who gets to answer lots of questions and receive lots of advice. You’re also a novelty, a curiosity, or even worse, inspiration porn for liberal straight cis heterosexual folks.

At Pride, for once, I didn’t feel like I was performing. I was talking to and with my own people. I was sharing knowledge with queer and trans folks who wanted to start planning a family. I was getting advice from queer and trans parents who had been there, with whom we share a common experience.

A young-ish couple stopped by the table with their beautiful four-month-old son and shared their advice with Waffle and me about coping in the first weeks after birth, which their kid punctuated by spitting up on his mom’s shirt. They also talked about their plans to switch up gestational carriers with their next child, something particular to families where more than one parent has a uterus.

We ran into several acquaintances who have slightly older kids, through fertility treatment, previous relationships, adoption, or blended families. We answered their questions about our pregnancy plans and asked questions about their families. We gushed over their adorable kids and laughed at stories of parenting fails and got lots of advice about being first-time parents.

We talked to folks who are our age or older who want to have kids in the future and traded info about friendly fertility centers, sperm banks, costs and insurance.

We talked to other queer trans parents and prospective parents about Waffle becoming a “daddy” and non-gestational perspectives on pregnancy.

A labor and delivery nurse came up to me and recognized me from this very column. She just so happens to work at the maternity center we’re planning to deliver at. She came out to us and we jokingly lamented over how heteronormative the entire birthing industry can be. She assured us the maternity center is LGBTQ-friendly. “I’m there all the time,” she said, “Ask for me!”

It felt like we were building community. I imagine this is what a mom’s group is for some other women—a place to talk frankly about pregnancy stuff, with people with similar life experiences. I just don’t see myself reflected in the “mom spaces” typically available. I often feel like an outsider.

The day after Pride, we did a tour of the maternity center with a bunch of other couples and we were, as far as we could tell, once again the only visibly queer couple in the group. There were a couple other people of color, but the people who spoke up the most and took up the most space were the white moms. Queer family spaces just don’t exist outside of the internet, at least not in my medium-size, upstate New York city. That’s why this column has been so cathartic for me to share with ya’ll. And so surprising to people who know me in real life and know how much I avoid centering my pregnancy in my day-to-day interactions.

This was our last Pride as a free-wheeling, child-free couple. As more and more LGBTQ people are able to and choose to have children, it seems Pride in our city is becoming more and more family-friendly. As we saw and talked to all these queer and trans parents, we couldn’t help but imagine how different it will be when we’ll have a Baby T. Rex to bring to our next Pride.

One year from now we’ll be in a very different place as a couple and a family. We probably won’t be able to sit outside for 12 hours in the sun with a little T. Rex in tow. We’ll be carrying diaper bags instead of singles to tip drag queens. We can’t wait to share Pride with Remi, to share rainbow flags and glitter body paint and drag shows, to teach them our intersectional LGBTQI history, to introduce them to their big bold queer family.

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9 Random Baby-Making Feelings I’m Currently Over-Processing

1. Go, Go Gadget Hospital Bag

As a shower gift, my friend packed a whole bunch of awesome feminist and queer and social justice-y kids books into this super-cute bag from the Rebel Wilson line at Torrid. It’s the perfect size to be my hard femme hospital “go bag.”

I think I have just about all that I need for the hospital: toiletries, snacks, huge underwear (for huge postpartum maxi pads), a nursing dress, comfy nursing bra, flip flops, hair clips, a mini-makeup kit, maternity yoga pants and a long black top for going home, breast pads and nipple cream, a newborn and a 1-3 month outfit for Baby T. Rex, baby socks and cap and mittens, and some newborn diaper stuff. We need to finish our birth plan to throw in there and also pack a bag for Waffle, who plans to room with me at the hospital postpartum.

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2. Finding QPOC Solidarity in a Sea of White Lesbian Moms

There was a big kerfuffle this past week in one corner of the Facebook universe. Members of a closed queer mom group I’m in got into a huge #AllLivesMatter v. #BlackLivesMatter debate, starting with a white mom asking that the group be “less political.” Despite the (white) moderators’ clear statement that the group supported BLM, individual members of the group started spouting off stupidity, like that the group should be for discussions of diapers and playgroups, not politics and race. As if parenting can be separated from race and politics for QPOC… It resulted in a separate group forming specifically for and closed to queer parents of color, which I joined immediately.

This is just one example of the ways in which white supremacy dominates the conversation even in small queer circles. Before this went down in the Facebook group, I had noticed the disconnect between the queer moms group and the rest of my queer family. While many of us were mourning the lives of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, white folks in the queer moms group were posting happy selfies with their kids and, while I understand not everyone posts political stuff on Facebook, it just felt wrong and not at all like the community I expect under the word “queer.”

It happened a few weeks earlier, too, when the Pulse shooting happened and many white folks in the queer moms group were posting #WeAreOrlando pics with their families, full of good intentions, but not acknowledging or centering the ways in which Pulse disproportionately impacted Latinx members of our community. At least they were posting something, though. The lack of posting around BLM and the audacity to call for “less politics” showed that for some white queer moms, “politics” and trauma only matter when it affects them personally.

The group moderators took it upon themselves to make very clear what the position of the group is. They’re now approving each individual post and blocking #AllLivesMatter posts. QWOC members of the group have used this time to educate white allies by posting links to articles and some white allies are stepping up and posting messages of solidarity. It’s a start.

This weekend, at Pride, I saw and talked to several parents of color and moms of color. I saw how QPOC families uplift and hold each other, even in mostly-white spaces. I also saw an otherwise very innocuous lesbian t-shirt company proudly selling cringe-worthy rainbow-emblazoned #AllLivesMatter t-shirts. I wanted to rip it down from their tent. I decided to walk away.

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3. Deep Dino Etsy Strikes Again

Waffle continues to procure dino things to cover every square inch of the nursery. This past week, this dino coat rack arrived for the closet door, along with a wooden dino growth chart by the same Etsy seller/artist. He can’t stop, won’t stop buying every dino thing he can find. But look at this happy face. How can I deny him?

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4. Things I’ve Googled in the Past Week:

• probiotics safe pregnancy
• aversion to cruciferous vegetables pregnancy
• blood sugar bedtime snack
• how to relieve pregnancy pelvic pain naturally
• peppermint itch relief safe pregnant
• orgasm third trimester
• breast pump insurance
• will walking make baby drop
• kneeling mat for bath time

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5. (Anxiety About) My Humps, My Humps, My Lovely Lady Lumps

I have to ‘fess up about something. I am totally and probably irrationally nervous about breastfeeding.

I’m not going to be super upset if I, for some reason, can’t breastfeed, like if Baby T. Rex is severely tongue-tied or it just doesn’t work for me. I do want to try. I’m more anxious about just, like, the act of breastfeeding. It’s something I think is going to be so absolutely weird and unnatural to me.

I have done as much reading and preparing as I think I can to educate myself. I’ll have a doula at the hospital and there are also on-site lactation experts. I feel like I’ll be supported. I just feel like it’s going to be a super weird thing and I’m going to have no idea if I’m doing it right even as I’m doing it and I just have to be OK with that.

I also just have anxiety about my boobs, in general, not being breastfeeding friendly. I have a fairly large chest (42 D before pregnancy) and my nipples are not petite. They also aren’t perky like they were 10 years ago and I’ve been researching breastfeeding advice for people with large breasts. I had nipple piercings on both sides, pierced on two separate occasions (my first set rejected), with significant scar tissue in multiple directions. I took out my piercings a little over a year ago, to allow my nipples to heal before getting pregnant. From what I have read, nipple piercings usually result in more milk flow, which is theoretically good, but can also be too much for your kiddo when they’re newborns.

IT’LL BE FINE. I’M FINE.

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6. Rub-A-Dub-Dub We’re Set For the Tub

We haven’t purchased any baby washcloths and we somehow have 37 of them thanks to lots of generous gifts from friends and family. We’ve also been gifted a plethora of bath toys, hooded towels for every day of the week plus some, and a variety of bath accessories.

Remi will be very clean and very loved.

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7. Gestational Diabetes Breakfasts That Don’t Suck

Eating breakfast every day is the biggest life change I’ve had to make diet-wise. I’ve never been a big breakfast-eater. My mom used to make me a toaster pastry or something portable and quick when I was in school and I’d scarf it unceremoniously while doing my hair or makeup. I’ve skipped breakfast for most of my adult life.

With gestational diabetes, breakfast is a must and I shouldn’t go more than 8-10 hours without eating. And, I only get two carb choices for breakfast, what amounts to roughly 30 carbohydrates. Fruit is completely off-limits. So typical fast breakfast choices like cereal and milk, fruit and yogurt, or a granola bar are not gonna work for me.

I’ve found a couple staple meals that keep my blood sugar stable, satisfy my personal need to eat quickly and get out the door, and that are generally not offensive to my taste buds. Here’s what I’ve been putting in my mouth, in order of quickest-to-longest to make and munch:

• Plain Greek Yogurt with Stevia, Cinnamon, and 1/4 Cup Granola
• Whole Wheat English Muffin with Loads of Peanut Butter (my least favorite)
• Whole Wheat Toast with Peanut Butter (also not my favorite)
• Frozen Whole Wheat Waffles with Peanut Butter and Sugar-Free Syrup
• Eggs and Toast with Butter and Avocado Slices
• Whole Wheat English Muffin Sandwich with Turkey Bacon, Fried Egg, and Muenster Cheese

For the record, I really don’t like peanut butter. Never have.

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8. Dino Couture Fashion Show

I asked Daddy Dino (a.k.a. Waffle) to curate his favorites from our very expansive collection of dino-themed baby clothes. I didn’t have to ask twice. Who knew dinos were so en vogue.

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9. Baby T. Rex, I’m Ready to Go

As we head into our last month of gestation, I’m pretty much ready to be done. At the same time, the idea that a baby is going to like…exist outside of me…is so wild that I’m also hoping it doesn’t happen too early. I vacillate between hoping to go into labor at 38 weeks and hoping it doesn’t come until the due date or later.

For pragmatic reasons, it would be ideal if Remi decided to come out at 39 weeks when Waffle’s scheduled paid time off (vacation time) begins. If Remi comes more than a week late, Waffle won’t get any paid time off to stay home with us, which will suck, but we’ll manage.

By the end of this week, Remi will be full-term and most practitioners won’t stop labor if it begins naturally, so it really could be any time! I guess we need to get on finalizing our birth plan and wrapping up the many half-finished cleaning projects we have going on around the house. #nesting