Countdown to Baby T. Rex: Loving My Fat Mama Self and Itchy All Over (33 Weeks)

As soon as I became visibly pregnant, people started paying attention to my body differently.

I didn’t show much at first, because I carry my weight in the front and I typically have a nice, rounded tummy. Also, I unintentionally lost fifteen pounds in the first trimester due to the restricted-carb gestational diabetes diet, so I didn’t gain any significant pregnancy weight until almost the third trimester. When people in my second trimester looked for and complimented my “bump,” they were mostly complimenting the natural tummy shape that I always have, albeit a little bit hardened up and perkier. The difference was, all of a sudden, my belly was culturally acceptable and beautiful and a symbol of fertility and womanhood.

About to head out to a party at almost seven months, bump only slightly showing.

A lot of people couldn’t tell I was pregnant by looking at me up until a month ago. Even now that I’m clearly showing and my belly looks pregnant even to most strangers, folks tell me I don’t look eight months, that I look small for how far along I am. I don’t remember the last time someone told me I looked small. “Thank you?” is my typical reply. “Well, fuck the patriarchy for making women’s bodies fair game for cultural critique and for deciding what I should look like at all times and for giving you permission to openly express your feelings about my body,” is what I want to say.

I much prefer the folks who just say, “You look great!” and very much prefer the folks who don’t stare at or comment on my body at all. I’m sure I’ve said similar things to other pregnant women before, though. I’m going to remember, in the future, to keep my opinions about pregnant people’s bodies to myself.

On the plus side (no pun intended), I don’t remember the last time I’ve felt so safe showing my stomach, unafraid that people are going to give me dirty looks for wearing a fitted tank top to run errands. It’s affirming in a way that’s very uncomfortable because being pregnant is the most cishet-acceptable way to be a woman in the patriarchy and I’m reaping the rewards of that in a way that feels yucky. It’s freeing and enraging.

I’m super glad, though, that I came into this pregnancy loving my pre-pregnancy body. It’s going to help me a lot in embracing my yet-unknown post-pregnancy body. My body is doing its own thing right now, to care for Baby T. Rex, and I often feel like I’m not in control of it at all. I’m going to come out on the other side changed, physically and in many other ways. I can’t imagine how much much harder it would be if I still hated the way I look, if I still resented my body and cursed every stretch mark.

This constant focus on my body has led me to think about body image issues as a future parent and how to break or at least disrupt the cycle of shitty self-esteem. But when do we start internalizing body shame?

Like many little kids, I started out experiencing my body as a source of fun and sensory pleasure and I never felt self-conscious. It was a challenge to keep me in clothes as a toddler, especially in the warm summer months. I loved running around nude-y rude-y, feeling free in my skin. When I was just a little bit older, I liked to lay naked in front of the living room fireplace after my bath. I’d spread out my bath towel, lie down on my stomach, and watch TV or read a book, letting the slow, constant heat lap at the exposed skin on my bare back.

Even in elementary school, I wasn’t very concerned about my appearance. I wasn’t particularly feminine and I didn’t like wearing dresses. I loved putting on my mom’s blush with the big fluffy brush she kept in the bathroom drawer, but I wasn’t otherwise into makeup or hair or clothes.

Somewhere in the two years between fifth and seventh grade, I changed. A lot. I ran face-first into puberty at age twelve. I started reading teen magazines and wearing more make-up and more skirts and fitted tops and “doing” my hair. By the time I was thirteen, I was very aware of my appearance, particularly my size because I was, by my own estimation, fat. My thighs were fat and my arms were fat and most of all my stomach was fat. Fat fat fat. FAT.

My weight fluctuated a lot in my teen years. I usually hovered somewhere around a size 12. My closest friends were around a size six. We all hated our bodies. I would work myself into tears shopping for jeans or a bathing suit. I would be thrilled when I could squeeze into a smaller size skirt or top. I flirted with Slim Fast and skipping meals when I felt like I was gaining weight. I hated looking at myself naked. I’d pick out all the things that were wrong with me — my arm flab, the line where my bra dug into my back fat, the place where my thighs rubbed together, my belly that was never flat enough.

In addition to all that body self-loathing, I was the only Korean girl in my high school. I could never be as pretty as my white best friends or the girls in the dELiA*s and Alloy catalogs I shopped from. Even if I managed to lose weight, no one would be attracted to me. I was forever doomed to be the fat and funny best friend, the ugly Korean sidekick to my hot besties.

16-year-old me, totally gorgeous and totally wishing I was thinner and whiter.

It was a long road back to loving my body, to reveling in the feeling of the sun on my back and arms, to embracing the pleasure of spreading out naked on my bed after a hot shower, to taking solace in stripping off my clothes after a long day and just being in my skin. But I did get here.

I still have broad shoulders. I still have a soft, round belly; thighs that kiss in the middle; and sturdy, thick arms. I’m bigger than I was when I was a teen. I’m thicker and rounder and I have a double chin and I have more stretch marks. My body aches more and has more challenges with every passing year, but I’m grateful for all it provides me and I’m sorry for all the years I spent hating it and treating it like the enemy. When my body was strongest and in its very prime, I was too busy punishing it and loathing it to realize. Yet, my body is still strong. Pregnancy has proved to me how strong my body is.

Rocking my GabiFresh suit at A-Camp 5.0 (photo by Laura M)

I think now about my future kid, about Remi, and how important it is to spread body-positive messages in our home. They’re going to be exposed to all that negative stuff everywhere else — on TV, on the school bus, from well-meaning friends and family.

I came to a place of loving my body, but the rest of the world didn’t necessarily follow. I recently had a man yell, “You’re fat!” at me from a moving vehicle, to which I laughed and thought, “Yup, I am!” I’m proud to be fat and happy with how I look 99% of the time, but society as a whole doesn’t think I should be. I have to seek out fat-affirming and body-positive spaces and friends. When I choose to wear a body-con dress, I also have to put on my fat femme emotional armor before I leave the house.

I know Waffle still struggles with negative body image. I have shitty days, too. That’s just how it is, no matter how much I work on loving myself. However, I don’t want to expose Remi to it. As much as possible, I don’t want Remi to hear Waffle or me talking about how disgusting we are or how we need to lose weight or diet or any of that negative self-talk. I don’t want to normalize that kind of thinking in our home.

A recent study found that more than half of girls and one-third of boys as young as six-to-eight-years old think they should be thinner and that one in four kids engage in dieting behavior by the age of seven. Yikes.

I want Remi to see Waffle and me being confident, attractive, smart people who are also people of size. I want to be able to talk about body positivity at home, about the things they’ll see on TV and learn from peers. I want to try to provide the emotional armor they’ll need to combat sizeism, particularly when they hit those difficult years between puberty and adulthood. I doubt I’ll be able to keep Remi from having a complicated relationship with their body, but I do think body positivity starts at home, with us.

I’m going to start with myself. I’m going to keep on loving my body even when it feels foreign and strange to me, as it does this thing called baby-gestating. When it’s frustrating, I’m going to remember that I can’t control it. I can hate the pregnancy symptoms (Hello, carpal tunnel and itchy skin!), but I can’t blame my body for doing what it needs to do. I’m going to do my best to appreciate how strong my body is right now and to embrace what my body will be after I bring Remi into the world.

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

1. Feathering the Nest

I’ve been doing a lot of internet research on whether “nesting” is a provable instinctual and/or biological phenomenon. The available data is inconclusive. Lots of folks have told me that I will nest now that I’m in the third trimester. There is even a myth that nesting behavior is a precursor to labor. All of that seems to be scientifically unfounded.

via giphy

It’s true that many pregnant women start getting into tidying their homes and getting the nursery situated as they near the end of pregnancy, but it’s unclear whether that is instinctual or just, like, practical. It’s also true that the brain chemistry of pregnant women changes to prepare for the nurturing role. However, this is also true of non-gestational dads. (I couldn’t find any studies that weren’t about heteronormative families.) I tend to personally feel like there aren’t hard and fast rules about human behavior, particularly when those behaviors are tied to gender. In our house, if nesting is indeed an instinctual thing, both Waffle and I are doing it.

Traditional nesting activities like prepping the baby room and washing and folding baby clothes and cleaning out closets are definitely stuff Waffle has been more motivated to do. Household management crap like getting house repairs done, getting finances in order, making lists of things we need to purchase and when is more what I’ve been focusing on. Only one of us is pregnant, so…

Either way, we have been getting as prepared as possible over the past few weeks. We have more to do around the house, but if Baby T. Rex came today, it’d be OK. We have the bare minimum in place. I mean, you really just need a spot for the baby to sleep, some diapers, and boob food. The rest you can figure out in time.

2. Constant Craaaaaaaavings

People keep asking what my cravings are and I’m not having too many. Or, rather, because of being on a gestational diabetes diet since February, I don’t get to indulge in cravings very often, so I don’t think about them too much. Actually, I’m kinda resentful of pregnant people who get to indulge in cravings on a whim. I BET THAT’S NICE.

The other day Waffle was eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger that smelled awesome/disgusting and I totally took a small bite. It was awesome/disgusting. That’s about the extent of my ability to indulge without throwing my glucose numbers off.

That said, there are some gestational-diabetes-approved snacks that keep finding their way to my mouth when I’m wanting a not-planned snack. In no particular order, my “indulgent” foods have been:

• String Cheese
• Dill Pickles
• String Cheese
• Dill Pickles
• String Cheese
• Dill Pickles
• Dill Pickles
• Dill Pickles

That’s it. Living on the edge! (Did you know you can buy dill pickles in a club pack?)

3. Got Schooled

We had our birth class two weekends ago at Beautiful Birth Choices. It was an all-day Saturday class because Waffle works nights and it was easier for us to get it done in one long day. We liked the class and the teacher and place enough that we’re planning to hire a doula through them.

As I expected, we were the only queer couple and I was the only non-white person. The instructor, however, was inclusive in the language she used during the class. We tend to let people assume we’re lesbians in such situations, which I’m sure everyone did. It was fine, though, and everyone was cool with us being there.

Some of the info was very basic, but Waffle pointed out that probably the rest of the partners and husbands in the room had never experienced a menstrual cramp and had no exposure to anatomy diagrams of the uterus and boobs and whatnot since their high school health class. So it was probably good foundational information for them.

Stupid Baby T. Rex squishing all my organs… (via highlands.edu)

I learned that the Lamaze techniques you see people in movies doing are no longer typically taught. The “hee hee ho ho” breathing stuff is apparently out of vogue. I was kind of glad because that sounded awkward to practice in front of other people.

We did learn some labor positions and techniques to deal with contraction pain, including ways for our partners to provide physical and emotional support. We went around and tried out the various positions. We did a simulation of negative pain, basically holding ice (a frozen wet sponge) on the underside of our arms for the duration of a contraction while working with our partners, using various techniques to manage the pain like massage, music, scented oils, etc. We talked in more depth about our birth plan.

Activity cards we used at the birth class to discuss our birth plan.

Overall, it was mainly a review for us of info we’d read in books or online, but it was a good experience to do the class together and have set time to practice labor techniques and talk about our birth plan. If you can swing the cost of a birth class, I’d recommend it.

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

• best lotion pregnancy itch
• packing list hospital go bag
• can my cat tell I’m pregnant?
• gestational diabetes breastfeeding
• questions to ask a birth doula
• lgbtq doula rochester ny
• feliway cat baby stress
• refusing episiotomy risks
• introducing baby to cat
• ligiment pain when standing up quickly

5. I’ve Got an Itch to Scratch. I Need Assistance.

Remember how I had an itchy armpit a month ago? That itchy pit spread into two itchy pits which expanded into itchy arms and an itchy back and sides and hips and upper thighs and belly and boobs. I thought I was going to rip my skin off, so I finally alerted my midwives.

I made the mistake of googling my symptoms, which of course led me to a bunch of articles that said itchy skin in the third trimester could by the symptom of a liver issue called obstetric cholestasis. Then I found stories of women who had lost their pregnancies because of obstetric cholestasis. And then I panicked Waffle a bit by relaying all this info to him.

I wasn’t too worried, but I wanted to be cautious. After I let the midwives know I was having EXTREME ITCHINESS, they told me to come in the next day. The tests ultimately came back normal, so that was a relief. Also, while they were getting some blood from me, they re-tested my A1C (hemoglobin) and my blood sugar is steadily in the non-diabetic range, so that’s good news, too!

The itching continues to suck. I was self-treating it with unscented lotion mixed with tea tree oil and lots and lots of witch hazel wipe-downs to soothe my skin throughout the day, but it was like, out of control. I had to reapply lotion and/or witch hazel every two hours. I was ducking into the bathroom or taking my top off at work all the time and at night it was unbearable. I had trouble falling and staying asleep… more than usual.

The midwives prescribed an antihistamine, which I was hesitant to take, but it seems to be helping. I still itch, but it’s manageable itchiness now and I can go a lot longer without reapplying lotion. I also bought this stupid expensive lotion with tea tree oil and vitamin E, which is AMAZING, but I think I’m going to go back to adding tea tree oil to regular unscented lotion because it’s, like, $10/bottle.

This shit is the SHIT. (Pic via Amazon)

6. The Best Laid Plans…

Waffle and I are in the process of writing down our birth plan. We’ve talked about it a lot and there are things we both want. He is putting the labor decisions mainly in my hands. There are only a couple non-negotiables. I feel like it will be less stressful if I’m open to whatever happens in the moment. There are so many variables with labor and I feel more at peace with it all if I don’t make judgments or assumptions about anything.

Like, in an ideal world, I would like to have a natural birth, but if that doesn’t work out for some reason, that’s what it is. I definitely don’t want an elective c-section or to be talked into one if I don’t need one, but if it becomes medically necessary, then that’s what we’ll do.

Some things we are set on in regards to our labor and birth plan:

• no circumcision if our baby is male assigned
• skin-to-skin contact as soon as possible after birth
• non-instrumental delivery (no forceps)
• early labor at home (with doula)
• delayed clamping of the umbilical coard
• no episiotomy (unless there is a very pressing medical reason — which is rare)
• alone time with Remi after birth and tests, etc are over and before accepting visitors

Some things we’d prefer, but are fairly open to changing our mind on:

• no pain medications or epidural
• let bag of waters break on their own
• let labor start on its own (no induction)
• vaginal birth
• spontaneous pushing (not forced)

7. Sipping My Way Into Labor

I’ve been drinking red raspberry leaf tea since the second trimester. According to some midwives and herbalists, it helps strengthen your uterus for an easy labor. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Couldn’t hurt, right?

Why not. (Pic via Amazon)

6. Culturing the Korean-American Kid

I know, I know. I have several years to even be thinking about sending my kid to cultural camp, but I wanted to know what’s available locally. One of the perks of living in a medium-size city is that there are enough families with Korean kids locally that there is a Korean Cultural Camp in my city for one weekend every summer. I wanted to go to Korea Camp when I was a kid, when I found out that another family’s KAD (Korean adoptee) kids went to one. There just weren’t any near where I grew up.

Remi is probably going to hate Korean Cultural Camp when they’re old enough to go and also to roll their eyes at me, but I think it’s important to try it out. I’m still learning a lot of new things about my culture and the foods and history of my ancestry. I know absolutely none of the language. I really wish I’d had more exposure to Korean culture as a kid. I feel like I want to be able to share that with Remi.

This is a pajeon or “Korean pancake” and the first time I ever ate one I was 30 years old and that is very sad because that means I went 30 years without this fluffy goodness in my life or mouth. (Recipe at Namiko Chen)

Most of the Korean cultural camps are religiously affiliated and the one near me is part of the “Christian Service Program” at a Jesuit high school, so hopefully it won’t be too awkward for a queer family to attend. I’ll let you know in, like, six years when Baby T. Rex is old enough to go and also after Remi is, like, you know, born.

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: Crying Over My Multigrain Waffles and Whimsical Onesies (31 Weeks)

I was going to write about our baby shower last Saturday, but I can’t get the words together. It was a beautiful day. People traveled from all over to celebrate with us. I’ve posted some pics below. But I can’t focus on it right now.

Not today. Not this week. Not when I woke up the morning after our shower to the news from Orlando. Not when I started the 31st week of my pregnancy crying over the kitchen sink as I crammed my gestational diabetes breakfast (two multigrain waffles slathered in peanut butter) into my mouth. It wasn’t the pregnancy hormones this time. It was the overwhelming grief and the sudden realization of what it means to be a parent.

I came out on December 3, 2000. I was 17. It was my senior year of high school and I was taking a couple non-matriculated courses at a nearby state college. I wasn’t out to anyone. I knew I was attracted to girls. I’d known since I was in seventh grade, but I hadn’t put words to it yet. For my 100-level American politics course at the local college, I chose the topic of “gay rights” for my term paper. I used this as an excuse to check out every single nonfiction and research book from the campus library that came up under the search term “gay.”

I hoarded the books in my bedroom in a tall stack. My nervous excitement reflected off the glossy covers and radiated back at me. This was something I’d never allowed myself before, to read about gay people, about gay youth, about a community I didn’t yet feel sure I could be a part of.

This was 2000. The internet was not yet what it is today. There was no GSA at my high school. Our pseudo-GSA, a club three of my friends and I started called Respect Club, was barred from having a LGBT history month by the school board because it “might incite riots.” My best guy friend (and ex-boyfriend) got sent home for wearing a dress to school. There were queer teachers at my school (as I found out later), but none of them were out to students.

I laid on the 70’s-brown carpeted floor of my room with my legs kicked up and devoured each book, one by one, cover to cover. I read Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence, a very mid-nineties book featuring original stories by popular young adult authors about growing up gay. I read a thin political science reader simply titled Gay Rights. I can’t tell you who the author was or even what it looked like. What I remember is reading a chapter on hate crimes. I learned about Matthew Sheppard and James Byrd for the first time.

It was while reading this chapter that something in me broke. The tears came fast, landing on the pages of the open book. I couldn’t finish the chapter. I sat up and put my head in my hands and wept.

I wasn’t sure why I was even upset. I wasn’t out. No one knew I had feelings for girls, so I’d never felt discriminated against or in danger for being queer. I didn’t know Matthew Sheppard or James Byrd. I’d been shielded from that kind of violence, growing up in a small, rural, mostly-white town with white parents and light skin. I didn’t know about hate crimes as a contemporary thing — wasn’t this something that happened in the past? A long time ago? It was just a few paragraphs in a book about a political topic for my research paper about something that happened to other people. Not me. Not me. But I couldn’t stop sobbing.

My parents noticed and sat me down in the family room. Their concern was genuine. I’ve always been overly empathetic, but I’ve never been overly emotional. Even as a toddler, I rarely cried. I curled up in a big recliner with my legs tucked under me. Gulping for air between heaving sobs, I told them about my term paper and about hate crimes and about how I couldn’t believe people were so cruel and I blurted out abruptly, “…and it matters to me because I’m bisexual.”

Silence hung in the air for what felt like hours, but was probably minutes. My dad eventually hugged me and said he’d love me no matter what (but he didn’t approve of me bringing girls home). My mom looked down and got up and left the room. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything to me for two days.

My coming out story isn’t the worst coming out story on a scale of “We love you and it’s awesome that you’re bi!” to “I’ll kill you.” My parents never stopped loving me or threatened to stop loving me. I wasn’t disowned or kicked out. My parents are generally socially progressive. They vote on the Democratic line. They’d always been welcoming to my gay friends, before and after I came out. It was still hard for them, especially for my mom. Part of it was shame and stigma and internalized homophobia, but it was their own shame. There was never a point where my mom or dad felt there was something wrong with me.

My mom would say, “I know it’s my problem. You just have to give me time to accept it.” This, of course, did not make me feel better, but it was honest. Even when we were fighting, when we were screaming at each other, my parents never had an open hatred of LGBT people. They just didn’t want me to be one or date one.

It never made sense to me. I never understood how they could feel that way, how they could love and hug my gay friends, how they could be supportive of gay rights, but not their bisexual daughter, until this week.

When you are trying to conceive, from the moment you are successful, you start building a wall of protection around your future child. You start making different choices in your own life. I radically changed my diet when I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes in the first trimester. I started exercising daily, after 33 years of saying I didn’t have the time. I cut down on caffeine and omitted alcohol completely. I didn’t go to A-Camp this year because I was concerned about how the altitude would affect my third trimester body. I worried through every test and ultrasound that something was going to go wrong. I changed the way I sleep and re-prioritized my after-work commitments to give my body time to fuel and rest. I want to give Baby T. Rex the best possible shot.

I stood over the kitchen sink crying on Monday, still struck with grief over the tragedy that unfolded in Orlando on Saturday night. All of a sudden, I understood my mother. I understood her struggle with accepting me after I came out for the first time. When my mom finally broke the silent treatment two days after my dramatic coming out tears, she said, “I didn’t want this for you. It isn’t what I imagined your life would be like.” She asked how I would get a job, how I would find a boy to love me.

I felt so offended by that, that she thought I couldn’t be loveable or loved or happy just because I’m bisexual. That she thought I could just choose to love straight cis men only and didn’t respect my whole sexuality. I felt betrayed. My parents never pushed my sister and me to get married or find a boyfriend. They raised us to be strong and smart and independent. I was angry she’d already imagined some heteronormative future for me, one in which I’d be married to a man with grandchildren on the way. I wanted so much more than that; I thought they wanted more than that for me. I realize now that it wasn’t about that.

I grew up in the queer 90’s and came out in 2000. My mom lived through the 70’s and 80’s. She saw LGBT people terrorized and bullied, denied dignity and basic legal protections. She saw a whole generation of our community die or become traumatized by HIV/AIDS. She saw how people treated LGBT people in the 70’s and 80’s. She saw Matthew Sheppard’s murder and trial play out on the nightly news. She didn’t want that for me. She wanted to protect me. She didn’t want to imagine a future where I was struggling, where I was sick, where my life was in danger, where I wouldn’t be able to live to my potential because of who I am.

She was a white woman in America with a light-skinned daughter. She didn’t have to worry about me being killed growing up and she didn’t have to worry about it herself growing up. She had fears like every parent does. I know she worried about raising a Korean kid in a white neighborhood and school district. She worried about me walking home from the bus on our busy street without sidewalks. She worried about me every day. But she never had to fear for my life like she did when I came out.

It was December 3, 2000, and my mom and I saw the world differently. I saw homophobia, yes, but I also saw hope. I saw queer people radicalizing and marching in the streets. I saw getting out of my small, conservative hometown and going far away for college where I could come out in a blaze of rainbows. I saw a future of falling in love and kissing girls and being 100% myself. I was privileged and I felt safe. I was sure I’d be OK.

My mom saw danger everywhere. She saw people who’d want to hurt me. She saw homophobia, hate crimes, disease, secrecy, and shame. Yes, these ideas came out of systematic homophobia and negative media portrayals of bisexual and gay people and were obviously wrong. It’s the context she had, though, as a white, straight, cis woman at a time when there was no Glee or It Gets Better Project. She was worried, like only a parent can be. She wanted to give me my best possible shot.

I understand now, how that feels, to want to protect your child no matter what. Above all that is rational, to want to cloak them in your love and shield them from an unforgiving and cruel world. I see now that my mother’s negative reaction to my coming out was about love, above all else.

It took us years and years to become close again. It’s still hard sometimes when old wounds are opened, but it’s mostly good, great even. We’ll probably never come all the way back to where we were before I was her “queer bisexual daughter.” We’ll always tiptoe around that hard part of our relationship in an otherwise supportive and loving family history.

I opened a new chamber of forgiveness in my heart when I realized that my mother has only ever loved me and wanted the best for me. It’s why she could accept other gay people, but struggled so much with my coming out. She never feared or hated gay people. She was fearful for me.

Watching the news roll in on the shooting at Pulse nightclub, I couldn’t help but think of our future child, of Remi. Reading texts between Eddie Justice and his mom moments before he was killed broke me. How can I bring a child into this awful world? How can I guarantee they will make it through?

As I saw white queer friends and allies post about the shooting, incidentally white-washing the whole thing with #WeAreOrlando hashtags, I wondered, how will I make sure I raise a child who is safe in this world? I want my child to be safe. But also, how will I raise them to understand the privilege that comes with being safe in this world? How will I teach them intersectionality, to stand up for their brothers and sisters and fellow humans who don’t have the luxury of safety? How, how, how?

I was talking with some queer and trans college friends from out of town after our baby shower last weekend, before news of the shooting hit. We were reminiscing about college nights of drunken debauchery and bad decision-making in our early twenties. One of my friends is also pregnant and has a kid at home, as well. I wondered aloud, “How do we keep our kids from making the same mistakes we made?” We agreed: we can’t. Even with the best, most supportive upbringing, once our kids are adults, we can’t keep them safe. We can’t stop them from binge drinking or experimenting with drugs or going home with an attractive stranger. We can’t prevent them getting raped at a party or being murdered in a mass shooting. There is nothing we can do but try to give them their best possible shot and hope they make it out OK.

I cried over my morning multigrain waffles because I could finally understand why my mom said and did those things that hurt me so much, that made me feel unwanted and small when she pushed me away after I came out.

I cried because it turns out I am able to have all those things my mom thought I never would: a house, a loving spouse, a legal marriage, a career, and yes, even a child.

I cried because I was also able to do the things I envisioned for my life: be an activist, major in creative writing and women’s studies, get paid to do work that affirms my intersectional core beliefs, find a partner who loves me for exactly who I am. I was right. Things got better. I went to college three hours away from home and came out in a blaze of rainbows. I went to the gay bars and marched in the streets. Laws changed and public opinion shifted. I have the joy and luxury of living openly and proudly in every area of my life.

I cried because not everyone has had the happy experience with coming out that I have. Not everyone has been OK. Not everyone has lived. I cried because Latinx and Black people and trans people don’t necessarily get to walk with the confidence I do in the world, that 17-year-old me did as I approached adulthood, sure that I would survive.

I cried for the Latinx and Black victims of the Orlando shooting, who were dancing and loving on a night they could be together and free and safe. They should have been safe. I cried for the grieving parents and partners and families of the victims, who had to wait hours to find out if they were alive.

I am pregnant with my own child now and I want everything that is good in the world for them. I want them to live boldly and be who they are. I also want, more than anything, for them to be safe. We live in a time where Black and brown parents worry about their kids being safe every day. We live in a time when Muslim parents worry about their kids being safe. We live in a time when parents of trans youth worry about their kids being safe. We still live in a time when we have to worry about our queer and trans friends and loved ones being safe, in general. We live in a time when Latinx and Black queer and trans people are fearful for their lives in ways the rest of us can’t begin to know or understand.

I see now, now that I’m carrying this little future human around with me every day, that my mom only ever loved me, even if she didn’t know how to show me that love when I first came out. It doesn’t make the way she reacted less hurtful. I doesn’t erase the times when I felt isolated from my family, when Waffle had to hold me as I raged or cried because I didn’t feel comfortable going home for the holidays. I forgave my parents a long time ago. Today, I am finally able to understand them, too.

Parenting is a lifetime of worrying about someone else and coming to terms with the fact that you can’t control everything while trying really hard to control everything. You can’t guarantee their safety. You can only support them and hug them and give them the best foundation for happiness and success.

Little Baby T. Rex, whatever and whoever you become, Waffle and I are always going to be here for you. We’ll always support you and believe in you. We’ll try to teach you to love and to approach others with empathy and to stand up for what’s right. We’ll probably mess up sometimes. We’ll say or do the wrong thing. We’ll hurt you without meaning to. But we’ll do our best and we’ll try to give you our best. We can’t promise to shield you from harm, but we’ll damn well try.

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

1. Showered with Love

Our friend and my mom threw us a baby shower last weekend and it was grand. Admittedly, I’ve always felt a little weird about showers. We didn’t have one for our wedding. We didn’t even have a gift registry for our wedding. Waffle and I like to do things on our own. We feel hella awkward about being the center of attention in gift-giving or party situations. We like buying gifts for others and going to their parties and showers. We’ve just always felt weird about letting people throw one for us. However, my friend asked if she could do this for us and, quite frankly, babies are something new for us. We did want to celebrate with family and friends and let’s face it, we need to get a lot of stuff together to prepare for a Baby T. Rex.

It was a really lovely day and our friends and family turned out and there were dinos everywhere and I was overwhelmed with gratitude. It stands in stark contrast to 24 hours later, when I read the headline about Orlando from my bed. This weekend was a strange one. So much joy and hugging and acceptance of our queer love with friends who traveled thousands of miles, family friends I hadn’t seen in years, our whole family showing up and celebrating with us. My mom made a million adorable crafty things and worked with my friend to organize games and dino decorations and a ton of food.

There were gifts of feminist onesies, queer and feminist children’s books, colorful toys, and gender-neutral clothes (lots of dinos!). The next morning, I woke up to a reminder of what can still happen in this world, that hate and racism and violence are still out there.

I am choosing to hold all things up simultaneously. I am immensely sad about Orlando. There’s been a heaviness weighing down on me this whole week, a deep sadness I can’t shake. I am also feeling deeply embraced by my loved ones and that is pulling me through. I’m grateful for my friends and my family. I feel so blessed that Remi is going to be born into a community of deep, unconditional love.

2. Things I’ve Googled This Week:

• “when should we install car seat”
• “baby sign language dinosaur”
• “baby sign language guinea pig”
• “baby sign language R”
• “what to pack for hospital labor”
• “rent vs. buy breast pump”
• “peanut butter chocolate shake low carb”
• “is pregnancy brain real?”

3. Let Your Fingers Do The Talking

Ever since I saw a friend’s not-yet-speaking baby use sign language to tell me a story about seeing a truck, I have been totally into the idea of learning and using baby sign with any future kid. The baby’s story went like this. The baby looked out window, pointed towards the road with her finger, made the sign for “truck” and said, “Wooo!” “Yes,” her mom said, “We saw a truck yesterday!” It was adorable. I was hooked.

Baby sign is a version of American Sign Language (ASL) designed specifically for hearing babies. Many of the signs are the same or similar to ASL. Children of deaf parents typically pick up sign language from an early age and start communicating from an earlier age than hearing children of hearing parents. Hearing babies typically start signing sometime after six months.

Teach Your Baby to Sign by Monica Beyer available at Amazon.com

The goal isn’t to teach the babies ASL as a language. In fact, hearing babies often forget the signs once they start speaking, most likely because the parents also start defaulting to speaking. The signs are also slightly modified for small hands, so it isn’t true ASL. It’s just a way to give babies the tools to communicate at an earlier age.

Waffle and I are, unfortunately, not fluent in ASL. We both know a couple signs like “thank you” and “sorry,” but not enough to carry on a conversation. We’re learning some baby signs that we can use with Baby T. Rex. We’re starting with “mommy,” “daddy,” “milk,” and “cat.” We’ll add other signs based on what Remi shows interest in. I’ve heard from other parents that the sign for “all done” is very helpful to ward off diaper-changing fussiness.

4. I Thinx I Can?

According to the sponsored ads on Facebook with weird pictures of vaginal-looking food and skinny women strewn haphazardly on modern furniture, Thinx period panties are something I should be into. I am currently not menstruating, possibly the best pregnancy perk, so I haven’t made the switch from Diva Cup to Thinx yet. I’m hearing rave reviews of these magical million-dollar undies from friends who have invested.

What is even happening here, Thinx? Who is your target market? Why is this menstruating person doing awkward yoga on a piano bench?

I’m wondering if they would be a good alternative to postpartum maxi pads. I hate pads for a variety of reasons, sweat and feeling like I’m wearing a diaper being the most prominent ones. I tried to find a review or story of someone using them for this purpose, but the mommy blogs have failed me. Anyone heard of this? If you’ve tried Thinx, do you “thinx” it’d work? I don’t have any experience with how much they hold or how dry they keep you or how well they stay up on fat bodies with big bellies, but I’m really curious. Also, I hear there are discount codes? Can anyone hook a mama up?

5. Gestational Diabetes Fast Food Test Kitchen Scorecard:

• Meal: Chipotle Salad with Rice, Beans, & Chicken: A-
• Snack: Dairy Queen Small Dish of Vanilla: A-
• Meal: Papa John’s Thin Crust Pizza with Extra Cheese: B+
• Snack: McDonald’s Four-Piece McNugget with Hot Mustard Sauce: A+
• Meal: Moe’s Southwest Burrito Bowl with Beans, Chicken, & a Side of Queso & Chips: A+
• Snack: Sonic Small Mozzarella Sticks with Marinara Sauce: D
• Meal: Subway Whole Wheat 6″ BLT Sub with Side of Apple Slices: B+

6. The Dino Nest is Ready for a Hatchling

All credit goes to Waffle for the décor choices and curation of the very, very, very adorable nursery. I didn’t really do anything, other than give directions about where to stick the decals (during which we very narrowly managed to not start an epic fight). Some friends and family stopped by after the shower for the Jurassic Park tour. My mom gifted us with a beautiful hand sewn dinosaur quilt that looks perfect with the bright room colors.

L to R, top to bottom: Decals and mobile, Dino paintings by my mom, light cord pulls, and quilt by my mom

The nest is almost ready for a dino!

7. KaeLyn & Waffle’s List of Shit to Get Done Before Baby Arrives:

• Hire someone to fix the ceiling in the mud room that the squirrels epically destroyed;
• Submit preadmission paperwork to the maternity center;
• Find a pediatrician who loves vaccines and is also LGBT-competent;
• Set up the car seats in the cars sometime around Week 35-ish;
• Clean out the crap room a.k.a. sleeping porch off the baby’s room;
• Move as much baby furniture and stuff into place as possible so as to not totally freak out that cat;
• Find and hire a labor doula;
• Inventory and figure out what baby gear we still need to buy;
• Reorganize the bathroom and linen closet to prepare for the influx of baby crap; and
• Spend one last weekend sleeping in and doing nothing.

8. Twos and Threes and Fours of Onesies

Waffle has moved away from the baby booties and on to whimsical onesies. I feel like we should buy stock in Etsy. Here’s the first batch he ordered:

Labyrinth onesie from TheStudioTwentyTwo, Made with Love (and Science) bodysuit by KatBirdofKentucky, Hungry Hungry Hippo bodysuit by YODERCROSS

I feel like this is just the tip of the iceberg…

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: Pregnant Adoptee Feelings and Dino Decal Decisions (29 Weeks)

I started “writing books” when I was four, dictating to my mom from the bathtub, my thick, dark brown hair smooshed up on top of my head with frothy shampoo. Mom would listen carefully, hand-print my words on blank construction paper pages I’d illustrate later with crayons. I adored stories. I relished in make-believe. Mom said, lovingly, that I had an overactive imagination.

My parents read with me a lot, pretty much every day as far back as I can remember. When I was a little older, my dad would read young adult literature to me and “do” different voices for all the characters. I was reading children’s books on my own by the time I entered kindergarten and short chapter books by first grade. I’d get completely immersed in the narratives, lose track of time and let my mind traverse across Madeleine L’engle‘s strange and transitory landscapes, find solace with Roald Dahl‘s lonely beasts and heroines.

Stories are about journeying; about discovery; about a sense of place; about a beginning, middle, and end. My story begins with blank pages, an empty journal that starts, jarringly and robustly, from the middle. There is no exposition, no framing, just a vague temporal beginning documented in my adoption papers in English translation.

Photo from my naturalization papers

I was abandoned or as my adoption papers describe it, a “foundling.” My earliest months are recorded roughly by the orphanage and adoption agency and seem partially fabricated. According to my paperwork, I liked to play with dolls, something that seems patently false. I liked dogs, which I believe is true—I’ve always felt close to animals and took to my family’s golden retrievers right away. I had two large purple burn marks on my right forearm that are to-this-day unexplained, what’s left of a lost narrative I’d love to know, however painful. They’ve faded to soft, rippled scars that look more like birthmarks than wounds.

My story began on an airplane, a transatlantic flight to Alaska and then to JFK airport in New York City where I met my parents. My younger sister is also adopted. For my family, kinship has never been about blood. “Blood is thicker than water” simply isn’t true for us. Chosen family has always made sense to me because my family chose me.

Dad holding me at the airport on June 15, 1984, shortly after we met for the first time.

Being adopted means I’ve always been filling in those first pages of my story with my own ideas, my own illustrations, some suggested by my parents, some discovered on my own. It takes someone with an overactive imagination to create your own context from scratch, to imagine yourself into the world. If you aren’t adopted, it’s probably hard to understand not knowing where you came from.

There are probably stories you’ve been told about your birth, about your gestational parent’s experience with pregnancy, about how you were conceived. You were born in a hospital or a bed or on a kitchen floor or the backseat of a speeding car. You were a quiet baby or a fussy baby or a happy baby. There are shared experiences between the parents and siblings in your family across generations. Births are compared to one another. Stories are passed down. Histories are created. You are tethered to your origin, whether you want to be or not. Kinship is in your blood. You know the exact time and place you went from an idea of a person to a squirmy human being with air filling your lungs.

I can’t imagine my birth story or even my infancy. I was a toddler when I began to exist in any documented way. Anything before that is intangible. When I imagine where I came from, I envision a train track split in two or three or four directions, a redacted manuscript with page-after-page of immutable ink blots. Or just a sidewalk that ends unexpectedly, surrounded on all sides by grass and weeds, like the scattered bits of concrete paving in my rural hometown. Imagine if your beginning was as unwritten as your future. How do you navigate a journey without a starting point?

Being an adoptee has made being pregnant all that much more strange and interesting. I’m building a story with my body, one I’ve never known before. It’s unfamiliar. It’s completely new. I can read about it in forums and books, but it doesn’t feel like something that’s real to me. It doesn’t feel natural. Maybe this is why I don’t feel a strong kinship with other pregnant people, with mama culture. Maybe this is one reason that “having a baby” was never part of my identity as a woman.

When I played make-believe house with my friends in first grade, I always volunteered to be the family dog. I was neither the baby nor the mom. Those weren’t roles I knew how to play or wanted to. My parents shared parenting roles and they never pushed us to have kids or get married. My mom was never pregnant with my little sister. She wasn’t pregnant with me. She was an amazing parent and educator, as was my dad. Baby-making just wasn’t part of my family’s narrative.

There is no birthing wisdom passed down between generations for me. My grandparents have passed and my parents have their own experience with family-making that is theirs and is challenging and wonderful in different ways than mine. My mother-in-law talks to me about pregnancy like it’s this normal thing that people do. It is. For most people. To her. I don’t feel “normal” in this pregnant body, though. I don’t feel like I’m carrying forth some family tradition of womanhood or embodying my mother or carrying forth the wisdom of The Mothers. Most days, I feel slightly out of place.

I’m not sad about this feeling. I recognize it. I sit with it. I hold it, see the hardness and the fragility in the words I used to say: “I don’t want to have kids.” “I don’t think I have a maternal clock.” “Writing is how I create and birth into the world.”

In many ways, being pregnant has forced me to contend with the loss I never fully grieved as an adoptee. It’s not a loss of family. My family is whole and complete. It’s not loss about being adopted or unwanted. I’ve never felt anything but loved, that I can remember. It’s the loss of my own beginning, of my story, my starting point, my origin.

Little me with my doggie friend.

It’s the realization that I don’t know what I looked like as a baby and there aren’t any pictures, something I never thought about until recently. It’s my unexpected need to find a South Korean donor, something I didn’t know I wanted until I wanted it, urgently, deeply, unapologetically. Because I long for someone who looks like me. Because I want to share my ethnicity with my child. Because I want my child to love being Korean. It’s my insistence that we use an open donor for the benefit of our future kid, who may one day wonder about their origins, too. It’s the daily reminder played out in the feeling of feet and hands poking me from the inside that I’m writing an origin story for Remi and that my story remains unwritten.

I am a mother. I am becoming a mother. Before I was a mother, I became a writer, a storyteller, fabricating fiction from wisps of truth, shadowing and lining the angles of my memories into essays, connecting letters into words into images with smokey lines of verse. I started writing my stories in the bathtub with my mom. I created fictions to fill in the gaps. I illustrated the pages of my books. I am writing a new story now, with my body, for Remi, who will never know or understand what it means to be birthed by airplanes and adoption papers and mythology.

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

1. Drumroll, Please: The Dino Decal Winner!

You’re probably wondering what we decided about the dino decals. Well, there were a lot of votes for all the decals. A mixed bag, if you will. Ultimately, the most votes were for the top left and top right decals.

With your input, we decided to go with a set by the same Etsy seller as the top left option because the colors are really bright and fun and go well with our bright and fun nursery. However, we went with a set that is kind of a hybrid of the top left and top right, dinos with cute and happy facial expressions and bright colors and eggs and trees and volcanoes. The pink pterodactyl in this set really sold Waffle.

Winner winner T. Rex dinner. (decals by YendoPrint on Etsy)

Thank you all for your feedback! I hope you like the decals we picked with your input. (I mean, ultimately we have to like them first-and-foremost, but I hope you like them, too!)

2. Doula Want to Hire a Doula?

We have a childbirth class scheduled for later this month so we can learn about breathing techniques and I don’t know…whatever you learn in a birth class.

The place we booked our birth class through also provides doulas. I’m still deciding if I want a doula attending our birth. We are working with a midwifery group and a midwife will deliver T. Rex. But it’s not like a traditional midwife. We don’t have one individual midwife, so depending on how many women are in labor, our midwife may not be able to stay with us at every moment.

Also, we’ve never done this before and I’ve heard a doula can be as beneficial for the non-gestational partner or support person as they can be for the person in labor. I think it might be helpful to have one, for Waffle and for me. I’d also love to labor as long as possible at home before heading to the hospital and my plan (very open to amelioration) is to attempt natural birth.

Mostly we have to see if the cost is worth it to us and I’m not quite sure yet. Have any of you hired a doula to attend your birth? Did it make the experience better?

3. Perks of Being Preggers

I parked here the other day and I felt great about it.

No shame.

4. The Best and Worst Pregnancy Symptoms

I keep saying I’ve had a mostly easy pregnancy and it’s true. I have a good amount of energy, enough to get through the work day and evening commitments. The gestational diabetes diagnosis in the first trimester was a momentary setback, but it’s forced me to make lifestyle changes that make me feel better like eating breakfast and exercising every day. My diabetes is still well-controlled without medication. I haven’t gained much weight at all, so I don’t have a sore back…yet…and my boobs are pretty much the same (large) size as they were before I was knocked up.

I have a lot to be thankful for. There’s still a lot of weird stuff happening, of course. Here’s the best and worst of the pregnancy symptoms I’ve had or been spared.

The Best

• Regular as F*ck: Pooping regularly is a big part of my daily routine and I was super worried I was going to be constipated for nine months. But so far, so good! Fiber is my friend.
• Not Hungry: The gestational diabetes eating plan means having three meals and three snacks every day, so I’m eating from morning until bedtime. It’s a lot to remember to pack snacks all the time, but I rarely feel hungry.
• Strong Nails: After 28 years of biting my nails, I finally quit last year, but they were in sad condition. Prenatals, hormones, and time have made my once-brittle nails super strong and thicker than they’ve ever been. It’s great! They’re starting to look half-way decent even without polish.

The Worst

• Itchy Pits: About two weeks ago I started getting really itchy in my left armpit and left side boob due to pregnancy hormones. I gave myself a rash, in fact, which was very visually appealing and a whole heck of a lot of fun. I treated it with witch hazel and tea tree oil and lotion and now I just have an itchy pit that’s prone to rashes if I let myself scratch. I’m controlling it with lotion and witch hazel applied three times a day.
• Mood Swings: The crying stage of my hormonal journey seems to be over, but the bitchy stage has kicked in in full force. I find myself snapping at Waffle for no reason. I know in my head I’m being unnecessarily mean or reactionary, but I literally can’t stop the words from coming out of my mouth.
• Daily Leg Cramps: I wake up with what feels like a horrible charlie horse in my leg almost every day. This morning, I had one that was so bad that I started doing pseudo-Lamaze breathing into my pillow because I wanted to scream, but didn’t want to wake Waffle up.
• Popping Joints: My joints are loosening all over and especially in my hips. I sometimes wake myself up by popping my hip or knee joint when I roll over in my sleep.
• Carpal Tunnel: Apparently you can get carpal tunnel symptoms during and after pregnancy, which I definitely have because my wrists are achey every day after work. Wee!
• Diabetes: It’s definitely not fun. I feel lucky that I can control it with food and exercise choices, but it is a huge part of my daily life in a way that’s kind of obnoxious. I’m grateful I’m in control of it, but I’d be really sugar-coating it to say it isn’t kind of a huge bummer. I miss white rice, a lot.

5. Squirting and Not the Fun Kind

Bladder control is something I usually feel pretty good about, but lately my confidence is waning. I sometimes spring a leak if I sneeze or cough.

via Shutterstock

I hear this gets even better after giving birth, so I’m really looking forward to that. In the meantime, I’m trying to kegel my way back into control, but I can’t stop my uterus from expanding into my bladder area, so I’m not particularly hopeful.

6. Building a Badass Library for Baby T. Rex

Books are a big deal to me. Books were my very favorite thing when I was growing up and I plan to read to Remi all the time.

My mom was a first grade teacher and she’s been gifting me a lot of amazing children’s books with accompanying stuffed animals because that’s the kind of lesson planner she is.

I’ve been looking up as many Korean children’s books (in English) that I can find, as well as feminist and LGBTQ children’s books.

Some wonderful friends gifted us this dark and hilarious book and I’m totally into Jon Klassen now.

Of course, we’re also acquiring board books and soft books in some of childhood favorites. Mine is Moo Baa La La La by Sanda Boynton. Waffle’s is Sleepy Bunny (but not this reprint, the 1982 Johnson & Johnson version).

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

• gestational diabetes cookie recipe
• what do labor pains feel like
• breastfeeding large breasts
• preparing for maternity leave
• labor how much poop
• cooked paneer safe pregnancy
• wrists hurt pregnancy
• baby won’t kick for partner
• sunburn pregnant

8. Can’t Stop Keeping My Hands to Myself

I keep touching my stomach with my left hand and I don’t know why. It’s just a thing that’s happening, like I’m being compelled by some invisible belly-hand magnetic force. I’ve always wondered why pregnant women are constantly touching their bellies and I still wonder it, as I’m constantly touching my belly. Touching my belly while I’m driving. Touching my belly while I’m standing in the grocery store. Touching my belly while I watch Game of Thrones. Touching my belly while I check my email. Touching my belly while I proofread this post.

WHY IS THIS A THING?

9. A Wiggle, a Bun, a Kitty, and a Dino

We’ve always had a lot of pets in our home. At one point, we had two guinea pigs, a rabbit, four rats, and a cat in our fur family all at the same time. We’re down to just three furbabies. I’m glad Baby T. Rex will be exposed to animals from an early age. Loving and caring for animals is something Waffle and I share and I think it builds empathy for kids to interact with animals.

However, I never meant to still have two high maintenance pets like the bunny and wiggle pig (guinea pig) at the same time as a newborn. It kind of stresses me out to think about. It’s a lot of poop to deal with on the daily, is what I’m saying.

Additionally, both of those furbabes are getting older and probably won’t be around for more than a couple years. The wiggle may not even make it through this year—she has a chronic bacterial infection that’s untreatable and inoperable. We got extra pages for Remi’s baby book for the three pets we currently have, but I wonder if Remi will remember them at all.

The cat should have many more years with us and will also be around the baby more than the smaller furkids, so I’m hopeful Remi will remember and love the cat, at least. I don’t know if the cat will love Remi, but I’m optomistic. Luckily, our scaredy cat is also very gentle, so I’m not worried about the cat ripping off Remi’s diaper like my parents’ cat did to me.

10. How to Maternity Leave

I’m so, so, so blessed to be able to take some time off via my day job employer’s parental leave policy plus accrued vacation time. The U.S. is one of the only countries that doesn’t have federally mandated paid parental leave. My employer chooses to offer up to six weeks of paid leave for birth or adoption. On top of that, I’m using some of my vacation time and sick time.

Note the left freaking hand. WHY? (image via Shutterstock)

Waffle’s employer doesn’t provide any paid leave, so he’s decided to use his vacation time for two weeks, but he had to schedule it way in advance, so we’re just hoping the baby comes in the two-week period he requested off.

I can’t believe I’m already in the third trimester. I have just about two months until my paid leave begins (unless I deliver very early) and I’m working on getting things situated at work for my co-workers while I’m out. I’m the director of a small office of a statewide nonprofit, with three staff (myself included) on-site and most of my co-workers six hours away in NYC, so it’s a lot to prepare for.

Like, who’s going to sign off on timesheets, but also who’s going to fix the printer when it disconnects from the wifi?

I have never taken this much time off of work before. The last time I had three months off was during summer break when I was a college student. For the last five years, I used a lot of my paid vacation time to travel for my second job as a professional speaker and sexuality educator. I just haven’t prioritized time off since I entered the work force. I’m grateful for the weeks to spend with Baby T. Rex and to heal and mend after delivery.

I imagine I’ll be exhausted most of the time, but I wonder what I’ll be doing in-between caring for Remi and sleeping. Reading books? Watching Netflix? Taking up radical cross-stitching? What do you do when you don’t go to a 9-5 job every day? Suggestions?

Mama Outsider: When Your Mother Thanks You for Keeping Your Baby

feature image via shutterstock.com

What sometimes happens in my temporary living arrangement is that my mother will in some way find my daughter delightful. And in finding my daughter delightful, she will thank me for my decision to keep her. It bothers me, but everything bothers me these days. To have a dead father who was your best friend is to be an exposed nerve, hypersensitive to pain and numb to joy. I wonder if the years will cover my nerves in thicker skin, if people will ever remind me of those terrible first months of my pregnancy without pissing me off.

I’ve received five years of gratitude and I’ve never given a straight, “You’re welcome.” Instead, I jump back into the mind of the girlish woman I was at 28, the one who didn’t know enough about the consequences for unacceptable motherhood to plunge headfirst into the fire. It has taken me much longer than my mother to see the gift of my own naiveté.

You are 23 and home for Christmas. You have not begun to unpack your knapsack, so you think yourself a star. Untouched and untouchable, the favored daughter of a just God. When your father announces his terminal illness, you ponder the irony of dumping Jesus on his birthday. The bad things/ good people conundrum is too much weight for your fledgling relationship.

You are 23 and a Type A over-achiever. You treat your father’s news as a rumor for a pop quiz. You don’t want to be caught off guard, so you begin to actively practice grief. Having never lost more than a wallet, you believe grief is clinging so as not to forget.

You are 23 and still think your body a valuable commodity. You wonder if you can trade it for your father’s. You draw nigh to Prosperity Gospel Jesus (PGJ), an ATM machine who gives miracles in exchange for fundamentalist applications of scripture. You throw away your box of dildos, swear off premarital sex, become an ordained minister, and expect a miracle.

By the time I met my daughter’s father, I’d trained my brain to vacillate dangerously between blind faith and death grip love. He could have been any tall man. He could have had any background and I would have gladly become his proselyte. In those limbo days before my father died, I joined cults, collectives, and identitarian sects. I lived for conversion, grateful to throw my faith into anything other than the certainty of death come soon.

My parents had developed a different relationship with faith. Having faced the pre-Obama healthcare industry with terminal illness, and having dropped their son off at the lion’s den (my PGJ-influenced conception of the prison industrial complex), they’d lost faith in this country’s ability to do right by bodies it did not value.

When the faint pink line tentatively appeared like my brother’s ex-girlfriend on visitation day, I had to decide whether to become such a body. In a hormonal moment of clarity, I saw my daughter’s father for who he was. Just a man not unlike Jesus — father of many, provider for few.

By the time you are 28, you have been grief cramming for five years. You are emotionally exhausted from anticipating death and the faint pink line seems like a promise. The list of things you don’t know about the life ahead is a temporary fence around your desire to parent. The fence holds even when, on your first trip home after the pink line, your father hugs you in the kitchen as if you are the spoiled thing you smell.

My family and I stand in the kitchen as the funeral service workers wheel my father’s body out of my childhood room, the only room that had space for his hospice bed. I lunge screaming at the zipped bag. My grandmother holds me for the first time in years, whispering the same mantras that have helped her through all of her many losses. “God knows what He’s doing,” she says, pressing me into the table so the men can pass us by.

I scream, “He made a mistake!” grateful for the scrape of my voice against my throat. My father has been dead for an hour and I haven’t cried. My raw throat is a reminder that I can feel. That I didn’t die with my father while we were holding hands. I don’t even think about disrespect, about the rule that you never raise your voice at an elder. I don’t give a damn about blasphemy or the spectacle I’ve become, lunging at a body that no longer houses my dad.

This scene is a gift that only families like mine can appreciate — families that rehash trauma over Sunday dinner, flooding the moments we’ve survived with light and laughter. “Remember when you cussed Granny out?” my brother will ask years later, bending the truth into a funnier frame.

Sometimes, my mother’s gratitude feels like trite faith — a “God knows what he’s doing” to keep me from lunging at the once-was or could-have-been shell of my childless self. Only now, I see how my whole family was lunging at this gone girl — the one who could have retained her status as a daughter of promise, the one who may have married a man like my father and bought a house. People who loved that version of me said hurtful, demeaning things in the first few months of my pregnancy.

It is only in the wake of my own loss that I see my decision for what it was — a double homicide that stole both that girl and the myth that made her. Because if American meritocracy were more than myth, how could all of the things I’d accomplished be destabilized by one decision? If meritocracy were more than myth, wouldn’t I “deserve” to bounce back? Isn’t all the hysteria over Black women’s reproduction and parenting really a death grip on mythology? The myth was already riddled with disease, but it is hard to conceive of death as relief while clinging to contrived memories about the way things were.

Clinging only prolongs the phase of grief that seems cruel: moving forward.

Days after the first anniversary of my father’s death, I called a psychic. I needed to know if my father was angry with me for the ways I’d disappointed him with my desire. I’d “come out” three times in as many years: a “bad boy,” a baby, and a first girlfriend. What if disappointment had crumbled his resolve and made him susceptible to the cancer that reached his brain? I cried openly on a bench in my university’s courtyard, unaware of the way unacceptably mothering had already thickened my skin against the glares.

“Let all of that go,” the psychic said. “Spirits are free from all that human stuff. Your dad is jumping up and down, saying something about a birthday.”

His birthday is in July. He died in April. I said nothing, not wanting to give up any information that would ruin the façade of communication that I needed to be real.

Not missing a beat, she said, “On the other side, the ones we love think of death anniversaries as birthdays. We think of it as the day we lost them, but they think of it as their birth into freedom.”

When my mother thanks me for walking into the fire, does she know that I couldn’t see? That I was directed by desire that grew stronger in the flames licking at my skin? Whether she knows it or not, her gratitude is neither pardon nor apology. Neither are necessary anymore. Her gratitude invites me to meditate on freedom, scope of power, and all the ways the universe responds to me when I close my eyes and follow desire to her core.

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: Sipping My Way Into the Third Trimester (27 Weeks)

feature image via Shutterstock

This past mother’s day, Waffle had a conversation with his mom where she asked if he would be celebrating mother’s day or father’s day next year. It’s something we’d been thinking about for a while. There’s a clear and direct answer, but we were stuck on how to present it to family members in the most casual way possible.

Before we got hitched in 2011, Waffle and I had “the chat” with his parents about his gender identity. People know Waffle by different first names (Waffle is his nickname and his actual last name) and call him different pronouns. I sometimes use different pronouns. Waffle is fine with she/her or he/his and doesn’t care too much either way, as long as people are being respectful. Like Leslie Feinberg once expressed, “For me, pronouns are always placed within context.” Waffle’s family mostly uses she/her. My family mostly uses he/him. Coworkers use she and friends use whatever they know Waffle as.

We just didn’t want our family feeling weird or making it weird at our wedding when they heard people using different names and pronouns than they were used to. We wanted people focused on the celebration and the fun and the silly children’s book readings we had picked out for the ceremony, not on Waffle’s gender and/or if they were being bad allies or whatever.

This is one of the readings we used. (We didn’t make this video or use this song, though) Do you see a theme?

I worked with our Unitarian minister to write a pronoun-free ceremony script. The wedding went off perfectly. People were cool. Waffle’s parents didn’t have an issue with it at all, though I think they were and are still kind of confused about how to address Waffle because he identifies as queer and isn’t binary trans.

I was just talking with a friend about how it seems LGBTQIA generations are about ten years apart. Like, because progress and culture has shifted so rapidly for our communities, the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s were really distinct eras of “being LGBT” and the 00’s and 10’s are a whole other world. Waffle and I came of age as activists and queer people on the back-end of the Queer 90’s. There weren’t words like “demiboy” and “demigender” yet and words like “genderqueer” were relatively new and still had a specific political connotation. Singular they/their wasn’t popular yet. Zie/sie/hir/hier were the most widely used gender neutral pronouns (though they never caught on in the mainstream). I think this is why genderqueer or gender non-binary or gender variant have never worked as identities for Waffle. It doesn’t feel authentic to his experience of coming out and finding an identity that fits.

(I can somewhat understand. “Pansexual” was still a pretty new term when I was coming out, which is why I still stick with “bisexual” and “queer.” Pansexual doesn’t mean anything to me in the context of my coming out experience, even if it’s an accurate description of my sexual and romantic attractions.)

Waffle cut his teeth on Leslie Feinberg‘s Stone Butch Blues. If you can be a lesbian or dyke politically, but not be a woman, he’d identify as that, but he feels it’s a little odd to claim “lesbian” if he isn’t comfortable claiming “woman.” So he identifies as a boi in the butch lesbian context of the word, but also as trans and queer. Sometimes when we’re out in the world, strangers perceive us as two lesbian women and he’s mostly OK with that. Sometimes people perceive him as binary trans or binary male and he’s mostly OK with that, too, though neither is correct. To Baby T. Rex, Waffle will be “Dad” and we’ll celebrate father’s day.

Polly Pagenhart, author of Lesbian Dad, defines a lesbian dad as:

les•bi•an dad n, neologism 1. a. A lesbian or genderqueer parent who feels that traditionally female titles (i.e., “mother”) don’t quite fit, and who is willing to appropriate and redefine existing male ones (i.e., “father”): She was a tomboy when she was a kid, so it’s not surprising she’s a lesbian dad as a parent. b. Often a non-biological parent in a lesbian family, and/or one whose role relative to the child in many ways resembles that of fathers.

Some lesbian dads and genderqueer parents come up with another word for “parent” that’s gender-neutral or use a word in another language or from another culture like “baba.” Much like using they/their pronouns and identifying as genderqueer doesn’t feel right to Waffle, using a different word for “dad” doesn’t really work for him either.

Long story short, we always knew Waffle would be “daddy” to Baby T. Rex. The furkids already give him a card on Father’s Day, after all.

Father’s Day 2010 message from our then-baby pigs.

At the same time, being visibly queer is important to be us and being misinterpreted as a same-gender couple is only, like, 70% wrong. The difference is that “dad” to us doesn’t mean “will teach kid about power tools” any more than “mom” means “will teach kid how to bake cakes.” I mean, we might do those things, but not because of the gender roles attributed to our monikers. Actually, I hope Waffle teaches them how to bake, or maybe we should relegate that to their grandparents, because it’s neither of our strong suit.

Sometimes I worry about how our kid is going to explain us to adults they will encounter outside our home (like teachers). On paper we’ll appear to be a lesbian couple. However, our kid will know us as “mom” and “dad.” Explaining these concepts to a kid is something I look forward to. It won’t be too hard. Kids have a much easier time with gender fluidity than adults do. (In some ways, our 7-year-old niece understands Waffle’s gender the most out of everyone in either of our families. She calls Waffle “Aunt” and also uses he/his pronouns, which his family thinks is funny, but is actually fairly accurate.)

I think Remi will be on board without any problem. What I wonder about is how to prepare Remi for going to school and discussing our family with cis adults and authority figures who think Remi has “two mommies” and who are generally ignorant about trans identities. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Any advice, non-binary parents out there?

For now, I’ve just got to get this darn Baby T. Rex safely out into this beautiful, gross, dangerous, brilliant, terrible, incredible, wild world.

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

1. Water, Water Everywhere and I’m Gonna’ Sip Up Every Drop

I think I’ve mentioned before how ridiculously thirsty I am. (Yes, you can interpret that any way you want.) I was settling in to do some lengthy work last Sunday afternoon and had to take a picture of my hydration station. Yes, I drank, drunk, drink-ed all of that in one sitting (with bathroom breaks).

L to R: lemon water with apple cider vinegar, a 24 oz Nalgene On the Fly Bottle of tap water, and a big ol’ pot of Yogi Mother-to-Be tea

I wish I could say it’s having a positive impact on my skin, but honestly I have no idea what my skin is doing right now. All the dermal things I have that typically flare up are flaring up real extra and I have an unusual excess of skin tabs (sexy!) and I started getting a super fun rash under my arm last week. Also, the physical exhaustion is coming back as I get closer to the third tri. So when people tell me I’m glowing, I kind of feel like they’re full of shit. I am, however, very, very, very hydrated. By the end of the day, I feel like a filled-up water balloon and my belly looks like one, too.

2. Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (Hello Heteronormativity)

I know I just got done telling you that Waffle is going to be a Daddy Dino to Baby T. Rex, but I have to say that it’s a little weird that the hospital we are using only has forms that have “mother” and “father” as options. Same-gender marriage has been legal in NYS since 2012 and is now legal everywhere. This is a fairly large metropolitan hospital, so I’m just surprised.

One of the biggest reasons we went with getting me knocked up is that Waffle can simply sign the birth certificate as the second parent. It’s one of the legal benefits of marriage. Waffle has zero interest in changing his legal gender markers or his legal name, so it’s going to be kind of awkward for a multitude of reasons when we turn in our paperwork with his stuff under “father.” Waffle doesn’t like to draw a lot of attention to himself and doesn’t feel particularly passionate about coming out to my medical providers, so we’ve been flying under the radar as assumed-lesbians at our medical provider appointments.

For all these reasons, we prefer gender neutral language on paperwork, when possible. I called the hospital to find out if there was another less-gendered version of the form, like one that just says “parent” and “parent” or something, but there isn’t. So it is what it is. Our midwives marked Waffle as my “spouse” and made a note to call him by his last name in their files, so that’s cool, at least. If all goes according to plan, the midwives will deliver the baby.

Side Note: I briefly considered having a homebirth to avoid dealing with this kind of awkwardness (and because it can be a really cool and empowering experience), but ultimately we both feel more comfortable at a medical facility. It’s a really personal choice and I respect people who choose homebirth as well as those who don’t. I’ve heard about good and difficult experiences with both. With it being our first pregnancy and having access to relatively LGBT-inclusive care providers nearby, we decided to go with our gut instinct, even if it means I don’t get to labor in one of those cool inflatable birth pools for the living room.

3. Reader’s Choice: Dino Decals

We need your opinion on dino decals for the nursery. Which one of these sets do you like best? Tell me in the comments, please. Big decisions.

HELP

4. What (Weird) Dreams May Come

Many people experience vivid dreams while pregnant. I typically remember my dreams once or twice a week. Lately, I’ve been remembering my dreams pretty much every night. I started writing down the really funny or strange ones:

• I was at work at McDonalds (which I actually worked at for, like, 5 years-ish in real life) and I was stationed in the grill. If you don’t know this already, McD now has an all-day breakfast menu. It’s real legit. Anyway, I was in the grill and I was making “round eggs,” which are the ones that go on Egg McMuffins. I just kept making eggs and making eggs and filling up trays with eggs until I’d made far too many eggs and my manager was like, “OMG KAELYN! Stop making eggs!” I don’t know what this has to do with anything, but it seems somewhat related to getting knocked up, I think.
• I was drafted into wartime service (who we were at war with was unclear) under the Trump administration and I was scheming plans to go AWOL. This dream was terrifying for a multitude of reasons.

Truly a nightmare…

• Some exceptionally vivid sex dreams and that’s all you need to know, except that they frequently end with me being unable to climax and feeling hella frustated in my dream and also in real life when I wake up.
• I spontaneously gave birth to a fully-formed baby at 26 weeks. It was a medical miracle! Or, at least, no one thought it was that concerning other than that I didn’t know I was going into labor at first. Then, my milk came in all weird and gross and I was trying to play it cool like I knew what I was doing with breastfeeding, but I was really panicking because it was the wrong consistency and color and I kept pumping and it just kept getting worse. I think I may have breastfeeding anxiety. I mean, I definitely do.

5. Rounding Third

Can you believe I’m just about in my third trimester? Maybe you can, because you only just learned I’m carrying a smol human in my body. But it feels like a big thing to me, like, we’ve been doing this for so long and we’re almost to the finish line! Also, oh holy mother of pearl, we’re almost to the finish line!

People keep asking me if I’m nervous about giving birth and it’s hard to answer. I’m not particularly nervous right now. I mean, human beings have been giving birth since we came to exist on the planet. It’s definitely doable. I feel like it’ll be fine, whatever happens. I’ll be ok. I’ll recover. I’ll figure it out. But I’m sure I’m going to be a little freaked once I actually start going into labor. That seems like a normal reaction to going into labor for the first time in your life and also to the possibility of having a very painful experience like, you know, your privates exploding. I doubt I’ll be feeling all casual about it, like, no worries, just making life with my body real chill like.

Everything’s cool. Just creating life with my body. Real chill.

However, I wouldn’t say I’m stressing about it right now at this very moment in time.

I’m fairly close to that day, though. There’s about 20 million things I want to get done before my due date, before I’m in it with Baby T. Rex for life, ride or die. It’s weird how when you’re waiting for something, it feels like the waiting is forever, until it gets close and then it feels like you’re recklessly hurtling towards it.

Like when you’re going on a big trip and you can’t wait. You’re counting down the days. But then it’s hours before you leave and you still haven’t packed anything and you’re cramming all your shit in a bag, hoping you didn’t forget anything important as you rush out the door (to catch your flight to A-Camp). Or maybe that’s just me…

Either way, it’s going to be T. Rex time before we know it! Most days I’m not overthinking it, just doing my day-to-day and going down my to-do list and looking towards the next couple weeks ahead. Normal life. Then I have these brief moments of semi-panic and I remember that we did this thing for real and, like, what goes in must come out, if ya’ know what I mean. There’s no turning back now! This brand spankin’ new human being is going to come into the world real soon and it’s going to change everything.

Sometimes when I’m in that headspace, I turn to Waffle and randomly exclaim, “This is happening!” I should probably stop doing that as we get closer to, like, the possibility of me going into actual labor.

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

• “armpit rash pregnant”
• “fetus kicked the cat”
• “gestational diabetes injera”
• “tea tree oil safe pregnancy”
• “first time breastfeeding tips”
• “best breast pump”
• “nipple piercings breastfeeding”
• “Korean children’s books”
• “nursing bra best for big boobs”

7. Cats in the Snoogle and the Silver Spoon

Jeter has taken up residence in my Snoogle. What, you ask, is the Snoogle? It’s an outrageously expensive (for a glorified body pillow) and also life-changing pregnancy pillow that is the sole reason I can sleep soundly at night. I’ve been a stomach sleeper my whole life and fairly early in my mid-first trimester, I needed to start sleeping on my side. It was extremely hard for me to retrain my brain to fall asleep on my side and stay that way all night. Also, I was waking up with a sore back and hips. I tried adding more pillows. I tried hugging a pillow all night. I tried gently lifting my stomach onto an extra pillow. I tried creating a fortress of pillows all around me. Nothing worked. Enter the Snoogle.

This is the glorious and almighty Snoogle.

It’s basically a body pillow, but in a weird elongated C-shape kind of like an open paper clip. You curl up in the thing or straddle it or hug it or use it to support your back or marry it. All I know is it works. It’s very bad for my romantic life, because it creates a literal impenetrable barrier down the middle of the bed. If Waffle wants to cuddle, he has to spoon the Snoogle to get to me. If I want to cuddle, I have to launch myself over the thing to get to him. But the Snoogle is fabulous for getting a good night of rest. For me and for my cat, who thinks we got the Snoogle especially for him to curl up and snooze in. He’s such an entitled little asshole. Like he doesn’t already own every other sleeping surface in the house…

Cats are jerks.

8. Baby Wearing, Not Something a Wealthy White Pediatrician Invented

I want to wear my baby. My mom used to wear my sister in a metal-framed back carrier. My sister’s adoption paperwork said (in rough English translation from Korean) that she “likes to be a backpack.” One of my earliest memories is playing in the backyard with my family on a sunny day, my mom doing yardwork with my little sister strapped onto her back.

Baby carriers have come a long way since then and have really picked up popularity in America since the introduction of “attachment parenting” by pediatrician and bestselling author, Dr. William Sears. Babywearing is a key component of attachment parenting theory and is said to be beneficial for forming a parent-child bond, promoting infant health, facilitating breastfeeding, reducing infant distress, etc. etc. etc. There are now babywearing mom groups and play dates and a plethora of carriers at different (mostly expensive) price points. Babywearing has practical benefits for parents, too, freeing up both hands to do chores and allowing more mobility without having to cart a carrier or stroller around all the time. These are all valid benefits of babywearing and part of the reason I’m interested, but I get really frustrated seeing image after image of babywearing as a modern white mommy thing.

Trust me. I’m a friendly white man wearing a stethoscope and you wouldn’t believe my net worth!

One thing that Dr. Sears’ followers don’t often acknowledge is that babywearing isn’t a new idea or even a Western idea. Carrying a baby using a sling or wrap or carrier has been practiced all over the world long before it became popular in industrialized countries. It isn’t a cool new thing for hipster parents and eco moms and feminist dads. Women of color have been doing it for centuries.

In Korea, babies are traditionally been worn by the mother on the back in a podaegi (포대기). The baby is worn on the mother’s back so the mother and child’s hearts are in alignment and the baby can hear the mother’s heartbeat. I absolutely love that! I plan to wear my baby in the front (which is also common in modern-day Korea), but I love the idea that babywearing is part of my cultural tradition and not just something a white pediatrician invented to sell books in the 90’s. I plan to use a baby wrap, which seems like a good choice for my round belly and big chest and is similar in style to a podaegi.

A contemporary podaegi (via Little Seouls

The idea of wrapping your baby goes back to women of color and particularly indigenous cultures. Japanese women used to carry their babies wrapped in their obi sashes. Brown and black women across cultures and continents have been wearing their babies in cloth wraps for a long time. While it’s ultimately good that there is respect for a traditional and natural way of carrying and bonding with a baby, especially one often used by poor women, the “industry” of parenting has white-washed the concept of babywearing. Wraps and carriers are super expensive and marketed primarily to middle-class moms. If any acknowledgement is given to the cultures that babywearing comes from, it’s in the “ethnic” naming of techniques like “African-style babywearing.” Google it. Count how many pictures are of white moms v. brown moms.

I’m admittedly planning on getting one of those expensive baby carriers and fancy wraps. I believe babywearing really is beneficial for parents and for babies (though I’m not a devotee of attachment parenting). I just wish it wasn’t yet another thing that’s been whitewashed and commercialized in the “mommy industrial complex.” (Is that a real thing? I just made it up tongue-in-cheek, but I feel like it’s a real thing.)

9. A Moment of Appreciation for Pregnant Peoples with Kids and Single Parents

A good number of people I know are pregnant right now, too, and most of them are on their second or third kiddo. I just want to say that it’s incredible watching them do their thing. Just being pregnant is a lot to deal with on top of, you know, life. Doing it while also raising an additional small person is awe-inspiring. I have the luxury of taking a nap after work if I feel like it. They probably do not, particularly if they don’t have another parent or caregiver around to share the work of child-rearing. Maybe it seems easier the second or third time because you know what’s up, but having all this stuff happening to your body and being tired and stressed and being responsible for a little kid on top of it just seems like a lot. Big kudos, second-time parents and single parents!

10. Queer Mom and Dad Dino’s Last Babymoon

As you read this, we are on our way back from our last road trip to NYC for several months. We’ll be pretty firmly rooted closer to home for the rest of this pregnancy and, I imagine, several months after Baby T. Rex arrives. As I’ve mentioned before, Waffle and I went kind of out of control over the past two years indulging in grown-up experiences and (cheapskate, but fun) travel and lots and lots of things that will be less-accessible after we have a little one in tow.

Of course, we plan to keep doing things as a couple even after we have a wee T. Rex and there are lots of babysitting offers from family members, but I imagine things may shift for us once we have a kid. Once they’re old enough to travel with us, we may want to bring them on our little mini-vacations. We may be more inclined to save up to take them to cool kid-friendly places. I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling our priorities will be different. Also, we’ll have a lot less discretionary income for these kinds of things.

So we’re living it up for one last weekend: seeing friends and shows (American Psycho on Broadway is one of them!); taking in a long, scenic drive from our home in Upstate NY to NYC; and partying it up (sober-style) one last time before it’s Dino Time!

Goodbye for a bit, grown-up parties.

It feels a little sad, like we’re saying goodbye to one era of our life as a couple and as individuals, but also like we are coming out on the other side a little more ready for the next chapter to begin. I think it’s going to be the best chapter yet!

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: “Mommy” Feelings and Dinosaur Mobiles (25 Weeks)

The biggest hurdle in deciding to become a parent, for me, was acknowledging and accepting that there is no way to extrapolate myself and my identity from “motherhood.” As a woman—and particularly as a woman who presents somewhere between hard femme and power femme—there is no chance I’m going to evade the Cult of Mommy-ness. My undercut can’t save me.

I love moms. I love my mom. Moms created the whole damn world and they run the thing, too. Motherhood is powerful as fuck. Yet, every time I think about being looked at as a mom, I can feel myself shrinking away from the idea. I can feel my other identities as a queer femme, a writer, an activist, a nonprofit director, a leader, a teacher, a badass bitch being forcibly subdued and overshadowed by the looming identity of “mommy.” I can visualize all those parts of me, of who I am and how I see myself, disintegrating into glitter dust, scattered to the wind like ashes.

It’s not being a mother that I’m afraid of. I know I’ll be a great parent. It’s how our culture sees moms, how it undervalues them, pushes moms into boxes, takes away their sexual agency, under-compensates their work while expecting perfect performance, stomps on moms with heteropatriarchal bullshit, and holds up the mom version of the virgin/whore dichotomy: “good moms” and “bad moms.” It’s too much.

Before we even got this thing started, I had to come to terms with the idea that the world was going to see me as a “mommy,” whether I liked it or not. The good news is, I know my partner wants an equal role in parenting. I mean, if anything, he’d like a slightly more prominent role. Like 60/40. The reality is that I get a good amount of paid time off from work and he doesn’t, so initially, at least, I’ll have slightly more time with Baby T. Rex. Plus we’re planning to breastfeed so that will be something I will have responsibility for until (or unless) we shift to bottle feeding.

Relationship roles are rarely 50/50. You play to each other’s strengths. I clean the bathroom. Waffle scoops the litter box. I deal with spiders and bugs. He lifts heavy shit. We alternate doing the dishes and the laundry. I’m okay with knowing I’ll be doing slightly more parenting in the beginning because I know I’m not expected to do all of it. When I go back to work, Waffle will be on daytime duty (I work days. He works nights.) and he’ll end up getting more meaningful time with the kiddo than I will.

As the non-gestational carrier, Waffle may even resent me for having more early bonding time with T. Rex. I know that’s been the experience of some of our queer parent friends. Already, I know he wishes he could feel T. Rex kick, which I feel all the damn time, but it isn’t strong enough yet for him to feel it from the outside. I don’t really love the sensation, personally, but I can’t wait to be able to share it with him. Being the non-gestational carrier can sometimes feel like being invisible. At our fertility appointments, the providers often talked directly to me and mostly ignored Waffle. He was okay with the situation because we went in with a pragmatism about the whole thing, but I imagine he wishes he could have had a more active role.

Unlike the heteronormative norm, in our relationship, the “baby crazy” person (Waffle) is the non-gestational carrier and the “baby ambivalent” person (me) is carrying. This is due to who has the capacity, due to body dysphoria and whatnot, more than anything else. A lesbian couple we know had a similar situation. The person who wanted to get pregnant first just couldn’t get it to work, so after some time, her partner ended up trying instead and got pregnant on the first try.

Queer baby-making just isn’t as cut-and-dry as it is for straight people, whether you have the parts or not—and some queer and lesbian couples have the parts naturally! Everything just feels very intentional in how our community tends to make these decisions. Being in a same-gender and/or queer feminist relationship means we’re already bucking the norm. Much like a lot of the marriage equality rhetoric never really worked for me, even as Waffle and I were getting legally married, a lot of the baby stuff makes me want to barf in my mouth. At the end of the day, though, we aren’t conforming to the institution of baby-making heteronormativity. We’re queering it, by the nature of how we’re making our family and how we are going to raise this future human person. That’s actually pretty badass.

It’s the rest of the world that frustrates me.

Since I’ve announced being pregnant, literally every person I run into wants to talk baby stuff with me. It’s fine. I guess. I mean, it’s fine except I know it doesn’t happen in the same way to men whose wives or girlfriends are expecting. It doesn’t even happen the same way to Waffle because he isn’t the pregnant one, so he doesn’t have to talk about it with strangers and acquaintances as much. Literally when I went to a new eye doctor recently, she started talking kids with me and proceeded to try to convince me that making your own baby food was the way and the light. Which, fine, that’s fine advice, but we’re doing an eye exam right now?

At this point, I’ve mostly come to terms with the fact that being a Pregnant Woman and eventually a Mommy is going to define who I am to other people. Having a supportive queer partner at home and a supportive community around me makes all the difference.

Also, I’m an activist and an opportunist and, well, I know the day will come when I’m at a press conference or in front of a camera talking about some bill or cause and making a statement that starts with, “Well, as a mother, I believe…” That’s okay, too.

Being a parent, being a mom or dad, is a huge deal and it’s going to become a huge part of my identity. I just don’t want to lose myself in the process. Being a part of the Autostraddle family and meeting other amazing lesbian and queer moms has been so affirming to me, that we can queer “mommy-ness,” that we can be all of the things we are and also embrace being moms. So here I am, embracing it!

That was a lot of feelings. Ready for some more?

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

1. Cool for the Summer

I’ve been back-and-forth about whether we should get air conditioning for our house. We had a window unit, once upon a time, but then we put it in the pet room (we have a pet room) so our little furkids wouldn’t die in the summer. I wanted to get another AC at first, but then I looked into it more and realized that the growing demand for air conditioning is a huge contributor to global warming. It’s one of the biggest threats to the environment and it seemed wasteful to have two window units just so I could sleep comfortably.

So I sweat it out in the summer. I’m so cranky during the hot months. I’m miserable. I stuff my bra with ice packs, draw the blinds, and scowl in the dark on the worst days. When I realized I’d be due August 20th, which means I’ll be in my third trimester right during the hottest weeks of the summer, I quickly changed my tune about that AC thing. Long story short, we’re using our tax return to get central AC installed so that Baby T. Rex, Waffle, and I all make it through this summer pregnancy. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that my body is ready.

via giphy

2. Mommy Things I’ve Googled This Week:

• “charlie horse pregnancy”
• “babywearing best carrier”
• “vulva fell asleep pregnant”
• “plus size when did you show 24 weeks”
• “weird dreams pregnant”
• “when did partner husband feel baby kick”
• “can baby hear my cat”

3. Both Hands

Glucose finger stick testing is taking its toll on my tough little fingers. I’ve got little bitty dots on the sides of all my fingertips where my tiny needle prick holes are healing and a couple fingers are developing light callouses. So that’s a fun thing that’s happening. I have to crank up the needle depth by half a turn to pierce through the tough parts now. It doesn’t help that I favor my left hand. For some reason, it bleeds better and hurts less than my right hand. Why? I don’t know! Tell me how human biology works!

4. Give Green a Chance!

We got the room painted the green color and we both like it a lot. It’s bright, but not shockingly bright and it definitely isn’t pastel. It’s exactly what we wanted. With the white trim and darker brown furniture, I think it’ll be the right kind of primary-colored jungle feel.

No regrets.

Which is good because Waffle has a serious case of…

5. Dino Fever

It’s getting intense. Here’s just a small sampling of dino stuff Waffle has bought in the past couple weeks, mainly from Etsy sellers.

Crochet dinos by IvoryTreeHouse, outlet covers by cathyscraftycovers, receiving blanket from TJ Maxx.

These should be coming soon, too!

Drawer knobs and fan pulls from Thimbletowne

Say hello to the pièce de résistance to the dino nursery, this adorable mobile.

felt mobile by feltcutemobile, pretend the kid has black hair and black eyes

I pushed back on the little white felt person, because our kid is Korean and I don’t want them staring for hours at a person who doesn’t look like them. They’re going to have their whole life to internalize racism and be inundated with images that don’t look like them. Believe me. I know.

Long story short, Waffle messaged the seller and we’re getting a custom version of this mobile with an Asian-looking kid at the center, which is going to be hella cute!

6. Things Remi Either Really Likes or Really Doesn’t Like Based on Intensity of Squirminess:

• my cellphone ringtone
• chicken tikki
• warm water directly hitting my belly
• when I lie on my side
• when I lie on my back
• French vanilla ice cream
• when I drink ice cold water
• conference calls on speakerphone

7. Surprise! (Gender)

One of the midwives at our midwifery group put “surprise gender” as a note on our file so practitioners would stop asking. Bless her.

The number one question we get, by far, is, “What are you having?” Of course, the snarky answer is, “A baby!” or, “A human!” What people actually want to know is the assigned sex of our dino. The answer is, we don’t know, chose not to find out, and we don’t want to know. It’s not so much that we want to be surprised. We don’t plan on having pink and blue cigars at the ready in the waiting room. I don’t care if the doctor yells, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” and I also don’t care who looks between the legs of our newborn to assign a sex based on visible genitalia. We genuinely don’t feel the need to know. We aren’t taking bets on what it will be, though we also get asked a lot what we think it is going to be. Honestly, I have no idea and that’s fine.

Ugh. I mean, I guess you can buy these gender reveal invites on Amazon if you really want to, if that’s your thing.

It’s also not that we don’t believe in gender. Quite the opposite. (If you believe in gender, clap your hands!) It’s that gender is, in fact, very real and we don’t want to start putting gender feelings on Baby T. Rex before it even emerges. Even if we try our very best, we will start to imagine what T. Rex is like if we start thinking of them as a “boy” or “girl.” We want to meet them when they get here. It’s why we have one gender neutral name picked out, regardless of assigned sex. So we can imagine them in our life and our family without getting bogged down by imagining two different gendered futures.

Of course, we believe in gender, but not in holding hard and fast to gender norms. Whatever gender T. Rex ends up being, whenever T. Rex determines their gender, we’re going to be just fine with that. We’ll probably use pronouns congruent with the assigned sex after birth, for simplicity’s sake, but if T. Rex comes out as something else later in life, that’s fine with us.

Unfortunately, I don’t always feel like having this whole conversation with my acquaintances, much less perfect strangers who ask this question. So to save time and emotional energy, I just say that we want to be surprised if they push for details. It’s not honest, but it ends the awkward conversation faster.

8. Furbaby, Meet Baby

I’m pretty sure our xenophobic and emotionally-fragile cat will freak when we bring home a new human. He’s afraid of everything: loud noises, knocking on the door, things that sound similar to knocking on the door, human voices, new furniture, new smells, people food, dogs barking, children’s laughter, the vacuum cleaner, the broom, shoes.

Will this weirdo be ok? Should we make him listen to baby sounds?

I’ve considered getting one of those baby sounds for pets albums. A lot of people seem to get these for their dogs before they bring home a baby. Anyone tried it? Does it work for cats?

9. Heel-Toe-Heel-No

In college, I would traipse across campus in the dead of winter in 5″ heeled shoes like it was nothing, schlepping two tons of books in my shoulder bag to boot. Quite a femme bragging right, considering I went to one of the coldest and snowiest colleges in the U.S. But that was then and this is over a decade later. I’ve started to trade out my high heels for flats and platforms over the last few years, saving the stilettos for special occasions only. I gave away my last pair of 5″ heeled boots last year, after putting them on for a party and realizing I was physically incapable of walking in them. Your center of gravity changes as you get older and it changes a lot when you’re preggers.

This past week, I tried to wear a pair of sensible platform heels to work, 3″ Aerosole brand shoes with a whole lot of cushion. Aerosoles is an American brand that is literally designed for comfort. By the end of the day, I could barely walk. I almost fell to my death trying to descend three flights of stairs.

via collegeproblems.org

So flats it is, from here until the end of pregnancy and then, well, probably in general. I am a masochist at heart, but comfort is winning over fashion right now.

10. Baby’s First Party Photobooth

As much as some people have been asking for bump pictures, it’s just not something I do. Depending on the time of day and what I’m wearing, I don’t always even look that bump-y. Just yesterday some person told me I didn’t look pregnant at all, which I’m never sure what to say back to. Is it a compliment? Is it a commentary on my weight? Should I be flattered? Should I be offended? Either way, I just don’t take bump pics. I do spend a lot of time staring at myself in the bathroom mirror and frequently grill Waffle on whether my belly is changing. I just don’t think to take pics. Maybe I’ll feel inspired in the coming months.

We were in NYC for a party last weekend, though, and we took a photobooth picture. So here’s your bump picture, world! Remi’s First Photobooth! (Actually, not true, we took another photobooth picture when Remi was a mere embryo on New Year’s Eve.) Eat it up!

Me (with Remi in utero), Waffle, and our friend.

Countdown to Baby T. Rex: Crying Over MasterChef Junior and Halfway There (23 Weeks)

If you didn’t pop into the Friday Open Thread last month, you may not know that my queer house spouse and I are expecting. Yes, I’m knocked up and it’s every bit as weird and fascinating as I thought it would be.

We found out on December 14, 2015, shortly after rolling out of bed in a cozy hotel room at the Wyndham Garden Chelsea in NYC. Our flight was departing in a few hours, so we were hazily pulling on clothes and cramming dirty laundry and travel detritus back into our luggage.

It was our third month of trying to conceive using anonymous donor sperm and IUI (intrauterine insemination). We’d only bought three vials to start, knowing we’d have to take a break and try again later in 2016 if we didn’t get pregnant before the end of 2015. There were about a million blood tests and transvaginal ultrasounds and appointments and then we were ready to do the thing.

We tried to remain pragmatic about it, knowing that it rarely “sticks” on the first try. Still, the first time around, it was hard not to imagine that we might be one of the lucky few, that it might work right away. This was compounded by the fact that I’ve never been pregnant before and didn’t know what to expect. Also, I chose to use Clomid to stimulate ovulation, which had side effects that imitated pregnancy symptoms. So I was Googling: “early pregnancy signs cramping,” “early pregnancy signs neon yellow pee,” “first-week pregnancy symptoms,” “hot flashes pregnancy,” etc. etc. and I was cautiously optimistic that it had happened. It hadn’t.

The first and second rounds, my ovaries only released one mature egg each time, which is normal if you are conceiving without medical intervention, but we were paying cash money each time and we decided we needed to double down. (I never planned to use fertility drugs at all, but once we started actually doing this thing—and paying the bills—I changed my mind.)

By the time we got to round three, I was using a higher dose of Clomid to work my ovaries into hyper-drive and a HCG trigger shot to send as many eggs flying into the hopefully-fertile abyss as possible. I had three mature eggs by the time we went in for our third IUI appointment. Of course, I had a million weird body things happening this cycle: the weird pee, the uterine cramps, the dull aches, the hot flashes, the mood swings. Still, I was pretty sure it was all the drugs and hormones I’d been taking and convinced myself that it probably didn’t work again. I don’t like setting myself up for disappointment.

Waffle packed a pregnancy test for our NYC trip, knowing the last day of our trip would be the first day we could get an early positive. We didn’t think or talk about it too much over the few days we were there. We were seeing friends and religiously attending a theatre show we’re a little obsessed with. I rolled my eyes when he pulled the pregnancy test out of his luggage as we were trying to get ourselves packed and out the door. “Do you really want me to do this now?” I asked. I took the individually wrapped pee stick and hovered over the pristine hotel toilet. Waffle lurked outside the open door as though he was afraid to cross the threshold into my pee-area (which is unusual for us—we’re usually all up in each other’s bathroom space). “Don’t look at it without me!” he said from the doorway. It was kind of too late, though. As soon as I looked down between my legs, I saw two lines. Two bright, clear, crisp, assertive, happy-horrifying pink lines.

“You have to wait three minutes,” Waffle read off the back of the pregnancy test box.

“Uh, is two lines pregnant?” I asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

“I wasn’t trying to look, but…I definitely see two lines.”

Waffle came into the bathroom and confirmed that I wasn’t having double vision or a brain hemorrhage or something. Then we tried to act normal while we were both clearly freaking out. It was thrilling in a terrifying way, like the moment just past the very top of the roller coaster when your stomach drops out and you lose touch with gravity. As much as we wanted it and paid hard-earned cash to make it happen, there was no way to emotionally prepare for this moment. Three rounds of IUI is the average for conception using IUI, but I’d had some timing issues with my cycle. After the first two duds, I’d convinced myself the third would be a miss, too.

Yet there were two undeniable pink lines on the used pregnancy test I wrapped in tissue and left in the hotel bathroom. (Sorry, hotel cleaning staff.) We’d need a blood test to confirm, but it was pretty clear. We kissed, stared at each other with ridiculous grin-grimaces on our faces, finished packing, and headed to JFK airport.

So we’re a little over half-way through now, just past the 23-week mark. It feels like August 20th is a million years away, but it also feels like it’s going to be here before we know it. From now until the day Baby T. Rex decides to meet the outside world, I’m gonna write down some of the weird and wonderful and less-wonderful stuff I’m thinking, feeling, and over-processing, as queers do.

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

1. Literally everything makes me cry

I’m not a crier. I’m a deeply empathetic person, but I also keep very distinct personal boundaries and I definitely don’t like to show emotions, like, on my face. I really resist the idea that hormones affect me because it sounds like patriarchal bullshit, but pregnancy hormones affect me. OMG. I teared up over a scoop of ice cream the other night because it was so good. I knew I could no longer deny it when I started crying, no, bawling when my favorite MasterChef Junior contestant was sent home. I felt the tears coming, which is usually where crying at TV or movies begins and ends for me, then I was sobbing. Like, gross snotting and sobbing and having to wipe off my glasses. Because this little girl was so sweet and just a perfect little cupcake too good for this world.

Chef Kya Lau, 8-year-old perfect human who tragically did not win MasterChef Junior

I wanted her to be in the finale so badly. She was the youngest contestant and the last-standing Asian-American contestant and I just like, imprinted on her deeply. I blame my overreaction completely on Baby T. Rex. I mean, though, look how perfect and adorable she is!

2. Puke free, baby!

I was one of the lucky ones. I never got morning sickness, ever. Thank fucking goodness, because I hate throwing up. I hate it so much. In college, I was one of those people who would hold it in when I was drunk or hungover, even though it would probably feel better to just let it all out. In fact, I think the last time I threw up was on my birthday 10 years ago and it was actual hell. Cranberry-pink-vomit-bathmat-destroyed-drunk-ugly-crying-in-the-bathtub-hell. I’m so glad my constitution has been strong.

3. Booties, booties, booties, booties, rockin’ everywhere

Waffle has gone into full nesting mode and is buying everything dino-related and/or adorable on Etsy. He bought four pairs of sneaker booties this week, which I believe strongly is four pairs of booties that Baby T. Rex is going to kick or pull off immediately. If they are anything like me when I was a kid (or adult), they are going to want to be as nude as possible as much as possible. The booties are pretty cute, though. Baby shoes are annoyingly adorable, in general.

I mean, they are pretty cute. (from BABYCROCHETfashion shopM)

4. Goodbye, sugar high.

I was diagnosed with prediabetes about a year ago and, like, honestly I just didn’t give a fuck. Like, I was supposed to meet with a nutritionist and I didn’t because I’m a proud fat girl and that stuff is triggering and weird for me and I just didn’t want to. Because of my prediabetes diagnosis, I was screened really early for gestational diabetes. Guess what? I have it!

At first, my midwives were concerned that I actually had undiagnosed Type II diabetes because early gestational diabetes usually means you are Type II. I was kind of scared, not that Type II is the worst thing, but just that it would make my pregnancy higher risk and it would mean a pretty significant long-term lifestyle change. However, after some testing and meeting with a diabetes nurse, it was clear that I just had plain ol’ prediabetes prior to being knocked up. It was a relief and a wake-up call, too. I’ve been able to keep my blood sugar normal, with no impact on T. Rex, through a carb-controlled diet and light exercise.

Being pregnant and having to carb-count is kind of the cruelest joke. It definitely takes the fun out of “eating for two.” If I’m honest, though, I’ve never felt better. I don’t feel hungry and I can sense a change in my energy levels.

Also, the emphasis of the diet isn’t on losing weight, as it would be if I wasn’t pregnant, so I’m not struggling too much with fat girl triggers. Any time I’ve dieted intentionally before, it’s made me spiral into negative self-talk and emotional breakdown. Surprisingly, this has been OK, though I struggle sometimes with having to plan my whole day around my six-meal schedule. I have to think about food, literally, from the time I wake up until I go to bed. I’ve gotten pretty good at the finger stick testing, though. I did it totally by feel in a dark movie theater the other day like a boss.

5. Baby T. Rex is already making me a better person and I hate it

Speaking of making lifestyle changes, it’s so me that I’m suddenly doing things that I haven’t ever been able to do before, like find time for 30 minutes of exercise each day. I am kind of horrible at taking care of myself physically, emotionally, etc. I’ve always had a habit of putting other people before me. I work in social justice and helping fields. I’m always overcommitted and falling behind. Self-care is a constant challenge for me. Even though T. Rex is still a part of me, not a separate person, somehow being responsible for their health and development has flipped a switch for me. Suddenly, I can find time for exercise and say no to yet another evening meeting after work and plan ahead to cook meals at home. I hate that it takes being about this little fetus dinosaur for me to actually do these things. I’m hoping I can continue to do them for myself after T. Rex is born because it feels really good.

6. Choppin’ broccoli

For some reason, Baby T. Rex loathes broccoli. I love broccoli and I keep forgetting I can’t eat it. I’ll have a couple bites of broccoli and everything will be cool, then I’ll take another bite and like, ABORT ABORT NO SWALLOW AHHHHH!!! It’s very sad because broccoli is delicious.

My sworn enemy. (via Medical News Toad)

7. Clear Eyes, Full Bladder

The last time I was both this over-hydrated and dehydrated all the time, I was at A-Camp. I’ve never liked drinking water and now it’s all I do all day long. Also, peeing in every public restroom I come across in my daily travels, out of necessity. Also, almost peeing my pants or actually kind of peeing my pants on the regular.

8. Fetus storytime with the boi

Waffle and I have this thing now where every Sunday he reads me my weekly update from a pregnancy website. It usually happens late at night before we go to bed. The site is kind of heteronormative, of course, so some of the stuff about “my husband” isn’t applicable, but straight women don’t refer to their partners as “non-gestational carriers,” either, so… Anyway, it’s neat-o to review together what T. Rex is doing this week and what my body is doing in relation to that. Like T. Rex can hear now and it can taste what I eat and it can sense light. WEIRD SCIENCE! I hope T. Rex likes all this hot sauce I’m scarfing. As you can probably tell, I’m a low-key pregnant woman, so I’m not really into the fancy pregnancy apps or taking stylized bump pics, but this is one baby-making tradition I enjoy with Waffle that’s just between us.

9. Gestational Diabetes Test Kitchen Score Sheet:

wheat bread plus fruit: A+
wheat bread plus tortilla chips: B+
wheat bread plus wheat pasta: B-
wheat bread plus potatoes: B-
lentils plus basmati rice: A+
lentils plus potatoes: C+
lentils plus pasta: D-
brown rice plus beans: A+
brown rice plus lentils: B-
brown rice plus fruit: A-
injera plus lentils: C+
injera plus collards: B+
pizza: surprisingly B+
white bread: surprisingly B+
white rice plus literally anything – FAIL FAIL EPIC FAIL GAME OVER MAN

10. Arm stumps and alien face

Waffle thinks our baby is already the cutest baby ever, based solely on ultrasound pics. Honestly, I feel like all ultrasound pics of babies kind of look the same. Like, it looks like a sea monkey, then an alien, then a larger alien. It’s pretty cool to see it move around and listen to the heartbeat and all that, but it doesn’t look “cute” to me yet. Waffle strongly disagrees. That said, the name “Baby T. Rex” comes from our first ultrasound, at just seven weeks, when the fetus looked like a little swimmy fish with arm stumps and a tail.

Seven week viability ultrasound confirmed I’m harboring a little creature!

“It has my T. Rex arms!” Waffle (who is part dino-boi) whispered to me as we were checking out at the front desk, sending me into a giggle fit. From then on, it was Baby T. Rex. Its arm stumps have grown to a longer length and it lost its tail by the next ultrasound, but the nursery will be dino-themed.

Be honest, 12-week-old Baby T. Rex looks like a stock photo of a fetus? Amiright?

11. I need Isabel to Google some stuff for me

Google is your best friend and worst enemy when you’re preggers. Every time I feel something weird or think I do, I’m on Google looking it up. How did pregnant people do pregnancy before internet forums? I lurk, but reading the experiences of other pregnant people (OK, typically very heteronormative moms) is mostly reassuring. I can lose hours scrolling through forums, though, just making sure that this weird cramp I’m having is OK and Baby T. Rex is not in danger.

I’ve found a couple forums for lesbian moms (which I’m not, but close enough) and once in a while I come across a pregnant dad in a thread, but there isn’t a lot out there that is for queer parents. Even the lesbian moms can be kind of…gendernormative and like, not my people. I guess it’s why we started our own queer family blog way back when, though I’ve really got to get back to updating it. I did join a feminist parenting group on Facebook and that’s been kind of a nice safe place to find other parents who want to smash patriarchy.

12. Moving and kicking, but not screaming yet

Feeling a baby kick you from the inside is kind of like having your first confirmed orgasm. Like, you’re not sure if you had an orgasm until you really have a good one and then it’s like, “OH YEAH THAT WAS DEFINITELY AN ORGASM!” I’d felt little tiny maybe-movements-maybe-gas since about 20 weeks, but this week Baby T. Rex went into full active mode. And won’t stop moving. It’s similar to that flippy feeling your tummy gets when you go over a hill on a roller coaster. Before, when it was just once in a while and very light, it felt like popcorn popping or light tapping. Now it’s, like, most of the day, every day, tummy flips and pronounced poking. It’s pretty wild. It’s definitely weird. Like, what is even happening with my body right now? I don’t hate it because it’s somewhat reassuring, but oh boi, this kid is going to be as hyper-active as I was when I was a tot. We’re in for it!

13. Does this make me a hippy?

I’m drinking apple cider vinegar like a crunchy mom and I’m really into it. Supposedly it brings down your blood glucose numbers if you have diabetes. I don’t know if it’s actually helping metabolize my glucose or whatever, but I do know it’s delicious with fresh lemon juice and stevia. I found a pasteurized version with the mother intact at Trader Joes, breaking the family moratorium on shopping at Trader Joe’s. (Waffle works for a competing grocery chain.)

14. Going to Lowe’s is the best way to start a fight with your partner

So far, we agree on the major baby-planning questions and decisions. We did manage to get into an almost-shouting match in a suburban Lowe’s over paint color, though. I actually didn’t care too much about what color the baby room was as long as it was bright and generally gender neutral. I thought we both agreed on a jungle green color, then Waffle brought orange into the mix. I was like, “OK, fine, I guess, if that’s what you want.” Waffle wanted me to have a strong opinion one way or another. I just didn’t have a strong opinion. I was like, “This is your thing. I don’t care,” which was definitely the wrong thing to say. This resulted in us passive-aggressive poking at each other until we were on the verge of an epic blow-out, over paint.

We settled on green.

15. Belly worship

Being a self-proclaimed fat girl, I feel like people can’t tell I’m showing unless they know or see me every day. Like, I already have kind of a nice, round, protruding belly. I love my belly. The shape has changed in the last few weeks. It’s hardened and is more “up” than “out” now, but I don’t necessarily look pregnant to the untrained eye. Well, I guess I kind of always look pregnant to the untrained eye. When I was trying on maternity clothes a couple months ago, I didn’t need the bump padding they have in the dressing room to imitate a second-trimester bump. My body is naturally bump-shaped.

I both love and hate that showing off my stomach is now socially acceptable because I’m knocked up, because being pregnant is the ultimate heteronormative act and suddenly my body is desirable and fertile instead of gross and offensive. It’s liberating and infuriating.

That said, a lot of my regular clothes work well as maternity clothes because my body mass hasn’t changed too much yet. Speaking of, maternity pants with the belly panel are my new best friend. Why was I not wearing maternity pants before? Why are they not marketing these for non-pregnant people who want to be comfortable and have pants that stay up over their belly? I’m a lifetime convert. I’ll be damned if I go back to regular jeans.

16. Pickleback, hold the whiskey

My cravings are salty, more than sweet. Since I’m on a gestational diabetes diet, this is actually ideal. I could drink a whole jar of dill pickle brine every damn day. Oh, geez, now I’m craving pickle juice. Ugh. BRB.

Gayby Maybe? The Epic Queer Parenting Roundtable!

Queer parents have been around forever (doing excellent work, by the way), but the conversation around queer moms having kids has evolved a lot in the last decade or so. When I talk to older folks and elders in our communities, many are childfree. Certainly many are childfree by choice, but others wanted kids and never thought it was an affordable or socially acceptable option. Some have kids from previous relationships before they came our or are step-parents to their partner’s kids from previous relationships. When I think about the lesbian elders I know, it seems like only a handful had kids with their queer partners, through adoption or conceiving on their own. And of course those who did, really really really really really really wanted it and worked hard for it and often faced a lot of obstacles to make it happen (and often had a lot of socio-economic advantages to make it work).

Right now, the choice of whether to have children or not is relevant to queer women in ways that it simply wasn’t for generations before us. In the last couple years, my lesbian 30-something friends have been blowing up my Facebook feed with ultrasound and baby pics. The decision to be childfree seems more like a choice than a circumstance. While many ways of expanding our families are still expensive and hard to access, the idea of having kids is more reachable than ever before. According to the 2015 Autostraddle grown-ups reader survey, about half of Autostraddle readers age 29 and older plan to have or already have kids.

Unlike our heterosexual counterparts, having kids is not socially or culturally compulsory. As getting hitched and having kids becomes more common, maybe that will change. Maybe our parents and grandparents will start harassing us about putting a ring on it and getting knocked up. But for now, it feels like lesbian and bi women are mostly still able to make this choice on our own terms. And that’s a good thing.

But gosh, there’s a lot to talk about. We need a place to have some grown-up conversations about queer parenting decisions. You may have noticed we’ve been publishing a lot of baby stuff lately. You hopefully followed Haley‘s Queer Mama vlog, chronicling her and her partner Simone’s adventures in making their perfect small human, Juniper Jude. Caitlin broke and healed our hearts by sharing her experiences with pregnancy after a miscarriage and her babies, Anders and Graeson. We’re published essays about baby-making as a single black lesbian, DIY insemination, and navigating pregnancy and trauma.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg under the queer parenting tag. There is so much to say about queer parenting and there are so many questions.

So many, in fact, that we asked you to send us your questions about queer baby-making, family-growing, and parenting. Then, we gathered together a group of folks who can speak from a range of personal experiences to answer. And here we are! Of course, there are many parenting perspectives that are not represented here and these fine folks can’t represent all queer parents’ experiences. So we hope you will continue to ask questions, educate each other, share your experiences, and discuss these topics in the comments. First, let’s meet your Gayby Mayby parents and parents-to-be:

Christina works in fundraising and is buried under a pile of dirty laundry. She lives in Maryland with her wife, 11 month old daughter, enthusiastic dog, and indifferent cat. A fertility clinic got her knocked up after seven months and 41 weeks and 4 days after that, she popped out a baby at home with a couple of midwives and her dog supervising. She formula fed her baby, finished her Masters with a 6 month old and continues to avoid the angry mob. Christina used to blog at Magical Unicorn Parenting until she got too tired to think straight and may do so again at some point. She believes in coffee.

Asher is a 26-year-old activist and aspiring writer living in St. Louis. As a tiny, black american/Yoruba, lesbian with anxiety who wants to raise her child in a race conscious, queer, intersectional feminist home she knows she’s in for an adventure and she’s pretty stoked about it. Her awesome relationship with her mom made her want to be a parent from a young age and she’s spent over a decade learning everything she can about adoption, pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, and early development.

Polly is a paralegal and non-fiction writer and Jess is a community college English professor. They live in Rochester, New York (in the woodsy non-NYC part of the state). Polly and Jess have a 2 year old son they adopted through the foster care system. During their five years as foster parents, Polly and Jess have fostered 13 children ranging in age from newborn to eighteen. Parenting has taught Polly that everything she always thought about parenthood was wrong (very wrong) or at least woefully inadequate. Jess says “Though we were LITERALLY trained to be parents, I still feel like I’m winging it most of the time.”

KaeLyn is a 32-year-old community organizer, sexuality educator, and contributing editor at Autostraddle. She and her partner live in Upstate New York with their furkids and (kind of on hiatus) blog about adding a human kid to the mix at Queer Family Matters. KaeLyn is currently trying to get preggers and has lots of emotions about getting knocked up as a queer feminist Korean adoptee who still likes cats more than babies.

Marybeth works as a compensation analyst for a supermarket and Michelle is an Ob/Gyn at a community hospital. They live in Rochester, NY. After Michelle’s unsuccessful attempts to become pregnant, Marybeth, as the younger spouse, took on the challenge. They now have 2 children together, Mason (age 3) and Alisa (age 9) months. It’s important to note that Michelle is an Ob/Gyn, not a pediatrician. Her expertise is in bringing babies into the world, not raising them! They are both learning as parents everyday! Marybeth says, “Just when we think we’ve got it down, the kids change the game!”

Lucy lives outside Boston with her wife and two daughters. She is a contributing writer for AfterEllen where she writes about mom stuff, sports stuff, and recaps The Fosters (which involves a lot of yelling at Brandon Foster). She has been a mostly stay-at-home mom since giving birth to her older daughter and a writer whenever she can find a spare five minutes. In 2014 she was able to steal enough time to write a short story called Dragon Slayer.

Your Burning Questions about Babies and Queer Mom Life

What makes queer parenthood different or unique?

Christina: Straight people have a *lot* of opinions about what makes queer parenthood different. A lot of those assumptions are based on heteronormative stereotypes about gender and are really unfortunate. There’s no law that says my wife is any more or less nurturing than a husband would be, or that my need to provide for my family is as strong as a dude’s. I could say that you have to deliberately want to have children as queer parents, but that slights straight couples with infertility issues and forgets that birth control exists. It’s definitely possible to have whoops babies as a queer couple, but not as possible.

I think, as a whole, it reminds you that you are trying to shoehorn yourself into a system that is not designed for you and that does not think to automatically include you. They will if you make yourself known, but from reminding your medical provider that the birth certificate form needs to be parent 1 / parent 2 instead of mother / father to finding a children’s book that features same sex parents without being about same sex parenting to the confused faces of your daycare provider, it’s just a reminder that you are different.

There’s also a little bit of fear in the back of my mind whenever I find a new healthcare provider or research daycare. Is this going to be the day that I encounter institutional homophobia? How will that look? What will they say? Honestly, if someone doesn’t want my money because my daughter has a two mom family, I don’t want to give it to them, but I still find myself agonizing over the imaginary confrontation.

KaeLyn: It was embracing the idea of “queer parenting”, specifically, that made me grow into the idea of having kids. Waffle has always wanted kids and I have always been like, “No.” I felt the same way about marriage for a long time, but here I am married and trying to get knocked up. All of my own free will. I was the one who brought up both topics, after a lot of thought. What was keeping me from embracing the idea was never a fear of children or of having children. It was the way the world views these super heteronormative ideas of pregnancy and parenting. It is the institutional and systematic oppression that is right there under the surface of the topics of marriage and kids. I didn’t fear kids. I feared losing my identity as queer. I feared disappearing into a white picket fence vortex. Being childfree by choice not only felt like a comfortable place, it felt like a subversive one.

But it can also be subversive to queer parenthood and to queer motherhood. I get really excited when I think about being able to raise a human who shares my values, about creating “family values” tied to intersectional feminism, about busting gender norms in my own home. I got inspired by looking at other queer parents’ blogs: poly families, pregnant men, pregnant butches, glitter femme mamas, QTPOC families, trans moms. I found my queer community, even if we’re far and few in popular media. There is a lot that queer family-making has to address to be truly intersectional in our understanding of where parenting and child-having intersects with race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. I’m excited about queer parenting now, about being part of that expanding and exciting discourse.

Lucy: Everything and nothing. Everything is different in that we get to decide a lot of things in a way most hetero couples can’t or won’t. Some of that is super irritating. Like why can’t we just have sex and poof! get pregnant? That totally sucks. But, it also means that we get to decide on timing of when to have kids, who is going to carry a baby, how we want to get pregnant, whose sperm we want to use, whether we want that process to be open or not or some kind of hybrid. Choice, choice, and more choice can make your head spin and also be really liberating. Honestly, there is something really satisfying about talking to the moms at the local playgroup about how my wife and I each carried a baby and having them all say, “Holy crap, I wish my husband could carry the next one.”

Nothing is different. Once you peel back the layer of making choices about who carries a baby and who cares for a baby and who washes dishes and does middle of the night feeding etc, there’s nothing different about being a lesbian parent than there is about being a straight one. Babies will poop on you, spit up in your face, babble your name, hold your hand, and tell you they love you without caring if you are gay or not. Being a parent is a universally humbling experience and much of that has nothing to do with being queer or not.

Asher: For me, I read this question and I think, “Queer parenting is just like doing anything else while queer”. Like, parenting is parenting regardless of orientation or gender but being queer means that queer parenting looks a little different. Like Lucy said, we get to decide a lot of things in ways that hetero parents can’t, won’t, or don’t even consider. In just conceiving or adopting we have so many options (private domestic adoption, foster to adopt, sperm bank, known donor, known surrogate, who will carry the tiny human, etc)! Also I feel like because so much of being queer involves forging your own path, being okay with defying normative expectations, and advocating for yourself, queer parents are more likely to question how they want to parent and what values they want to instill in their kids (instead of relying on: “This is how I was raised so I’ll raise my kid just like that.”). I know that for myself, I’m intersectional as fuck so I knew right off the bat I’d have to consider how best to teach my kid to not only deal with racism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, patriarchy, and classism, but to take pride in who they are and what their family looks like.

The more I educated myself on how to parent in an intersectional feminist way the more I thought about the way I was raised and questioned what parts of parenting I wanted to keep (Hello, encouraging questioning!) and what parts I wanted to toss (Goodbye, whoopings!). I’m with Kaelyn in that queer parenting is one of the things I most look forward to when it comes to making babies.

Jess: I have no idea. I’ve never parented any other way!

Marybeth: In my viewpoint, it’s parenting, period! We all face very similar, dare I say, the same challenges in parenting. How we get here is different, how we have to help those around us understand how we got here is different. But ultimately one parent spends more time with the kids while the other parent spends more time providing for the family. At least that is how it seems when I compare our family to that of my friends and co-workers. Yes, we had to make more choices to get us here and there are no accidents in our world, but we are just trying to raise our children to be the best they can be. It is not easy and all parents will have challenges. What I have realized as a mom is that we all need to stick together and support one another, whatever the family situation. Because most days at daycare drop off I exchange a knowing look of exhaustion with another mom or another dad, especially if we are both running behind at the start of our days! But I do believe being a parent is simply incredible and the best “job” I’ve ever had (probably with the most ups-and-downs)!

If you’d known five years before you tried to have kids that in five years you were going to try to have kids, is there anything specific you would have done to prepare or otherwise ready yourself?

Christina: I knew I wanted to have kids when I was 28 and we started when I was 32, so a lot of the things we did were with kids as a question mark in the back of our minds. We bought a house with a potential nursery, banked savings for treatments, that sort of thing. In hindsight, I would have banked a lot more money than we did (fertility treatments were really expensive). And while I love my puppy with the passion of a thousand suns, I’m not sure I would have adopted her in 2013 knowing we’d have a baby in 2015. Carving time for the dog when you’re already exhausted from dealing with a newborn has not been easy. It’s gotten better in the past few months, but not a lot better.

Lucy: I gave birth to our first child when I was 29. Five years before that I was still in law school and my then fiancee (now wife) hadn’t started medical school yet. What should we have known then? Oh! I’ve got one. Frozen sperm don’t swim for shit. We spent about 5 months thinking we could get pregnant with frozen sperm at home without doing an IUI. NOPE. Later, a doctor told us that was equivalent to dropping some sperm in the ocean and hoping it worked. Don’t be as stupid as we were. Don’t waste your money like that.

Christina: Lucy’s got a good point, I wish I’d known how long it was going to take. We are told throughout our teens and early 20’s that even looking at a penis will get us pregnant, and then when we actually want to, we find out it’s a much more involved process. I started our IUIs thinking I’d get knocked up the first try, no problem. HA! I have acquaintances who tried home insemination with a known donor for two years before they got pregnant. The conception process is also emotionally fraught and holds you hostage for a lot of time during it.

Jess: Trying to keep up with a toddler at 39 is EXHAUSTING!

Marybeth: We knew we wanted kids, but we waited. We wanted to do things…to travel…well, I wanted to. I knew we would not be able to travel as easily once we had kids. The waiting may have impacted Michelle’s ability to get pregnant. Because I am 7 years younger, our plan was for her to carry the first baby and me to handle the second and any others. The realization that she was not going to carry one of our children had us “stuck” for awhile. We were considering all our options and I was mentally preparing myself to be the only one that would carry our children. I got pregnant with Mason at age 35, otherwise known as “advanced maternal age.” So we were concerned about the health of our first baby and how well I would do pregnant. Lucky for us, it all worked out! I will say that I was set in my ways to NOT use fertility aids when we were trying to get pregnant the first time. I was convinced I would have multiples if I even used clomid. My levels were good and our doctor humored me. We got pregnant with Mason on the 3rd IUI, with only HCG as the added helper. I was quite pleased with myself! For our 2nd, I was 37 and my levels had changed. Our doc let me try one round without fertility aids and then suggested clomid. Clomid didn’t work after two rounds, so on round four we went with injectables and were successful in getting pregnant and in only having one baby as a result! I think I needed to have a little control of the process, because I really had no control. I remember being so frustrated about how this was supposed to be science helping us get pregnant and, in my opinion, was just not exact enough!

Oh – I now know why you should have kids younger though…sleep deprivation! I think we deal with lack of sleep better in our 20’s and/or early 30’s. Michelle is 45. I am 38. We are TIRED!

KaeLyn: We are trying now and I don’t think I took seriously how many emotions going through this process would bring up. We’re pretty pragmatic about this stuff, in general. We’re not super romantic about the process of getting pregnant. We just want it to work. And a lot of it has been pretty much what I thought it would be, very clinical and efficient. But I was still taken aback when I realized that I was not going to be in charge of my body at all once it all started. I mean, I am, but I feel out of control all the time between what I’m supposed to be eating and not eating and when and what vitamins to take and whether to take fertility drugs and pregnancy tests and why am I having these cramps and googling early pregnancy signs and generally feeling like my body is not my own right now. I can’t wait to get a positive test back, just so I know what is going on. I guess I’d say that if you are going to be the gestational carrier and, like me, pregnancy itself is a thing that is not 100% your cup of tea, be prepared for it to kind of take over your body and your life. The two week wait is the worst, is what I’m saying. I’m glad we are doing this roundtable because I learned so much in the process just reading about other queer moms’ experiences with pregnancy and parenting. There isn’t a ton of support out there that is LGBTQ-specific and I really, really would like us to have the kinds of forums and chatrooms and networks that straight moms do as they go through this stuff.

What did you feel really strongly about before arrival of kid that you ended up deciding to (or having to) completely throw out the window once kid arrived?

Christina: I had really strong feelings about wanting to breastfeed, but that never materialized for us. We had to start supplementing (under the advice of a lactation consultant) at five days old. I had chronic low supply issues and flat nipples, the baby never got a good latch and eventually decided against nursing all together at three months. I exclusively pumped for six months and finally weaned from the pump when the baby was 9 months. This was really, really devastating for me. I’d worried about bonding with the baby since my wife would be taking primary care while I work outside the home, but figured we’d have a nursing relationship to help compensate for it. Then that disintegrated and I felt panicked and left out. It also hit every feeling I had about not being good enough for my child and not being able to provide for her, which, in the postpartum haze of hormones, is really rough. Not to mention that a lot of the birthing and early parenting community has terrible things to say about formula and is really unkind to those who use it.

Parenting is, in a lot of ways, watching all of your self-righteous thoughts and feelings about how you’d parent erode slowly. I said I’d never use formula until, you know, I realized just how serious our nursing issues were. I said I’d never use the television instead of parenting until I needed my daughter to calm down for five minutes so I could pee. I said I’d never give my baby canned baby food until I tried to feed a six month old homemade solids while in grad school and working full time. You adapt and find your way through.

Lucy: I am just nodding along with everything Christina just said. Every single thought you have ever had about a parent screwing up in public, every single one, will come back to haunt you. It’s one of the greatest joys of watching friends and family, especially judgmental ones, have kids of their own because it humbles you. It will bring you to your knees and make you wonder what you were thinking over and over and over again. You will wonder how you could have ever been so stupid. But you can’t know until you have a kid. I can tell you that you will spend nights sleeping on the floor of your kid’s room because it’s the only way you can get any sleep when she turns 18 months and decides sleeping is for losers. I can tell you that and you will look at me like I am a total fool and a wussy parent who just needs to buckle down. And then you’ll find yourself on the floor with a sleeping bag you haven’t used in years just wishing for 5 minutes of peace. Think of me then and know I am smiling and wishing you sleep.

We came home from the hospital to zero bottles and no breast pump. Our older daughter refused to nurse so we sent my parents to the store to buy bottles, formula, and a pump. It’s like doctors knowing that the person with the most intricate birth plan will end up with a c-section, whatever you didn’t plan for will come true. Babies will do that to you. You will be wrong more times than you thought possible. Relax. Know everyone else was too and don’t be too bothered when everyone around you laughs at you. You’ll get your turn later.

Polly: Before we had children, both Jess and I were convinced that our kids would never partake in the commercial culture of childhood—we would avoid the trendy toys that are hawked every five minutes on Nickelodeon. We knew that our kids would play exclusively with educational toys and learning games (brand-free of course). We also thought that we could raise children who would not adhere to societal gender norms—our girls would love trucks and our boys tea parties. Ha! We were so naive. I sit here now in a living room buried in Jake and the Neverland Pirates merchandise and my two year old son has never had a tea party. In fact, he broke the tea set we bought him mere minutes after opening it by stomping it with a dinosaur.

Jess: TV is not the devil, pop-tarts are OK for breakfast (and sometimes lunch and dinner), and the occasional swear word or fart joke from a toddler in public is both embarrassing and hilarious.

Marybeth: I guess I should throw my need to control things right out the window, although I still try to keep some sort of control over our lives/household! It’s so interesting to read what others have responded with. I feel like I had a good handle on what it meant to take care of a newborn, but I was so naive about breastfeeding. The whole concept of it being natural gave me the impression that it would just work for me and for my baby. This was not the case with Mason. I blame him…jokingly…but really, it was his fault…he was a lazy sucker. He just wanted a bottle. He had a horrible latch and no matter how hard I tried, I could not make it work for us. My breaking point was at about five weeks postpartum when I threw the breastshield (that was supposed to help him latch easier) across our family room in a moment of defeat. That was the point when Michelle said she thought we needed to reevaluate the nursing. I asked her why. I really did not see how it had overwhelmed me. When I set my mind to something, I am not a person who fails, so this was a failure to me. In the end, my wonderful lactation consultant was the person who helped release me from my black hole of nursing. She said something to the effect of, “You don’t have to nurse. It may not be what works for you and your family,” and it opened everything up for me. It made me realize that what I needed to keep my family on track was to do what would work for us. I pumped until 12 weeks, but it was only about a quarter of his supply. Mason was basically formula fed. I will say things were so much easier and the guilt I was putting on myself did go away. I now remember how I would cringe in the middle of the night when he woke up for his feeding. I was so paranoid about getting him to nurse that I was not even enjoying my time with him. I know I made the right decision for us and for our family.

The experience with Mason also provided me with a better mental start for nursing Alisa. I basically decided that if she was like him, I would just pump what I could and move on. This girl is a ROCK STAR at nursing. She’s amazing and I am so happy that I was able to experience both. Alisa is nine-and-a-half months old and we are still going strong.

I also thought sleep would get better quicker. Although I know this can be different for everyone and I know we could have it worse. But living through the baby phase and the teething phase a second time makes me firm in my decision that our family is complete with two kids! I’m thinking back and realizing that I thought we could just do a little “cry it out” if the babies didn’t sleep. Mason would gag himself from crying and vomit even in just 10 minutes of crying. It was not for us. Neither one of us could justify allowing him to vomit just to get us sleep. We did a lot of rocking him to sleep. He’s a better sleeper now, but he will still wake up and come into bed with us. We are both okay with this, to a point. When he was in our bed so much that I had a backache, we needed to do some tough love. Ultimately, we do what works for us!

If you are partnered, did your partner induce lactation so they could nurse the baby? If you adopted, did either or both of you try to nurse?

Christina: My partner was never particularly interested in inducing lactation. I think this idea is lovely if both partners are on board, but it was first presented as the solution to my nursing problems. It both hurt my feelings and ducked the question. My partner’s breasts should not be the answer to my lactation failure issues (if for no other reason than it takes time to induce lactation). As time has moved on though, I see the benefit of co-nursing. It takes pressure off the carrying mom to be the sole source of food for the baby, meaning that not every feeding has to be you. You’ll never realize how much you treasure seven hours of uninterrupted sleep until you don’t have it for three months. Keep in mind that one of the drugs you use for this, domperidone, is not readily available in the United States.

Lucy: The thought never occurred to either of us. We each breastfed/pumped for the child we carried. We shared feeding for both babies though with either pumped milk in the night or formula. Sleep is a luxury and getting four hours in a row is heaven in those first weeks.

Michelle: I did think about this but quickly decided not to when a good friend of mine shared that it took three months of Domperidone and pumping before she got even a drop of colostrum.

I think I need a list with every variation of “mom” possible for my future household. What different mother titles do you use?

Christina: We use Mommy and Mama, but always forget which one we are.

Lucy: I am Mama and my wife is Mommy. Nothing cracks my kids up like when they accidentally switch names or confuses them more than when strangers use the names interchangeably.

Asher: I don’t currently use any titles since I’m not even pregnant yet but I’ve already got thoughts about which terms I like and which ones I’m not too keen on. I absolutely don’t want to be called “ma” or “mom”. “Màmá”, “mommy”, “bàbá” are the ones I’m leaning towards most now but also kids tend to come up with their own names for people so I’m open to that as well. Actually I’m kind of hoping for it. Please name me, tiny human! I don’t want to chose for myself.

Marybeth: We use Mama and Mommy, but we would mess up a lot in the beginning and now only occasionally.

KaeLyn: I used to call my grandma, who was also my daytime babysitter while my parents were are work, “Ama.” It was probably my Korean adoptee toddler-kind-of-recalling-language-even-though-I-was-then-learning-English version of the Korean colloquial word for mom, “Umma” (엄마). I like the idea of being an Umma/Ama. I took German for many years in high school and college and my mom is German-Swedish, so I sometimes call her “Mutti,” the casual German word for mom. Searching your native language or ancestry for words for “mom” and “mommy” in other languages is a great way to find alternatives that have meaning for you.

What are some alternatives to “mom” for genderfluid or gender non-binary parents?

KaeLyn: I know “baba” is a popular one. We has mixed feelings about using it, since it draws from cultures we aren’t a part of. My genderfluid and transmasculine partner is probably going to settle on “dad” and there are definitely lesbians who use dad, too. There’s a blog by a “lesbian dad” a.k.a. Polly Pagenhart that is a great resource. You can also make up your own word. Haley and Simone came up with “monie” for Simone, which I think is really, really cute. Or you can let your kids use your first names or a variation of your first names, if that feels OK to you.

Christina: One of the favorite ones I’ve heard is Momily, for a mom named Emily.

Asher: A genderqueer friend of mine’s kid calls them “sweetie”. I think that’s kind of a cute idea.

How do you deal with “mom” communities and stereotypes that are really heteronormative and conservative?

Christina: Funny story, I was super excited to join a BabyCenter group for my due date until I saw that they didn’t allow controversial topics to be discussed, including LGBT issues. So I took my controversial ass to Ravelry and found a great group of online support there. On the internet, I just try to avoid it whenever possible. We haven’t had to deal with it too much in person (yet), but it’s frustrating. I try to have some banked snarky answers.

Lucy: I challenge them or roll my eyes, usually. Honestly, the more I got to know the moms at the library play group I took our kids to the more they came to see how awesome our family was. Mostly they were jealous of the shared burdens of child rearing and the fact that we were having two kids but only had to be pregnant once. For every mom who was weird or uncomfortable at the start they almost universally got over it and expressed jealousy by the end.

Any tips for talking about LGBTQ issues with your kids? How do you prepare them for possibly being teased by other kids for having two moms (or queer parents)?

Lucy: We talk a lot in our house about how families are all different from single parents, adoptive parents, grandparent caregivers etc and we talk about our family a being a part of that overall patchwork. We live in liberal Massachusetts so haven’t had much issue but we are quick to challenge ideas that come home from school. If a kid doesn’t understand that our kids have two moms we talk to our kids about it. If it happens while we are around, we answer questions honestly and with kids, it’s never been much of a problem.

We have added some books with same-sex parents to our bookshelves (like “Mommy, Mama, and Me“) to give our kids a sense that their family isn’t bad because it’s different and to give them a sense that they aren’t the only ones with two moms.

KaeLyn: Not necessarily the same thing, but I grew up being pretty much the only Asian kid at my rural school and my parents did a pretty good job of preparing me for being “different.” One thing they did that I really admire is that they talked with me about our family and being adopted and looking different than my white peers. I don’t know that anything fully prepares a small kid for bullying. I still came home crying sometimes. But I knew I could talk to my parents about it and I wasn’t confused about who I was and who my family was. It made it a little easier to deal with the world.

I like to think the world is changing, too. Today’s kids hopefully won’t be the only ones with lesbian, gay, bi and/or trans parents in their school. But I always think about those isolated rural areas where that may not be the case and I think having the open conversation and support at home makes a huge difference.

Did you always know you wanted kids? If so, how did you know?

Christina: Around eight, I thought I would adopt a bunch of kids from the foster care system and raise them, since so many other kids in the world needed love. Around 16, I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll have one biologically.” Around 23, I thought I didn’t want kids, mostly because I couldn’t imagine supporting a child at that point in my life, working in theatre, making $20K a year and living with my aunt. My circumstances improved marginally, but I continued to feel that way until my late 20’s, when my biological clock kicked in with a vengeance and not only did I want kids, I wanted to be pregnant NOW NOW NOW. I changed careers, started making more money and started ticking off the milestones I had for kids (earning more money, owning a house, etc.). The more concrete it got as a future, the more I wanted it.

Lucy: Nope. I was sure I wouldn’t have kids for a long time. I was sure about it the same way I was sure I wouldn’t get married. I never imagined it was possible. At 18 I met my first girlfriend and she told me she was having kids and if I wasn’t interested I could take a hike. Well, that girl is my wife now. She was worth changing my mind and so are my kids.

Asher: I’ve always known I wanted to be a mother. From as early as I can remember when I was a kid I always carried around a baby doll and loved on her like she was my own. I read through my journal from when I was twelve the other day and even then I was talking about being a mom and thinking about potential baby names as if it were the most natural thing in the world. There are two things that I’ve always known about myself, one being that I like girls, the other being that I want to be a mother someday. I’ve just always known.

My own mother was/is a really amazing, wonderful, and accepting parent and I’ve always had a really close intimate bond with her. I want to try to create something beautiful like that with my own child.

Marybeth: I’ve always known. I remember not knowing what I wanted to do when I grew up, but knowing that I wanted to be a mother. I never pictured getting married or dreamed about my wedding day. But I pictured being a mother!

KaeLyn: I was strongly childfree by choice. Honestly, if I had not fallen in love with who I did, I don’t know if I’d be doing this right now. Because I never imagined myself as having a kid. I imagined having a career I loved and doing work for social change and lots of other things. I never imagined spouse and kids. I didn’t hate the idea. It just wasn’t on my Top Ten List of Things I Want to Accomplish In My Life. But I met and cultivated this beautiful thing with someone who is as different as me as different can be. Opposites attract or whatever. And we did my career stuff for the first ten years. Now it’s time to do the family stuff for him, and for us! I never thought I’d be as ready as I am, but I really am. My biological clock has been about creating change and creating words more than babes in the past, but I’ve never wanted to be pregnant as much as I do right now.

Queer Mama for Autostraddle Episode Eleven — My Birth Story Wasn’t At All What I Expected

I wasn’t at all scared to give birth. I’d spent most of my happily uneventful pregnancy feeling like a warrior goddess. My yoga teacher complimented my squats in the twice-weekly prenatal class I attended. I breathed deeply, grinning, with both hands plunged into ice during my mindfulness in childbirth and parenting classes. I’d read Ina May and Peggy Vincent and Natural Hospital Birth and Labor Day and half a dozen other titles. I was more than prepared; I was excited.

Early labor selfie

I have a unique relationship with pain. I’ve ecstatically subjected my body to intense sensations many people would find horrifying. I know something about endurance. I’d studied about how labor should go and ways I could help it along. I had an awesome doula who had birthed seven children of her own. I had a supportive partner with absolute faith in my ability to joyfully birth this baby.

A few weeks before my due date I re-made our little altar to focus energy from pregnancy to birth. As I had so many times in this journey of making and carrying this baby, I sat alone at my kitchen table, closed my eyes, took three slow breaths, and pulled a tarot card from my Osho Zen deck. The Master. Last card of the Major Arcana. I don’t believe in tarot, really, but I like it as a tool for self-reflection. I’d pulled some seriously powerful cards along this journey and now here this one was. I was going to rock this labor.

When I realized I was most likely in labor, in the early morning of Friday, August 21, I was giddy. We had coffee and breakfast at a cafe, gentle contractions coming steady. Back home, we tidied and washed dishes and laundry. I dismantled an old planter on our deck and replaced it with new ones we’d bought a few days before. I was hugely pregnant, 39 weeks and 6 days, and huffing and puffing and using power tools and feeling powerful and thrilled that I might very well be meeting my baby that day, sooner than I’d imagined.

It took me over an hour to fold two baskets of laundry, having to pause every few minutes for a contraction to pass, and I thought yeah, this really must be it. At 2pm we walked up the big hill near my house with a view of the whole city, and I stopped to close my eyes and breathe each time I felt my uterus tighten again.

Walking uphill

Back home I really started to get into the rhythm of labor, swaying and humming. The contractions came just like a wave, like everyone had said. I could feel one coming on as I readied myself on all fours or draped over Simone’s lap or leaning over the bed, breathing as I went up and up in intensity, peaking for ever-longer stretches, easing back down the other side. In between I rested, feeling drifty and blissed out, enjoying the pause, letting the oxytocin bathe me in soft feelings as my body did the work of birthing this baby.

My water broke around 6pm, and I gushed fluid now and then during contractions. I felt glorious, making up songs to welcome our baby as I labored, “sounding” more intensely during the contractions, feeling increasing, though not unmanageable, pain. The doula arrived, and she and Simone pushed my hips together during contractions and fed me sips of water through a straw.

At 8:30pm, more than twelve hours since labor had begun and at least eight hours of 90-second-long contractions just a few minutes apart, we decided to go to the hospital. There is so much more that could be said about this decision and about what happened when we got there, but there we were at the hospital. One step closer to holding Tiny in our arms.

The best part of laboring in the hospital is UNLIMITED HOT WATER!!! I spent hours in the shower, gloriously hot water streaming over my aching back or tight stomach during contractions. The other best part is not having to worry about mess. When things really got wild I peed and pooed with abandon all over that hospital bed and clean dry things would just appear.

Our doula dimmed the room, soft lighting from LED candles, and drew baths and kept me hydrated. Simone was ever present, curating music as my mood shifted, loving and trusting me as only she can. The pain was intense, and I was belting gospel music at the top of my lungs, dancing in the shower, fully in it, surrounded by Sounds of Blackness singing, “Hold on / you can make it / hold on / everything will be alright.”

In the middle of the night the pain was nearly overwhelming, magnitudes greater than it had been at home. I had to get on the hospital bed for intermittent monitoring of the baby’s heart rate for 20 minutes of every hour. Stuck there, hooked up to a finicky machine, I felt a bit of panic rise every time I felt a contraction coming on. I had to immediately make sure I was in position, on all fours usually, bracing myself for the smashing waves of sensation. At some point the only way to work with the pain was to push into it with all my might.

I was bearing down with all the force of my body into the pain, imagining each contraction moving that baby down and eventually out of my body. I labored like this for a long time before the midwife said it seemed like I was having the urge to push. Seemed like?! Hadn’t I been pushing for hours already?! Each time a provider came to talk to me it took what seemed like forever, as they could only get about a sentence out before I went into another contraction. 90 second contraction, brief moment to get my bearings before the next one.

The hospital midwife checked my dilation. It was 12:30am, 4 hours after I’d been admitted at 4.5cm, and I was 6 centimeters dilated. Not at ALL close to the time when you’re supposed to want to push. Though no one said anything, my wheels were spinning. What was this premature urge to push about? What if I injured my cervix and then the baby couldn’t get out at all?! I’d read about how bad it could be to push on a still closed cervix, causing swelling that then prevents further dilation or even possibly a vaginal birth at all.

I was scared, but I found my resolve. I reminded myself I only had to meet each contraction one at a time, that all I needed to do was stay focused and visualize opening. That was my body’s job right now, to allow each contraction to soften and open my cervix fully so I could birth this baby. After how boisterous I’d been, this phase was intensely quiet. I was on all fours on the bed breathing as slowly and quietly as possible with each contraction, visualizing my cervix opening, using every fiber of my being to resist the urge to push. I needed total concentration to meet each contraction; this was the most mentally challenging part of my labor.

By morning I was pushing again, bursting a huge second bag of waters all over Simone at 7:30am. We all thought this would allow the baby to finally really descend. We were laughing and triumphant. By 10am it was confirmed that I had dilated to ten centimeters. I had done it! I was so proud. I pushed with all my strength in every position imaginable.

Tiny wouldn’t budge. A midwife realized Tiny was posterior. Only a few days before she’d been anterior; perhaps she’d rotated during labor, trying to descend. It’s harder to get a posterior baby out, the widest part of their head not matching the widest part of the pelvis quite as well. I was having double contractions, the second one beginning right after the last, with no pause in between.

More hours of pushing with zero progress, and the doctors recommended we try manually rotating her. I huffed nitrous as three times they inserted their hands inside me to try to turn her while I was blinded with pain. Tiny didn’t move. I pushed into the afternoon without progress.

I spiked a fever. My water had been broken for over 20 hours, I’d had at least four internal exams and several whole hands inside of me. Infection was highly likely. I’d been pushing in every position with unimaginable strength, doing everything right, doing everything I could. Tiny hadn’t moved an inch. The doctors gently recommended a c-section.

In one last hail mary pass for a vaginal birth, they inserted an epidural. Necessary for the c-section in any case, perhaps it would let my uterus relax enough for something to shift. I pushed for another hour, pushed so hard my vagina was swollen for days. Pushed so hard I burst several blood vessels in my eyes. The doctors thought it was time for a c-section. I agreed. Nothing had changed for many hours, no progress at all. It was time to get this baby out.

I had dreamt of holding my child for the first time. After the painful, glorious sensation of pushing her out she’d be placed, still slippery, on my chest, and I would weep tears of joy and gratitude and tell her how much I loved her. I would kiss her soft head and snuggle her tight until she settled down. It would, without a doubt, be the most beautiful moment of my life, welcoming this miracle in the flesh, examining every perfect inch of her, the tiny fingers and chubby toes, her pale eyebrows, her seashell ears.

The moment I met my child for the first time was nothing like I imagined it would be. There were no tears and no laughter. My heart didn’t burst at the seams. I felt nothing.

When she was removed from my body and Simone went to her, exclaiming “she’s here, beauty, and she’s so healthy,” I felt mostly nothing. Dissociated, a little sad that I could hear my wife in her joy and couldn’t meet her there. I knew I was supposed to feel happy, to feel relief.

But I wasn’t happy it was all finally over, wasn’t happy my baby was safe. I was on the brink of sanity, exhausted, wanting so badly to close my eyes but terrified simultaneously that I would just disappear if I did, missing my baby’s first minutes entirely. I so badly wanted to close my eyes, to float away, but I didn’t want to be gone.

The lights were so bright, all eyes on me, and yet none at all. I was already gone in a way, an object in the operating theatre. Increased risk of hemorrhage. Elevated temperature. Internal scalp monitor. Low transverse incision. This won’t be a simple procedure. A stuck, stuck baby and the anesthesiologist saying “just a few more minutes” over and over and over again while Simone begged him to give me something to ease the panic.

Tiny Dancer Jude was born on her due date, August 22, 2015. 8 pounds, 7.6 ounces, 21 inches long, and a 98th percentile head that was molded into quite the cone shape from all her hours trying to make it through, one ear totally flattened from being wedged some which way against bone. She was hearty and perfect, ready to nurse in the recovery room, gripping her tiny hands around our fingers. She was here.

I was traumatized by the c-section, and, perhaps worse still, the recovery. I said again and again to Simone that I would have pushed for several more days of unmedicated labor if I’d known how bad it would be. I felt swindled. This is a routine procedure? It was hell on earth. You have a lot of time to think when you have a newborn, up at all the darkest hours, replaying the events of the birth over and over again.

I wondered what would have happened if I’d been at home like I’d always sort of wanted. Could a skilled midwife have gotten that baby out? Was it something about the hospital environment, the constant monitoring and interference, that prevented me from having my baby vaginally? Did I give up, did I just not try hard enough? Could I have avoided this c-section?

Or was it the only possible outcome? Was I really one of those very rare cases where the baby just wouldn’t fit through, whether because of sheer size of her head in relation to my pelvis or because of her posterior position? A hundred years ago, or in a part of the world without access to a hospital, without access to antibiotics, I might have died. We both might have. What does it mean to have a body that couldn’t birth my baby? Was I a failure for lack of effort or by design? Which was more tolerable? Here I was again, just like after my miscarriage, realizing that sometimes it doesn’t matter how bad we want, how hard we try, how much we prepare and do everything “right.” Sometimes we don’t get to control the universe or the outcomes.

When my milk came in and I fell asleep with hospital heating packs on my breasts I woke up suddenly in terror, labor flashbacks replaying in my head. When it took me 20 minutes to get out bed just to urinate, I wept, unable to bear how cruel it was to be recovering from major surgery while taking care of a newborn. I bled all over the hospital floor, losing so much blood on top of the nearly two liters (a standard amount) I’d already lost during surgery that a transfusion was briefly mentioned.

I hated the hospital. I was angry at the attending who came by and told me I had maybe, at best, a 20% chance of a future vaginal delivery given the size of my pelvis and the fact that second babies are usually bigger. I felt hoodwinked and devastated by the seemingly insurmountable recovery I was facing. I couldn’t get out of bed to pick up my child. I couldn’t lay on my side. It was excruciating to sit up every time I had to nurse her. I couldn’t believe this had happened to me.

It took many weeks and so many haunting hours playing the events over in my head and many sessions with my brilliant therapist and all the support from my most beautiful love to begin to integrate what had happened. To mourn the loss of the birth I had wanted. To accept that I had made the very best choices I could in each moment for myself and for my baby.

It struck me that I was a parent now, and I had done everything I could to keep my baby safe. This was my job. With Simone by my side I fell in love with this beautiful baby — not in an instant like I’d always imagined, but moment by moment, over many hours, despite my intense pain.

At first I was obsessed with figuring out which was it — a failure of body or of will. But eventually “so what?” became my mantra. So what if I had had a vaginal birth, I asked myself, as I physically recovered day by day. What would be different now? Would this beautiful baby be any different, would my love for her be?

Many of us put a lot of emphasis on our child’s birth, on our story of their birth. It’s their entrance into the world and our transition into parenthood after all. It is questioned and repeated, shared in whispers and with tears. The story is told again and again and again. It reveals something about who we are. It is a peak experience for many, good or bad. But it’s only the beginning of a relationship that contains so much more.

As I allow myself to fall into the fullness of my relationship with my child, I allow myself the fullness of my birth experience as well. I remember with sweetness all the beautiful moments even as I cringe with recollection of some of the worst. I remind myself of all the pieces that went exactly as I wanted, as I reckon with the much unwanted finale. I hold onto the contradictions. They are what make up our lives.

When I got home from the hospital and looked at that Master card sitting on the altar, I was pissed. I had been promised the birth of a master. It took me some time to realize that this was the perfect card after all, not despite the fact that the outcome I was most terrified of happening had happened but because of it. Life challenges us the most when we don’t get what we want, when things don’t turn out as planned, when we are reminded, yet again, that we can’t control the universe. I had met and was meeting, day by day, that challenge.

I love this Tiny with every fiber of my being, and I have come to a place of gratitude. I am grateful for every moment, even the excruciating ones, that brought her into my arms. I am grateful that I live in a time and a place that allowed both she and I to survive and come home healthy. I am grateful for the providers that made this happen, for the nurses who were kind, for all the family and friends who came to our aid as I recovered slowly from the physical and emotional trauma of the events, for my therapist, and for my love.

I am grateful for my own resilience. After the birth I thought often of my miscarriage, of how devastated I was, how depressed. I thought I might have a long road to hoe with this trauma too. But I reminded myself, too, of my recovery from that loss. Of the relief that comes with accepting that I cannot control the universe. Of the power that comes with being grateful, despite it all. Of the deep knowledge that I would survive this too, that I would come out the other end, deepened by pain, more able, yet again, to contain huge wells of joy.

We named her Juniper, this big-headed baby of ours, and she is growing strong and tall like a tree. Her first week of life contained more ecstasy and agony than I’d ever experienced in all my days, and not in any of the ways I’d expected it would. A fitting welcome to parenthood, Juniper is here at last!

The End, The Beginning: Notes from the Last Weeks of Pregnancy

Read Caitlin’s previous writing on her first pregnancy and current one here!

Week Twenty-seven: My wife sets up the bassinet we bought in week one. I feel victorious, and terrified. The cats love it and have claimed it as their own, so we find ways to deter them (tin foil, double stick tape). The reason it’s up so early is that we are hosting friends whose son was born on Anderson’s intended due date. I prepare for an emotionally difficult weekend, with this child who is the exact age our son should be, a weekend of “this should be our life” head games.

Because we need the nursery for a guest room, all the other baby stuff is hidden in the closet, which is probably better for my sanity. We are still doing a lot of other pre-baby necessary things, though. For example, this past weekend we got haircuts, installed the car seat (for said visiting baby), bought fabric so the wife could make a sheet for the co-sleeper, detailed the car, weeded the garden, wrote thank-you notes to those who had already sent us baby gifts, and perhaps most importantly, took our c-section birthing class.

Photo Copyright: Caitlin Zinsser

Week Twenty-eight: I have a cold wherein there is a lot of phlegm sitting in my throat and chest. So much so that the overnight post-nasal drip causes me to vomit around 3:30 a.m. and again when I wake up around 7; so much so that I’m coughing and it hurts. I know the coughing and vomiting won’t hurt the baby, but oh gracious, it seems like it will when your abdomen contracts so violently. I’m exhausted from several nights of very little sleep due to problems breathing. I HATE COUGHING (but I keep reminding myself it’s still better to have this cold now than when I’m recovering from the c-section. There is very little in my life that has hurt more than sneezing the day after my c-section). I see my doctor for a regular visit, and he isn’t that concerned – apparently this cold is going around, so I just need to deal with it. It is my first time meeting the final Maternal-Fetal Medicine specialist in the office — he is new to this practice (though not to being an MFM). The other three I know well from my time in the hospital before, and I have definitive opinions about them. I love this new guy, though; he has by far the best bedside manner of the group, and he takes the time to listen to my concerns and put my mind at rest, which seems to be his top priority.

I’m slowing down a lot, but I attribute a good portion to this cold. I can no longer walk to and from work on boxing days — the four miles plus an hour of class is too much, so I’m compromising and taking the bus to work on days I go to boxing, and only walking home. It seems so silly to care about this — I’m in my third trimester, I’m still healthy and active — but to me it feels like failure.

Week Twenty-nine: I think we thought redoing the baby registry would be therapeutic, but right now it’s annoying, although seeing the original and all the stuff that was supposed to be for Ander could have hurt too, I suppose. We choose more of a color scheme than a theme, per se. My mother-in-law made us gorgeous curtains from fabric we picked out after painting the walls. The walls are porpoise gray with white trim, and the curtains are gray, yellow and blue, big flowers and geometric patterns. We’re planning on white furniture and yellow and gray bedding. We have some wall decor from our original plan that is a big tree with owls and a koala night light. We also have a koala painting from my own childhood bedroom and an actual stuffed koala from our grief group. Most of the stuff we’re picking out sticks to this basic color scheme, with a variety of animals (yellow ducks, gray hippos, etc.) – though there will be some dinosaurs in there for an Ander touch, and the baby will have some of “his” things.

Photo Copyright: K. Zinsser

I am invited to speak on a panel at my hospital on caring for patients experiencing perinatal loss. It is great, as it always is, to tell Anderson’s story. I am glad too because I am the only panelist to have such a comprehensive experience of the care at the hosptal — MFM, L&D, NICU. I get to say everything I want to say, and the very, very best part is that I know some of the workshop participants and panelists and it is so good to see them, such as our favorite chaplain, and my favorite Labor & Delivery nurse. The best was one of the NICU nurses, who came up to me afterwards and said, “You don’t know me, but I was one of Anderson’s night nurses. I had him after his PDA ligation surgery, and I remember him. We talk about him frequently. He made a big impact, and he isn’t forgotten.” Definitely the best part of my day!

Week Thirty: Seeing the number “3” at the beginning of the week is crazy exciting for me. I think (hope, hope, hope) that I’ve finally turned a corner on this cold and cough; I still have coughing fits morning and evening (my stomach muscles are so sore!!) but I have slept well for three whole nights now!

My doctor isn’t thrilled about me traveling, given my history of preterm labor, so my sister and her fiancé Skype me into my dad’s retirement party so I can hear all the speeches. I’m also missing the memorial service for my grandma, but I’m again able to Skype in to the after-picnic for that. She had nine children, 13 grandchildren, and 21 great-grandkids and counting, and only six of us total were not there. It’s been ages since that many of us were all in one place, so I’m disappointed to miss it but glad to have had such a productive weekend. We are now 75% done with the nursery; all we are missing is the glider (on its way), the boxes we left with our parents to bring out post-baby from our showers back East, and whatever we might get from the shower the wife’s work is throwing us next weekend. I am drained from 89 degrees and a day at Ikea, but I do enjoy the nesting. Now I just hope I have a living, healthy baby to take home to it!

Week Thirty-one: I am getting more of those “is this your first? Are you excited?” questions from strangers. I am unwilling to pretend Ander didn’t exist, so usually answer that it’s my second and my son would be one right now, but he died last year. I follow that up with “we will be very excited when this new baby arrives and is healthy!”

We are really flummoxed about the idea of circumcision and are thus taking all opinions. My mom thinks we’re crazy to even consider not circumcising, but then again her generation thought it was the norm. Most of my friends now aren’t circumcising, and it’s not popular globally. I think in the end we might not because “everyone else is doing it” doesn’t seem like the type of compelling argument that would sway us (plus, it’s not really true). But we’re asking our friends, our doctors, and two pediatricians as well — clearly this is a hot topic for me! I also feel like I shouldn’t be the one making this decision for my son, as it’s his body — but then if he wants a circumcision when he’s older, it’s a lot more work and a lengthier, more potentially complicated procedure. So…. hard call!

Week Thirty-two: So, with Ander I had nausea and fatigue, and of course the bleeding and such — but no other “typical” pregnancy symptoms. With this baby, I’ve had the gamut! Besides those I’ve already mentioned, now I’m getting bleeding gums (just a little, occasionally, when I floss) and hemorrhoids. Gross. But I’m truly not complaining — it’s nice to feel normal! I have another ultrasound. This time, they find a marginal cord insertion. It’s always something that could be nothing but could influence the pregnancy.

Week Thirty-three: It is 2015, right? I ask this because, in the world of trying to conceive and pregnancy, I have read a LOT of books and websites since we started trying to have a baby three (wow, three) years ago. And you know what they all have in common? They assume that mom has a partner. And that the partner is her husband and the baby’s father. It goes without saying that the partner is male. In fact, nearly every website has “tips for Dad” or “what Dad should expect when Mom is expecting” or “how to help your partner” or “tell Dad to do X so that he feels involved.” Of course, the things these sites and books recommend Dad do are also very sexist (“He’ll be excited to get out those power tools to set up the nursery furniture!”).

Now, I get that for most expectant mothers, there’s a Dad in the picture. But again: it is 2015, right? Can not one of these sites/books consistently use the word partner instead of husband? And can they sometimes acknowledge that maybe there IS no partner? Often they start out using partner, but then it’s like the author regresses to Dad when their attention drifts. (Note: when we went to our baby classes (birth, bringing baby home, etc.) it was also hard for the instructors to remember this. They addressed “Dads” a lot, even though I had introduced my wife and she was sitting right there. In one class they even segregated the Dads and Moms for certain sections, which was awkward). Ugh.

Week Thirty-four: We have now taken all our classes except for breastfeeding, which is in a few weeks. I have to say, “Bringing Baby Home” was underwhelming. I think it’s just that I’ve read so much that I’ve reached saturation — in theory, I know what needs to be known, but until I actually practice, it’s all just theory. I did love the tour of Labor & Delivery though, as it was so reassuring to be able to see everything. I also found out that if the baby is doing well, I’ll get skin-to-skin right in the OR as they stitch me up, which is so wonderful to know. And wow the new postpartum rooms at our hospital are huge and luxuriant! Double the size of before, with new futons and two bathrooms — one for mom and one for guests! I feel so very lucky to be having this baby in a major metropolitan area and at a top-notch hospital.

As we get closer I’m getting more irritable, which is due to both the lack of sleep and the ever-present anxiety that this baby will just, at some point, stop moving. I am so deathly terrified of stillbirth. Even typing that word seems superstitious to me. It doesn’t help that after a day of SO much movement like Sunday at the Pride parade, I come to expect that level of activity (which isn’t fair to baby!) to keep me sane (especially as I’m pretty sure he was just reacting to the marching bands!). I have fallen head over heels with this baby already and now that I have seen the OR I can actually imagine the c-section happening and him coming out and being shown to me. But every daydream of joy brings an equal one of terror. It’s so frustrating to feel that I’ve made it this far doing so well with my fears and now in the last few weeks I’m just unraveling. Last night we got a call from friends who will be in town unexpectedly in a few days, and we’re very excited to see and host them. My wife went into the nursery to move the crib and everything (again — this is our third stint of visitors after having set up the nursery as we wanted) and I just lost it in a festival of waterworks. Since we will have both of our parents staying with us in August/September (not at the same time), she had figured we’d just leave the nursery a jumbled mess (everything baby shoved into a corner) so we could fit the air mattress, bedside tables, etc. that we usually haul out for guests. Rationally, this made sense — our folks deserve a moderately comfortable space, and the baby will be with us in our room. But emotionally, not having full access to this perfect nursery we had set up made me ridiculously upset. We spent a lot of time and love on that room, and the idea that I’ll barely be able to go in there for a month, the first month of this baby’s life, just had me bawling. I think I’m really hung up on wanting everything to be so perfect for this little guy. I keep rearranging and washing things — I know that’s partly nesting, but I think it’s also partly me thinking “I didn’t get to do this last time, I want it to be perfect this time.”

Week Thirty-five: Two weeks to go and two weeks left of work! I’m planning on working right up until my c-section so that I can maximize my maternity leave — and honestly, as I can work from home and I’ll “only” be 37 weeks, there’s no real reason I can’t/shouldn’t. I most definitely have senioritis though. I keep telling my wife that I feel like a teacher with only two weeks left in the school year. And 35 weeks! My doctor rejoiced that “we made it!” because we’re past the mandatory special care/NICU window. It does feel like a pretty big milestone! We finished all of our baby classes — breastfeeding was this past weekend. I was glad to learn that our pediatrician’s office (we had our meet-and-greet) has two board-certified lactation consultants on staff to meet with new moms and help with breastfeeding issues. That makes me feel a lot better as to be honest, I know of way more people with breastfeeding troubles than those who have it easy.

It was in the ’90s this weekend and I guess I didn’t drink enough water, because I was in triage this Monday with dehydration. It ended up being good that I went in, but it was a lot of pain and anxiety, and I think I’m more nervous now because of all the times I was told to “keep a very careful eye on fetal movement.” Baby’s amniotic fluid is a little low, but I’m not leaking, so dehydration is to blame. Still scary, though, but isn’t everything? I have to keep reminding myself that if I didn’t have my history, and wasn’t considered high risk, I wouldn’t even know about borderline low fluid or a marginal cord insertion — both things that shouldn’t make a difference to the baby’s development.

Week Thirty-six: We spend the weekend shopping and cooking big batches of meals to freeze that are conducive to throwing in the slow cooker. I usually hate cooking, but I blame the nesting bug – I lead this charge and have a lot of fun choosing recipes and taking pictures of our stocked fridge and freezer. Then we have a thunderstorm and a brownout, leading to momentary panic – what if we lose power? The crisis is averted.

Except for the triage incident, I’ve been VERY lucky regarding the heat — in that it’s pretty much nonexistent. It’s been in the ’70s or low ’80s pretty consistently, which is nice for pregnancy but pretty crappy otherwise, in that I really like hot weather and it makes it feel like it jumped from spring to fall. We went to see a movie at the park and were freezing in sweatshirts and jeans. In JULY. The one thing I dislike about Chicago… though apparently in 1995 they had a heat wave that killed over 700 people. So, I’ll stick it out.

Week Thirty-seven: We meet our son this week. We meet our son this week. We meet our son this week… and you will meet him, too, as soon as we come up for air!

VIDEO: Queer Mama for Autostraddle Episode Ten — Third Trimester

This is Part 10 of a 12 column series. If you’re just joining in, start at the beginning!

I am coming to the end of this pregnancy journey, which of course means the beginning of a much bigger journey. Time has flown by. I imagined at this point I’d be feeling quite tired of being pregnant. I mean three quarters of a YEAR being pregnant?! That’s a long time to give one’s body over to a new and unpredictable experience, to another person, a person I’ve never even met, a person pretty much guaranteed to be utterly unable to imagine what I’ve done for her already. (Kidding / not kidding!)

Twenty-eight weeks in, I entered the third trimester and thought, “this is it! The tie-breaker trimester!” So many people told me they were reading the series and decided “oh goodness, pregnancy is not for me” after my first trimester column, but then “oh wow, that sounds awesome, I totally want to get pregnant!” after my second trimester column. I felt some pressure on this trimester. What would it be like? Would it drastically tip the scales back from the nearly absurd levels of deliciousness I felt during the second trimester to the not-so-much-fun-at-all state of being of the first trimester?

I was warned by nearly every previously pregnant person I’d known that it got much harder again towards the end. The second trimester bliss and ease would not stick around. Pregnancy books, too, harkened of heartburn and shortness of breath and trouble rolling over and swelling and all sorts of grotesque ailments awaiting. I put off writing this column and recording the video for weeks, feeling like I must not have fully entered the third trimester yet, feeling like I didn’t have anything that different to say yet, feeling like something harder must be around the bend.

Here I am, though, at nearly 40 weeks (just three days from my due date!), feeling great. For me, very very lucky me, the third trimester has not particularly challenging or uncomfortable. It’s been actually pretty darn awesome. I feel a weird sense of shame writing this, like I don’t deserve it. Or like my experience will somehow diminish that of so many others who do feel just darn sick of it by the end. I suppose all I can say is I’ve heard it can totally be hard at the end for many, so you’ve been warned, people deciding whether or not to get pregnant based on my column. (Insert inappropriate-for-essay-form smiley face emoji here.)

This is not to say that I’m some sort of mythical creature who has had no physical complaints to speak of in the last several months. Although I never got the much discussed shortness of breath (maybe because I have a super long torso or did oh so much yoga?), I definitely had my bouts with heartburn. The worst was right after I traveled and thus was more out of control of my diet and routine. That shit hurts! I was woken up several times in the middle of the night with a burning throat, only able to fall back asleep on a wedge pillow all propped up.

Digestive enzymes with meals and chewable papaya enzymes just after cured me in the nick of time, 5 days into the nighttime wakings, the very day I sent Simone out to buy a bottle of Tums. Now if I get a hint of it, slippery elm tablets or chewing a few papaya enzymes does the trick nearly instantaneously. Much of my symptoms have been like that. Something will come up for a few days, bad enough to be annoying, perhaps, like hip pain that makes it hard to sleep, but then I will go to yoga a few times, or commit to doing hip stretches every night before bed, say, and the symptom will fade into the background. I’ve been very tuned into my body and doing my best to take very good care of myself.

There have been some more constant body weirdnesses, too, though, of course. I mean, I’m about to birth another human, I’ve gained 30 pounds, and my blood volume has nearly doubled, so let’s be real. I find them to be pretty minor annoyances though. I run much, much hotter, going from sleeping with a comforter to often with nothing at all. In these last few weeks of somewhat bizarre San Francisco heat, I’ve needed a fan in the bedroom to make it easier to sleep (no air conditioning here). When you’re pregnant your temperature goes up and your sweat point goes down (to make your body more efficient at cooling your baby, who has no way to sweat themselves…) So I sweat.

I’d also be remiss not to mention the hunger and thirst of the third trimester. I eat ALL THE TIME! If you’re anything like me, plan to increase your grocery budget, wanna-be-pregnant folks. Waiters stare at restaurants. I’ve filled my house with healthy easy snacks. I’m a little bit terrified about how much I will want to consume when I’m breastfeeding, when your caloric needs go even further up. Eating a ton of calories when you care as much as I do about the quality and healthiness of those calories can be a little tricky, but I’m doing it. That and more water than anyone would ever think humanly possible. I say this as an already very serious water drinker. Give me all the water. With ice cubes, please.

Given the fantastic quantities of water, and the baby’s ever-heavier head pressing on my bladder, I have to pee all the time again. It’s the trickiest when we’re out all day, or if I do too much of my water drinking the second half of the day and end up waking up seven times in the middle of the night to pee. But even then it’s not terrible. I figure I might as well get used to it, and I file it under minor annoyances whilst trying to remind myself to drink as much as possible before 3pm the next day instead.

Swelling, I should tell you, is also a thing that happens to most pregnant people at some point. Worst in the heat or if you eat too much salt (beware processed food!) or if you’re sitting all the time (as so many of us do for work.) At 35 weeks I could still don heels, but no longer, as my pregnant-in-summertime feet don’t fit. This stiletto devotee now wears flip flops regularly in public. They warned me motherhood would do wacky things to my identity. Aside from the aesthetic issues, feet and hands can get achy with the swelling, but massage and exercise and lots of water help.

So does, for me at least, an appreciation of this baby and this body. I just love how I look pregnant. I still kind of want to be pregnant forever. I don’t feel quite ready, even days from my due date, to give this experience up! I love this baby inside who makes this belly grow. She is so much stronger now (sometimes her jabs hurt but that’s cool too), and she gets hiccups all the time, which I find adorable. I feel my uterus contract more and more, practicing for labor and giving baby a little hug.

Sometimes I still feel in utter awe of being here. The depth of gratitude I feel for getting the chance to carry this little love to 28 weeks, 35 weeks, and now, here, more than 39 weeks is profound. I carry this gratitude with the weight of my previous loss, with the knowledge that not everyone who wants to gets to have this experiences, with the remarkable truth that there will soon be a person in the world who I grew in my body.

Y’all, I managed not to cry in this third trimester video, but here I am now, writing, tears rolling down my face at my desk, just a few feet away from our new rocking chair where I plan to spend hours nursing my baby. It is so very humbling, in the best possible way, to be taken over by this transformative experience. To be the custodian, for such a short time, really, of this new life, of this person who will grow up and feel all her own feelings and live out all her dreams and be wounded and sometimes scared and all the things that make us human.

I am still in awe that growing a person is a thing my body can do. In awe that it’s a thing bodies can do at all. That it’s how all of us got here. I feel tickled thinking about all the other completely mundane and utterly miraculous things I will get to witness in the life of this child.

I feel patient as I wait for Tiny to emerge, confident she will make her appearance when it’s just right for her. I wouldn’t mind if that took weeks more, might prefer it even, as I savor having her to myself in this sweet way. Feeling her ever more powerful limbs travel across my uterus. Listening to her heartbeat in weekly appointments. Falling asleep with my belly on Simone’s back as Tiny kicks her to sleep. We love you so much little one, and we look forward to meeting you so very, very soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlxRHr8JoSo

VIDEO: Queer Mama for Autostraddle Episode Nine — Our Kid Doesn’t Have Two Moms

This is Part 9 of a 12 column series. If you’re just joining in, start at the beginning!

I’m a queer femme who prefers she/her/hers pronouns and is super excited to be called mama/mommy/mom/ma or whatever variation our little muffin comes up with ANY DAY NOW! Okay, so she’s probably not going to start calling me mom any day now, but she is due to arrive really at any moment from here on out. Which omg holy shit. We are so excited to be parents of an outside-the-uterus baby, and we are checking all those last things off our pre-baby to do list. For those eagerly awaiting, Tiny still has no name, and neither does Simone.

Simone, the love of my life and the co-parent to our future child, is a masculine-identifying woman. She lets me call her butch at times because I think it’s sexy, but it wouldn’t be the first term she’d use to characterize herself. There isn’t a particular gender term that she claims, really, though I could also describe her as a boi, perhaps. Simone’s gender is complicated. She firmly identifies as a woman. Though she tucks them away in sports bras on the daily, she has beautiful boobs that she (and ahem, I) enjoys. She shops exclusively in “men’s” sections of clothing stores. When she puts on a dress, it looks and feels like drag.

Simone’s gender is simple. She’s a masculine-identifying woman who prefers she but doesn’t mind if waiters call her sir. She cuts her own hair short and wears the clothes that make her feel sexy, the clothes that make her feel like herself. It took her into her twenties to embrace this gendered self, but she’s been holding it with ease and confidence ever since.

When Simone and I got engaged, I couldn’t imagine anyone calling her a bride. Way too weird. Way too feminine. I was happy to be becoming her wife, but in no way did I envision her becoming mine. Calling her my wife felt like I must instead be referring to Cinnabon, Simone’s drag persona alter ego. Simone was not becoming my wife.

She was and would stay my partner. I realized quickly, though, that people never knew what I meant when I talked about my partner. Simone and I run our video production company together, so in some contexts people thought I was just talking about my business partner. In others, they assumed my partner was a man. They definitely didn’t always know I meant the person I was married to. The woman I was married to.

I started calling her my wife, sometimes, when it felt easier, or when I wanted to be sure someone knew what I meant. Now I use it at least half the time, because I’m glad it means people know right away that I’m a lesbian. Though I’m not a lesbian, and neither is Simone. Is this confusing? We’re both queer, really, but I do also identify as a dyke. I’m in a same sex relationship (now, marriage!) with a woman who doesn’t identify as a lesbian. Also, wife has three less characters than partner, and this is important on Twitter.

Simone and I have a little dog named Noodle. Actually, Simone adopted him a few months before we started dating, which we like to say was her signalling the universe that she was ready for some serious commitment in her life. I’m Noodle’s adopted mama. Simone is Noodle’s daddy. She always has been, it’s what she and I have always called her in reference to our boy.

She’s not, though, the daddy or the father to our child. For a long time I thought she might be. It feels the most natural for me to refer to her that way, after all, since I’ve been doing it about our dog for nearly five years. No reason not be a woman “daddy” to our babe. The main problem I could foresee is how confusing it would be to the world.

Simone gets misgendered all the time. This is mostly fine but can be scary, especially when we pull up to gas stations in towns we don’t know, parking lots filled with groups of macho straight men. Or when she comes out of a stall in a ladies room and a woman freaks out. What would happen when she was taking our child into a woman’s bathroom and that child was calling her daddy? Or when people couldn’t wrap their minds around using she pronouns for a “dad”? Not insurmountable challenges, but something we didn’t want to deal with necessarily all the time.

More to the point, in any case, is the fact that Simone doesn’t feel like Tiny’s dad or father or even daddy. But, if you haven’t yet gathered, she also certainly doesn’t feel like Tiny’s mom. Being called a mom makes her skin crawl.

People always assume we are a family of two moms, being that we are two women. We don’t fault them. Simone even hesitated with wanting to write or vlog about this because she was concerned about making all these sweet people who have tried to be inclusive of our “two mom” family feel bad about their mistake. She deserves, though, as we all do, to be identified how she wishes to be. And the people who love us or even just read about us deserve the chance to get it right, too!

The simplest title is that Simone is Tiny’s parent. How fortunate that we have a gender neutral term built right into our language. If you’re writing a letter, “dear parents” is great. Or if you’re introducing her you can say, “this is Simone, Tiny’s parent.” Hopefully schools and communities can without too much trouble fall into this preferred language.

Tiny won’t call Simone her parent, though. I mean we hope she will in some contexts at some point, as a descriptor, but it’s not exactly a pet name. It’s not a name we imagine playing peek-a-boo with. “Where’d parent go? Peek-a-boo!” And it’s not a name I imagine Tiny shouting up across the apartment, “Parent! I can’t sleep!”  While I’m mommy, what will Simone be?

A lot of our masculine female friends and some transmen we know who are parents have chosen to go by “baba.” Some of them like it because it means father in some languages, grandmother in others. Or simply because it’s something that is not mom or dad. Or because it’s becoming a thing, a gender identity to have community around. Simone has never identified with baba herself, though. She doesn’t love the ring of it and it doesn’t jive with her.

We’ve (okay, I’ve) looked at lists upon lists of options. People use all sorts of words of course for themselves as parents. Maddy or zaza. Ima or mima. Duda or madu or duna. Nothing on any of those lists speaks to Simone as her name. Sometimes, I know, the kid just makes something up, so maybe that will happen with us, and it will feel right, and we’ll feel silly for worrying about it at all.

For now we’re going with “Monie” (pronounced MO-knee). It’s short for Simone, and a pet name her friend’s children and other loved ones have called her in the past, so it’s already imbued with sweetness and intimacy. It rings with, but also sounds distinct from, mommy. Most importantly, it’s her own, and it feels right.

http://youtu.be/FO-7MEScVO4

We’d love to hear from folks further down their parenting journey (or folks right here with us! or folks still just beginning to think about this stuff!) about what it’s like for you as a gender non-conforming parent. What names did you pick? Did they stick with the kiddos? How has navigating your complicated/simple gender been in the world? Please share your thoughts! And thanks in advance to all who will now refer to Simone as a parent, not a mom.

12 Big Baby-Making Questions This Queer Couple Asked Before Taking The Plunge

Once upon a time, there was a childfree-by-choice woman in her thirties who made the decision to have kids, after all. This was a radical shift in thinking and in life-planning, so she and her spouse set out on a year and a half of talking, writing, and thinking about everything you can possibly overthink about having kids. Here are some things they learned about the process and about themselves and about each other.

1. What is queer parenting, even?

via Shutterstock

The first thing we did was go out and look for resources for queer parents and families. We found some lesbian parenting books and some gay and lesbian parenting resources. We got some books that had helpful info. But it didn’t feel like they were really written for us so much as for middle-to-upper class white lesbians. Queer parenting, it seemed, was mostly code for two cis gay men or two cis lesbian women. We didn’t find a whole lot for bisexual parents, for trans parents, for queer interracial parents, for gender non-binary parents, etc. etc. So we decided to join the blogosphere to make connections and start processing what this all means. Through that, we found other bloggers writing about their experiences, including poly families, trans moms and dads, gender non-binary parents, lesbian dads, pregnant butches, and young-ish queer people like us.

What is different about queer parenting? So much. It’s about raising kids in a queer-normative environment. It’s about the way that we create family, which has little to do with blood and a lot to do with love — but we know that — our chosen families have always been bound by love. It’s about how you disrupt heteronormativity and the gender binary and how you help your kid navigate all that in the real world. It’s about considering intersectional feminism as a basis for the worldview you present to your kids. It’s about lots of stuff that we won’t even know or understand until we get there. But it’s not in any book we’ve read yet. Queer parents are changing the narrative, pushing the boundaries of “Heather Has Two Mommies” into new territory.

2. How many ways can you consider adoption?

via Shutterstock

I always thought I’d adopt. I’m an adoptee. I always thought I’d adopt from South Korea, actually, where I was born. Something about having the ability to help another Korean adoptee navigate life in the white-washed U.S. felt really important to me. However, I never thought I’d have kids, so I’d never truly entertained the idea. As it turns out, which is no big surprise, same-sex adoption and single parent adoption is illegal in South Korea, so there’s no way to make that work. OK, but adoption still seemed like the better idea to me. I’ve never wanted to be pregnant and adoption was still more appealing.

As it turns out, adoption decisions aren’t as easy as agreeing that it’s a good idea.

Younger vs. Older Children

I don’t have a strong preference towards infants. In fact, I like older children. However, Waffle really strongly wanted a baby. I couldn’t blame him. He certainly isn’t the only person to imagine a future with a baby in his arms. Sometimes we just want what our hearts want and I get that. Infant adoption, however, means a longer wait time and more competition with other potential adoptive parents.

Adoption Through Fostering

The Fosters is one of our favorite shows. But it also makes pretty clear that adoption through fostering is not always simple. We know some queer folks who are foster parents and have adopted through fostering and it was a lengthy and emotional (and absolutely very worth it) process. Additionally, we aren’t really interested in fostering, personally. It’s hard to imagine not getting super attached to a kid who lives with us and becomes part of our family. So, foster adoption was checked off the list of possibilities.

Surviving a Home Study

It is very possible for same-sex couples to pass adoption screening these days. Especially seemingly non-threatening, dual-income, married couples like us. However, we are a queer couple, not a same-sex couple. Waffle uses different names and pronouns in different contexts, which he is 100% open about. But it would add an additional layer of having to explain ourselves over and over during the very-invasive, mandatory home study. So we could decide to try to pass as lesbians, which neither of us are. Or Waffle could try to pass as a man which is not necessarily how he identifies. Or we could try to find a highly-queer-and-trans-friendly adoption agency. Or we could seek out a knowledgable LGBTQ law attorney. Or we could plan to do Gender 101 to everyone we meet in the adoption process. Or we could crawl into a hole and die.

Closed vs. Open adoption

At the end of the day, it came down to this. One of us is firmly in support of open adoption. One of us is firmly in support of closed adoption. We went around and around and around until we came to terms with the fact that neither one of us was going to change our opinions. We both had very deeply personal reasons for our opinions and neither of us was budging at all. So there it was. Adoption, it turns out, was completely off the table.

And yes, every time some well-meaning person asks, “Have you considered adoption?” or “Why don’t you just adopt?” I want to slap them in the face. Not only because I’m an adoptee and like WTF, but also because we have thought about it a lot more than anyone who has asked me this question.

3. Who will carry this potential human?

Congrats! You’re having a gayby! (image via Shutterstock)

Easy. Me. Waffle has zero interest and I respect that. I mean, really, neither of us has much interest, but I’m the only one with the capacity, really. So in a move that was as close to my worst nightmare as I’ve ever gotten, I decided it’d be me. I’m not afraid of pregnancy or of how my body will change or of popping out a baby. I am nervous about how the world will treat me, as a pregnant woman, as a mom in the most traditional heteronormative sense of the word. As a femme feminist, I know that people are going to start reading me as straight more often if I’m knocked up and that I’m going to have to deal with people seeing my body before my brain in a weird, patriarchal way. But this was the best way, so onward!

4. Where will we get the sperm from?

sperm pop art via Shutterstock

Neither of us is interested in a known donor. I actually think having a friend donate the sperm is very sweet and I love big, extended families. But for us, we know we want an anonymous donor. I’d like to have an open donor, though, which means that the future kid would have the option of looking up their donor’s name and biological heritage when they turn 18 and that the donor is open to being contacted at least once at that time. As an adoptee without any biological records, I know that it can mean an awful lot to have that door open, even just to get a complete health history. But also to have access to who you are, fully, and what your heritage and history is. My parents are my parents and my family is my family, but I do wish I knew something — anything — about my birth history and biological heritage.

Oh, and I decided pretty early on that I wanted Korean sperm, if possible. I’d like to share an ethnicity with my kid and I’d like to be there for them as a Korean-American. Waffle has no issue with this. Sharing biological material isn’t important to him and, for us, it isn’t what makes a family bond.

5. Midwife? Doula? Doctor? Hospital? Home birth?

via MidwifeAtYourCervix.com

We’re still figuring this out. As of yet, we don’t have strong opinions either way. Maybe we will once I actually get knocked up, but we are checking out some midwifery practitioners to get a feel for what we might want.

6. How far are we willing to go with fertility treatments?

We’re going to start with IUI (intrauterine insemination), the least invasive and costly procedure. We’re going to do it at a fertility center. Neither of us feels very romantic about it and we’re perfectly satisfied to have a medical professional deliver the package, if you will.

Hormones or no?

In the beginning, I was staunchly against taking hormonal stimulants. But now that we know what path we are on and how much it will probably cost and have talked to a lot of folks who have done IUI in their 30’s, I’m feeling more open to it. Taking Clomid (a commonly prescribed hormonal stimulant) slightly increases your chance of twins from about 2-3% to 8%, which I’m not super pleased about. But it also increases your chances of conceiving, at all, so…

IVF

The jury is still out on whether we’d be up for a more lengthy and costly procedure like IVF. Waffle thinks it’s my body and I have the final say. We are both kind of…not sure if we would be willing to go there. I think we’ll have a clearer view if it becomes challenging to conceive through IUI. Until then, we’re putting all our (my?) eggs in the IUI basket.

7. What about gender?

poem and artwork by chotpot.tumblr.com

We have a lot of thoughts about gender, obvs.

What’s in a name?

As most folks do, we started thinking about names right away because it’s a fun thing to do. We agreed that we wanted our future kid to have a gender neutral name. We don’t plan to raise them genderless, because we plan on sending them to public school and they will be out in the world and watching TV and we can’t imagine being very good at creating a gender-free household. However, we want to raise them with a very open and critical view of gender and we want them to be able to decide how to express gender and how to identify. If their gender is different than what they are assigned at birth, we want to give them a name that doesn’t make coming out more difficult.

Also, gender neutral names are amazing! As we started going through gender neutral names, we agreed on very few. We also realized that we felt differently about names based on whether they were for someone assigned male at birth or assigned female at birth. Like Spencer is a cool girl’s name, but not a cool boy’s name. GODDAMMIT GET OUT OF MY HEAD GENDER BINARY. Anyway, we finally got down to a few names we like that are really gender neutral. And I think our number one choice right now is “Remy” or “Remi” for a child of any gender.

Will we find out the assigned sex?

No. I mean, I’m not pregnant yet so maybe we’ll change our minds once I am, but I doubt it. We both feel like it’s better not to know. We won’t be swayed by our gender binary-loving lizard brains if we don’t know. Also, it will force our well-meaning family and friends to not put our future human in a gender box before they are born, either.

Gender neutral baby room themes

Ranked by preference:
Dinosaurs
Cute monsters
Zoo animals
Rainbow explosion

8. When will we share the news?

via Shutterstock

Honestly, I’d be down to shout it from the rooftops immediately. But Waffle doesn’t want the heartache of dealing with everyone knowing if the pregnancy doesn’t “stick.” And I get that. I also want to be able to talk about it if we do have a miscarriage, because I don’t want to be alone in that. But I know I have an ample support network if that happens. And I respect where Waffle is coming from. So we are planning to do the typical no-telling-until-the-second-trimester thing.

9. Whose last name will future human have?

Fine. It’s gonna’ be a Waffle. (image via Shutterstock

There is a reason we didn’t hyphenate our names when we got married and that’s because our hyphenated name sounds ridiculous. We fought a little about this one because I felt like if the kid came from my bod, they should have my name. Waffle felt like I would have a strongly recognized legal bond with the kid because of being the birth mother, so they should have Waffle’s name. Valid argument. Also, if we are successful with this whole Korean sperm donor thing, the kid will not look like Waffle at all. So they are getting Waffle’s last name, in the interest of making parent-teacher conferences less confusing. However, they are getting my Korean birth last name as one of their middle names. Lee is my second middle name and it will be future kid’s middle name, too.

10. How will I share cultural heritage with this future human?

South Korean flag

As a KAD (Korean adoptee) whose parents and spouse are white, I feel I have a responsibility to this future person who will share some of my DNA and who will be at least half-Korean and hopefully 100% Korean like me. I want to share my family’s cultural heritage — my mom’s homemade butter cream frosting and my dad’s authentic Italian red sauce and our family traditions. I want to share Waffle’s family traditions, as well.

I also want to give future human a taste of their Korean ancestry — no, more than a taste. I want them to know the Korean side of their heritage, too. The challenge is, I’m still learning about Korean history and culture. For example, I want to celebrate toljabee, a Korean choosing ceremony on a child’s first birthday where various items are put in front of the baby representing wealth, long life, scholarly pursuits, etc and the object the baby picks up foretells their future. I was 18 before I had any Korean food. I want them to at least know what traditional foods are, even if they prefer McDonald’s over kimchee. And if possible, I want to send them to Korea school so they can learn the language. I’d like to learn my people’s language, too.

11. WHEN…WHEN?!

This is basically what I feel like right now. (image via Shutterstock)

I feel like taking almost two years to really think this all through and to conceive of a financial plan to make it happen in the way that we want it to, was worth it. I mean, I’m not going to lie. Since we started on this and I fully realized that some people can just rub up together and make babies for free, I’ve been a little resentful. But I also know we are so privileged and lucky to be able to afford to do this in the way we want to and that many queer and trans folks don’t have the options we have. So we’re taking a deep breath. And we’re ready. In fact, this is the closest to a biological clock situation I’ve ever been in. I am ready to go now. I’m prepared. Let’s do it.

Speaking of…

12. What if it doesn’t work out?

We are strong like rhinoceroses…rhinoceri? rhinoceros (plural)?

There is great risk in putting all these words on the internet before we even know if this is going to work. What is it doesn’t? What if we just can’t get pregnant, for whatever reason? What if we have to make an abortion decision? What if we have a miscarriage? Honestly, we don’t know. We know it feels right to be honest and that there are so few queer narratives out there in the world around pregnancy and parenting. And we know that writing these words down has helped us so much to process, to connect with other people in our real life and online who are also trying (or tried and gave up) and we feel so much better about these decisions now. We feel less alone. We feel like we have more queer resources and support networks. We don’t regret it. And if it doesn’t work out, well, I feel confident we can support each other through it and we’ll take it from there. And have a lot more expendable income in the future, for sure.

How about you baby-wanting or baby-making or child-having folks? What questions surprised you or challenged you along the way?

Panic and Parenthood: Having A Baby, Being Torn Apart, and Putting Myself Back Together

I can still feel the carpet scraping against my bare skin as I crawled away crying, “No. No. No.”

“Kate.” She reached toward me. The dorm floor was musty, burning my nose with that plastic stuff they use to make institutional carpet fire-resistant.

“Kate.”

My name sounded weird in my ears, like that game I played as a kid where I tried to guess what my friend was saying while we were both underwater. The sound was distorted so that it wasn’t music; it was a nightmare. “Wake up,” I told myself. “Stop shaking.”

One second I was having sex with my girlfriend and the next second my brain broke. It was New Year’s Eve 1999 and I was twenty years old.

When I stopped panicking, I started trying to figure out how I went from having sex to having a panic attack. I loved my girlfriend. I loved having sex with my girlfriend. When I kissed her for the first time, it felt like movie kisses finally made sense. When we sat in class, six inches between the edges of our thighs felt like miles. We were fireworks in my chest.

When she and I had sex before it was heaven. It ended with me saying “holy shit” and giggling and holding onto her so tight. It made me want her more. But now I was crying and the sunlight was shadows and I couldn’t make sense of any of it. I couldn’t make sense of myself.

Sometimes late at night I would stare at the springs on my roommate’s bunk and revisit that first sex panic. My eyes would track the way her weight pushed the striped mattress into the s-curves of the springs. With the room dark, with my roommates sleeping peacefully, I would try to decipher the shadows in my mind.

One night, my girlfriend sat down on the edge of my bed, perched like she might need to make a quick getaway.

“Did something happen?” She paused, moving her head to one side to get me to look at her face. “Did something happen to you before?”

I shook my head and then buried it in her shoulder. She smelled like Herbal Essences conditioner. “I don’t know.” She didn’t let go when my loud sniffling invaded her ear. “I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

The third time it happened we were both watching for it. Me trying to force out the panic creeping into my chest, she looking down and watching my face for any hint that she was losing me. My skin would go cold and tears would burn at the corners of my eyes. I would try to keep them there, try to keep her from seeing what was happening. But she would always know. She could see what was happening even before I told her to stop. She would stop and wrap her arms around me until I stopped crying.

“I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to deal with this.”

“Neither should you.”

We made rules. If we were drinking we weren’t having sex.

In one of my college psych courses we had to try to use conditioning to get rid of bad habits. My classmates tried to stop biting their nails. I tried to stop panicking during sex.

We talked more. “Is this okay?” became the most common question. It helped but I hated it. I just wanted to be normal. I wanted to be able to want her without having to check in a thousand times because my brain was a ticking bomb. I wanted all the time I spent thinking about sex to be fun. I didn’t want to think about how much I wanted to have sex with her right there on that couch or pressed against that wall while also worrying “Would that be okay? Would I be able to do that without losing my head?” There was always a monster lurking in my fantasies: ready, waiting to pounce. “Don’t be an idiot, you could never do that without falling apart.”

It went on like that for years. We graduated from college and moved into an apartment together. I went to law school and she went to medical school.

In 2006 this girl, the same one I had met on the first day of college, became my wife. Sometimes we could have sex without me having to fight myself. Sometimes it didn’t hurt. Sometimes it did. But it took years of feeling broken and wrong and trying everything we could so I wouldn’t lose it every time we had sex and she wouldn’t have to feel like she was hurting me. It took a long time to figure out how to listen to my body, my heart, and my head all at the same time. But I got better recognizing when the panic was rising too fast for me to stop it and when I could escape it before it got over my head. We followed our rules and I listened to the voice in my head that told me to slow down even when the rest of me was consumed by wanting her. The panic still crept into my life but as time went by it became less devastating when it arrived.

In 2008, we decided to have a baby. And for the first time since puberty, probably, and certainly the first time since I met my wife, I stopped thinking about having sex. From the moment I scrambled away from my now-wife on the horrible carpet on that dorm room floor, I’d been trying to keep everything under control. If I examined my panic enough, if I called it out, if I studied it and talked about it and forced it to obey me, I would stop coming apart. I could learn to control my panic. I could keep it together. I knew I could.

And then my wife got me pregnant. We did it at home, in our bed. I wouldn’t recommend it. She used the speculum from her OB/GYN rotation. It hurt like hell. I don’t remember if I cried or not. Fuck, fuck, fuck it hurt. And then I was pregnant. Rip.

I spent the first trimester feeling like I was carsick but never being able to get the hell out of the car. My emotions were all over the place. I laughed while I was crying and cried while I was laughing. I felt like was losing my mind. Rip.

I felt like there was an alien growing in my belly. She moved and squirmed and kicked and did this weird turning thing like a surfacing whale that I could actually see through my skin. I was growing a human and feeling totally insane and for the first time in my life had no interest in sex. Rip.

I didn’t look like myself. It’s hard to know just how vain you are until you lose control of your body and can’t do a damn thing about the way it looks. I hated the way I felt and the way my body was changing. I hated the stupid, girly shit I had to wear because they don’t make maternity clothes for women like me. It was like someone else was walking around in my shoes, going to my job, talking to my wife. I don’t know who she was but I wanted her gone and my old self back. Rip.

Then I went through labor.

I had been a Division I athlete. I suffered through two-a-days, running stadiums, and lifting before class. I thought I had a clue what hard work felt like. It was nothing compared to giving birth. The pain was awful. The epidural didn’t work. My daughter arrived with a thirteen-inch head. Thirteen inches. She was delivered naturally. Thirteen frickin’ inches through my vagina. Rip.

After they handed her to me all pink and swaddled in a blanket, they had to stitch me back together. They had to sew back together the place where they cut my skin to make room for my daughter to push through. But even cutting my skin wasn’t enough. My daughter still ripped a hole in me on her way out. They had to stitch that together, too. At one point I wondered if the doctor was doing needlepoint or if he just liked to embroider his initials on my skin. Rip.

I pretty much never wanted to have sex again. The thought of anything but a giant ice pack going near my lady bits was enough to make me cringe. It’s hard to feel interested in anything vaguely sexual when you are in the middle of a six-week long period and are only allowed to use those monster size maxi pads that you thought you were done with in middle school. I never thought I would want to have sex again, but just like everything else that came with pregnancy, the cravings, the weight, the postpartum weepiness, that feeling went away, too.

While some things slowly oozed back in the direction of normal, nothing in our lives was the same. We didn’t sleep much. I was feeding a baby from my boobs. My clothes didn’t fit.

Slowly I started to feel like me again. A big part of that change happened when, after more than nine months of not being interested at all, I started thinking about sex again. It was like pulling on a favorite pair of jeans and having them fit perfectly. That feeling of putting on the outfit that makes you feel like you’re hot shit. Sex seemed like a good idea again and just that tiny thought made me feel more like me than I had felt for months.

I was more than a little hesitant to give it a shot. First of all, my boobs were essentially a feeding station and I had taken to mooing because there was always milk everywhere.

Second, I had both an episiotomy and a third degree tear (for the love of all things holy do not Google image search either of those things. Just don’t). When we got down to the serious business of having sex would everything feel the same? Would all that stuff they sewed back together even work the same? I had no idea whether they had put me back together correctly. I didn’t know what to expect, what to hope for, or whether I should just run screaming in the other direction.

Third, while I had already made peace with never knowing what caused that first panic, there was the vague, lurking feeling that if I tried having sex I could end up right back to where I started. I could end up rocking in a corner, sobbing my eyes out. I wasn’t sure I could handle that on top of the exhaustion and the emotional rollercoaster of being a new parent.

I was more awkward having sex that first time after having a baby than I was when we had sex for the first time as teenagers. I felt weird in my post-baby body. It wasn’t like the one I had before I was pregnant and that made me self-conscious. But my wife didn’t care that my body was jiggly. For that time we weren’t parents washing a thousand onesies, changing diapers, and doing our best to make it through a day on zero sleep; we were us. She was the girl with the devastating green eyes that I fell in love with at nineteen and I didn’t want to keep my hands off of her for another second.

When I pushed my daughter’s tiny body (and giant head) into this world, the entire process tore me open. The doctor took a needle and thread and stitched me back together while I cried over my baby. The happiest, most exhausted tears I had ever cried in my life. After ten months of growing an alien who stole my body, my clothes, and my brain, I had produced a beautiful, tiny person.

Did you ever make paper in elementary school? Tearing a fully-formed scribbled-on page into tiny pieces, softening the scraps, and molding them together into a new shape? Something solid made brand new? I think that’s what giving birth to our daughter did to me.

I’m not the same woman who got pregnant with her seven years ago. I’m a little bumpier across the middle and softer at the edges than I used to be, but I don’t cry anymore when we have sex. The panic never finds me. Our daughter ripped me open as easy a sheet of used paper. My wife and I put the pieces of me back together again.

VIDEO: Queer Mama for Autostraddle Episode Eight — The Baby Shower

I didn’t want to have a baby shower. I didn’t have a bachelorette party or a bridal shower. I know this is going to sound odd coming from someone who is currently vlogging the most intimate parts of her life on camera, but I feel sort of awkward being the center of attention. Unless I’m doing something I feel is worth watching, I guess, since I do love being on stage. But being the center of attention for something as mundane as growing a baby? And asking people for presents for it?

I didn’t think we needed a baby shower. Simone and I both have older siblings with kids who were handing down a fair amount of baby stuff, and so I was sure we didn’t really need anything else. I am pretty horrified by the amount of junk that accumulates around small children, all those expensive pieces of plastic that will eventually end up in a landfill. The anti-consumerist in me cringed at the idea of people buying us all these things. Where would we even put them in our 800 square foot apartment that also houses our business?

And what does the baby really need? A car seat, diapers, a place to sleep. Unfettered access to my boobs for food. We decided not to have a baby shower. Then, when I was 4 or 5 months pregnant, people started asking when our baby shower was. I realized people like celebrating babies, like celebrating the people they love embarking on a new chapter of their lives, and, let’s be real, a lot of people like buying tiny adorable baby things. So when a most generous friend of ours offered to host a baby shower for us, we said yes.

I started looking at lists of what a baby “needs,” and, despite my supposed desire to raise my children with nothing more than a bearskin rug and my bare breasts, I started thinking maybe there were just a few things that might come in handy once the baby arrives… I started making my own lists, and it started fairly simply. A baby bathtub did sound convenient, and a bassinet for the first few months. A crib, too, for later. Probably something to carry the baby around in.

My list quickly grew from there, as I consulted every corner of the internet I could find to decipher what we actually needed or wanted. Sure, we could change the baby wherever, on the floor, but maybe a changing station would be nice? Simone reminded me how many diapers we’d change a day. I knew I wanted to try cloth diapers. It’s (arguably, I know) better for the environment, but also it’s a whole heck of a lot cheaper. Over time that is – buying the initial stash can be kind of pricy.

Then there were the small practical things, like a snotsucker, baby first aid kit, a sunhat. There were also some things for the nursery (currently an office) we could use, like a dresser and blackout curtains. Bottles. A travel crib. Swaddle blankets. A diaper pail with reusable liners. What about a white noise machine?

I’m Type A, and an avid researcher, and when I decide to buy things I want the highest quality, most eco-friendly thing I can afford (“can afford” being a seriously subjective designation.) I spent the next three months looking at the reviews for baby products in every single category. Turns out there are a lot of rabbit holes to fall down in the world of baby stuff. People, you’ll be surprised to learn, have opinions about these things.

There isn’t just one best baby carrying device, there’s a whole community around “baby wearing.” Baby wearing, I learned, is a sort of religion, or perhaps a sub-sect of attachment parenting. It appeals to me because it seems so much more convenient than hauling a bulky stroller everywhere, and also it’s just so darn sweet. So what to get? There are ring slings and soft structured carriers, stretchy wraps and linen fabrics. There are things that can carry floppy infants and carriers meant for toddlers, all in dozens of different brands.

The baby wearers told me I should wait until my baby is here to decide what to get, come to a meeting (there are meetings!) and try a few of them on, but I didn’t want to wait. These things are expensive, and so I wanted to register for them. I decided on a ring sling because they are great for infants, my yoga teacher loves them, and they are easy to get on and off. My community of twitter mamas helped me solidify this decision and pick a brand, Sakura Bloom. I also decided on a Tula soft structured carrier for when the baby gets a bit bigger. Later we were handed down an Ergo and a Baby Bjorn. I’ll probably also buy a used Moby for $20 at my local kid’s resale store. Baby wearing here I come! I will report back.

For cloth diapers, there were even more choices. Flats or prefolds with covers? Something with inserts? All-in-ones? There are the easiest cloth diapers (all-in-ones), which are the most similar to disposables and the easiest for people unaccustomed to cloth. But they are also by far the most expensive, and they take the most time to wash and dry. Did I mention we don’t have our own washer and dryer? There are dozens of different brands of all these things. I decided to get mostly flats and some prefolds with covers from a couple brands, plus a few all-in-ones for ease for other caretakers, like her grandparents.

As I went into the depths of baby product internet review land I was nearly seduced by things like an adorable wooden baby “play gym”, but I just could not imagine asking someone to pay $135 for something I could probably make for $20. On the other hand, I had no problem asking for the $60 bathtub when the $15 one would have done the job. But we have a tiny apartment! And plan to have at least two kids! My choices were very carefully considered and yet of course also somewhat capricious, I admit this.

I could detail every decision for every product I put on our registry like this, but I imagine it might be somewhat boring other than to people who are about to make these decisions themselves. The big decisions, for you other soon-to-be-parents out there are as follows:

1. The Lotus Everywhere Travel Crib
More expensive than other brands, but the only travel crib free of flame retardants and very well reviewed by moms.

2. The Halo Bassinest
Not the prettiest bassinet (see this hot little luxury number) but well made and convenient and really darn nice compared to a lot of the options (not cheap though, so we better use it at least twice).

3. Glass bottles

I’ll stop there, but feel free to ask me questions in the comments if you want to know more or geek out on baby products or cloth diapers or whatever with me. And tell me your favorite baby items! Though I really probably don’t need to buy too much more at this point. I still have a too long list of items to get, things like diapers and detergent, a drying line, maybe the white noise machine.

The shower itself was incredibly dreamy, and of course not really about all this stuff at all. Simone and I wanted to make our marriage legal before the baby came, and we surprised our guests with a little wedding ceremony at our shower.

We renewed our vows to each other and said new ones to our sweet little baby, and we signed the paperwork that made our marriage legal in California. And then, just about a week later, it became legal everywhere. Our hostess surprised us with the most awesome hot pink wedding cake I’ve ever seen, which we ate amidst mountains of other delicious food.

We played no games, thank goodness, but we did ask guests to write little letters to us and to our baby. I love real letters, these tangible expressions of love and support that I can re-discover time and time again, and I’m so glad we did this. You should watch the video to hear some of the incredibly generous, funny, and thoughtful messages our friends left us and our daughter. She is so lucky to grow up surrounded by such a caring group of friends and family, and so are we.

http://youtu.be/lVS8iEneIeo

I felt so grateful, then, at our baby shower, and I feel so grateful now still, to be transitioning into this next phase of our lives as parents with all this community around us. I know all these decisions about stuff I probably spent way too much time on are really the tiniest, most meaningless decisions we will make in the life of this child. We are going to have so many more and harder decisions to make. I will rely on the internet, my online parent communities (including you fine folks here!), and all these wonderful people as we make our way. Just a month to go!!

VIDEO: Queer Mama for Autostraddle Episode Seven — Help Name Our Baby!

This is Part 7 of a 12 column series. If you’re just joining in, start at the beginning!

Okay dear Autostraddle readers, we need your help! This baby could come in as little as a month, and she doesn’t have a name! Simone and I have been talking about names off and on for years now, but we’ve yet to settle on something. I think maybe my commitment-phobia is rearing its head.

Simone says choosing a name is not unlike choosing a sperm donor. It’s this big, totally subjective decision we have make together for our future child that will be with her for life. Well, or not, as it’s actually not that hard to change your name, whereas changing your sperm donor retroactively is actually biologically impossible.

I think maybe other people don’t find these decisions as hard as we do.

How does a person go about naming someone they’ve never met? What did you do, readers who’ve done it? (Or maybe you just named yourself, tell me about that, too.) We started in the abstract several years ago when we were thinking about baby making, compiling a list of names – boy, girl, and gender neutral – that we thought we liked. We considered all the family names we could think of, but none quite landed. Eventually I bought a couple baby name books and we began looking through those, too.

As, ahem, you’ve probably gathered, Simone and I have very strong opinions about things, and they are not always shared opinions. One of her favorite names is the name of a super shitty ex of a friend of mine, and I have such negative associations with the name that I couldn’t possibly give it to my child. One of my favorite names is the name of her ex-girlfriend’s cat. Damnit. Or there’s the name of that person who was kind of a bully in high school. Or a former lover. Or too similar to the name of someone very close to us.

That’s the thing about names — they carry a lot of subjective weight based on when and how (and if) we’ve encountered them. Or whether they’re suddenly at the forefront of popular culture; Dora and Olivia come to mind. There’s also the more aesthetic qualities. The sound of the name, what imagery it conjures. How delightful it is to say, how easy to spell. Does it jive with our last name?

I think Juniper is an awesome and adorable name, but I’m pretty sure Juniper Jude sounds like a cartoon character, and probably not in a good way. We considered and rejected a fair number of J names because of this. So that’s our first criteria, readers, the name shouldn’t begin with J. I think. Unless you have a really good idea, then give it to me anyway. Oh, also, the baby’s middle name will probably be Everhart, which is the maiden name of my paternal grandmother, so take that into account. __________ Everhart Jude.

June, a name we both like (shocking!!) was also rejected, though not so much because it begins with J, but more because it’s only one syllable. Something about having two one syllable names can make it sound terse, or incomplete. I confirmed this with a friend with two one-syllable names. People often say huh? like they missed something, when he introduces himself, even though his first name is simply John. But now that I think of it Miles Jude has a pretty nice ring to it, though I’d probably want that name more for a boy. So in any case that’s our second criteria, more than one syllable in the name.

Speaking of Miles, that brings us to gender. When Simone and I were first considering names, we thought we should err towards the gender neutral side of the girl-name spectrum. We know a good number of masculine-identifying women and so many trans men who haven’t liked their more feminine given names. But that’s the problem with “gender neutral.” It mostly has just come to mean sort-of masculine. Lover of femininity that I am, was I really willing to write off all the beautiful feminine names because our kid might not be femme?

We decided no, we wouldn’t do that. Our kid can change her name if and when she wants, and in the meantime, we will call her a name we love, even if that’s feminine! In any case, I have friends who’ve later changed their names not because of gender at all, but just because they wanted to be called something else, so there really are no guarantees. After wrapping her mind around it a bit, turns out Simone really loves some of the more feminine names, and we seem to gravitate towards old fashioned elegance or southern flair with our lists these days. Names like Adeline or Eloise or Loretta. Bring on the powerful, feminine names, people!

We also like feminine names with a more andro nickname though, as it seems nice to have that available. Josephine has been on and off our short list for a while, and I like that it is feminine and elegant but has a simple and more boyish nickname (Jo) as well. An androgynous nickname is not an absolute criteria, but it’s an added bonus if available. In general, actually, we prefer names with nicknames, which is sort of funny because neither Simone nor Haley have clear nicknames at all. But nicknames are so cute! We love them! I call Simone Simone-y, and we have approximately 405 nicknames for our dog. Vivian, with so many cute nicknames – Viv, Vivi, simply Vee – is currently a front runner.

Part of thinking about nicknames, and about the gender presentation of the name (is that weird to say, that a name has a gender presentation?) is wanting a name that feels versatile. Which brings up all sorts of feelings. I love frou frou names and once had the thought, “Can a Tallulah be a CEO?” How fucked up is that? Why couldn’t a Tallulah be a CEO? And since when do I hope my daughter will be a CEO anyway?! Clementine Jude could be a badass artist, certainly, but what if she just wants to be boring and mainstream? (Just kidding, darling, I’ll never think you’re boring, do whatever you want in life!)

I tend to think names change, our interpretation of them changes at least, depending on who’s wearing them. I always thought of Simone as quite a feminine name before I met my Simone. She’s quick to point out, though, that’s it’s actually a boy’s name in some parts of the world. Simone thinks names have a strong power, almost as if we are pre-determining a trajectory for our child based on the name we give her. That’s some serious stuff. How can we possibly decide?!

I don’t fully agree with Simone about pre-determining trajectory, but I do think names have power, and I do think it’s quite a decision to make for another person. I kind of want to meet her before we decide. Not that her personality or some essential essence of her will be revealed in the first 24 hours or anything. But I don’t know, maybe something will become clear. The look in her eyes or her tiny face or the way she enters the world giving us some clue into who she is and how we should name her. The next of many honors, little one, letting us choose your name. Well I guess she’s not letting us exactly (Tiny can’t really consent yet!) but it’s something we get to do as parents, something we have to do.

Something we have to do very soon!! So please help us. Send us all your favorite name ideas. More than one syllable, unique but not trendy or too out there (whatever the heck that means!), sounds good with Jude, versatile and pretty and powerful. I know she’s going to be quite the gal, and she needs a name that can match her ferocity or tenderness or whatever it is she turns out to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipKRVnBwv5o

Tell me the story of how you got your name, and if you like it. Have you always liked it? Or do you kinda hate the name your parents gave you? Tell me that too, and why. Write your suggestions in the comments. And if we choose your name, you totally get a prize. We just haven’t decided what that is yet.

VIDEO: Queer Mama for Autostraddle Episode Six — Finding Out the Sex

This is Part 6 of a 12 column series. If you’re just joining in, start at the beginning!

Sometimes I almost can’t believe that I’m growing a PERSON. Twenty-nine weeks inside me now, skull firmly lodged by my bladder these days. I imagine, sometime in the distant future, looking at my grownup child with their now adult-sized skull and thinking, “wow, that thing was once inside me. I grew you.” Wild.

I know so little about this creature I’m gestating, and sometimes I wonder what kind of person our baby will turn out to be. What passions, what personality, what will our relationship be like? There’s no information available about who this person will be, though I sometimes like to guess based on how active the baby is or what kind of music causes the most kicks.

The only real clue one can get about this baby inside, and a very murky clue at that, is what genitals they appear to have or what sex chromosomes (depending on how and if one chooses to get the news). I always knew I wanted to find out the sex of my baby. I don’t know that I would’ve gone out of my way to find out if it cost like a ton of money or required some special procedure, but given the choice? Hell yeah, I wanted to know. I didn’t want some ultrasound tech knowing something major about my baby that I didn’t! Or weirder yet, having to hide this big piece of information from me by swooping by the genitals at every ultrasound.

Simone was impatient to know from very early on. She wanted something more concrete to envision about this child, and she wanted to start talking more seriously about names! I felt patient, knowing it was likely (all being well healthwise) the only big piece of news we’d get for the whole fortyish weeks with this babe inside.

I need to pause here and say, in case it isn’t obvious, that Simone and I both recognize that gender is a social construct and that a person’s sex and gender aren’t always determined by what their genitals look like at birth. Whether our child has what appears to be a penis or a vagina or even xx or xy or another chromosome combination entirely doesn’t really tell us who they will turn out to be. They could be intersex or transgender or genderqueer or gender non-normative in some way that is yet to be named.

Our own gender evolutions have been complicated. Simone was a tomboy who ran around shirtless until she got to the age where other people were uncomfortable that this girl, no longer just a child, wasn’t wearing a shirt. She had crossed that invisible line created by our fucked up society between shirtless and topless. In her pre-teen and teenage years she felt stifled, awkward, and distressed by having to perform “girl” in the ways being modeled around her. It wasn’t until much later, after she came out even, that she came into her own gender as a masculine-identifying woman. She-identified, men’s clothes-wearing, handsome and tender. Still frustrated by the fact that men can run around without shirts while she can’t.

I’ve mostly always been femme, though I didn’t always know it, and I definitely didn’t always own it. I came into my femme-inism as a teenager frustrated by the double standards around sexuality for boys and girls, unwilling to accept unequal access to things like having sex just because it felt good. I enjoyed my feminine powers of seduction, though also tired very quickly of the way I was treated as a white, pretty, bubbly blond young woman. I diminished my femininity for some time because of this, wanting to be taken seriously, whatever that meant, wanting to be a sex object, too, sure, but also so much more.

It wasn’t until I found queer community that I really came into my own femininity. I met powerful, sexy, brilliant, tough femmes who I wanted to be (and, ahem, also make out with). I was suddenly surrounded by people I felt could see me in my wholeness, people who respected my femininity, elevating it to the place I believe it deserves. Our culture’s relationship with femininity is oh-so fraught, and queer culture gave me a totally different terrain upon which to play with gender and embrace my own identity. I believe in the radical potential of femme.

I also just love “girly” stuff – hot pink and sparkles, stilettos and short skirts. But I don’t shave my legs, and I keep my nails short. I pick and choose the pieces of femininity I want. I’m lucky to live my life and feel in my body in such a way that I rarely feel a pressure anymore to conform to gender norms that don’t suit me.

This is supposed to be an essay about finding out the sex of our baby, and I have digressed oh so much already. Can you tell I care a lot and think a lot about gender?! This is complicated, intimate stuff people, and I feel committed to revealing the complexities as best I can. So I’ve given you a sense that Simone and my genders are complicated, and that we very much understand that sex and gender are not somehow essentially tied, so why did we even care what sex the baby appeared to be?

One queer friend put it this way: the child is likely, statistically speaking, to identify in some fashion with the gender they are assigned at birth. So this piece of information does give us a big clue as to who they might be or, at the very least, a clue as to how the world will be towards them in their early years.

I’ll be straight up – I’ve always wanted to have a daughter. I love girls and women and mostly choose to surround myself with them in my friendships and in my life. Being a lesbian separatist would be problematic in so many ways, but I sometimes fantasize about it anyway. I am drawn to people choosing to live in the world as women, across the whole spectrum of masculinity and femininity, cis or trans, queer or not. I’m also drawn to femmes, male or female-identified, and I’ve joked with Simone for years that all I really want is a princess, boy or girl, and that I won’t stop having kids until I get one. Which I realize means I will probably end up with a pack of the butchest kids you’ve ever seen. And then I’ll be that mom hoping they date someone girly so I can shower them with the pink things my children rejected.

As I compiled our registry, before we found out the sex, I filled it with hot pink items, because that’s my favorite color. I mean the baby doesn’t care what color the bathtub or stroller is. I’m the one who has to look at it! I realized that people looking at our registry would likely just assume the baby was a girl, however. I thought about how all my pink stuff would be considered transgressive if it turned out we were having a boy, but read as gender normative to most of the world if it so happened we were having a girl.

I was so nervous the day of our 19-week ultrasound, much more preoccupied with whether the baby was healthy and growing well than with what sex they might be. It had been 7 weeks since I’d last seen our baby, which felt like far too long, since I’d been spoiled with so many early ultrasounds due to IVF. I was in that weird part of pregnancy where I only felt I was pregnant because I wasn’t getting my period. I had started feeling some movement, but it wasn’t consistent and wasn’t as distinctive as it would grow to be in the coming weeks.

The ultrasound tech walked us down two long hallways into a small, sterile room with giant screens, dimmed the lights, and drew a smiley face on my belly with lube. Seriously. I only noticed this in retrospect, reviewing the footage. She took her time, entering numbers into the computer, fiddling with dials, checking all the important things off her to-scan list before finally the baby turned their butt and legs towards the wand.

“It’s not looking like there’s much between the legs,” she said. Simone and I laughed nervously. “Yup, nope,” the tech said, moving the wand back and forth, and from that moment forward our baby became a she.

It wasn’t until after I heard confirmation from the doctor that our baby did in fact look healthy and well, until after I wiped the gel off my stomach and pulled my shirt back down, until I got outside even, on the way to our car, that it really sunk in. I was having a daughter. I am having a daughter. It is with reverence, complexity, and so much bliss that I share this news with you now. We are having a baby girl!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IwyLgs0DHc

VIDEO: Queer Mama for Autostraddle Episode Five – I Want To Be Pregnant Forever!

All of a sudden, somewhere between twelve and fourteen weeks, I woke up and pregnancy was everything I ever wanted it to be and so much more. It’s hard to say how much of the crappiness of the first trimester was the IVF hormones and how much was normal first trimester stuff, but the day I went off my progesterone injections I had so much more energy.

I was lucky, too, that, like clockwork, my “morning sickness” (ahem, pregnancy induced nausea, which most certainly did not happen only in the morning) disappeared. I stopped having so many weird food aversions and a desire to only consume huge amounts of carbs, yogurt, and oranges.

Off the progesterone and, uterus floating up out of the pelvis, I stopped getting up 5 times in the middle of the night to pee. The early part of the second trimester was marked by an absence of symptoms, mostly. No nausea, no fatigue, no peeing, little moodiness. For several weeks I thought “well, I haven’t gotten my period in a long time so I guess that means I’m pregnant.” Not bleeding felt like the only real clue.

Then my belly started to grow, bit by bit, until somewhere around 18 weeks when I felt like it just popped out and I could see it growing in real time. My boobs went through a second growth spurt too. I reveled in my changing body, staring at myself in the mirror all these new curves, feeling a feminine lusciousness.

I felt well enough to start exercising again and quickly became obsessed with prenatal yoga, all juicy hips and pelvic floors and rooms full of pregnant ladies. Across the threshold of that early more dicey time, and holding onto that faith I’d cultivated, I told myself I was no more likely to lose this baby now than at 35 weeks, and so I might as well enjoy it. (I realize that might sound like a bizarre comfort to people who’ve never experienced loss, but there you go!) I saw my future in these women, huge bellies and powerful warrior poses.

I actually felt like the earth mother goddess I had envisioned becoming. I decided I wanted to be pregnant forever. Those of you who’ve been reading my column are probably thinking, holy 180! And it’s true, it felt that dramatic to me, too. In a way, I think the bliss came in that way it only can after a dark time. I thought often of Kahlil Gibran’s lines of poetry: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

I was overflowing with joy, with gratitude for making it this far in my pregnancy, with curves and creativity. An expansiveness that connected me to all the beauty and love around me. There would have been a time in my life where this much gushing would have been embarrassing to me, the level of sap I rose to, but not now. I felt a deep empathy for everyone around me, and rather than feeling like all these feelings were a terrible strange burden, like I sometimes did during IVF and the first trimester, I felt so very grateful for them. It felt so good to look at the world with so much compassion and tenderness.

This sweetness and sensuality drew me ever closer towards Simone. I would wake up each morning and stare at her, slightly baffled by how magnificent she was. In awe that there she was, in our bed, yet again, day in and day out. That somehow I was getting to spend my life with this wonderful person. That we had chosen each other, and that we kept choosing each other, over and over, as we plan to do for the rest of our lives. I could lay there, puzzling over how lucky I was, staring at her and snuggling back in, for hours.

Sometimes, though, just staring at her wasn’t enough. I had to have her hands on me, needed her to devour me, over and over please, and just never stop. Every inch of me felt hyper attuned to each touch or kiss, all that extra blood flow and sensitive breasts being put to good use. I was ravenous, pretty much all the time. It might have been overwhelming if it wasn’t so much fun. Our sex is often interplanetary, but during these months there was super extra holy wow total transcendence mind blown don’t worry I never to need to come back from here-ness.

Slowly, as I wasn’t sure at first if it was really happening, the other coolest part of the second trimester began to happen. I began to feel the baby move. At first there was a lot of, “is that?!” But later it was unmistakeable. On a trip away from Simone I captured my belly moving for the first time, real evidence that there was a little person growing inside me. A little person with legs to kick and hands to punch and a head to head butt me with and somersaults to do.

Tiny Dancer makes me laugh and laugh with her/his moves, like s/he’s telling me some kind of joke or discovering something new for the first time or even fumbling around all uncoordinated. Whatever it is, I find it very funny. And I find it very sweet.

I am carrying my baby inside my body, teaching him/her about the world through my experiences. Every good feeling transmitting those hormones through the placenta. Every taste filtering into the amniotic fluid. Teaching her/him the sound of laughter and music and Simone’s voice. Teaching him/her about how beautiful and filled with sensation the world s/he is coming into is going to be.

I felt so present during the second trimester (lots of mindfulness probably helped). Because of my miscarriage, because of how hard we worked to get here, because of all the people I know still trying (or who have decided to build their families in other ways, or not at all), I take nothing for granted. Not a moment. I savor every kick, every new curve, every song Simone sings to our little one. I feel very aware of how fleeting this time is, how we will never be here again.

I can’t guarantee I will ever get pregnant again (I so hope to, of course), but even if I could it would be a totally different experience. A different baby, a different pregnancy, a different time in our lives. And likely (oh, how I hope) I’ll have a little one in the world clamoring for my attention. As I approached the end of the second trimester I became more aware of this transition on the horizon. Baby as beginning and end. The end of this era of us, of me and Simone, of our early years as a couple. It will never be just the two of us, ever again.

As I rounded the corner towards the second trimester I felt both patient and ready. Simone and I are so ready (whatever that means!) for this new phase of our family, a phase that will no doubt call upon us to both strengthen our bond as a couple and release some of our hold. But I felt in no rush to get there, either, as I looked to the last trimester of pregnancy and our last few months together. You can take your time, baby. I want you fully cooked.

I write this in the early days of the third trimester, with a keen awareness that the only thing certain in this journey of pregnancy, of parenting, of life is that EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE. So stay tuned with me for what this last phase of pregnancy will bring. If you’ve been pregnant, chime in with comments about what I should expect next!

https://youtu.be/IYBLXHifJr8

Watch the video for more on the second trimester, and, always, sappy moments between me and Simone, and, yup, more tears!

VIDEO! Queer Mama Interviews +one: They Want To Help You Get Pregnant

I heard about +one, a new integrated product and platform that helps lesbian couples conceive, from multiple sources simultaneously. My networks were super excited about it, and I know you will be too, dear Autostraddle readers! +one is poised to fill a serious void for us in terms of resources, materials, and peer-to-peer support.

If you’ve spent time searching the depths of the internet for accurate, up-to-date, trustworthy information about how to conceive — from medical, legal, financial and emotional perspectives — you know how seriously lacking it is. +one intends to provide tons of content on their website in the form of articles, webinars, and personal consultations with experts. They’ll also have a forum for folks to connect and share experiences.

For folks who want to conceive at home, they’ve got a sexy product for that too (currently designed for use with a known donor.) It’s a reusable, all glass and silicone, insulated collection cup and applicator, designed to make it as easy as possible to suck all that precious semen up and shoot it inside yourself (or your partner). The kit also includes simple to read in-the-moment instructions so you know what to do.

I got my hands on the prototype, and it’s awesome. Also, I really like glass — and rad queer/women-run businesses serving our underserved communities! Watch the interview to hear directly from two of the founders, visit their website, and stay tuned for their launch.

What +one wants most right now is to hear from you! Sign up for their mailing list on their site and get in touch with them if you have ideas or resources. Also, share your stories, challenges, and joys of your conception journey in the comments. They’ll be hanging out down there and would love to hear from you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKjV_AqQ–4

Pregnant Beginnings. Literally.

When I was in fourth grade, my teacher had us bury the word nice. She wrote “nice” on an index card and made a coffin out of a tissue box covered in black construction paper. She played the traditional funeral march (you know, dum dum da dum, dum da dum da dum da dum) and slipped that index card into its Kleenex grave. At the time, I thought it was a clever way to remind us 10-year-olds that there were more descriptive adjectives. Now, I recognize this was slightly morbid and potentially insensitive to some students in the class. However, the analogy remains: When we started trying to conceive again, I had to bury a word of my own: If.

I have always been superstitious, the kind of person who believed that if something went wrong, it’s because I didn’t worry hard enough. Yet the rational part of my brain knows that science and religion have both shown that positive thoughts lead to more positive outcomes. I had to let go, deliberately and with difficulty, to my negativity. I decided to “poked fate in the eye until fate gives up,” to quote another mama who lost her first baby. I’m being a rebel. I will no longer say “if” this new, rainbow baby makes it to life, but “when.” At least, I’m trying.

Each week of this new pregnancy has been a battle between hope and doubt. This was our journey the first trimester.

Week One: A colleague is selling a hand-me-down bassinet. My IUI is two weeks away. With reckless optimism, I buy it. I bring half the pieces home; the other half remains at the office to be picked up at some nebulous future time. My wife gets me a card that says how proud she is of me of making this leap of faith. She put a “Joy” card in the offering at church “for the beginning of a new life.”

Ander’s Foot
Photo Copyright Joyce Kilpatrick

Week Two: We tentatively schedule our IUI. I have very few pictures of me pregnant with Ander; I thought there would be time; I thought it was silly. This time, we start early, taking pictures on our way to the IUI: our hands on the doorknob to go outside; a silly shot of me acting like a swimming sperm.

Week Three: The two week wait overlaps with the Advent season, in which Christians wait for the birth of a baby. The irony is not lost on me as I struggle to decide how and if we include our lost son on our Christmas cards. To avoid awkwardness, we choose to sign them “The Zinssers.”

Week Four: On Friday, I see Anderson’s name five times, and it seems to occur just as I begin to wonder if I’m pregnant. On Saturday night, both my wife and I dream I am pregnant. Therefore, I decide to test on Sunday morning. There is a second line. It is faint, but not so faint. Definitely there. We spend Sunday in bursts of giddy excitement. We know, of course, that one pregnancy test means very little, but one day of bliss is better than one day of anxiety. I have learned that my disappointment is not greater if I start from a place of happy rather than sad.

Week Five: We head to the East Coast for Christmas, and tell our parents we are pregnant just a few days after we find out ourselves. They are thrilled. I contemplate the challenge of surviving the holiday season without any alcohol. I feel guilty about not doing anything really special for Anderson, but we hang a stocking for him, and give a ceramic ornament of a touched-up picture of him to the grandparents.

Week Six: This is the week I started bleeding with Ander. This is the week I started bleeding with Ander. This is the week… I get superstitious about which bathroom stall to use at work. I have flashbacks anyway. I check to make sure I’m not bleeding yet at least once an hour. I take a flight to DC for work and opt out of the full-body scanner at the airport. The lady doing my patdown runs her hands over my stomach and says “Oh! Are you pregnant?!” I’m like: (a) I can’t seriously be showing yet, and (b) what would you have done if I said NO? Secretly, though, I am glad. Granted, probably 90% of the women she pats down are opting out due to pregnancy, but still. When she asks how far along I am, I lie and say “oh, the end of the first trimester” because I am ashamed of saying only six weeks.

Week Seven: It is Ander’s first birthday. We are supposed to be feeding him his first cake. Instead, we keep gazing up at the sky, hoping to see a sign of him. We do: it snows, which is perfect. It should always snow on our polar vortex baby’s birthday; it was snowing the day he was born and as we left the hospital after he died, 26 days later. We build him a snowman and thank him for picking out his little sibling for us. We ask him to keep this baby safe and to watch over them. It is odd, being pregnant on your baby’s birthday. Unfair, somehow.

Anderson’s birthday snowman
Photo Copyright K. Zinsser

Week Eight: We have our first ultrasound! There is a baby with a beating heart. My relief is overwhelming. I find out my due date is August 25, but my c-section is tentatively scheduled for August 4, the day I turn 37 weeks (due to the classical incision from my first c-section, if I go into active labor I’m at risk for uterine rupture). I suffer from a case of the should-have-beens: Ander should be toddling down the aisle at my sister’s August 8 wedding. Instead, I’ll be delivering my maid-of-honor speech in a hospital bed under the influence of painkillers.

Week Nine: We decide to go all out to enjoy and celebrate this pregnancy. However long it lasts, we will always have two children now. So: we paint the nursery. We talk with our moms about baby shower dates. We’re assuming this baby is going to stick around. Granted, it helps a LOT that this pregnancy is off to such a better start. It means I’m not obsessing and fretting over every little ache and pain (especially as I’ve felt them before and have a good sense now of what is normal and what is not). Plus, I can EAT with this pregnancy! I was so sick with Ander, and so averse to everything, that I lost weight and felt crummy all the time. This little one makes me ravenous and I only dry heave sometimes in the mornings. I also don’t seem to have the crazy aversions to everything like I did last time (yet) though I am craving black olives, cheddar cheese and chocolate soy milk like nobody’s business. With Ander, I loved pizza and any carbs with tomato sauce (lasagna, spaghetti), but this time pizza makes me feel bloated, so it’s out.

Week Ten: We start telling a few people who ask directly or who otherwise need to know (my physical therapist; one of my sister’s bridesmaids who really wanted to know why I couldn’t make it to NYC in late July for a bachelorette party). We have dinner with the friend whose son was born on what would have been Ander’s due date, and she asks because I’m not drinking.

Week Eleven: We begin to keep a journal for the baby, whom we call Poppyseed. Last time, I obsessively recorded my symptoms (which in retrospect did at least provide a handy comparison to this pregnancy). This time, however, we want to write about everything Poppyseed does in utero. To share with them later, and also… just in case. So that we at least have these memories preserved.

Week Twelve: In another pique of reckless optimism, we book a baby moon! Well, to be fair, I have to be in Ft. Lauderdale for work, and it happens to coincide with the wife’s spring break (she is a college professor), so we plan to stay for a long weekend to enjoy the beach and sun. I figure if I’m going to be pregnant through the summer, I can even justify a maternity bathing suit (even if I’m not really showing yet). I also treat myself to a new fancy dress because we have to go to a university ball in a few weeks and I figure I can re-wear that dress for a later baby shower. This, however, leads to an episode of Midnight Panic. All I can think of is: what if this baby is stillborn? What if lightning strikes twice? What if I manage to avoid the abruption, only to have something else horrible happen? What if it already has, and I won’t know for another three weeks? Every day that brings me closer to the 19 week mark – when I started to really bleed with Ander, what I think of as the beginning of the end – makes me both more confident and more nervous.