VIDEO: Queer Mama for Autostraddle Episode Four — First Trimester Realness

This is Part 4 of a 12 column series. If you’re just joining in, start at the beginning!

If you’ve been following along, you know how badly I wanted to be pregnant and how hard I worked to get pregnant. I thought this meant that actually being pregnant would be pure bliss. Oops.

A lot of this journey for me has been about letting go of expectations, letting go of any semblance of control. This is probably one of the things I’m going to need to be learning for the rest of my life, but damn if the first trimester wasn’t a good teacher. Look how much my baby is teaching me already, and s/he’s not even here yet!

Tiny Dancer at 10 weeks

One of the many messed up things about IVF is that you feel like you’re in the first trimester before you actually are, as the hormones precede the embryo transfer and any possible pregnancy. They also tend to give you more hormones, and for longer, than you really need for safety, so it’s like going through a seriously jacked up version of first trimester. Yippeee!! If you thought shoving large amounts of progesterone into your body through a giant needle sounded bad enough, wait until you hear about the side effects.

Progesterone made me TIRED. Unfathomably tired. Because I’d been through IVF before, I was a little more ready for it this time, and I filled our freezer with easy meals and said no to pretty much anything I possibly could. (Sorry, friends, for those twelve weeks I was a total hermit! Now you know why.) I was so thankful I worked for myself because I could, and did, nap whenever I needed to. So much sleep.

In addition to growing a still very tiny baby, my body was also creating a new organ: the miraculous placenta!! How incredibly cool is that?! It also created blood vessels to support the placenta, and increased my blood volume, too, while my kidneys filtered all that blood even faster than usual. Hormones are powerful stuff, whoa. The uterus also expands and the combination of all these things together is directly responsible for another lovely first trimester symptom, peeing ALL THE TIME. Turns out the sleepless nights, for many of us, begin long before baby even gets here.

Me at 10 weeks

I started waking up multiple times in the middle of the night to pee, and I just decided to roll with it. I read 3 to 4 books a week during those 12 weeks. I grew to love it even — look at all the reading I could get done! It made me feel like maybe waking up with a baby every few hours to breastfeed wouldn’t be so terrible after all, as long as I just surrendered to it. (Not the same thing, I know, but just let me have this one, okay?)

Sometimes, though, I woke up terribly nauseous. I once made and consumed an entire pot of oatmeal at 2am before I could fall back asleep. Food aversions combined with nausea were a particular kind of hell. Nothing would sound appealing to eat, but the hungrier I got the more nauseous I got, which meant the less I wanted to eat, which meant the worse I felt… I started setting my alarm for every two hours to remind myself to preemptively just eat something. Lots of yogurt and toast, the lowest sugar granola bars I could find, and tons of citrus. I shoved handfuls of lettuce into smoothies to make sure I was getting enough greens.

Simone was delighted I was nauseous. It was a good sign for a strong and healthy pregnancy! She proudly marched through the door loaded down with bags filled with every assortment of snack I thought I could stomach and all the ginger candies our local co-op stocked. “I really feel like I have a pregnant wife now!” she beamed.

I was happy about it, too, at least for a while. I cried tears of joy the first (and luckily only) time I vomited. I was really truly pregnant, raging hormones and all. I would wake up in the morning and smile at my nausea, glad it was still with me, gradually much less glad five or six hours later.

And if I thought eating at home was hard, eating out was harder. I’d find myself wandering around an unfamiliar neighborhood before a work meeting desperately searching for something I thought was not only baby safe but baby nourishing. I landed on a hippie-ish coffee shop, thinking their hummus sandwich with veggies was a safe and healthy bet, no non-organic meat or anything weird, but when the sandwich came out it had sprouts on it. Weren’t sprouts one of those things that often had food-borne illnesses? I wouldn’t risk it.

At least there was a side of fruit. I could eat that. Shit, weren’t grapes on the dirty dozen list? There was no way these grapes were organic. Should I ask? I was too embarrassed to ask. Was it better to eat something covered in pesticides or nothing at all? I agonized over these decisions, wanting so badly to protect this vulnerable little being I couldn’t even be sure was still growing inside me.

That’s one weird part about the first trimester, the fact that the work my body was doing and the baby her/himself were both so invisible. I couldn’t feel any movement, my belly wasn’t expanding yet, and symptoms ebbed and flowed. Was there really a baby growing? I was scared a lot of the time. More than I wanted to be. Especially when I bled, which I did several times throughout the first trimester.

Bleeding in pregnancy, and in the first trimester especially, is fairly common, but that doesn’t make it any less scary. Having had a miscarriage, I knew what was at stake, I knew how precarious this pregnancy still was. More than that, I knew what it felt like to lose a baby, how unbearable it had been. I knew that loving someone that much, especially someone who wasn’t even yet really a someone, was the most dangerous thing I could do with my heart.

It was overwhelming. I consider myself a very rational person, calm in a crisis, not easily overtaken by anxiety. I was untethered from that ease, that sense of who I was, during those early months. I was so happy in the very earliest weeks when we first found out, but as the weeks went on, as the bleeding cropped up every once in a while, that happiness was often interrupted by near panic.

Every week there was more at stake as this baby and I grew more attached, both literally/physically and emotionally. I couldn’t quite believe that odds were good I would end up with a baby this time, and I also couldn’t stand the thought of the alternative. Simone held me as I cried many nights, assuring me that though she could not promise me that our baby would be okay, she could promise me that I would be. She promised me that she would be by my side, loving me, holding me up for as long as I needed, no matter the outcome. I am so grateful for her love.

That love, and journaling, and mindfulness, and every coping mechanism I could grasp, and a lot of support from my brilliant therapist, got me through those weeks. At 10 weeks and 3 days, a few hours after seeing a decidedly baby-looking baby bop around on the ultrasound and just after a very affirming therapy session, I decided I was tired of speaking in conditionals. I was going to pretend this pregnancy was real. It didn’t matter what I thought or that I didn’t believe. I was going to just pretend, as an experiment, that there would really be a baby at the end of this.

Fake it ’til you make it works, y’all. I knew at that point that I couldn’t really protect my heart by not having hope, so I let something go that day. I allowed myself to begin to enjoy the pregnancy again. To begin, even, to have fleeting glimpses of that future baby, something I’d been so scared to even imagine. The next day, Simone and I picked out a cute onesie at our local secondhand kid’s store. A week later, I joined our neighborhood parenting listserv (albeit with a new/fake email address) to keep an eye out for used gear.

I started settling in, day by day, as I finally rounded the corner into that hallowed second trimester.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHlBUKXfuaA&feature=youtu.be

If you haven’t yet, watch the video to hear me talk more about all those wacky first trimester symptoms. Oh and also to see me cry, again. One of these days I’ll make an episode where I don’t cry, I promise… And please share your first trimester experiences in the comments, it’s important for folks to hear about how different it is for everyone. And, as always, ask me questions. I’ll answer them here or in my next video! Until next time.

Taking a Chance on a Second Chance: Managing Fears, Anxiety and the Unknown When Getting Pregnant

Feature image by K. Zinsser

I’ve wanted a baby for years. Many of my friends have toddlers already, and I was anxious to get the “have 2.5 children” box ticked off on my life goals. I felt a desperate need to “catch up,” which I know is both ridiculous and insulting to those good friends of mine who aren’t even in a relationship yet and also want children (and don’t want to parent on their own). I get anxious about completing tasks at some nebulous time in the future, and can’t fully feel relaxed until they’re complete.

For me, the bad days are triggered by fear: that it’s too late, that I’m too old, that horrible things will happen again. I am a box checker. In fact, completing items is something about which I am rather obsessive. In my entire life, for example, there has only been one book that I didn’t finish (Catch 22, if you must know). Several of my bookshelves contain books that I haven’t yet read but plan to, and I will feel a vague sense of dissatisfaction until they are complete; the stack of four by my bed is arranged in the order in which I will read them next. A new book may come out and move an older one farther down the pile, but the old book will remain until it is read. I tell you this because I think that this obsession about completing items on my to-do list is what contributed to my panic about not yet having a living child.

On good days, I remember that the problem is that I am the one who makes the to-do list. And it’s an arbitrary to-do list. There is no rule that says I have to read those books next to my bed, or on my bookshelves. If I didn’t read a single one of them, no one would know or care but me. This translates to child-bearing, too. In the ten months between my son Anderson’s death and the new baby’s conception, I was constantly anxious about getting pregnant again. About how old I’d be when we could start trying again. About how long it would take me to get pregnant. About if I’d miscarry. About if I’d have another abruption. About if I’d be on bedrest. About if something goes wrong with the c-section. About if the baby has a disability or heart defect. About SIDS. About childhood cancers and diseases. When I see another friend get pregnant, have a baby, have a second baby before me. About a whole lot of other things I had to learn to let go because they cannot be controlled.

When we were first trying to conceive Ander, I was the killjoy, the “remember our odds are only 25% each time,” the “we’ll see.” For the first ten weeks, I was the “remember one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage,” the “let’s not tell anyone until at least 14 weeks, to be safe.”

Ironically, the wild hope came later, after the bleeding started at 19 weeks, after the doctors told us to prepare for the worst. It was then that I became the “c’mon baby, we can do this,” the “let’s buy some clothes and stuffed animals just in case,” the “we should start a registry.”

When my wife and I were preparing to start trying to conceive again, we had to balance a lot of bad days and good days, a lot of “what ifs” and statistics and medical advice. The simple fact is, no one knows why I had an abruption, so we were left guessing as to what adaptations to the TTC process might lessen our chances of a recurrence.

In meeting with our Maternal Fetal Medicine (MFM) specialist, we could definitively say the following. All of these carry their own risks, so we faced balancing how reckless we wanted to be versus other, more practical concerns. The fact of the matter is, we cannot control for everything. So, what can we control that will help us feel more at ease? What must we absolutely do, and what can we leave to the fates? How can we feel both in control of the process, but not obsess over being in control (when we know now that ultimately, control only gets you so far)? Here are the risks we were balancing:

• There is a risk of recurrence. Because I used IUI (which, along with IVF, carries a higher abruption risk) and because we cannot eliminate other risk factors (such as smoking, since I never was a smoker), my risk is approximately 20% for a repeat abruption. Risk: moderate to high, but nothing we can do about it.

• I am CMV negative. I hadn’t gotten tested for this before, but now know I’m in the minority who has not been exposed to this virus. Our donor is CMV igG positive but CMV igM negative, meaning he has been exposed to the virus, but was not actively infected when he donated. There is an extremely small chance the virus could pass to me through the semen, but we’re talking really low. There’s a greater chance — though still small — that I could contract CMV while pregnant. If I do, there’s a 20% chance the baby could end up with moderate to severe birth defects. Great. But ultimately, not much I can do about it. It didn’t happen last time, and the CMV status had nothing to do with my abruption. Risk: low.

• Oh, the ever present donor question. Should we switch? On one hand, there is a small body of research that suggests some placental issues, such as preeclampsia, are tied to sperm, and that placental formation is likely driven by the male genes. Do we know this for sure? No. Are there any placental abruption studies that link it to sperm? No. Can we, in our doctor’s words, guarantee that we are selecting a “safe” donor if we choose to switch? No. So what we weigh is having a full sibling to Ander or not. Then, there’s the fact that we have only eight vials left, enough for four months of trying, and the donor is sold out. We thought eight would be enough for a sibling, and it will… but will it be enough for two, now that Ander has died? Unfortunately, we don’t know, on either count. Then there’s the cost; we already pre-purchased the sperm after we had made it 18 weeks into a “successful” pregnancy, so we’d be out a decent amount of money. Risk: moderate either way, unfortunately. My wife would like to use the same donor, so we decided to do so, and I’m letting go of the anxiety about that decision. There’s only so much we can do.

• What I could do, to eliminate or lessen another factor that makes me anxious: get tested for clotting factors. My MFM didn’t think it was necessary, though he left it up to me, basically saying that if I’m worried about it, I could get tested. He also said that if I did have a clotting factors issue, that might just make me more nervous, and that treatments such as Lovenox and baby aspirin carried other risks that could cause me additional anxiety. However, due to the fact that we decided to keep our donor, and due to a second opinion, I decided to get tested. This will at least allow me to manage my anxiety about this. If I test negative, great; I can let it go. If I test positive, at least I’ll have some weapons in my arsenal. Risk: low. I didn’t really have anything to lose, and didn’t think I had a clotting factors disorder anyway. (Note: I didn’t.)

So there’s that. We’re trying to balance being responsible and reasonable with being… not reckless, but rational? Are those all synonyms? It feels reckless, to keep the same donor, but on the other hand — if this were a male partner’s sperm, it’s not like I would trade him in for the hope of an improved model, knowing that the new version could also be a dud, so to speak. It feels like… a reasonable risk. As the wife points out, we did everything “right” the last time, and we know how that turned out, so maybe we should let go of some of the control this time and let things be. I vacillate between that and “must control or else I’ll blame myself if something happens again.”

Photo Copyright K. Zinsser

So in our reckless optimism, we decided – and were cleared – to start trying again. When we started TTC the first time, we went to a fabulous clinic that specializes in helping LGBT couples have babies (yes, we know how lucky we are. Thank you, major city!). They are therefore used to working with women who have no known fertility issues except the obvious lack of sperm, which means that they fully support drug-free attempts at IUI and ICI. It also means, however, that they’re sticklers about charting for at least three full months before any doctor-assisted process (we chose doctor-assisted IUI, as this sh*t’s expensive and this has shown the greatest probability of success within four months of trying). At our clinic, when you begin the process, you are required to attend a one-hour consultation in which you learn all about charting and exactly how to do it, and are given sheets on which to track everything, daily (no app. A literal chart on a literal sheet of white paper, which you then take to work and surreptitiously photocopy).

The first go-round, I took extensive notes on everything, from my level of cramps and pain to the exact look of my cervical mucus. It helped a bit; for example, I discovered that I get a low, dull backache when I ovulate. But now that I’m a veteran at this, I’ve learned that really, only three things mattered for me when taking a good chart: cervical mucus, ovulation predictor kits (OPK), and basal body temperature (BBT). The first tells you that you’ll likely ovulate in the next few days, the second that your ovulation is imminent, and the third that you’ve ovulated. These three things in combination helped paint a picture for me and my doctor of what my specific ovulation pattern looks like. A breakdown is below. A disclaimer: I’m not a doctor. This is what I have learned, and what works for me. Talk to your doctor about what tweaks would work best for you!

Cervical mucus – don’t bother Googling images. They’re gross. And what your cervical mucus looks like isn’t necessarily what someone else’s will. Pay attention to yours, though. It will likely — and I say likely — start out watery and then turn egg white when you’re about to ovulate. This is good — healthy cervical mucus is what helps lubricate and protect the sperm on its journey. For me, it means a few days of discomfort at the gym, when running feels like I’m peeing in my pants. Good times. Also, however, it is the most accurate way for me to determine when it’s the right time to use an…

Ovulation Predictor Kit – necessary for pinpointing your most fertile window. I’ve heard doctors with various theories on when you’re most likely to get pregnant. I will say that I got my first OPK positive on a Thursday evening, and my IUI was scheduled for noon on Friday and 8 a.m. on Saturday (two per cycle was recommended by my clinic, to increase the likelihood of success). And I got pregnant. My friend’s doctor would have scheduled her for Saturday and Sunday (she’s not pregnant). So make of that what you will. When you’re actively trying to get pregnant, it’s not uncommon to test first thing in the morning, mid-day, and in the evening starting around day ten of your cycle. With the second baby, I only tested in the morning (a positive should be visible for 24-48 hours), though I did start at day ten. I didn’t want to get too obsessed over charting, knowing that controlling my need for control was important. That said, I described to my wife how anxious I was that it was day 14 and I hadn’t gotten a positive OPK yet (usually I ovulate around day 12). “Could you have missed it?” she asked. “Unlikely,” I shrugged, “but possible. After all, I’m only testing in the morning. I don’t want to obsess about it too much.” “Tell me,” she laughed. “Would testing twice a day make you obsess about it more than you are right now?” I had to concede this was an excellent point. So, twice a day it was. Other notes on OPKs – we found it best to buy the sticks in bulk from Amazon. You’ll save tons of money, and they usually come with a handful of pregnancy test strips, too. No frills, but less than half the price you’ll find at the drugstore. The only other thing you need is disposable cups in which to pee. Once you get a positive OPK, time to check your…

Basal Body Temperature – granted, you start charting your BBT the first day of your period (day one for charting). This establishes a baseline, as all a BBT will tell you is if you actually ovulated — a BBT should spike several tenths of a degree post-ovulation. This is helpful information for fertility docs, since this helps them determine if further tests are needed and provides evidence that a medical intervention like Clomid might be necessary. Taking BBT sucked the first time around, but as I’ve mentioned, I’ve learned a few things. One, I bought a good, reliable basal thermometer, cotton balls, and alcohol (for cleaning said thermometer). If you’re lucky, you have an alarm clock with a flat top, like mine. I put the thermometer right on top of my snooze button. Five days a week, the alarm goes off at 6:50, I reach over, pop the thermometer in my mouth, wait until it beeps, turn it off, hit snooze, and go back to sleep until the alarm goes off again at 7:00 (then I lounge around until around 7:15, when I drag myself into the kitchen for coffee, but that’s neither here nor there). Actually, when I finally sit up in bed, I first turn back on my thermometer, which retains the last reading, put a dot on the chart I taped to the wall next to my bed (it’ll ultimately look like a line graph), go pee in a cup and dip in my OPK, and let it do its five-minutes thing while making coffee. I take the coffee back to the bedroom, check the OPK (“stupid bleeping negative!”), throw out the test strip, and pout while handing the wife her coffee (I do weekdays, she does weekends. Pretty fair deal). Oh, back to BBTs. It’s a pain, true. And most of the time, it seems completely unnecessary. But the post-ovulation spike can be quite reassuring. Now, most of the time I get up around the same time, and my temp is pretty steady. But as I’m just looking for a pattern, I actually don’t worry too much about it. I take my temp regardless, whether I went to bed late, got up late, drank too much alcohol the night before, was hot, was cold, was traveling, etc. If I miss a day, I just miss it and take my temp the next day. Patterns, after all. I do note on my chart the time I took my temp and if there was any other anomaly that could explain an errant reading (like last Saturday, when we went camping and I was restless most of the night due to a thunderstorm). The time matters, because body temperature rises with time, so if you’re, say, at 97.0 every morning at 7 a.m., then a reading of 97.6 at 8 a.m. would be perfectly normal and within your pattern. On the other hand, a 97.6 at 7 a.m. might indicate you have ovulated…. or that it was 95 degrees in your bedroom because your air conditioning was on the fritz. I write it down, look for the pattern… but don’t obsess too much. BBT is helpful for a doctor in determining if you’re ovulating, but waiting for a spike in BBT to have sex would likely be too late for pregnancy purposes. It’s used as confirmation, not a predictor.

There you have it. It’s a pain. But it’s also a way to feel like you’re doing something to pass the time. Really, they should have taught us this in school. How many pregnancies could be prevented if teenage girls knew that cervical mucus was a big “danger/congratulations, you’re fertile!” sign? Especially knowing that our hormones prime us to feel randier during these days. So, not IF, but WHEN your baby is conceived and arrives, let me know if any of this worked for you. And don’t let it take a tragedy for you to indulge in reckless hope.

VIDEO: Queer Mama for Autostraddle Episode Three — Let’s Go Sperm Shopping!

A lot of things would have been so much simpler if Simone had sperm. We wouldn’t have had to do IVF, of course, but also we wouldn’t have had to choose a sperm donor. Oh my goodness was it hard for us. When people ask, which they often do, who he is and how we chose, it’s hard to know where to begin. How do I distill two years of conversations down into a column or a video, let alone a conversation over brunch?

You’ve probably noticed by now that I am a person who cares A LOT about things, especially this future baby of ours, and that I have passionate opinions. Simone, it turns out, does too. I believe that DNA matters, that our genes influence who we are and how we start in the world. I like to geek out on my 23andme results, read every article I can find on prenatal epigenetics, and trace genetic patterns in our large extended families.

When we were first considering our donor options, we looked at a few Bay Area sperm banks and it seemed like every other guy was a filmmaker (maybe because independent filmmakers, like lots of artists, could pretty much always use some extra cash). I kept having this ridiculous vision of, say, five years down the line being at a filmmaker meet up, looking across the room and recognizing my child in a stranger’s face, being like holy shit, I think that’s our donor. It’s a little absurd, I know, but San Francisco is a pretty small town!

I felt weirded out, on so many levels, about using a sperm bank donor. I also felt like we had to use a known donor. So we grabbed our phones, pulled up our social media “friends” lists and proceeded to evaluate pretty much every person we knew with sperm.

What about that cute gay guy I went to college with? Nope, he’s a nihilist who doesn’t believe in procreating. What about Simone’s brilliant old friend from New York? No, his mom is schizophrenic, and so is one of my close relatives. What about the charming anarchist I used to live near? Maybe not, because I also used to sleep with him…

There are so many criteria that can be used to select – or eliminate – a possible donor. Looks, interests, smarts, family medical history, do we want them in our lives FOREVER, are they proximate?

After more conversations than I could possibly recount, we eventually chose our donor. Smart, creative, attractive, emotionally intelligent, someone we would be delighted to have in our child’s life (and ours) forever. We approached him, discussing expectations, family history, process, all of it, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly.

Until he went to our fertility clinic to get his semen tested.

I sort of laugh at myself now because the one book I read about “lesbian conception” said, basically, “if you are going to use a known donor, get his sperm tested, right away, first thing, before you’ve committed or even fully decided.” I thought that was presumptuous, like “hey, dude, we’re not sure about you yet, but would you mind jerking off into a cup so we can see what we’re working with?” It also felt unnecessary. Our donor was young and fit and seemed plenty virile to me.

Turns out (duh) you can’t spot infertility by looking at someone. His semen analysis came back with low count, low morphology, and low motility, not good all around. If we’d been planning IUI we would’ve had to stop right there. But because we were doing IVF anyway, our clinic said we could just use a little process called Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) where a single sperm is injected into each egg to assist with fertilization.

What happened next (lots of additional tests and soul searching, mostly) is a story for another day, but to make a very long story oh so much shorter, we had our first IVF cycle, and then I had my miscarriage.

Simone and I could barely tend to our own feelings for a while after that, let alone try to attend to what this might mean for our friend, who we cared deeply about. Simone held onto most everything for a while, really, while I was pulled under by it all, under the covers, typically, hardly leaving our bed for months.

As we very slowly picked up the pieces of our hearts, we had to decide what to do about sperm the next time we tried.

In part because of the emotional turmoil we’d felt, in part because of the advice of a new fertility doctor, and in part to try to simplify things as much as we possibly could (a little ridiculous of an attempt, I realize, given that we were undertaking fucking IVF again…), we decided to try with an unknown sperm bank donor this second time — someone with proven pregnancies and impeccable sperm. Someone with tons of vials available for purchase, frozen and ready for our use, whenever and however we wanted to use them. For IVF or IUI, for this child, or any number of future children we might want to have. Nothing to do except pull out our credit cards.

And, of course, decide who this mysterious person would be. I wasn’t certain about this shift for some time, and I was still imagining the fictional filmmaker meet up I’d invented. I was thinking about how often people lie in their online dating profiles, about how you can’t really know someone without interacting with them through more than forms filled with text and written or even audio or video interviews.

I thought a lot about the child we were trying to create. This new way forward felt right and simple to us, but how would it be for them? We were doing something that felt so much easier in the short term, but would it be harder in the longterm for our family? I looked at every donor conception site I could find. I read studies and personal accounts. How did these kids turn out? Did they hate their parents?

I came to the conclusion that our kid might very well have some questions, but that they would also probably be just fine. They would, in all likelihood, consider the two of us their parents, being the people who not only raised them, but also chose to bring them into the world at all.

We did decide, however, to only look at “willing to be known” donors, so our kid would have the option of contacting their donor at age 18. I’m guessing by then they will have already found a mess of their half siblings online thanks to all the DNA testing services out there, but who knows.

Thus began, again, the question of how we would decide. I wanted someone who seemed like us, someone with a creative and intellectual seeming family and similar interests, someone I imagined would fit in with us culturally. This is such an abstract thing to figure out from a series of questions on a form, and it became more absurd the longer we looked.

Hours into looking at yet another bank, I actually suggested ruling someone out because his favorite food is spaghetti. (What’s wrong with someone’s favorite food being spaghetti? I really can’t recall.) I also refused to consider anyone with a police officer in their family. I really don’t like cops.

Simone gravitated towards someone a little less like us, someone she thought would balance us out, perhaps someone with a degree in business or more of an interest in athletics. She also just could not choose someone whose voice she found grating (incredibly auditory and musical person that she is). We both had our sticking points, and sometimes they were weird.

It’s a weird process, really, this hyper focus on the semi-random details of a person, those details being the only pieces of information you get to form a picture of who they are. It’s easy to nitpick in a way I don’t think most of us do when choosing a partner. It never once crossed my mind, for example, that Simone would somehow be a less suitable parent because she wears glasses. But if I had a choice between a donor with perfect vision and one without?

You should probably watch the video to get a sense for how it went, how ridiculous and exhausting it really was, but eventually we did it. We found someone we were both excited about, someone who ticked a lot of our boxes but, more importantly, someone we just felt good about. It was a huge relief.

We called the sperm bank, placed the order, and put another $7,400 on our credit card. As you might have guessed, I’m hoping Tiny Dancer isn’t our only child.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC9NfxYZDOU

My Pregnancy Was Perfect, and I Lost My Baby Anyway

First step – create a folder in your inbox labeled “Conception.”

Well, no. There are many, earlier, first steps, though this was the moment when the journey to have our first child began to materialize in a concrete way, changing from a future wish to a tantalizingly close prospect.

I am four years beyond the creation of that folder. Two months past the birth and death of my first child. Back then, 2010, lifetimes ago, I was anxious when I thought of how close I already was to that suddenly less-fertile age of 35, and how if I want to have a second child, I’d likely be in that nebulous, dangerous zone of 35-40.

I am a first born.

I tell you this because it was what my mother used to say to justify why I was such a perfectionist as a child, so anxious to “get it right.” I was the child always labelled “teacher’s pet,” even as a superlative in my high school yearbook. And I was the child proud of that label.

I am obedient to a fault. Jaywalking, even when the street is totally empty, makes me uncomfortable. I come to full stops at stop signs. When I have to swing my bike onto the sidewalk in places where it’s unsafe to ride in the street, I get off and walk so as not to inconvenience pedestrians, who have the right of way there. I follow rules. All. The. Time. And I’m proud of it; I call it integrity.

What this means, however, is that I also believe that I am entitled to certain things. I follow rules. Therefore, I am intelligently minimizing my risk of bad things happening to me. Therefore, good things are more likely to happen to me, and since I’ve been such a “good girl,” I deserve them. For the vast, vast majority of my life, this “rule” held true. I did well in school, attended and graduated from a good college, got a good job… you get the picture. I went to church every week and said my prayers every night.

Of course, I even followed the rules for getting pregnant: I got married, which also meant legal paperwork, since we lived in Virginia in 2011, and we wanted to ensure that our relationship would be protected. My wife, completing her PhD, applied for jobs in more gay-friendly states, and we chose Illinois. Before we even moved there, we visited a health clinic to begin the IUI process. We got a nice place to live with a room for a nursery. We saved money from our better-paying jobs for sperm and medical expenses. I started taking prenatal vitamins three months prior to conceiving. I cut out all caffeine and alcohol. I follow rules, so I never smoked or did drugs of any kind (I’ve never even been on any prescription drugs. I’ve never touched a cigarette.). I read all the baby books and followed the rules on what to eat, what not to eat, how not to lie on your back after your first trimester, how to exercise, why to see the dentist (I did, of course).

I did not get my reward.

I was determined to have a healthy, non-medicated, 100% exercise pregnancy, and a beautiful, natural birth. I was healthy and young and was going to give my baby the best possible start in life! (Exclamation added to represent the excitement I felt over having the opportunity to do this “perfectly.”) No one in my family had any history of pregnancy issues, so I expected a pregnancy similar to my mother’s – the standard morning sickness and other common pregnancy ailments, but nothing serious. I had a small bleeding incident at six weeks – just an hour of red blood – and we went to the ER, where we sat for eight hours (overnight) for them to tell us everything looked normal and the baby was doing great.

All proceeded then as normal until just after Thanksgiving (around 19 weeks). The baby was moving, all prenatal visits had gone swimmingly (A+, my midwife said; of course I expected nothing less), and we were designing our birth plan – vaginal birth, no epidural, waiting 90 seconds to cut the umbilical cord, midwife driven at the family birth center (not at the hospital), home visit 24 hours after the baby was born (they discharge you after only 12 hours so you can bond with the baby in a familiar setting). Of course, best laid plans and all that….

The day after Thanksgiving, I started feeling really bloated, like I had eaten too much and the really full feeling wouldn’t go away (I did eat a lot on Thanksgiving, but by the next day it should have subsided). I started having some brown spotting, and went to my midwife, who reassured me that it looked very minor and was “old blood,” maybe even leftover from the six week bleed. But a week later, as I was lying in bed reading around 9:30 p.m., I felt like I needed to pee very badly. I just made it to the toilet when the blood gush started, followed by a large blood clot the size of my hand. We headed to the hospital, shaking, terrified, where I was monitored overnight, given an IV, and first diagnosed with a placental abruption. Now, many times these are mild, and you only have one incident; the placenta doesn’t reattach to the uterine wall, but it doesn’t get any worse, either. I was having contractions, but I couldn’t even feel them, and they weren’t opening my cervix, so the doctors released me with the instructions that I was on pelvic rest and should go back to the hospital if I had any more bleeding, about a 50/50 chance.

Well. There are some things outside of the control of even the most controlling of control freaks. That next Friday night I started bleeding again, and we got a bit of a stern talking to by the doctor, who told me to go home and stay there – and “be prepared for the likelihood of a miscarriage.” By this time I was so close to the magic, viable 24 weeks, so we prepared to heed her advice. Over the next two weeks, I was in the hospital four additional times for heavy bleeding, only permitted to go home for Christmas and New Year’s, though the holidays were celebrated over Skype instead of at my parents’ home in Connecticut as planned.

I went into labor on January 3, 2014. I was 23 weeks and six days pregnant.

I was taken to Labor & Delivery, where a neonatologist met us to talk to us about the baby’s viability options before 24 weeks. We were warned that he would likely not survive and we were asked what lifesaving methods we wanted them to take, since they could cause permanent damage. I was given indomethacin to stop the contractions, but told there was only a 50% chance it would work, and I was started on a course of steroids to help mature the baby’s lungs should he happen to come that weekend.

He came that weekend, in a blur of sudden contractions, running nurses, a jammed OR door, my wife sodden and sweating in her snow gear, my anxieties still powerful enough to ensure my belongings (sentimental teddy bear, glasses, cell phone) were still with me. My son was born kicking and screaming, but neither of us saw it. I needed two pints of blood and I guess it was a messy procedure, and the placenta was all in tatters. I drifted in a Demerol-induced haze in recovery for over four hours, not quite believing that I had just had a baby. I didn’t see it, after all; there is an element of the surreal in being told you have just given birth, but not remembering any of it.

I was lucky – as soon as I was alert enough, before they took me to my room, they wheeled my gurney to the NICU so I could see the baby. I couldn’t sit up yet, and his isolette was a bit high, so I didn’t see much of him that day – but it was enough to know that he was alive and stable and perfectly okay for now. The first thing I said was, “he’s so big!” Of course, 1 lb 9 oz, 12 3/4 inches isn’t that big, but to me, he was huge! I couldn’t believe he had fit in my stomach. The second thing was looking at my wife, and then at the nurse, and confirming that his name is Anderson.

Ander slept so peacefully, with his hands under his chin or on his cheeks. But his heart and lungs were struggling from his first breath, 16 weeks before he was supposed to need them. We cupped his head and sang him Christmas carols, hoping to get his oxygen levels to improve. We had a “honeymoon period” the first week, and we held him. But then: he needed heart surgery, as his heart hadn’t finished forming properly. His lungs weren’t getting enough oxygen to his developing organs, and the doctors played a “game” of ventilator roulette trying to find the best combination of pressure, suction, ventilation, and oxygenation. The threat of pneumothorax loomed. Our doctors discussed with us our options for treatment, and started putting some of the aggressive treatment options in frames of quality of life and expected outcomes. Our son’s chronic lung disease kept getting worse, so they put him on a go-big-or-go-home drug that was, one doctor explained, “like hunting for an antelope with a torpedo.” A few days later, he went into cardiac arrest, but was revived. The next day, it happened again. The third day, we chose to take him off of life support so he could die in our arms. We informed our family: “Anderson is a Scandinavian name that means brave and strong,” we told them. “And our little boy fought like hell to give us 26 days together.”

The feeling of bitterness, the vast expanse of unfairness, is not altogether different from that you felt as a child when you didn’t get something you wanted, even though you behaved. But then, perhaps you could blame your parents, a teacher. When you lose a baby, who can you blame? You could blame yourself, but when you know you did nothing wrong (a fact confirmed by several doctors), it feels hollow. You are left, then, blaming intangibles. Life. Often, God. With Ander’s death, the structural support upon which I had built my perfectly constructed life came crashing down.

I am still waiting for our first “permanent” child to arrive. They have a name. They have parents who love them, who have planned, literally for years, for their arrival. They have grandparents already debating who gets first visitation rights and what they want to be called.They have cousins stashing aside hand-me-down clothes and promising not to steal “our” name. I know this, because our angel boy had all of these things, and he still did not survive. I know this, because they are on the way, due to arrive this August. So, I’ll keep following the rules, because they protect me from guilt and are a subtle but present barrier to some of my anxieties.

Makin’ Babies: Getting Pregnant On a Whim

feature image via Crystal Jensen with permission

Welcome to Autostraddle’s ongoing series, Makin’ Babies, where real queer parents tell you all about how they created their precious little weirdos! While every new life is created in essentially the same way — egg meets sperm, makes baby — every queer conception story is truly unique. We’ll be sharing a wide variety of experiences here, so get ready to laugh, flinch, cry, high five, and be amazed. Let’s meet some brand new people!

by Rory Midhani

“We haven’t figured any of this out yet,” I told my partner Kellie.

We were barreling along the highway towards Walla Walla, traveling in the shadow of giant outcroppings, while the Columbia River stretched below us. Our three-year-old son slept in the backseat. We were only fifty miles from the home of our sperm donor and his family, and we were trying to decide — before we arrived — if we wanted to conceive a second child.

“If we think too hard, we’ll never do it,” Kellie said. She was right. A cost-benefit analysis would yield no practical reason to grow our family. The only reason to make a new baby was that we felt like it, and we could.

Originally, we’d planned this trip as nothing more than a friendly visit to our donor family. Zac and his wife Erin had a son who was also three. Our boys were too young to understand their biological connection, but when we got them together they played like cousins, splashing each other in an old metal washbasin, and chasing each other naked around the yard while the rest of us shared beers and took in the sun.

We hadn’t visited since last summer. It was spring now, and we were ready for a break from the Olympia rain. But also, we’d just learned that Erin was pregnant with their second child. Their news came with an offer: did we want to try for another as well?

Up until now, I had never dreamed it possible that two lesbians could make a baby on a whim.

The Wallula Gap, Washington

I had entered adulthood knowing that I was queer and also knowing that I wanted a child. I understood that getting pregnant would require some money, and some sourcing of anonymous sperm. This struck me as a small obstacle, a hurdle I might easily clear. But I hadn’t anticipated the months I would spend in weekly debates with my partner trying to convince her to have kids.

Nearly all of our arguments took place where straight couples would normally conceive a child: in the bed we shared. We’d wake on a Sunday morning and drink coffee together while propped against pillows, a ritual we had observed since our relationship began. Years earlier, when we were newly in love, we required no entertainment but each other. We talked, we sipped, we looked out the window, we made love. Over time, once the novelty of waking up together had faded, we turned our attention to books. In this era, I might laugh at something I read, and Kellie would ask me “What?” and I would read to her for a spell.

But increasingly, we did none of these things. Every Sunday morning, after the first sip of coffee, I’d raise the topic we’d been avoiding all week. “Any new thoughts?” I’d ask, as if by some miracle she might have decided she was ready to be a parent, but forgot to mention it during bustle of the workweek.

“Not really,” was her typical response, and I would reply by recycling all my arguments. I was convinced that any child we conceived would be angelic, the sweet-tempered composite of any child I’d ever loved; Kellie thought it likely that we would have a monster, a sociopath, a screamer who tortured animals and refused to eat vegetables.

“What’s wrong with us the way we are?” Kellie asked me all the time. She felt betrayed that I needed to change us, that my desire for motherhood competed with my loyalty to her.

There was nothing wrong with the way that we were, nothing wrong with Sunday coffee, except that I had grown bored of it. I wanted to trade in my coffee for fetal kicks, for newborn squeals, for small bodies climbing into bed between us. I wanted to lose the privilege of quiet Sunday coffee for a while, so that I might enjoy it anew ten years later, both of us softened by age.

“Come on,” I pushed her. “If we were straight, you’d do it.”

“If we were straight, we’d have three kids already,” she admitted.

I knew that Kellie was right. If we could conceive children the way most straight couples did, Kellie would have the same fears, but they would be easily overcome. We’d be one of those couples who, through recklessness rather than decision, got pregnant early on. For us it might have happened on one of those Sunday mornings in the early years of our courtship.

What’s more, I understood that the fears themselves connected to the fact of our biology. Since I would carry the child, our baby would share my DNA but not hers. Her fear of a monster child was a stand-in for another, truer fear: that she might not love whatever child I bore.

During those months, I began to notice them everywhere: the young by-accident mothers. There was my friend’s housemate whose boyfriend wore leather pants. The way they clung to each other, no one was surprised when she started to show. There was the student in the class I taught with straight red hair and cat-eye glasses, one hand always on her belly. And there was an endless stream of them at the café I frequented, long-haired women who wore skirts with boots and toted clear-eyed babies around in slings.

They were all in their twenties and gorgeous. Perhaps behind closed doors they nursed fears and regrets, but in public they smiled. I wanted to shrink them with my eyes, and then squash them like ants.

In all of my adult life, I had never once wished I was straight, but I found myself pining for the advantage that heterosexuality offered. It seemed that straight people didn’t need to be certain. To them, babies were often apparently a thing that just happened.

It took nearly two years of discussions, two years of arguing, of cajoling, of pretending we might break up, before we agreed that Kellie’s certainty was impossible, but that we would make a child in spite of this. Together we selected an anonymous donor, and purchased a dozen vials of sperm.

Twelve months later we were still childless, and my jealousy had spread to include anyone with children. When friends announced they were pregnant, I offered a hollow “Congratulations.” I could not get my voice to sound anything but somber.

So far, our journey towards parenthood had been a relentless upward trek. Our efforts had cost us in money, time, and joy. The story finally shifted when Erin and Zac, introduced by a friend, entered our lives. Without hesitation, they offered the very thing we needed: sperm, for free, every month. This blessing from the straight world was powerful medicine. Five months later I was pregnant.

As my own belly grew, as the baby took shape, I walked down the street with one hand on my belly. I nodded at all the young mothers. I didn’t hate them after all.

On the afternoon that our first son was born, I lay on the hospital bed waiting to greet him. Kellie was holding him already, trying to offer him comfort as the nurses cleaned him and cut his cord. As she handed him to me, she leaned in and whispered, “He’s really cute,” surprise and wonder in her voice, and in that moment I knew that we were in the clear.

March 2015

It was Kellie who insisted on a second child.

Some months earlier, while I was traveling, she had told me on the phone, “I think we should start trying as soon as you come home.” I hadn’t said no, but I had put her off until now. I had only just begun to recover from the sleep I’d lost in my first years as a parent, and to enjoy my free time, which was returning in bits and pieces. But when Erin offered the chance for another child, I was excited by the prospect of a pregnancy that wasn’t fraught with the weight of years of planning.

That weekend in Walla Walla, we stayed in a hotel one mile from Erin and Zac, in a dark room with two beds, thick drapes and old carpets. It overlooked the parking lot, a soda machine, and a tiny pool. Kellie woke just after six and left the motel in search of coffee; I took over her warm spot and went back to sleep. When she returned forty minutes later she carried more than coffee. “I got a text while I was out,” she explained.

After ten minutes outside the body, sperm begin to die. We turned the television on to distract our son, and headed into the bathroom, beige and bright and windowless. Commercials for new toys and sugared cereals blared in the background.

Every time we had tried to conceive our first son, I’d felt a flutter of hope followed by the fear of another failure. But this time, lying on the bathroom floor, I was surprised by the feeling that surfaced: ambivalence. I considered telling Kellie that I needed more time. But she’d already loaded the semen into the needleless syringe, and stopping her just wasn’t in me. Our family was heading towards four.

I took a pregnancy test only ten days later, left the test on the back of the toilet, and turned over an egg timer. A friend knocked on our door before the sand had run out. I greeted her and chatted for a minute before excusing myself to check on the test. When I returned, I made us tea and pretended all was normal. In a way, it was. It was my second pregnancy, but this time I had become something I had never dreamed possible: a lesbian who’d managed to get pregnant on a whim.

It struck me that of the gifts that Erin and Zac had offered us, this one was substantial. They’d given Kellie and me the luxury of conceiving in the midst of ambivalence without endless deliberation. I found, and continued to find a joyous sense of abundance in this: that I was able to make a baby without having to feel desperate for him first.

VIDEO: Queer Mama Episode Two — How We Got Knocked Up

I never crawled (too fat), but at ten and a half months I stood up and started walking, refusing to be pushed in a stroller ever after. At two I announced I didn’t want to wear diapers anymore and never wore another one, not once having an accident. I’ve always been the same – precocious, decisive, eager to get things going, and determined to do things my own way.

I thought I’d have my first kid by age 26 at the very latest. Simone was two days shy of 35 on our first date, and, even though her biological clock wasn’t exactly ticking (she never wanted to carry a child), she didn’t want to wait too long to become a parent either.

So one night we decided to stop using condoms and… boom! Well no, not really. Alas, we don’t have the right parts for that. Two uteruses and four ovaries but nary a sperm between us.

We had to decide how we were going to grow our family.

I could say that it’s frustrating that we didn’t just get to smash some body parts together and hope for the best, that we had to even think about it, because that would be a true thing to say. It was/is/can be frustrating, but it was also a gift. Because there was no obvious path, we had to talk about it, be intentional, think long and hard about what we wanted in a family and how we were going to make it happen.

To me this is one of the greatest gifts of queerness. We don’t get that same script that the majority of straight people do about our lives, our relationships, how we have sex or how we procreate. As many commenters noted on my last column, that lack of representation can be scary and lonely. But it also gives us the opportunity to write our own stories. And these stories can be the most wondrous, fantastic stories of our dreams.

Four months after Simone and I vowed to spend our lives together, I was crying on the streets of New Orleans, asking angrily why we hadn’t started trying to have kids yet. There was a sign that said “For Rent. Not Haunted.” on one of the apartments nearby, and our days had been filled with every manner of fried food, drinking wine on medians, and the sort of southern queer delights that made me ache for North Carolina.

There were good reasons we hadn’t started trying. We were in debt. We’d had a big (illegal) wedding and released our first feature documentary that past summer, two distracting and expensive endeavors that had derailed our paying work for a couple of months. We had taken too much time off, and we were only in the first full year of business together, still nervous about the sustainability of this fledgling dream.

But the bigger reason, which came out right there in a flood on cobblestones in the French Quarter, was that Simone wanted me to carry her baby, and that was maybe going to be impossible to achieve.

Simone had never wanted to be pregnant herself, but she had always envied the privilege that fertile straight people have. That chance to co-create a child, to know your partner is carrying a piece of you, that biologically together you are making this new life. (There have been so many days on this journey where I’ve envied this too, the alchemy and ease and free-ness of it all.)

But at some point Simone realized that, through the magic of IVF* and the science of surrogacy, that a female partner of hers could actually carry her baby, that that piece of her dream was possible, and from then on she had wanted that. In some ways it felt like the ultimate romance, her partner (me) carrying her child.

(*Note: In vitro fertilization is a process in which eggs are retrieved, fertilized by sperm in a lab, and then resulting embryo(s) are transferred into a uterus to hopefully implant and grow into a baby.)

Simone’s medications

We had discussed this previously, and I was keen on the idea – what I really wanted was the experience of being pregnant and the whole being a parent part – but we had eventually ruled it out because of cost. IVF is seriously fucking expensive. $20,000+ expensive, per round.

Under a lamp post, Simone admitted that she wasn’t actually ready to abandon the possibility and move on to other, less costly, ways of making a baby, and I, in part earnestness and part desperation, said, “Well let’s just do IVF and get on with it, then.”

Anyone who has ever gone through IVF can tell you I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Simone was two weeks away from her 38th birthday, so we knew if we wanted to have her biological child we had to get on it, ASAP. There was no time to try another way first and then see if it this dream still mattered to us once a baby came, and then do something different for our second child. It was now or never.

Our IVF calendar

We had talked about, and would again discuss many nights over bourbon on the rocks, every possible way we knew to make a baby – insemination of me at home by a known donor, IUI in a clinic with a sperm bank donor, IVF with her eggs and my uterus, adoption, etc.

I reckoned with how badly I wanted to have a child that shared her DNA. I couldn’t stop imagining the child’s face, who they could be. As our extended families grew around us, I saw family resemblances in nieces and nephews, the weird way genes combine to make a new face. I wished for that for us, too, in whatever way.

Some people argue that wanting to have a genetic child is a narcissistic desire, and I will admit that I felt that, so strongly, whatever the partner-focused version of that is. I wanted to make a mini-Simone. How could I not, when she is the most incredible person I have ever known? Doesn’t our world deserve a little more of that special Simone-ness floating around?

Baby Simone

I begged and cajoled her to get pregnant at several points, suggesting we could go live for six months on a farm, say somewhere by the Russian River, to shield her from some of the internal gender dysmorphia and external assumptions she’d experience carrying a baby, watching her body change. We could even run a farm for butch preggos, a little b&b, I’d do all the cooking! She thought long and hard, but she just didn’t want to do it. At all. She would rather not have a genetic child if it meant she would be the one carrying it.

For Simone it wasn’t simply about passing on her genes, it was also about me carrying her baby.

We wrestled with our privilege, and I had a lot of sleepless, guilty nights. If we could spend this many thousands to create a baby, shouldn’t we instead come up with the money and donate it to a prison abolitionist group? Was this the most selfish thing we’d ever done and, because maybe it was, were we okay with that? I’d had a full ride to college, and Simone had partial scholarships and parental assistance, so we had no student loans. I had basically zero credit (I didn’t get my first credit card until 25 because fuck capitalism), but Simone had nearly perfect credit and high limits.

At the IVF clinic

We tackled spreadsheets – how much would it cost, really? With the procedures, the drugs, the sperm? (Answer: an estimated $19,209 per round. Significantly more with a known donor.) And how would we come up with the cash? We researched medical loan programs and credit cards, shaved away at every category in our budget, reducing our personal discretionary income (the only money we spend outside of our budgeted categories) to $100 per month, and thought about all the sacrifices we’d be willing to make for this baby, this dream. We were so lucky, then, too, that our business was booming, and Simone’s parents offered to help pay as well.

Money is weird. $19,000 felt like both all the money in the world (I used to live off $5,000 per year!) and no money at all in the lifetime spending on a child. This child that I would grow inside my body and love and hopefully know for the rest of my life. This child of ours, this child we would co-create and raise together, with all the love and intention and complexity we approached his/her/their conception with, and so much more.

We ultimately threw our hands up and, in a burst of both foolishness and long-considered decision-making, said, “it’s just money, right?!” With the help of a 0% interest credit card, we decided to go for it.

We were going to do what some call “shared maternity” or “reciprocal” IVF, where you harvest the eggs of one partner, fertilize and grow them to embryos, and then transfer an embryo(s) to the hormonally prepared uterus of the other partner. If you are damn lucky, a baby results.

Our embryos

And thus began one of the hardest, most expensive undertakings of my entire life.

So go watch the video to learn a little more about the wild science of IVF and what it was like to actually do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDmk7Iayygw

If you’ve done IVF, or are considering it, or want to know more, let me know in the comments. Happy to share knowledge and resources.

And stay tuned for the next column: choosing a sperm donor!

Makin’ Babies: How I Self-Inseminated and You Can, Too

Welcome to Autostraddle’s ongoing series, Makin’ Babies, where real queer parents tell you all about how they created their precious little weirdos! While every new life is created in essentially the same way — egg meets sperm, makes baby — every queer conception story is truly unique. We’ll be sharing a wide variety of experiences here, so get ready to laugh, flinch, cry, high five, and be amazed. Let’s meet some brand new people!

by Rory Midhani

My daughter Evelyn is the product of the ol’ “turkey baster” conception method, just without the turkey baster. As a single lesbian mom by choice, I used a known donor to conceive. This means that apart from my donor’s genetic contribution in a sterile cup, I was on my own in the whole getting pregnant process. My donor did his thing in the bathroom of my home, after which I was left to my own devices with the company of no one but my dog. Who was absolutely no help in my endeavor to get pregnant, by the way.

Equipment required:

• Preseed (sperm friendly lubricant) or egg whites
• Medicinal dropper (aka – your turkey baster)
• Sterile cups
• Pillows for bum propping
• Instead Cups/Diva Cup or Luna Cup
• Optional: books, iPad/iPhone or magazines

Positive ovulation sticks!

Set Up Your “Get Pregnant” Area

While your donor gets busy, set up the area in which you’ll be doing the basting. Place your butt-propping pillows up in the bed. Lie down and test the positioning to make sure you’re comfy. You’ll want this to be as comfortable as possible, because you’ll be here for a good while. The last thing you’re going to want to do — or be able to do – while inseminating is adjust your pillows. Have your infant medicinal dropper, Instead Cup and Pre-Seed at the ready.

Note: I inserted the Pre-Seed while my donor was producing his sample. You can also opt to insert it moments before you inseminate.

Remember to put a towel over your butt-propping pillows for spillage issues.

Me with my sister, being super pregnant!

Inseminating

Keep the semen warm in the sterile cup, either by placing it in your hands or under your armpit (if there’s a lid). It’s okay if it sits on the counter or bedside table for a few minutes while you are getting yourself prepared, but you don’t want to leave it for much longer than that, because those little swimmers, while fast, do not have a long shelf life outside of the body.

Once you’ve drawn the semen into the syringe, slowly insert it using the medicinal plunger. If you plunge it all down (up?) at once, you might have some spillage issues at hand. Literally. Make sure you get the syringe as close to your cervix as possible, but if you hit the cervix, back up a little bit. It took me a good two to three minutes to insert all of the sample, simply because I was concerned about runaway semen.

Butts Up

Lay down with your hips raised up on a pillow and relax your body. Once I inserted the semen, I always said a prayer and meditated to help relax my body. A lot of women choose to have an orgasm to help pull the sperm up to where it needs to be. Totally optional and not required, but may help an otherwise awkward situation be a little less stressful.

I kept the syringe in after the semen was up where it should be, using the syringe as a “plug” for 10-15 minutes. Once that time had passed, I inserted my Diva Cup to avoid spillage when I eventually stood up.

Keep your hips slightly raised on your pillow(s) for another 15-20 minutes. Fun time-killing activities during this stretch include: taking selfies and posting them to Instagram with the hashtag #selfinseminationselfie; getting familiar with the two-week wait websites of which you will become all too familiar whilst you obsess over every real or imagined “symptom” through the next two slowest weeks of your life awaiting the pregnant or not verdict; doing the math in your head to determine what Astrological sign your almost-conceived child will fall under.

If using an Instead or Diva Cup, make sure to remove it in about 12 hours. Expect the cup to have some residual bodily fluids in it when you remove it. This is normal. If you are inseminating in the evening, the easiest thing to do is leave it in over night and remove it in the morning.

Does It Work?

While not the “traditional” method of conception, I’m certain at least tens of thousands of humans have been conceived this way. I know the ol’ turkey baster/medicine dropper method works, because it resulted in not only my daughter Evelyn, but also two other children I gave birth to as a traditional surrogate well over a decade ago. At this point, I’m old hat at the “DIY Turkey Baster Child Creation Method.” If your donor is able and willing, try to do 3-4 inseminations each month during your most fertile week of the month. The more you do it, the closer you’ll get to the optimal pillow-to-butt ratio, too.

For more on the legal side of self-insemination, read Here’s What You Need to Know Before DIY Insemination.

Did you conceive with a turkey baster/medicine dropper? Do you know your perfect pillow-to-butt ratio? Got any questions for Lindsay? Let it all out in the comments!

VIDEO: Queer Mama Episode One — Meet Haley and Simone!

I’ve always wanted to get pregnant, have a baby, and be a mom. It’s one of the few things I’ve been certain of for as long as I can remember. I’ve always thought that growing a baby would be the coolest, most trippy, most transformative thing I could possibly do with my body. And I love kids — their absolute zest for life, their curiosity and silliness. That unadulterated fascination they have with the world, how everything is up for grabs. How easily they love. I adore make-believe and singing all the time, jokes and new adventures. I love constantly discovering, and the way kids remind us how much there is to teach and learn. I’ve always filled my life with children.

My family describes me as “capricious,” which I don’t think is exactly fair, though it’s true that I throw myself passionately into new things, and there have been quite a few new things.

When I was a kid, I thought I’d be a mathematician or an actress. Then I thought I’d work in post-conflict zones or be a professor. Then I wanted to be a writer. Or a professional activist, or a lawyer, maybe, just briefly. I wanted to live by the ocean, abroad, on a farm — no! — definitely in a city.

When I landed a full scholarship to college, I took the money I’d saved waiting tables during high school and flew to Cape Town. I spent the next 15 months in 25 countries spanning Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. I thought, then, that I might be a traveler forever.

Turkey!

In college I went to sit-ins, disrupted white supremacists, got arrested and became, for a moment, the poster child for everything wrong about radical left youth. (She’s queer! She’s been to Africa! She’s majoring in performance art!)  As a performance artist, I was booed off a stage at Mondohomo in Atlanta. As a gardener, I sorta accidentally grew hundreds of pounds of tomatoes and thus learned to can a lot earlier than I’d initially planned on. I’ve got a lot of passions that turn out to be whims. In 2010, I moved to San Francisco. I had a place to crash, but beyond that, my only plan was to meet some queer people I (or my exes) hadn’t already slept with.

So I understand why my loved ones sense they’ll never know where I’ll end up next, or if my next passionate whim will stick.

But no matter what, I’ve always, always, always known that I would be a parent. I’ve always wanted to have a baby. Actually babies, plural. Lots of them. One miscarriage, four embryos, dozens of pee sticks, 18 months, and approximately 132 injections later, I’m 18 weeks pregnant!

Even though I grew up without queer role models, I’ve been privileged enough to never feel the need to be closeted or worried that my queerness would conflict with my desire to be a Mom, and as a cisfemale femme, I didn’t grow up with the kind of gender policing that less gender-normative queers often experience (although I’ve certainly experienced other forms of gender policing!). I came equipped with the hardest-to-come-by parts of conception (uterus, eggs), as well as the desire to carry a child. So I was surprised when someone close to me responded to me coming out by saying, “but you’ve always wanted to have kids!”

At Slovenia Pride 2009

I know there are so many queers out there who’ve felt this external questioning, or an internal one, emotional or physical, about whether their queerness would prevent them from having children. Will I find a partner to start a family with? Will someone love me in my queer wholeness and brokenness? Do I/we have all the necessary ingredients to make a child? If not, how will we afford them? If not by procreation, will some authority let me take home a child? Will my partner and I be legally protected if we have a child together? Will our child be safe in the world, this child of queers?

I’m so fortunate that for me, the answers to those questions never led me to think a child couldn’t be part of my life story.

On my first date with my now-partner, Simone, I said, “I want to have kids young, and I want to have them on my own. I don’t think I’ll find a life partner until much later, maybe my fifties.” I also told her that I didn’t believe in monogamy and wasn’t looking for a serious relationship. Long-term relationships were not for me. I wasn’t necessarily charming first date material, but at least I was honest!

I’d moved to San Francisco only three months prior, and I was getting acquainted with every experience and person I could get my hands on, reveling in what still felt like a queer mecca. I was ready for only one kind of long-term thing: having kids. But I’d just emerged from a decade of variously devastating relationships and couldn’t imagine meeting a potential girlfriend I’d want to commit 18+ years to any time soon.

On that first date, Simone told me she was looking for something serious and wasn’t interested in anything casual. “I find you too attractive to just sleep with you,” she said. I told her I was disappointed when she said we shouldn’t date, but that I understood. I was hoping we could be friends, because I thought she was very cool and very fascinating.

Then, at 1:00pm on a Monday, before going back to work, she drank a chocolate martini and kissed me. Everything changed.

Nearly five years later we are expecting our baby. To be precise, I’m the one “expecting,” but the two of us are in it together. I’m every bit as thrilled as I imagined I’d be, even if it hasn’t been exactly the road I was expecting. It’s been so much harder, longer, stranger, more expensive, and more joyous, too, than I ever knew it could be.

So I’m doing this thing, this column and video blog, to share this journey with you, fellow queers! I’m excited to contribute to a growing conversation on queer parenthood — how we get there and what the fuck we do once we’re there.

I’m writing this all from the only perspective I can speak from, that of a white queer cis-female femme, living in San Francisco, partnered with a female-bodied masculine-identifying person who is the love of my life. I’m 28, and she’s 39, and we spend our days making movies and drinking lots of (decaf) coffee.

photo by Miriam Beach

There are so many other things I feel like I should tell you about me, about us, about who we are and how we got here, but instead I’ll let you watch this first video. In addition to getting to know me a little better, you’ll catch a glimpse of my hot butch sweetie and our cute dog.

This column is just beginning, and definitely still evolving, so give a shout in the comments if there are things you want me to address. I’d love to connect with other queer expecting parents as well!

Next column you’ll learn how I got knocked up (hint: not the old fashioned way).

Here’s What You Need to Know Before DIY Insemination

There comes a time in the lives of many young, married couples when their thoughts turn to starting a family. Then, assuming that they’re a queer couple without access to home brewed semen, they find out about the laws relating to artificial insemination and instead construct a fort out of pillows and back issues of The Advocate, never to emerge again.

Did you guys know that in many states, if a physician doesn’t conduct the insemination, then the parental rights of the sperm donor might not be terminated? This legal loophole has recently been used against a lesbian couple in New Jersey, whose sperm donor is suing for parental rights despite having signed a contract giving up these rights, and a sperm donor in Kansas, who may be forced to pay child support after providing sperm to a lesbian couple. (See? These laws hurt everybody — even straight guys attempting to share their sperm with lesbians through the magic of Craigslist!)

Perhaps my wife and I are more naïve about the legal system than your average queer dyad, but when we first read about the New Jersey case we were pretty much gobsmacked. We’re not planning to become parents for another couple years or so, but in the meantime we’ve been saving money in a baby fund, discussing the pros and cons of adoption vs artificial insemination, and generally preparing the way for us to start a family. We’ve also thought a fair bit about the ways in which doing so might be complicated by the state we land in after my wife starts on her PhD (she’s currently working towards a MS in entomology). But our rule of thumb had always been blue state=good, red state=bad — that is until we read about the couple in New Jersey. Although we’d likely have gone through a sperm bank rather than using a known donor, we’d certainly never planned to inseminate inside a sterile doctor’s office. And frankly, even if we take all the precautions necessary to avoid this particular problem, it’s been more than a little terrifying to consider all the other things we might not know about the way the law will treat our family.

The presence or absence of a physician may seem arbitrary now, but most of these laws date back to a time when lesbians inseminating at home as a couple simply wasn’t on the cultural radar. The standard text, which is found in many of these older statutes, reads:

“If, under the supervision of a licensed physician and with the consent of her husband, a wife is inseminated artificially with semen donated by a man not her husband, the husband is treated in law as if he were the biological father of a child thereby conceived. The husband’s consent must be in writing and signed by him and his wife. The consent must be retained by the physician for at least four years after the confirmation of a pregnancy that occurs during the process of artificial insemination.”

There’s an awful lot to be worried about with that wording. In addition to relying on the presence of a physician, it goes on to assume the existence of a “husband” to whom the rights and responsibilities of fatherhood are transferred. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s the worst that’s out there — in South Carolina sperm donors are actively encouraged to claim paternity through something called the Responsible Father Registry, and in Georgia (and possibly in other states as well, according to Beth Littrell at Lambda Legal who I spoke to for this story), anyone other than a doctor who conducts an insemination may be guilty of a felony. Littrell went on to emphasize that even in states where a physician’s presence is not required in the law, heavily gendered language is often present which may complicate the situation of same-sex couples. Lambda Legal is currently pushing for gender neutral interpretations of the laws, but as things stand the legal status of married same-sex couples is not settled.

By Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart for Autostraddle

In all, there are twenty states who’s laws require a physician to conduct an insemination before the donor’s rights to be terminated, (although in some of these this loophole hasn’t been enough for a court to grant paternity to a sperm donor). In a further nine states the language of the law relies on gendered terms like “husband “ and “father”, and in many other states there are no laws dealing with the paternity of donors in the first place. In fact, there are only five states where gender neutral language exists to protect the rights of queer couples seeking to conceive with donor sperm (these are New Hampshire, Vermont, Nevada, Washington, and Oregon).

Most of these laws shouldn’t have any bearing on couples that locate an anonymous donor through a licensed sperm bank — such facilities have mechanisms that protect both the donor and prospective parent(s) from unwanted legal complications. Unfortunately this means it disproportionately disadvantages lower income folks, who may try to find their own donor and eschew involving a physician to keep the cost down. It’s also really hard on couples who’d like to get to know their donor personally before inseminating, many of whom would rather conduct the insemination in a more intimate setting than a doctor’s office.

If same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land, then there’s an excellent chance that gendered language for married couples won’t withstand a challenge in a federal court, especially with attorneys like Littrell fighting for the good guys. But the requirement that a physician be the one to perform insemination is a trickier animal, one that will require sustained advocacy at the state level to ensure that better laws are written. Ideally, these laws would balance the rights of queer couples (and single parents), with the protection of children and the rights of fathers who do not wish to terminate their rights, to arrive at a clear and equitable legal framework for all parents. For anyone who thought their rights would be fully protected once the reach of same-sex marriage went everywhere, bad news —the struggle for equality under the law continues.

We Went to the Moon; Why Can’t We Make A Baby from Two Eggs Yet?

Feature image via enggul

I don’t really like generalizing about queer women — we’re all different, we’re like rainbow snowflakes, some of us have never even seen The L Word. But I will make an exception for this statement: get a bunch of us in a room for long enough and we will start talking about whether two cisgender women will ever be able to produce a biological child together. (Corroboration available from my roommate, who, when informed of my article topic, shouted “my friends at Smith discussed this at least once a week!”)

There are many, many ways to start a family, and queer women take great advantage of nearly all of them. A 2013 survey by the Williams Institute estimates that 24% of female couples are raising adopted, step, or biological children. But smushing your genome with your special someone’s is a dream so universal it’s become a cliché. That you will attempt to try it goes pretty much unquestioned in mainstream society, unless you run into a hitch. And — even as queer couples inch closer to that mainstream — choosing to start a family with someone who has the same sort of gametes as you is still a big hitch.

SHE’S GOT MY HAIR AND YOUR EYES!

After another of these will-we-won’t-we conversations, this one with a couple of lovebirds whose kids would have truly incredible hair, I started to wonder why that hitch is so big. After all, we’ve done crazier things. In 2000, researchers used in vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic diagnosis to engineer the birth of Adam Nash so that his umbilical cord blood could save the life of his sister Molly, who was born with severe Fanconi anemia. About a hundred children worldwide have three biological parents, thanks to a technique that combines an egg and a sperm with cytoplasm from a second egg, and thus allows women with mitochondrial defects to bear children who are genetically (mostly) theirs. If we can do these things, how hard can it be to combine a couple of eggs?

The more I sniff around, the more the answer seems to be “easier than the state of things suggests” — especially because every five years or so, someone gets close. In 2001, it was a group of researchers at Melbourne’s Monash University, led by Dr. Orly Lacham-Kaplan. Lacham-Kaplan’s team developed a chemical technique that, she explains, “trains” a somatic cell to “become like a sperm when inside an egg.” This “training” consists of a series of chemical steps that induce one set of the somatic cell’s chromosomes to leave the egg, effectively turning it into a germ cell that then fertilizes that egg. Voila: instant embryo.

ORLY LACHAM-KAPLAN AT HER MICROSCOPE IN 2005 (VIA THE MELBOURNE LEADER)

Success in mouse models led to publication, which inspired reporters everywhere from BBC News to the Telegraph to write articles with headlines like “How To Make Babies Without a Man” and second opinions from concerned bioethicists. According to Lacham-Kaplan, this, in turn, led to “a lot of downfall” for her research: her funding was not renewed, and her work was widely criticized. She gave up on follow-up tests she had designed to work out the technique’s kinks, and diverted her resources to less controversial problems. Eventually, she left research altogether.

“When I presented my findings [in 2001] I was very hopeful,” Lacham-Kaplan told me. “I thought that if I had the financial support and the team, I could reach conclusive results by 2005-2006. I honestly believed in my technology… scientific obstacles would have been there, but I think we could have overcome them.” (Other researchers agreed, calling her work “genuinely revolutionary” and including it in a textbook chapter of “Actual Achievements” in gamete cell derivation.) “But obviously I was proven wrong in one way, because nobody was ready for [this research] yet.”

EXCEPT FOR THESE PROGRESSIVE MOUSE PARENTS, WHO VALUE VARIOUS GENDER EXPRESSIONS (VIA MAGW21)

It’s the fifth time during our conversation that Lacham-Kaplan has said something along the lines of “the world wasn’t ready;” when she notices this, she is reminded of her earlier work with intra-cytoplasmatic sperm injection, or ICSI. “A lot of people were against it,” she recalls. “But this procedure is used daily now in every IVF clinic.” I’m reminded, in turn, of countless such flip-flops in the history of fertility studies — when artificial insemination was first performed in 1844, the idea was so taboo the patient wasn’t even informed; when it was finally described for science 25 years later, the doctor was “strongly criticized.” Now you can have a round done on your way to work. The world is slow to prep for certain things.

But, as we’ve established, some people have been prepping for this for decades. Lacham-Kaplan knows this better than anyone — she gets emails from them daily. “People, same-sex couples mostly, approach me, coming forward to say ‘we would like to be your guinea pigs,'” she tells me. The rest of the world just has to say yes.

PHOTOESSAY: “Modern Conception” Perfectly Captures Queer Pregnancy, Features Michelle Tea

Someone finally got it right.

You know all those maternity photos of ladies gazing dreamily toward their swollen bellies while golden light streams in from the background?

Yeah. That is NOT what pregnancy is like. Much less queer pregnancy.

Photographer Sophie Spinelle explores queer pregnancy and medically assisted conception in the photo series Modern Conception, with queer writer Michelle Tea as the model. Full disclosure: Sophie is also a friend of mine, and supported me and my wife Anita through years of fertility treatments. She has said that watching our journey helped inspire this series.

Like most queer couples, Anita and I approached the project of growing our family with open minds. We considered all the different ways to get a baby, from foster care to adoption to pregnancy. Anita said pregnancy would feel to her like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and as a family lawyer I knew too much about the uncertainties of adoption, so we decided that I would carry the baby. I was actually a little nervous about spreading my genes, which distinguish themselves mostly by bad teeth. But I was excited to join the ancient sisterhood of women who had shared the experience of pregnancy. I thought it would feel instinctual, animal, natural.

We asked a gorgeous, creative friend to be our donor and were giddy to learn that his wife was just as excited about our project as he was. Whenever I was about to drop an egg, we took the subway to his Bohemian, cat-ridden apartment. He and his wife went into another room and came out with a cup full of the fresh, warm “genetic material.” Then my wife and I went to a different room to inject it with, of all things, a Baby Tylenol dropper. The process felt intimate, exciting and a little naughty. One magical night, after the insemination, we all drank wine, ate Moroccan pheasant pie and noticed a full moon out the window. We were sure our child had been conceived. We were wrong.

Sophie’s image of Mother Nature in stirrups captures the tension between the way women are taught to conceive (naturally, instinctually) and the way most queer women actually do conceive. After our nights of wine and moonlight produced exactly nothing, Anita and I escalated to fertility clinics, where we learned that at the relatively young age of 34, my egg supply was low and we were “scraping the bottom of the barrel” (yes, a doctor actually said that out loud). We began a monthly procedure called Intra-Uterine-Insemination (IUI) that involved injecting needles full of fertility drugs into my stomach and monitoring my eggs as they grew. Every two days, I had a 7 AM tryst with the transvaginal ultrasound, a shockingly long, cold, condom-covered wand that we promptly named “The Dildo-Cam.”

Our poor donor was working hard, too. No clinic would inseminate me with his fresh sperm despite the fact that we had swapped fluids at home. They required STD testing, genetic testing and psychological evaluations. To prevent HIV transmission, they also demanded that his sperm be frozen and quarantined for 6 months. It enraged me that straight couples could just show up at the clinic with their marriage certificates, while we had to prove we were sane, genetically sound, medically immaculate. Of course, the reality of depositing sperm in a bank is not as immaculate as one would hope. Our donor later told us that they made him fill out a “bible” full of paperwork, then put him in a room lined with red padding, where he watched a porn called Milkmaids in Manhattan.

After eight IUIs, dozens of dates with Dildo-Cam, and hundreds of needles full of hormones, I began to forget my feminism and feel like a failure as a woman. I even forgot about all the family-growing options Anita and I had considered in the past and became desperate to have a baby in my belly. I knew that I had become obsessed when I found myself drinking carrot juice, eating bitter pineapple core and listening to a meditation CD called “Help for Infertility,” in which a soothing yoga type urged me to close my eyes and imagine sperm meeting egg. Anita and I were advised by well-meaning morons that it was all due to stress and we should “take a vacation.” Meanwhile, our doctors urged us to try the most stressful and expensive procedure to date: IVF. It involved harvesting eggs, growing them in a test tube and implanting them back into my uterus. In comparison to other families who suffer failed IVFs and miscarriages, Anita and I were incredibly lucky. Our first IVF was covered by insurance, and resulted in a healthy twin pregnancy.

The last two pictures in the series depict pregnancy in all its gore and glory. In contrast to cheesy maternity shoots or tabloid “baby bumps,” Sophie’s photos show our animal hunger, our exhaustion and our inability to keep up with the housework. Was pregnancy my happy ending? Partly. I was admitted into the sisterhood I had hoped to join, a sisterhood of strange and secret symptoms. Random acquaintances (and one family court judge) told me about their own swollen labia, leaking nipples and heartburn. As I lumbered through the city streets, women called out to me: “God bless you, you gonna have a football player!” and “You got it, baby, you’re almost there!” (I was only 6 months pregnant). But there was also the night when I woke Anita up to ask: “Do you think acid reflux could actually kill me? I feel like I could die. Could I die?” Spoiler alert: I didn’t, you can’t.

Here’s the honest truth, or at least my truth: Trying to conceive sucks. Pregnancy mostly sucks. Birth totally blows. But here’s real happy ending: Our beautiful twin daughters are now four. They wear tutus everywhere, even the beach. They know they were in my belly, but they love their Mommy and Mama equally. And the other day, we played an entire round of Candy Land without a meltdown.

Freezing My Assets: On Transitioning and Wanting To Be A Mom One Day Too

feature image via Shutterstock

trans*scribe illustration © rosa middleton, 2013

click here for more trans*scribe

In the early days of my transition, it happened sometimes that I would get frustrated with someone messing up my pronouns, but once in awhile, there would be someone who got it right that made up for any number of people getting it wrong. One such person was the secretary at the desk at the andrology clinic who explained to an orderly: “She’s here to deposit her sperm.”

To be clear, I have no desire whatsoever for children at the moment. I’m not maternal; I don’t understand how one can get so excited when a baby figures out how to use a spoon. I can do that, and I can do it without making a mess of myself – most of the time. Nevertheless, being trans means you have to plan ahead. It is possible, somewhere down the line, that I’ll stop seeing babies as small, unemployed, inarticulate noise machines, and when that day comes, I’m kind of tickled by the idea of being one of the very small number of lesbian women whose child can answer the question of which mom is their biological mom with “both of them!”

With that in mind, I made my appointment, drove out to the university’s medical complex, and checked in at the andrology lab. I sat across the waiting area some distance away from the desk filling out the forms. An orderly went behind the desk, and perhaps he wasn’t paying much attention to me, because he became very confused when the secretary said, “Can you take Miss Catherwood to Room 1?”

Bear in mind that these little rooms have nothing in them but a sink, a bunch of porno magazines, a TV with a bunch of porno tapes, and a chair which no woman in her right mind would sit in. There is only one thing that these rooms are used for. So after being asked to take “Miss Catherwood” to one of these rooms, the orderly glanced at me briefly, then asked the secretary, quietly but audibly enough in the nearly silent waiting room, “why?”

The secretary told him, quite simply, “She’s making a deposit.” Increasingly bewildered, he asked, “A deposit of what?” and the girl said in a tone as though this should be completely obvious, “Of her sperm.” Like, duh. This was about the time I got up and brought the forms back to the desk.

I appreciated the secretary’s attitude, and moreover, it managed to momentarily distract me from the fact that I was actually very nervous about this. Not about ejaculating in public, I have a history that adequately prepared me for that sort of thing, but because I was worried that I had waited too long to do this. I had already been on hormones for some time. One thing the doctors warn you of is that, not-unexpectedly, going on a high dose of estrogen as well as a testosterone blocker does not do wonders for your fertility.

I found myself getting the wrong kind of worked up on the way to the room, thinking, “I’ve totally screwed this up, my sperm are probably all floating at the top of the ball, belly up, or swimming in circles in estrogen clouded waters like goldfish dropped into a murky swamp, wondering what the hell’s going on around here.” Then it hit me that by getting myself so worked up, I might make it worse by scaring them; do sperm get test anxiety? I had to calm down. I chatted with the orderly to distract myself.

He told me I had thirty minutes to produce the sample, and I responded, “Thirty minutes? That doesn’t leave a lot of time for foreplay. No time whatsoever for cuddling afterward.” He didn’t seem to appreciate the joke. Not willing to give up so easily, I asked, “Well if I’m going to be cutting corners anyway, what is the fastest anyone has ever been in and out of here?” and he responded, “I don’t know. A couple minutes.” I nodded: “Two minutes. Challenge accepted.”

Not so much as a grin.

Inside, I lifted my skirt and got to work. I didn’t manage to beat two minutes, by which I mean I beat for more than two minutes, after which I had a little form to fill out that asked some basic questions such as how long it had been since my last ejaculation and that sort of thing. It asked if any semen was lost (dribbled out) during collection. On the blank I wrote, “Nope!” and signed “Annie Oakley.”

Like a girl bringing home her first A+, I proudly marched my little cup to the lab where I was to give it to the doctor who would analyze it. Along the way, I explored a little, very curious to see what the freezer section of this combination doctors office and pornography supercenter looked like. I didn’t find it. Arriving at the doctor’s office, I gave him my sample, and he told me to wait while he pulled up my file to make sure he had my information. While he was doing so, it occurred to me, “He’s a sperm doctor; this guy has got to have a good sense of humor.” Hoping he would make up for the humorless orderly, I asked him, “So… what makes a guy go into the sperm trade?”

His response was disappointing. He just said, “Oh, I don’t know, the job was open at the right time, I was qualified to….” blah blah blah. I don’t know why, but I really thought the sperm guy would have something more witty to say. I expected, “I heard that it was an UP AND COMING business!” or something to that effect. I suppose I can’t complain about a medical appointment that includes an orgasm.

The doctor called that afternoon with my analysis while I was in the supermarket, the freezer section to be precise. Already, I’d been expecting tragic news about the state of things down under, and I thought a tub of ice cream might make me feel better (don’t think about that one too hard). I checked the caller before answering and thought to myself, “Damn, that was really fast. Didn’t take long to count ‘em, not a good sign…”

I stood gazing at the container of frozen ice cream I had just pulled out as I listened to him begin to explain how the whole thing worked. I knew what he would say. I knew I shouldn’t have waited so long after going on estrogen and spironolactone, and the tub of Karamel Sutra melting in my hand wasn’t going to bring me much comfort. He was about to break the news that I would never have a child of my own, and nothing else had ever made it so clear that I wanted one.

I really, really wanted one.

He laid it all out for me.

The average man’s sperm count is TWENTY MILLION.
The average woman’s sperm count is ZERO, and I had TWENTY-EIGHT MILLION more sperm than the average woman.

He also told me that average sperm motility is 60%, while mine was about 70%. That means rather than swimming in circles or floating aimlessly, my sperm apparently shoot around like armor piercing missiles. Naturally, to all of this I responded, “Yes!” and did a happy little dance in the freezer section of Jewel-Osco which attracted no small degree of attention.

When I was finished celebrating, I thanked the doctor and hung up. I placed the ice cream gently back in the freezer and shut the door.

I was in a fine mood for the remainder of the day, but those few hours spent wondering, and those few moments spent convinced that I had thoughtlessly traded away my ability to have a child, stuck with me. I would not have traded it for nothing, of course; I would have traded it for a body I am finally comfortable in and a life worth living. And yet, some part of me thought, “Yeah… but still…”

It dawned upon me that this question of the ability to have children is not a frequent one in our discourse. Perhaps because, as part of the LGBT community (not to open a can of worms), we are among a group of people who already face a certain reproductive challenge that most heterosexual couples do not. Or perhaps it is because, unlike lesbians and gays, previous generations of transpeople have not necessarily shared this problem.

Thanks largely to a more accepting social climate, over the last thirty years, the average age of transition for a transperson has plummeted. Now we see teenagers and young children transitioning, and like anyone else, I’m filled with joy for them, and perhaps a touch of envy. Riki Wilchins recently wrote a somewhat controversial op-ed discussing the fact that due to the gradually lowering age of transition and the slowly shifting culture, the experiences of the new generation of trans people would bear little resemblance to the experiences of the generations that have come before.

And in most respects, I think we can agree, good for them! No decades of crushing inner turmoil trying to live a lie. No having to explain to a spouse of twenty years that you’re not who they think you are. And in the cases of transitioning in childhood, maybe even no struggling with the physical aftermath of the wrong kind of puberty. Good for those kids. Jerks.

But among those experiences this new generation of early transitioners will not share will be that of fathering or mothering a biological child, and while we may argue about the degree of significance, it is a thing that is lost in transition. I know many older transgender people who were married and had children prior to their transition; I also know many younger transgender people who, having transitioned early, will not have those experiences — in most respects, a very positive development. And yet, some part of me thinks, “Yeah… but still…”
To be entirely clear, here is a brief list of things I am NOT suggesting:

+ That the benefits of transitioning do not outweigh the losses. This is not an argument against transitioning at any age.

+ That everyone must want a biological child, or even want children at all. Certainly, many people do not.

+ That one could not love an adopted child or a child born with the assistance of a third party every bit as powerfully as a child that is their biological offspring. Of course they can.

All I am suggesting is an addendum to something already commonly understood. The decision to transition is a major one, one with many consequences, most of them positive, and it is a decision which must be informed. All I suggest is that considering the matter of fertility should be part of that informed decision. Because it is an important one, and it is one we might not think about until it is too late.

Author’s Bio:I’m a PhD candidate at Northern Illinois University where I teach English and Gender and Sexuality Studies. My fiction, creative nonfiction, and critical work has appeared in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, Towers Literary and Creative Arts Magazine, Autostraddle, The Huffington Post, 34thParallel, and Plenitude. I believe in life writing as a way to understand ourselves and the world around us. Find me at rhiannoncatherwood.wix.com

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Oh, That’s Where Babies Come From

Kristen’s Team Pick:

Babies are a magical wonderous creature and nowadays it seems like everyone is up in arms about how (and whether) gay parents have kids. Is there a stork involved? Can you get one mail order? If you collect enough kittens can you trade them in for a baby? These are all legitimate questions and luckily two lovely mothers-to-be decided to set the record straight with a pregnancy announcement for their family and friends.

Oh, that’s what the turkey baster is for.

A & C have been chronicling their journey into the land of baby-making at Lez Be Mamas since March. So if you happen to be curious about what it’s like when two ladies decide to make the leap to motherhood, you should check it out. If these women are this cute and creative when it comes to announcing their soon-to-be tot, I can only imagine what an interesting childhood said baby will have once they show up! Or at least pop in around April 2013 to see whether the mamas used enough sugar or puppy dog tails in their baby brew.

Real L Word 2’s Cori and Kacy Post Heartbreaking “Update On Our Family”

“Charlie Monroe Boccumini was born at 9:12pm on Christmas Eve. Our little angel was 13.2 ounces of perfect:  from the tip of her button nose to her perfectly formed toes, she was the spitting image of Cori. I saw my little girl take one small breath of life before she was lifted up to Heaven.  We had been crying for the last 3 days non-stop until she arrived.  Suddenly, a calm came over the room.  The nurse wrapped her in a blanket and handed her to Cori, and we finally came face to face with our sweet girl.  We held her, kissed her incredible little cheeks and hands, and told her how much we loved her and how special she will always be to us.”

– read the entirety of To All Of You on Kacy & Cori’s “Adventures in Baby-Making Blog”

Cori and Kacy at their wedding in 2008