Hatchling

I have my HSG tomorrow at 1130. The clinic’s approach is that they make sure everything’s clear before starting. So they squirt some dye through my fallopian tubes and take an x-ray to check they’re not blocked. It’s meant to be a bit painful, but it also is meant to increase conception if done in the preceding three months before starting, which is why I left it until this point. I hope it goes ok. I am going to call in sick to work. I had thought about saying I had an appointment and taking the day off in advance on sick leave, but I thought it was just easier to call in and not explain. A will come along to the appointment. I do hope there’s not a fuss about her being there with me. You’re meant to bleed afterwards. Argh.

I dreamt last night that I had a baby in a room of my parents’ house.  I had still not told my parents that we were planning to have a baby.  So I walked out into my parents’ kitchen and everyone was wondering where this new born baby, wrapped in a blanket in my arms, had come from.  I explained that it was A and I’s, and my mother said ‘Oh my Gawd’ (as my Mum is quite a staunch Christian, I never hear her say Oh my God, but I remember once in my childhood, she said oh my Gawd at a point of absolute exasperation and I was so shocked) with a tone of exasperation and ‘what has my crazy daughter gone and done now’.   A bit like when A and I were getting married and my mum kept saying ‘just remind me, why are you doing this again?’  as if, to her, who has been married 47 years, the idea of lifelong commitment was totally unfathomable.

But I digress,  so this dream was so vivid, and really brought home the idea that it could easily get too late to tell them.  So, they’re coming over to visit at the end of September.  I subtly tried to steer their visit dates away from when we would be inseminating or testing or injecting etc. - which left some very narrow windows. I am still not sure how to broach it.  Some advice is that if they’re not going to be supportive it is not useful to bring them into the loop too early, however, other advice is that telling them only once you’re pregnant doesn’t often give them time to process it - and they feel left out that you have not told them sooner.  By the time they visit, we could be pregnant, or more possibly, in the midst of ttcing efforts.

I told A I was thinking about seeing a counsellor about it, or more usefully, calling the GLBT counselling line to get some GLBT specific advice.  A. suggested I call PFLAG and seek advice on how parents would have liked their GLBT children to have handled it, and advice they might have for us.  In principle, this is a great idea, but, as I pointed out to A, the PFLAG parents are accepting people, whereas my parents have not been able to come to a point of wholehearted acceptance (despite well over 25 years of experience - as my 46 year old sister is also lesbian).

Apart from the sexuality stuff, we have a great relationship, I speak to my parents at least once a week, often twice or more, with a great deal of warmth and fondness.  So it’s complex.  And, at the moment, it’s really hard talking about what’s going on in my life, without mentioning most of it.  I feel duplicitous and deceitful.

It all seems to be about time at the moment. Our sperm comes out of quarantine on the 25 July. The final requirement is another HIV, Hep C etc test for our donors before the clinic will allow us to inseminate. As I expect our insemination will probably be around the 17 August, I thought we had a decent window to get the tests done. But: the clinic wants the test results before we can even ‘book-on’ for our cycle that month - i.e. around 1 August.  Which makes timing incredibly tight.

Our donors have been wonderful throughout the process and have been pretty complicit with all the administration required. But we have project-managed the process pretty carefully the whole way along: booking appointments, writing instructions, calling ahead to the clinic to ensure the bill is fixed up. We wanted to make sure there was as little impact on them as possible. When they undertook all the screening and depositing in January I wrote them up a little chart with each appointment, what to expect, where to go etc. Like most men, they loved being taken care of like this. But now they are overseas, we have a lot less control over arrangements, and hell, I have no idea where they should go for a blood test. They had said they would take care of it, and I have no doubt they will, but they had also expressed some doubt about the pathology services where they are and how quickly the could get results. Now that we have such a short timeframe (i.e. the 1 August one) my nerves have set in about we can get a blood test taken and pathology results in a developing country and faxed back to Australia in a 5-6 day timeframe.

(insert interlude) …. rather than writing about my problems, I decided to take matters into my own hands and, thanks to some good internet research, I have just called up the 24 hour private hospital there and got put through to one of the laboratory technicians, a delightful man called Jessie. I am sure getting a call from some random Australian was the highlight of his night shift. The good news is: they can do all the tests we need and have results ready in 24 hours! And it won’t cost a gazillion dollars. I am so glad. And the fact that it’s 24 hours means that our donors can go in on the Friday evening to get the tests done. Meaning, we should be able to go ahead for August! And I can relax. Almost. Just waiting on the final tranche of consent forms to come back from them. And sorting out our future.

So, Inshallah, we have one month until lift-off.

This has been a year of waiting… and I am so over waiting. I work in a job that has a lot of focus on spending time working overseas. In December last year, we found out that we would be going overseas for three years with my work in January 2009 (yep, they believe in long lead-times). In November last year we found our known donors, and by January we had their sperm deposited at the clinic. We’ve had to wait out a six month quarantine before we are legally able to use it (only one month to go!). And we face a five month window in which we can ttc - complete with all the waiting that will involve.

So, we’ve spent this year in a strange holding pattern, on the cusp of being somewhere, but not yet there. Slowly disengaging from our life here. But it’s all so complicated.

If I have the baby while working overseas, I can take my 12 weeks maternity leave, but cannot take more than that otherwise we get sent back home and my position overseas gets cancelled. It’s also commonly held that it’s a ‘bad look’ to get pregnant while overseas. (Given that it’s a pretty conservative workplace, I can only imagine how much more of a ‘bad look’ a pregnant lesbian is.) But we’re pretty well informed of our rights, and I am of the view that maternity leave is the cost of doing business with women (in some parts of this country anyway) so have been working on the assumption that we would aim to get pregnant before we go and then I would take the 12 weeks while we are away and then A would stay home with the baby thereafter. There’s no other way we could have done it. We couldn’t get pregnant earlier, we can’t get pregnant while over there (at least not easily), and there’s no way I am letting four more years tick past on my biological clock before getting started.

The opportunities overseas are good work-wise and excellent money-wise. Personally, I have been ambivalent about going, as I like our life here and I do not love my job, but A has been pretty excited. We’re headed to a great city and I think A is looking forward to a bit of a break and the opportunities that being a SAHM open up. But I’ve been worried a lot about this model: three years is a long time, our first child will be 2 and a half before I would be able to consider spending time at home with the children, I can imagine regretting this. It will be difficult for A to conceive our second child overseas, and costly flights home for inseminations will be very difficult to manage. I worry about how A will go at home with the baby non-stop and how her career would be affected. She might get bored pretty quickly - particularly in a new city without the support networks. I imagine that I could work through the early stages of our child’s life if I had a job I loved, but the reality is, while my job is a good job, it is not one I love. I worry about the stress of managing it all with my employer - because even though I know my rights are pretty water-tight, the emotional politics of it could get messy. I worry about being expected to work long hours, and travel away from home, and finding that really tough. I worry about breastfeeding and bonding and how I will feel being in the breadwinner role, without an escape hatch. How I will go working all day after sleepless nights. So there’s a lot to worry about.

And while everyone knows we’re going away, there are very few people in our real lives who know that we’re planning to add a baby into that mix. And the baby is not negotiable. A and I both know that now is the time for us to start this journey and nothing should postpone it.

So this week I saw a job advertised that is pretty close to being my ‘dream job’ and is definitely on the career trajectory I have been working towards. It’s the kind of job I would have thought about applying after we returned from overseas. It’s in our town and with an employer who has a reputation for fostering work-life balance and supporting women, and includes options for work from home, part-time work etc. The work excites me, but the prospect of a more flexible future in which we could grow our family excites me more.

I told A about it in a careful way, sounding her out about a possible future for us that involved staying here, and she was wonderfully supportive. She said that I should definitely go after the job. She was so good about being able to let go of the certainty we had created about going overseas. Which is tough, particularly as she’s been having a really rough year in her work and was looking forward to escaping. But escaping is not always the best exit. We went out to a cafe and mapped out pros and cons of staying or going, and drew up life-maps about where our lives and our careers could be in three years. I am sold on staying put, and I think A is comfortable with either approach. We are both aware that we don’t yet have a decision to make as I have to be offered the job first - and there is a lot hinged on this one job. Personally, I see applying for this job as a first step towards loosening the expectations we have for next year. In three months, hopefully we’ll have a better indication of where our pregnancy attempts are up to and will be able to take a more informed decision about what we’re planning to do. We can have a few options on the table.

If we stay here, we can look at models where we both take a few months off when the baby is born, and then both work part-time or more flexibility. We both got quite excited about the idea of staying in our house. Which room would become the nursery, the changes we would make if we were to stay here for a few years (installing a dishwasher is top of the list). It would be difficult to extract ourselves from our plans and will require some careful management regarding telling both of our works. But no one is ever as bound up in these things as you are yourself, and they will deal with it.

So this past week has shunted us out from the comfort of at least knowing where we were going to be next year, back into the world of multiple uncertainties. I think you can tell where my heart is… so fingers crossed for this job or something like it and for our ttc journey.

We went for our orientation at the fertility clinic today. We’re this ridiculously zealous pre-inseminating couple. We’ve still got six weeks until the sperm can come out of storage, and probably about eight weeks until we do our first IUI. But, as we’ve been waiting since last December, we’re eager to be as prepared as we can. So off we went for our first glimpse of the place where our sperm is waiting and where we’ll be inseminating. It’s a pleasant clinic. Neutral tones. Down lights. Quite glamorous really. Although the room where we’ll be inseminating looks a bit like a kitchen with a set of stirrups in it. I am planning on taking Stephanie Brill’s advice and making it our own, bringing in our insemination playlist.

Our Nurse Coordinator’s name is Buffy. I love this and loved her instantly because of it. I was imagining a funky, young dyke, but she’s actually a kindly and delightful middle aged woman, who is so neutral and non-judgemental. (A. later tells me that Buffy is a well-known shortening for Elizabeth, but I never knew this and am still captured by the novelty of my kindly sperm nurse Buffy.)

In our last appointment with Dr Young & Funky, we decided on starting with a stimulated IUI. You can read about my grappling with whether to use drugs here. Even though most of the advice we received from other tccing lesbians was to the contrary, A & I have decided to go straight to stimulated IUI. I noticed that most advocates of no-drugs IUI had ended up having to ramp up their attempts to using drugs and IVF after a few unsuccessful cycles, and because time is of the essence for us, with an overseas move at the end of the year, and our sperm is frozen, thanks to known donors who are in another country, we’ve decided to go straight to what we think will work best with limited intervention and less ethical complexity than IVF. We figure that we’re not trying to recreate heterosex and would like to give this the best chance, and shortest timeframe, as possible.

So we’re going to be using Puregon, at a very low dose (50), and then a trigger shot and then something for a few days after the insemination (possibly the trigger shot or the Puregon again?). There will be a regime of blood tests and ultrasounds. I have completed all the blood tests and ultrasounds that are required before starting treatment, and just need to have my HSG (I have been waiting until closer to the time, as apparently if it’s had close to the time of insemination it increases your chances.)

Reading other blogs out there, including Vee and Jay’s staggering running total, we’re so fortunate to live in a country where our Medicare system covers most of the costs involved in this whole process. There’s a lot we had been shelling out for earlier in the process (sperm analysis, sperm storage and a plethora of tests for our donors) but thanks to the system here we’ll probably only end up out of pocket about $300 per month for over $2000 worth of treatment. Perhaps less with our health insurance on top of that.

So we’re on our way. It’s finally coming into sight. And I am so excited. There’s still mountains of administrivia before we’re home. Such as discovering a whole bunch of consent forms the clinic was meant to get our donors to sign when they deposited were not given to them to sign, meaning we are now having to send them across the world for them to sign (and find a witness for - which will be tricky for them to explain) and return. We also have to arrange their final blood tests and ensure that a third world doctor’s testing and diagnostic procedures are reliable enough to satisfy our doctor. And we do all this just to get to the starting line…

So far, our donors could not be more perfect. A and I are both a besotted with them. As such decent human beings. As such wonderful men. They have been so willing to go through this process so openheartedly. And for that we are grateful. Originally, our first ob/gyn (who we saw for our first appointment) said that we had to choose from one or the other and we were a bit trapped in a cycle of weighing up attributes and sperm quality. But we have since decided and told the clinic that we want to alternate between the donors each month. This was a bit of a revelation, but works for us. Because we entered into this with them as a couple. Because we equally couldn’t decide between one or the other of them, nor did we want to. Because storing two types of sperm protected us from waiting six months to find out that the sperm didn’t work so well. Because ideally we’d like for A. to have our next baby with the other of them’s sperm. Because having this concept of a donor-couple really waters down the biology of it all. It’s our baby, but our friends are helping us. And such wonderful friends they are.

Even though I had been the original proponent of using an anonymous donor, I am so glad about how this has worked out for us so far. With the right men, known donor arrangements can work so well. As we all know, with the wrong men, they can be disastrous. I think distance always helps.

So that is where we are on a Thursday evening in June. It’s so cold outside. A. is out for the evening. I am listening to a wonderful CD by Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu and contemplating a pile of dishes.

And the countdown is on.

…where I feel like I am doing way too much.. I can’t believe I totally forgot about Blogging for LGBT Families Day when it had been the highlight of my foray into blogging. Although, I think that I can shift some of the blame onto my workplace. While eating my lunch, I used to make a daily stop by Mombian and catch up on a daily digest of news from the world of lesbo parenting, as well as a good round-up of GLBT news in general.. I’d also make a stop at Lesbiandad and partake in a great essay or a cute photo. This is in a workplace where surfing the net is de rigueur and there is no shortage of hits from my colleagues to random personal interest sites of all varieties.  Suffice to say, after happily checking in to these sites, about a month ago, when I clicked on both sites, they came up with a huge red stop-sign screen, warning me of inappropriate content and blocking my access. I checked the workplace’s reasonable use of the internet policy, and confirmed that I was definitely not in breach of any of the guidelines.  In fact, there was nothing in their content that could be classified as ‘unreasonable’. I’ll never be sure if the workplace has just upped the netnanny software, or, more likely, seen the word lesbian, and banned it. Because in a place that has equal provisions for same sex partners and a pretty progressive HR policy, the word lesbian is still so inappropriate. Even when the website is more about civil rights, parenting and children’s literature than it ever is about sex. Even when I had already mentally checked-off how defensible these sites were before clicking on them.  Because I am in a position where I need to choose my battles, this one is going through to the keeper.  And because this kind of stuff is so subtle that it does make you doubt yourself.  That little voice that starts to wonder maybe there is something entirely inappropriate about a lesbian parenting site compared to a straight one?  So, anyway, rather than being reminded by Mombian that Blogging for LGBT families day was coming up so I could go home and write a blog entry, it passed me right by…

A & I are off for the long weekend with a group tomorrow, and spent last weekend out of town. I have exams in a week or so, and no wonder I feel like I am not sure where I am going to find the time to study. While complaining how busy things are, while we were in Melbourne, A & I bought My Miserable Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy and I must admit I have been getting my lesbian parenting fix reading it.  I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book.   I was worried that I’d find Askowitz neurotic and annoying, but I really loved it and thought that it was the most accurate portrayal of lesbian post-break-up dynamics and so honest, but warm and delightful, at the same time.  A is in the bath right now reading her way to the end of it and I can’t wait to hear what she thinks.  Then, it’s going straight into my book-sharing lesbian ttc circle.

I’ve always been a no-drugs kinda girl. I prefer to endure a headache than pop a panadol, and will spend weeks drinking honey and lemon rather than embarking on a course of cold and flu tablets. But I am starting to wonder whether there’s a role for drugs in our IUI process. We see our ob/gyn on Tuesday (who I am realising will be needing a suitable name as she’ll be appearing on here a bit) to decide on our treatment plan. We’ve ruled out IVF in the first instance. We were thinking a natural IUI cycle to begin with, but I am starting to think that it might be worth it to go all out, or at least use a trigger shot, in our already uber medical-interventionist baby making. My tracking efforts have confirmed that I have long and slightly irregular cycles, and am just worried about wasting sperm (and time and money) with a poorly timed insemination. According to my calculations, my period was due today and it hasn’t come! I am as anxious about it as a teenager two weeks after unprotected sex. Where is my German railway clock cycle, on which I can intuitively depend?

I think what has shifted my thinking on using any drugs was that on the online discussion board in which I posted about whether to use IVF or IUI one woman replied (after I had written on here about it), saying that she had fallen pregnant on her second IUI with a trigger shot. I was inspired. Two cycles and pregnant. Sounds wonderful. And I figure, if it’s made from pregnant women’s urine, surely the HCG can’t be too bad for you?? A & I will talk it over, and we will talk to Dr C on Tuesday and work it out. Although I think we need to have our own minds made up first, because I am sure Dr C will be trying to ply us with drugs with more fervour than a dealer on the corner of Northbourne.

While the California Supreme Court has recognised the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, this week the ACT passed its watered-down civil union laws. Numerous attempts by the ACT to introduce progressive civil unions with ceremonies were overridden by the federal government, and finally the ACT caved to a pared back model, which doesn’t ‘mimic marriage’.  Too little, too late.  On Monday morning there were some brave folks that queued up outside the registrar’s office to sign the paperwork as soon as possible, families with kids in tow.  Deserving so much more than this.

I was glad that A and I had not waited for our local laws, how sad we would have been with this model, that involves a ‘ceremony’ by the registrar in the government office, but does not allow for any ceremonies of substance.  We know the kind of Clayton’s ceremony they’re talking about. The words above are the vows we were allowed to say when we got legally hitched in the British High Commission the afternoon before our proper, but legally non-existant, wedding.  Nothing more than these words, in a waiting room, with rows of plastic chairs, a dead pot plant, and a lot of hilarity.  We, and the close circle of family and friends present, actually had a lot of fun with the crazy environment, and made it our own.  We crowded into that room, A & I having decided on our outfits about 30 minutes before, our guests a mix of having dashed straight from work, or wandering in from a day of sightseeing, tourists with video camera in hand.  As we read our ‘vows’ and signed our certificate, our guests clapped and cheered and commented ironically on ‘how romantic’ it was.

It kinda was in a way.  Romantic in the way that my parents, who have been married for 47 years, got hitched at 18 at the registy office, my mother in a grey skirt suit, a small and random selection of guests, with key players missing, and a small spray of freesias.  If a ceremony like that can lay the bedrock for 47 years of a successful partnership it must be doing something right.

It helped that we took ourselves seriously the next day, and had a proper wedding, with words that meant something to us, with proper frocks, flowers, music, a priest, a church a three tiered cake with the two brides cake-topper I had pestered her for so much, and all the signifiers that said  that this was a capital W wedding, that demanded we be taken seriously.  And our guests did.  Ask any of our guests what they saw that day, and they would say a wedding.  And the way they treat our relationship now is as a marriage, to the point of introducing me, to my shock and pomo feminist discomfort, as ‘A’s wife’.  A’s 78 year old grandmother said ours was the best wedding she’d ever been to.  And that’s saying something. I am not sure where our civil partnership certificate is, probably under a pile of bank statements in the study, but as for the memory of our non-legally recognised wedding ceremony?  They’re still talking about it.

Which reminds me… A & I need to write this weekend to our faraway donors to tell them who’s sperm we’re using first. I think they’re being very conscious of not intruding in our process, but were secretly both so keen for us to pick their little swimmers to go first… It’s funny how much men like the idea of having little miniature thems running around in the world somewhere. A & I had never thought of having children as being about creating little ‘us’s’, but for them, it was their first thought. And perfect that there’s women out there who want to raise them. Our choice was ultimately an instinctual feeling, coupled with the advice of our ob/gyn, and we’re all committed to using the other donor for the next child (which we’re planning that A will have), or even swapping during the process. It’s a bit complicated, I will let you know how it goes…

Last night an exhausted A. returned from few days away on quite an intensive business trip. After about an hour of coherent conversation over dinner, she departed for bed, and I found myself at 8pm on a Friday night with not a whole lot to do. So I dug out a DVD of ‘You’ve Got Mail’ which was part of a Meg Ryan (sigh) set of DVDs that A & I had bought while we were up in the mountains last winter, but never got round to watching. I had seen this movie once before, at the movies many years ago, but watching it ten years on, I was struck by just how much the internet has changed. It was so strange watching them wait with anticipation for their computers to dial-up, that all-too-familiar squarking sound that I hope I never have to hear again, their grainy screens and clunky, plugged-in laptops. The internet has moved on so much, and it is only in this lesbian ttcing efforts, that I have truly embraced its potential.

In our town, we have two other sets of lesbian couple friends who are also starting on the lesbo parenting rollercoaster at the same time as us, and one single friend who has just started to think about it. Our town is a highly competitive city, career-centred and, at its worst, a vipers’ nest of ambitious and driven people. (I think this affects the kind of lesbian community that is here also, at least among the younger, professional set). We have realised, that from one of the couples’ perspective, there’s a vicious race-to-the-top, mortified that we could steal each other’s ideas, or worse, donors. The other couple are older friends of mine from my hometown, we are very close and have happily created our own lending library of all our ttc related books, but again, there seems to be a competitive distancing that happens when we talk about our plans. We talk about it to an extent, but there’s an element of it being too close to home, and discussions of donor searches or clinic methods feel like they’re somewhat off-limits.

So this whole baby-making process can be pretty isolating. Keep reading →