Just say no?
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?? Lo & 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 a street corner.
When words are not enough…
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 Lo 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, Lo & 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 Lo 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 ‘Lo’s wife’. Lo’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.
You’ve got mail, Part 2
Which reminds me… Lo & 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. Lo & 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 Lo will have), or even swapping during the process. It’s a bit complicated, I will let you know how it goes…
You’ve got mail
Last night an exhausted Lo 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 Lo & 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 some distance 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.
Lo & I have been quite open to most of our straight friends about our plans, nearly all of whom are childless, and at best they’re inspired and supportive, and at worst, surprised that we would want to intentionally seek out having children. Even though we haven’t started inseminating, the planning process has taken up a lot of our emotional energy, as well as having required countless doctor’s appointments, tests etc. However, our lovely friends have very little advice to offer on how to negotiate with donors, how to chart our fertility, which ob/gyn is most lesbian friendly etc. And so we’ve turned to the net to seek out the village we need to raise this child. After a briefly successful foray into the world of internet dating some years ago (thanks Gaydargirls), I had been a bit out of touch with the GLBT online community. I have loved discovering that there are more lesbian parenting ttcing blogs than I can read, but there’s always room for another. I love that in the GLBT parenting community, people are willing to share information, put questions out into the ether and get answers back. While trying to work our whole journey out, I have got so much inspiration from reading blogs of those who have been there ahead of us. There’s something so reassuring about seeing that it can be done, and that it is being done, all the time.
A glance at the same sex parenting section of a discussion board shows recent topics as: how to access sperm in a part of Australia with restrictive laws; how to find a GLBT appropriate baby-book; whether IUI or IVF is a better choice for a fertile couple with frozen sperm and how to come out to your child’s classmates’ parents. Compare this to the forum’s general posts: where to store the cat’s food and water bowl; cheapest laundry detergent; discounts on nursery goods. All questions that I am sure we will need to turn our mind to at some stage, but I’d rather be agonising about shopping for sperm than laundry detergent any day, and I am so glad that the internet creates a virtual space in which we can do that.
There’s something I missed…
It may sound like Lo & I have this all sorted. Sperm?: check; Worked out how baby will fit into our life?: check; vitamins, charting, abstainence from caffeine: check, check, check. But there is a huge ‘To Do’ remaining on our ttc list.. And that is telling our families. Who both happen to be of the very conservative Christian variety. Well, they are a lot less conservative since attending our wedding last year (partly held as a civil partnership ceremony at the British High Commision, followed by an elaborate and cheeky high church ceremony thanks to a very progressive priest) which they actually quite enjoyed. But they are still of the church going, Bible study group hosting, God fearing variety.
And I am realising that not only will I have to start charting my temperature (thanks Clark), as much as I don’t want to, we are going to have to tell our families, ideally sometime before we start trying in August. And there’s a lot of them, our two sets of parents, my four older siblings + partners, and Lo’s three younger siblings. I am expecting that Lo’s family will be a bit more relaxed, they’re younger, and I think they’ve heard of this happening before. Like most people, mainly it’s my mother that I am worried about.
As a subtle heads-up, I sent her for Mother’s Day a copy of book Lo & I found while browsing in Bo.rders, All you need is love: fifteen journeys to motherhood. The book profiles all different kinds of mothers, from adoptive mothers, blind mothers, hippie mothers and er, um, lesbian mothers – of the most non-threatening, garden variety type. I sent it along with a warm-hearted Mother’s Day card and crossed my fingers. Mum called to say she had received it, and thought it was a lovely book.
So that’s a start. When I came out, some ten years ago, (actually, it was a few years later that Mum found out -are you noticing a pattern?), I remember her lamenting that I would never have children, and that I would have made such a good mother. I protested then that I could still be a mother, but I don’t think that got heard among the pain and the tears, and the fact that she was already lamenting that I was going through what she referred to as my Hungarian Refugee phase: dreadlocks, vegan, living in an inner-city hovel and having swapped my sensible degree for a Creative Writing major.
I am just hoping that these years on, seeing Lo and I so happy (and so bloody hetero with our house in the burbs, our wedding, our good and very sensible day jobs and my very femme hair) they will find a place in their heart to make sense of our unconventional conception. . . I think we will need to schedule a telling mission in the next few months. I know that most parents come round, and I think that once parents get older, they do get a lot more low-key about things. They’ve got so much more perspective, and they’ve learnt that things generally do work out. Because they generally do.
My womb is a greenhouse
While I like to imagine myself as a fertility goddess, my womb a greenhouse, ready to conceive at any moment (I was inspired by a chapter in a fertility book I saw entitled “making your womb a greenhouse”), I also know how many people start out thinking this way before discovering the hard and emotionally exhausting world of endless cycles and 2WWs.
Ideally, I’d like to limit the time spent legs in stirrups, paper-gowned. I’ve decided that we’ll be having a home birth after all this is over. I’ve already seen enough medical intervention in this pregnancy and it hasn’t even started.
Being an A-type personality, I have been dutifully noting down and applying all the fertility boosting tips that are proffered by the numerous lesbian parenting books that line our bookshelf. The New Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy and Birth is the Bible of hard-core life changes. I’ve done my best to take them on:
- I have quit coffee since Jan 08
- I have practically stopped drinking alcohol, with perhaps a glass of wine a month, if that (except for the kd lang concert at the Tempus Two winery – it would have been unlesbian not to have partaken in the Hunter Regions’ delights )
- I exercise regularly, and have added more yoga and swimming to the mix
- I have lost around 3kgs since March, and sit about 2kgs over the ideal weight range, so I am working on getting that down
- I have been taking a pregancy and conception vitamin for about three months
- I have been trying to drink the Maia fertility boosting tea, by the gallon as directed
- We juice religiously and start the day with a tonic of one amazingly healthy fruit and vegetable combination or another (we’ve been doing this for years)
- I have monthly massages and will try and start acupuncture closer to the TTC time
- I have been charting periods, moods, and ovulation indicators, but just can’t master the temperature taking. I find it tedious and never could quite get the hang of it.
Will it be the lack of temperature taking that will be my downfall? Will it be that last glass of fertility tea that I just couldn’t fancy? Oh, for the beauty of hindsight… The one thing I am not doing is actually inseminating! But we expect to start soon, and I wondering where to start and what might we wish we had done differently? I put this question up on a same sex parents’ forum regarding insemination methods. We just don’t know whether to start with IUI (15% chance with drugs) or do we go straight to IVF (45% chance)? Do we have the drugs, trigger shots, or do we attempt without to begin with? Is my womb a fertile greenhouse or will this be an uphill battle?
Most responses were in favour of starting with IUI and no drugs. But in their experience, they all seemed to progress to IVF before having any success. One person said honestly that had they their time again, they would have skipped IUI and gone straight to IVF. I was interested that there were many advocates of IUI, but no success stories of using it were provided.
Lo and I have been going around in circles on this one and we need to make up our minds before our next appointment with the ob/gyn on 27 May. We are really struggling to balance risk, chance and time. . . I will keep you posted, but would welcome any thoughts or advice on what has worked for you.
Six month snapshot
Since my last post, a lot has happened. I’ve moved the blog over to this new page, which I prefer. I have missed covering some big steps in our TTC process; but I guess we’ve been so busy doing them I haven’t had a chance to write about it! That’s going to change from now. Blogging for LGBT families day is coming up, and I want to be part of the fun. Also, now that Lesbiandad has gone on a prose diet, I have the time I would have spent reading blogs, to start writing mine. Here’s the past six months of our TTC journey in snapshot:
- Nov 07: Faced with a three month wait to get an appointment with the lovely Dr Heavenly, I called around and got an appointment for early December with another ob/gyn who was leaving town shortly, and therefore had appointments available. The deal was that we would see her for our first consultation and then our case would be taken over by her replacement. The catch: this clinic only works with known donors…
- We had been open to the idea of a known donor (in fact, Lo was very much in favour of this option), but had not been able to come up with a suitable candidate. We had a shortlist of possibles, but none were perfect. Except for this lovely gay male couple friend of ours who we had thought were ideal, but we knew they were going to be away when we were planning to start. In fact, they were going overseas in mid December for six weeks, and then would be back in town for only three weeks before taking off for a three year work assignment overseas. We had always thought that this timing would have made it impossible for them to be involved.
- We were at a party, and it was one of those parties where all of a sudden you realise that everyone is having babies or is pregnant. One member of our couple friend (X) was also there. He starts talking about our plans to TTC (which he knew about) and how he loves babies, and how he would like to have children one day, but was not sure what that would look like.
- · I went home and spoke to Lo about it. We decided that we would take the plunge and ask X if there were any synergies between their plans or thoughts and ours. We thought that if we kept open and non specific about our intentions, they could be candid about what they wanted and we could see if there was the potential to work together on this. If they were set on having a co-parenting arrangement three nights a week, we would know that wasn’t for us. But at least we wouldn’t have missed an opportunity to consider creative solutions that may work best for us both.
- I met X for lunch and asked him. He was thrilled, surprised, and taken aback. He responded very positively, but took it on notice to speak to his partner. He said that practically, they would probably be more interested in making a donation, than anything more involved. Great from our perspective. He suggested what was our ideal model. We arranged to have dinner that Friday.
- They came over and I cooked duck with blood orange and star anise and Chinese pancakes. Before they arrived, I swept the front path, cleaned the house meticulously and felt like a heterosexual woman for the first time in my life. They were both excited. They both wanted to donate and wanted us to choose which one of them we wanted (he’s cuter, they said, yeah but he’s buffer). Ideally, they were interested in being a birthdays and school concerts , and general good male role model figure, with our permission. They were so perfect in all the ways they responded. So honouring, so decent, and are generally such good wholesome men, delightful.
- We agreed that they would think it over while they travelled overseas for 6 weeks, meanwhile we would line up all the appointments for both of them to undertake in the 3 weeks they were back in town before heading overseas. They could opt out at any time.
- Dec 08: We had our appointment with the ob/gyn. She was nice. Surprised by our two donor model, but decent and pleasant. She arranged all the forms for them to complete the tests, screening, donations.
- To complicate matters, I find out that we will be going overseas for three years with a work assignment, starting Jan 09. Workwise, it’s a great opportunity, and we’ll be going to a good, liberal, western country which is GLBT friendly. But it complicates the TTC plans a bit. Ideally, we’ll need to conclude TTCing and fall pregnant before we go – by Dec 08. Also, I’ll only be able to take 12 weeks off work when the baby arrives. We decide that I will still carry the baby, and Lo will take some leave without pay from her job to stay home with the baby after I go back to work. I think I am going to find this hard, but I think it will be really good for ensuring that we both share a bond with the baby.
- Jan 08: We had a busy January, with X&Y making the deposits, doing blood screening, us having the obligatory counselling sessions with what must have been our city’s worst psychologist, and a few clinic mishaps including the clinic running out of dry ice the day before they were due to deposit (?) and then they left.
- · The sperm must stay in quarantine for six months, so it will be ready for use in July, after they complete a final blood test which we have arranged for them to do while away.
- · April 08: We met the replacement ob/gyn. She’s young, funky, and a bit off-hand. I preferred the motherly nature of her predecessor. The sperm is plentiful, and of good quality. We now just have to decide how we want to inseminate, when to start, and which of our two donors to start with…
No wonder I haven’t had time to blog!
