The Year of Waiting
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 Lo 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 Lo has been pretty excited. We’re headed to a great city and I think Lo 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 Lo to conceive our second child overseas, and costly flights home for inseminations will be very difficult to manage. I worry about how Lo 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. Lo 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 Lo 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 Lo 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.
Buffy, the sperm nurse
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. (Lo 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, Lo & 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. Lo 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 Lo 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. Lo 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.
It’s been one of those weeks..
…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…
Lo & 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, Lo & 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. Lo 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.
