God willing

I am getting this one in early tonight.  I hate the way that under the NaBLoPoMo regime blogging has become a bit like teeth-brushing, a habit to drag yourself bleary-eyed to before tumbling into bed.  So, I am putting first things first and lodging this post while Lola is in the kitchen frying red snapper and baking potatoes.

Lola and I need to prepare wills.  There’s an external reason why we need to have wills in place in the next month or so. And I guess we’ve finally crossed the threshold from young people who have nothing that matters to slightly-older people who do have somethings that matter.  So this got us talking about what to do about our as yet unborn children.  Because we’ll have the will in place and then I could get pregnant and we both could die and our unborn child could survive and what would happen then?? Enough to put even the most level-headed girls in a panic.

So we got on to that troubling topic of who we would entrust with guardianship of our children if we both died.  It’s so tough.  Do we go with family or friends?  What role do our donors have in this process?  If they were to have a role, what does that tell them about how we perceive their legal relationship to the children and, in a worse case scenario, how could that affect things in the future assuming we don’t die?  Will our siblings feel a connection to a child that is not biologically related to whichever of us is their sibling? Our families definitely won’t provide them with connection to their queer heritage and community.  Our friends may not provide sufficient contact with our families.  Also, friendships can change and even the best of friends can be a bit unhinged at times. All the relevant people are so scattered, that our child might not even know them very well.

We’ve come up with a solution to put in this iteration of the will that feels comfortable to us.  And we were relieved when we realised that we could change it at any time.  And, that at this stage, this stuff is so speculative, that we don’t need to have it all sorted before we’re even pregnant.  Thank goodness we live in a place where the non-bio parent is automatically recognised, so we don’t need to cross that hurdle.  God willing we will never need these plans, but it makes you realise how kids really raise the stakes, and this is before we even have one.

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