The late night phone call

I am sorry I’ve been in hiding lately.  The pregnancy is quite overwhelming and when I think about blogging, I really don’t know where to start..   It’s been a bit tough.  The pregnancy is going fine, we have the 20 week scan on 1 May and  I am really looking forward to that.  We’re not planning to find out the sex, although I feel that it’s pretty likely to be a boy.   A has been wonderful at supporting me and our baby.  She’s been talking to the baby every night since we found out and lately that’s developed into a lovely session reading poems and chatting about the day with our little one.   She’s away this week, so I’ve been holding the phone to my belly so they can have their nightly chat.  I am supremely confident that our relationship is going to thrive from parenthood.  My body is changing rapidly and I don’t like it as much as I thought I would.  I kind of thought that I would get a glossy, round bauble of a belly, but instead, thanks to the fact that there was a bit of a belly to begin with, it is more like a pillow stuffed up a Santa suit and I feel frumpy and fat, rather than glowing and pregnant.  When I look down past my boobs I see my belly protruding.   I find being a same sex parent-to-be exhausting.  The family stuff continues to be hard.  We have just had a two week visit by my parents, followed by a one week visit by A’s parents.  My mother has come on board a lot, but it’s very much in this ‘my daughter is having a baby’, mother-daughter bonding sense.  I know a lot of the lesbo conception/parenting books talk about this.  How it’s wierd that suddenly your mother (who before could not relate at all to your ‘lifestyle’) now has a womanly inroad with you, no matter how it came about.  She’s made her concerns known about what we’re doing, and I think by doing that we’re able to move on.  It’s not an easy dynamic, but the relationship is strong enough to hold it, I think.  My father remains disengaged.  That’s ok.  My parents have a long-standing overseas holiday planned around the time the baby is due, so my mother will come a few weeks after the baby and stay for two weeks once A has gone back to work.  I think this is ok, as I think we will thrive from having time just A and I and the baby to settle in and find our style without any opportunity for others, albeit wellmeaningly or not, saying things that hurt or undermine or just don’t get our family structure.   Hopefully my mother and I can grow together around this. I think that’s already happening.  There is general ambivalence in my broader family (i.e. siblings) and in fact, one of my brothers didn’t even reply to my email telling the news.  Didn’t even reply (it says something about the relationship already though that I choose to tell him by email.  I just didn’t have the reserves for anymore phonecalls). Perhaps I was being blind and I actually didn’t worry to much at first and just put it down to him being generally crap.   But no,  when I asked my parents whether he had got the email, they said he had, but he hadn’t known what to say and so had said nothing.  They then cited his feeling about our ’situation’ as a possible barrier to this big family reunion that’s scheduled for next year.  That he would be too uncomfortable and rather than the entire family going away for a weekend perhaps we should just go out for a meal.  He has never told me he has a problem with my sexuality (not forgetting my older sister is also gay) and he doens’t even have the guts to tell me himself.  So I hear this whole backstory about what he thought about our wedding (he had to bring his children (9 and 12) as they couldn’t get a babysitter and he told them we were having  a party to celebrate buying a house and then my niece read the word ‘wedding’ on one of the menus at the reception and he was so embarrassed – I am sorry, I am not going to be complicit in maintaining a cover story for your comfort on my fucking wedding day).  He and his wife are quasi-catholics, but he’ll take that mantle on when it suits him.  I think he just doesn’t love me enough to get uncomfortable… Sure, it’s uncomfortable explaining to your kids that gay people exist, that they get married and that they can have kids, if you’re a buttoned up garden variety hetero.   By comparison,  I am saying my mother’s been supportive, but she suggested I give the baby the ‘father’s’ surname ( A and I have unfortunately rhyming surnames that makes hyphenating cruel and impossible, so we’re going to use A’s surname for the baby) and when I was talking to her about the problems with A’s family’s over-enthusiasm (see below) she was like “I find that extraordinary, given it’s yours and someone else’s baby, and it’s not even related to them.”  At the time I responded with all the right things, but thinking about this in my yoga class tonight brought tears to my eyes, and I was tempted to jump on the phone and tell her how hurt i was and regive the same sex parenting 101 lecture I gave last time.  But I decided against it, even though I am sure you’re recoiling in horror at this, for my family, she’s come 70 per cent of the way and I think it just needs time and for her to see in person how we are going to live as a family. And aside for my not-very-into-kids lesbo sister, she’s the closest ally I have in my family.  I am using every opportunity when I talk to her to reinforce A’s role in our family (she knows we plan for A to have the next child so heaven help us if they see themselves as ‘not even related’ to the baby), but I think we just need to keep modelling our family (it’s so foreign to them, they don’t know what it’s going to look like), being ourselves, and gently correcting asumptions.  And, apart from parents, who get special dispensation, blocking out people like my crap brother, who do not love us enough to be part of our family. … Anyway, I am nearing 2000 words and that I am sure is a mortal blogging sin (just like not blogging for months on end). So I’d better sign off.   If you’d made it this far, I thank you.  This blog is like one of those late night phone calls to a friend in tears needing to debrief.  This proves the point that I should blog more so that I can relay these dramas in episodes.  But, Fuck, it’s just too much.  It’s emotionally very exhausting..

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