Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Friends category.
Romancing the sperm
You may have read my earlier post here about the way that courting our donors brought out this inner-hetero in me that wanted to clean and cook and make sure everything was perfect for ‘our guys.’ Well lately, I’ve had this strange desire to make sure that I’ll be at my absolute best for the insemination. It’s like I think the little sperm will be able to look out and decide whether or not it wants to make a home in me based on the silky smoothness of my legs or the colour of my toenails. So I spent far too much of my Saturday at the beauty salon getting my legs waxed and today I just had my hair cut for the first time since January (it’s long, and I normally get away with cutting it myself). I feel like I’m getting ready to go to a ball…It is nice to feel prepared and to have something else to be working on to pass the time. I guess I am also conscious of wanting to look my best in front of Dr Y&F.
And I was about to write about how today is the first day where I’ve felt totally normal and have not been conscious of the fertility drugs. However, I just went in to the bathroom to shown Lo (who’s in the bath tub) a card I bought for good hetero friends of ours who have just gotten engaged. The woman is a true romantic and the proposal is a dream come true for her. When it was our wedding last year she bought us one of those huge, elaborate, embossed golden wedding cards with lots of sappy wording. We knew she was projecting all her nuptial desires onto us! Although the card was a little more elaborate than our own tastes, we really appreciated that she took our wedding so seriously (rather than the euphemistic congratulations cards we received. ) So, this afternoon, after the hairdresser, I took it upon myself to go and buy a similarly elaborate engagement card for us to give to them. I was pretty proud of myself as I found the ultimately cheesy prince-charming style card that I knew she was going to just love. So there I was showing Lo the card while she soaked in the tub, and in what only could be a moment of hormonally induced clumsiness, I somehow dropped the card on the floor, picked it up, spun around, and dropped it into the toilet! Arg! I have no idea how that happened. So, back to the newsagent tomorrow to try and track down another and I’m pretty sure this was the last one. Although there’s plenty of other designs to rival this one. This episode may just be me, and nothing to do with the drugs, but I would prefer to blame something!
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
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.
