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.
