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.
