Tight timing
It all seems to be about time at the moment. Our sperm comes out of quarantine on the 25 July. The final requirement is another HIV, Hep C etc test for our donors before the clinic will allow us to inseminate. As I expect our insemination will probably be around the 17 August, I thought we had a decent window to get the tests done. But: the clinic wants the test results before we can even ‘book-on’ for our cycle that month – i.e. around 1 August. Which makes timing incredibly tight.
Our donors have been wonderful throughout the process and have been pretty complicit with all the administration required. But we have project-managed the process pretty carefully the whole way along: booking appointments, writing instructions, calling ahead to the clinic to ensure the bill is fixed up. We wanted to make sure there was as little impact on them as possible. When they undertook all the screening and depositing in January I wrote them up a little chart with each appointment, what to expect, where to go etc. Like most men, they loved being taken care of like this. But now they are overseas, we have a lot less control over arrangements, and hell, I have no idea where they should go for a blood test. They had said they would take care of it, and I have no doubt they will, but they had also expressed some doubt about the pathology services where they are and how quickly the could get results. Now that we have such a short timeframe (i.e. the 1 August one) my nerves have set in about we can get a blood test taken and pathology results in a developing country and faxed back to Australia in a 5-6 day timeframe.
(insert interlude) …. rather than writing about my problems, I decided to take matters into my own hands and, thanks to some good internet research, I have just called up the 24 hour private hospital there and got put through to one of the laboratory technicians, a delightful man called Jessie. I am sure getting a call from some random Australian was the highlight of his night shift. The good news is: they can do all the tests we need and have results ready in 24 hours! And it won’t cost a gazillion dollars. I am so glad. And the fact that it’s 24 hours means that our donors can go in on the Friday evening to get the tests done. Meaning, we should be able to go ahead for August! And I can relax. Almost. Just waiting on the final tranche of consent forms to come back from them. And sorting out our future.
So, Inshallah, we have one month until lift-off.
The Year of Waiting
This has been a year of waiting… and I am so over waiting. I work in a job that has a lot of focus on spending time working overseas. In December last year, we found out that we would be going overseas for three years with my work in January 2009 (yep, they believe in long lead-times). In November last year we found our known donors, and by January we had their sperm deposited at the clinic. We’ve had to wait out a six month quarantine before we are legally able to use it (only one month to go!). And we face a five month window in which we can ttc – complete with all the waiting that will involve.
So, we’ve spent this year in a strange holding pattern, on the cusp of being somewhere, but not yet there. Slowly disengaging from our life here. But it’s all so complicated.
If I have the baby while working overseas, I can take my 12 weeks maternity leave, but cannot take more than that otherwise we get sent back home and my position overseas gets cancelled. It’s also commonly held that it’s a ‘bad look’ to get pregnant while overseas. (Given that it’s a pretty conservative workplace, I can only imagine how much more of a ‘bad look’ a pregnant lesbian is.) But we’re pretty well informed of our rights, and I am of the view that maternity leave is the cost of doing business with women (in some parts of this country anyway) so have been working on the assumption that we would aim to get pregnant before we go and then I would take the 12 weeks while we are away and then Lo would stay home with the baby thereafter. There’s no other way we could have done it. We couldn’t get pregnant earlier, we can’t get pregnant while over there (at least not easily), and there’s no way I am letting four more years tick past on my biological clock before getting started.
The opportunities overseas are good work-wise and excellent money-wise. Personally, I have been ambivalent about going, as I like our life here and I do not love my job, but Lo has been pretty excited. We’re headed to a great city and I think Lo is looking forward to a bit of a break and the opportunities that being a SAHM open up. But I’ve been worried a lot about this model: three years is a long time, our first child will be 2 and a half before I would be able to consider spending time at home with the children, I can imagine regretting this. It will be difficult for Lo to conceive our second child overseas, and costly flights home for inseminations will be very difficult to manage. I worry about how Lo will go at home with the baby non-stop and how her career would be affected. She might get bored pretty quickly – particularly in a new city without the support networks. I imagine that I could work through the early stages of our child’s life if I had a job I loved, but the reality is, while my job is a good job, it is not one I love. I worry about the stress of managing it all with my employer – because even though I know my rights are pretty water-tight, the emotional politics of it could get messy. I worry about being expected to work long hours, and travel away from home, and finding that really tough. I worry about breastfeeding and bonding and how I will feel being in the breadwinner role, without an escape hatch. How I will go working all day after sleepless nights. So there’s a lot to worry about.
And while everyone knows we’re going away, there are very few people in our real lives who know that we’re planning to add a baby into that mix. And the baby is not negotiable. Lo and I both know that now is the time for us to start this journey and nothing should postpone it.
So this week I saw a job advertised that is pretty close to being my ‘dream job’ and is definitely on the career trajectory I have been working towards. It’s the kind of job I would have thought about applying after we returned from overseas. It’s in our town and with an employer who has a reputation for fostering work-life balance and supporting women, and includes options for work from home, part-time work etc. The work excites me, but the prospect of a more flexible future in which we could grow our family excites me more.
I told Lo about it in a careful way, sounding her out about a possible future for us that involved staying here, and she was wonderfully supportive. She said that I should definitely go after the job. She was so good about being able to let go of the certainty we had created about going overseas. Which is tough, particularly as she’s been having a really rough year in her work and was looking forward to escaping. But escaping is not always the best exit. We went out to a cafe and mapped out pros and cons of staying or going, and drew up life-maps about where our lives and our careers could be in three years. I am sold on staying put, and I think Lo is comfortable with either approach. We are both aware that we don’t yet have a decision to make as I have to be offered the job first – and there is a lot hinged on this one job. Personally, I see applying for this job as a first step towards loosening the expectations we have for next year. In three months, hopefully we’ll have a better indication of where our pregnancy attempts are up to and will be able to take a more informed decision about what we’re planning to do. We can have a few options on the table.
If we stay here, we can look at models where we both take a few months off when the baby is born, and then both work part-time or more flexibility. We both got quite excited about the idea of staying in our house. Which room would become the nursery, the changes we would make if we were to stay here for a few years (installing a dishwasher is top of the list). It would be difficult to extract ourselves from our plans and will require some careful management regarding telling both of our works. But no one is ever as bound up in these things as you are yourself, and they will deal with it.
So this past week has shunted us out from the comfort of at least knowing where we were going to be next year, back into the world of multiple uncertainties. I think you can tell where my heart is… so fingers crossed for this job or something like it and for our ttc journey.
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.
Six month snapshot
Since my last post, a lot has happened. I’ve moved the blog over to this new page, which I prefer. I have missed covering some big steps in our TTC process; but I guess we’ve been so busy doing them I haven’t had a chance to write about it! That’s going to change from now. Blogging for LGBT families day is coming up, and I want to be part of the fun. Also, now that Lesbiandad has gone on a prose diet, I have the time I would have spent reading blogs, to start writing mine. Here’s the past six months of our TTC journey in snapshot:
- Nov 07: Faced with a three month wait to get an appointment with the lovely Dr Heavenly, I called around and got an appointment for early December with another ob/gyn who was leaving town shortly, and therefore had appointments available. The deal was that we would see her for our first consultation and then our case would be taken over by her replacement. The catch: this clinic only works with known donors…
- We had been open to the idea of a known donor (in fact, Lo was very much in favour of this option), but had not been able to come up with a suitable candidate. We had a shortlist of possibles, but none were perfect. Except for this lovely gay male couple friend of ours who we had thought were ideal, but we knew they were going to be away when we were planning to start. In fact, they were going overseas in mid December for six weeks, and then would be back in town for only three weeks before taking off for a three year work assignment overseas. We had always thought that this timing would have made it impossible for them to be involved.
- We were at a party, and it was one of those parties where all of a sudden you realise that everyone is having babies or is pregnant. One member of our couple friend (X) was also there. He starts talking about our plans to TTC (which he knew about) and how he loves babies, and how he would like to have children one day, but was not sure what that would look like.
- · I went home and spoke to Lo about it. We decided that we would take the plunge and ask X if there were any synergies between their plans or thoughts and ours. We thought that if we kept open and non specific about our intentions, they could be candid about what they wanted and we could see if there was the potential to work together on this. If they were set on having a co-parenting arrangement three nights a week, we would know that wasn’t for us. But at least we wouldn’t have missed an opportunity to consider creative solutions that may work best for us both.
- I met X for lunch and asked him. He was thrilled, surprised, and taken aback. He responded very positively, but took it on notice to speak to his partner. He said that practically, they would probably be more interested in making a donation, than anything more involved. Great from our perspective. He suggested what was our ideal model. We arranged to have dinner that Friday.
- They came over and I cooked duck with blood orange and star anise and Chinese pancakes. Before they arrived, I swept the front path, cleaned the house meticulously and felt like a heterosexual woman for the first time in my life. They were both excited. They both wanted to donate and wanted us to choose which one of them we wanted (he’s cuter, they said, yeah but he’s buffer). Ideally, they were interested in being a birthdays and school concerts , and general good male role model figure, with our permission. They were so perfect in all the ways they responded. So honouring, so decent, and are generally such good wholesome men, delightful.
- We agreed that they would think it over while they travelled overseas for 6 weeks, meanwhile we would line up all the appointments for both of them to undertake in the 3 weeks they were back in town before heading overseas. They could opt out at any time.
- Dec 08: We had our appointment with the ob/gyn. She was nice. Surprised by our two donor model, but decent and pleasant. She arranged all the forms for them to complete the tests, screening, donations.
- To complicate matters, I find out that we will be going overseas for three years with a work assignment, starting Jan 09. Workwise, it’s a great opportunity, and we’ll be going to a good, liberal, western country which is GLBT friendly. But it complicates the TTC plans a bit. Ideally, we’ll need to conclude TTCing and fall pregnant before we go – by Dec 08. Also, I’ll only be able to take 12 weeks off work when the baby arrives. We decide that I will still carry the baby, and Lo will take some leave without pay from her job to stay home with the baby after I go back to work. I think I am going to find this hard, but I think it will be really good for ensuring that we both share a bond with the baby.
- Jan 08: We had a busy January, with X&Y making the deposits, doing blood screening, us having the obligatory counselling sessions with what must have been our city’s worst psychologist, and a few clinic mishaps including the clinic running out of dry ice the day before they were due to deposit (?) and then they left.
- · The sperm must stay in quarantine for six months, so it will be ready for use in July, after they complete a final blood test which we have arranged for them to do while away.
- · April 08: We met the replacement ob/gyn. She’s young, funky, and a bit off-hand. I preferred the motherly nature of her predecessor. The sperm is plentiful, and of good quality. We now just have to decide how we want to inseminate, when to start, and which of our two donors to start with…
No wonder I haven’t had time to blog!
Conception
Last night Lo and I started our family. In theory, perhaps, if not yet in egg-meets-sperm reality. We crept in late, through the side door, to our local fertility centre’s information night, a compulsory experience before you can make an appointment with a specialist.
As we entered, we exchanged cheeky smiles with the only other lesbians in the room, our friends S&L, and took our seat next to one of the many garden variety heterosexual couples (except I quickly realised that there was nothing garden variety about these people, given their reason for being here). A man with sweeping, grey hair was speaking about the clinic’s work to a set of powerpoint slides.
At first, I instinctively felt cynical and wary of this man and his patriarchal, heterosexual medical model approach to fertility – warning men not to wank before donating sperm and women to remain lying down after insemination – but then another doctor, a leggy blonde with a warm smile and classic chignon, with a name not dissimilar to Dr Heavenly, went on to introduce the next slides and, in doing so, apologised for the penis and vagina nature of some of the material outlining the centre’s commitment to working with same sex couples. From my seat, I beamed one of those ‘thank you’ smiles that we members of marginalised groups use to great effect, I guess when we’d rather be leaping to our feet in applause for someone who has acknowledged our existence but know we’d better not.
As the seminar progressed, I started to see Dr Heavenly and Dr Big Gray Hair and their contemporaries as the heros they were. If it were not for the brave, pioneering and radical work that they had done in the early days of fertility treatments, in the face of severe criticism and judgement, Lo & I would not have the options for starting a family that we do. When we left the centre, we felt validated and awash with the options before us. We floated on the emancipatory promise of science – the everyday miracle that fertility treatment offers us homo folk. There is something entirely pro-feminist and radical about the options available to us for designing our family. We know that men will have to be in there somewhere, either inserting the speculum or jacking off for our benefit in a privacy room but we also know that we hold such choice and options before us.
For us, by virtue of where we live, we will be able to have a child who has both parents’ names on its birth certificate. We will be able to retain our five star lesbian status without having ever to have to experience the feeling of warm sperm running down the insides of our leg. By starting our family, Lo and I are doing what we believe in, knowing that the road ahead will not be an easy one. Knowing that we will have to justify our decision to form our family intentionally, to a design that continues to be scrutinised. But knowing that we are doing a right and brave thing that has been done in so many different ways by the global community of GLBT families. And I am so excited about being part of that.
