Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood

by Eric Rosswood

  My very first reaction was, “Oh, shit, what have I done?” I called Cathy on her cell phone immediately. “I’m pregnant,” I told her. “I thought I wasn’t, but it was there. In the trash. The plus sign. On the stick. I didn’t see it at first. It was there, the pink plus sign. I’m freaking pregnant!”

  Cathy, ever the picture of calmness, replied, “Oh my God. I’m driving right now, but I need to pull over. Oh my God, I’m gonna pull over.”

  Frankly, we were both in shock. I’m not sure how much either of us believed this could work, despite assurances to the contrary. A friend’s brother, a cardiologist, was convinced that getting pregnant this way was not possible and to this day he’s absolutely certain we did it the old fashioned way. But he was wrong—it worked! After the shock wore off, Cathy and I were excited.

  As a forty-one-year-old, newly-pregnant woman, the specter of miscarriage darkened my thoughts from the very beginning. I’m not usually superstitious, but I didn’t even sneak peeks at baby clothes for the first six months of my pregnancy.

  Unbeknownst to us, a distant family member got very early word of our news and immediately sent infant booties in the mail. Not suspecting a thing, I opened the package and got spooked by those insidious frilly things, my kryptonite. I dashed to the other side of the room and hollered at Cathy, “Oh, holy crap, close that box!” We ditched the box in the deepest recesses of the hall closet where its evil juju was less potent.

  Little did we suspect, but my baby bump precipitated an avalanche of gifts and a huge outpouring of love, support and well-wishing. A baby on the way was a great equalizer. Queer or not, people get behind a pregnant couple.

  We were grateful for the support, too, because we needed it. A friend threw us a beautiful baby shower and suggested we do a registry. We visited a local store, walked inside and froze in place over the vast and bewildering consumer circus in front of us. There were miles and miles of baby stuff. Lactation accoutrements alone occupied what seemed like a full city block. How on earth could you know what you’d need?

  We probably needed a stroller, but what kind? What was better, a swinging chair or a vibrating chair? Or should we ditch them both for a jumper? Was there a trick to picking out the exact right crib, mattress or changing table? Did we need a nursing pillow, a baby intercom or special laundry soap? And for the love of God, someone please tell us if there is any damn difference between leading diaper brands!

  Fortunately, our family and friends helped us navigate this new universe. Their support carried us through. Not everyone was initially supportive, though. Early on in the process, I checked in with my doctor, looking for feedback on my age and any general getting-pregnant-after-forty advice. As I described our plan to her, I started to realize she was mentally checking out on me. To this day, I hold an indelible image of her standing in front of me in her white doc-smock, arms folded across her chest, a little gold cross pendent glinting under the fluorescent light and shaking her head, saying, “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  She was wrong, too. It did work. I was absolutely, positively pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy, because I had morning, noon and night sickness every day, the entire time. I had the classic sensitivity to smells, perfumes especially. I could detect a scented candle from ten or twelve feet away. My only odd craving was for olive oil. Even though my taste buds were completely screwed up for the whole pregnancy, I wanted crusty French bread just so I could soak it in olive oil.

  Cathy and I are not heavy drinkers, but we are routine drinkers, so being dry for nine months was rough! I probably would have sneaked a glass of wine here or there during the pregnancy, but Cathy had read too much on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and made me promise not to.

  On August 10, 2006, our daughter, Claire, came into the world. She was 6 pounds, 11 ounces and had a mass of black hair. Cathy and Dave were both in the room. There were a few complications toward the end, but everything turned out fine. I was so excited to see the face of this little baby who had been moving around inside of me all that time.

  I’ve heard people say they felt an immediate love for their newborns. I felt something more akin to animalistic mama-bear protectiveness. I recall arriving back home after my two-day hospital stay and seeing our brand new next-door neighbors standing in the front yard when we pulled up. We hadn’t met them yet and I had this weird instinct not to let them see we had this new baby. I’m not sure I can say why I felt that way. In retrospect, it was irrationally protective, but animal instincts aren’t always rational.

  Little Claire was so soft, tiny and warm. Holding her and nursing her brought a feeling that words don’t quite capture. Like that surge of emotion you feel when hearing beautiful music, you feel it in your body: a oneness, a warm sensation. It feels primal.

  There is also the lack-of-sleep part. That part is less fun. Sometimes I felt so sleep-deprived that I seriously worried about my ability to care for my baby, but it worked out fine.

  People sometimes ask if I had postpartum depression. After feeling seasick for nine months straight, I had postpartum elation! It was great to feel good again. I vividly recall my first meal right after giving birth—it was an iceberg lettuce salad with a squeeze packet of ranch dressing, a soft, white roll and (gag) margarine. Any other day of my life I’d have turned my nose up at that meal, but at that moment, it was glorious manna from above. I could taste food again!

  In the delivery room as Claire came out, I called for a gin and tonic. I actually got a beer instead. That was glorious, too.

  When it came down to filling out the birth certificate, we originally wanted Dave listed as the father for genealogical purposes; however, we were told that when Cathy legally adopted Claire down the road, a new birth certificate was going to be issued with Cathy’s name taking Dave’s place, so we didn’t add him. To our surprise, we were able to have both Cathy’s name and mine on the original certificate with no issues whatsoever.

  Our little girl is now seven years old and a real force of nature. Every week, every month is a new installment of watching her development. First it was walking, then talking. She said her first word at sixteen months during Christmastime. We had just decorated the tree with lights. Cathy turned it on and the whole tree lit up in twinkling colors and Claire let out a long, drawn-out “Wow!” We cracked up.

  Those first couple of years as we bathed her or changed her diapers, it struck me again and again how overwhelmingly vulnerable little human children are. They rely on us completely. It made me want to enact legislation requiring all people to take psychological profile exams before they could procreate. Sometimes I feel gay parents really are best because such an effort precedes parenthood.

  Cathy and I live happily with our daughter here in San Diego and have never regretted our decision to have a kid. We live on a block with several other children her age and they all hang out a lot. We love our little girl and are grateful to Dave. His whole family adores Claire and his mother faithfully remembers her every birthday and Christmas.

  Early on, we talked about Dave’s dating life and whether it was going to be weird for him to tell a potential mate that he’d helped someone get pregnant. I loved his answer: “The most important thing in a relationship is understanding. If a potential mate can’t fathom why I wanted to do this, then they’re not the right person for me.” He eventually found the right person and they are now married. Claire has been treated with nothing but love and kindness from the two of them and she adores them both.

  We are an extended, untraditional family. Our families have all come together with great adoration for Claire. She is a true delight and Cathy and I are both so glad that we didn’t miss out on being parents.

  Sarah Ann Gilbert

  DENVER, COLORADO

  Wanting a second child as gay parents was a bit like playing the lottery a second time and assuming we had a better chance of winning. It was easy to believe that the odds of us having another baby were one in four: We had four frozen embr
yos and we wanted one child.

  But statistics don’t care what you believe.

  My initial round of fertility treatments resulted in seven fertilized eggs. But then we lost one of them. After that, we lost a fetus at around eight weeks. The fetus “failed to develop,” as the doctor told us on a cold November day, as though she were describing a change in the weather. “Most women don’t even know that they’re pregnant when it happens,” she said.

  And then our daughter, Wynn, was born healthy and alive.

  This happened all at once, because that is the other rule of the game. You tend to get nothing or everything—triplets, for example. When you are going through in vitro fertilization, you must use your embryos two or three at a time. It increases your odds of having a baby.

  We had used up three zygotes and I had given birth to one baby in just one round of treatment. And even though we really wanted to have just one more baby, we might end up with three. But three seemed so much better than none.

  We bought our tickets.

  “Is there anything we need to do before using the frozen eggs we have in storage?” I asked the nurse.

  “No,” she said. “You’ll just need to have them transferred to our lab where they’ll be thawed. And then an embryologist will determine how many of the embryos are viable.”

  “Really?” I was astonished by the simplicity of it all. “I don’t need to take any drugs?” It occurred to me that I might sound like an addict at that moment. But these weren’t the kind of drugs you do for fun unless experiencing the combined symptoms of PMS, menopause and pregnancy is your idea of a good time.

  “No drugs,” said the nurse, who was dressed casually in a golf shirt and jeans. I didn’t believe her. Maybe she wasn’t actually a nurse. Or maybe she was just forgetting something. Surely there would be painkillers, at least.

  “I’m still breastfeeding. Does that matter?” I asked.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “You might want to stop, but it shouldn’t matter.”

  I was a bit disappointed by her answer. I was looking for a reason to stop. Breastfeeding wasn’t that fun. Production was down and there had been enough industrial spills with the breast pump in my office that the place might start to stink. Besides, our daughter had started eating solid food now, so she didn’t need breast milk anymore, did she?

  “How old is she?” asked the nurse, looking down at Wynn, who was on the floor in her car seat.

  “Eight months.”

  “Wow, she’s a big girl.”

  So am I, I thought. We were both in the ninety-fifth percentile for height. And while I held myself accountable for a lot of her height, I blamed our sperm donor for all the future conversations about women’s basketball that she will have to endure. It wasn’t my fault that finding a short sperm donor was harder than finding an ugly supermodel.

  “This guy looks good,” my spouse said while clicking through the thousands of donors available in the online database for a popular cryobank. “Oh never mind. He’s six-foot-three,” she added, returning to the search page.

  “You should screen for people who are short,” I often told her. “Try looking for people who are five-foot-nine.”

  “There aren’t any,” she replied.

  I didn’t have the patience to go through donor profiles one by one, so I came up with ways to narrow down the search. This is how we decided that we wanted a short donor with green eyes. I have green eyes, so that increased the chances of our baby looking like me. And green eyes are rare, so that would narrow the search. Eventually, we found our donor. He was five-foot-nine with green eyes, which doesn’t really explain why our daughter was born with brown eyes.

  But as soon as Wynn was born, I knew I wanted to have another baby. I liked being a parent a lot more than I had imagined. My friends, like me, were surprised by my unforeseen tenderness toward our daughter. I loved her more every day.

  But there was another reason I wanted Wynn to have a sibling, a reason I only told myself in the middle of the night when I woke up with anxiety about how her life might be. I worried about her feeling lonely and socially isolated as the only child of gay, older parents. And I felt guilty about it, because I knew what it felt like to be left out.

  Now I worried that my daughter might feel the same way. Would she learn to listen and watch as carefully as I did to determine if someone was homophobic before telling them about her moms? Or before she asked her friends to come over to play after school? Would she be gay by extension? If the answer was going to be “yes,” then I thought I could at least give her someone to share the misery with, someone related to her and even someone who was part of the same batch.

  Choosing to start our family using the mainstream medical system felt like the most comfortable choice for us. We liked the idea that everything was scientific and federally regulated, that there were going to be a lot of experts guiding us throughout the process and protecting our health and our rights along the way. Perhaps we were being optimistic and naïve, but in some ways that gave us the endurance that we would need for our journey.

  The physical battles in fertility treatments are fought and won in two-week increments between ovulation and menstruation. But the war against self-doubt and hopelessness doesn’t have a timeline. So when we found out that all I needed to do to have a second child was show up on the right day and hope for the best, I was so relieved that I wanted to have the baby immediately.

  The first step was getting the fertilized eggs.

  I called the clinic and asked what was needed to transfer the fertilized eggs from the lab to our doctor’s office. “Some paperwork and a method of transport,” said the nurse on the other end of the phone. The eggs could be shipped through the mail or I could come and get them. This was our first family carpool.

  I chose Memorial Day to drive to the clinic and retrieve our four frozen embryos. As I got out of the car, a slight breeze whispered below the cloudless, blue sky. There was no one around, which made me feel more, instead of less, self-conscious about driving around on a holiday weekend, tending to my own medical procedures. In just a few minutes, I was going to have human embryos in my possession, so I half-expected pro-lifers to jump out of the bushes and rush at me with accusatory questions.

  I walked into the clinic, explained to the woman at the front desk why I was there and she called the lab. Then I sat in the waiting area across from a couple—a man and a woman. It had been more than a year since I was there, but everything looked the same. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies on brochures stared at me with their placid faces, willing me to store my cord blood or try some drug I couldn’t pronounce.

  A lab technician appeared from a back room wheeling a dolly that carried a surprisingly large, hard plastic canister shaped like a fat dart and covered in stickers that shouted OVERNIGHT and FRAGILE. I had expected to see something smaller and more sterile looking.

  Together, the technician and I wheeled it out to my car and put it in the front seat. Being approximately the size of a human torso without arms or legs, it fit perfectly. And just to make sure it wouldn’t be killed in an accident, I put its seatbelt on. I thanked the technician profusely, took one more paranoid look around for pro-lifers and sat myself down in the driver’s seat.

  Now it was just the two of us. Actually, the five of us, I thought, glancing over at the canister. It felt like I was on a date. It was just a plastic container, but together, we were driving away from all the hardship of the fertility treatments and into a hopeful future of sisters or brothers for the child I already loved so much. My sense of freedom and contentment was palpable.

  I quietly hoped our next child was a girl. Not because I didn’t want a boy. I have nothing against boys. It simply seemed perfect to imagine Wynn having a sister. Sisters fought over jeans and made up over shared secrets. Sisters called each other on Saturdays when they couldn’t decide what movie to see or had their hearts broken. Sisters were bound by immutable laws of bonding, friendship and
blood. I wanted that for my daughter.

  “This way,” said the nurse as she showed me back to a large exam room furnished with the requisite paper-covered table and laminate-faced countertops and cupboards. Unlike the other rooms I had been in, this one contained a large, flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. Maybe there was a game on and no one wanted to miss it. Or possibly an advertiser had sponsored it.

  I glanced at the TV. The screen showed two large, watery orbs that looked like clusters of soap bubbles. They were floating around, but also looked busy and even frustrated. I stared more closely. I could see new bubbles being created inside and sometimes outside each of the orbs.

  “This one is hatching,” said the doctor gleefully, pointing to one of the fertilized eggs on the screen.

  Those were my eggs. There were two of them.

  The only thing I could think to say was, “You call it hatching? That’s adorable.”

  “Yes. And it’s a really good sign. You see this area, the dark part? That is where the baby is starting to form,” the doctor explained.

  There was a dark cluster of smaller cells in one corner of one of the bubbles. I felt like I could see the cells dividing or at least getting organized to form something important, like a leg or a head. This is what hope must look like, I thought.

  “You can have the video,” said the doctor.

  I laughed. Some people make videos of their child’s first steps, a clip of their first turn on the ski slopes or their first rollercoaster ride at Disneyland. Our family was getting a video of our child’s first cells dividing. My parents would be proud.

  The two viable eggs were inserted effortlessly in my uterus. Then I went home to wait. I was scheduled to go back to the clinic in ten days for a blood test to determine if I was pregnant, followed by an ultrasound. If there was a baby, the ultrasound would show a tiny blinking light in an enormous black chasm. I had seen it before. The blinking light was the baby’s heart cells and on the monitor you could see them beat, flashing on and off like a miniature lighthouse.