I stayed calm and realised I had to get Aden to my father, who was going to look after him while we were busy with the birth. I left Anna-Marie in the bath at home and rushed out with Aden. Then I returned as fast as I could and helped Anna-Marie out of the bath. We started to walk to the car and as we were about to exit the house, Anna-Marie had another contraction. We stopped and she told me to feel. I put my hand against her pants and felt the head.
That was when I realised our daughter was coming and coming fast. We arrived at the birth house and the midwife started with the regular exam. Anna-Marie was fully dilated and needed to get into the bath as fast as possible if we wanted to have a water birth.
I helped Anna-Marie out of bed and into the birthing bath. After her next contraction, Anna-Marie’s parents arrived, just in time to see the crowning. Two contractions later, our baby girl was born. She was perfectly healthy and arrived in the midst of joyous emotion. We stayed at the birth house for another four hours and then went home with our little one.
When we got there, we saw that Aden was back from my father’s and having his afternoon nap. After he woke, we immediately introduced him to his new little sister. We also gave him a gift and told him his sister had brought it with her especially for him. He was very impressed and very protective of her from the start. He sat with her in his arms for long periods of time and whenever someone else wanted to hold her or touch her, he told them, “No, that’s my sister.” We were so glad that he accepted her with such love and care. He was a real big brother. To this day, he is still very protective and brother and sister love one another very much. Ruana is absolutely infatuated with Aden and laughs at everything he does.
We used different donors for our two children for various reasons, but they look very much alike and we are raising them as brother and sister, even if they are only related through love. Anna-Marie and I were able to have them without too many issues. We are both registered as their parents on their birth certificates, which means we do not have to go through the long process of second-parent adoption.
It’s now more than half a year after our daughter’s birth. Our lives are so full with our two children. There are still some challenges and trials, as with everything else in life, but we wouldn’t change our family for anything in the world. We love our children unconditionally and will do anything to make them happy, keep them safe and help them to reach their full potential.
Lois D’Imperio and Holly Robinson
DANBURY, CONNECTICUT
I’m not sure how the discussion first started about kids. I liked kids, but wasn’t so sure I was capable of raising them without incident. I’d been a good dog owner, but hadn’t been able to keep a single goldfish or plant alive. I was quite skeptical of my ability to be a mom. But my partner, Lois, was great at it. She was sensible, practical, fun and organized—all of the things I thought it took to be a great mom.
Lois was a little gun-shy, though. She had pursued a court action for visitation with her twins (she had no legal rights or biological connection) and had felt really devastated about losing them. She did have very limited visitation, but no recognition as a mother. I think the hesitation at that point was more of her just needing a promise from me that we were going to work at our relationship and always put the best interest of the kids first. We were both on the same page with that, so soon she was ready to start looking for a donor.
We tried the “find a willing male friend” route first. We had two different friends we talked into being a part of the baby-making process. I went through the steps of creating necessary legal documents to make sure that the man couldn’t be a “dad” and that this was solely a contractual relationship: sperm for money.
But the whole thing just didn’t feel right. I didn’t want the biological father to be someone the child knew. Both guys also felt torn about not having any relationship with the child at all. That’s when I discussed the dilemma with our very awesome gay rights attorney and she strongly urged me to use an anonymous donor through a clinic for legal and medical reasons.
Picking the mom was the easy part: Lois is nine years older than me and didn’t want to be having a baby when she was in her forties, so she went first. Next we had to find a donor. When we sat down at the computer, Lois prepared me for a long, drawn-out process. “This may take weeks,” she warned.
When we first started exploring assisted reproduction, we talked to the OB/GYN and she immediately suggested that Lois take a cytomegalovirus (CMV) test. This test showed that Lois was CMV negative. Therefore, due to scientific and medical mumbo jumbo that I don’t understand, our donor had to be CMV negative as well.
So now we had some parameters based on Lois’s family medical history and some physical attributes in my own lineage. The donor had to be CMV negative, without a history of Alzheimer’s or diabetes and of some European descent. That was really it.
We found two guys in less than ten minutes. And that’s where we started arguing.
I liked the philosopher/chef guy and Lois liked the oh-so-cute musician guy. We had pages and pages of profiles for each of them. My straight girlfriends were blown away by how much we knew about the donors. They don’t even know that much about their husbands! Lois and I spent the weekend discussing our two candidates and then, first thing Monday morning, Lois called to order the cute musician’s sperm. It was sold out, so we went with the insightful thinker guy instead.
The actual insemination wasn’t simple. Lois had a history of cervical cancer and her treatments had affected her cervix to an extent. The first step was to dilate her cervix without anesthesia, which wasn’t fun. Then we had to coordinate the sperm pick-up with the ovulation. Since our doctor’s office didn’t have a storage facility, we had the sperm sent to a fertility center in our state. It was fifty-five miles from our house and fifty miles from the doctor’s office.
Once we had the timing down, Lois drove to pick up the sperm and then brought it in a cooler of dry ice to the OB/GYN, usually talking to the sperm and singing Melissa Etheridge to it the entire way. The IUI worked on the first try. While I was scared but excited, Lois was more reserved. She simply said one day, “I’m not feeling connected. I’m not feeling like this is the baby we’re going to raise.”
At thirteen weeks, Lois had a miscarriage. I was devastated, but Lois seemed really calm and was totally accepting of it. Unfortunately, not all was smooth sailing afterward. The doctor on call the weekend of the miscarriage advised us not to come in and suggested we just let nature take its course. It was a horrible weekend.
Four weeks later, Lois found herself in the emergency room with a doctor telling her “You have to go in for surgery right away. You’re not bleeding out in my ER!” After that night, we both seemed to be really accepting of what had happened and were ready to move on.
After five more failed attempts using this sperm, we sat down with our OB/GYN for a consultation. She simply said, “Why not try a new donor? Some things just aren’t meant to be.”
So that night, we went back online and discovered that the cute musician was back on the market. Lois got pregnant on the first try and she stayed pregnant this time around. Due to her ripe old age of thirty-eight and the cervical cancer history, we had a ton of doctor check-ups along the way. Just when we thought things were going great (Lois was twenty-eight weeks along), she was told at a routine visit that she had to be put on immediate bed rest. She couldn’t even drive home.
So we went into “strict bed rest” mode. We borrowed a cot bed from a friend and set up our living room for the patient. Lois didn’t move except to go to the bathroom. I often went to work in the morning and left her two travel mugs of coffee, a laptop, a cooler of lunch and snacks and the TV remote. Sometimes, I didn’t get home until late and found Lois hanging out in the dark, too afraid to get up to turn the light on.
“I didn’t have to pee and didn’t want to waste a trip getting out of bed,” she said. It was not nearly as fun as one might think and I’m sure she wanted to
jump down every person’s throat who said, “Oh, lie down for eight weeks and watch TV; how hard can that be?” Lois is not someone who wastes time. It was a brutal experience for her.
At thirty-six weeks, the bed rest was finally lifted and Lois felt sure that the baby was just going to fall right out. But no matter what she tried, that kid didn’t arrive until three weeks later—in tornado-like fashion. For all of our pre-delivery preparations and conversations with the doctor about medication and Lois’s fear of pain, nothing really went as planned.
Lois’s water started breaking at 3:00 P.M. on a Wednesday (she didn’t tell me until 6:00 P.M., because she didn’t want me to leave work early). It really broke at 7:30 P.M. right in front of the burger joint she just had to have that evening. We got to the hospital around 9:00 P.M. and then Andrew was born at 12:07 A.M. There was no time for drugs, no time for anything, really. The one anesthesiologist on duty was busy with an appendectomy and despite Lois continuously calling out “NUUUURSE!” during labor, she never showed up to give Lois drugs.
The State of Connecticut had recently released a new birth certificate form prior to Andrew being born, so children of same-sex couples could have both of their parents listed on the form. It had something to the effect of “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” instead of “Mother” and “Father.” The hospital didn’t have those forms yet, so I called our gay rights lawyer who advised that I get one from the appropriate state agency. The nurses at the hospital weren’t aware of the new form, but they were nice about it. We had a form faxed to them and became the first parents at the hospital to use the new certificate.
After we brought Andrew home and had a little time to settle in, the hospital social worker came to visit Lois and talk to her, since that was the protocol for a “single mom.” Lois kept arguing with her, saying “I’m not a single mom! I’m married under state law and Holly is a parent under state law.” But the woman kept insisting Lois was a single mom. It was annoying, but we just let her give her spiel after arguing didn’t get us anywhere.
Wanting to have a second child meant that it was my turn to carry the baby. I was indifferent about being pregnant. I never thought I’d really do it. But I wanted a kid, so it was time to step up. Our OB/GYN was excited about our story. “How great that each of you gets to experience this!” she said. “Do you know how many of my patients would love to have their husbands go through a pregnancy, too?”
I got pregnant on the first try—our donor had super sperm. Like the first time, we found out the baby’s gender when we could. I thought we were having a girl all along until the morning of the ultrasound. I woke up, turned to Lois and said, “It’s totally a boy.” And it was.
My pregnancy was fairly uneventful. I had morning sickness for almost four months—just constantly nauseous—and heartburn all the time. I worked a half day one Friday in November and left early for a doctor appointment—it was six days before my due date. My blood pressure was high, so I did a few more blood tests over the weekend. On Monday morning, we were instructed to report to the hospital to be induced.
As we settled into the delivery room, we told the nurse about Lois giving birth in the same room. The nurse came back a few minutes later with a big grin on her face and said, “You’re not going to believe me, but the anesthesiologist on duty tonight is the same one Lois had and she’s scheduled for an appendectomy again.”
She wasn’t kidding. The anesthesiologist missed the opportunity to give me drugs, too.
I think it’s pretty amazing that we have two boys who have biological traits from both of us, but I don’t think it makes any difference to them or us who gave birth to whom. Our firstborn was a very tough, stubborn, colicky baby. He definitely seemed to be spirited very early on in his life—and still is. So when we decided to have a second child, we were a little more confident that we could handle it.
We are doing everything we can to raise these boys with compassion, resiliency and a good moral compass. I sometimes feel like my seven-year-old is a little restless, but just yesterday his speech teacher stopped me in the hallway of his school to tell me what a sweet, kind boy he is. I was blown away and later told my son how proud I was.
Right now we live in a very diverse community. We are surrounded by families of all kinds of races, religions and beliefs. Both of our boys have been accepted in every school and sport they’ve joined. We’ve become involved in their activities, including coaching T-ball and soccer in the past few years.
Our families are incredible. Our friends are wonderful. Our neighbors are fantastic. I can honestly say that Lois and I have been met with more responses of “That’s cool!” or “Okay, great!” when we’ve explained that we’re both the moms.
Today we are almost at our fourteen-year anniversary. We have a great relationship with each other (although Lois cringes at the words “wife” or “marriage” from time to time). We worry about money and work opposite schedules so one of us is usually home with the boys. It’s been hard since our time together as a family is fairly infrequent—my wife works nights and weekends and I work fifty hours, Monday through Friday—but we’re making it work.
They are both amazing boys and we are very lucky to be where we are. Our state and the community in which we live have been truly remarkable. We have stories on top of stories about our lives with these boys. They are so different in personality, but both full of energy and spirit. As with any kids, we have moments of frustration and insanity, followed by moments of incredible gratitude.
Jenn and Michele Margiotta-Watz
SHOREHAM, NEW YORK
My name is Jenn and I have always known I wanted to be a mom. I am one of thirty-one grandchildren on my mother’s side alone—a large family that has generations which overlap in age. I was babysitting cousins when I was ten years old and loved being around babies.
My wife’s road to parenthood started when she lost her partner of eighteen years to cancer and realized she was all alone. Michele had no one else to recount the good times with, to remember the vacations and laughs shared. It was the first time she wished for a child—someone who could tell her story after she was gone.
Michele and I moved in together in 2001 and enjoyed going to musical concerts, theater, travelling and living in our legally-unrecognized “marital” bliss. As sappy as it sounds, we had so much love in our hearts for each other that we wanted to share that love with a child. While we certainly weren’t considered “in the closet” at the time, we did want to start our own family and have a child with whom we could share our lives.
Knowing we wanted to have a family and that I definitely wanted to carry our child, we began to look at sperm banks. Neither of us was comfortable with knowing the donor personally or having him remain a part of our child’s life, so we decided to use an anonymous donor. We felt that with all the love we had to offer our child between the two of us, the lack of a biological father wouldn’t be missed. And happily, today we can say that while the absence has been acknowledged, it has not been more than a passing thought.
So with the Internet at our disposal, we started looking for the perfect donor. It was amazing to see all of the details that were readily available online. Obviously there were the physical characteristics like eye color, height and hair color, but also their SAT scores, short answers on their favorite childhood holidays, college majors and even their GPAs. Another discriminating factor that’s made available to potential buyers is the donor’s educational status. When we were purchasing our vials, the sperm collected from those with graduate degrees was more expensive than others.
When we decided we had found the donor we wanted to use and were ready to start actively trying to conceive, it was 2004. We began living our lives in two-week cycles. The first two weeks were waiting to ovulate and then the next two were waiting to see if I got my period or a positive test. It was an exercise in patience—something you need in spades as a parent.
In the two weeks leading up to ovulation, I took my b
asal body temperature daily (there was supposed to be a slight increase which signaled ovulation), although I didn’t find this methodology very helpful. It’s also suggested to check for a thinning of cervical mucus as your body prepares to ovulate. But my failsafe for determining ovulation was the standard ovulation kits. They work similarly to any pregnancy test you can find at the drugstore. These kits measure a hormone that spikes just before ovulation, but they aren’t cheap. Most kits come with only five or seven pee sticks, so once I got pretty good at judging my cycle, I managed to stretch one box across two cycles (provided the expiration date cooperated).
At the time we were trying to conceive, New York State regulations were significantly more relaxed, so we could practice self-insemination at home. As long as the sperm was signed for and delivered to a licensed physician’s office, all was good. I had a wonderful relationship with my general practitioner and her office received the large liquid nitrogen tank containing our vials of sperm and allowed me to bring it home. I remember driving down the road with the large tank buckled into my passenger seat. The inseminations themselves were as easy as every “lesbian with a turkey baster” joke implies.
After we had completed the insemination, we were responsible for shipping the tank back to the cryobank. The most accessible drop-off location for us on the commute to work together had a gal working there who we assumed was “on our team.” She had a very butch haircut, never wore make-up and was always wearing cargo shorts. We weren’t ones to make assumptions about a person’s sexual preference, but we always felt this woman “got it” whenever we dropped off the tank. One day she casually mentioned that she had shipped a tank like that from a local horse farm—they ordered sperm for their mare. Clearly she “got it.” We smiled and parted ways.
I used pregnancy tests as early as detection was advised on the box and continued until my menstruation started. After trying for several months, we were elated to find out I was pregnant. It had worked! A doctor’s trip and blood test confirmed that one of those frozen swimmers had made its way to my egg.
Journey to Same-Sex Parenthood Page 17
