All The Answers to the Extremely Personal and Borderline Inappropriate Questions We’ve Gotten Regarding My Pregnancy

When you’re a lesbian and you have children, or you’re pregnant, or you’ve ever even mentioned the word “baby” in a public place… you've inevitably been hit with an onslaught of extremely personal questions.

 These are questions no straight couple would ever be asked. I mean can you imagine going up to a man and wife at their baby shower and asking, “So, how does this work?  Was your wife on top when you conceived, or were you hitting that from behind?” 

No. 

You wouldn’t do that because you probably have some level of social awareness and decency. 

For some reason all of that goes out the window when it comes to the “exotic" world of same-sex parenting.

For years before I was ever pregnant, perfect strangers have asked me questions ranging from the normal “Do you want kids?” “Which of you would carry?” to the very invasive:  “Who would the donor be?” “Do you know him?” “How would that work?” “Do you actually use a turkey baster?” 

And the answer to that, of course, is “Yes, this November our Thanksgiving dinner will be tinged with the slight hint of baby juice.” 

But I know that education and understanding help break down stigmas, which is why I am personally going to take a moment to answer some of these questions since I'm an open and sharing kinda gal.

Here’s our journey so far:

I’ve always wanted to be a mom.  My own mother died when I was 14, but in just those few years, she gave me an example of the kind of closeness that a parent and child can have. The lessons she taught me, and the love that she gave are still with me 17 years later and I’ve always hoped to pass that legacy of love on to my own kid. 

Even the time that I spent way-too-young helping to care for my sisters during my mother’s illness and then later having one of them live with me after her death didn't discourage me…and believe me, if you’ve ever had a teenage sister live with you while you were a college student…you know it’s a miracle that we’re both still alive, much less that I still want kids someday.

Or at least "someday" is what I told myself while I stayed busy "building my career" and waiting for everything to be “perfect”…yeah, I know, rookie mistake, thinking the word “perfect” has any place in parenthood. This is something my wife and I have both finally realized.

And, I know I’m still pretty young, but I come from the south, where people start hounding a girl about when she’s gonna have babies about five minutes after she first starts her period.  Most of my childhood friends started families at least ten years ago and now have their own softball teams, while here I am starting the process at 31, or as I like to call it living in L.A., “Hollywood 20”.  

Not to say I have't been a little bit traditional about it. I DID wait until I met a lovely woman online, dated her for three years, married her in a state where it was legally recognized (yay, NY!), domestically partnered her here in California, then got legally recognized here in California with the overturn of Prop 8.  

You know, just standard, super traditional stuff.

And my wife, Cat is exactly the kind of person I want to raise a kid with. She is most loving, kind and talented person I know. Seriously. I'm kind of jealous that our kid gets to have such an amazing person for a mother. 

So now, six years into our relationship, and three years after getting married: we are ready to expand our family…just like any other extremely boring couple who is really into family planning. 

For any lesbian couple wanting to conceive the first step is acquiring sperm. If you decide to chose an anonymous donor from a bank, as we did, and you live in Los Angeles, as we do, this means you get access to the Mecca of all sperm acquiring facilities: California Cryobank.

Cryobank is amazing.  It’s like Central Casting and crash course in genetics all rolled into one. You can search guys by height, weight, hair color, heritage, ethnicity, religion, blood type, GPA, or even occupation—although in L.A. that means either actor or musician. 

They also give you medical backgrounds on the donors’ entire families all the way out to cousins. I honestly know less about my own family’s medical history than I do about our Donor’s. And it doesn’t stop there. The dudes write essays about themselves: telling us their hobbies, hopes and dreams and even provide voice recordings, facial feature reports and childhood photos. 

Then in the most LA  move in the history of medical baby making, the female staff of cryobank compiles a list of the three celebrities they think the donor looks like, so that you can get the designer Ryan Gossling/George Clooney/Tay Diggs hybrid baby of your dreams.

Basically, my straight friends would consider it the world’s best dating site. Except it’s totally anonymous and they’d never get to actually meet the 6 foot tall actor who enjoys hiking, building his own canoes and cooking for your mom.  And yes, I’m already working on the screenplay for a sperm bank dating rom com, so don’t even think about it.

Since we’re using my uterus, my wife, Cat, and I chose a donor who is as close to her as possible: tall, reddish hair, blue eyes, and her ethnic background with even the hint of Native American ancestry.

We also made sure the staff said he was extremely good looking. Let’s face it: if love isn’t going to play a factor in your genetic baby-making, you’re allowed to be shallow.

After perusing “Sperm Tindr” for the prefect genetic specimen and making our fairly expensive purchase, we were ready to pop it up in me and make a baby!

Just kidding.

When we first showed up at the fertility clinic in Beverly Hills we thought we’d have a consultation, give them some sperm and get the show on the road. What actually happened, is that the doctor wanted to make sure it would be the best, healthiest pregnancy ever.  Hooray!

But what this meant was before anything from that little vial ever even went into my womb, I would apparently need to have 15 different blood tests and two vaginal ultrasounds over the course of several weeks just to quote “look around and see what the situation is.”

Good news, the blood tests said I was super fertile for a “woman my age.” Ew.

So great. Now my old womb and my ridiculously high egg count were ready for some babies.

 Just kidding again.

The doctor then tells me that while the other 97 blood tests came back great, my vitamin D levels are low and because this could potentially cause pregnancy complications, we need to wait a month and put me on a vitamin D supplement.

Okay, I am going to follow the doctor’s orders because I want a healthy baby, but I feel pretty sure there is a prom queen getting knocked up this very second who has no idea what her vitamin D levels are.

At this point, my wife and I had been planning for so long and were so ready that I contemplated just going to a bar, grabbing some dude and saying “Don’t worry, neither of us will enjoy this.”

Instead, I took all of my vitamin D, got blood tested AGAIN and was finally told that I could start peeing on ovulation sticks to find out when I’ve hit the 36 hour window that women can get pregnant. Did you know that it’s only 36 hours? I have no idea how anyone was ever born.

Anyway, the day finally came for that special romantic moment where I laid back in stirrups and stared up at the florescent lights covered with a fake painting of the sky while my beautiful wife held my hand and my doctor and her nurse squirted a vial of donation into my uterus via a cathader…

I’m sorry to say that no turkey basters were involved, but I do think it’s still pretty lesbian that the only time semen has ever been inside me, it was placed there by a woman.

Then came the world’s longest two week wait. There’s only a 20% chance that an IUI (Inter-uterine insemination) will work on the first time, so we knew our odds weren’t great, but still you hope. You hope because every single time you do this, it is sooo freaking expensive ---Any dudes reading this, I want you to take a moment and realize that you’ve thrown thousands of dollars away in dirty tissues over the years. 

But mostly we were hoping because we are just so excited to be moms.

And I am happy to say that as of a little over five months ago, we found out that our kid was ready to get here on the first try and now all of that time and all of those blood tests don’t matter, because we’ve gotten to see adorable ultrasounds of a big-headed fetus with little t-rex arms dancing around and have experienced the magic that is the first time you hear your baby’s heartbeat.

Later this week we are hoping to find out the baby's sex. We're excited either way, but are mostly just looking forward to being able to call the baby by name. So, please join us, for the first and probably the last time as a parents that we encourage our little one to spread their legs and show off their junk.