Our family is made of love.

I remember one of the ‘birds and bees’ talk my Mom gave me when I was a kid. There were multiple talks like these over the years so my memory is likely a conglomerate of episodes – with the embarrassing teenage sessions erased from my mind altogether. We had one of those stereotypical explain-it books from the 1970’s. You know the ones, the cute cartoon-y people characters, the large bold fonts, the basic mechanics laid bare on the page. As a kid, this book explained my family’s origin pretty well. Mom and Dad mixed up their genetic material and ‘poof’, out popped me, Bee and Ahr. All it really took was some love.

Love. Peach and I had (have) that in abundance. It would have been really cool if Peach and I had hoarded all our love, squeezed it super tight into a dripping ball of gooey poems and sappy eyed looks, compressed that ball in mental hugs and hopes and suddenly had The Bean pop out – fully formed, our own tiny Athena. That sounds so much easier, and much cheaper, than what really happened.

In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) sounds way more mechanical and less steamy then ‘the old fashioned way.’ And, alas, it is both mechanical in nature and often takes place in cold sterile hospital/clinic rooms. But they are rooms filled with love. You have to really want a baby to go through all the tests and procedures, paper work and needles, cycle tracking and medications – need I go on? On our first visit to the doctor he looked at us and our histories and proudly declared our ovaries and wombs ‘slam dunks’! If things went as planned (they never do) we would have a tiny bundle of joy 10-ish months after that first meeting.

It took us 3 failed attempts, 2 surgeries, 2 rounds of egg stimulation, un-numbered needle sticks, $30,000+ and almost 2 full years of trying. In the end we took one my fertilized eggs and transferred it to Peach, who then carried the pregnancy. For as atypical as our road to pregnancy was we got lucky and had an incredibly normal and sedate pregnancy.

I did not simply wake up one day and say “hey, let’s make a baby today”. And even if I had it would have been logistically difficult to follow through with on such short notice.To make this point a bit more clear I guess I should mention that me and my wife happen to both be women (gasp!). Yes, yes, we are gay parents. We are not celebrities out to make gay parenting cool. We are not evangelizing liberals out to demonize adherents to more traditional familial norms. We are simply two women who fell in love, spent years adoring each other and eventually decided that the only thing that could make our lives more perfect was to have a little munchkin of our own. Do we have an agenda? You bet we do: raise our daughter to the best of our ability and try not to mess up too often or too outrageously. Does this make us any different then most of the other families in the world? Nope. I think it actually makes us pretty much on-par with all the ‘normals’ out there.

If Peach was writing this she would likely say that she was ready for said child many (MANY) years before me. She’d be right. I think her biological clock simply beats a bit louder and stronger then mine. I dug in my heels against it for good reasons: finish graduate school (check), get married (check), find stable jobs (check). Slowly my list of reasons to wait for kids grew shorter then my list of reasons to have a kid. Peach’s subtle hints (i.e. emails detailing various get-pregnant methods or pictures of baby clothing, the stopping of strangers to ogle their kids when we were out running errands, her dis-inclination to get the standard surrogate lesbian baby known as a puppy) became more frequent and eventually her internal clock made mine submit.*

So of course the discussion turned to logistics (as an aside: turns out these logistics are pretty similar for any couple or single who cannot have kids the old fashioned way, whether we are talking single mom’s by choice or heterosexual couples with infertility issues). Do we adopt? Which of us carries? IVF? IUI? Surrogacy? How do you choose a donor, a doctor, a procedure, a date…..? You get the picture. One question led to another whose answer led us back to more questions. The exponential increase in questions meant copious amounts of research was done into medical and legal subjects we superficially understood. In the end we were pretty much just spinning our wheels. We were much more informed but we still did not have any personal answers or a course of action to follow.

What we needed was to ACT on our decision. No more talking. No more research. No more taking audience participation polls. Simply decide: adopt or pregnancy? If pregnancy, what route? And so we decided.

* I realize post-writing that this makes it sound like I was strong-armed into the whole child rearing thing. That was not the case, of course. And if you sadly insist on taking my witty banter at face value then I fear you will often misinterpret my literary goals. So quit your worrying, I am happily a mom and wouldn’t have it any other way (though I would occasionally choose to be able to sleep past 6.30 a.m.).

Well, fifteen months in and you would have thought we would have made time to write a little something. Obviously, we must have had other priorities. Though when I think about what we have accomplished in the last fifteen months a lot of it seems pretty ephemeral, at least in comparison to starting a blog.

Eep, I said it, the dreaded word – blog. I’ve read my fair share but never felt the urge to write one. Then an oh-so-kind co-worker got us this site as a pre-birth present. We thanked her profusely, promising to use it and promptly shelved the whole idea in favor of buying ear plugs to silence the wail of our newborn. (I kid, I kid. The noise canceling headphones worked much better.)

So like any good initial blog post we figure you want to know the who, the what, and the why. Can we just say these definitions will be transient based upon current preoccupations and the position of the stars? No? Fine, I’ll budge an inch and give you half definitions with some accompanying thoughts. But I reserve the right to change my mind and burn this page.

Cast of characters:

• Oy – me, myself, I. Will I refer to myself in the third person? Likely not, but this gives me a fail-safe in case the wifey decides to write! I am some odd combination of sporty nerd. I obsess over details. I bury my nose in books and read TV spoilers on the internet.
• Peach – my partner of 11 years, and wife for the last 3! Mother of my child. The spontaneous balance to my overly scheduled calendar. The voice of ‘feelings’ countering my constant ‘reasoning’.
• The Bean – our daughter. Smart as a whip. Agile as a ninja. Gearing up to be a holy terror.
• The Boys – our cats, 2 brothers whose main pleasure is meowing at 3 a.m. and eating plastic bags.
• The Peanut Gallery – a rotating cast of family and friends who brighten our world.

You probably are asking what is this all about? It is a valid question but this site is less a well designed thesis and more an amorphous thought bubble. It is about my family. How we became a family. Why we became a family. How sickeningly normal we are as a family. It is about our current obsessions, our child’s milestones, our quest for acclimating to our ‘new normal’. We may occasionally get political. We will likely always be sarcastic. The likelihood is that I will be the main author with an occasional interlude in Peach’s voice. Heck, I may even go all split personality on you and write as The Bean if she has anything significant to say!

But why you ask? Why now, why you, why should we care?

A very smart scholar, Rabbi Hillel once wrote, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” For selfish reasons, writing here works as an outlet, a way to let out spare thoughts and free up mental space. It lets my family and friends get a glimpse inside our heads (oh, perish the thought!) and it lets strangers see the world through our eyes. But it is also for passing strangers – whether they are trying to have children,  have non-traditional families of their own, or are simply stumbling across the internet in boredom. Maybe something I say can help someone somewhere make their own personal decision. And, if I’ve already put off starting this thing for ten months then what am I really waiting for….the end of the world?

So sit back and make sure your belt is locked in secure. Our path will be less then straight and any anomalies we come across will be gallantly entered.