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.).