“You were not an accident, where no one thought it through."
Brandi Carlile’s lyrics reflect an idea that can be a comfort sometimes - a conviction that our journey to parenthood wasn’t (and couldn’t be) undertaken on a whim. But that sense of moral superiority is a cold comfort when all I really want is to be a mom.
My spouse and I have been together for 5 years, and in that time we’ve built a life that we love together - a home, a community, a small flock of pets - the good stuff. We have known for years that we want our life to include raising children together. However, as a same-sex couple, we knew that our journey to parenthood could never be a "typical" one. What we didn’t know was how awkward, painful, and isolating the journey to getting me pregnant would be. As I wrote before, we had the advantage of knowing in advance that we would require medical assistance, as opposed to finding out years into our attempts that our two bodies in combination would struggle to make a baby. So, we weren’t starting from behind, but there’s still a peculiar grief that comes with trying to conceive while Queer.
I think that I initially underestimated how demoralizing it would be to watch as friends and family had babies the “normal way,” while we had to prove to doctors, lawyers, counselors, and administrators that we deserved to be parents. Over and over, we’ve had to convince people who don’t know us at all that we deserve to be parents. That we’ve considered the potential outcomes. That we’ve thought things through. So while opportunity for self-reflection doesn’t go completely unappreciated, it’s hard not to be hurt and humiliated by the fact that we have to jump through all these extra hoops to do something that so many others do so easily.
Of course, there are same-sex parents who get their first-shot miracles (and certainly there are couples under the LGBTQ+ umbrella who have the biological means to make a baby the old fashioned way). But the most common stories we hear about Queer conception are ones of hardship and and bitter perseverance. It becomes difficult not to give in to the belief that pregnancy only happens for us against the odds - after doctors, after medications, after failures and losses. In fact, the method we chose was strategically centered around the expected outcome of failure. An IUI (usually seen as the typical entry point to conception in same-sex female relationships) has much lower odds of success per attempt than EDA. I knew that I couldn’t endure cycle after cycle with failure as a likely outcome, and we planned accordingly.
As Abigail Swetz writes on Romper: “I know there are straight couples who face incredible challenges in getting pregnant, and I do not mean to diminish their journey. And yet ours is different.” Like many straight couples facing infertility, our conception journey will require medications, doctor and lab visits, and hours of travel to the nearest major city. Also like many couples facing infertility, we are a loving couple who wants nothing more in this world than to become parents. However, our journey to this place of heartache looks very different from theirs, with the process fraught with judgement and rejection. So we have to take comfort where we can - and remember that there will never be any doubt that we have wanted our children from the very beginning, and were willing to do whatever it took to meet them.
Are you a same-sex parent, or do you hope to become one? What was your experience conceiving?
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