This is what I hope will be the start of a list of blogs in Spanish by and about lesbian families. If anyone knows anyone else, please send them this way. Without further ado, I give you:

Julieta and her less-than-legal wife who are still in the planning stages over at http://willowsbrain.blogspot.com/.

Magui, Gabi, a three year relationship, a cat, a dog, and the desire to start a family in Argentina at http://quemarnaves.blogspot.com/

Florencia and Gabriela who are TTCing in Argentina at http://maternidadeslesbicas.blogspot.com/

Guza and Oruga waiting for their Juan in Argentina at http://saltorana.blogspot.com/

Tilvy and Andre have triplets Abril, Jazmin, and Santi who were born at 27 weeks and are still in the NICU, but doing well in Argentina at http://ellalostrillizosyyo.blogspot.com/

Ana and Paula with their 1 year old twins in Argentina at http://piedralibreparadosmamas.blogspot.com/

Cris and Ana with their twins Diego and Santi in Mexico at http://dosmamis.blogspot.com/

Roma, Triana, and their 4 year old son Tati in Argentina at http://mamispordos.blogspot.com/

Please welcome guest blogger Nina, from Queercents!

“The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.” – George Santayana

We’ll blink and find ourselves at the two year mark. Two years of trying. Time is one way we mark this baby-making business. When asked for an update, my partner, Jeanine typically rattles off the number of months we’ve been trying. I always speak about it in terms of dollars spent.

You see, I’m the money person in our family. I write about finance over at Queercents where I focus on how to save, invest and create wealth. It’s not a secret formula. Wealth boils down to two simple steps: 1. Spend less and 2. Make more money.

Well, we’re spending a boatload of money these days and temporarily it is altering our financial plan. This, of course, freaks me out.

As each month passes, we’re on the brink of becoming one of those crazy, desperate infertile couples spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the baby. Jeanine and I recently tried to have a frank discussion about dollar limits. We’re at the $45,000 mark.

The experts all warn that financial stresses can intensify the complexities with this experience. In Conquering Infertility, Alice D. Domar, offers insights into the coping process. She writes, “The stress builds as conception fails to happen the second month, the third, the fourth, the sixth. It grows as you start wondering if you’ll ever get pregnant and skyrockets when you see doctors, undergo tests, endure invasive medical procedures, and still fail to get or remain pregnant. The stress builds and builds and, in my experience, hits its peak after two to three years of unsuccessful trying. For many women infertility is the most upsetting experience of their lives, a tragedy that causes as much stress as does a life-threatening disease.”

What I’m learning though is that I’m reacting like a typical husband in an infertile heterosexual couple. Domar writes from this perspective, but many things apply to me as the non-childbearing partner. She continues, “Infertility affects every aspect of a woman’s life, from her relationship with her family and friends to her career. Often the first thing to be affected is her relationship with her husband, and for many couples infertility is the first crises — the first real test — of their marriage.”

“Most couples I counsel say that, looking back after their infertility is resolved, they realize that the experience brought them closer together, that they forged a deep bond during the process. While they’re in the middle of the infertility crisis, however, husbands and wives often find themselves out of step with each other. Although many couples agree that they both want to have children, I have never in my career seen a couple who are in the same place at the same time regarding pregnancy and infertility.”

I’ve learned that this has nothing to do with gender or being a husband. As a couple, because we are individuals, we respond differently to the infertility challenges. Another example told from the straight viewpoint but again, applies: Domar writes, “They ask themselves, ‘Why isn’t he [or she] reacting the same way that I am?’ The woman wants the husband to be more upset; the husband wants the wife to be more rational. They fight about it. They withdraw from each other.”

In our case, I believe I’m being more emotionally supportive and empathetic than a man might be. But then again, sometimes my practical side gets the best of me. Especially when it comes to money and that’s where we are at right now.

As far as I know Abigail Garner doesn’t have children yet, but she offered some great advice when I interviewed her previously about money. She said, “I recommend that hopeful couples agree on a financial cap in advance, and then take a break if they exceed that cap. Use the break to refocus on the relationship, get a sense of your financial picture, and reassess the tough questions about how — and if — they want to proceed. The relationship is in serious jeopardy when one or both of the people in the couple start to resent the financial sacrifice but won’t bring it up with their partner.”

Jeanine and I agreed that we would try three rounds of IVF. This is beyond the numerous artificial insemination tries last year. As we creep towards our third attempt, it’s easy for me to be practical and think we should move on to adoption or use donor eggs instead. But Jeanine isn’t quite ready to relinquish her role as bio-mama. This is where I need to be more understanding and less of a bean counter.

But “spending money” is riddled with lots of emotions and issues that predate Jeanine… most go back to my childhood and the unhealthy relationship my parents had with money. Childhood, parents, and babies — everything cycles in life and I’m learning through this experience a lot about myself and Jeanine. Hopefully, at some point, I will get to learn about my child. Another $12,000 might be all that it takes to get us there.

I give Queercents readers regular updates on the running tally. Here are the posts in case you want to see how I’ve marked the journey to date:

The Expense of Donor Eggs
Coping with the Cost of Infertility
Advice from Others
Lesbians Buy a Family
The Baby Making Business
Baby Race
Donor XY

Send a little love over to Chris (and her partner Susan) at Not the Mama. Susan had a very bad ultrasound on Thursday and is taking cytotec to help her body deal with the not viable embryo.

So sorry for your loss, friends, and I hope the next insem turns out to make your family a healthy baby.

Lately, stress, and inter-couple stress while TTC seems to be a topic of conversation that’s running rampant through the queer parents blogosphere. I’ve read of some break-ups, some really rough arguments and many tearful breakdowns.

I must confess though. S and I have had next to NO TTC (or otherwise) related arguments. This is because I seem to have married the most patient, understanding woman in the entire world. As I know that I am perhaps the least patient person in the world, this is a really good thing. Though I’m sure there are plenty of couples in which both participants fall into my “not patient” category. And I’m wondering how they are dealing with the kind of stress TTC seems to throw upon a couple.

S and I have seemed to manage our TTC stress as a joint force. We’ve not gotten angry with each other, just the process, and have seemingly been very good at being able to distinguish our anger at not being pregnant yet with any feelings we’re having towards each other.  Then again, I was the one having the temper tantrums (when on fertility meds), and not her, so perhaps she sees things a little differently. Who knows? In any case, I’m almost certain that there are women out there who fall into the “not so patient” category, and may also be in need of some TTC/baby stress reducing techniques.

What I’d mostly like to see is some conversation about stress management happen. What are YOU doing at home, in your partnerships, or by yourself, to manage stress? How does the stress change when you go from TTC to actually having a family? For seasoned TTC’ers, or new parents, what was key to keeping your sanity during the TTC process? For seasoned parents, what are you doing now to maintain harmony in your relationships?

Melissa, aka The Town Criers, is starting a chapter on assisted reproduction for her book.

She’s particularly interested in interviewing folks, among others,  who used assisted conception because they are in a same-sex relationship.

If you’re up for talking to her, you can email her at thetowncriers@gmail.com and she’ll send you a questionnaire, or you can head over there and read about it for yourself.

Sometimes I feel guilty expressing my strong desire for another child. I read so many blogs of people trying for their first baby and think of my own precocious cuddler and I lose my breath at my presumption. How dare I try for another piece of snuggly perfection, don’t I have enough? How can she not be enough?

But then I remember that my desire for a baby and our attempts to have another child doesn’t take anything from anyone else. Not even from Julia. We’re so schooled in the economics of scarcity that I forget that such limitations don’t apply here: joy isn’t a commodity to be measured out with only deserving people getting a share, and neither are children, though at times it might feel that way (and, oh boy, have I felt that many times in my 10 months of TTC).  I remember something that I put in words for a friend in an email earlier this week: I’m trying to get pregnant not because I don’t love Julia enough, but because I love her so much. I know that she was worth everything we did to get her, so I know that the next child, should it appear, will be just as worth it. My love for Julia propels me forward through my pain and frustration and fear.

Most of the time my desire for another child is an intellectual thing: my family is not complete, there is a member missing, this is what we feel we must do to rectify that problem; this is accompanied by a feeling of loss similar to missing the presence and company of a known and deeply loved family member. Sometimes my desire for another child is an issue of personal pride: I cannot believe that my body cannot do this thing, I will do this thing because I have never failed to do something I set out to do. (I think I’ve mentioned before that my impulses are not always the most laudable). Other times my desire for another child is a longing for the next step that my life is to take. But rarely is my desire for a baby visceral and sensual. I am too busy with my toddler to miss the milky smell of a baby’s cheeks or the way their eyes gaze at you as if you are the most wondrous thing they have ever or will ever behold.
Until I get to posts like this letter by H.D. I read her sentiments and look at those pictures and I can smell that baby, I can feel those tiny fingers and toes. The very cadence of her words brings back those heady, near-drunken on hormones and sleeplessness, wondrous, love-struck days. I read her post and both the absence of my baby who has turned toddler, and the absence of my baby that has yet to be hits me in the gut.

Clicking over to Lesbian Dad’s site does me no good, either. Those pictures of toddler and little brother help me sketch my own imaginary pictures of Julia meeting a future sibling. The melting of my heart at these images feels a bit too close to crying, and sadness is a part of that, but only a part. The feeling is one of happiness for them and projected happiness for a future us and a keen awareness that the future is not now. And I lose myself in bittersweet dreams for a time.

Dreams that even Katie’s post with the scary NICU pictures, and her long labor as described in her birth story posts, can’t disperse. Because at the end of all that fear is such a beautiful baby.

And I will have another beautiful baby, too. One day. One way or another.

I feel like I’m a woefully late guest to the two uteri family conversation, but that topic is at times, so hard for me to wrap my head around that I needed a little extra time to put my thoughts together. They still may not come out in the coherent, easy reading fashion that I’m striving for, and for that I apologize in advance.

To the unknowing outsider, I suppose it could seem like S and I have the perfect two uteri set up. She has one, I have one.  For those of you that have been following our journey, you know that we’re trying with my uterus. My uterus which must contend with my PCOS riddled body. My tubes which, while clear, are certainly nowhere near optimum.  My cycle, even when on fertility drugs is often long and drawn out. In contrast, S has perfect, 28 day cycles, and always has. There’s no indication that her uterus/tubes are anything less then perfect. Yet we continue to use me as the baby maker.

Why? Well, the answer….isn’t that simple. For one, I really really really want to carry a baby, and have really wanted to for quite some time. For whatever reason, while her desire to parent is strong, the desire to carry a child has never been evident for her. I think there are a couple of factors that weigh in on her decision, the first being that when you’re the kid of an obstetric nurse and lactation specialist, you may see some things from an early age that might just…scar you for life. I know that S was in attendance at some of her mom’s childbirth education classes from an early age. Perhaps that was enough to have her shy away from wanting to actually “do that.” Who knows?

Perhaps its that possibly less than optimum genetic material courses through her body.  I’ve never, in the 2 years I’ve blogged, talked about this, but I think the time has come. S’s brother, B, has Williams Syndrome.  People with Williams Syndrome are missing some genetic material on the 7^th chromosome, and this causes (among other things) distinct facial characteristics (similar to Downs Syndrome, but different,) and numerous mental and physical abnormalities. I think that growing up with B as a brother brought distinct challenges to S and her parents.  S has lived through how hard and difficult it can be to care for a challenged family member, and she saw the strain that it put on her parents.

To further complicate things, S has a few other mentally challenged family members that are close to her in lineage.  I think that, while these are not necessarily inherited characteristic, S is petrified of her genes being the cause of a less than “perfect” child.  If that fate is to befall us, at least it would be random, rather than a pre-disposed type of thing.

Perhaps it’s just that she REALLY does not want to carry. At all. Not with her eggs, my eggs, or donor eggs, she is adamant that her uterus will not be used as a baby growing location.

And I understand this. I really really do. But I’ve had to do a LOT of work to get to that understanding place, and honestly, sometimes I still have moments where I don’t understand. Where I wonder why she won’t do “this” for us. For me. For our family.  This is something I’ll likely have to contend with until that beautiful day when we bring home a child of our own. Which, no matter how it happens, there is comfort in knowing that someday, it will happen.  Two uteri or not.

I really need to ask myself why all my posts over here have my inability to perform up to my expectations and follow-through with my stated intentions as a primary theme.  It could be that I’m here to write about parenting and family creation and my path to parenting and family creation was full of the crumbling of my intentions and the flummoxing of my expectations (e.g.: our child will be conceived in a romantic moment between the two of us and our syringe; my child will eat only home-made, organic foods).  Or it could be that I’m lazy.  There are many people who will vouch that I’m just lazy.  See, I didn’t even post last week, and this week instead of getting a cheery and funny round-up of some of the intriguing posts made during this last week, you’re getting a emotion-laden discussion based on posts more than a week old, and we all know how quickly things can change in the blogosphere in a week.  Regardless, I am charging forward.

I was struck last week by the discussion on several blogs about different ways the not-getting-pregnant partner of a TTC couple feels as the time to conceive stretches out longer and longer.  Charlotte talked about the slow and painful realization that she and her partner need to switch rolls; Lo wrote of her feelings around Co’s decision to take a break month and how frustrating the TTC journey has been for her;  Jay wrote about her own stresses and grief over how tenuous her participation in the attempts to conceive her and Jay’s child feels and; E. shares a conversation that she and her partner have had about living in a 2 uteri home.  So I thought I’d add my own voice to the discussion.

When I first met Kristin I was set on getting pregnant within 2 years.  I was planning on being a single mother and then she came along, and she was not ready.  Further, she felt that the best way to build a family would be through adoption.  In one of our first serious discussion on family I told her that I would be happy to adopt as many children as we could care for, but that I was going to get pregnant and give birth at least once, and for us to be together she had to accept that.  And, eventually, she did.  But by the time we were ready to add to our family, she had great health insurance through her job and I had nothing.  Though intellectually I have no problem with lesbians going on Medicaid when pregnant because they can’t be insured through their partners, emotionally I have a strong working-class distaste for taking assistance from the government (this is only a distaste for myself taking such aid, I don’t have any problem at all with other people receiving aid).  So, even though I am older than Kristin and have a strong desire to be pregnant whereas Kristin did not, we decided that for us it made sense for her to be the first one of us to get pregnant.  So that’s what we did.  And I poured all my desire for pregnancy into getting her pregnant.  But the term “getting” implies control; as the not-getting-pregnant expectant mother, control was something I had to realize had been forfeited.  This realization took, um, until Julia was (I’m embarrassed to admit this) 14 months old. That’s right, folks, I have been free of the need to control Kristin’s TTC and pregnancy as a way to prove my value and worth to the family for a whole two months now. What can I say?  Letting control is all about faith, and I have never had an easy time with faith.

I was miserable and conflicted through the time we were trying to conceive Julia.  I felt like a 5^th wheel.  There were times when our donor was in the basement, producing his contribution, when I would look at Kristin readying herself on the bed and think that if I were gone Kristin could be getting the stuff direct from the source, as it were.  As time went on I began to be convinced that such directness would be the only way to produce a child.  I felt that my demands for intimacy during the process, my bumbling fingers, my extreme distaste for the semen, my conflicted emotions and thought processes were all contributing to the failure of our endeavor.  Such was the way I maintained a sense of control.  If I couldn’t control success, I could damn well claim credit for failure.

It didn’t get better when Kristin finally got pregnant.  Oh, yes, there was joy.  There was excitement.  There was tenderness and love.  But there was bitterness, too.  I lost my job.  My job was part-time and very flexible – I was able to work from home a great deal.  I had been consoling myself that I wasn’t to be the birthmother by saying that I was still to be the main caregiver.  When the company I worked for folded, I realized that I would have to get a full-time job to be able to make the same amount of money: I was no longer to be the main care-giver.  At that point I felt that the only thing I could offer our family was a paycheck and some emotional support.  But as my job search stretched out longer and longer I lost all sense of value.  Even the paycheck I thought I could give my family was in doubt at this point.  We were keeping our household afloat with my unemployment checks: I was on gov’t assistance. And with that reality I became jealous and bitter.  I was jealous that Kristin was pregnant.  Her pregnancy was a high-risk one and secretly I was certain that if I were the one pregnant everything would be smooth sailing.  Further, I had been hoping to be able to continue my education by getting accepted into the PhD Creative Writing program at the U: after months of being kept in limbo it was finally revealed to me that I had never been waitlisted, my rejection letter had simply never been sent.

As I sank beneath the turbulent and turgid (like this prose) emotions of depression, anger, bitterness, disappointment, worthlessness, and shame I became unable to support Kristin emotionally.  Oh, I tried, but I was too busy concealing all of the emotions I deemed to shameful to share with my partner.  Further, I did not know any other woman in my position.  All the lesbians who were mothers in my acquaintance had given birth to their children, and all of them were separated from their “deadbeat” “worthless” ex-partners.  If their ex-partners had any contact with their children, the bio mothers were hypercritical and resentful of such contact.  I think if I had some one to talk to, some other lesbian who had gotten children the way I was trying to get a child, I would have had a much easier time emotionally.  I needed someone I could reveal these emotions, who would tell me that they weren’t shameful, that they were natural, and not indications that I was unworthy to become a mother or be partnered to a woman about to give birth.

And now, I’m afraid, this post is getting too long.  To be continued…

Announcement!

Tomorrow, Monday November 13, the 2006 Weblog Awards open for nominations!

Mombian, Lesbian Dad and I have been discussing this for a few weeks, and we hope you’ll agree with our thought that it is time for us to REPRESENT in the parenting blog category!

If each one of you nominated your favorite lesbian family blog (or blogs) in the parenting blog section, can you imagine the visibility it would bring to families like ours?

Sure, we’ll be outnumbered, but the diversity and range of parenting blogs will be out there and noticed by a community within the blogosphere that we seldom reach, and who rarely think about us.

And who knows? One of us might even win!

PS - Let’s also nominate in the “best of the rest” categories designed for blogs with smaller readerships. The more visibility, the merrier! :)

Updates

Several of you mommies-to-be are ABOUT TO DROP, but so far, nothing in the blogosphere says that you’ve had the babies yet. GOOD LUCK! The Internet is rooting for you!

Congratulations to Married Lesbian Mom, who is moving from “trying” to “expecting!”

Sad goodbyes — late ones, since I haven’t been good about updating the categories lately — to Baby Krimpet, who has left off TTC. We’re sorry, and we’ll miss you.

Send good thoughts to B at http://www.seekingthestork.blogspot.com/, who’s mom is in the hospital with a 3 cm “mass” in her brain, discovered because of an unrelated trip to the ER for injuring her ankle.