I’ve decided to add a news ticker to my life, using keywords like “lesbian” and “parenting”. This week, I received 85 notices that Jen*ifer Anist*n and C*urtney C*x were going to kiss onscreen. How exciting! *rolls eyes*

Yet I did come across some interesting news links and offer them up for you this weekend in addition to Trista’s great weekend reading.

If you missed it, Mombian posted a story last week from the Mail and Guardian Online that asks, Why are Pregnant Lesbians scary?

Across the pond, government ministers in the UK are moving towards a decision that would make Catholic (and other faith based) adoption agencies comply with a new anti-discrimination law, which would require them to place children with gay and lesbian families.

Again in the UK, My So Called Gay Life reports that 3% of gays and lesbians intend to adopt in the next 5 years.

In response to this ongoing issue in the UK, this story states that adoptions by gays and lesbians seems to have become less of a contentious issue in the US.

As many of you may have already seen, US VP Dick Cheney made a few waves this week, responding (or actually, not responding) to comments about his daughter, her partner and his future grandchild on CNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer (video included).

For those Oprah fans out there, this Monday, January 29th, her show will feature “Extraordinary Families” including a family with two dads.

In Sweden, a proposal has been forwarded that would allow lesbian mothers equal custodial rights to their children conceived outside of the country or in private arrangements (known donors?). Also, a section would be added to the law allowing for children conceived with donor sperm/eggs to have access to the identities of these donors.

In old(ish) news, a second state in Mexico, Coahuila, has extended legal statues to same-sex partnerships.

In Kenya, LGBT folks have been making headlines, demanding rights and thinking about ways to become parents.

Two recent projects by the NCLR (National Centre for Lesbian Rights) have been launched: to support low income LBGT families, and to provide legal education training for lawyers dealing with same-sex parental issues in Florida.

And finally, a story that characterizes how families are being redefined (the two moms in this story are members of a lesbian moms group in our city).

Happy reading!

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 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…