There are so many ways to bring a human life into this cursed world and if you’re old and gay, like I am, they’re all extremely expensive and physically draining. But sometimes after 3.5 years, seven IUIs, lots of crying, gallons and gallons of blood drawn from your tender veins, tons of money thrown into an endless abyss, and one major deviation from the original plan — you finally get pregnant. It’s not how you thought it would go. You’re not even the pregnant one! But pregnant someone now is, and shall continue to be.
In this new AF+ column “Baby Steps,” I’ll be sharing the process of this pregnancy from the perspective of me, The One Who Is Not Pregnant. In this first edition we’ll be going back in time to bring you up to speed — how the hell did we get pregnant? We’re at 27 weeks as I write this intro — perhaps a little late to start a pregnancy column but listen, I had anxiety! In future columns I’ll be sharing more about the joys and triumphs and tragedies of the past 27 weeks as well as new joys and dilemmas that occur in real time.
I’m really super eager to hear from all of you, too — your questions, advice, thoughts, concerns and your own personal stories — there aren’t many places where queers are talking to each other about these things and there’s so much to talk about and think about! Let me know if this column topic interests you really let me know anything at all.
Today I’ll be switching back and forth between my narrative of what occurred and a conversation my roommate Gretchen reluctantly agreed to participate in.
I’ve always wanted kids…
This is the only picture I could find where I look like a child who might want to have a child one day but honestly I don’t seem very sure of myself
I don’t know why, but I’ve always wanted kids, it’s one of the only things I’ve ever really been sure of. After years of waiting for the perfect time — when I’d have the financial stability, mental serenity and work/life balance necessary to make it work — I realized the perfect time would never come. Then there was a pandemic, and I was rapidly approaching the end of my fertility window.
So, in July 2021, at the tender age of 39, I told my girlfriend of several months, Gretchen, that I was starting the process of trying to get pregnant. (We’d been best friends for two years prior to dating, jsyk.) Gretchen wasn’t sure if she wanted to have kids. She’d just gotten sober and was processing a lot of life choices and concepts and just generally did not feel ready to commit to doing that with me, which was of course totally reasonable!
Riese: What were your thoughts on human reproduction prior to me declaring my intention to get pregnant?
Gretchen: Well, I’ve always known and dreamt of being a mother. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had my baby dolls, and I thought, “I want to do this for the rest of my life.”
Riese: Did you have baby dolls?
Gretchen: I had dinosaurs.
Riese: So what you’re saying is that before our conversation, you had not thought seriously or whimsically at all about being a parent.
Gretchen: Correct. As a kid, I wasn’t interested in feeding or wheeling a fake baby around. Girls would be like, “do you want to play house?” And I was just like, “I mean—”
Riese: “I already live in a house.”
Gretchen: “Not really.”
Riese: “My mom does that all day, and she’s really unhappy.”
Gretchen: Exactly. So I never had baby dolls, and to be honest, I’ve never really thought about being a parent.
The Process of Getting Pregnant Via IUI
I began my journey in July of 2021 with rapidly mutating start-up Kindbody, a fertility clinic located in Los Angeles’s own Century City Mall. I chose Kindbody ‘cause I could book an appointment online and it took my insurance. It has exactly the vibe and color scheme you’d expect from a fertility clinic hoping to entice downwardly mobile millennial girlboss customers with freezer-ready eggs: pale pinks, creams, yellows and golds; vaguely inspirational framed posters from Target; baskets of Kind Bars, etc.
The first step with Kindbody was an in-clinic new patient consultation to discuss my health and the process. They counted my follicles (fantastic) and took my blood to test my AMH levels (fine). There were more blood tests, a mandatory out-of-pocket “therapy session” about donor sperm, and an optional (out-of-pocket) genetic carrier screening that was definitely not optional. I tested posi for carrying genes for three of the 280+ conditions I was tested for, thus limiting my pool of potential sperm donors to donors who’d been tested for the same things I was tested for. Some donors at the three banks Kindbody worked with — California Cryobank, Fairfax Cryobank and Seattle Sperm Bank — hadn’t been tested for anything at all. Ultimately I had around 20 guys to choose from when it came time to choose.
I ordered two vials ($2.3k) from a donor I chose because he was tall, got good grades, and didn’t have any mental illness or seasonal allergies in his family. (Because I have a lot of both already.)
My First IUI
My AFC numbers were good enough for me to try an IUI round without Clomid (a medication that stimulates egg production), but I did use the HCG shot that triggered the ovaries to release an egg at the right moment for the IUI. Two weeks later — on Valentine’s Day of 2022 — I found out that I was pregnant! And terrified! And so was Gretchen.
My first ultrasound was normal. Gretchen came with me to my eight-week ultrasound and, well…. I wrote about this experience in How to Survive a Miscarriage By Marathoning 168 Episodes of Survivor.
Gretchen: The miscarriage was really interesting for me… which sounds like an insane thing to say!
Riese: “Your miscarriage was really healing for me.”
Gretchen: I think about the moment at the doctor’s office, when they were looking for the heartbeat, and — you know when everything stops, and you’re realizing the worst thing ever is happening to you? They couldn’t find the heartbeat. I basically blacked out, but I remember them handing the wand thing over to another doctor.
Riese: And everyone got really quiet.
Gretchen: That moment was uniquely horrible for you in a way that I’ll never understand because I’ve never had a miscarriage. But for me, who didn’t even know how involved I was going to be, if I even wanted a kid, all of a sudden that moment, that’s all I wanted, is to find a heartbeat.
Then I didn’t walk out of the office thinking, “Oh, yeah. I can’t wait to be pregnant soon,” or, “I can’t wait to be a parent.” But I did think, “Oh, that’s interesting that I felt that way.” I really don’t know how to describe it. It’s just that I had hopes onto this that I didn’t even know that I had.
Riese: In that moment, you realized that you wanted it to work. You were like, “we’ll try again,” which was our first first “we.”
Gretchen: Right. But I was like, “I’ll push that feeling aside.” I still wasn’t sure, I wanted more time to think about if it was what i wanted or not.
Post-Miscarriage: A Lot of Waiting and a Lot Of IUIs
After the D+C in March, I had to wait a few months for my AMH levels to go down to a place where we could try again. Between June 2022 and February 2023, I did five more IUis. I did medicated cycles and my body responded well to the meds, producing so many eggs they worried about multiples. Each cycle cost around $3k for the IUI, sperm and meds. But none of ‘em worked.
In February of 2023, I had another counseling session with Kindbody, and they advised me to switch to IVF, which costs around $30k a cycle, an amount of money that I simply did not have access to. So I left with a lot of pamphlets about loans and a lot of feelings about how cost-prohibitive this whole thing is.
Gretchen Steps Up to Bat
By this point, Gretchen was officially in, and her brother was on board to be a donor so we could both have little bits of ourselves in the mix. So we got an appointment at a really good fertility clinic in June of 2023 — for $30k a cycle we wanted the best doctor in the universe.. We also wanted the doctor to look at Gretchen’s situation to see if she could carry. She had no desire to be pregnant, but we just wanted to see all of our options.
But that summer a bunch of mental health stuff happened with me and we ended up canceling and then delaying the appointment until early 2024. At this point, she was 39 and I was 42 — not a huge age gap overall, but significant years when it comes to fertility. The doctor’s verdict was that if I wanted to carry, IVF was the only option and we had to start immediately. Gretchen, on the other hand, could give IUIs a shot. Ultimately, we made a financial decision to go forward with Gretchen as the carrier.
Gretchen: This still isn’t my ideal scenario, but I knew my chances were better to have a healthy kid. And at the end of the day, that’s what I wanted.
Riese: It was tough because I’d been very attached to the idea of having a genetic relationship to the kid.
Gretchen: Yes, right. Because of your Dad.
Riese: Right, he’s dead and I wanted a piece of him to live on through the child. My brother wasn’t able to be our sperm donor. So that meant there was no way for me to have that. Although I was starting to think — do I really wanna give all of this to a kid? I have like 50 syndromes, multiple mental health issues. I have every skin disease that exists. I mean my seasonal allergies are really bad!
Gretchen: Right.
Riese: But yeah, despite all that — I wanted a little piece of my Dad to live on.
Gretchen: Yeah, and I said, “What about a big piece of me?”
Riese: I decided to settle for you.
Gretchen: That’s what people are doing. They’re settling for me.
Gretchen’s IUI Journey
Gretchen’s insurance is the actual worst (Oxford United Healthcare, for anybody who can commiserate) and basically the only place we could go was…. drumroll… Kindbody! They’d shut down their mall location and moved everyone to Santa Monica. Everyone who worked there was always so incredibly nice but they were also all clearly overbooked. It was chaos.
The genetic test she took wasn’t even the same one I took, but she tested positive for more things than I had, thus eliminating even more potential donors from the pool. But also, the sperm market had gotten really bananas!
Gretchen: Here’s the thing about the old sperm market — sperm is flying off the shelves!
Riese: California Cryobank had doubled the cost of sperm since I’d tried, so now it was over $2k a vial, plus shipping.
Gretchen: You think you’ve picked somebody, then your doctor takes 5 to 20 business days to get back to you about it. During the process, it felt really frustrating to me because straight people just go out there, have sex with whoever, and then they have that baby. And the baby is what the baby is!
Riese: Some of the things that they test you for felt like eugenics to me, like they are deciding for us things that I don’t think are their decisions to make! Like can’t it be up to us if we want to take that “risk” or not? Anyhow — we ended up with like five dudes to choose from. We chose a man who is 6’7′ and was a musician and also athletic.
Gretchen’s first IUI cycle, in February of 2024, didn’t work. She did the first cycle unmedicated, but we decided to maximize our chances by taking Clomid for the second cycle, in April. She got the IUI the week we moved in together. Two weeks later, she got a migraine — generally the sign that her period was around the corner — and she cancelled her follow-up appointment at Kindbody. A few days later, I followed up with Gretchen to ask about the arrival of her period and….
LOL Gretchen’s Pregnant!
this picture is from October 31, 2024 when we got married which is totally out of the timeline for this post but listen it’s what we have so we’re working with it
Riese: And you didn’t tell me!
Gretchen: I got nervous. I hid the pregnancy test.
Riese: Yeah I was like, “So, um, did you get your period?” and you went, “I’m pregnant,” and then you ran into your office.
Gretchen: I didn’t really know how to tell you, as evidenced by the fact I said, “pregnant,” and then ran away. I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked. It’s so funny because you think that only shock happens when you have sex with a random guy at a bar, and then a couple of weeks later, “Oh, shit.” That was the intent, was for me to get pregnant, and I still was shocked.
Riese: After that, we didn’t tell anyone. I tried not to think about it because I was just so, so, so scared that it wasn’t going to last. But then you wouldn’t go to the doctor to get it confirmed!
Gretchen: So here’s the thing. I don’t believe in doctors that much. Okay? I don’t trust them. I think, “Where are you getting this information,” because I can also surf the web.
Riese: They did go to medical school.
Gretchen: Sure. Right, right. Yeah. I did too. It’s called WebMD.
Riese: Oh, you got a PhD in WebMD?
Gretchen: I’m joking. Look, I believe in medicine, science —
Riese: Dinosaurs, the Big Bang.
Gretchen: Yeah. Let’s get on the right level here. I got vaccinated. We’re fine.
Riese: Gretchen just gets a lot of surprise medical bills so she likes to avoid the doctor. But I was really interested in going to the doctor to get a confirmation.
Gretchen: I said, “I have a stick, and it says I’m pregnant. And I don’t have my period. Sounds pregnant to me!”
Riese: That was difficult for me because I’d had a missed miscarriage, when I thought I was still pregnant but the baby had already died inside me. Which I didn’t even know was a thing before it happened to me. So I was so nervous to not have your pregnancy confirmed. I didn’t realize how rare missed miscarriages are though. I just didn’t want to get too excited or invested or tell anybody or anything.
Gretchen: Also we call the baby “banana.”
Riese: Right because you call me a top banana.
Gretchen: No I call you a tall banana.
Riese: Right, so we call the baby “banana.” This is an important thing to know.
Finally at nine weeks, Gretchen made an appointment at Kindbody and we went in to have the pregnancy confirmed. By that point we’d already downloaded the ‘What to Expect” app but did we really know what to expect when we were expecting?
Gretchen: For some reason there were a bunch of people in the office at Kindbody. Everyone piled in, ecstatic.
Riese: Yeah, there were like seven doctors there. I’m like, “Where were you guys when we were calling about this bill?”
Gretchen: They walk in full of joy and we weren’t smiling. We weren’t reacting.
Riese: To them — we were here nine weeks after an IUI and you didn’t have your period so obviously you were pregnant, but they were so confused from the beginning why we weren’t 100% convinced that we were pregnant. They’re like, “So you skipped your two week appointment?”
Gretchen: I said, “Yes, sure. Yes, I did. Thank you so much for asking. I did skip that appointment.” And then they said, “Okay.”
Riese: I was like “Why is everyone excited? They haven’t done the ultrasound yet! Don’t they wanna be sure the kid is still kicking before getting so excited?”
Gretchen: We were both sitting there so solemn, like this was a funeral. They’re doing the ultrasound. They looked. You can see the baby. “It’s a baby.” They’re pointing to it. They’re smiling at me. They’re looking at Riese or smiling at Riese. Waiting for a reaction.
Riese: Finally, you asked, thank God. You were like, “So there’s a heartbeat?” They’re like, “Oh, yeah. Of course.” And I was like, “You could’ve led with that. Why didn’t you tell us that?”
Gretchen: Because no one else is thinking, “My baby may have flat-lined in my stomach.”
Riese: We were relieved. I mean, most of my friends who’ve had kids have also had miscarriages. So I just think there’s miscarriages everywhere, and it’s so common. It was normal for us to be worried.
Gretchen: It was really hard for me to picture a reality where this worked, and it was healthy. I had been fully prepped for everything to be a disaster and had absolutely no response when they were like, “Couldn’t be greater. Looks clear as a bell. It just is perfect.”
Riese: Yeah. So we went to Trader Joe’s and got a treat to celebrate.
Learning To Sacrifice Ourselves For The Child
After that appointment, I told Laneia and she told her best friend Molly but nobody else in the world knew. But our desire to keep it to ourselves for the first 16 weeks met a formidable test very early on.
Gretchen: Okay, I love the movie Twister. It is arguably the best film of all time, and I think Drew would agree—
Riese: I’m sure she would agree, yeah. Positive.
Gretchen: Twister is peak cinema. When I heard there was going to be a sequel, I was ecstatic. When I heard you could see the sequel and wind could blow at you, you could feel the rain literally in 4D on you, I thought I was born to see Twisters 4D in theaters. This was my calling.
Riese: Yeah, for sure.
Gretchen: And we got tickets. I told everybody I knew. It was more exciting than honestly the pregnancy. I was like, “I’m going to see Twisters 4D.” It’s like, “This is everything that I’ve ever imagined and hoped for and dreamed when I was a little kid.” When we talked about what we wanted as little people?
Riese: For you it wasn’t baby dolls and dreaming of motherhood, it was wanting to see Twisters 4D.
Gretchen: Yeah. People want to be mothers. I wanted to see fucking Twisters 4D in cinema. And we got tickets, and my friend, Molly, said to me, because I was bragging to her and everybody I’ve ever met that I’m seeing this, she said, “Are you sure you can go, because you’re pregnant?”
Riese: And then we had to look it up online, and it turned out—
Gretchen: I could not go. Apparently, pregnant women shouldn’t be jostled in the seat.
Riese: It’s absurd. Big Cinema…
Gretchen: So yeah, I had to cancel.
Riese: So then our group chat of our friends were like, “Gretchen, how was Twisters 4D??!” and I was like, “Oh, she had to work late. We ended up not being able to go,” which would never happen. You do always have to work late and miss things because of that, but there’s no way we wouldn’t have bought tickets to go another day if that had happened.
Gretchen: Nothing would have stopped me.
Riese: Nothing would’ve stopped you.
Gretchen: Luckily, they didn’t press on it hard, but that felt like a real moment of dishonesty.
Riese: Yeah, it felt like lying.
Gretchen: Also, one where I truly learned what it is to be a parent, because you have to be selfless. Sometimes, you have to miss the best moment of your life.
Riese: You have to give up on your dreams.
Gretchen: You have to give up on your dreams. Whatever you were dreaming, you have to give that up now.
Riese: Exactly.
Gretchen: You have a kid, and life is hard. You have to stop having wants in your own life.
Riese: You’ll still have wants and your own life when the kid is born!
Gretchen: Right. But I’ll never have Twisters 4D.
Please comment and let me know if there’s anything specific you wanna see in this column or really anything at all! I know comments have been sparse these days but I have a dream maybe we could turn that all around starting here and now! Are you pregnant? Have you ever been pregnant? Have you ever seen a pregnant person or Twisters 4-D? Tell me how you got pregnant! Tell us everything!
EXCITED TO READ ABOUT THIS JOURNEY!!!!!!!!! for real, love super personal and vulnerable writing on queer family-making
thank youuuuuu i am so excited to write super personal and vulnerable writing on queer family-making!
CONGRATULATIONS I CANT BELIEVE YOU DID YODA TALK IN YOUR VERY FIRST QUEER PARENTHOOD COLUMN
we are going to birth a baby yoda actually
riese! you got married! you’re having a baby!! mazel tov!!!
thank you!!!!
genuinely v happy for you. hope your kid will grow up to appreciate that their mamma shaped lesbian history, nbd!
This made me smile!
congratulations!!!!!! this is so wonderful!!!!
thank you!!
Congratulations!! My wife and I have 2 kids (almost-6 and almost-2). I carried both as she never wanted to. I was also always sure my whole life that I wanted kids.
Getting pregnant as a queer couple is a journey for sure. It was so much harder on me than I expected. Our first was conceived on the 6th IUI; our second on the 4th. I thought it would be easier emotionally the second time around but it was not! I also went through 4 sperm donors lol. 2 did not work, the 3rd worked, but then when we went to try for baby #2 his sperm was not sperm-ing anymore, and no one at the bank or clinic had ever had that happen. So our daughters have 2 different donors and we really had to talk through that.
Pregnancy and birth and baby hood are such special times and somehow both very short and feel like an eternity. I’m a little maudlin about my youngest leaving the baby stage to join her big sis in kidland, but our family feels complete and I don’t know if I could go through it all again. Reading about IUIs and cost and anxiety-inducing ultrasounds…it’s worth it but it’s so hard.
Good luck to you both and I am very excited to read this column!
oh man, going through five unsuccessful IUIs must have been emotionally draining but I’m glad it eventually all worked out for you and you’ve got two lovely kiddos! i think when it was all said and done we blazed through maybe 6 sperm donors? they kept advising me and then us to get two vials instead of one but when they doubled the price we were like…. no. but also bc at that point we knew we’d only be having one cuz of our ages, so there wouldn’t be a need for an extra vial if the first one worked. and yes, overall my number one feeling is wow this was so much harder than i expected!!
and also thank you!
also, love that you call the baby “banana” as one of my nicknames for many people is “banana” since my name means it in hindi
what if we just named him banana kayla hansen would that be weird
i would feel spiritually obligated to give him money on every holiday so i think u should do it
YAY!! i’m so excited to read all about the journey to baby banana. hopefully i will able to give all three of you a big hug in person soon!!
thank you and yes!!!!
I appreciated hearing the journey–so many people in my life have done IUI or IVF or both, but there’s so rarely space to talk about it or try to be supportive as they’re going through it bc it’s so scary, especially in the early months. And it’s so often super socially isolating.
Also there’s so much weirdness/unexpected things you end up missing depending on pregnancy timing. Sending all the condolences for missing Twisters 4D.
It is so socially isolating! cuz you don’t wanna talk about it but it’s also all you’re thinking about. i really hope that one day soon we will be able to see Twisters even if we are unable to do so in 4D but gretchen seems to feel that if we’re not doing it in 4D then we may as well not be doing it at all
In the spirit of not missing things just because you’re a mom, could you rent it along with a fan and a super soaker to recreate the 4D without the seat jostling??
i have in fact suggested exactly this and she frowned and said it would not be the same … ☹️ devastating
I’m so excited about this column! My kiddo is 16 months old and the process of conceiving her took two years, what feels like a million IUIs, and a miscarriage but she’s here and she’s wonderful. Becoming a parent and being a parent in a lesbian relationship has felt pretty lonely because we don’t have many other gay parents in our circle, or parents at all for that matter (somehow we both befriended a bunch of straight people who don’t want kids…). So I’m so excited to hear your thoughts and experiences and feel like I’m part of a little queer circle of parents. Thanks for taking us on this journey with you!
i’m so excited too! it’s weird because i have so many friends with babies but almost all of them live far away — within our group of friends here we are the first to have kids. i grew up in such a perfect neighborhood that had like seven other families that also had two kids each, usually one or both were aligned age-wise with me or my brother, and it was so cute! i see parents walking around our neighborhood and am like… firstly trying to see what kind of stroller they have and secondly wondering if they’ll be our friends once we also have a baby in a stroller? but by then their baby will be older than ours….
I hope you can join a PEPS group or a queer PEPS group to guarantee some of those connections RIESE!
oops did not mean to capitalize your name
Oh my gosh, I was peeking in people’s stroller’s constantly. And doing the math of well if their baby is 1 now then they won’t be able to play together right away, but by the time my baby is 3 and their baby is 4 probably they can play together. Ultimately, I’ve reconnected with people that I had worked with/supervised who happened to have a kid right around the time we did, so we’re starting to build a little community of like minded parents. But honestly, most of those people didn’t pop up until I was at least 7 or 8 months pregnant or after our kid was born. So hopefully there are some secret soon to be parents who are also in your slightly tangential circles just waiting for you to talk more about having a baby so they can be like “OMG ME TOO!” My therapist also keeps reminding me that parent friends are easier to make once your kid is walking, talking, and participating in activities. And I think I’m maybe starting to see the very beginning of that? At any rate, wishing you lots of surprise parent friends and excited to read more about your jouney!
Congratulations!! I’m currently 33 weeks pregnant and have been craving this content from Autostraddle
congrats!! <3
Thank you! We are so grateful and excited
eeeee congrats and that’s so similar to where we are! what is your due date??
January 5!!! 💗✨
I’m so happy for you both!!! Very very excited to read this column. I immediately bought an AF subscription because I needed to read this.
I also always knew I wanted to be a mom, since as long as I can remember. My wife was less committed to having kids until she met me. She gave birth to our little one almost a year ago and we both love him (and parenthood) so much.
I’m up next and planning to start trying next month. I’m so scared I won’t be able to get or stay pregnant because I have PCOS, have used a fancy fertility tracker that says I’m not ovulating, and my mom had tons of miscarriages when trying to have a second (I’m an only child). But I know even if I can’t give birth that I’ll still be happy with our family because we have our little one.
As a side note, I just tried to buy the $6/month annual subscription and it wouldn’t go through, so I settled for the $4/month subscription which did go through. Not sure if the issue is on my side or if something’s wrong with your AF link, but want to make sure you’re getting all the money you can because I love Autostraddle <3
Thank yo so muchu!!!! and thank you for joining AF+ to read this!
I hope your journey goes well! I’m glad your wife was able to carry and I hope it goes well for you too — I know it can be so complicated with PCOS, I hope you have a good doctor you can trust and I’m glad you have a little one to keep you warm either way!
(also I told the ppl who run membership now about the $6/$4 thing!)
Well this is perfectly timed, as I’ve been undergoing IVF and my egg retrieval was this past Saturday (I wore a “Future MILF” shirt to the procedure). Clomid is no joke. I was supposed to take it for a week but my body lasted 36 hours before I got my period early. The roller coaster of emotions in those 36 hours, oof.
The whole thing is so weird and I can’t wrap my head around it, so I’ve started phrasing it in language that fits the disorientation: the surgical removal of my eggs that were fertilized with anonymous sperm I bought on the internet second-hand from a lesbian couple. I don’t believe life starts at conception, but it’s literally conception…the chromosomes/DNA/genes/whatever are set. What do you do on Sundays? I saw the Wicked movie, and my future children were conceived.
I learned I carry zero of the billion things in the genetic screening, but my AMH sucks (I’m just shy of 35 and have the AMH of a 43 year-old). Also my insurance company surprisingly covered this $20k+ ordeal in full; I have paid max $500 in copays plus the thrifted sperm (much less than list price). IT’S NEVER NOT WEIRD.
I’ll find out soon how many of these embryos have blasted off (blastocyst stage).
P.S. Did you mean to call Gretchen your roommate? “Today I’ll be switching back and forth between my narrative of what occurred and a conversation my roommate Gretchen reluctantly agreed to participate in.”
Good luck for the embryo wait! I hope the pain isn’t too bad. It’s weird how you can actually feel the egg sacks inside you. (Like having grapes in your ovaries is one description that resonated for me). The pain continued for a few days for me (mild OHS which is totally common) and the hormonal impact for a while after that.
ROFL on the Sunday description. You’re not even there for the big event! In our case I believe it happened in a basement while we had lunch in a nice restaurant.
I just looked up the size of a grape in MM, and it’s roughly 25. As someone who has zero concept of the metric system and also of size apparently, I thought my 25 mm follicles were basically the size of eggs because they were so heavy. LOL those fuckers were grape size. Haaaaa! To be fair I used to have a 3 CM cyst, which is the size of a large egg. I guess if I had multiple follicles that were 3 cm each, my ovaries would explode.
Sometimes it felt like they might, but thankfully, that did not happen! They held that small bunch of grapes really well.
that is so good about your insurance company! i think more and more insurers are starting to cover it — my ex and her wife actually had two babies through reverse IVF, all covered by insurance. i hope you get good news about your embryos!! what was weird with me and clomid was that i became insane like a week AFTER taking it, which i couldn’t find anything out there about it but my therapist said the same thing happened to her. i also would just get super achey.
p.p.s. yes i thought it would be funny to cal her my roommate even though she is my wife eeeeeeee
I joke around that the reason my insurance covers it is because it’s through my university (I’m a full-time grad student), and most 18-22 year-olds aren’t doing fertility treatment, so it’s not something they need to cover regularly. Faculty and staff have a completely different insurance company, which I don’t think covers any fertility treatment. I didn’t need prior authorization, I just had to be considered as having infertility, which I was because I have PCOS. My insurance plan’s massive booklet that says everything they cover actually said fertility was not covered, and I called the insurance company to confirm, which they did, so I was very surprised to hear it was covered.
I went straight from clomid to stim meds, and my emotions regulated basically the moment I stopped taking the clomid. I wasn’t feeling side effects of the stim meds until the very end, but I think that was less from the meds themself and more from these massive follicles in my ovaries. I was so bloated and was generally feeling “blah”. I got a massage the day after my egg retrieval, which was an incredible idea because my body was so exhausted from the whole process.
It is sadly not covered in the UK. But then also sounds cheaper* overall so maybe we win there.
They should REALLY tell you about the going crazy due to hormones
*not in any way cheap. I paid a lot of money for my wife to stab me twice daily
My wife and I have a 3 year old (I carried and got pregnant through IUI with a sperm bank donor.) Having a kid is wonderful and wild and you’ll never forget how much you wanted it and how hard you tried for it. I told a knock knock fart joke at dinner and our kid laughed so hard that he couldn’t talk for 5 minutes straight and it was maybe the best moment of my life. And stuff like that happens all the time! Enjoy and a massive congratulations.
Eeee thank you I am so excited for the wild wonder!
Riese and Gretchen I am so happy for you! It is shocking how hard and expensive it’s can all be to make happen, but my gosh is it the best. I feel like the Grinch because my heart has grown so much, in ways I never expected since becoming a parent.
i am v excited for HEART GROWTH
Congratulations! And thank you for doing this series at the precise moment my wife and I have been talking about our need for lesbian mum representation, after the previous 15 years where I have been annoyed that every gay film was lesbians having babies (none of these seem to still be available on streaming except for the Kids are Alright, which I am not counting). Autostraddle, as always, for the win. (Riese pun intended).
We’re doing reciprocal IVF, so our embryos are frozen and we’re counting down to our first attempt. No one prepared me for the massive impact the hormones had on me, I will definitely try to be very sympathetic to my wife if/hopefully when she’s pregnant. I felt a level of out of control that the worst PMT (PMS) did not prepare me for. Adding this to the comment in the hopes that someone else is better prepared as a result.
I’d love to hear more about Gretchen’s journey from not wanting to be a parent to being one and Reise your feelings on being the non-gestational parent. I bought a couple of “other mother” books and they were NOT reassuring. It was all “my kid really likes me wife more than me” or in one case “my kid said ‘I wish you were dead'”. Positive stories please!
Just chiming in to say I’m the non-gestational parent and also read those Other Mother books lol. Baby is 2.5 weeks old and I just wanted to say I LOVE this baby and all my worries have just… kind of faded away? It’s not dramatic, it’s just like, it doesn’t matter any more. They’re my kid and I’m their mom and that’s kinda that! So I hope you have a similar experience and best of luck with the crazy process!
Oh yay, thank you! That’s really great to hear.
And mega congratulations.
this is really great to hear!!
ok so re: non-gestational parenthood….. i saw this really cute video of melissa etheridge talking about her kiddos (since she’s never been the one to carry, i think it was julie and then tammy lynn) that made me cry that i showed to gretchen right away that made me feel so much better about being a non-gestational parent (and so did all of the comments!).
This is lovely, thank you for sharing. You are much cooler than me, being on TikTok! I embraced my geriatric millennial-ness in that regard.
haha i’m definitely not a cool geriatric millennial — it’s actually just really hard to have the job i have and not have tiktok, since there’s so much discourse and news (especially sports and celebrity stuff) on the app, and to keep on top of what people are doing on social in general since we have that arm although i don’t control it. it is probably breaking my brain though, like it’s very hard to stop scrolling! i should probably delete it when i’m on family leave…..
I carried our kid but my wife has described feelings similar to what Kat said below. Once our kid was here she stopped worrying about loving her because of course she did because she’s our kid. And while there are definitely days that she prefers me, there are also times that all she wants is her Momo. Watching the two of them together is one of the great joys of my life. (Also a lot of the other mother books we bought were also OLD. So maybe look at when they were published and take their stories with a grain of salt given the potentially different historical context?)
This is extremely reassuring, thank you. The classic “other mother” book is definitely old so a shovelful of salt was taken, but the other was much more recent so the fear fully took root! Interestingly I haven’t seen much out there about reciprocal IVF and whether that plays any part, so I guess I’ll report back if we’re lucky enough to have a baby as a result of it.
If you are taking suggestions for future articles in this column, I’d love one about sperm donors. I’ve been feeling this weird parasocial connection to my anonymous sperm donor. I think part of that is because I’m single (fairly recently), so I’m not doing this with a partner, and also because there are no humans yet & it’s very abstract… but this random dude and I have combined our DNA to make pre-babies. I’m one of the people who knew instantly & instinctively the moment I saw his profile, and the process was a little weird because there was low stock, and then no stock, and I ended up buying vials from a woman on the cryobank forum who had ‘leftovers.’ I hadn’t even confirmed the donor with my doctor, but the woman was getting other offers, and my gut said he was the one…plus the woman selling is also a lesbian in my city, and she and I have the same niche profession… the whole thing felt beshert. I did one of those AI baby generators when I was losing my mind the night before my retrieval, and these AI children are very cute, if I may say so myself.
Maia Midwifery, a queer midwife group in Seattle, has a solo conception conversation group that meets once a month in case you want other solo folks to talk to! The signup link is on their website.
Oh Riese, I know don’t know you but I’ve read AS for a long time and I’m so so so happy for you! <3
Thank you!!!!
Riese!!!! Longtime reader, I am so excited for you! We have a 2.5 week old baby and it is truly. The best thing. I’m not someone who has always longed for kids but I am just absolutely obsessed with this incredible creature and I am so excited I get to be their parent for the rest of our lives! It is so weird and so awesome!
I also wanted to say that we also unwittingly stumbled into the Byzantine nightmare that is Kindbody and though we did end up with a child, the process of trying to navigate their system was one of the worst things that has ever happened to me. Like way way worse than trying to actually get pregnant. It caused so many tears and so much frustration. When you posted that article about them months ago, I was like I AM VINDICATED it’s not just me. So I’m sorry you had to go through that! But I’m very excited you’re done with them and gonna have a baby <3
Thank you so much!!! and congratulations on your baby!!!
yes that article was the most comforting thing i’d ever read ’cause we didn’t know anybody who’d used them so we felt insane… billing obviously was a nightmare but even how they handled the appointment scheduling for the D+C was maddening. the communications portal…. all the delays…. when we switched from me to gretchen they made us go through all the same out-of-pocket appointments all over again before she was allowed to do a cycle. i did actually like all of the doctors and most of the nurses there when i saw them in-person (i think my blood-draw lady is one of my favorite health care providers of all time), but man, the system itself was such a mess.
it really felt like a miracle that we actually succeeded in making a baby out of all that!
So happy for you both! And also commiserating over missed experiences. My wife carried our first kid. I, like Gretchen, never planned or cared to carry. But once I got on board for a second and realized I had the potential to experience a much healthier pregnancy than my wife (hg then preeclampsia), it felt like the right move. I’m 15 weeks today! I love hearing the heartbeat but hate pretty much everything else lol (as expected). It’s a means to an end and I’m looking forward to the lil squish at the end.
Ahhh congrats!!!!
I have been waiting for another baby column ever since Queer Mama! The details about donor selection and what kinds of plans you’re making for your home, relationship, lives, etc are so welcome. Also it’s cool to hear about the ambivalence of it all and how you and G are conceptualizing the pros and cons of going ahead with this and changing your lives (and how it is involving or affecting your friends).
noted re: topcis!!! and ahhhh queer mama was so good i actually had gone back and started reading them again and was like hmmm maybe i should write one! still can’t believe there was a moment in time when she allowed autostraddle readers to help name her child, truly a landmark moment in autostraddle history.
Incredible news! Congratulations on the wedding and the bebe!!! I’m so very happy for you!
I will read your future columns with great interest! My gf is currently pregnant (22 weeks) as a surrogate for these lovely two gay dudes… so it’s been a weird and wild time for me as a semi-unrelated third-party to all of it. What am I? A step-uncle? What do I do during the birth? I guess I’ll find out in a few months!
ALICE ALICE!!!!!!! thank you and wow that is such a lovely thing that your girlfriend is doing and also so exciting! i know you will be a great step-uncle or any other title that you have yet to discover
Congratulations! I have a 16 month old conceived via RIVF (my wife’s egg, donor sperm, my uterus) which is incredible! It took us 14 months, 6 IUIs, 3 egg retrievals, 4 FET (frozen embryo transfers), one chemical pregnancy, and then our sweet baby! We are currently in the process of trying for another, this time with my wife being the incubator.
I love this column, it’s so nice to hear about other people in my community and how they to about having kids of their own etc. Please tell us everything you and your wife are comfortable sharing!!
thank you and congratulations (and best of luck!!) to you!!
Congratulations!!! I want to be a Cool Aunt rather than have kids myself, but that means someone’s gotta have the kids! So happy for you guys!!
thank youuuuuu katieee
AWWW CONGRATS !!!! This is so exciting !!! I’m really very excited for this column !!!
I’m 19 weeks through reciprocal IVF using a sperm bank donor! I work as a nurse at the same hospital system where we did the fertility treatments so my insurance was super awesome (since they’re basically paying themselves lol it almost completely covered retrievals and embryo freezing for both my spouse and me + 2 transfers, the first of which worked)! I’m the first of all my friends/cousins etc to get pregnant so it sometimes feels a bit lonely although trying to find as much community as possible, especially with other queer parents & families.
Check out LGBT Mummies online for a small virtual community, and the Queer Family Podcast. From a probability perspective I’d assume you’re not from the UK, but over here there are lots of IRL/virtual queer family childcare and childbirth classes which promise to create a queer community, possibly there is stuff over there too.
And also, congratulations!!!
Congratulations!! I’m on this journey right now and have been for the last few years. I appreciate your honesty so much and your accurate descriptions of the insurance induced limitations and the nightmarish/borderline eugenist hoops along the way
About a hundred years ago in 2008, I conceived via IUI with an anonymous donor via a clinic. Clomid, HCG injection to trigger ovulation, interstate travel because fertility support for unmarried people was still illegal in Victoria (this was fixed a few years later).
My twins are now 16 years old!
I left their other mum in late 2019, so I’m a single mum of teenagers. Not the path I’d envisioned, but pretty much nothing about being a mum is in my control.
So excited to read more! Also the cost issues are real. My wife and I couldn’t afford any of the fertility treatments for years so we went down a truly unexpected journey fostering for 8 years and are finally on a path to adopt our two boys after having many shorter term queer teenagers. Ironically we finally got thrifted embryos this year and also got better insurance. Really wish there was more reliable information about the whole fertility healthcare system. Congratulations 🎊