We are Hovering

around what would have been the due date of our first child.

Last Christmas, E and I were spending the holidays with my family in Country House outside of Small Town inside of Large Midwestern State. Let's call it Monotony.

E had done her 5th IUI, medicated, a few weeks prior. She had gotten her period a few days before we left, and the disappointment was threatening to suffocate the few days we had off for the holidays.

Christmas was celebrated with the family, who were bouyant and compassionate about our repeated failures to get pregnant. They consoled E and engaged in much frank discussion about the trials she had endured thus far to get pregnant. Which was good, because I had grown surly with the perpetual talk of frozen sperm and anonymous donors and injectables and the whole damned medicalized process.

Frequently, when I woke and stumbled to the kitchen for coffee, I would find E and my mother quickly hushing their conversation and rather loudly discussing the weather or the dogs. I'd scowl and march off.

At this point on our path to parenthood, I was rather ambivalent about the whole baby thing. Moreover, I was almost wholly uninvolved. Our initial plans to do home inseminations with a known donor did not work out. Having been initially quite determined to make it happen naturally, we were disheartened to have to find an RE, and the news that E had high FSH was an even bigger blow. We gave up the notion of making it ourselves, and started medicated cycles. My job prevented me from attending E's frequent doctor appointments, and trying to conceive was nearly the only thing she talked about. I was feeling more and more peripheral to the process.

That, in a recap, is where we were when it happened.

A couple of days before our holiday vacation ended, we were milling about aimlessly in Monotony. E popped into Depressing Drugstore for some Advil before we drove back to Country House.

Later that afternoon, E approached me, wild-eyed, and asked that I accompany her to the bathroom. There on the counter lay a stick, with two very dark blue lines. What she thought was her period was actually implantation bleeding.

"I'm pregnant!"

This was the first time in her life she had ever been pregnant, and she was lit and shining with the thrill and the terror of it.

And there it was, for a long and wild 6 weeks. I was alternately sick with apprehension and filled with a a soft, warm, spreading happiness. What a ride it was.

Our first ultrasound showed a little sac, the fetal pole just a bit small for what it should have been at that point. Just a bit.

The second appointment was the biggie, The One When You See The Heartbeat. E was nervous, but oh, we had hope. It had only been a bit small.

When we got there, E clutched my hand, glowing as she had been for weeks. I looked at her - she was pregnant, without question. The physical manifestations were there: she often had a faint sheen on her face (sweat from the persistent nausea), and her belly felt hard. She had changed shape somehow over the last few weeks, although obviously what was there was not big enough to show. Maybe it was just her happiness.

I squeezed her hand and felt only blind optimism.

It took a while for the doctor to do the ultrasound. He kept moving the wand, and there was what felt like a deafening silence.

There wasn't a heartbeat.

E folded in on herself when the doctor left the room, and I wrapped her up and took her home.

Her body clung to that little fetal pole for three weeks. We refused the D&C, and instead she took one tiny pill on a Friday night, and we holed up for the weekend. We called it our Miscarriage Party. I rolled a joint, and we took the dog for walks.

And we loved eachother endlessly.

Congratulations...It's a Gay!

So the little social science community is all a-flutter as of late, what with the scandalous Dr. Bailey being semi-exonerated by an ethics scholar who just published a paper about him and the controversy surrounding his work.

For those unfamiliar with Dr. Bailey's "science," he wrote a book a few years back in which he hypothesized that (I'm summarizing, here) transgender women are actually just male cross-dressing fetishists, motivated to change their sex by the sexual arousal they feel when perceived as women.

So, whatever your thoughts are on that asinine theory, Dr. Bailey also expounds the belief that sexual orientation is genetic (stay with me here), and, once the gay-gene is isolated, parents' determination of their fetus' sexual orientation and subsequent selective abortion based on the results of that test is "morally responsible."

Let's be clear here. We're talking about an educated white straight man who has made a name for himself by categorizing trans and gay people essentially as "genetic mistakes." Talk about exploiting those a wee-tad bit lower on the political-clout totem pole.

What a douche-bag. I feel like calling him up and telling him that, given the choice, most gays would stay gay. I know I would. I'm not one of those lesbians who snub other lesbians because "my orientation is the least interesting thing about me." I'm just not interesting enough to feel that way, I guess.

But also I think sexual orientation is pretty deep. It informs nearly every part of my life, down to the most widely-experienced life events: making friends, buying a coop, interviewing for a job. Having a baby.

I look forward, with great interest, to confusing the shit out of people who will doubtlessly question the origin of our child (for this will surely happen, even in enlightened NYC).

It's pretty freaking interesting, watching the world react to gay people.

Anyway, the Dr. Bailey scandal made me think of the whole infertility thing again. Part of why I feel so connected to the world of infertile people (even though I'm sort of reluctant to become a parent in lots of ways) is that people who struggle so hard for a child are more likely to love that child no matter its orientation.

Imagine a poor infertile woman busting her ass to get pregnant finally becomes pregnant and takes Bailey's gay-gene test only to discover her long-awaited fetus is, lo, a 'mo.

If she's a homophobe, she may grit her teeth, sock money away for ex-gay camp, and line up Billy Graham himself to christen the wee baby, but she sure as shit isn't aborting.

And my guess is she'd probably love that baby anyways. Because we infertiles have a lot of fucking love to give.

On the Road Again, or, My Blog is My Toilet

Thus far, I've used my blog primarily as a place to bitch and moan about various items of minimal interest to anyone aside from myself. I'm cutting myself a little slack, since it's brand spanking new, but I do feel the need to clarify its purpose a little.

When E and I decided to go the "let's split this baby down the middle, shall we" route, I poked around the net for others who've done the same, but didn't find much. I did, however, find loads of people blogging about their IVF experiences, which was enormously helpful, and especially consoling after our first go didn't work and we were struggling.

So I thought I'd try it out - to talk about the experience of IVF, in particular the experience of sharing the IVF-related responsibilities with my partner E. Initially I had lofty goals of creating a resource for other lesbian couples going this route, but it quickly became clear that I would instead be regularly abusing my readers with verbal diarreah of the bitter variety.

And that's okay too.

Because what other bloggers have taught me is that infertility (whether due to troublesome reproductive organs or the general sameness of your partner's sex) sucks a whole lot and so does IVF.

Infertility kicks the shit out of you and leaves you doubled over on the sidewalk, crying like a ninny. Then IVF steps over you, walks over to your car and takes a dump on the hood.


E and I have been married for four years tomorrow. Which is astonishing, since I feel sometimes like I am just beginning to know her, a feeling this ordeal has intensified. We laugh a ridiculous proportion of our time together, hysterically; we are mirrors of eachother's twisted and juvenile sense of humor. We cannot ever seem to get enough of the other, despite being tired, overworked people.

And o, our love for eachother. It's fierce. That our love is incapable of creating our family is profoundly unfair. Just as it is for so many infertile people.


So there's stuff to bitch about, in other words. Reading others' stories of their experiences makes this whole bumpy-ass ride less desolate and the disappointments less devastating.

And frankly, it just feels good to know that we're not the only ones with busted lips and shitty hoods.

So the time has come. Today our second IVF cycle begins.

We met with our doctor today (wait time: 3 minutes - i heart him) for my day 2 ultrasound (time spent with dildocam: <1 minute - i heart him so much) and bloodwork (satanic phlebotomist scrubbed my arm with steel wool then poked my vein with her pitchfork: i will seek my revenge with holy water).

We next met with the Protocol Nurse who is also Adorable and who Loves Us Very Much, and she informed us that E would be on Lupron this time, not me, which I think is best for all involved (although I admit I am slightly evil because I hope E experiences a taste of the ferocious Lupron-induced crankiness).

So, I'm doing my best to be hopeful and positive in the face of the barrage of drugs and dildocam appointments and blood tests that lay ahead.

But ambivalence spreads its wings right in my chest when I remember all we put ourselves through last time, for nothing.

But what the fuck else are you going to do? You get to your feet, wipe the shit off your car with a bit of newspaper from the curb, and then you stab yourself in the gut with your Gonal F pen.