And it’s probably not exactly what you think.
A couple of posts ago, I lamented about how difficult marriage can be, admitting that if we ever decided to have a second baby, I’m not sure our relationship would survive it. The truth is, I was kind of speaking from experience, but I just wasn’t ready to say that, yet.
Sona and I started trying to get pregnant with baby #2 at the beginning of this year. Our first attempt was in February. Below, is the one-day-I-will-post-this-blog-slash-diary-entry that I wrote on my phone about a week before our first insemination, lying next to Sona while she slept, that I planned to post when we got pregnant, which I assumed–naively–would happen rather quickly. We got pregnant with Finn on the second try, after all. I was excited and anxious and hopeful, and I couldn’t sleep because of it all. Now, I read through the damn-near exuberant tone of what I wrote back in February, and it makes me cringe a little.
Here is the box of donor specimen (appreciate the sterility of that language?) that arrived on our doorstep back in February:
Fast forward 8 months, and I’m a little disappointed to report that no, we are still not pregnant. Yes, we are still trying.
Sona and I have thought long and hard about whether or not we want to share this process. Only a handful of people even know that we’ve been trying. Sona had a lot of reservations about spreading the news, mostly do to her own anxiety and internalized doubts about whether or not she will be able to conceive again. I would never push her to share, especially if it added more stress to an already stressful process. As time has gone on, though, I think she’s grown a bit weary. The testing and temping and charting and everything else that goes along with trying to conceive has tired her out, and now she doesn’t really care who knows; she only cares about getting pregnant.
So, I’m going to share our journey, and I have a lot of catching up to do. Let’s start here.
February 18, 2017
Mission: Give Finn a Sibling is a go, y’all.
Today, it feels like shit is getting real. I mean, it’s been real for several weeks, now, as we’ve known that February was going to be the month we pull the trigger for quite some time. (See what I did, there?)
We are trying to plan a second pregnancy around my teaching schedule, which will likely backfire. Still, we’ve conceptualized our preggo plans, working around semester-long chunks of time. So, if we put things off any longer, it’d have to be for another 5 months or so, and Sona’s ovaries ain’t no spring chickens. (Sorry, honey.)
Today, we took our first concrete steps toward bebé deux: First, we got all of our ducks in a row with our sperm bank. All of our forms had expired, and we needed to update a bunch of info, as Sona’s last name has changed, and we’ve moved, since our last order.
I’ll place the order for our little swimmers, tomorrow, and they will be here in 48 hrs. Luckily, Monday is a holiday, and I’ll be home to sign for them. Else, we’d planned to ask our upstairs neighbors whether or not they had any problem signing for a giant “bio material” box stamped “keep frozen.”
There is truly nothing more surreal than paying an exorbitant price to order a Tic-Tac sized vial of sperm that may, if you’re lucky, grow up to sass you and eat you out of house and home, one day. It was a disembodying experience, last time, and it is this time, too.
Second, we continued to deliberate over who exactly would perform the IUI, as we got the delightful news that our OB, who did or last IUI and oversaw our prenatal care, no longer does the procedure.
That news derailed us quite a bit. We felt prepared, had scheduled a pre-preggo appointment and blood work, and then Sona got to the appointment only for our doc to tell her that–for BS liabilities–our whole health system has stopped doing in-office inseminations. AWESOME.
We thought we had it all figured out.
That news came a few weeks ago, and ever since, I’ve reached out to every viable option: midwives, health centers, LGBT organizations, etc. They’ve all been dead-ends, in that the options presented to us involved weeks worth of workshops and consultations and preliminary visits–which we’d already done and which, doing again, would cost us a ton of extra money and set us way off schedule. The Fertility Center of IL seemed like an obvious choice, but a quick phone call revealed that our monthly costs for the procedure itself–excluding $1000 worth of sperm–would be around $2000. We’d paid $400, before. $3000/month to get a well-vetted Tic-Tac squirted inside of you in a procedure that literally takes 45 seconds?
No. That’s not doable for us. And it’s not fair, either. We’ve done this before. We know what to do. We’ve already done blood tests and temping and ovulation tests galore.
As soon as we were starting to get discouraged, a friend I’ve made through online communities mentioned that she and her wife do at-home IUIs.
While we’d always known that a lot of lesbian couples do ICI at home–you know, with the proverbial turkey baster–we hadn’t considered that doing IUI at home might be a possibility, too.
So, of course, I went into data-gathering mode: reading countless forum posts about the process, sourcing supplies, asking other lesbians for a step-by-step guide.
Let’s just say that there aren’t enough images of cervical openings on the interweb. C’mon, folks. Can we get more than a cartoon diagram of a women’s anatomy, please?
Sona wasn’t sold on the idea, but as it has become clear that we have limited options, she started to reconsider it. Tonight, she came home from work with a bag full of things to prick and prod and poke with. I sorted through each of them, mildly horrified. “What am I supposed to do with THIS?!” I asked.
After we put Finn to sleep, we had an exploratory session. That may sound a little sexy, but trust me: it wasn’t.
“I need to be absolutely certain I can find your cervical opening–and access it–before we do this with $1000 worth of sperm,” I insisted.
I won’t tell you every gory detail of the 30 minutes I spent playing OBGYN, but I will tell you the following:
1. Stirrups are useful, as it turns out.
2. I do not know how to work a speculum. What angle it should go in at. How widely it should be opened. I’m sure you can imagine Sona’s excitement at my having to figure all of that out through trial and error.
3. I feel faint when I see a part of the human body that no one should ever see.
4. The cervix has a mind of its own.
The whole ordeal was a comedy of errors. Truly, if Sona had let me video that shit–and I asked–we would already be millionaires.
Truth is, I thought I’d get in there, see a cervical open stretched wide from childbirth, and a blinking neon sign, buzzing “put baby juice in here.”
I didn’t. I caught a glimpse of the opening once, but then it disappeared. Where could it have gone, you ask? I wish I knew.
I knelt on our bedroom floor, flashlight in my mouth, and waffled between laughing hysterically and feeling completely discouraged. I had tears for lots of reasons.
Eventually, we gave up. If roles has been reversed, I wouldn’t have lasted half as long as Sona did. She’s a total beast.
I did a little more reading, and I am determined to go back in, tomorrow. Cervix, you will not defeat me!
Luckily, the wife of a doc Sona works with is an OB. Like, a real one. And she’s offered to help us out, if we need it.
The whole thing has been an unorganized mess. I just don’t feel like we are as prepared as I thought we were–not as prepared as last time. But, then again, Sona reminded me that we got pregnant with Finn about 12 hours before our sperm would have been a week old and no longer viable. We thought we had the timing all wrong, and we ended up with the little boy who has made my life.
So, I’m going to choose to have faith. In us, in a woman’s miraculous body, in the universe, and in my ability to wield a speculum, should we go that route.