We’ve received a lot of supremely kind and generous feedback since we’ve started sharing our attempts to conceive baby number two. It means a lot that so many folks have expressed their well wishes, crossed their fingers, or–in many cases–shared their own stories, which are at once very different and eerily similar. Through these conversations, there are a few questions that keep coming up. So, I thought I’d take some time to answer them. Here it goes.

Is Sona pregnant, yet?

I get the impression that some folks assume this blog series is like a serial podcast–one with a predetermined end that has already been established but not yet revealed to the audience. I wish that were the case.

Hopefully, eventually, this will culminate in a pregnancy–and a healthy bambino. For now, though, I can tell you that, even though I’m going back to catch everyone up on the past several months, we are–as I said in my first post–still trying to conceive. If you follow us on Instagram, you know that we share a lot via InstaStory. You probably also know that we did an insemination 9 days ago. (We went InstaStory-crazy that night and shared a lot of info.) In hindsight, we think we likely got the timing wrong by a day, but we will test for pregnancy at 14 DPO (days past ovulation) and keep you posted on the results.

As of right this second, there is a tiny chance that Sona is pregnant, but we aren’t very hopeful.

How does all of this lesbian baby-making stuff work, anyway?

Okay, so few people have phrased the question quite that way, but the majority of responses and/or questions we’ve received have made it quite clear that folks don’t really understand how: 1. conception happens, generally and 2. the options available to lesbians TTC.

We have tackled both of those things via InstaStory, but I’ll review.

First, it is important to understand the difference between ICI and IUI. This has been a great source of confusion among folks, even other lesbians. (Hell, it was all a great source of confusion to us when we first started this process. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this blog. But more on that, later.)

So, ICI is intracervical insemination. It is the closest to sexual intercourse, as the sperm is placed into the vaginal canal, close to the cervix. The hope is, of course, that the strong swimmers make their way through the cervical opening and into the uterus.

IUI, intrauterine insemination, actually places the sperm directly into the reproductive tract by going through the cervical opening and near the uterus. The chances of pregnancy are slightly higher with IUI, as you’re already getting the little swimmers through the first door, if you will. But this is also considered a medical procedure. It can be difficult to get through the cervical opening, and it could potentially introduce bacteria into the cervix. IUIs are typically performed in-office by medical professionals; ICIs are typically performed at home.

Also, the sperm you use must be specific to the procedure you are doing. IUI sperm is washed and free of all ejaculate fluid (I hope I never have to say that phrase again), as that can cause an infection inside of the cervix.

So, that’s your sperm education for the day.

Essentially, when lesbians decide that they want to have a biological child (i.e. not adopt), these are the options:

1. Go with a known donor. Do an ICI with fresh sperm.
2. Go with a known donor. Have sperm washed. Do an IUI with fresh sperm.
3. Go with a sperm bank. Order either ICI or IUI-specific sperm. Do corresponding procedure.
4. Do a procedure called reciprocal IVF. Harvest egg from mom #1. Fertilize egg. Implant in mom #2.

Because we didn’t want to know our donor and because we couldn’t afford reciprocal IVF (which I’m not actually sure we’d care to do, anyway), we chose option #3. Because there is a slightly higher chance of pregnancy with IUI, we decided to go that route.

Let’s look at a nice little infographic that gives some good stats about IUI, including the small chance of success each cycle and the high cost.

The low success rates per cycle (our docs said expect it to take at least 5-6 for a healthy and fertile woman) is almost entirely due to errors in timing. Timing is EVERYTHING with IUI, and it is what drives those of us who are TTC mad.

I’m not going to go too much into this, but here is my short–and rather unscientific–explanation. Frozen sperm is only viable for a maximum of 24 hours, but a lot of studies indicate that viability rapidly decreases after 12. A woman’s egg can only live 12-24 hours after ovulation, but the older you get, the shorter that window. There’s a good chance Sona’s egg needs to be fertilized within the first 12 hours.

Are you doing the math? That means that we have to have the 12-hour peak of sperm viability overlap with the 12-hour window in which Sona’s egg is happy and healthy. TWELVE HOURS.

This is why women take their daily temperatures and check the consistency of cervical fluid and pay attention to all signs of whether or not their bodies are ovulating. There are ovulation tests that predict when your LH surges, and that generally indicates that ovulation will occur with in 12-36 hours. However, do you see that even that window is too wide? Even within that, there is so much room for error.

To complicate things further, we believe that Sona is ovulating either BEFORE the tests indicate an LH surge (maybe her levels are low?) or very soon after. If she’s not testing 5 times a day, it is potentially very easy for us to miss when we window is. And we don’t think we’ve been able to nail it down, yet.

Fresh sperm can live for up to FIVE DAYS inside of a woman. (Start charging rent for that shit, ladies.) So, that’s why women are much, much more likely to get pregnant if they use a known donor and a fresh, never-frozen specimen. Their window is huge compared to those of us doing IUI with frozen sperm.  12 hours vs. 5 days.

Why are you sharing such personal information on this blog?

This is the one people have been afraid to ask, but I know a lot of folks are thinking it–even close family and friends. The varying levels of discomfort with our sharing our story are evident.

I started this blog, initially, for three reasons: First, I want Finn to have a recorded history of his life. I want him to know our journey, and I know that–at some point that’s closer than I’d like to admit–we will want to relive these memories, ourselves.

Second, I am a writer. I love stories. I believe in the power of stories. It is in my soul. I have been writing since I was a kid. I majored in English in college. I studied Poetry in graduate school. I am an English professor, now. Whether through fiction or poems or photographs or blog posts, I have always told stories. It is how I process the world. It is how I cope. It is the thing most dear to me in the world.

Lastly, as I’ve already alluded to several times, the stories I read on the internet–stories about families, blogs about motherhood, about trying to conceive–are almost always from the perspective of white, upper-class, mostly Mormon (right, tho?), hetero-normative couples. There are some stories that aren’t being told, and I want our own to help fill that void. I want to normalize our kind of family for everyone who doesn’t understand what it means to be a two-mom household, and I want to give other families like us the chance to see themselves represented. When we first started this process, I desperately sought that, and it was hard to find.

And now, I have a new, albeit lofty, goal: I want to demystify the conception process for same-sex, mainly lesbian, couples. I don’t want women to have to spend hours and hours doing online research, only to get half-true answers on discussion forums. Sona and I were so ignorant when this all started. We couldn’t find the answers we were looking for easily, but now we know a lot about the process. Often, we know more than the medical professionals who have helped us. That’s empowering, but it is also discouraging. We’ve learned to advocate for ourselves and for our family, and we want other same-sex couples to feel like they have the tools to do the same.

Last week, I let you all in on a secret: we have started trying to conceive (TTC) baby #2.

(This photo is actually from the day we got pregnant with Finn.)

This is the second in what I imagine will be a long series of posts (though, hopefully not TOO long) about this journey.

In that last post, I mentioned that we have been TTC since this past February. That was both true and not true. Let me explain.

Around the holidays last year, Sona and I began seriously talking about baby #2, which we always knew was going to be part of our future. So, the conversations were never “Should we have another baby?” They were more “When should be begin this process, again?”

(Okay, sometimes when life was particularly rocky, as I’ve alluded to before, the conversations were about whether or not we should have another baby. But mostly, they were always about when.)

Since Sona was 35 at the time–36, now–we knew that the longer we waited, the harder it would be. We’ve also always been motivated to start sooner rather than later because of two other factors: 1. We want Finn to have a sibling who is relatively close to him in age–a playmate. 2. We want the baby/toddler years to be over ASAP. Neither of us are particularly interested in drawing out that misery. I mean bliss. (I mean misery.)

We also have always planned our attempts to conceive around my school schedule. I’m the one who has the opportunity to take the longest maternity leave, but that leave needs to be aligned with my academic semesters. If Sona has a baby mid-semester, I have no choice but to take off the full semester, should I want to be home, and I’d essentially waste 2-3 months of maternity time. I want to maximize the amount of time I get off with our second baby; I had 6 months at home with Finn, and those were some of the best months of my life.

So, our goal is to try to time it where the baby comes in either May or December, allowing me to have as much time off as possible (1 full semester + the 3 summer months). Of course, the universe has other plans.

Last fall, Sona started charting, tracking her morning temperatures, her ovulation cycles, and a range of other symptoms, prepping for an early-2017 IUI. We were all set to go when we found out that the doctor who did our last inseminations–when we got preggo with Finn–no longer performs the procedure. I talked about this, already.

When  I ended my last post, I might have given the impression that we were going to try doing IUIs at home. Well, we were, and then we quickly realized that it was going to be a very bad idea. I had NO idea what I was doing. I ordered a random assortment of “supplies” from Amazon, including pipettes that ended up being for HORSE INSEMINATIONS. Horses, people. Those things wouldn’t have fit in Sona’s mouth, let alone her cervix. We had to find a pro, and a pro I was not.

We scrambled to find someone else, went with a recommendation, and ended up going to a posh OBGYN practice in the ‘burbs. The doctor was nice, but his hours were really inflexible. Sona can’t quit her job to get pregnant. We also can’t chance missing her ovulation window because our doctor has limited hours. It just wasn’t ideal, but any other options we explored (women clinics, LGBTQ clinics) were going to take too long to get us in, and we were only two weeks away from what we hoped would be our first insemination.

So, we went with it. We did our first insemination in February with one vial of sperm. Finn came with us, and we were all together for that first appointment. We were hopeful.

As you’ve probably gleaned, Sona didn’t get pregnant that first time. She takes each negative pregnancy test pretty hard, despite the science-minded part of her knowing that chances are relatively slim each time. Still, each month wears on us.

At about that same time, our marriage wasn’t great. To be honest, I can’t even remember what the problem was, I just know that we were not in a good place. Like, I think it was one of the darkest periods we’ve experienced in our relationship. Finn was working through chronic ear infections. Teething was awful. We had all just had a two-week long run-in with the Norovirus. And the stress of TTC–and all of the disorganized chaos that accompanied it–really didn’t help. We were struggling big time.

Still, we pushed forward, and we decided to try again in March. Sona wanted to get an ultrasound to help us better predict ovulation for that month, which the office offered to do. (I should say this: as great of a practice as they were, they were pretty clueless about guiding us through this process. That has been the case for every single doctor we’ve interacted with. We’ve been the ones taking the reigns, suggesting care plans, proactively advocating for what we needed.)

Just in case she was ovulating soon, she took the tank of sperm into the office for her ultrasound appointment, although we knew she was likely 4-5 days away from her window. She got checked in. Put the sperm in the office. Went to the ultrasound room. Found out that she was 3-4 days away from ovulating. Came back. And, to her horror, saw that the nurse had taken the sperm out of the tank and thawed it while she was gone. $1200 (sperm + doctor visits) down the drain. Her heart sank.

Of course, at that point, she had no choice: she had to do an IUI right then and there. So, she did. The doctor apologized. Said it was still possible that she’d get pregnant. But we knew she wouldn’t. The window is already SO slim, and the insemination was about 4 days too early. The sperm would be dead before her body even thought of releasing the egg.

It was a tough blow. It compounded the stress and anxiety we already felt, and it made us question whether or not we were doing the right thing. It added weight onto our already heavy marriage. So, when she didn’t get pregnant, which we knew was likely, we decided to stop. All signs seemed to point in the same direction; the universe was telling us that it wasn’t the right time. We listened.

A week later, we  traveled to Italy together, leaving Finn at home with my parents, and it revived us in a lot of ways. We tried to make lemonade (limoncello?) out of lemons, and we relished in the fact that Sona could eat all of the cured meat, soft cheese, and drink all of the bubbly that she wanted.

We tabled the baby-making conversation for several months, although Sona kept tracking. Since we were trying to stick to the whole time-it-with-Danielle’s-academic-semesters thing, stopping meant that we had to wait a full 4-5 months before we started to try again. Honestly, it relieved a lot of stress–stress on Sona, stress on our marriage, financial stress. It gave us a chance to re-group.

In August, we started trying again. More about that, later.

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.