Two Women and a Baby

It's a daunting thing to accept when you realize you're a lesbian that having children may have well been either put on hold or taken completely off the table. That's what I thought at least. My girlfriend and I had been together for seven years when we decided it was time to expand our family. We looked around online at our options, and holy heck, we were out of our league. The prices seemed outrageous. What two heterosexual people, medical reasons aside, can typically do for free, or at least keep making attempts, would cost us an arm and a leg. We gave up hope for awhile that this would ever happen for us.

Not too much later we learned of something called a "known donor." This is a donor that is not anonymous to you versus it being a stranger's sperm bought from a sperm bank. We started looking around and came up empty handed in our search. It was disheartening to say the least. It's a weird thing to ask someone, regardless of your familiarity with them, to lend you a little sperm and relinquish all rights to whatever comes of it. You'd be surprised at how many men have difficulty forming an emotional disconnect between their sperm and it potentially being used to form a whole entire human they will have no part in aside from donating the sperm. Which, I totally get it. It's not for everyone. Having been a recipient of donor sperm, I can't say I'd be comfortable donating my eggs. It takes a strong human to be able to make that sacrifice, and to our donor we are eternally grateful.

We mapped out menstrual cycles to predict when ovulation would occur for months beforehand to ensure we didn't miss any fertile days. This was done by marking the start and end of each period to determine how long the actual cycle was. For most women, it can range between 21 and 35 days, from end to beginning. We had finally found a donor who was willing to donate to us. Now the waiting game.

When ovulation was near, we took ovulation tests, just generic ol' Dollar Tree tests. These let you know when you're ovulating. I had to have taken three before the line actually showed up confirming ovulation (good thing we went the Dollar Tree route!). We called our donor and arranged to meet up so that we could pick up his sample. Not going to lie, it's incredibly awkward, but hey, what can ya do.

Once we were home, it was time to get down to business. I won't get too into it because, hey, privacy and all that. We went the good old cup and syringe route and then we waited. Legs up in the air, the whole nine. Anything that we read that could increase our chances, trust me we were gonna do it, right down to eating kale. We took a picture together right afterwards, which is so cool to have as it is a picture of when our daughter was conceived. We met up with our donor twice a few days apart so that all of the fertile days were covered, however we knew that it was the first round that we got pregnant on.

The wait was incredibly long and difficult. It's hard to be planning for a baby and keep in the back of your mind that there may not be one at the end of all this. We didn't have any help from medical professionals, we had never done this before at all. We could have been off while charting menstruation and set ourselves back months. We were scared. It was one of the longest waits of my life.

Then weird things started happening. I threw up at work doing something I did every day about 50 times a day. My girlfriend and I looked at each other in complete bewilderment. I started crying watching Facebook videos that were in no way meant to be tear-jerkers. We were still very skeptical.

I was getting impatient. You're told to wait so many days after your missed period to take a pregnancy test, but I couldn't take it anymore. To my memory, we waited either a day late or not even late yet to take that stick in the bathroom and pee like I'd never done before.

We stared at that test so hard I'm surprised we didn't burn a hole through it. Suddenly we watched the faintest second line appear. We were completely dumbfounded. We didn't even get excited at first because it all felt surreal, like it was too good to be true. My girlfriend even took a test and we compared the two. Mine was definitely different. We were pregnant.

We did it. We created a human being. I will never forget that moment as long as I live. Two women or not, WE made a person together.

There are many different approaches to conception in the LGBT+ community or those struggling with infertility. I'm happy to share our own personal story and pray it gives a little hope to those who are doubting their chances just because they are in a same sex relationship.