RJ! SJ! Goooo!

Weekend Agenda:

 

From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for  Reproductive Freedom

 

LET’S GET ACTIVATED!

New Year. New Agenda.

It’s been a while, friends.

 

Things got quiet on the Agenda because I got quiet. And sad. And sadder. And quieter. And sadder still. And I left my wife. And I stayed quiet. And later, I fell in love and wanted to shout it through every open airwave. But I stayed quiet. For reasons I’m not entirely sure of. Until now.

 

So was this agenda “Convert Straight Friend”? Or “Achieve Bonus Child Status”? Or “Create Chaos”?

 

I’m preferring to call it “Best Decision I Ever Made That Affected a LOT of People.”

 

Stay tuned.

Happy holigays

May your gays be merry and bright!

Top Items on the Agenda (Tuesday)

1. Why am I seemingly unable to create and gestate a child who actually sleeps? My second child started out like a dream sleeper (slept a 5-6 hour stretch at a convenient time – 11pm to 4-5am – FROM BIRTH) who would put himself to sleep and now, 11 months later, needs to be held and rocked to fall asleep, needs to be held through the night, and is nearly impossible to put down. Like my daughter was. Until she was about 18 months old. DEAR GOD.

 

2. What on earth possessed my wife to run the washing machine for a load containing – wait for it – THREE ITEMS??!?! Three SMALL items. Like seriously, at first I thought maybe she moved clothes from the washer to the dryer and forgot a couple of pieces that were stuck to the sides. Dear God.

 

3. Why do we seem to have even LESS money now that I’m working four days a week? Ugh. I should just stay home.

BREAKING NEWS:

I swept the dining room floor. Twice.

Friday

The other week went like this:

sick baby

sick baby

sick baby

made applesauce

sick baby

sick baby

drove a few hours to pick up donor milk

sick baby

 

Then we had a long weekend. It went like this:

See old friends

Watch kids play together

Eat crap food

Spend too much money

Go to fun science museum

Spend a lot of time in the car

Praise God for the DVD player

 

Then we came back. It went like this:

work

dishes

work

laundry

work

baby up all night

work

drink a lot of coffee

work

 

Today’s my day off. So far I have gone to “Work Share” at #1’s school while #2 napped in the Ergo on my back, came home to have the mouse exterminator check my traps, and had coffee while playing with a baby. Soon it will be time for Early Baby Lunch and (hopefully) Early Baby Nap, wherein Much Dinner Will Be Prepared.

THIS EXCITING LIFE CAN BE YOURS! Queer glamour at its finest!

Disappointment

I have always wanted a sister. Big sister, little sister, it didn’t matter. There is just something mythical and special about sisters.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my brother. He is probably my very best friend. Now. In our 30s. As kids? Not. Even. Close. Childhood, when a distance of 3.5 years feels like 50, was not kind to our friendship. We were polar opposites with contrasting personalities and, well, he was a boy.

Fast forward to five years ago and I’m  pregnant and one thing the wife and I are sure of is that I want a little girl. We’re pregnant with twins and there is a good chance that there is a girl in there, right? Except then we lose one of the twins.

(This could be another whole blog post about disappointment, as twins are born all around me and it seems like everyone in the universe gets to take home their twins, even the ones who dare to announce twins at 6w pregnant. But I digress.)

And then, like magic, I win the baby genital lottery and we get the girl. And oh boy, do we ever. Dresses, ponies, magical unicorns, princesses, sparkles and glitter, desperation for nail polish, ever accessorizing. (This describes neither of our girlhoods, and I am loving it.) And from the moment we start even thinking about going for #2, I know without a doubt that I want one thing: sisters. I want matching Christmas dresses and hair bows and I imagine years of impromptu dance shows in the living room. I can practically TASTE the matching outfits, people. You don’t even know.

At 20 weeks on the dot it is there, front and center – the penis. That upside down, weird-angled, “crotch shot from below” monstrosity and it is there in all its glory, announcing to the world, “THERE WILL BE NO MATCHING DRESSES.” Because while I have no problem giving my son a plethora of tutus and dress-up options, I feel like I have to draw the line at the Christmas photo. For Grandma. She’s 89, you know.

I was open in my disappointment as I had been open in my desire. I wanted an all-girl household. I could smell the Girl Power. I worried about the idea of a son, alone in a house of women. Would he feel left out? Would he wish we had more male friends? Would I be his best friend the way I am so effortlessly my daughter’s best friend? Would they hate each other until their 20s?

My son… he was conceived on the first try, with reduced-cost sperm, with donated meds, with one follicle. This child was meant for me and he came, front and center, to teach me something. About him? About myself? About life? All of the above.

It took about 3 weeks past that ultrasound to shed the disappointment’s grip and now, honestly I can’t imagine how I ever felt that way. This boy was Meant To Be, no doubt about it, he and I are MFEO. I don’t know if we will be best friends, and it was hard to part with all of the hair bows, but my love for him is fierce and deliberate, every moment, with every breath.

I believe his soul is that of the twin we lost nearly five years ago, and how can I be disappointed about that.

My true love has my heart, and I have his.

Friday

On Today’s Agenda:

5:30 Wunderkind wake-up call

8:30 Girl Genius preschool drop-off

9:00 Nap for the baby and an exciting kitchen clean-up for me

9:30 Field mouse exterminator does his business

11:00 Shopping for five-year-old boy’s birthday present

12:00 Baby lunch

1:00 The endless dance of “will he or won’t he nap?”

1:30 Climbing Mount McFoldMe

3:00 Preschool pick-up

 

Glamorous

Blog Carnival: Donor Sperm

So a bunch of bloggers are writing about some aspect of using donor sperm today. Whenever you get a couple of women who want a baby, you’ve got to get the sperm somewhere. It’s inevitable. And there are different options out there, depending on what you are looking for.

We used an anonymous donor from a sperm bank, as was my wife’s preference. As the non-gestating mother, she got to make the final decision. I thought that she had “more to lose” in terms of not having a genetic link to our kids and therefore I wanted to do whatever she was comfortable with, and sperm was “her job” in the process. But I’m not going to write about that.

I’m sure many of you have seen the article in the Boston Globe about the dude who donated sperm and has 70-something kids. It was all about how he was reaching out to them and blah blah blah. And some people gasped, “70 kids! That’s insane.”

I am here to tell you that I would not be at all surprised if my children have more than 70 genetic half-siblings. We purchased from a bank with a high guaranteed sperm count who also is willing to give that sperm to a LOT of families. I am not sure if I am remembering correctly, but I think it was 40 families. They would sell to FORTY families.

Think about that for a moment. They sell to forty families and families have multiple kids. And then maybe some people have some leftover sperm after their families are completely and they sell those vials to other families – outside of the bank’s knowledge – and then there are more than 40 families. And our donor had a pretty good success rate, I have to give him that. Let’s put it this way: I used him twice, and I have two children. End of story.

So what I worry about, more than “donor sibling incest” or about whether or not my children will be upset that their donor is not willing to be known (because really? even a dude with good intentions is not going to have much to offer 80 kids), it’s that one day my children, my absolutely special, lights-of-my-life, perfectly unique and wonderful children are going to think about their origins and feel mass-produced. They are my children, and they are my wife’s children, but they are – in some ways – products of donor #9558. Products like IKEA furniture. (You know – they’re cool, they’re hip, they’re really cute, BUT EVERYONE HAS THEM.)

Will my children one day find out that they are 2 of (let’s say) 80 and feel less special? Will they feel like pieces of meat? Will they feel somehow cheapened that all of these other children share half of their genetic origins? My brother and I are the only two combinations of our mother’s DNA and our father’s DNA. Neither of them had other children. We are IT. There is something concise and neat about it. My two sets of grandparents each had two children. My mother and her sister each had two children. My father had (obviously) two children and his brother adopted one child. My children’s father may have 70 children, or 80, or more. And worse (or better?), we will never know how many. I believe last reported tally was over 40 but we all know that many people don’t report births to the bank.

Our donor still has vials being sold. (Would you like to have kid #81? He makes cute babies.) They started being sold more than eight years ago, as I know of a donor sibling who is eight or slightly older. Sometimes I can’t help but picture a little assembly line-type machine spitting out babies, and in my mind it looks a lot like the “Children’s Television Sausage Factory.”

(Follow the conversation over at http://firsttimesecondtime.com/2011/09/donor-sibling-registry-yay-nay/)

Fish

I made the most delicious baked fish tonight for dinner. It was incredibly tasty. My kid ate five helpings of it. For serious. Five.

There was also broccoli.