Three. That’s how many weddings my wife Deirdre and I had. And yes, all three weddings were to each other.
After meeting and falling in love in college, we had a personal ceremony in 1999, back when gay marriage wasn’t yet legal. We did the whole shebang at a gorgeous winery — we invited all our friends and family, wore white dresses, exchanged vows, held flowers. Then, in 2004, we rushed to the courthouse to make it official when Gavin Newsom, the then-mayor of San Francisco, allowed the city to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Unfortunately, the California Supreme Court declared those marriages void shortly after. Finally, in 2008, gay marriage was legalized in the state and we were able to legally wed. We’ve stayed that way ever since.
With a beginning like that, no one was surprised that when we decided to start our family, things were… complicated.
For many straight couples, deciding to have a baby is as simple as having The Talk and going off birth control. For lesbians, there are a lot of questions to answer first. First of all, we had to decide who was going to carry the baby. We both had a uterus and were in good health, so we decided we’d have two children, with each of us carrying one. I would go first.
The next question: Where would we get the sperm? That may sound funny, but it’s harder than you think. We briefly considered asking a friend before realizing how confusing that could make things down the road. Random hookups were out of the question. So, sperm bank it was!
Forget what you see on TV — using a sperm donor is stressful. We had countless discussions about how it would impact our future children. Did we want the kids to meet the donor? If so, how would that affect our relationship with them? Would they want to call him “dad”? Does that mean we’d be adding a new member to our family? And what about the donor’s family — would we be in contact with them, too?
Read This Next
In the end, we decided to go with an anonymous donor. But that only lead to more questions. How would the kids feel about not knowing him? Would they feel like they were missing out? What if they wanted to meet him one day? Eventually, we realized there was so much we couldn’t know or plan for. We could only make the decision that felt right for our family.
Surely now it would be simple, right? Nope. We read a million books on how to get pregnant and did everything “right”; I took my basal body temperature daily, recorded my cycles and tracked my ovulation. Then, when I was in my fertile window, my doctor would place the sperm in my uterus using intrauterine insemination (IUI). That’s right, no turkey basters! This process meant making the 60-mile drive to our sperm bank in San Francisco before it closed and then racing back to my doctor’s office for the procedure.
Transferring the sperm was always some kind of adventure. Sometimes it was held in a big metal pod, other times it was in a Styrofoam chest with dry ice. One time it was “washed”, which meant it was unfrozen and would die if it wasn’t inseminated within an hour. Of course, it was raining that day and the roads were terrible. We rushed to the hospital, and I ran upstairs with the vial, skipped the line and yelled at the receptionist, “I have live sperm that is dying as we speak and I need it in me right now!” Fortunately, she was sympathetic and got me in right away.
None of it worked, though. Month after heartbreaking month went by with no positive pregnancy test. Getting my period became a crushing letdown. We desperately wanted a baby, but it seemed like we couldn’t get pregnant even with a whole team of doctors. It didn’t help that because we’d told everyone we were trying, our friends and families were heartbroken, too. I felt like I was disappointing everyone.
We decided to try Clomid, a fertility medication that helps stimulate the ovaries to release eggs. After I took the pill, the doctor would give me a sonogram to determine the egg size. Once it was ready, I would get a human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) injection to trigger the egg’s release, and then the doctor would inseminate me. It was an agonizing process. Sometimes we felt like giving up, but we kept trying — we both had always dreamed of being moms.
Finally, after a year of trying, I got pregnant. I don’t know if there was ever a more celebrated baby! We had four separate baby showers thrown for us. In 2001, our daughter Grace was born. I will never forget the moment the doctor put our warm, naked baby on my chest. Deirdre and I just held her and cried. We had a baby! We had our baby.
Two years later, we told Grace she was going to be a big sister. Using the same process but a different anonymous sperm donor, Deirdre got pregnant. This time, it took about eight months. In 2004, our son Ian was born and our family was complete.
Of course, just as getting married and conceiving wasn’t straightforward as a gay couple, neither was having a baby — and that started with our children’s birth certificates. When our kids were born, there wasn’t a place on the birth certificate to list a second mother. The process is different today, but back then, we had to leave the “father” section blank. We could put any surname we wanted, so we chose to hyphenate our children’s last names. Later, we legally changed ours to match.
We also had to hire a lawyer to draft up paperwork and file for second parent adoption, which essentially meant that the non-biological parent had to adopt their child. Once it was approved in court, we could request another birth certificate with both of our names listed on it as parents.
It was — you guessed it — complicated. But we felt that it was important to do this to protect our children in case of an emergency. It was an incredibly frustrating process and I hated that we had to jump through so many hoops just so our children could legally be ours. It made me feel like a second-class citizen.
Raising kids as a gay couple comes with its own set of challenges. One big difference for us is that we are basically “coming out” for the rest of our lives. It feels like a constant coming-out process: to teachers when our kids are asked to make Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards in class; to other parents at playdates, sleepovers and birthday parties; to the lady in the grocery store who says, “Your son must look like his father”; to the neighbor who wanted to know what we told our own children about our “family situation”; to the curious and well-meaning people who want to know which one of us is the “real” mom.
Our answer has been to be as open as we can and constantly remind our children how wanted they were. My wife and I had to work so hard to bring our children into the world, and every day they are a reminder of the challenges and love that binds us together. I wouldn’t change a moment of it.
This story is written as it was told to Charlotte Hilton Andersen.
Yes 
No 
Trending On What to Expect
