Sometimes people ask me how long I’ve been waiting, and I never know whether to say “18 months” or “all my life.”

I didn’t blog about the early parts of my determined journey toward parenthood, because it was messy and weird and sad, and private. But I certainly talked about it with my friends, all the time, and emailed about it, and kept diaries for myself.

Diaries!  Oh, man, did I keep track of things back then!  Chart after chart after chart of menstrual cycles, my early-morning temperatures, and all sorts of specifics about bodily fluids that don’t have charming euphemisms…  yeah, I burned all those records.  Burned them like they were old love letters from someone I wanted to forget.  So it’s actually really hard to piece the story back together with specific dates.  I had to log on to my old email and look through my sent messages for subject lines like “no news” and “maybe!”

And then, of course, it’s pretty much all cussing, so I still can’t post it.

Certainly it started in August 2008.  Ah, 2008….  I missed teaching like a physical ache, but it had been all-consuming and stressful.  After only a few months of a quiet office job at Duke I found I could sleep, I could have hobbies, I had time to make friends.  I had been through a whirlwind year of internet dating and decided it was enough to last a lifetime.  I was settling happily into being single, stable, and feeling whole.

I was taking care of my young neighbor, Emily, several days (and nights) each week.   I had to sign forms for school, and take her to the doctor, and I didn’t really have legal authority to do any of that.  I was constantly in the middle of her family’s conflicts.   I was starting to feel a little out of my depth.  So even though she wasn’t “in the system,” I signed up for foster training that fall.  (It was a huge help.)  And every morning that she woke up in my house, I felt like bluebirds were sitting on my shoulder.  She was (and is) my heart’s daughter.   But I wasn’t her mother.

One morning in August I was just at home doing nothing particular and I heard a sound like yellow flowers blooming and I knew that my child had called my name.  It was a very weird experience, and it made me very happy and very sad and very worried and very not-worried, all at the same time, because I realized I needed to start my family even though I was still single.  That’s not how I had always imagined things would be.  Have a baby, alone?  But the feeling of rightness was more powerful than anything else I’ve felt, before or since.

At that time, I felt very strongly that I was “supposed” to have a baby, that the baby who was to be mine somehow existed already and was trying to come into the world.  So I assumed I would begin my family by getting pregnant, and I would need a donor, and a doctor.  There are other ways to do it, obviously.  In fact, people close to me begged me to do something more traditional:  go to church, meet someone and settle down!  Go to a bar, meet someone, and come home knocked up!  Either way would be more …  normal?… than getting pregnant, on purpose, on my own.  But I had a Plan.  And it felt like a Plan Greater Than Me, like for the first time in my life I knew what I had been Meant For.

I wanted to have a donor who was actually part of my life, even though he wouldn’t be my partner.  I wanted my child to know his or her biological father, and to know that our family had been created through love, even though it would not be the traditional kind of romantic/sexual love.  I asked a good friend if he would be my donor.  He agreed, which is probably one of the most gracious and generous things I’d ever experienced in my entire life.  His girlfriend also agreed to the plan, which was even more gracious and generous.  They’re amazing people.  And we all thought it would be pretty easy – a trip to a clinic, and some legal paperwork, and there you go!

Well, the legal part turned out to be a little tricky.  So did the medical insurance part.  I wasn’t covered for fertility treatments until I’d been at my job two years, and it had only been one.  When I asked about how the finances would work, I was shocked.  Even with insurance, it was impossibly expensive. Thousands and thousands of dollars, and no way to know how many treatments, how many payments.  I met with the fertility clinic’s financial advisor and I just flat-out asked her, How in the world do people afford this?  You know what she said?

“Well, I guess our families just want to have a baby so much that money isn’t an obstacle.”

Edit for cussing.

So everything was kind of on hold, and then it turned the clinic wouldn’t even work with a “known donor.”  They insisted I use an anonymous donor from a registered sperm bank.  I thought that idea sounded disgusting – some anonymous stranger!?  Yuck.  No.

Things were more complicated than I’d hoped, but it was JUST RULES.  Lawyers’ rules, doctors’ rules.  I just had to find lawyers and doctors who would work with me.  I was sure of My Plan.  I would bend the world into a shape where I could find my place as mother.

Sept. 2008, from an email to Catherine:
> Subject: happy happy happy
I had a very good talk with Emily’s guidance counselor.  She’s going to help me sign up for foster care training.  It’s just a first step, but hey.  Also, we’re totally getting her into after-school.  Either her dad signs the thing to make it actually affordable (which he’s resisted – it also makes her qualified for free/reduced lunch) or else we’ll just find a way to pay for it.  But I think we can get that form signed, especially if we get the forms for the health insurance at the same time.

Oct. 2008, from an email to Amy.  It was actually much longer, but I’ll leave “guess where all the cussing was” as an exercise for the reader.

7 am – Up, because ‘lil Emily stayed at my house last night.  Taking the day off work today.

8 am – Actually made breakfast, pretending like I always eat breakfast

8:15 – We walk to school because it’s a pretty morning and we only live 6 blocks from the school.  She’s in 5th grade and she’s never done this before.

9 am – Drop off medicaid forms with dad.  If he fills them out she can get free health insurance, but he keeps saying he’ll sign them and then saying he lost them.

10 am – Deeply anxious about doctor’s appointment

11 am – Actually the doctor is very very nice.  I told her I want to have a baby and she said if I do this in a clinic it will involve getting a progesterone shot in the ass every day for weeks.

12 – Lunch with my potential donor and his sweetheart – but guess what!  She’s pregnant and they’re getting married!  Spent next 2 hours being very very happy for them
both.  Because obviously it’s not all about me.  And we did think it might be fun if I go ahead as planned, and we would have kids about the same age…  it does complicate things a little, though, doesn’t it?

2:00 – ran into B. (an ex – from a brief and disasterous relationship)  He’s moving far away.  With his finacee. 

5 pm – Trying to figure out where Emily sleeps tonight; evidently not at my house (sigh).

7 pm – fencing lesson; I did not pay a whole lot of attention

8 pm – went to visit a knitting friend; the sock I was doing is hopeless and I must start again with something much less ambitious

10 pm – crying

12 pm – netflix

And that was my day.  I am giving myself until Saturday to become a more mature, gracious, and generous hearted person, who can be sincerely happy for others’ good fortune without
being a jealous whiny self centered sap.  Also I bought new shoes.  They are cute but sensible.  As totemic magic, this is sure to help.

_____

That was 2008.