"Conception"

First step – create a folder in your inbox labeled “Conception.”

Well, no. There are many, earlier, first steps, though this was the moment when the journey to have our first child began to materialize in a concrete way, changing from a future wish to a tantalizingly close prospect. 

Thus, the title of this blog is a bit disingenuous. We are at least two years away from our first child, though it makes me anxious when I think of how much closer I’ll be then to that suddenly less-fertile age of 35, and how if I want to have a second child, I’ll likely be in that nebulous, dangerous zone of 35-40. But this chronicle is still about being a parent. In some ways, I’m already one. I’m waiting for our first child to arrive. She has a name. He has parents who love him, who have planned, literally for years, for his arrival. She has grandparents already debating who gets first visitation rights and what they want to be called. He has cousins stashing aside hand-me-down clothes and promising not to "steal" "our" name.  

Over the next few weeks, months, and years leading up to our first child, I’ll chronicle our lives and how we came to this point, two women who fell in love, got married, and anxiously awaited the birth of their own child. Well – and here’s the gay disclaimer – as much our own as is biologically possible when the child can, necessarily, really have only one of our sets of genes. This is a point about which I’m amorphously bitter, at the cruel nature that makes it possible to create babies in petri dishes, but not blend genes willy-nilly. Not that I would necessarily wish that this type of biological tampering was possible, but there are times when I think, well, it would be nice. I am not bitter at God for denying us the ability to have a child who is truly, biologically, ours. And though I am grateful that we live in times when this is possible, sometimes I wish I was just far enough in the future that scientists would be able to gratify my demanding desires. Sigh. Such is life.

This may also be a forum, at times, on gay apologetics. It makes me so angry when people don’t get it, who see us only as the stereotype. Who have not met anyone like me, like my wife (whom I'll call K), middle-class white women with graduate degrees and pretty, "straight" faces. I keep thinking, hoping, that if they just met us, maybe they would think differently. I have so many arguments, both good ones and circular ones, as to why we should be allowed the same rights and roles as anyone else in society (note: not just us women who might not look the stereotype, but people of all beautiful differences. I'll explain what I mean in a later post). I plan to address some here, to help make the waiting pass a bit faster, to leave a legacy to my child that I did something, at least, to help the cause. I can use my words if I can’t do anything else.