I spent my teenage years being terrified of getting pregnant. Every Bible lesson, biology lesson, and casual reference to the future was marked with the warning: if you get pregnant, your life is over. Though I knew I wanted a family someday, I took heed, and I avoided sex for as long as I could, and when I did engage in sex with men, I was very careful never to do so without protection.

When I began dating women, it was definitely a relief not to worry about it anymore. I skipped careless through my 20 and landed, childless, into my thirties. I pursued my passions, I wrote, I chased women, I traveled, I slept late, or woke up early -- my day was always my own. I imagined that one day I would meet Miss Right, spend an appropriate number of years reveling in our romance, then, over careful discussion and even more careful planning, we would find a sperm donor, who was the right combination of both our ethnicities, and we would procreate.

Except, one day I looked up from the jaded wreckage of my umpteenth breakup and was deafened by the horror of my ticking biological clock. I was 35 and living a solitary life in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City. Suddenly, writing a memoir, traveling to South Africa for the summer, being on Broadway or drinking red wine from the navel of one gorgeous, feminist lesbian after another didn't seem all that meaningful anymore. I wanted to experience another kind of love. I was ready for a baby.

My friends who had babies talked about how amazing it was to be a mother, how it changed them, how it was simultaneously the most terrifying and the most rewarding relationship they had ever had. Having never had a relationship with my mother, I had no first-hand knowledge of what they were talking about. I only knew that I wanted to experience it. Against every instinct and every bit of advice I was given by the wise old women in my past, I decided that I was going to get pregnant without having a partner.

I scanned my circle of friends for sperm donors. I wanted somebody good looking and smart and OK with signing away his parental rights. I was surprised by how many men had a problem with the latter. It took me a year to find someone who would say yes. A young artist, Edward, agreed to donate his sperm; he did not want the daily responsibilities of raising a child, and I wanted the freedom to do the day-to-day without the unpredictable compromises of co-parenting. He thought it was a wonderful thing to help a lesbian become a mom. I thought he was a miracle for saying yes.

It was perfect.

I felt sure that I was prepared for Edward's visit in every way. I had been charting my cycle for months now. I peed on a stick every morning between the hours of 6 and 9. I took my basal body temperature first thing in the morning. I examined my vaginal fluid. I knew how long he should abstain from ejaculation in order for me to get the brightest and the best sperm to partner with my desperately aging egg. It was all very normal, I told him. I calmly explained how long and why he had to get there before the egg died.

The obsessive-compulsive that I am, I cleaned the bathroom and dimmed the lights; I set up the pillows on which to prop my hips after I did the insemination; I had my needle-less syringe ready. I laid everything out on a clean, pink bath towel in the bathroom and waited for him to arrive. And when he did, I soundlessly pointed him to the bathroom and turned up the music so that he would have some privacy in my one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment. I lay down on the couch and visualized my baby's face -- because I had heard somewhere that that improved a woman's chances of conceiving.

I read that on average it takes men three to seven minutes to ejaculate with masturbation. And under pressure, which clearly described today's activities, it could take as long as 15 minutes. I settled into the spiritual leaf-blowing, fully intending to puff away for at least 10 minutes. 
So I was caught completely off guard when a minute later, the door popped open, and Edward padded out with the pink towel wrapped around his lower half.

"What should I put it in?"

His question did not make sense. I thought he was asking about his penis. For a moment I thought I had chosen the only man who had no idea how to masturbate.

I almost said, "Your hand, you have to put your penis in your hand and rub," but my mouth wouldn't work. I opened it, but nothing came out.

"The stuff," he said. "Where should I put the stuff after it comes out?"

Jesus! I hadn't given him a collecting cup. Every book and blog and personal account of home insemination reminded you to have a collecting cup! Is this the kind of mother I was going to be? Was I going to forget the kid when I left the hospital? In a cab? On the plane? Was I the kind of mother who was going to neglect her child?

I rummaged through my kitchen cabinets in search of a container. A coffee mug seemed daunting; the shot glasses too small. But the flower-printed soy sauce dipping dish would be exactly the right size to make any contribution look hefty. It was wide enough to not require perfect aim. I grabbed two and presented them with fanfare to him. He tightened his towel and headed back to the bathroom.

Five minutes later he rushed out, dipping dish in hand, almost brimming over with all my possible children. I grabbed the dish and sped off to the bedroom.

It took me only a few seconds to suck up every bit of the semen into the syringe. On my back and knees to chest, I inserted the needle-less syringe and emptied it inside myself, after which I forgot to picture my baby's face, because it was kind of hard trying to relax, and to elevate my pelvis, while keeping my vagina covered without moving so that I could hug Edward goodbye. He had a date, so he had to rush off, but he wished me all the luck in the world.

Two weeks of obsessing and checking my body for pregnancy symptoms later, I peed on a stick, and it told me that I was not pregnant. I was devastated.

It took me another year to find the courage to do it again.

When the second attempt proved unsuccessful, I decided to go to the experts.

The staff at the clinic reception was sweet and helpful. They all smiled and listened and nodded while I explained that I was a lesbian and wanted to get pregnant. They laughed when I told them about my funny, unsuccessful home attempts. They assured me that I had come to the right place.

"Look here, Staceyann," said Dr. B, as he turned the screen toward me during the ultrasound. "Do you see that mass right there? That is a fibroid that is very unfortunately located."

I looked at him blankly, before asking what he meant.

"Listen." He said, "Don't start thinking negatively. The trick is to think positive. I suggest we do a couple things first. I am of the opinion that the size of this mass should be removed before we proceed. I'm going to send you to a doctor who has operated on a member of my own family to do this surgery."

Six months after laparoscopic surgery, I began taking drugs, which turned me into a crazy woman. First up were the birth control pills, after which they added the series of fertility drugs. Those kicked it up a notch. My breasts were swollen. I was constipated. I slept all the time. I was peeing twice in the hour. I was convinced I was pregnant, though nothing had been done to make that possible just yet. My ovaries were looked at, my blood tested for genetic abnormalities.

Then they asked for sperm.

In the years I had been plotting to become a mother, I had had conversations with maybe 30 men about sperm. Many had said yes and then changed their minds. So now, I made one last-ditch effort and reached out to a handsome 20-year-old filmmaker. He said yes, and we took his super-sperm to the clinic.

They put me under, took ten eggs out of my ovaries and attempted to fertilize them. Three days later they called me to say three of my eggs had made it to embryos. I went back in and watched on the high-tech screen as they injected the three four-celled globs into my uterus.

Everyone who has done this will tell you that the two-week wait for the blood test is the hardest part of trying to get pregnant. It is brutal. Every sign is an indication that you are pregnant or not pregnant. Every moment is agony. Every episode is reason to collapse into tears. And the compulsion to test is almost physically painful to resist. I lasted a week and four days. On Mother's Day I dared the universe and tested. The first line appeared in seconds. The second took its time, but it was faint, and I was almost convinced that it wasn't there. I took a picture with my cell phone and sent it to a friend, who called me back whooping and screaming and saying congratulations. I could barely breathe. I didn't want to let myself believe that this journey had actually borne fruit.

I cried because I was so happy. And then I wept because I was so alone. I cried for myself as a fetus, unwanted and unplanned for. I allowed myself to ache for the child I had been, who was forced to navigate the world without parents, without a buffer between her and the world. I promised the tiny seed growing inside my womb to never allow him or her to feel unwanted or unloved. I marveled at how changed I felt. Already.

>via: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/staceyann-chin/a-single-lesbians-quest-for-moth...

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Staceyann Chin

Author, 'The Other Side of Paradise'

>via: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/staceyann-chin/open-letter-to-my-unborn-_b_9344...

__________________________

My First Period - Spoken Word of Staceyann Chin

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Renninger, N. / plainpicture / Corbis

 

The teen years are never the easiest for any family to navigate. But could they be even more challenging for children and parents in households headed by gay parents?

 

That is the question researchers explored in the first study ever to track children raised by lesbian parents, from birth to adolescence. Although previous studies have indicated that children with same-sex parents show no significant differences compared with children in heterosexual homes when it comes to social development and adjustment, many of those investigations involved children who were born to women in heterosexual marriages, who later divorced and came out as lesbians.(See a photographic history of gay rights, from Stonewall to Prop 8.)

 

For their new study, published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers Nanette Gartrell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco (and a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles), and Henry Bos, a behavioral scientist at the University of Amsterdam, focused on what they call planned lesbian families — households in which the mothers identified themselves as lesbian at the time of artificial insemination.

 

Data on such families are sparse, but they are important for establishing whether a child's environment in a home with same-sex parents would be any more or less nurturing than one with a heterosexual couple.(See a gay-rights timeline.)

 

The authors found that children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — scored very similarly to children raised by heterosexual parents on measures of development and social behavior. These findings were expected, the authors said; however, they were surprised to discover that children in lesbian homes scored higher than kids in straight families on some psychological measures of self-esteem and confidence, did better academically and were less likely to have behavioral problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression.

 

"We simply expected to find no difference in psychological adjustment between adolescents reared in lesbian families and the normative sample of age-matched controls," says Gartrell. "I was surprised to find that on some measures we found higher levels of [psychological] competency and lower levels of behavioral problems. It wasn't something I anticipated."

 

In addition, children in same-sex-parent families whose mothers ended up separating did as well as children in lesbian families in which the moms stayed together.

 

The data that Gartrell and Bos analyzed came from the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), begun in 1986. The authors included 154 women in 84 families who underwent artificial insemination to start a family; the parents agreed to answer questions about their children's social skills, academic performance and behavior at five follow-up times over the 17-year study period. Children in the families were interviewed by researchers at age 10 and were then asked at age 17 to complete an online questionnaire, which included queries about the teens' activities, social lives, feelings of anxiety or depression, and behavior.

 

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that 41% of children reported having endured some teasing, ostracism or discrimination related to their being raised by same-sex parents. But Gartrell and Bos could find no differences on psychological adjustment tests between the children and those in a group of matched controls. At age 10, children reporting discrimination did exhibit more signs of psychological stress than their peers, but by age 17, the feelings had dissipated. "Obviously there are some factors that may include family support and changes in education about appreciation for diversity that may be helping young people to come to a better place despite these experiences," says Gartrell.

 

It's not clear exactly why children of lesbian mothers tend to do better than those in heterosexual families on certain measures. But after studying gay and lesbian families for 24 years, Gartrell has some theories. "They are very involved in their children's lives," she says of the lesbian parents. "And that is a great recipe for healthy outcomes for children. Being present, having good communication, being there in their schools, finding out what is going on in their schools and various aspects of the children's lives is very, very important."

 

Although active involvement isn't unique to lesbian households, Gartrell notes that same-sex mothers tend to make that kind of parenting more of a priority. Because their children are more likely to experience discrimination and stigmatization as a result of their family circumstances, these mothers can be more likely to broach complicated topics, such as sexuality and diversity and tolerance, with their children early on. Having such a foundation may help to give these children more confidence and maturity in dealing with social differences and prejudices as they get older.

 

Because the research is ongoing, Gartrell hopes to test some of these theories with additional studies. She is also hoping to collect more data on gay-father households; gay fatherhood is less common than lesbian motherhood because of the high costs of surrogacy or adoption that gay couples face in order to start a family.

>via: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1994480,00.html