Journey of Two Moms

Lets go all the way back to the beginning…February 14, 2010

Wouldn’t it be great to have a baby lying here between us?  I am not that crazy person that spouts this out with every new relationship but somehow I was inspired to exclaim this one morning in bed at a vacation rental on the beach.  And I am inclined to think that normally Erika would have chewed her own arm off and ran if she had heard this any other time.  And this is how you know things are right.  You do and say the cheesy things that you judged others for in the past and it feels right.

I have always wanted children but it had never been the right time.  Don’t get me wrong, I know you can’t plan ahead for everything and its never truly the “right time” for kids.  You kind have to make it the right time and if you are blessed with a surprise of offspring then it must be the right time if you believe in “things happen for a reason”  and they “happen when they are supposed to”.  Which I do.  Because what is life without a little magic and mystery?

I have five nieces and nephews and have been around kids enough to know what I was getting into.  Erika on the other hand does not come from a family of many children and it wasn’t something she had really considered.  But, that morning when I popped the vision of children in our future, even though we barely knew each other, she didn’t skip a beat.  Maybe she thought I would forget.  She tells me now that at the moment she looked at me and thought, I love this woman and so she went with it.

Fast forward to the summer of 2016.  We better hurry up she says, if we are going to do this we better do it now, we aren’t getting any younger.  We had now had 6 years together, 3 of them legally married and spent a LOT of time enjoying the kiddos in my family.  She loved having lunch buddies and ski and hiking buddies, she was ready for our own. After looking at sooooo many donors from the Seattle Sperm Bank and weeding through their health history, pictures, stories, voice clips etc I felt overwhelmed.  “You know what?”, I said, “you are the baby daddy, you pick out the sperm donor.”  She was a little shocked that I would let go of that but honestly, it was such a hard decision and I knew she would pick the right one.  All you get as far as pictures go is a childhood picture that the donor picks out to share. We started tracking my ovulation (which I was not very consistent about) and it resulted in a couple of home tries with negative pregnancy tests.  We decided to go with the experts and consulted Seattle Reproductive Medicine.  We started the process and had success on the second go.  Let me tell you about that.

We planned on doing an IUI which means an intrauterine insemination.  Basically they just put a very tiny syringe in through the cervix and push in the sperm, hopefully at the right time when there is a happy healthy egg releasing!  In order to do that I had to track my ovulation which was fairly easy, an over the counter pee on a stick contraption.  Once it was determined that I was ovulating we would drive over to Seattle and have an ultrasound done to see if there truly was an egg.  Then I would plan to be back the next day and give myself a hormonal injection to release the egg and have the IUI done.  I remember sitting in the office watching another lesbian couple that had a baby with them and they were most likely going for baby number two.  I was Jelly in a good way and hoped we could be so blessed as well.

February 13, 2016, a magical day for our family.  The day before it had been determined that I was ovulating and it would be ideal to have the IUI done the very next day.  I will forever be grateful to my wonderful coworker for picking up that day so I could got to Seattle.  We headed over early and crossed our fingers.  The day was crispy but sunny and the clinic is close to the water, we could hear the seagulls calling.  It was winter on one of those sunny days that makes the city beautiful.  Afterwards we stopped at our favorite pub called Mcmenamins, this one was the six arms, which we had never been too.  Our hearts full of hope and happiness we wondered if magic was happening right then and there.  Now we know it most certainly was!

A couple of weeks later Erika insisted on me peeing on a pregnancy test.  I subconsciously wasn’t ready to be disappointed so I kept saying I would grab a test at the store but kept forgetting.  One morning she cornered me and ran to the corner store to grab some very overpriced pregnancy tests, but so worth it.  I was half asleep and couldn’t believe my eyes, 2 lines, one was a little faint so even though we were ecstatic I almost couldn’t believe it.  It just seemed like such a wild ride!  Well, folks you know it was right because 18 months later we have a beautiful, healthy, intelligent 9 mos old that is crawling everywhere and getting into everything.

We are so blessed to be mothers to Ethan.  He brings us joy and a higher understanding of all things every single day.  We have had so much support from friends and strangers that are new friends.  We love all of it, even the exhaustion, because even on the most tired of days we just look into those sparkling eyes and are renewed with energy.  This story is to share our motherhood journey and to inspire you with hope and happiness.