Allow this thought to enter your mind, preferably late at night, when you are alone in your apartment, thinking about how you’ll probably never love again because you are pathologically attracted to crazy people but have gotten old and wise enough to be over it. The phrase is: “If I don’t have a baby right now, I’ll never have a baby.” This is because you are, like, 38 or 39. Maybe you’re even 40. Maybe it’s because you’ve forsworn romance and do not understand how you will fill your days if you’re not convincing the people you’re having sex with to go to therapy / get on psych meds / go to Al-Anon.
The good thing about ending things is that it leaves space for new things! You hadn’t imagined your new thing being a baby — maybe a yoga practice or international travel — but the thought, with its frisson of “time is running out” urgency, pulls you from your bed to your computer, where you Google “fertility at 40” and land on a New York Times article called “Are You as Fertile as You Look?” that discusses the phenomena of super-well-preserved women in their 40s who look really young and act really young and just presume they can just up and have a baby because they’re so awesomely youthful. But guess what? They can’t.
You relate to these women a lot — you, too, are often mistaken for someone decades younger, and you have the lovers to prove it. But even as your skin glows and you continue to pull off fashion meant for the later generations, your ovaries are deteriorating. The likelihood of getting pregnant at 40 is not awesome, and guess what? You are already 40. Even if you got pregnant right now, you’d be 41 by the time the baby came. Miscarriages are all around you, like landmines. And you don’t even know how you would get pregnant, because you have fired all your lovers, and they are mostly gay anyway.
Burst into tears before your computer. Flash on the “I can’t believe I forgot to have children!” T-shirt with the picture of the ’50s-era woman sobbing into her hands. You are that woman. What is greater: your sadness or your embarrassment at your sadness?
That was how I decided to try to get pregnant. When I suffer an emotional blow, I like to give myself one night to really weep about it, and then the next day it’s time to get it together and figure out what the F I’m going to do. For me, the task was clear. If I wanted to have a baby, I would need sperm.
As a primarily queer person, there are no shortages of handsome young men around me, men who are very free with their sperm. So I set about asking them. I quickly learned that as careless as my male compatriots may be about spilling their seed around town, the thought that it could be repurposed to create a baby freaked them out.
Queens who always had a quip for everything were speechless. The main thing holding them back from sharing with me the gift of life seemed to be fear. Fear of having bad feelings later. What if they did this thing—gave me sperm—and I had a baby, and it was, like, genetically linked to them, and then they became, say, a heroin addict, or I became destitute and needed groceries, or we needed college money, and they would either have to help — thus supporting a kid they never wanted? Or what if they didn’t help, knowing that their flesh and blood was wasting away somewhere because they were too selfish and coldhearted? There was a sense that if they gave me their sperm, they may find themselves in a future moral quandary that would make them face who they really are, which would bum them out.
I was starting to look for straight men who would be so psyched to get it on with me sans condom that they’d overlook any offspring that resulted from the tryst. Straight men, unlike gays, have a great history of ignoring the progeny that their dalliances produce. But before I fully explored this option, my top choice came through: a gay man was interested in passing me some sperm.
The gay’s name was Quentin, and he was a drag queen and an activist. He was totally pretty, with big, heavy-lashed eyes and a sweet smile. He was extremely smart, and his drag personas were totally feminist and cool. There really wasn’t a single thing about Quentin I wouldn’t be thrilled to have passed down to my child. I began tracking my fertility with ovulation pee-sticks, and when the test line grew a darker pink, I summoned Quentin and my best friend Rhonda, and we set up our system:
Quentin would go into my kitchen and masturbate. We would have to lock him in so my cats wouldn’t barge in and disturb him. He would deposit his, um, stuff into a bowl I had warmed in the oven and left on the table for such purpose. Then he would holler to be let out.
Rhonda would run, sliding across my hardwood floors in her socks, and take the bowl from Quentin. She would be wearing a pair of latex gloves. With a children’s oral medicine syringe I’d gotten for free at Walgreens (!), Rhonda gathered the semen. I was on my back, on my bed, my hips raised on pillows. “I’m sorry,” I said to my friend as I pulled open my labia, and she inserted the syringe into my vag. She gave the plunger a tremendous push, and I was inseminated.
We did this for many months—Quentin, Rhonda and I—over time tweaking the process. Maybe the bowl was too hot? I tried holding it in front of a space heater instead. I gave myself an orgasm after insemination, while Quentin and Rhonda watched YouTube videos in the kitchen, the volume loud enough to drown out the lawnmower buzz of my Hitachi Magic Wand. I went to acupuncture. Cut my three-cup-a-day coffee habit down to one. Drank a weird German blood tonic that was vegetarian but still tasted, creepily, like blood. I drank maca smoothies. I made an altar and placed baby binkies and onesies beside candles and pinecones. I laid with my legs way up in the air, and then, hearing that sperm are actually primed to swim up, I laid with them down. Month after month, my pregnancy pee test came back negative.
The most profound thing that happened during this season of insemination was that I fell in love. Though I’d sworn off dating, not wanting any scrubs hanging around my soon-to-be nursery, I found myself seated next to what seemed like a bona fide gentleman at a dance party. She asked me wholesome questions; her good vibes were strong and immediate. When I asked some friends about her, they squealed — yes, she was so great, really nice, has a job, not crazy. Really? Hmmm.
Word got out that I’d found her handsome, and soon we were on our first date. She picked me up at my front door and hailed a cab to bring us to a seafood restaurant. We dined and talked for hours, and after paying the bill, she walked me home. Our goodnight kiss, which I’d planned to be a little, chaste thing, was epic. Already in mom mode, wanting to make better, more cautious choices for my life, I did not bring her upstairs. We kept dating, slowly at first—then bam, we were in love. I hadn’t told her I was trying to have a baby — first because I didn’t expect much to come of us, and it wasn’t her business. Later, because something was becoming of us, and I was so scared that if she learned I’d (hopefully) soon be pregnant, she’d bolt.
But when I told her, she didn’t bolt. Her big eyes grew wider, and she was, like, “Whaaaaaaat?” She shook her head like she was dreaming. She wanted to have kids so badly that her friends had made her promise not to tell me, sure that I would bolt. But neither of us bolted, and Dashiell became the newest member of Team Inseminate.
It is a year later, and after trying and failing to get pregnant the almost old-fashioned way, Dashiell and I have taken our quest to the fertility clinic at UCSF. Some light research suggested it was the most affordable, with a great reputation, and we love our doctor. An ultrasound of my ovaries provided us with some crucial, disheartening information: My uterus was covered with so many fibroids the doctor couldn’t even see one of my ovaries. As far as the ovary he could see, it contained a less than average amount of eggs. Considering that by age 41, most of those eggs were no good anyway, my chances for becoming pregnant were pretty bad. But my doctor was delighted to hear I was in a relationship with a female person almost 10 years my junior.
“Her eggs are infinitely more fertile than yours,” he said brightly, and this did not make me feel bad about my eggs. It was more like we had a joint ovary, the way other couples have joint checking. I had less to contribute, but she would make up for it with her early-30s, robust young eggs.
“A 60 to 80 percent success rate,” the doctor proclaimed after peeking at her insides and declaring, “Now that’s a good-looking ovary!” Because Dashiell is more like a boy than a girl, she’s not keen on the idea of getting pregs. What we’re working toward has been referred to by a friend as “The Lesbian Dream”: through in vitro fertilization, I will carry Dashiell’s spry ovum in my own uterus, which, unlike ovaries, doesn’t fall into disrepair with age. The thrill of being able to have my beloved’s baby totally eclipses any upset that the baby won’t have any of my own genetic makeup.
Having had the fibroids removed and a couple of follow-up procedures, the next step is for Dashiell to get a battery of genetic tests, for our cycles to be synced up via birth control, ironically, and then to wait for her to drop some eggs and for the doctor to grab them, fertilize them and plant them in me for the duration.
I never thought I’d be having a baby in my 40s, but that’s because I never thought I’d be having a baby at all. It took until I hit this age to have the all-around stability that raising a kid demands — the same goes for many women, from the look of the world around me.
I’m not the only one who’s spent my fertile years being a kid, living wildly, traveling and building a career, only to find at 40 that the last frontier was children. It’s exciting to imagine what this means for our culture, a generation of children raised by satisfied, self-actualized mothers who are choosing to have kids out of desire and love, not fear and expectation. As unpredictable and inspiring as my path to conception has been, the trek through motherhood is bound to be a blast.
Is It Worth Having Kids in SF?
Illustrations and design by Jack Whittington
