I promise this Rachel isn’t me. Though, they’re story is quite similar! So happy to have another pair of Jewish Immas along this crazy ride.
My wife and I are planning to start trying to conceive in March, and suddenly, two months or less out, I find myself trying to freeze time. I don’t mean feeling immobilized or freaking out and not wanting that time to come. I mean that I am living in and enjoying every moment until then.
I’ve spent the past couple years agonizing over when we could have a baby. Not every second, of course. We were occupied with house-hunting, moving in and settling in, my conversion to Judaism. A lot of wonderful things have been happening, and we’ve had a great first couple of years of marriage. But I’ve also been acutely aware throughout of our financial struggles and goals as well as the complicated and expensive process of family-building for us as a same-sexcouple, and that’s kept conception always just past the horizon. Now we have a realistic time frame and it’s right around the corner!
A first consultation and then following up on some initial fertility issues kept us busy and distracted throughout late fall and early winter. Now we’re just kind of…waiting. Waiting to get a little more money for this very expensive process so we don’t have to dip into savings or charge it or go on a payment plan. Waiting for our upcoming mandatory counseling session so we can be approved to order sperm.
And in the meantime, I am reveling in the smallest, sweetest details of domestic marital bliss.
Last weekend we spent most of Saturday with our only friends that are a same-sex parenting couple, our mentors of a sort. We had made a Tot Shabbat date for that morning and did a really sweet Tu Bishvat workshop with them and their two boys. We had a great time and they were so eager to talk to us about where we are on our path to pregnancy that they suggested we have lunch together afterwards at an Indian restaurant a few villages away. We spent HOURS there in a booth overlooking the lake, chatting with them and interacting with their young sons, ages two and four.
They gave us a lot of helpful advice, but also asked a lot of questions we don’t yet have answers to. “Do you know which vaccinations you want to give your child and which you might want to decline?” “Are you going to save the baby’s cord blood?” “How ‘natural’ or not are you going to go with labor and delivery?” And more!
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