Trying to lead a fertile lifestyle

At this point, I am *hopefully* about six months away from starting all this craziness!  So, in the past couple of months, I've been researching about all of the things I can do to make myself as fertile as possible.  I mean, really, what else would I be doing?  I don't know that I would necessarily be doing all of this if I were trying to conceive the old fashioned way, but I suppose when one thinks about spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on such a thing, one does not want to mess around.  So, here is what I am doing to try to maximize my fertility:

(These are all based on recommendations from Real Food for Mother and Baby, by Nina Planck and The New Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy & Birth, by Stephanie Brill, which is basically my bible at this point)

1.  I have given up coffee, ahhhhhh!  I will admit, there have been a couple of stress-induced relapses.  

2.  I have cut back on refined sugar.  This one is kind of challenging because people are always bringing baked goods and stuff into work.  I can't really do what I do at work and then walk past a cookie.  At least there is no refined sugar in my home.  

3.  I'm trying to stay away from empty carbs and unhealthy fats.  

4.  I am eating a lot more vegetables and fruits.  The recommendation is 9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, about 3-4 being dark, green, leafy vegetables and to get "all the colors of the rainbow" (no pun intended).  I think I am getting close to nine and definitely "all the colors of the rainbow."  It's hard to get in all of the dark, green, leafy, vegetables, but I am having one at lunch and one at dinner.

5.  I'm trying to eat mostly organic, especially meat.  I was pretty much doing this already.  Luckily here in Vermont, there's plenty of local, organic meat.  We won't talk about my grocery bill though.

6.  Supplements- pre-natals, fish oil, and pro-biotics.

7.  This one might be a little wacky, but I'm trying this thing called "lunaception."  This is where you sleep in total darkness, with the idea being that, prior to electricity, women's ovulation would occur with the full moon.  So, I guess the idea is that if you eliminate light from where you sleep, but then let in a little bit of light when you're supposed to be ovulating, you might be able to trigger ovulation.  This just involves me putting a blanket over my alarm clock, so I figured, why not?  Interestingly, after doing this for a month ***TMI Alert*** my ovulation symptoms lined up with the full moon.  

Aside from the things that I'm already doing, I also need to work on exercising more, which I am seriously lacking in motivation to do.  I also might try a round of acupuncture when it gets closer.  

Honestly, if standing on my head would make me fertile, I would try it.  I guess doing all of this also helps me feel productive, like I'm at least doing SOMETHING while I wait.

Choosing a sperm bank

Before I can delve into the complicated process of choosing a donor, I have to first choose the actual sperm bank.  So, that's one of my big tasks for the next couple of months.  I'm working with a local reproductive endocrinologist who will do the actual insemination, but they do not have a sperm bank.  However, they do purchase some vials of sperm from New England Cryogenic Center (NECC), which is based out of Boston, and then offer those vials at a lower price.  So, I can purchase these vials or I can make my own arrangements through the sperm bank of my choosing.

Just as an aside, I have really had to work on developing a comfort level with the word "sperm."  Uhg.

The benefit to using vials that my RE's office has purchased through NECC is that it would save money and the hassle of shipping.  The vials are about $200-300 less than you would normally pay.  Now, they're not discounted because they're defective or anything.  The donors available are also still available through NECC, it's just that my RE's office has this arrangement through them.  I don't know the exact details.  In terms of shipping, the vials are already at my RE's office, so I wouldn't have to deal with that.  Shipping of sperm is no easy task.  It's usually around $200 and comes in a liquid nitrogen tank, which is good for a few days to a week and then you also have to have the tank sent back to the sperm bank.

The downside to this is that my RE's office only has seven donors to choose from.  They have given me their profiles and I have looked them over, but there's not a whole lot of information there.  Also, none of these donors are "willing to be known at 18," which is a concern for me.  Another concern, is that I have done some internet research (what I do best) about NECC and I found a few not-so-favorable reviews.  However, I don't know the actual validity of any of these reviews.  The complaints were pretty serious though- accusations about children being born with disabilities and NECC continuing to sell the donor's sperm.  Again, no idea how valid this is.  With any sperm bank, there's only so much screening that be done.  There's always a risk, just like in the general population, that there could be some genetic disorder or disability.  However, I haven't found any such complaints about other sperm banks that I am interested in.  I guess my real concern is that if I went with NECC and my kid ended up to have an issue like this, how guilty would I feel after having read those reviews?  In reality, it's not really that much more money to go with another sperm bank.  If there's one area of my life where I shouldn't be so cheap, it's probably with the other half of my potential child's DNA.

So, I'm going to do a little more thinking about NECC and probably call and see if they have any baby photos or impressions of a couple of the donors available through my RE's office, but I'm strongly leaning toward going through another bank.

The are many other choices, but the two that I've most strongly considered are Pacific Reproductive Services (PRS) and The Sperm Bank of California (TSBC).  PRS is $$$, so I'm probably not going to use them, but I did consider them because they have a good number of donors with adult photos and some with video and many donors who are willing to be known at 18.  Plus, they're lesbian owned.
However, I did actually order a few adult photos of donors that I was interested in and I was kind of disturbed.  It's not that there was anything wrong with them...it's hard to explain.  A couple of them were a little older and balding, not bad looking, but.....I don't know.  I think the adult photo might just be too much for me.

I'm probably going to go with TSBC.  They are pretty much the gold standard in terms of ethics in this industry.  They only allow ten families to be created with one donor.  They are not-for-profit.  They have an ethicist? on their staff.  They don't have adult photos, but they do have very detailed profiles, staff impressions, and baby photos.  Also, many of their donors are willing to be known at 18.

This process involves having to put a lot of blind trust into a sperm bank, which is not an easy thing.  My gut definitely trusts TSBC over NECC, so I'm probably going to suck it up and pay the extra money and deal with the shipping.  I'm hoping to officially make a decision by next month, so that I can begin working on donor selection.

Grieving the dream

At this point, I've read most of the books out there on the subject of becoming a single mother by choice and one theme that comes up pretty consistently is about grieving the childhood dream of marriage, then baby.  It can be tough to grow up being fed those fairy tales about how love works and then have to let that go.  I kind of wish someone had said to me growing up, "you know, not everyone meets someone and that can be ok too."  Maybe it would have saved some grief.  Of course my "dream" evolved into the lesbian version awhile ago.  You know, the one with the perfect softball playing lover, a Subaru, and a bunch of cats.  Luckily, I can probably still have the Subaru one day and I already have the cats.

Anyway, I am proud to say that after a lot of hard work, I have reached a point where I am really ok with being single and with the idea of being a single mom.  Don't get me wrong, I have my moments, but it's like those moments are growing further apart and are less intense.  If I wanted to, I could probably spend a lot more time and energy trying to meet someone, but I'm not going to do that and here's why:

Like I was saying in my last post, time is of the essence.  If I met someone tomorrow, it could postpone having a baby for at least a few years.  I know that taking a relationship slow is the right, healthy thing to do.  I don't want to get into some lesbian u-haul situation.   However, I don't feel like I have that kind of time.  I certainly don't have the patience.  There have been a couple times in the past few years where I found myself feeling sort of "interested" in the occasional woman.  We would starting "hanging out," "getting to know each other," and then I would start thinking...."how long is this going to take?"  Realistically, this is not fair to the other person.  Even though I never said it out loud, I'm pretty sure that's what killed it each time.  Also, if I did meet someone and then waited to have a baby and then had difficulty conceiving, there's a chance I could end up resenting them and who wants that?

I also just don't have a lot of experience in relationships.  I've never really had a long-term relationship.  There are no ex-girlfriends in my past or ex-boyfriends for that matter.  There are just, what I like to call- "ex-situations."  Basically, brief, dramatic relationships of sorts, mostly from the college years.  Wow, that probably makes it sound like something's wrong with me, but I've thought it about it a lot and I don't think it's me.  I think it's women.  So, it's actually really hard for me to imagine how I would take care of myself, take care of a baby, and attend to an adult relationship.  I mean, I know that people do it all the time.  I just cannot imagine how.

Then, there's the risk of having a baby with someone and breaking up.  Again, I know... people do it all the time, but I don't know... it's hard to want a child so much and then think about the possibility of having to split custody with someone else and what an ugly side of me that could bring out.

One could argue that this is all rather selfish and that a child is better off with two parents and maybe that's true.  Another mother would certainly be another role model, another set of hands, another paycheck, but somehow... I just don't see a partnered version of myself being the best mother I can be.  There are all different kinds of families now, so hopefully this one will be good enough for my child.

I suspect that I will have some occasional lapses from time-to-time, where all of sudden I find myself being like "whhhhhyyyyyy am I aloooooooone!!!!!!!!"  In the privacy of my own home of course.  This can easily be triggered a TV show.  (See the episode of Parenthood where Crosby and Jasmine get back together).  So, like my last post, I guess I am writing this to reference when I have these momentary lapses.

I still hope I'll meet someone someday, but maybe it just needs to be more of a second-half-of life thing.  If I never meet someone, I know I'll find a way to be ok with that.  I'm just not sure how I'll ok with never having had a child.

"But you're so young!"

Over the past year or so, I've started to tell people in my life about my plans to pursue single motherhood by choice and the one comment that has come up pretty consistently has been about my age- about being "so young, " having "so much time," etc.  There are times where I start to doubt my plan and I do find myself thinking "yeah, maybe I am too young, maybe I can wait longer."  That being said, I do have my reasons for choosing to move forward with this at the "very young age" of 30.  So, here are some of my thoughts around the age thing:

1.  I wonder if anyone would think that a 30-year-old couple is too young to have a baby.

2.  No one really knows how easy or difficult it is going to be to get pregnant until they start trying.  Maybe I do have many childbearing years ahead of me, maybe I don't.  It's certainly not something I've tried before :) I don't have any known fertility issues, but there has been a question about whether or not I have endometriosis and I have at least one uterine fibroid.  While this is not an immediate cause for concern, I find myself wondering what the status of these things will be in a few years.

3.  It is simply more difficult to conceive with frozen sperm.  The timing has to be right.  You get one chance per cycle unless you have the money to pay for more.  The reproductive endocrinologist's office that I am working with says that the monthly fertility rate for humans with no intervention is 25% and that their office has had about a 12% success rate per month for women using donor insemination.  Granted, they are probably working with some older women and with women who have known fertility issues.  I have read more hopeful numbers other places.  However, it's pretty well known that there is a fertility decline at the age of 35.

4.  This one may sound nuts, but I have always wanted to have two children.  At this point, that is probably pretty unlikely, so I'm not getting my hopes up.  I will also not be devastated if I can't have two, but I'm not ready to shut the door on it just yet.  I do know that I would need two children to be spaced far apart in age.  Like, the older one would need to be in school.  So, I feel like the longer I wait to have #1, the more I am closing the door on #2 and on their chance to have a sibling.

5.  If the girls on "16-And-Pregnant" can do it, so can I.

6.  I have kept my cats alive for nearly eight years.

Ok, 5 and 6 are a joke, but seriously, I see women in much worse positions than myself raise children.

Basically, I do think that 30 is young, but I also feel that waiting is taking a gamble.  If I had a good reason to wait, I would.  I wouldn't try to have a baby if I wasn't emotionally or financially ready or if I had some major thing that I had to accomplish first.  Everything else that I hope to do in my life does not have the kind of time limit on it that having a baby does.  Also, I firmly believe that however stressful parenting may be, it will not compare to the grief I will experience if I am never able to have a child.

So, I guess I'm writing this so that I can come back and remind myself of all of these things when I have those moments of doubt and also in case anyone was wondering why I would do such crazy thing at such a young age.

Some Background

So, I feel a little weird about this, but here it goes anyway.  I'm not really one to blog, but I have found myself on quite the journey here and I would like to share this journey with some of the people in my life.   That being said,  I don't really feel that it's facebook appropriate, hence this blog.  I suppose I also don't want to torture people with this information when they don't necessarily want to hear it.

So, as most of you probably already know:

1.  I am a lesbian, although this is pretty easy forget given my dating track record over the past eight years or so.
2.  As you could guess from above, there is no partner in sight.
3.  I really want to be a mom.

So, I have set a date of August 2012 to begin the turkey baster process.  August might seem kind of soon, but let me assure you, it has been quite the process already.  So, to bring you up to speed, this is how it all began:

I would say that I have wanted to be a mom FOREVER.  My sister could definitely verify the countless hours I spent raising a family of dolls growing up.  I wasn't one to play with barbies, but I definitely had my babies.  Interestingly, I had an imaginary husband, but he was almost always "away on business."  Basically, I've looked forward to being a mother for a really long time.

As far as artificial insemination goes, that's been pretty much a no-brainer since I knew I was a lesbian (around 2000-2001).  Yes, I have considered adoption, but more about that at a later time.

Around 2004-2006 (grad school), I started to think that I might need to eventually consider single parenthood.  By that point, I had experienced enough dyke drama for one lifetime.

2006-2009, I tried to meet someone, but it just wasn't happening.  I was also living in Philadelphia and hating it, so I began to plan my escape.  By that point, I was pretty sure I would pursue single motherhood, but it was hard to imagine how I would be able to pull that off.  However, in the past two years, some things have really come together for me:

1.  After meticulous research, I moved to Burlington, VT.  I was looking for a more family-friendly place to raise a kid and someplace where my income could stretch further.  Also, let's face it, Vermont is one of those places where the gays come to be free.

2.  The position that I was hired for here was eligible for federal student loan repayment for a two year commitment to work in a health care shortage area.  This freed up a big chunk of my income every month and is really what has allowed me to move forward with this plan.

3.  Thanks to a land trust program, I was able to buy a nice, affordable, two bedroom condo.

So, that brings me to 2012, two weeks away from turning 30, and hopefully the year that I get pregnant.  I still have some things that I need to accomplish between now and August, more on that later.

Most importantly, this is something that I am so EXCITED about.  One of the hardest things so far, has been having to keep this excitement to myself.  In other ways, I am a very private person, but I just find myself wanting to go up to people and be like "I got a positive OPK (ovulation predictor kit) today!"  So, there you have it.  If you want in on this excitement, feel free to keep reading.  If not, you will not have to be tortured by the status of my ovaries.