Pride Angel Journey | Russian Dolls

It was a Thursday in October, almost thirteen weeks into my pregnancy when I had the first scan. At last proper confirmation that this nausea wasn’t for nothing – there really was something inside me, something human. I was still being sick every evening but the misery was now tinged with hope and excitement: hope that the nausea might end fairly soon, and excitement at the knowledge of the life inside me. Meanwhile, a tiny being reclined comfortably in my womb as if relaxing on a sun lounger. It looked so laidback, so collected – so different from how I felt. And tiny, yes, but not a bit vulnerable or needy. Not like it might scream for hours, appalled at the shock of life itself. It was time to go public, although by this time it was only really a secret to people who lived far away and hadn’t witnessed the pathetic sight of me gnawing miserably at half a breadstick in between gulps of Gaviscon. We’d been nervous about telling our parents – I wasn’t sure how mine would take to our method of conception, involving a man from the Internet masturbating in our bathroom, but their desperation for a grandchild, the extent of which I hadn’t truly realised, apparently overrode any concerns they may have had. When I was little over seven weeks gone, my mum took the opportunity while the neighbours were on holiday (since it was still early days) to get my old baby clothes and Terry nappies out of the loft, through the wash and hanging on the line in the garden. This child was either going to look ridiculous, dressed in clothes over thirty years old, or like a supercool 70’s retro baby. Close friends either already knew our method of conception or, if they didn’t, were quick to ask. More distant friends and work colleagues tended not to ask and, while part of me wanted to correct their probable assumption that we’d been to a clinic and used anonymous donor sperm, I also felt that the quite intimate details of our child’s beginning were best kept as distant as possible from staffroom gossip. We left our parents to spread the news to the older family members still surviving, and I still experience a slight discomfort when I wonder exactly how much they were told and what their understanding is of how lesbians go about these things; it horrifies me to think that they may be under the impression that I had sex with a man – but perhaps I’m insulting the intelligence of a generation that we have actually found far more accepting of our relationship than the post-war baby boom generation that followed them. Meanwhile, my body was changing. It was around the fourteen-week mark that a sliver of tummy was starting to emerge between tops and trousers. Keen to avoid both a November crop-top look and the risk of catching a chill, I had to reassess my wardrobe. A similarly proportioned friend had very kindly leant me a mound of maternity clothes, and my forage into the bag heralded a revelation: the comfort of maternity jeans with a shrewdly practical elastic-and-button adjustable system on the waistband. There was really no hiding the emerging bump now and one break-time, a group of Year 11 girls cornered me; clearly aware of the delicacy of the issue, yet determined for answers, after a little skirting around the topic they ventured to ask whether the rumours were true. I hadn’t anticipated the screaming that my response inspired, and the anxious educator in me was a little perturbed at their complete lack of concern that their English teacher would be leaving a month before the GCSE exams. A couple of weeks later, one of the girls – interestingly a student who was rather too relaxed where her work was concerned – presented me with a hat she’d knitted for the baby. I was very touched by the effort she’d gone to, and felt a surge of guilt: my knitting needles hadn’t surfaced since the last charity blanket square I’d produced twenty years ago as a Girl Guide and now my baby was reliant on sixteen-year-olds for its wardrobe. I hastily consulted Amazon and ordered a copy of Vintage Knits for Modern Babies, some wool and needles, and hoped I’d be able to find a YouTube video on how to cast-on. Meanwhile, I was unaware that around the country a hum of clicking needles was already picking up tempo; the post-war generation may struggle a little at first with homosexuality, but news of a baby is well within their comfort zone and the automatic reaction of many of our mums’ friends and friends’ mums, it seemed, was to reach for a couple of balls of Baby DK and a pattern. By mid-November, I’d reached seventeen weeks and the misery of the nausea had been replaced by a renewed appetite for evening meals which I could now keep down. My weight started to increase – until now, despite the emerging bump, with two and a half months of minimal food and no exercise, both fat and muscle had been dropping off from the rest of my body. We started to socialise again; I was still rather prone to more severe travel-sickness than I was used to, but we managed to visit relatives in Wales and on the South Coast and for the first time in over twenty years in my family, talk was of babies. We went for an Indian meal with friends, one of whom was two months ahead of me, and we were able to share both the exasperation of being told for the fiftieth time that ginger could solve the sickness problem (it wasn’t even slightly effective for either of us) and the excitement of what we both had ahead. The fact was, that pregnancy was starting to become quite good fun. And all this time I was still only just beginning to get my head round the miracle inside me. I was reminded of the> colourful Russian Dolls I had as a child, especially when I learnt that if our child was a girl, she would already have a full complement of eggs ready to produce her own children: another two generations there, inside me. I was almost ready to don a bright yellow headscarf and paint my lips bright red. But if only birth was as easy as a brief twist and pull of two bits of painted wood… Article: by Lindsey, West Yorkshire 6th July 2013

Calendar date - Insem 6:30pm

We’d had it pencilled in the diary for three months. Our first insemination. In fact we hadn’t pencilled it in at all: there was just an ominous unmarked weekend on the calendar; a question mark by Days 11 and 13 on my chart; a pair of affectionate parentheses in my diary, embracing nothing. There’s an element of trying to be discreet – when I jot down the time of my next dental appointment, I don’t want Brenda on the surgery reception to glance across and see…well, what? What would you write? “Man we met on internet coming to masturbate into cup 6.30pm”. Clearly that’s far too convoluted, but the five-syllable “Insemination” doesn’t seem much shorter – “Insem 6.30pm perhaps? At least its obscurity would tick the box for discretion – it sounds like a business meeting with a software company. It was fortunate I’d been at work during the designated day. Despite occasional surges of excited panic, my mind had been distracted from the evening ahead. My partner, however, had been at home, which was useful in the sense that she was able to review the instructions and put together a checklist, scatter a few candles about in our bedroom for ambience, and place a specimen cup in the spare room (with a bottle of water and a tube of Smarties as light refreshments). Meanwhile without the distraction of work, her brain had been free to muse on our plans. “What are we doing?!” she asked, on my return from work and I felt the bile of panic rise. There were two things going on here: 1. We return to that ‘man we met on Internet coming to masturbate into cup 6.30pm’, but with the added entry of ‘Insert product of said masturbation into me.’ 2. To continue in diary entry style, ‘Sacrifice next 20 years of life to child/ren At that moment, an hour before our donor was due to arrive, it all felt so rushed. It felt like we had just decided on a whim, to have a baby, and having recently read that your nine months start from the first day of your last period, I realised that I was feasibly already two weeks pregnant, and we hadn’t even done it yet. I had to remind myself that we’d talked about this. For, ominously, nine months, we’d talked about this. We had to rely on the fact that whatever panic we felt in this moment, we’d made a careful, considered decision. The familiarity of the sound of the doorbell was strangely comforting, amid the chaos of my mind and the impending awkwardness of “when he arrives”. Unfamiliar with the etiquette of receiving a sperm donor, since we’re English, we resorted to the offer of a cup of tea, which, to our relief, was gratefully accepted. Thence an hour of polite conversation before he suggested perhaps it was time he got on with it. Meanwhile, leaving him in privacy upstairs, the two of us headed down to the kitchen and nervously completed a week’s worth of housework in about fifteen minutes (‘nesting ‘, I’ve decided, is actually just a fevered release of nervous energy encountered by expectant parents). Anyway, just as we got the iron board folded back up, he popped his head round the door and was ready to get off home; we all knew it was advisable not to leave the stuff lying around cooling down for long. My partner put the sample bottle down her bra for warmth while I prepared to be bedbound for an hour or two, by gathering personal possessions like someone about to be deposited on a desert island for ten years. I arranged myself on the bed, with my hips propped up on a pile of pillows in a position which I very much doubt is listed in the Kama Sutra, and my partner used my tummy as a handy table for her list of instructions. I closed my eyes and waited to feel the squirt of the syringe, but when it happened, I felt nothing. I opened my eyes and we smiled at each other in nervous collusion. After twenty minutes lying on my back, I rolled over and did five minutes on each side, and then on my front, like an obedient sausage turning itself on the grill. Then, nicely browned on all sides, I watched as my partner snuffed out the candles and, exhausted, we settled down to sleep. Somewhere very nearby, a million or so little beings had just woken up and were starting to have a look around… Article: 3rd August 2012 by Lindsey, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom To read more personal experiences click here.