Two Mama Homestead

I love this question because I have enough distance from when we started this whole journey to see how my perspective has evolved.

On a practical level, I have a post I wrote in the early days with Dash that outlined the tangible actions I and / or my wife took that really reinforced my standing as a parent. I’ll track it down + reblog right after this because I think it stands up.

At a higher level, I’ve really seen my visceral response to having a donor involved in our family planning evolve. If I’m being honest, I started at a place of resentment, frustration, and frankly, vulnerability as the non-gestational parent with Dashiell. As we are on our way with our 2 kiddo family, I now feel pretty plain acceptance — in some ways, it’s just science! — and I feel grateful that this person out there donated + we now have the boys that we do. I also think it’s really special that our 2 boys share this connection given their shared donor.

When we were initially trying + throughout my wife’s first pregnancy, I really felt left out and not visible by the medical community and by the general world. As soon as Dashiell arrived, up to + including the birth of Archie, I’ve felt absolute confidence in my standing as a parent. Frankly, once the baby is here, there is SO MUCH TO DO and parenting can be SO CONSUMING + OVERWHELMING — this really created an opportunity for me to cement my parenthood (and support my wife and our family).

I will say, my wife and I are fiercely protective of our family unit. We will have honest and ongoing conversations with our boys about how we built our family. What we won’t do is being a theoretical curiousity for random people who we come across and who ask invasive questions. And that includes putting a stop to questions on the donor. Unfortunately, we have had extensive and difficult experiences in this vein - both with perfect strangers and with people quite close to us.

as a more practical supplement to my earlier reflection on being the non-birth mama, i thought i’d share the things i did/do to feel more involved in the pregnancy and to bond with our baby from go. some tips are uniquely queer, while others i got from my male friends who often felt left out during their early days as papas. these won’t be right for everyone. 

without further adieu:

1. have an amazing partner with whom you communicate early & often sounds obvious, but this is everything. my wife knew before she got pregnant what i was nervous about (feeling left out). the world knew she was pregnant, so she in part became my advocate. she constantly talked about her wife (me) and that WE were expecting. be open. be honest. have each other’s backs.

2. be actively involved in choosing a sperm donor again - sounds obvious (this is your family!), but i’ve heard of non-birth partners being disengaged during the sperm selection process. this is where the journey went from a ‘one-day thing’ to an imagined reality. bonding starts with dreaming up your baby.

3. attend everything you can alongside the birth mama i went to every doctor’s appointment, blood draw, and ultrasound while my wife was pregnant. not everyone can do this, but it underscored a broader principal: i am an equal part of this. 

4. get loud and persistent about your role as an equal parent it was awkward, but it got easier. a lot of times, i felt in the way. i often felt like the medical world ignored me. some of it is understandable – my wife was the patient as the pregnant one. but often, i felt like if i had been “the dad,” i would have been addressed directly. it’s a shitty feeling. so get brave, even if it starts as a shaky whisper. 

5. find a role: spoil the birth mama sure, i wasn’t the one growing our son, but i made myself the one who cared for my wife. growing & birthing a baby is hard work! so it felt like a perfect fit to be my wife’s advocate at this time. i made it my mission to ensure she was well-cared for - lots of food, water, massages, and general TLC.

6. find LGBTQ-inclusive medical providers once my wife was pregnant, we prioritized finding a doctor who would be warm & welcoming of our family. it made all the difference in the world. they made notes in the file to include my name & that i was the other mama so that nurses would know to address me.

7. get in the trenches after birth it was tough when Dashiell was first born. breast feeding can be really challenging & there’s very little sleep happening. i changed every diaper when Dash came home until i went back to work. and while i wasn’t his food source, i carved out the role of putting Dash to sleep. i spent the first month of his life rocking him to sleep while reading aloud Joan Didion to the whole family. it was exhausting and romantic and one of the best times of my life. 

8. have the baby take your last name not for everyone, but this one was important to me (and my wife was happy to go along). but let me tell you, seeing my son’s birth certificate with my last name on it - my heart burst out of my chest.

9. control the narrative early and often and to anyone who will hear, i’ll tell people about my wife and our son. this is to try to hedge the stupid fucking questions from nosy strangers. you know the ones: “who’s the real mom?” “ what’d the donor look like?” these questions suck and they will happen. so have responses ready. “We are both the moms.” “That’s private.” “He’s ours.”

You’re too kind! 💕 And how exciting for you + your fiance. Building a family with your partner is truly a dream come true.

Good question. I’ll have to answer on behalf of my wife since she carried both times.

For Dash, she was in a very fast-paced corporate job with tons of travel. So, she was constantly on flights + staying on hotels (and not fun boutique hotels, more like business hotels). The stress of the job plus the stress of being nauseous on a flight was unique + undesirable.

For Arch, she didn’t have the stress of that same job. But, she was pregnant through concurrent macro-level stressful environments. Pregnant during COVID. Pregnant living in our neighborhood through the rise of civil unrest and the ensuing National Guard presence on our streets in the days following George Floyd’s murder. Pregnant while also caring for a 3 year old through all of this. We never could have imagined our son would be born into the world he has been.

In some ways, having a newborn right now feels absolutely schizophrenic. Most of the time, we’re myopically focused on the 4 of us + living in a love bubble. Then, we lift our heads + recognize that our country is led by a racist buffoon, a global pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of people, while also destablizing millions who lost their jobs and therefore their insurance, our capitalist society has wiped out the middle class for decades and the police state continues to harm the black community without reprimand. And we have two tiny boys whose hearts + minds we have responsibility for as they making meaning of this world we live in.