Answers to questions you asked(!)

Welcome to the final part — let’s call it the post-event Q&A — of a small series of essays about queer baby-making. In part 1, I wrote about our (long) process of deciding to add a new baby to our family and the choice to have Ash, who is nonbinary, be the gestational parent. In part 2, I shared our experience of working with a known sperm donor and planning for an at-home insemination. Part 3 details the day of the insemination. It’s been a total delight to share this story. Thank you to everyone who subscribes to this thing, and especially to the paid subscribers, whose support helps fund the childcare that makes my work possible. Today’s post is free for everyone.

At the end of part 3, I invited you to leave questions in the comments. A few of you did, and today, you get your answers.

---

Natalie wrote:

Don’t leave us hanging- there has to be parts 4 and 5- pregnancy and birth! I’ve loved these essays so, so much, it makes me terribly sad this story might be concluded for us! If it is, that’s ok- I’ve enjoyed every word.

And I’ve enjoyed writing every word! Thank you for reading.

As for pregnancy and birth, you know, I did think about it. Ash gave me the go-ahead. But I’ve decided not to. Ash’s pregnancy is Ash’s, not mine or ours, and the same goes for their birth. It’s different in that way from the planning stages and the insemination, aspects of the process that we unquestionably shared. Maybe Ash will write one day about being a pregnant nonbinary person? Maybe Ash will write their birth story? But I can’t.

I will say, though, that we had an exceptional experience with the midwives at Providence-Swedish, and especially in the CenteringPregnancy program at Swedish Ballard. This should not be noteworthy, but: every member of our care team got Ash’s pronouns right with zero fuss, and the fact that we are a married couple with two vaginas was absolutely no thing. Ash felt both affirmed and… normal.

---

KB asks (and Rachel B did too):

I’m curious to know what parental title Ash has chosen to go by, if one at all (and of course without any expectation that that might be something you want to share).

Ash is ‘Baba.’ It took time to find the name that felt right, but Baba is it!

---

Virginia writes:

In your "The sound in the room" writing, after Ames was born, you mention in the last paragraph many things you'd like to write about, including a hot take on equitable parenting in the newborn days. I am so curious to hear. As a new mama (well, she's almost 9 months, but that still feels new), I think this is what I've struggled with most.

Virginia. I’m glad you brought this back up. I’ll admit that been putting off writing about this subject, even though I said I would. I’m not certain of my ability to write usefully about it — not only because I have lots of unruly feelings about parenting labor and how it gets divided (or doesn’t) among members of a household, but also because I can sense my blind spots; because my experience is limited and is colored by my class, race, and geographic location; because there are dozens of books that I should really read before I write a single word about it; and because other writers are better prepared for the task of unpacking this nuanced and fraught subject.

But I said I would try, and I do want to. Here is what I feel able to say, in the order in which it percolates to the surface:

1. I had to end my first marriage in order to get anything resembling equitable parenting.

I didn’t know the phrase “equitable parenting” when we split, but I knew we weren’t doing it. My husband did not intend to heap all the parenting and domestic work onto my plate, but it happened, and then we got stuck. I can’t live for very long that way, feeling stuck. Some can. I cannot.

It happened that, around the same time, I was experiencing a shift in my sexual orientation, and that was a kind of catalyst. It rearranged me, put a fight in me, gave me a sense of some future beyond my marriage. I think what my emergent queerness was making way for was my self: someone I’d lost touch with for a while, in the course of becoming a mother. I had to end my marriage in order to disentangle my identity as a mother from my identity as a human being.

That said, I do not recommend divorce. I hate it for my child, I hate it for myself, I hate it. But my ex-husband and I both emerged from it, eventually, as better parents, separately and together. I attribute much of that to the fact that we weren’t trying to be married to each other anymore. (Also: therapy, time, physical space, growth, a kid we adore who inspires us to work hard, both of us choosing partners who are also invested in growth, neither of us wanting revenge or victory, etc.)

2. If heterosexual partners are to parent equitably, men must radically change the way they have been socialized to think, act, and care.

Gender is reductive and makes me tired. But I am about to talk about gender a lot, because it is a meaningful construct to the majority of people.

Love and marriage — with a hat tip to writer Amanda Montei for this clarity — do not exist outside of the social, cultural, political, and economic forces that define them. Men and women are socialized according to our gender. No one is immune. Even men who consider themselves feminists, even “the good ones,” must begin to notice and interrogate their habits and beliefs about unpaid work — household tasks, parenting, care work, etc. Then, men must do more of that unpaid work. Even if they have a difficult paid job that leaves them tired at the end of the day. They must do the unpaid work so that they will see it and understand, marrow-deep, that it has value. It will not be comfortable. The smooth functioning of life depends on countless shitty tasks that no one wants to do, but someone has to do them. No one gets to opt out. CAN YOU HEAR ME YELLING! Obviously I am talking here primarily about heterosexual relationships.

I asked a dad-friend about this topic, a heterosexual dad-friend who I know works hard to be an equitable partner. What men must be prepared for, he said, is this: if a man does an equitable share of unpaid work at home, it is going to seem to him as though he is doing more than his fair share. Men have been so accustomed to not seeing or valuing unpaid labor that when they begin do it themselves, the sheer volume and weight of the work will feel bonkers and totally unfair. If you are doing it right, my friend says, it will feel like you — you here being the man — are doing way more than your (female) partner. Distrust that feeling. It is part of the process.

If you haven’t yet read this conversation on unpaid labor and more between writers Amanda Montei and Sara Petersen, please:

How much of ourselves can we afford to efface?

Now. I will not claim that my queer marriage is immune to these troubles. But if there is one thing that we do not struggle with, it is the equitable division of unpaid work. Much of this is, yes, because of how we were socialized, as females: we both recognize, value, and feel responsible for the work of maintaining our household and raising our children.

Something that also helps is that, by chance, we earn roughly equal amounts of money in our paid work. That probably helps more than I am accounting for, actually — that our paid work is equally valuable, financially speaking, to our household. We both also like our jobs, and neither of us wants to be a full-time baby-parent. That said, Ash’s job requires them to leave home each day, and mine does not. Ash’s job provides benefits for us, and mine doesn’t. My job, however, comes with a flexible schedule. Which leads me to:

3. If partners do not work together to explicitly and fairly divvy up household and parenting tasks, one person — whoever is home more, whoever is wired to notice that X needs to get done, whoever already knows how — is going to wind up bearing the heavier load.

I wrote about this in a newsletter last fall, when this concept came up in a meeting of our CenteringPregnancy group. Much of the work of parenting and maintaining a household is invisible. That means that if you don’t point it out, talk about it, and make a plan for who will do it, it either won’t get done, or it will consistently fall to the one partner who remembers it. It’s not enough to want to be equitable, to want to share the load: you’ve got to actively decide who is going to do what. Then you have to follow through. It does not sound sexy, but the results are. Meow.

The goal is not to divide tasks equally, because Ash and I have different strengths, preferences, needs, and availability. Because I work from home and have a more flexible work schedule, I do more unpaid work most days than Ash does. It is not equal, but it is equitable: it feels fair to both of us, given our circumstances. When Ash gets home from work each day, they take over with Ames. They notice what needs to be done, and they do it. Even when they’ve had a long and/or hard day. Even when they are tired! Sometimes I cannot believe it, and I’m, like, living it. I am typing this sentence at 7:24pm, and Ash has just put Ames to bed, after having been on duty with him since they got home at 4:45. Now I am typing this sentence, this one right now, at 10:12pm, and they are at it again, dream-feeding him before we head to bed. It is astounding.

Later tonight or early tomorrow morning, I will tend to his night waking. That’s been our arrangement for months now: I do the night waking, because I don’t mind — unless he wakes more than once, in which case Ash takes the second one. When Ames wakes for the day around 6:30am, Ash is on duty. I sleep in until 7ish, and then I take over with the baby when Ash leaves for work around 7:30am.

We pay for 23 to 25 hours of in-home childcare each week. I do all hand-offs with our nanny, who is generally with Ames for a few hours in the middle of the day. I’m with Ames until the nanny arrives and then again in the afternoon after she leaves, until Ash gets home from work. On the weekends, we’re mostly together, but Ash and I each have time when we’re ‘on’ and time when we’re not, according to what we’ve got planned, what we need, etc. In general, we both feed him, attend his doctor’s appointments, buy his clothes, wash the bottles, stock his diaper bin.

Plenty of tasks are distributed unevenly, and that’s fine. I am our household money manager, a role I LOVE and that Ash has found great relief in ceding to me. Ash is the power-tools person in the family. Other areas of task allocation could use some tweaking. I do almost all the cooking, something I usually don’t mind, but when I do mind, I am fucking sick of it. I do almost all of the ferrying of June to school and back, activities and back, and the like. I coordinate with June’s dad on June-related decisions, expenses, and plans. I do most of the dog-walks. Ash takes care of our guinea pig, Percy. Ash does most of the laundry. They also do the vacuuming and sweeping.

Sometimes I catch myself checking out when it comes to Ames-related tasks, waiting for Ash to take the lead, because I can. With June, I couldn’t check out — much of which can be attributed to the biological fact of being a breastfeeding mother, but I also had a sense that if I wasn’t paying attention, no one was. I’ve wondered: do I feel able to chill out now because Ames is my second child? I mean, I do worry much less this time around. Do I feel different because I didn’t give birth to him, and because the person who did is here with us, in the room, invisibly tethered to him forevermore? Is this what it’s like to be a dad? Sometimes it really feels like I’m shirking my duties, lazy. Sometimes my inner asshole wants to sit back and let Ash do the heavy lifting as payback — You wanted this so bad? WELL THEN ENJOY. I do not like feeling that way, and I try never to act on it. I don’t think I have.

The farther I ride this train of thought, the more I start to wonder if what I’m calling ‘checking out’ is something more like relinquishing control. Is it the inverse of what my dad-friend described, the other side of the unpaid-work coin? When I give an equitable amount, it feels like too little. When we share the load fairly, when I am permitted to relax or zone out or disappear into my own mind, when I am permitted to be a non-parent person, the feeling is still so new, I don’t have a word for it.

I wonder if and when I will get used to it, to not being obligated to leap at Ames’s every call. I am his mother, but there are two of us in this household who do the work of mothering. I almost never put Ames to bed. I have only given him one single bath in his 7.5 months of life. I do not have a lullaby for him, not yet. But Ash does. I like that.

When June was a baby, I felt that most of my value in my marriage came from my role as her mother. No one said it aloud, nor did I ever sit back and name it as such. But I think it’s an accurate assessment, at least of the first five years of June’s life. Something I love about my second marriage — and about bringing more life experience to this partnership — is that I am never asked to be only one thing. In this iteration of marriage, I am regularly encouraged to be and reminded that I am a mother and a spouse, yes, but also a writer, a teacher, a friend, an increasingly extroverted introvert, a person who likes to nap, a person who is learning about gardening, a person who did water aerobics for the first time on Sunday and fucking loved it, a person who is into complimenting strangers, I mean who even knows who I will be next.

Lastly,

4. Formula-feeding. Formula. Formulaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Though heinously expensive and, sure, sure, lacking antibodies and other miraculous things in human milk, formula has been the single most important factor in allowing Ash and I to parent equitably. From day one, we have been equally able to feed our baby. As a woman who breastfed exclusively, this is — wow.

Because Ash had top surgery, we knew from the outset that our baby would be bottle-fed, likely on formula. We were lucky, early on, to also receive donated breast milk. A longtime friend of Ash’s, when she learned that Ash was pregnant, began pumping extra milk to freeze for our baby, and then after Ames was born, two other friends reached out to offer us their frozen breast milk, too. Between the three of them, we had enough breast milk for the first month of Ames’s life. For a while, Ash also produced a small amount of milk — a total, and happy, surprise — which they hand-expressed, and we added it to Ames’s bottles. But even when we had a supply of breast milk, Ames was also receiving formula. When he was still regaining his birth weight, our doctor encouraged us to boost the caloric content of the breast milk by adding teaspoonfuls of powdered formula to his bottles. There was never a time when Ames didn’t have formula, and there was never a time when he wasn’t bottle-fed. There’s a lot that’s annoying about formula: making bottles, washing bottles, washing bottles, and washing bottles. But it set us on equal footing from the start. It was great.

Here’s the rub. If you had told me all of this back in early 2012, say, before June was born, would I have assented to feed her formula? No way. I was determined to breastfeed. Of course I was. My doctor, to his credit, made sure I knew that breastfeeding was not the only option; in fact, he was very direct about how challenging it can be. But for an educated middle-to-upper-class white woman to not try her damnedest to breastfeed, and to breastfeed exclusively? I couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t even think it. I can barely think it now. Even given what I wrote in the paragraph preceding this one, were I to have a baby tomorrow, I would probably still feel that I should breastfeed, because I can. I’ve never met a gestational mother who didn’t plan to / try to / feel pressure to / go to heroic lengths to / endure pain to / spend tearful hours scrolling Kellymom to / grieve if she wasn’t able to / feel like a failure if she wasn’t able to breastfeed.

I was fortunate to have a good supply of milk, but my nipples were so sore and June’s latch was so finicky that for the first NINE weeks of feeding her, I was beside myself. I saw lactation consultants, read articles and tips, bought all the feeding pillows, tried all the positions, even called a breastfeeding hotline. Then, suddenly, something shifted, I still don’t know what, and breastfeeding began to work. I continued until she was 15 months old. I felt proud, even, that I’d never had to give her formula. The cost was, for a time at least, my sanity — and the hundreds of unpaid and unquestioned hours I spent nursing and/or pumping. When June was nine months old, I went to a conference in Austin for two nights and wound up flying home early in a panic after I got wild and went four hours without pumping so that I could sit beside the Barton Springs pool like a regular person. I returned to my hotel room with a plugged duct the size of a gumball.

I do not mean that I regret having breastfed. It was an astounding thing to do with my body, with my child. But I do regret having believed I must breastfed exclusively, having bought into narrative that caused me pain, that made me distrustful and ashamed of my own bodily experience. I regret how much I suffered for it. I bent myself into a shape I am still undoing.

I regret the precedent that it — both breastfeeding and the suffering I endured to do it — set within my marriage. Because that’s the thing, it set a precedent: that I would and should carry the primary responsibility for our child’s wellbeing, that I was the default parent, that I could always be counted on. After all, I was such a good mother.

So I don’t know how to write about this: how glad I am that we are formula-feeding Ames, and how hard I fought not to formula-feed June. I am glad to get a chance to do it differently. I want to think that, if, when I was a new mother of June, a mother or mothers I admire had mentioned using formula to spare their own suffering and gain more equity with their partners — I don’t know, I want to think it would have made me think twice. The only mothers I knew who used formula did so as a concession, only after they found themselves unable, for any number of reasons, to breastfeed. I want to think it could have been different if someone had told me something like I’ve written here. But I don’t think it would have changed anything. I don’t know what to do about that.

I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments —

M.