Traffic jams, sperm, and spoiled fish

The third time

Oh, now I might be able to say—what a HOOT that was.

K decided she was mighty fertile on Monday (though none of her signs were present). So, she scheduled a sperm pick up. I ended up in the car with her—my bike on the trunk rack—due to a knee injury that is keeping me from biking round trip, ughh…

We decided to grab some fish from a market to make tacos before we picked up the sperm to make a baby. The don don said not to get there before 5:30, so we had five minutes to blow in the store. We swung by the don don’s and he handed off a too cold jar of jiz, which I promptly stuffed up my shirt next to my sweaty belly. Did I mention it got up into the low 90s on Monday—humidity 60% or higher.

Then the hell began. I had had a bad feeling about getting on the freeway to make our way home, but we did it regardless only to be instantly stopped by a long, long line of traffic. The radio said an accident was causing back ups. I had to pee when we got on the freeway and an hour later I still had to pee; we were still in traffic (though we had ventured off the freeway to find ourselves in another jam, cause everyone else had gotten off the freeway too); and we still had a baby food jar that once contained pureed sweet potatoes now full of potentially perishing sperm.

By the time we made it home I thought the fish that we were going to consume for dinner had spoiled and that the sperm had died along with my bladder.

We pulled into the driveway and I jumped out of the car while it was still moving to get a head start on running to the toilet. K threw the fish in the fridge (I was still very wary of swallowing it for dinner) and jetted up stairs. She took a leak and grabbed the orange syringe. I sat on the bed, undid the jar, and sucked up the bleachy liquid into the plastic injection contraption. 5 CCs this time—that’s a hell of a lot of jiz.

Once I shot it up into K, a little came spewing out. But there was so much I did not think it mattered.

All in all, this is getting to be humorous and tedious, scientific and common, difficult and easy.

no sugar patch--this month

Welp, the flow is on. K is not knocked up. She started her period exactly 30 minutes after me this hot June morning. Maybe our flowing together is a sign from some higher being cause the two of us have never been so tight on schedule. We rarely line up and when we do overlap we never start at the same time; it is still off by at least a day.

I'm thinking the first jiz didn't find the egglette cause we still needed my extra strong womanly side to appear and make fertile the ground for conception. Okay, maybe not, but starting our monthly wonder thirty minutes apart is very strange and if I believed in something mythical or real, I would say it means something.

So, since I am starting to believe in something again--something bigger than me and you, but not too big and not too powerful--I think maybe it is a wee sign of something about to be conceived.

Or, maybe not.

Urging her to pee on the stick

Yesterday, while I worked in the garden, K waited for the second line to appear on that strange plastic pregnancy stick in the bathroom upstairs. I kept shouting up, “Did it turn yet?” She kept shouting down, “No.”

I’m the one that was persistent in the asking—the asking her to pee on the stick before she even missed a period.

I guess I’m anxious. Not a bad kind of anxious, but a I want to know now cause if the period comes spotting out onto K’s underwear I will most likely not be there with her when it happens anxious. And I want to be there for her when the first disappointment surfaces, or maybe the better word for it is crashes out onto her panties.

When we first started I was more realistic about all of this. I know many people wait for years on end to finally get the sugar patch blooming in their uteri. But then the news came that our don don is heading straight out of town—he’s moving July 1. So now we have one more serious try time and then we will have to do it on the fly.

K is having a hard time determining her ovulation, so if this period does come then we will try everyday after it ends for ten days—injecting sperm like mad women. And then we will start the waiting all over again. Waiting to see if it takes or not.

The stick showed a negative, but it was done four days before her period is supposed to start so that means that the stick is only 54% accurate. Now the anxiousness is heavier than before, but like I said it is not a bad anxious; I’m still hanging onto giddy patience. Soon this all might be as common as taking a morning shit. But for now I will treasure the anxiety and patience and look forward to whatever comes next--a period, a sugar patch, a big dose of sperm--all of it is a gift.

Sugar Patch

Well, the waiting is tricky. Waiting to find out if the sperm has taken root requires a new kind of patience. I refer to it as giddy patience. I mean it is highly unlikely that after two doses of semen K is going to find herself all knocked up, so with that thought looming over our furrowed brows, we wait with giggles in our guts and a little nervousness. I’ve been referring to the possible sperm/ egg cell concoction as the sugar patch. I think of the potential fetus as sweet and mysterious--all the stuff that a nice candy treat is made of.

We will know in a few days if it took. If it did not K’s bleeding time will start up and then we will start all over again--with giddy patience guiding us through a most wonderful process. This creation of a sugar patch stuff is really quite nifty.

taking up space

One thing that has me scared out of my guts about the possibility of raising a kid is the tendency of people with children to take up way too much space.

Whether you have kids or not, you know what I’m talking about. Screaming, spoiled rotten kids on planes; folks in groups talking about their kids as if nothing else in the world existed, “Johnny’s day care is $750.00 a week but they start teaching kids trigonometry when they are 18 months old, so he’ll have a head start in this competitive economy”; unsupervised children running through areas of streets and sidewalks where little human feet should not tread; 3,000 square foot homes for 4 people (2 children/two adults). It’s all too much.

I am not a space taker upper, or at least I try not to be. I squish me and all of my shit into a tiny ball when I am riding public transportation or walking through a crowded area. I do not like to be stepped on, and I try with all of my might not to step on anyone else.

I ride my bike to work and back home almost everyday, and mommy walkers on the Gallup park trail are my new irritant—the thing that makes me swear thirty dirty words up inside my head. These ladies take up way too much space. Sometimes they walk in fours sometimes in twos but what ever the case, with two trailer size strollers side-by-side and back-to-back on the trail, they become an enormous brick wall that is practically impenetrable even when I shout out that I am about to clip all of them at a relatively fast pace.

Cause when I yell, “On your left,” they are usually so caught up in their little bubble world of kids, exercise, and the latest health food at the Whole Foods that they can’t hear good old me shouting. So I have to come to a full stop and yell, nicely (but not too nicely), “excuse me please; I need to get by.”

And then they might see me and edge their stroller semi-trucks ever so slightly over, so that I have 2 centimeters of trail to pass them on. Other times, when their exclusive world of plastic baby RV joggers and chatter take precedent over everything else on the planet, I am left to venture off the asphalt and over the grassy/muddy/bumpy/watery edge of the trail.

I mean the geese are more willing to recognize that I exist and move their families off the trail—hissing and making a fuss all the while, but at least they see me and at least they move out of the way.

So, I swear now on the holiest manhole cover around that I will only ever use an umbrella stroller. A little folder-upper that only takes up two feet (at the very most) of space.

calcified commitment

Deciding to try to get pregnant, was a journey unto itself. K and I have been together well over 7 years. We have been through the good times, the bad times, the in-between times. We have been learning to love one another and learning that a relationship is a complicated endeavor—it is hard work; it is good work.

Two years into our relationship we went through the last weeks of k’s mother’s life together.

I think experiencing the process of life leaving one who was so loved touched us as individuals and as a couple in ways that we are still processing and discovering. A solidity to our togetherness has been part of that processing—a permanence—an unspoken commitment has calcified around our hearts. When we stare our impermanence in the face and wrestle with the fact that those we love will vanish before our eyes, we are driven to respect, appreciate, and savor the seconds on this planet that we have together.

Being together is beautiful and one of the realest things I have ever done. Everyday we wake to the prospect of tackling the struggles of this world together. Whether those struggles entail getting out of bed and doing the house chores—the work of daily living, gardening, food preparation, cleaning—or the struggles for justice that both of us are engaged in, we are there for one another in support.

Support is this elusive idea that is not quite definable. Do I want it to have the potential for absolute definition?—no. Support may come in the actual preparation of food—the dicing, the slicing, the heating, the blending. Or, it may come in the gentle grasp of a hand after a hard day in the office. Support may be revealed in the strong ears that listen to the venting that accompanies multiple encounters with the variety of people that live in this world.

In the deluge of unwavering, mutual support amidst all that we come up against and in the quiet moments of being alive, k and I put our queer hearts together and decided that our next step in this life should be a bold one. A step toward the creation of something bigger than us—something mysterious and amazing and alive.

The aforementioned is part of the many elements that went into this decision, but in short the fact that we are solid together, in love, and support one another had to exist before we could even contemplate the other dimensions of this decision.

Second Try—on the day we left for New Orleans (June 2, 2007)

We decided it was best to skip a day. Nobody seems to know for sure about the virility of sperm if it doses out day after day after day. But I think that straight people have been sticking it in and letting it flow for years on end sometimes more than once a day. So what’s the big dealio if we overdose k on sperm around the time we believe her to be fertile.

Next month that may be what we do. The don don is very willing to whack it and hand it over on demand. Therefore, we may ask him to provide us with sperm daily for an entire 8 days after k’s last day of bleeding.

But all of this is beside the point, cause who knows perhaps by some special grace of the universe the meeting of egglette and spermy has already happened and the thing inside her vast uterus is beginning to build cell upon cell upon cell.

The second try was by no means as sacred as the first try due to the fact that we were in a state of hurriedness.

We woke up in a rush. K fled out the door to drive all the way to ann arbor to pick up the jiz. I was supposed to spread three yards of dirt around the freshly tilled garden area in our backyard, but instead I walked around the house in my underwear, wandering aimlessly, trying to think of all of the last minute packing items I needed to organize for our trip to New Orleans (we needed to leave for the airport at 1:30 p.m.).

See we had just a few hours to pack, drink coffee, take showers, finish the laundry, write out an instruction note for the cat caretakers, get Pookah’s, the whippet, shit in order to hand her off to the dog caretakers, and inject sample number two up into kk. She came home with coffee in one hand and the jar of potential life in the other (once again wrapped in a dark towel to keep out the dangerous light). And as the don don's boyfriend had said as he handed it to her, she walked in exclaiming, "Here's the magic!"

This time around we had learned that saliva was also dangerous for the sperm and that she might want to orgasm after it was injected rather than before. I was fine with all that, but I would not take part in this orgasm. Even though I now believe sperm to be a rather harmless substance in the practical sense, I have no intention of putting my mouth, fingers or other body parts near it, on it, or in it. Needless to say, k would have to attend to this orgasm.

I sucked up the sticky, chlorine smelling fluid into the orange syringe (yes, R it does smell like bleach, quite a darn bit). This time it measured nearly 3 CCs with the bubbles (one whole CC more than try number 1—maybe the every-other-day male masturbation thing is true?). I gently shoved it into k’s hole and very, very slowly pushed the syringe in.

Then I kissed her a couple of times long and hard on the lips and went to the basement to take care of the laundry.

listening to the Boss while injecting

There's a secret here--maybe too big of one to share. As a girl who likes girls, and by like i mean that i like the way girls smell and walk and talk and taste, I like sex with a girl. I have never had sex (intercourse or oral) with a man, but I've had no desire to. I've been close to a penis, but it creeped me out.

So, when I say that if ever I were to get knocked up it would be nice to do it with Bruce Springsteen; this essentially means i have this strange fantasy to sleep with him. But the line is thin, cause maybe the fantasy is really to be like him. Look like the young him--in his tight jeans and tight t-shirts (cut off or sleeved) with his hair all wild. Bouncing hair with a touch of a feathered features but not too feathered and not too mulletted--just right.

In all my obsession with fashion and style, and yes I'm into appearance, I have this yearning ache to be a bit like Bruce.

On that note, it is worth mentioning that k and i listened to Springsteen's Nebraska as i shot the first wad of jiz up into her sweet body. The album played quietly on our cd clock radio above our bed as we made love and tried to make a baby.

k thought it was a perfectly appropriate music selection cause the lyric that stuck in her head was from the song Atlantic City, "Everything dies baby that’s a fact/But maybe everything that dies someday comes back." And then she thought of her mama who passed away over five years ago, and she cried as we tried to make some life in the presence of the loss that was hitting her in the gut that very moment.