Babymaking

One night, over dinner with friends, we discuss our extended decision-making process. "Why don't you just pick a date and start trying?" one of them asks. I note that they are childless, but our next move suddenly seems obvious. Why don't we just try and see what happens? Sooner or later, you leap or you don't.

Later that evening, after our friends have left, Jane and I talk again about pregnancy and parenthood. Maybe we just needed 10 years to grow into the idea, but somehow we have muddled through to the point where trying for a baby feels surprisingly right. There's no guarantee that I will get pregnant, of course, and we have already decided that we do not want to go down what appears to be the very slippery path of fertility drugs and hormone shots.

If we were straight, we would throw out the condoms and the pills. Because we're not, the process is more complicated and involves more people and more money, but it's fundamentally the same. We will start trying and wait to see what happens. And so we have decided to put ourselves in the path of pregnancy. It is our way of making ourselves available to the fates -- with a little assistance from a speculum, a catheter and an anonymous donor.

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At the clinic, Jane sits on a chair next to the exam table where I have been instructed to remain for the next 10 minutes with my hips propped up to get the little guys pointed in the right direction. I am so grateful that we are doing this at a time and place where I don't have to pretend to be straight and single -- or worse, straight and married. Until relatively recently, fertility clinics have been the domain of heterosexual women and their slightly embarrassed husbands. But here we are in our very mainstream clinic in Edina, Minn., with its flouncy valences on the windows and its medical art -- large geometrical shapes in lots of pinks and light blues -- and the nurses seem to think it's just great that a couple of lesbians want to get pregnant.

Lying on the exam table, chock-full of sperm, I feel weirdly relaxed. I was afraid that I would come to this point and panic, suddenly realizing that I was hurtling down a highway with no remaining exits. But in this moment, I feel it is a fine thing that we are doing. I lean over the edge of the table and kiss my Jane. I hold her hand, pet her hair. We are part of intersecting modern phenomena: medically assisted conception and the so-called gayby boom. But we are also part of a timeless tradition: two people coming together in love and hope to make a new life. The possibility of becoming pregnant feels like venturing into a rushing stream, not knowing where the current will take us. I close my eyes and trust that there are steppingstones under the water, made of history and dreams, and that our feet will find them.

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