KACY ON S2: EPISODE 1
When Cori and I first started discussing starting a family, we decided very early on that she would carry the child. Let me be very clear: I have no desire to be pregnant. That was never my vision of parenthood. What I would love – and what I dream about still – is being able to make a baby with Cori that is made from her and I. That was the hardest part to get over. No matter how strong our love is, no matter how perfect I strive to be, I can never give her what is necessary to physically conceive a child that is from both of us. Being the non-birth mother of a child, there is a process of acceptance I had to go through in order to be “ready” to have a baby. We are lesbians, which by definition excludes a man in our relationship.
Having a child, on the other hand, actually requires sperm, which after in depth research (and silent prayer) turns out to only exist in males. That being said, Cori and I were relieved when her friend Brent was willing to forgo some of his to help us live out our dream of being parents. It’s very hard to rely on someone else to make any dream come true, much less try and do something like this. Aside from the legal red tape, which is not straightforward, there are all the logistics: personal, emotional, and physical. How close is too close? Where do you define the roles of parents vs. a donor? We didn’t know how this was all going to shake out when we first started. What we did know were two things: 1) Cori would carry, and 2) The donor had to be someone we knew, but who wasn’t in our everyday lives as to interfere with our role as the sole parents. When Cori and Brent discussed him donating his sperm to make a baby, we really felt like that was the perfect solution. She knew him and was completely comfortable, knowing his history, physical appearance, etc., and that he lived far enough away not to interfere, but close enough to have him be logistically viable as a donor. I mean, despite the lack of materials on the market for at-home insemination (and no, butt douche does NOT count as one), at the very least we had sperm. That had to count for something, right?
That fateful day when Cori got the text message that our Plan A was no plan at all, we were crushed. It’s so difficult to see Cori cry. It happens so rarely that when it does, it’s almost shocking. And to be the person sitting next to her, her wife, partner, and not be able to do anything about it… not being able to give her a baby of our own, and now, not being able to prevent this horrible thing from happening, I felt totally out of control. What could I do but hold her and tell her that everything was going to be all right? Even if I didn’t know that it would be, or what the next step was, I knew that my job in that moment, was to hold her and tell her that it was going to be.
