Beyond the baby: Thinking about Queer Family Making

I am twenty-eight weeks pregnant. In less than 3 months, I will meet my newest family member. This inspires daily fits of terror as I realize that I still haven't cleaned out all of my closets, stocked up on diapers, or thrown away that crap that's been in my refrigerator since my subletter of two summers ago left.

(Yes, I know, this is my own fault. I should have taken better notes during that nesting conversation...)

In addition to doing deep breathing exercises to mitigate the panic of my lack of preparedness, I've been thinking a lot about family, and what queer family really means to me. Throughout this process, I've felt committed to a vision of community, of family, that is rooted not in the biological, or even the sexual, but rather, on shared priorities, ideologies, commitments, love.

This vision manifested itself in my first insemination, last June, when eight of my closest friends, one of whom was my lover, came over to share in the process of making a baby. We didn't know what we were doing. We had a vial of sperm from the bank, given to me by a lesbian couple who had no use for it anymore. We had speculums, catheters, syringes, and a lot of knowledge gleaned from the internet. We had a diverse range of medical experience between us all, but none of us had ever performed an intrauterine insemination, or IUI, before. All I knew was that this was statistically more likely to get me pregnant than simply inserting the sperm into my vagina, and that, although it is a procedure usually performed in a doctor's office or clinic, I very much wanted my baby to be made at home.

The other night, looking back over the pictures from that insemination, I was struck again by the particular sort of courage it takes for a group of people to make a conscious decision to work outside of the system, to support one another in making choices about our bodies, our reproduction, our families, when we have so little support from the mainstream. My insemination involved a "medical procedure" that, by working together, we transformed from a clinical act into a manifestation of our joint commitment to building family. My insemination involved a "private moment," the origin of a new life, that is so often assumed to belong to the privileged realm of heterosexual intimacy. Even when we remove conception from the sex act, it still retains its mantle of intimate privilege. Who should attend one's insemination? Why, one's lover, of course. Not seven other people. In working together, as a group, to learn from and support one another in the process of inseminating, we affirmed that love does make a baby, and that that love can manifest itself in a diversity of ways. Could this be the bedrock of queer family making?

Recently, these thoughts have been on my mind again, as I've begun my childbirth education classes. My classmates, four straight, married couples, don't seem to know what to make of our group. Because indeed, we are a group, and a particularly queer one at that. I go to class every week with my trannyboi lover and my genderqueer friend, who committed a year ago to being my birthing partner. Our pronouns probably confuse people. Our relationships to one another probably do too. And indeed, sometimes they confuse us as well. One of the challenges of making this arrangement work has been reassuring both my friend and my lover that neither of them is superfluous to the process. And that has forced me to articulate for myself what I want out of my birthing experience. To commit oneself to a process that doesn't privilege one's lover over one's friends is challenging, particularly in the context of a class and a teacher who refers at best to "partners," and often simply to "dads."

I am not interested in replicating a heterosexual nuclear family unit. I want my lover to be with me when my baby is born. But I want my friends to be there as well, and to be recognized as a playing a role no less important, no less critical. If, as all of these birthing books keep telling me, birth really does set the blueprint for the life to follow, this seems particularly crucial. I want my child to come into the world surrounded by queer family, loved by, bonded with, and cared for by a group of people who aren't necessarily related by blood, who don't necessarily fuck one another, but who have nonetheless staked out commitments to each other. A group of people with the courage to love one another, to support one another, to call each other family, even in the absence of recognized models that look like us.