Bed

Overcast and mild. Still in bed at midday!!

Hollie is under the weather and has the day off. We've spent it in bed so far... such a luxury. Watching ABC family drama and talking about how our family tree will look. Working out the plan for this evening (the sperm logistics!) and talking about worries. Talking about what we are looking forward to. Sorting out Christmas plans. The cat thinks all his Christmases have come today, with both of us still in bed for hugs.

This time together feels really important. We might make a baby together tonight.

Fingers crossed!!!

Long, long days

Wet. Again. A second week of having the Preps inside every lunch time will send me completely crazy!

The weekend was also crazy. Actually, our whole life feels like madness at the moment... Too much work and not nearly enough sleep or time to talk. Hollie's hours are even more long and ridiculous than usual and in addition to the usual truly insane work hours, she had a paper reappear from the job she had two years ago that needed one final edit before publication. She is one of the toughest people I know, when it comes to just knuckling down and doing it, but her life is looking pretty crazy from the outside. I don't really know how she is feeling on the inside... That would require seeing her for more than the hour before bed when we try to eat dinner and catch up and do the dishes and iron and work out what to do about the fact that we have no milk and it is raining... again!

I have also been working stupidly hard. I came apart at the seams a week ago though (my threshold is lower than Hollie's but it is still only the second time I've ever cried at school), and since then I've sorted out some things that should help, with the ever wonderful Harriet and a little bit of footstamping in the Principal's office. The school stuff is all looking significantly more do-able now, with a few new strategies and resources and the holidays also coming very soon. More than anything, I was struggling with the emotional task of managing all those kids, parents and co-teachers. I know that I couldn't possibly teach any other way, but when people tell me that teaching must be some much more emotionally easy than counselling was (my previous job) I feel like running down the list of emotional work that I do each day and explaining just how much this job requires all the same involvement of heart and mind... only unlike counselling it's not all over in discrete hour long blocks, you never have any idea what is coming up next, you get all of them all at once, all day long, not one-at-a-time with a reasonably certain lunch break. And in counselling, my job wasn't kids. Wild, wonderful kids who bend towards you like plants if you water them with love, making it double, triple as important to do it right, treat them well, love them back. Oh well.

The problem is, even with school on the up and up, a brand new dishwasher and Julia the German exchange student - who  we've employed her to come and clean the house (and named the dishwasher after) - insemination #1 is approaching and we haven't really got much time for last minute getting ready. Emotionally, I mean. I remembered the other day that I have to find a needle-less syringe somewhere, but it's the emotional preparation I am wondering how we'll find the time for in the next couple of weeks, Actually, I feel prepared. Surprisingly, I feel calm - happy and quietly excited. But I think Hollie has a few last worries to work out. Obviously, it's not like we have ALL the emotional preparation to do in the next two weeks or I would be REALLY worried, but still. On the weekend, we should have talked about it, but we were so tired, emotions ran high, it was hard, there was arguing.

Anyway. Like school, the answer is always love, finding more time for love. I know this about Hollie: it never takes much. A head scratch and dinner. Flowers. Clean pyjamas. In the Complete Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy and Birth they say that before you have kids you should do this:

The Love Map (Truly! That's what they called it!)
- make a list of all the things that make you feel loved.
- from this list, prioritise and mark the top four ways of being loved that you absolutely must have or you start to feel stressed, insecure or alone.
- make sure something on the list happens every day.

I think Hol and I do a particularly good job at love in general, but the thoughtfulness that is behind this way of approaching each day is worth remembering in these days of 8pm finishing times. So, to dinner.

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Mother, parent, mum...

Wet and getting colder... the air was crisp this morning!

I went to the doctor yesterday for the second of my HepB vaccinations. This is because a month or two ago, my GP recommended that I get a set of blood tests done to check things pre-baby-making. I'm not actually sure what they checked, to be honest. Whether I'd had chicken pox and what my iron levels were like? Anyway, the same week, I also had my breasts scanned as part of the routine of managing whatever risk it is that I may or may not have inherited. (This post so far makes it sound like I have a lot of medical tests which is not actually true!) The ultrasound lady had said it all looked fine, but then a week later, I got a letter from the doctor saying only that I had been 'Recalled: For Discussion of Test Results'. Of course, I panicked... but it was only that I'd apparently never been vaccinated against HepB.

Anyway, the point of all this is that while I was getting the injection, the GP casually handed me a package of pamphlets that she "always gives to people who looking to get pregnant" and recommended that I take them home to read in case there was information in there that I needed. It felt absolutely bizarre to accept the package... I felt like the honest thing to do would be to hand it back and tell her that we were actually just pretending and that she should save it for genuine prospective parents! It was precisely the same feeling as being handed my the class roll on my first day of teaching as a 'real teacher'... I really felt like I'd got into a situation where somehow I'd accidentally been mistaken for the teacher when really I should probably be joining the kids sitting with their legs crossed on the floor.

I've been thinking about this, about how having a baby makes you a parent, a mother, 'mum', since seeing the counsellor the other week. Hollie and I were talking about it in the car afterwards, because a fair bit of the session was given to explaining and working out what it was that we were imagining as roles for everyone in this situation. Anyway, some of the mother/parent/mum words feel easier to approach than others. 'Mother' and 'parent' feel relatively more simple when you make them into verbs, for example. Mothering, with all its emotional and practical tasks is something I feel strongly about even in my work as a teacher, and babies fit so snugly into my arms, so it's not something that seems like an unmanageably huge stretch to imagine myself doing - although, God, I really, really hope that I do it well. Parenting feels like an extension of this... the day to day running of a household with children - probably because this is how we've been defining it for the purposes of distinguishing between 'parent' and 'dad' when people ask about what Joey's role will be. That also seems approachable enough... I did enough parenting duties for so many of my nanny jobs that I hope I've at least got the basics. To be someone's mother, though - that seems unfathomably huge. And the idea of being called mum by a kid - and not just a kid at school who has got comfy leaning against me at silent reading and forgot I wasn't Mum after all - that also seems enormous. I guess any new role takes a bit of getting used to - and, after all, I do feel like a teacher now, I teach, I am someone's teacher... I presume the same magic will work itself so that 'mum' also feels real enough for me and Hollie by the time it comes around. I am so curious to know how we are all going to end up relating to this potential little person. Two mums is only the beginning of the web of love I hope we manage to make.

Four weeks to first try!

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Relationships counselling

Rainy, dark. I should really be in bed.

Yesterday Hol and I went to see a psychologist/counsellor/relationships kind of person who was recommended to us by a community health centre as someone with experience helping "rainbow families" with planning for their (presumably multicoloured) babies. I was dubious and terribly hopeful that she'd be amazing at the same time. Dubious because I really wasn't at all sure that we had anything to talk to her about and I didn't want to spend the money telling a stranger about our plans if she wasn't going to be helpful, but terribly hopeful too because the closer we get, the more I feel like it would be very nice to have someone who's seen it all before to be there with some steady advice and cheerful practicality if we happened to need it!

She was great. She got us both talking, fished around in our language untangling what we meant with the inadequate words we have to describe relationships between us all, made sure we both got heard, kept Hollie's waffling on track and noticed when she hit the nerve with me about feeling very responsible for everyone. She also seemed genuinely excited for us, which is flattering, and gave the distinct impression that she thought us fit and proper parents (yes, I was looking for approval... Do you ever grow out of it?) She was sharp and kind, my two main criteria.

So, although I didn't really get much from the session in terms of new information or huge emotional revelations, the feeling of security, knowing that she's there and will be on top of everybody's best interests if any of us wanted her, it's a really good feeling.

In other news, we figured out a plan for the kitchen over the last week and I got all nerdy with Google Sketch Up, and now we know how we can fit in a dishwasher. Having a dishwasher is on the very top of my to do list for before we are allowed to have a baby, plus the kitchen we have now is functional but quite overwhelmingly made of brown faux wood grain laminate and quite strangely shaped so it is very exciting to think that we might be up for a change sometime soon.

That's it! I have to go to bed before I ruin a day of teaching for myself tomorrow by being too tired to enjoy the little guys!

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