February 11, 200

bigtips

My honey and I have decided to have a baby

by M.T. "the Big Tipper” Martone

I miss my sweetie. She's not even that far away, just in the other bedroom, snoozing fitfully between desperate grabs for the noseblowin' toilet paper.

I, meanwhile, try very hard not to cough up any important organs as I hack, and hack, and hack. And hack. It's better this way, because the precious moments of sleep that we might individually score would certainly be ripped away as the other careened into some sort of snot-induced convulsion. So I lie in the upstairs bedroom, thinking fondly of her charms, and focusing on keeping my chubby pink lungs inside my chest cavity.

It's not that we can't be apart. I've just been feeling particularly tender towards her lately, especially since we've started trying to have a baby.

I hadn't told you that? Yeah, I know. I just thought it would be rude to tell you before I told my parents we were trying. I finally sucked it up, and received their tentative acknowledgement, so now I'm free to tell you. It's a veritable soap opera: The Fresh and The Frozen. If you don't mind (and if I hear nothing from you, I'll assume you don't), for the next few columns, I'll tell you how it's been going.

The gal and I have been together for about two and a half years. Perhaps that's not very long, but I like to think that were either of us a guy, and were it, say, 1966, we'd have a toddler and another bun in the oven by now. We hadn't been dating two months before she told me that she definitely wanted kids, and had always known she'd have one by the time she was 27.

Hmm. I was still trying to negotiate having a few nights a week when we would not be together (see top paragraph to see how that went), but I've always been a roll-with-it kind of girl. Sure. When we've been together for a couple of years, we'll think about it. What I could not at that time foresee was The 27th Birthday.

I'm seven years older than the girl, and have not spent a day of my life worrying about my biological clock. I've suspected that, like the one on the VCR, perhaps mine was never set, and has just been flashing "12:00... 12:00... 12:00" all these years. My period? As Suzanne Westenhoefer would say, "I've never used it for anything."

off over a year of pleas, kittenish suggestion, and appeals to my concern for Kiera's obvious loneliness and lack of socialization. No. No second dog. No. No.

(See previous column on our acquisition of Brenda, the cocker spaniel, for how that ultimately went.)

So, that November, when she looked at me and said, “I want to have a kid. With you," and I looked back at her and said, "Okay," she was shocked.

BIG TIPS

So, I was utterly unprepared for the transformation that occurred on November 29, 1998, when something in my lady's psyche snapped into fertile high gear, and the petitions for another dog changed to something requiring a little more commitment.

Now, as you know, I love Kiera the Irrepressible Boxer as though she had sprung from my own loins, but repeated pleas for a second dog had been met with my (I thought) faultless logic: When Kiera goes to obedience school, we can get another. I figured I had the mighty power of lethargy on my side, thus rendering me untouchable. I had warded

What the hell? I know how to pin a diaper without sticking the baby's butt. They stop pooping in the yard when they're four or five. And what am I doing for the next twenty years or so? Nothing I can't reschedule. I love kids. I just never thought this was my lifetime for popping a few out, but maybe now it is.

The first challenge was obvious: Where does the kid come from? Short of a Raising Arizona-style snatching, it looked like adoption or home cooking. We had some friends who had just adopted a little boy, and had had a very easy time doing so, but they'd had a lot of money to throw at the process. Adoption has always seemed like the most morally compelling means of child acquisition in my mind. There are kids out there with no parents. There are latent parents with no kids. It doesn't take Stephen Hawking to match that up.

What I hadn't realized was that adoption,

in the here and now, is basically a system for buying a child and there's no Ross Dress for Less or Marshall's. If you don't have $15,000 or more, you don't get a kid.

I know it's going to cost us dearly once we actually have the kid, not to mention all the band candy bars I'll eat and end up having to pay for, but there's no chunk of change that big laying around, no matter how much that teenager would like us to take her baby.

So it looked like we'd be taking the DIY approach. Producing a bootleg child. It was quickly decided that she'd be the designated vessel. It might have made sense for me to go first since I'm older, but she had the glint in her eye. There was no standing between her and the freight train of fertilization. Now we were just one sperm shy of the goal.

I'm pretty crafty. I can make a belt out of gum wrappers. I can make a nice coconut cake that looks like a bunny. But I can not make a sperm, unless there's something at the end of that Pipecleaner Art book that I never finished reading.

Popular lesbian wisdom dictated that we either go to a sperm bank, or hit up a pal of the XY persuasion. We mulled over the men in our lives. What did we want in a cell? Ultimately it came down to two traits: Tall, and brilliant. No problem.

Next: Sperm, Sperm Everywhere, and Not a Drop..

Burning questions? Contact me at the Chronicle, attention Big Tips, P.0 Box 5426, Cleveland 44101, or fax to 216-631-1052, or e-mail to martone@drizzle.com.

John R. O'Connor, LISW ACSW of D.L. Dunkle and Associates Practicing in Two Locations!

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