Read The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant for Free Online Page B

babies with lesbians—and forming a large, happy, extended queer family—appealed to me politically.
    So I talked with both Lesbian Couple and Lesbian Single. And talked. And talked. And talked.
    This was my first personal experience with lesbian deep-process, and I can't say I cared for it. I especially didn't like how powerless the whole thing made me feel. Waiting for other people to make their minds up about something I was ready to do is not my idea of a delightful way to spend a year. But I couldn't force the issue, as that would have made me an asshole, and I understood that the decision had more serious consequences for the lesbians than it did for me, so I was willing to wait. For a while. I did my level altar-boy best to be patient as the talks dragged on. And on. And on.
    As I soon learned, all three lesbians had approached me at the “beginning of their decision-making process,” and none of them were even sure they wanted to have kids. They were “exploring” the possibility of parenting. Why they needed my balls along on their explorations, I don't know. If this was a purely hypothetical exercise, why not a hypothetical sperm donor? Lesbian Couple wasn't even sure who would be impregnated, though they were pretty sure they were going to take that step. They'd been together ten years, and parenting was the only new territory they could explore together. But then the talk of kids, the future, and the rest of their lives made mortality a little too palpable, I guess, and soon they were talking about breaking up.
    Lesbian Single seemed closer to making a decision, but she was talking to another potential donor-dad. Even if she went ahead with the baby, I might not get to jerk off into her Dixie cup. I'm tall, with dark hair and eyes, and I look a lot like Lesbian Single herself. Her other potential donor, whom I met, was four feet tall and had white-blond hair. Apparently the Lesbian Single was having some difficulty deciding whether she would bring a tall, dark, handsome child into this world, or an albino dwarf.
    Thinking one of these two scenarios was bound to pan out, I informed my delighted mother that she would have another grandchild within a year. Six months later, with talks still dragging on, I told my mother to forget it. Soon I was having a feeling , though because deep down I am a Catholic and not a lesbian, Ididn't share this feeling with anyone. The feeling was resentment. Why had they bothered to approach me before they made up their minds? Why didn't they wait until after they'd come to what we boys like to call a decision before bringing me in?
    While this was going on, I explained my frustrations to another lesbian friend, who didn't know any of the women involved. She was unsympathetic. “That's what it's like to be a woman,” she told me. “You're learning what it's like not to have any power.” I should embrace my powerlessness, she felt, and learn from it. When I told her I was thinking about adoption instead, she accused me of running back to my male privilege after a small taste of powerlessness women have had to endure for all of recorded human history.
    “Your willingness to access your male privilege,” she told me, “proves you're not really a true feminist.”
    “But,” I protested, “I'm a feminist because I don't think anyone should have to put up with powerlessness—not women, not men, and certainly not me.”
    “The true feminist man,” she corrected me, “would accept his powerlessness in a situation like this, and make a small payment on the enormous karmic debt men owe women.”
    Back at the negotiating table, things were getting ugly. Lesbian Couple had found out that I'd talked to Lesbian Single about doing for her what they had asked me to do for them (beat it, fill a Dixie cup, beat it). Because deep down I'm really Dan Quayle, Lesbian Couple was my first choice. Working in a day care for a couple of years left me of the opinion that two-parent homes are