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I'm a soon-to-be non-gestational, non-biological, non-adoptive mother. In short, I'm a lesbian and my wife is pregnant... this is my blog following documenting our journey.


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People watching and prams...

Sunday is a pretty good day for people watching, and my favourite pastime has now got a new logistical spin. Basically, when it comes to the practicalities of bringing a small person into this world, my wife and I aren’t sweating the small stuff. Look, we took five years of IVF clinics and private consultations and plane rides and sperm donors and operations and general chaos to get to the point that we are at now. So things like the day-to-day practicalities haven’t quite caught up yet. We have a friend who is due a month before us, and all they need is the baby monitor. We, on the other hand, have a Barbapapa lamp we fished out of a skip and a book about a giraffe.   We have loads of time… but still, we’ve started to think that we might need a pushchair. So in the sun, we sat on the shores of a rather big lake in Switzerland, watching the people promenade whilst paying close attention to the buggies that went by. This has taught us a few important facts – ...
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Nursery Schools and compromises

Next week we are going to visit some nursery schools. I wasn't expecting this to happen at all, or at the very least quite so soon, but it seems that a shortage of spaces in the local area means that you've got to get your kid's name down on a list before they've even got a name... This has also flagged the issue of what we do post birth in regards to childcare and maternity leave. The plan was that one of us would stay at home full time, but recent promotions and retraining make that pretty unlikely to happen. To cap it off, my wife will have only 16-weeks off for maternity leave. And I'll have exactly nada, nothing, zip. In Switzerland, there is no legal requirement for paternity leave. My company offers a discretionary couple of days, but I am yet to find out whether that'll be extended to me. I honestly doubt it, and have no legal leg to stand on to get a day off even for the birth. It is completely possible that I'll be asked to make up the ti...
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Telling people...

Telling people is interesting. You are projecting something that brings you great joy, onto someone else and hoping they mirror it. Sometimes they do. Sometimes the widening of the eyes is enough to translate the complete surprise; sometimes a spontaneous hug; sometimes just stunned silence. This weekend we told my in-laws and my brother.  As I’m going to expand on this I might as well address this now – my wife and I are of different nationalities. We live in a third country, one that doesn’t permit single-sex parenting, one that has no laws in place to support gay marriage, and in a village near major cities that have no gay bars or LGBT cafes or even Pride marches – a conservative country.  You probably didn’t guess it from the description, but we are also in a major European country, and not a developing nation in the back of beyond. To be specific, we are actually in Switzerland. And gay-rights aside it is a very nice place to be.   Going on from...
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