I am someone who imagined babies and birthing and mothering since I was very young. I am someone who couldn't wait to breastfeed. To be pregnant.
It hit me at the beginning of the second trimester. Just as we were about to tell everyone our news. I got in the packed car to leave for week for work, and I realized this baby was not coming with me. She was staying where she should - warm and growing in my wife. As we started telling people about the pregnancy I felt even further from what I thought it would be like to become a parent. Socially - I wasn't needed. I wasn't part of the action. I was outside.
In that week away from home I worried. I thought of the day I'd have to tell my daughter that we did not share the same genes and blood. I imagined her birth and wondered if we would know each other. If I would matter in those first days and months of breastfeeding and sleeping. I wondered if I would be forgotten by family and friends during the pregnancy. If the way I felt (outside) would be how others saw me. I wondered if they would really see me as the parent and mother to this child. I wondered if I would feel like a mother. Her mother.
As we began to tell more and more people about the pregnancy I did indeed feel left out of the loop. Our families and friends generally saw Colleen as the person making this epic journey to motherhood. And they seemed confused about me. What was I becoming? Was I also a mother? Was I a dad-mom?
Most people understand how to honour parents who are adopting children. But when there is someone who is pregnant, and someone who is not - we don't have ways of celebrating both becoming mothers. Together. But in different ways.
I decided that the best thing for me to do was to find ways to celebrate becoming a mother, too. After all, I was expecting a baby. Not in the way that I had imagined as a child, but in a way that made sense to our family.
I started to spend time with our babe each night. I sang and read to her. I felt her kick. I spoke with her. I allowed myself to 'nest'. We threw out the 'dad' books that were insultingly basic. We both asserted our family's names and reality to friends and family - gently educating those who did not understand. I prepared to breastfeed our baby by inducing lactation. We planned for time alone after the birth to bond. We got a sling and planned for me to carry our baby often in the months after her birth. We spoke and spoke about what matters to each of us in terms of becoming mothers and being pregnant. We charted a new path to parenthood together that respected both of our needs and hopes.
Family and friends responded wonderfully. Not everyone understood us. Not everyone had a good idea of what two moms could look like. That we could be equal parents in a situation where one person had a biological tie, and the ties of pregnancy, and the other did not. But they respected us. And many did come to understand very well just what this journey meant to us both.
Zo is my child. I've been her mother since the moment she was a dream in our minds. I have loved her every moment of her existence. She is my child no more or less than Sage is my child.
In those first months it took some creativity to figure out how to be parents together. When Sage was born we had to figure it out all over again. We focus on the joy - and how to magnify it. We focus on our love - and how to magnify it. We are family together. Each of us undeniably, inextricably, connected.
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