Pregnancy, Parenting and narratives of loss and denial

[ishai_wallace]

I've been doing a great deal of listen to queer, trans and even some straight people talk about their journeys towards parenthood of late. All of these hard hard stories. Some of them are hard stories that eventually get better, and some are hard stories that just keep on being hard, and then are hard some more in whole new ways.

Some of the people

Comments

[pantryslut]

I have to say that I also think that several people in that room didn't really know consciously that theirs was a hard story until they saw all of us sitting together.

Mine isn't a hard story, either (some speed bumps excepted), and a big chunk of that is privilege, and another big chunk of it is not going through the fertility medicine side of it (except for one course of Clomid, which really should be the twins' middle name). I learned a lot from talking recently to a straight single mom-to-be who went through IUI and IVF for many years. It also seems to me that butch foster parents do not have the same sense of woundedness around their stories, and I think that's telling. The stuff that fertility medicine brings up around being a real woman, being a real parent, and how that's extra-complicated for butches (!!!), obviously deserves a lot more discussion.

I have lots more I could say, obviously.

[muncher]

Interesting point about butch foster parents. I hadn't thought about that before, and I will chew on it.

Another thing that was brought up in the workshop that I want to think more about is the invisibility of pregnant butches - even when they are 7 months pregnant. Add to that, for me, the fat and how infrequently I will be read as pregnant for both gender presentation and size reasons. I need to think about whether that makes a difference for me -- how important is it for strangers to see me as pregnant and why?

[muncher]

j, it's Melanie. I found this through facebook. I have a lot to say about how the workshop went, and hopefully someday soon I will flesh out my thoughts in my journal. But I wanted to say to you: (1) thank you for this thoughtful entry; (2) you are absolutely right about the sense of isolation that it seemed that folks who were at the workshop felt. The loose outline that Jaron and I had written up before hand (which included more discussion about clothing and negotiating the world-at-large) kind of went out the window. People really needed to share their stories and hear others' stories. Hopefully these connections will continue through the (imperfect but convenient) email groups that we'll be setting up. And, hopefully, there will be discussions of the practical, in addition to the emotional support.