Parenting magazine Romper has just launched a special digital issue titled “Trying,” which follows five women trying to conceive. One of them is a queer woman who has been trying to get pregnant along with her wife.
Dese’Rae Stage and her wife Fel life in Philadelphia with “too many pets,” she writes in the first of several diary entries that Romper will be posting. She and Fel tried to get pregnant at the same time (not all that uncommon), and after a detour with one less-than-knowledgeable fertility clinic, they found a clinic to help them. Fel got pregnant and had their son Gus after a difficult birth; Dese’Rae, however, lost what was a five-week-old embryo only 11 days later. At the end of her first post, she writes of her conflicting feelings about trying again.
In her second post, she writes of Gus’s difficult birth, when his heart rate plummeted, then skyrocketed, and the doctors called for an emergency C-section. Fel contracted an infection that “could have killed her.” Now, she has questions:
What would it mean to only have one child instead of the two we’d always planned on? Now that we’ve experienced the fourth trimester, how worried should we be about my mental health if I carry, knowing that I’m predisposed to postpartum depression? What if I become suicidal again? What are the financial pros and cons of having one child versus two? Would Gus suffer without a sibling? What if I can’t balance it all? What if I ignore Gus in favor of the second child by virtue of a baby being needier than a toddler? I love being Gus’s mom. What if I ruin this perfect thing we have?
Go read her pieces for more on her experiences and feelings. Stay tuned, too, as Romper rolls out more of her entries and those of four other (not obviously queer) women about their trying-to-conceive journeys.
Romper is also launching a new series titled Endo Memo, “dedicated entirely to an often misunderstood disease that impacts a reported 176 million women (not to mention trans men and other non-binary individuals).” Kudos to them for recognizing that pregnant people come in many genders. (Not every article gathered into that series, such as a 2017 one on endometriosis and sex, is inclusive of trans and non-binary folks’ experiences—but let’s hope they add some new content that is more encompassing as the series moves forward.)