Clearly, San Francisco TV anchorman Pete Wilson has never been pregnant.
If he had suffered from swollen ankles and periodic nausea for close to a solid year, I'm guessing he probably would not have described the recent birth of a baby here--whose father is a gay city supervisor and whose mother, a lesbian, is his close friend--using a trio of really cloddish metaphors: a toy, a social science project and a possession. His reason? The pair, who are planning to live together, are not romantically involved and therefore have no business procreating.
"[Having a baby] is not an opportunity to see how far you can carry your views on parenting, alternative lifestyles or diversity in family structures," said Wilson on his radio talk show, where he also sarcastically suggested one of the San Francisco 49ers football players impregnate a cheerleader in order to "raise a mascot."
Setting aside the fact that it would be nice to replace our scraggly bearded Yosemite Sam gold miner mascot with a doubtlessly attractive and athletic alternative, because this is San Francisco after all, the city's four-alarm intolerance bells went off and Wilson was cowed into a quick apology to the parents and child. But he did not back down completely, noting in an interview in the local newspaper that: "I think the argument needs to take place about the number of directions we have gone with parenting and children"
Well, welcome to the debate, Pete. I have been part of it ever since I got pregnant more than five years ago. To describe myself as weary about the topic would be inaccurate--actually, I am exhausted. I wonder sometimes what I used to do with all the extra time that I now spend explaining and re-explaining exactly how my partner and I have miraculously come into possession of two boys.
Here's the short version: We scanned an online catalog at hellobaby.com; bought some sperm that came from an anonymous donor for a small pile of money; had a few insemination procedures--in 2001 for me and 2004 for Megan--and each thankfully and quickly had an uneventful gestation period resulting in two healthy babies.
A slightly longer version for friends might include a litany of anecdotes about the pregnancies. About almost selecting a donor based on a single oddball answer to a question about whether he had artistic ability: "No, but I can draw an egg." About a work colleague calling me during the insemination (he recently emailed me, noting, "the real issue is that you are such a lunatic that you actually kept your cell phone on and even took a call during the procedure."). About watching "Law and Order" so much while pregnant that I became convinced the baby kicked whenever its familiar doink-doink sound came on. About no one thinking Megan was pregnant until the very end because she is so tall and everyone thinking I was about to give birth at only three months because I am not. About having to race to the post office to file Megan's taxes by deadline on April 15th, the same day she gave birth to Alex.
You'd think that would be pretty much all one might need to know.
But I cannot recall a week when someone new, mostly straight but often gay, does not grill me on the detailed logistics of two women having babies as if we were engaged in some, well, social science project. Last week at a wedding held at the San Francisco Zoo, in fact, the same passel of queries came so fast and furious and sometimes bizarre that I felt like a search engine.
Why did you pick your donor? (Height and nice handwriting--given we did not have much more to go on.) Could he lie on his form? (I guess so.) Why didn't you ask a friend? (Potential custody battles with anti-gay relatives we didn't know existed.) How did they do it exactly? (Pass.) Did you think about carrying each other's eggs? (Others have, but we're old-fashioned that way.) Are there other siblings out there? (Oh, yes, quite a few I would imagine, as a dozen families can use one donor, and there are now Web sites that help you find them.) What do they call you and isn't that confusing for them when there are two moms to summon? (In our case, Mommy and Mama and apparently our kids are much smarter than yours, so, um, no.)
And, always, the dawning clarity: So they're real brothers? That always comes right after it occurs to the questioner that we used the same donor for both kids. For some reason, this knowledge seems to soothe way too many people, who would never imagine asking Angelina Jolie if her two adopted children are real siblings. I get it, of course, that the biological connection between our sons is an interesting aspect of our story and that biological connection can be an important one. So important for most people that the follow-up question has started to seem inevitable: Do you love your biological child more than your non-biological one?
That particular question is always asked sheepishly but still insistently. Because I am, some might say, obnoxious, I often say, "Why, yes, of course!" before really answering honestly that the only time I think about it is when I am asked.
I hate this question most of all, because it suggests even more than the real brother question that people are incapable of forming new kinds of attachments and creating, yes, alternative versions of loving families. So anything that smack of different, even though most parental set-ups are each unique, is always scrutinized. That's why, even here in San Francisco, I suspect the fusillade of questions about Louie and Alex will not end for quite a while.
Still, I wasn't so much irked at Wilson as perplexed at why he so harshly criticized a pair of people who seem certain to be loving parents (who, by the way, are indeed the bio-parents too). At the end of the day, I think most everyone can agree that being a loving parent is the most important criterion for raising a child, one that neither time nor trend will change. In a way, even while Pete Wilson's diatribe compared the child to a set of Legos, he seemed to know this all along. "A baby is a human being, a delicate thing, our past, present and future," he said. "It is not an experiment."
Well, exactly.