Solicitation

by Mouse

After spending several months obsessing about trying to become pregnant, my mind has reached a saturation point in thinking about the actual process. I’ve moved on to how I’ll be getting to point B (as in baby).

In my first pregnancy, I used an obstetrician recommended by a colleague. The obstetrician participated in a group practice, so I also got to know some of the other obstetricians since there was no telling who would be on call when I finally went into labor. Although the appointments were not incredibly long, I was encouraged to ask any question I had and never felt rushed. Other than a minor scare at 6th week, I had no complications and my pregnancy proceeded within all normal ranges.

This practice’s office delivered at one particular hospital in the nearby city, perhaps the nicest one there. Each woman had a private labor and delivery room with attached bathroom, TV, adjustable bed, and a reclining chair. I won’t go into the details here—that would fill a whole other post—but my delivery was more complicated than we were expecting and ended in a forceps delivery.

For the two days my insurance required I stay in the hospital, I shared a room with a woman who was spending four days in the maternity ward after a Caesarean delivery of twins. We had our own bathroom and a shower down the hall (walk right in, no edge to step over). I had a choice of keeping Scooter with me in a portable bassinet or leaving him in the nursery for a while. The nurses knew I wanted to breastfeed and were very helpful with that—there was even a special lactation session given every day or two for mothers to attend with baby and partner. Before leaving, there was a short care session to answer questions and remind us about things like caring for the umbilical stump.

Besides all of the above, Trillian and I were both impressed by the security procedures. Scooter had both a bracelet and anklet that matched mine. Each time a nurse brought Scooter in, we checked my bracelet against his. Trillian also had a matching bracelet. To enter the maternity ward, she had to stop at the locked doors, display the bracelet, and wait for someone to let her in. Anyone leaving with a child was similarly checked.

And while not a necessity, Trillian and I also appreciated the freebies. I’m not referring to the free bag from a formula company (which, yes, we did get, but I don’t want to step into that mess right now). We were encouraged to take anything we wanted from the drawer of the bassinet: extra disposable diapers (which we left because (a) we were going to use cloth at home and (b) the newborn size didn’t provide adequate coverage for our long and skinny guy), the very soft hairbrush, extra alcohol pads for stump care, the small plastic basin for sponge bathing, and probably a couple other little things.

Now I come to my point. Or rather, my plea for help.

Since we no longer live near our old city, we can’t just use our previous experience as a guide for the second pregnancy. We’ve started looking into options here and are trying to figure out our options. Of course, right now, our reading raises as many questions as it answers.

So this is where you come in

Midwife or obstetrician? Where we were in the states, midwives were most often used when one expected to deliver at home or at a birthing center. Because I knew that at least some women in my family had difficult deliveries, I went with an obstetrician and hospital. But from the explanations we’ve had, a midwife seems like a real possibility in Toronto.

Which hospital? I know that the privileges held by my obstetrician or midwife will largely determine this, but I’d like to know some specifics about the downtown hospitals—which will, in turn, influence the first decision.

Share a little or a lot. Just the bare bones or your entire birth story. In the comments or via email (mousenest at gmail dot com). It’s your chance to offer advice to a (hopefully) pregnant woman and actually have it heeded!

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Mouse is: a mother, a lesbian, a graduate student in the Humanities, an American in self-imposed exile, an observer, an introvert, and an expert in Thomas the Tank Engine and Mighty Machines.

TTC

by Mouse

As my wife and I work on giving our son a sibling, all things pregnancy are very much on my mind. One evening as I walked back from Shoppers and a streetcar sped past me, it hit me that two very different things share an acronym: “trying to conceive” and the Toronto Transit Commission. But the further I walked, the more similarities I found between the two.

Timing is out of your control.

Sure, I have a basic idea of when I need to leave the house and when I’ll arrive at school, but I build in a cushion of time. If Scooter and I manage to catch a streetcar just as it arrives, we make it to campus as much as fifteen minutes early. But if we just miss a streetcar, we could be waiting anywhere from three to ten minutes and may have to hurry to stay on schedule.

Similarly, when I’m ready for another cycle, I can figure out a rough schedule of when I’ll ovulate (and, therefore, need to head over to Buffalo). But I have to be flexible. So I begin to look at a window of time: I’ll surge between Monday and Wednesday, which means insemination between Tuesday and Thursday, and then I figure out what appointment times might work on those days. Even then, I can’t make any definite plans until the surge decides to come.

Sometimes the best route is not the most direct one.

When I’m traveling downtown on the subway, I usually decide to go a few extra stops by way of Union Station instead of transferring at Bloor. While I can’t know for sure how long the other route would take, the few extra stops make sense to me.

My first child was born in the States, using a US donor; we are using the same donor for our second baby. Due to Canadian regulations, it is not a straight-forward task to have ‘pop’ sent to us here. We would be able to get an exemption since we already have a child by this donor, but it would require paperwork and waiting for bureaucratic approval. Add to that the waiting time for getting into a fertility clinic up here. So we decided to use a clinic over in Buffalo. It means more driving time, but has probably allowed us to get an earlier start.

When you stop and add it up, it costs more than you think.

Once a month, I go buy my monthly TTC pass. Twice a month, I buy twenty child TTC tickets. And then we pick up the odd batch of ten adult TTC tickets for my wife to use when I can’t get the pass to her. Even without including the per ride cost of my pass and even with using the discounted ticket price, the cost of a round trip for the three of us is $5.14. And our cost per month? Not doing that math. It’s a budget item and we stay within our limits.

The cost of insemination is pretty much the same. We purchased several of the donor’s ‘deposits’ before we started the insemination and are now paying for ‘banking.’ Each time I go to the clinic, I hand them my credit card at the end. Yes, I am aware of how much each item and procedure costs, I’ve got the receipts. I just don’t look at them all together. This, too, is a budget item, though we’re hoping to remove it soon!

“surge” links to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luteinizing_hormone
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Mouse is: a mother, a lesbian, a graduate student in the Humanities, an American in self-imposed exile, an observer, an introvert, and an expert in Thomas the Tank Engine and Mighty Machines.

Winter Break

by Mouse

For every year but one,* I have lived on an academic schedule. Even before I started school, both of my parents worked at the university, so our vacation times were determined by dates of finals and the start of a new semester. Until our family grew to a point where it became too expensive to fly to visit out extended family,** Winter Break was our chance to go see everyone. Since one side of the family is Jewish, the other Christian, we never had to worry about conflicting dates.

By the time I got into junior high, Winter Break often meant having some work to do, maybe a book to finish, a rough draft of a paper to write, a double set of math problems to complete. High school was similar, though the expectations grew: entire books to read, papers to write, projects to do. But I never really minded. Winter Break meant having the siblings and parents home most of the time; it was good to have an excuse to retreat to my room for some quiet. Plus, being the big nerd that I am, I actually enjoyed the work.

When I went to University and during my first graduate school experiences, I gained some freedom during the holidays. Since our final exams took place in the second and third weeks of December, my semester obligations were over by the time residence closed for a month. Sometimes there was some independent work I could work on, but mostly I devoured books of the non-required sort. The one exception occurred the year I had a professor who did us the “favor” of setting the research paper’s deadline after the holidays; as a result, it became the focus of much of that time.

As a teacher, I continued to have a good amount of time for myself during Winter Break. Where I taught, exams were set for the week before vacation, and I would almost always grade them that same day. I would bring the raw data from my gradebook with me so that I could start figuring grades—which wouldn’t be due until mid-January anyway—but I didn’t have to do that work. Since we weren’t allowed to assign work for our students over the break, I didn’t have to worry about a backlog of work after break, so I could afford a little fun time.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that now, as a graduate student again, I find myself with work that will hang over my head for the next few weeks, occupying a corner of my mind in the midst of the festivities. If I get myself organized before we head back to the States, I may be able to take care of two of the three major items that come due in early January. But the exam scheduled for January won’t budge. And so I will need to find a balance over the next few weeks—taking moments to enjoy my family and our traditions while remaining disciplined enough that I get to work when less important things are happening, e.g. putting things down for the menorah lighting, but finding a quiet place to study when A Christmas Story comes on.

It hit me towards the beginning of this holiday season that I have little recollection of holiday preparations in Toronto from last year—I had a similar schedule, plus we were looking for a new place to live. I must have been walking around with blinders on. I haven’t had a chance to be much more observant this year. But next year. Hopefully next year, when I’ll be well into a new stage of my program and when we may host the in-laws up here, I will finally get a chance to discover Toronto’s holiday spirit. I’m storing up all the good suggestions and will join the holiday celebrations with abandon.

*The one year I worked in the corporate world. And I was hyper-aware that entire year of what I was missing.

**We then switched to three weeks in August so that we could drive to see everyone.

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Mouse is: a mother, a lesbian, a graduate student in the Humanities, an American in self-imposed exile, an observer, an introvert, and an expert in Thomas the Tank Engine and Mighty Machines.

Introductions

by Mouse

My wife tells me I’m lousy at introductions. She comes to various functions with me—at the school where I used to teach and now in my department—and I often forget to do the whole “RandomPerson, this is Trillian, my wife. Trillian, this is RandomPerson. S/he’s in my class/ a senior graduate student/ my professor/ a thorn in my side.” When I have forgotten and we have parted company, she will whisper in my ear, “And that was...?”

I have two primary reasons (read, desperate excuses) for my lapses.

1. I tend to think she already knows most of these people. She hears me talk about them a lot and they can easily figure out who she is since I have only the one wife. Sometimes she has met them before, but when she’s around these people for only a couple hours a few times a year, it is a bit much to expect her to know them all. For those, I quickly whisper back a name and description.
2. I don’t know their names. I’m actually pretty good with names; as a teacher, I could learn my students’ names in a very short time. But there are a lot of people in my department with a lot of significant others and friends, many of whom I don’t see much more often than my wife does. For those, a shoulder shrug is the best I can manage.

Now all of this is my long-winded way of saying, let me introduce myself and my family.

Mouse—That’s me. It’s a nickname I carried for several years when I was younger; I think it stuck because I can be quiet, introverted, and skittish. I’m a doctoral graduate student in the Humanities, currently finishing up coursework and teaching a course. Before this, I taught at a private school in a large, US metropolitan area.

Trillian—My wife. The name is an homage to Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, in which Arthur Dent finds himself on a spaceship with a woman he had once chatted up at a party, a statistically improbable event. I sometimes find it a statistically improbable event that we found each other given all of the decisions we each made before that point. We’ve been together since we were undergraduates and got married about two years ago on a visit to Toronto.

Scooter—Our son. Most of his nicknames play on his real name or are less complimentary than I would want to immortalize here (Stinker being the nicest of those). Scooter (and its variant Scooter-Pie) comes from the early days of crawling and still pops up from time to time. He’s 3 _ and a perpetual motion machine.

And the title? “It is what it is” summarizes a philosophy that I try to put to practical use. I am a worrier and have the ability to work myself up over things that may never happen or over which I have no control. And so I take a deep breath and try to take things as they come. Can’t say I’m always successful, but it’s worth a try, right?

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Mouse is: a mother, a lesbian, a graduate student in the Humanities, an American in self-imposed exile, an observer, an introvert, and an expert in Thomas the Tank Engine and Mighty Machines.

It Is What It Is

by Mouse

How does an American lesbian in Toronto balance graduate school and motherhood?

The idea: Mouse and her wife move themselves and their preschooler North to a country where they can avoid the increasingly nasty politics back home, be recognized as a legally married couple with all attendant rights and responsibilities, and Mouse can take another stab at that PhD she’s been eyeing. It’ll be easy.
The reality: Life doesn’t get any easier. New scenery, new routines, new challenges. Nothing earth-shattering, but it sure can test Mouse’s attempts to be level-headed and calm. Which is why she must frequently remind herself, “It is what it is.”