Lylet's story
I knew I wanted to be a mother around the age of 14, however when I realised at 16 that I was gay I thought that parenthood was off the table. After much teenage experimentation with girls and a couple of long term (long term in teenage years – read 6 months!) girlfriends I started a relationship with my best friend – who was a man. The relationship lasted 2 years and was complete hell – he didn’t treat me very well and I was deeply unhappy. If I’m entirely honest with myself I think the only reason I stuck around was grasping for normality and the idea of having children one day. When it all came to an end my only thought was that it was my last chance at having children (at the ripe old age of 23). At the time, the thought of fertility treatment and donor sperm seemed like a complete fantasy – I’d have to be rich to afford IVF.
I then met my current partner and fell in love quickly, bought a house, a dog, settled down. Everything was perfect – except for one thing. She didn’t want children. In fact, she really thought it would be unfair bringing children into the world knowing they would be picked on and would never do it. Fast forward four years, attitudes have changed, less people raise eyebrows when you tell them your other half is a woman, more and more same sex couples in the media are having children. This coupled with my partners biological clock kicking in (Yay!) meant that we revisited the subject and we both agreed that we would try to have children.
Our original intention was for my partner to carry one child and me the other with around a 2 year age gap. What actually happened was she had 6 failed treatments over 18 months (an abandoned IUI, 2 negative IUIs, IVF which resulted in an early miscarriage, a negative FET and an abandoned IVF) so on our next IVF we chose to have 2 blastocyst embryos transferred (at this point I think we’d have had 16 transferred if it meant we could have a baby). This resulted in our wonderful twin boys, both born naturally at full term for twins – For the purposes of this wiki I will call them ‘The Biter’ and ‘Saurus’.
As it had taken such a long time to have our boys – 2 and a half years including the pregnancy – We decided to go back to the clinic when the boys were 9 months. We really didn’t want too much of an age gap, we thought if we left it too long the boys might be too much of a handful and we might not bother, so best to try again before we realised we are lunatics. I was incredibly lucky to conceive on our first IVF attempt using the same donor sperm and our baby daughter was born (I’ll call her Vosene), 19 months after our boys were. I would say our family is now complete – however we do have four vials of sibling sperm on ice burning a hole in our pockets.
Life with 3 under 2s is very busy – particularly when some days it means I have changed 6 nappies before 9a.m. – but it is worth it. Our children are so funny and make life entertaining to say the least. They may well be picked on when they are bigger but we see it as our job to give them the tools to deal with it.
