Because my daughter could have died alone

This post is the one I don't want to spend the weekend writing.  I thought of funnier topics and cuter topics, but this is the post I need to write.  This post is part of Blogging for LGBTQ Families Day sponsored by Mombian, but today I'm not talking to my usual audience of friends, lesbian moms, feminists, and fellow travelers.  Instead my imagined audience for this post is someone like Kendra, who blogs at Catholic All Year.  I hope she won't mind a shout out (and just a note that this post contains no cursing, no explicit content, and a minimum of typos).  I thought of Kendra when I began this post because she is an intelligent and thoughtful blogger who engages with political and social issues, and also finds gay marriage in my words: morally, culturally, and theologically abhorrent, and in her words "immoral" and "sinful."

This is our story:  I married B in a civil ceremony at the courthouse in D.C., attended by our parents, and occurring two days after we found out our first attempt at IUI was unsuccessful.  A month later I was pregnant.  A few months into my pregnancy (2nd clinic IUI, anonymous donor from a bank), we made the obligatory trip to a family lawyer.  In most urban areas you can find a small cadre of lawyers specializing in gay families and you find them by asking around or googling.  I believe we paid $2,500 for a 2nd parent adoption and an additional $1000 for estate planning. In Maryland, our part of the process included a doctor's note, some essay questions, letters of support from friends and family, and pictures including a required picture of our front door.

While we were happy with ourselves for being diligent and starting the process early, the legal reality was that no guardianship or adoption paperwork could be filed before a living baby was born.  I could make my belief that this baby belonged to both B and me and that we would parent the baby together known through unofficial channels, but we could not formalize B's relationship to our baby until after the baby was born.

At the time, that didn't seem like a big deal.  Life continued, lots of sleeping, trips to IKEA, inhaling chicken and bulgogi beef, picking up extra work to earn extra money, procuring my great grandmother's rocking chair.  Throughout I was nervous but healthy, as was B.

Then, an ultrasound showed that baby's previously normal growth had slowed: monitoring.  And long after my nausea had subsided, I had some episodes of violent puking (in the bushes outside my classroom and in a plastic bag in the car and on the sidewalks of my neighborhood where only junkies puke).  Not great, but I knew that puking could be a normal 3rd tri thing.  Then were some headaches so bad that they made me cry, but my screenings and blood work were okay, so I went about my business.

We hit week 27 and I was headed out of town for one final conference.  I went in for my regular checkup: blood pressure pretty high, concerning level of protein in my urine - for the first time, blood work ordered.  The next day I was prepping for class and one of the midwives called to request my presence at L&D - immediately.  The blood work had shown significantly raised liver enzymes.  "But I have a class to teach.  I don't have a bag packed." I negotiated for two hours, hustled over to my classroom to put a sign on the door, burst into staff meeting crying, and called B. to come get me.

At the hospital we went immediately to the MFM practice.  I had previously met the doctor there when he brought some med students in to observe my impressive fibroids.  Extended and anxious scanning, discussion of IUGR, a steroid shot, and the doctor: "You have severe preeclampsia.  We need to prepare for you to have this baby in the next 48 hours," he said pulling a sad face.

On L&D we sat on a bench in the hall.  They brought a woman through as she screamed that she was losing her baby. Our midwife waved from behind the nurses' station, but didn't come out to greet us (still bitter).  My blood pressure was 160/100.

The night in the hospital was long and loud.  The nurse's default was to turn up the baby's monitors as loud as possible so that it sounded like I was in my own womb, women screamed endlessly, my blood pressure monitor alarmed every 15 minutes because my pressure was too high and no one came to turn off the alarm.  But I had B there with me, sleeping fitfully, together.

A second night B went home to stay with our freaked out dogs.  A nurse told me she wouldn't be able to come back until visiting hours started again the next morning.  "We're married, we have a certificate, she's my next of kin."  The nurse said we could get it sorted in the morning.  B remembers that the visitors desk swapped her "visitor" wristband for a "family" wristband that gave her access to L&D 24 hours a day without any hassle.

Despite the frustrations of the hospital, I started to simply exist.  The days blurred quietly together with tests and scans and quiet.  I read steadily through the collected Sherlock Holmes stories.

B and I couldn't discuss the what-ifs, we lay in my little hospital bed and tried to imagine our baby's future.  I had a half-waking dream about a little boy and a little girl on a beach, and I felt a wave of peace.  We had already chosen LB's first and middle names after her great-grandmothers, but I told B that if they baby was a girl and she lived, we should give her a second middle name, Grace, after the Our Lady of Grace statue in the hospital lobby.

Time felt soft, I was floating and waiting.  Baby stayed strong.  And then her heart rate was alarming.  And she went off the monitors and couldn't be found.  The head resident efficiently and calmly, too calmly, pulled the portable ultrasound into the room.  She was so calm that I didn't know when she found the heartbeat, and asked several minutes later "is she there?" I called B and asked her to leave work and come sit with me.

B talked to our lawyer, who said she would drive up to Baltimore after the baby was born with our paperwork.  "What if something happens to me during the birth?" I asked a nurse.  "You'll be okay," she said.  It wasn't a question I asked with fear for my own mortality, it was a technical question.  "What if something happens to me?  They'll put our baby in foster care," I said to B.  "We have a lawyer, if there's a problem your parents will come down and sign over custody, it will be okay." B understood, but we didn't have much of plan, and I couldn't dwell on the future.  When I did, I was forced to consider a future in which our baby did not live.

For the first nine days in the hospital, I felt okay.  On the 10th day, I did not.  I saw floaters before my eyes, that I did not report.  I felt off.  My MFM popped back in with the verdict: rising liver enzymes, stubbornly high BP despite major meds, baby not growing, and now dropping platelets.  "It's time, you'll have this baby tomorrow morning."

B stayed with me that night and we cried and imagined our baby.  Surgery prep started early, but we were already awake.  A nurse came in to start the magnesium sulfate, which I describe here.  Mag acts as a muscle relaxant, and after I stopped sweating and puking bile, I felt very calm.  B put on her gown and held my hand as I was wheeled to the OR.

The anesthesiologist was waiting for us, he asked me to sit on the table and put both my arms around B's shoulders.  "It will feel like bee stings" he said.  I was too relaxed to talk, but I thought, "I've totally got this!" having been stung several times by a wasp in my office with no ill-effects.  I lay on the table, relaxed and unable to see without my glasses.

I'm sure B was trying to crack some jokes, but I don't remember much until there was a flurry of movement and someone said "You have a daughter."  "Is she alive?" I asked.  "Yes, Yes" and a tiny pink bundle was flashed somewhere near my face.  I thought I heard a tiny mew.  "She's breathing on her own."  B ran back and forth between me and LB(G) managing to snap the first baby-in-a-plastic-bag (to conserve body heat) photos.

As the NICU nurses prepped LB, my team got louder and more energetic.  "Blood, I need blood!" became "WHERE'S THE DAMN BLOOD!"  Muttering, orders, cursing.  "Okay, we need to put you under, okay?  B, you'll need to step outside after she goes under." I tried to nod, thinking "yes, I don't really want to be awake for this." I breathed as deeply as I could, trying to make it go as fast as possible.

The next five hours or so are not my story, but what has been told to me.  Medically, my low platelet and fibroids combo had complicated delivery, and led to extensive bleeding requiring extensive surgery.  Thankfully the replacement blood did arrive in time.  Meanwhile, B was sent back to my room to wait with a friend who had just happened to come visit us.  She prayed the rosary with a Quaker, and sweated through a Code Blue not knowing that it wasn't me.  A nurse came in and sent her up to the NICU to see LB.  Born at 29weeks, weighing 2lbs 3oz, LB was holding her own.  B kangarooed her (I would share the lovely pics, but B isn't wearing a shirt), and took more pictures.

LB's first hour in the NICU

I came to around noon, looking and feeling rough.  It was hard to remember what had happened, but I did remember "you have a daughter," and I felt waves of joy and love.  A nurse, one of the ones who was both kind and efficient brought me a gingerale with a straw and it was the best thing I ever drank. B came bouncing into the room flashing pictures and telling me all about the NICU and about how she held LB.

In 1995, Julie and Hillary Goodridge had a daughter:

"When their daughter was born, she breathed in fluid and was sent to neonatal intensive care. Julie had a difficult caesarian and was in recovery for several hours. Even with a health care proxy, Hillary had difficulty gaining access to Julie and their newborn daughter at the hospital."[full text here]

As Julie lay in the OR, Hillary sought to see their daughter in the NICU.  She was turned away because  she had no legal relationship with the baby.  She waited until shift change and lied to a new nurse, saying she was her baby's aunt, and was allowed access. Hillary and Julie became the lead plaintiffs in the case Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health, the case that brought gay marriage to Massachusetts.

If not for Hillary and Julie, what would have happened to our LB?  Would she have laid alone in an isolette while B fought to get to her?  Would she have been denied that time sleeping against her mother's skin?  If things had gone worse, would she have died never being held by someone who loved her?

"We're married" were magic words for us, words that opened doors and produced wristbands.  These are the stories of unfortunate couples who possessed only lowly civil unions: Brittney Leon and Terri-Ann Simonelli, Janice Langbehn and Lisa Pond, Kathryn Wilderotter and Linda Cole, and Bill Flanigan and Robert Daniel.  This latter case is particularly sad, because Robert died alone after Bill was denied access to his hospital bed.  In each of these cases the couples were in a legal domestic partnership.

The sad fact is that "we're in a domestic partnership" is not a magic phrase.  Say domestic partnership and very few people know exactly what rights you possess. Say marriage and everyone knows you should be at your spouse's bedside.  In 2010, the federal government offered additional guidance to hospitals receiving some types of federal funds, telling hospitals that they must allow patients to designate their own visitors.  That's a step forward, however, at least one of the cases above occurred after 2010.  The workers at the hospital front desk don't necessarily follow changes in federal guidance, but they do know what marriage means.  Marriage means you get the bracelet.

I am not equipped to speak to matters of theology.  I have freely chosen not to know what, if anything, exists after this life.  I am living this life with love: the intense love I feel for my wife and daughter, the joy I feel for my friends and coworkers, for clerks and bus drivers and randos, the perplexity and fascination I feel for those who claim to love me, but would deny my daughter a mother's love.

as a big girl

Thanks to Mombian for hosting the 9th Annual Blogging for LGBTQ Families!

A smartphone App for Queer Families

This piece from the New York Times "The New Old Age" blog caught my eye.  It describes the My Health Care Wishes app developed by the American Bar Association.  It lets you upload your advance directives that can then be accessed through your smartphone.  I'm intrigued.  This solution sounds much better than our current pile-of-papers-buried-in-the-closet system or the carry-your-docs-on-a-flashdrive option recommended by lawyerly types.

Many of us queer families are now of the married/2nd parent adoption/birth certificate level of official recognition.  But history has shown that it just takes that one hater in hospital intake to block access to a sick or dying loved one.  Of course you can demand access to hospital council, lie, or plead your case, but being a hospital patient or loved one of a patient is such a vulnerable position and you may have little time to work through official channels.  And, the comments on the blog post are filled with cases where paperwork was explicitly ignored.  Despite all that, having easy access to the documents we so carefully collected, when we most need them seems like a very good thing.

If I actually get it together to try this, I will report back.

Providence, Oh Providence

 
I survived my first week at my new job.  I week during which B was on the other side of the country for her job (which, from what I saw on facebook, seems to involve watching Dodgers games and eating fancy meals), and being woken up in the middle of Sunday night by a puking child.   My new job is right in downtown Providence, and I got to walk around a bit to get my bearings and drink quite a bit of coffee in local shops. 

I've lived in a few cities, and gone on interviews in many, many more.  My specialization seems to be the small post industrial (aren't they all) city, with a good dose of Rust Belt.  In each of these cities, I got a tour describing the place as a "city of neighborhoods"- aren't they all.  Providence isn't post-industrial like Chicago or Pittsburgh, but it is certainly post-manufacturing, and you can see that written all over the city.

My morning commute brings me to Kennedy Plaza, the central bus transfer point for the system.  The Plaza brings together all kinds of people, but overall it reflects the demographics of bus-riders who are poorer than the city as a whole, and described in one local NPR commentary as "the 3rd world" of Providence.  They also blast classical music through the loudspeakers on the Plaza.  I assume this choice was based on some broken windows theory that classical music keeps away the riffraff or generally classes up the place.  In practice, I can say that it is very disconcerting to stride away from the Plaza to a soundtrack of "Flight of the Valkyries."  My associations are either Apocalypse Now or Brown Shirts, and I'm assuming that neither of those was what the city fathers and mothers were going for. 

Gay Power, Gay Vulnerability: SCOTUS, SCOTUS, SCOTUS Edition

Gay is a place of vulnerability in our society.  Sometimes we can buy our way out of that vulnerability with money and lawyers, or powerful friends.  But paying for the proper paperwork didn't help Janet Langbehn, or Sharon Reed, or Bill Flanigan-all gay spouses kept from the bedsides of their dying partners.  Rights in that moment that you approach the desk in the emergency room aren't about what's written in law, rather they are about what people believe to be true.  That is why minorities need special protections, we need to have the justices of the Supreme Court shout it from the courthouse steps that "The Gays, they are equal!"

Sadly, the justices seem very removed from the workaday world in which most gay people function, a world of paying bills, finding healthcare, and spending hours on the phone explaining to various agencies that yes you are married, but not necessarily according to their definitions. In the SC, our actual experiences as gay people facing a multitude of discriminations and insults large and small got little attention as both sides argued the broad issues.   As the SC deliberates, we remain separate and unequal.  Vulnerable.

In both cases, the arguments made in the amicus brief filed by the Concerned Women of American, which I mocked last week, made an appearance.

In the Prop 8 case:

"CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: — I — it seems to me that your position that you are supporting is somewhat internally inconsistent. We see the argument made that there is no problem with extending marriage to same-sex couples because children raised by same-sex couples are doing just fine and there is no evidence that they are being harmed. And the other argument is Proposition 8 harms children by not allowing same-sex couples to marriage. Which is it?"

In the DOMA case:

"CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case." [In reference to the "sea change" in attitudes toward gay people, and whether that change means that gays are politically powerful.]

So now with gay marriage in 9 states out of fifty and wins at the ballot box in 4 states, we are too powerful to be protected against a federal government that does not recognize our marriages, or protected in the 41 states in which we cannot marry.  As for the child of gasy issue, I think we should avoid the issue of psychological harm to children of gay people who cannot marry.  Gay kids survive and thrive even in families that face discrimination.  Rather, discrimination harms children economically in many of the same ways that unrecognized gay spouses are harmed.  Our children do have a human right to have their parentage recognized, and this right exists even if they do not suffer psychological harm due to a lack of recognition.According to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), Article 8, "States Parties undertake to respect the rights of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name, and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference." 

So where do we go from here?  We'll have to wait until June for the decisions.  If they don't go in our favor, we do have the ballot box.  I think we can win in many states, but clearly not all.  Despite the HRCs very successful marketing coup, gaining attention for cases for which they had done little, the future is the Maryland strategy.  In the last election, Maryland activists abandoned the HRC-style strategy of running a slick ad campaign featuring respectable HRC types.  Instead, MD focused on regular people telling their stories, while also building a coalition of people across lines of race, class, religion, and region-a coalition of the willing, if you will.  While we can win at many ballot boxes, at this moment, when we seem poised for so much change, the expense and grind of campaigning just seems like a waste.  Maybe I'm just getting greedy.

One thing is for damn sure, we are out and we're not going back.  If we have to take it back to the streets, in the tradition of our forefathers and foremothers at Stonewall and in ACT UP [watch How to Survive a Plague on streaming netflix], we havenshown that we have the will to make change happen.

Whiplash

I told a friend that as a politically progressive married lesbian mom, I feel like I'm getting whiplash moving back and forth between happiness about Obama's evolution and frustration with the political goals of marriage equality.  The ABC interview was loving, but also troubling.  I think the word "monogamy" was a thorn for many of us. Badger and I are really the poster children for Obama's vision of marriage, but where does the extension of rights to those who are monogamous, committed, and child-having, leave the kinky, slutty, and otherwise disrespectable members of our community.  Where would our gay forefathers and foremothers fit into Obama's narrow definition of gay respectability.  In today's politics, it's acceptable to talk about rights and marriage, but not so acceptable to talk about gay sex.  Without gay men and lesbians who formed sexual subcultures, we wouldn't have gotten here to talk marriage, so best not to forget them.  I'm not sure that the drag queens of Stonewall, the radical lesbian separatist who rejected monogamy, or John Geddes Larence and Tyron Garner would make the cut.  Rights are rights, and you shouldn't have to conform to a narrow standard of behavior to be worthy.

So where does that leave me.  This anti-marriage agenda article by a progressive lesbian was published a couple days after Obama's statement, and even though I completely agree with the substance of her arguments, the piece felt a little petty and holier-than-thou.  This video (Making Newark Better) warmed my heart, and shows rather than tells the good (non-marriage related) work that committed glbtq activists can do-work that helps some of the most vulnerable community members.

Finally, I was watching Melissa Harris Perry's show. Perry always seems to come up with interesting analysis that goes beyond what you usually get on TV.  (I probably like her because she's a social scientist not a policy wonk.)  She used the analogy of slavery (and, of course, was NOT trying to say that being queer in the 2010s is like being a slave) to argue that gay marriage and a broad and inclusive gay freedom struggle are not in opposition.  Perry argued that slaves sought marriage and recognition for their relationships even as they sought the ultimate goal of freedom.  Wanting to be married did not mean that the did not want to be free. To mix some historical metaphors: we need bread, but it's not wrong to want roses too.

North Carolina On My Mind

The person keeping me updated on North Carolina's marriage amendment is a friend who is a straight, white man, with no other reason to oppose the amendment than being a decent human being.  And it makes me happy that he cares about us gays, and single ladies, and couples for whom "it's complicated."  Overall the North Carolina situation leaves me with not quite fear or sadness, but a deep feeling of heaviness.  As a historian, I believe in the human capacity for change, love, forgiveness, and transcendence, but I also know that we allow terrible things to happen.  "Never again," is a wish, not a promise, because it always happens again, just not in exactly the same terrible form.  If you were a Jew in Germany in 1932, or a Pole of any sort in 1938, a Sarajevian in 1991, or Rawandan in 1993, you didn't know how bad it would get.  You lived in a modern country, your neighbors were good people,  and then things fell apart.  I don't say this to be overly dramatic and argue that North Carolina's vote on marriage starts us on the march to genocide, but it is smart to consider the ultimate goals of your enemies.  I suspect that the gay haters, like the haters before them, don't know exactly what they want.  They don't want to kill us, but they do want us to disappear, and that is dangerous.  I also believe in the strength of America to hold its self together.  For all the craziness of this nation, maybe because of it, we are resilient.

My NC friend points me toward data showing that most NC voters don't actually know what voting Yes on One means. Is ignorance better than principled homophobia?  I have no idea.

I can't say that becoming a (gay) mom has made me more of an activist, I don't think I have the constitution for activism, sadly.  But, being a mom has raised the stakes of politics for me.  This blog post expresses many of the same feelings I've had as the political and the personal have become hopelessly intertwined.  After I gave birth to Ladybug, I was put under for a multi-hour surgery, followed by the loopiness of a mag sulfate/morphine cocktail.  Badger went to the NICU and held LB, cuddled her, and took pictures.  I'm haunted by the fact that that experience, in many states, is a privilege doled out by the hospital and not a right.  Under NCs Amendment 1, could our LB have spent her first hours alone with no mother's touch or voice.  If she had been sick, would she have died alone?

I tell myself "be the river." The river just flows.  It moves on without anger or bitterness, because it is made to flow.  I hope that queer families are the river washing gently over those who oppose us.

It's tax day, so we're lying

because the federal government tells us to.  For our family, it's not about the money.  Our tax penalty as single filers is negligible, and our finances aren't complicated enough (aka rich enough) to make separate filing burdensome, but it still irks me.  I consider myself an honest person, and that makes it really hard to check the box labelled Single, when I know that Badger and I have a marriage certificate.

It didn't help when I learned that in states with common law marriage, straight couples who publicly hold themselves out as married can legally file both state and federal as a married couple even if they have not been formally married.

Sigh

Why Call It Marriage?

I just started reading this blog, which I like a lot.  The author is a lesbian from a conservative Christian background.  I don’t know how she currently identifies herself, but it seems like she is still pretty religious.  I read this post

http://theadventuresofkari.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-do-i-want-to-call-it-marriage.html

and it got me thinking, once again, about why marriage matters.  I’m a secular feminist, and if I was straight it is very likely I would not be married, so why does it matter to me that I am (gay) married and not civil unioned? 

I had always told Badger that I wouldn’t get married, so I had to get past some issues in order to feel comfortable with marriage.  The history issue is a huge one—historically marriage is an institution based on and designed to reproduce the unequal status of women, so when I think marriage I think coverture.  I also think marriage is a distinctly stupid way to distribute rights and privileges—why should marriage affect the amount a person pays in taxes, for example.  I find the consumerist aspect of modern marriage off-putting.  And of course, there’s Joni Mitchell’s classic argument that “We don’t need no piece of paper/from the city hall/to keep us tried and true.” I guess that last one is where I go so far to the left that I end up on the right sounding like a libertarian.

But, despite all that, I got married.  Mostly because I love Badger so dearly, and I was happy to tell the world.  And I got married because of the court case Flanigan v. University of Maryland Hospital

http://www.lambdalegal.org/in-court/cases/flanigan-v-university-of-maryland

In this case a California man was visiting Maryland with his male domestic partner.  His partner became very sick and was admitted to the hospital.  Despite having evidence of their registered domestic partnership and despite the fact that the men had the correct paperwork to show that they designated each other as respective medical decision makers, the hospital claimed that “partner” did not qualify as family, and denied Flanigan access to his partner during that man’s last lucid moments. 

What this case says to me is that as long as marriage means so much to the people who hate us, it better mean something to me.  You can have all the civil unions in the world, and those civil unions can carry with them all the rights in the world, but if you show up at the hospital any person sitting behind that registration desk can deny you because they believe that only a marriage is a marriage.  Those same people see power in the word marriage.  Because it means so much to them, they are reluctant to deny the same rights that they would deny a person with a civil union.  I wish there was a way that those who don’t wish to share marriage with gay people could have their institutions, while still protecting our rights, but I think we tried that, and those same people did everything they could to make sure we would be not only separate, but unequal.

So now I have a lovely wife, a daughter conceived a month after we married, and a kitchenaid mixer—how conventional can you get?