Erica & Alana Talk Raising A Black Son As Two Lesbian Women
Real Couple Stories: Erica & Alana Talk Raising A Black Son As Two Lesbian Women
All photos provided by Erica and Alana
Erica (left) is from Maryland and Alana (right) is from New York. The two knew each other through mutual friends in a basketball league. After running into each other repeatedly, eventually, Erica, who had been drinking, struck up a conversation with Alana and they started dating from there.
They dated for two years and then Alana proposed to Erica in May 2016. They had both been on the receiving end of these proposals and joked that they would not be doing any asking in the new relationship, so they would be forever girlfriends.
Erica: We had both been on the receiving end of the prior proposals. So we would talk about it like, ‘I’m not proposing. Well, i’m not proposing. Fine we’ll just be girlfriends for life.’ I knew ‘I’m going to marry this woman so I should start planning. But unbeknownst to me, she had already been planning.
Alana: I bought a ring in January and I didn’t tell her.
MadameNoire: Alana, what let you know you should go ahead and propose?
Alana: I just knew from the beginning. I had a very, very bad ankle injuries and after that and everything we went through, seeing how supportive Erica was, in the midst of my depression–because it was me pretty much at my lowest–So it was just a matter of timing.
MN: There’s a lot of discussion about interracial dating in the Black community. If a Black woman is with a White man, she’s called a bedwench. And Black men are criticized for dating White women. But I rarely hear any discussion about Black women dating or marrying White women. Have you experienced any type of backlash or criticism?
Erica: Before we were together, when I met her I had a boyfriend and he was White. My family has always been very supportive. I was terrified to come out. And my dad said, ‘I don’t really care who you date. I will string up a girl, the same way I will string up a guy if they hurt you.’ And I was like, ‘Oh ok, that’s good to know.’
But the comments I heard on the street walking in Harlem with a White man, were different than walking with Alana. I have definitely heard the comments like, ‘How come you went that way?’ or ‘Oh, what’s he got?’ or ‘You just haven’t found the right man or the right Black man.’
Alana: And we get those comments sometimes. A lot of the times when we’re walking down the street in a more Black neighborhood, some of the men on the street will be like, ‘Why are you holding her hand?’ or ‘Can I hold your hand too?’
Erica: We were at a birthday party and I think this was probably the most extreme example that we’ve encountered together. We were at a nightclub, standing with our backs against the bar, very discreetly holding hands. And this guy, walks and tries to step between us. He grabs my free hand and tries to take our hands apart. It was one of those moments that escalated very quickly. Had I been there holding my ex-boyfriend’s hand, it would have escalated in a very different fashion.
Alana: I’ve also experienced, more recently, now that we’re having a kid, a lot of people being confused about the whole situation. Like, we think in five years, the entire world is going to be a light shade of cinnamon. But a lot of people don’t like that. I feel like I’m starting to hear those conversations more.
MN: Had you talked about kids before you got married?
Alana: Yeah, we had talked about it. I love kids like, beyond belief. I’ve just been around kids my whole life and Erica’s always talked about wanting a family. We got married January 15, 2017 and we decided we wanted to start the whole process January of this year. Erica was super excited to carry. I’ve always wanted to be a mother but I’ve never necessarily felt like my uterus was telling me I needed to carry a child. If, for some reason, it didn’t work out with her, I definitely would have done it but luckily it did.
MN: Erica, what was it about carrying a child that felt like it was something you needed to experience?
Erica: I was actually a health and sex education for a while and so for me, it was about being on the other side of this thing I had been teaching all those many years. And then being this science nerd and being fascinated by all of the change that happens in your body in a nine-month period. Most animals it takes over a year to make a replica. That seems pretty cool, I would love to try that. When we were having the conversation I said, ‘Yeah, I would definitely want to do it.’ There was no hesitation.
But then there’s also the process of not knowing what all goes into it when you don’t have access to sperm all the time. And I had never really had the conversation with my mom if she had any difficulties. So I didn’t know if this is something I can actually do? But it was good to know that if this was something I couldn’t physically do, that Alana was there to still give it a shot.
MN: So I know this whole process can be expensive. Do you feel comfortable speaking about the financial side of it?
Erica and Alana: Yeah!
Alana: There’s a few different things that are expensive. The first one, and this is subjective to what the couple decides, but we wanted an anonymous sperm donor. Some people will use a friend or a relative. Like, she could have carried one of my brothers’ or cousins’ sperm to replicate the closest thing to me. We just felt that we want our child or children to know that we are your parents and we just needed help creating you but we are the ones raising you. We didn’t want the kid to be thirteen-years-old searching for their birth father and it’s Uncle George.
Erica: Alana’s best friend and her wife have twin girls and I think seeing them and hearing the questions that they asked, helped me to be like, ‘Oh ok.’ Like, what do you tell a kid that sees their friends have a mom and dad but they don’t? How do you explain that? But having watched those two, I felt like we could do this.
Alana: We used California Cryobank. And the weird thing about picking out sperm, is, it’s like online dating with baby pictures. And depending on your subscription level to the service, you can get more information about the donors.
Erica: You can pay to see adult pictures of them, hear their voice, read journal entries, things like that.
Alana: When we started our conversation with the fertility doctor, one of the things they tell you is that for every try for pregnancy through IUI–which is basically a glorified turkey basters, you need two viable vials of sperm. We had to buy four vials and each vial was $1,000. We spent 4 grand on sperm.
MN: And sperm is everywhere.
Alana: And we were lucky. The universe worked in our favor because we got pregnant on the first try.
Erica: I think it’s like 2-3% of people who get pregnant that early.
Alana: At the top of my head, I’d say we spent about $8,000.
MN: How did you go about choosing a donor? Was race a part of the discussion? What was it that you liked about the donor that you chose?
Erica: I initially wanted a donor who looked like they could have been related to Alana. So she’s Jewish, so I wanted someone Jewish.
Alana: And I was like, ‘Then you get every chromosomal disorder on earth. Please don’t check that box.’
Erica: And when you check it, it goes from 100 guys to like four. I was like, ‘Alright, he doesn’t have to be a Jew. I can let that go.’ But then trying to find someone who was smart and seemed caring. You’re trying to figure out all these qualities reading a profile.
Alana: You’re skipping ahead of yourself. Erica was deadset on this donor looking like me. I said the entire time I literally said, ‘I do not care. All I want is a healthy baby. I couldn’t give a sh*t if my kid was bright red, I would be happy, all I want is a healthy baby. For me, what was more important was clean, family medical history, no history of mental illness. I was more concerned with the genetic part of it. Erica was like, ‘I want a blond haired, blue-eyed person.’
Erica: I was concerned about the family history but if there was a way for us to make a person, with our two eggs, I wanted our baby to be what would happen.
Alana: So we had picked out three people that we liked. They were all White, with varying skin tone and hair color and then we went to the fertility doctor and she asked if they had done genetic testing. And we said, ‘We don’t know.’ And we checked and none of them did. And the doctor said, ‘Well, the cryobank is offering free genetic testing on all the new sperm they’re releasing, you can have free genetic testing on the donor. So we went back and looked again and our donor is half Black and half White. So our son will be ¾ Black and ¼ White.
Erica: What’s interesting about this is they give you pictures of them as children but they also give you celebrities and athletes that the people at the cryobank think they look like as adults. Our sperm donor is half Black, half White but all of his celebrities are Hispanic men. So we’re not really sure what our kid is going to look like.
Alana: While I tell you that I don’t care at all what shade this kid is, I do know that raising a young, Black man in America–there will be things I can teach him about being a good person and being smart and having good values and morals but I cannot relate to him on any level of what it means to be Black in America. That is something we talk about all of the time.
Erica: I sort of had a moment of panic a few months ago, right after we found out he was a boy– about the fact that most of the people in our circle are women. Most of our friends are other lesbian couples. And all of our friends who have had babies, are girls. So, we’re bringing a boy into a very female-saturated environment. Which I think is great. But, especially now, he’s going to need men and men of color to tell him, ‘No, this is how you act as a man. This is how you act as a good man.’
My family and my closest male friends are all still in Maryland. I feel better about it now, but I really kind of struggled and asked, ‘Who do we know?’
Alana: Even though we’re saying that our son will need a strong male role model so he knows how to act like a man. I hate that that’s a thing. Because acting like a man? What does that mean? It’s a society built concept. For me, as long as we make a good human, that’s all I care about. But I’m not naive and I know how the world is and I know how America is. Like, the other part of this expensive conversation is even though I’ll be on the birth certificate, I, in theory, still have to adopt my own child because not every state recognizes the second parent on the birth certificate when it’s two women.
MN: What do you think are some of the positive aspects of growing up around so much feminine energy?
Alana: My hope is that he’s open and okay with being sensitive and talking about his feelings and feeling 100 percent okay to express himself, in any scenario regardless of what he may be feeling.
Erica: I want him to be emotionally aware and I want him to understand and value what women have to say and the role that women play in society. I think now, that’s something that’s very lost in young men and even older men. It’s this sense of ‘Oh, well they’re just women.’ And for me, I’m like at the end of the day, we wouldn’t have men if we didn’t have women. And that’s the thing I want him to really understand is that everyone is equal. Everyone can be what they want to be and do the things they want to do in this life. And everyone deserves that respect, it doesn’t matter what your gender is…
Alana: …or what your race is.
Erica: Everyone deserves the opportunity to be heard and listened to and understood.
Alana: And my hope is that he exists in a way where he treats everybody with respect. Who knows who he’ll want to date, but if he wants to date women, he’ll be very in tune with the right way to treat everybody and in turn, women. Whether it’s coworkers or his friends, he’ll be the one in the locker room to stop making bad jokes. He’ll be the one ending conversations going down a bad path.
MN: Do you foresee him having problems with parents who have an issue with him having two mothers?
Alana: 100 percent.
Erica: We’ve braced ourselves for that already.
Alana: When he starts having playdates, that’s when I can imagine it happening. I can’t imagine him getting bullied by other kids for having two moms. I would be curious to see if parents don’t want their kids to come over and have playdates because they think being a lesbian is contagious.
Erica: It’s not. We’ve figured it out. But it’s going to be about meeting parents. That’s a big part of our job, protecting our son from those people and subsequently their children.
Alana: But when he’s old enough, that’s a conversation I want to have with him. There are ways to teach him, ‘Everybody’s equal and we love everybody. And some people are just not that way and that’s one of the reasons we don’t hang out with them so much.’
MN: How do you imagine the conversations about his donor will go?
Erica: I think it’s hard to answer because we don’t know when it’s going to come. For some people’s kids, it happens when they’re six or seven. Some people’s kids actually don’t ever ask the question. The good thing about the anonymous donor is that California Cryobank will allow the child to contact the Cryobank once they are 18 and then the Cryobank will reach out to the donor to see if he wants to speak to him. But I think it’s about being honest and saying, ‘We loved each other and knew we wanted to have a baby.’ And when we picked the donor, we chose someone who we thought would be a good person.
I think the other thing we’re planning to do and we’ve actually started building a library, there are a lot of books about families to be able to make it a normal thing. And he’ll see this with all of our friends’ kids. I don’t want him to think that we’re weird because we don’t have this thing. I want him to understand that families look a lot of different ways. You have two moms but some families only have one mom or a grandma, grandpa or an uncle. You have two people that love you and care for you and that’s the important piece.
MN: Erica, what has been the most unexpected part about pregnancy?
Erica: Oh! I kind of feel bad saying this I went into it so excited about the process, being pregnant and making a person, it’s going to be so great. But it has been very hard. I think, while we have been very lucky of not having to go through the expense and trying, it was emotional with all the poking and prodding at the beginning. And then there have been times where I’m just like, ‘I am tired. I don’t want to be pregnant anymore.’ So it’s been hard for me to be in the process but there have been days when it’s been horrible. I had really bad morning sickness, lost a lot of weight and then I ran into pregnancy exhaustion.
And I think it’s been hard because people don’t talk about it very often. Most things you read are, ‘The miracle of pregnancy.’ No one really talks about what it feels like when it doesn’t feel that great. And in my mind, I feel like I shouldn’t be feeling this way because I could be one of those women who couldn’t get pregnant or gets pregnant and has a miscarriage. But I’ve been telling Alana, I’ve been ready to not be pregnant since I was five months.
I haven’t actually gotten excited about being pregnant until a few weeks ago because I had this constant aching nervousness everything has gone so well, something is going to go wrong. I have that little bit of tension in my shoulders the whole time, worrying. That’s the part that’s been the hardest of the whole thing.
MN: Alana, what has been unexpected for you, witnessing it?
Alana: Honestly, I got really jealous in the middle of it. I never expected to feel this way. Before I realized that I was gay, even when I was little, I was like ‘I’m going to adopt a kid one day.’ I never thought I’d give birth to the child I have. But five months in, when he started moving, I got so jealous. And I was also having pregnancy dreams. In the first trimester, with her morning sickness I felt bad for her but I’m so happy she’s chosen to do this for us. Then, when she started feeling better and he started moving, I was like, ‘This seems like the best thing ever and I don’t get to experience any of it.’ They’re bonding and I’m wondering if he’s going to know her more than me. I’m not worried about the affection and the emotional part of it but this is the person who has housed him for ten months.
I talk to him every night and I read books to him. The doctor told us that he can recognize sounds. But he really responds to my voice. When we see each other at night, I’ll be talking to him and if I lay on her stomach, he’ll be punching me in the face. I think those feelings of jealousy have subsided but I was very surprised I felt that way. And I was honest about it. I woke up one morning and I told Erica, ‘I am so jealous of you right now.’ And she said, ‘Oh, do you think you want to carry.’ And I was like, ‘Let’s not go that far.’
And you know how they say women’s periods can follow each others? I swear to God that my hormones were going nuts with her hormones. I think the real difference for us, is that I’m experiencing this yet I’m also 100 percent capable of also carrying a child.
MN: Have you guys decided on a name?
Alana: We just picked one last night! We could not agree on anything. We polled everyone we’d ever met. We asked every relative.
Erica: We started asking strangers, waiters at restaurants. We were trying to find inspiration from everywhere. We had a name if he was going to be a girl. So we were ready. And they were like, ‘It’s a boy.’ And we’re like ‘Sh*t.’ So we started coming up with a list. And I think we started making ourselves crazy. And then we went through a period of time where I wanted him to have the same initials as Alana. And then we went through a nickname phase. We wanted old man names at one point and her mom started looking through the obituaries, which is kind of creepy. Then last night we were talking and we came up with a name and we kind of looked at each other and– it felt like a cartoon where the lightbulb goes off. And we high-fived each other. And we have four weeks to go. We had a list of things we wanted to get done before the baby got here, and I will say finding a name has been the hardest thing. I would say to Alana, this is something very significant that we’re going to give to him and I want to make sure that it encompasses who he is now but also who we want him to be.
