Erica & Alana Talk Raising A Black Son As Two Lesbian Women

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.

PREVIOUS NEXT PAGE