I went to the Family Court this morning, in the bright subfreezing sunshine, to legalize the bond between myself and weeSpawn.  My parents and my daughters’ GME (godmother equivalent) were in attendance to witness the event.  The Judge who presided over this occasion was the same one who signed the adoption papers when my wife adopted Spawn1, almost 10 years ago.  The whole thing was  a bit anticlimactic, but that’s just fine, no need for drama, we’ve had plenty in the years we’ve worked to complete our family.

My wife and I have been together for 16 years.  We knew from the start that we would create a family and both of us wanted to carry and deliver a baby.  I went first because I’m older and we didn’t want to chance my eggs aging out before I got the chance to use them.  As it was, it took a few years and a miscarriage before I was finally, ecstatically, pregnant.  I was the happiest pregnant butch you ever met, especially after I got through the first four nausea inducing months.  There was some drama around her birth, including potential for one of us to die, which resulted in our first born being a preemie, born 9 weeks early and weighing in at a scant 2 lbs 3 oz.  Fortunately, she was born with everything fully functional, a miracle in itself, and with an incredible survival drive.

Now she’s almost 10 and the proudest big sister you ever saw.  My wife’s journey to pregnancy was even longer than mine.  From the beginning, we agreed not to go for the big fertility guns for fear of having a litter.  Not because we wouldn’t love them all, but there is the reality of resources to consider.  So after several years of trying, we started to look at adoption as a way to9 complete our family.   We were close to making serious money deposits when financial disasters struck elsewhere in our family.  We chose to help out and put adoption on hold.  During that time, my wife’s desire to carry and deliver our second child grew stronger.  We strategized and agonized and decided to talk to someone we know, a close friend of hers, about being a sperm donor for us.  ElderSpawn is the result of my union with an anonymous sperm donor and the legalities are fairly straight forward.  Going with a known donor is much more risky.  Luckily, we made an awesome choice and he was willing to contribute to our family and cede his parental role to me without any drama.

And so today I formalized the relationship with Spawn2.  We jumped through a lot of hoops to get the government to recognize a relationship that already exists, but we’re used to that by now.  In a state and country where strangers can decide what couples can marry or not, my wife and I have had to jump through lots of hoops and pay lots of legal fees and sign lots of documents in order to minimize the possibility that someone else will interfere with our family.  Even though we are registered domestic partners in Washington, and may have been able to skip the adoption, other states don’t have to recognize the legality of our relationship.  And we’ve seen other families abused by officials in other states, so we do everything we can to prevent that happening to us.  And today, we took another big step binding the four of us for all of time.

I want to thank the many readers and friends on twitter for their support and love, it’s truly wonderful to belong to such a warm and generous community.  And a special thanks to Roxy, who’s love and encouragement helps me get through every day.  Contrary to what some might believe, being in a poly relationship doesn’t mean family isn’t important to us.   And my relationship with her, helps me be a stronger partner to my wife and a better parent to my children.  Thank you, sweetheart.

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