by Cathy Busha & Anna deligio
FAMILY
In The Family Way
Ohhhh Oliver
welcome to the world oliver Bernard
deligio-Busha! our baby was born at
1:32 am at Sunnyside Hospital and weighed
9.9 pounds! moms and baby are doing won-
derfully. It was a long journey from our lives
pre-pregnancy to oliver.
When I was in my late 20's, my first nephew was born. Meeting his little
magical self, I had the first thought that it might actually be fun to raise
a child, but knew that I wasn't ready to make that big of a commitment.
I shared my parenting niggling with a wise friend who told me not to have
kids until I couldn't think of doing anything else because it was that com-
prehensive of a life-changer. She told me
the biological clock was a false deadline
and that there were a many ways to be a
mom if I ever got to that all-consuming
place and my ovaries had shut up shop.
I heeded my friend's sage wisdom and
went on enjoying the role of aunt and get-
ting my own self figured out. I moved to
Arizona from Texas, changed careers, did
graduate school for Social Work, came
out, and began dating Cathy, the only
person I can imagine ever wanting to co-
parent with.
It wasn't until a few years ago at 35 that I
began to find all my thoughts drifting back
to wanting to have a baby. We had just
moved to Colorado from Arizona and my
dad was newly diagnosed with the liver
cancer that would kill him a year later. In
addition to the family stress, Cathy and I
weren't necessarily on the same page with wanting to parent.
While we were discerning, I began doing things that honored my baby-
making energy – I learned about my cycle, read lesbian parenting books,
took my basal body temperature to track ovulation every morning, exer-
cised, quit caffeine and drank gallons upon gallons of herbal tea uterine
tonics (I still believe I have the most toned uterus around!).
Shortly after that first hard year in Colorado, Cathy decided that she very
much did want to be a mom and we began the work of deciding how. After
weighing the different choices, we eventually chose to use an anonymous-
willing-to-be-known-later sperm donor from a bank with good pricing
and inclusive language.
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Justout.com
Neither of us wanted to spend too long in that process because it began
to feel a little eugenic and odd. In fact, when we looked at our own fam-
ily health histories, we acknowledged that we probably wouldn’t pick our
own sperm.
We set our non-negotiables as willing-to-be-known (so Oliver would have
a chance of finding this history if he ever wants to), prior pregnancies (so
we knew the sperm worked), white (because we both are) with some basic
shared characteristics of Cathy (tall, fair-skinned, hazel eyes, light brown
hair) and decent family medical history.
We chose Intra Unterine Insemination (IUI) as our strategy. IUI is where
they take the sperm concentrate (minus the fluid, slow, and dead ones) and
inject it directly into your uterus via a thin catheter. This process compares
to ICI, which is when you take sperm as-is and shoot it up to the cervix
(some have used turkey basters for this process). By bypassing my cervix
and putting them practically at the finish line,
the hope was that they could shake off having
been in the deep freeze and make some magic
happen
We did our first IUI and commenced to spend
a very nerve-wracking two weeks waiting to
see if it stuck. It didn't. We both cried hard
that first time.
From there, we went on to have five more tries
with the doctor's office. Each try that resulted
in my period brought us such sadness. There
were a lot of tears, some fights, and lots of
fears around the choices if this didn't work.
We even did the county's foster-adopt train-
ing during this time to try to keep the par-
enting energy going, however it was going to
happen.
In spring of 2011, we decided to move from
the doctor's office to a full-blown fertility
clinic. They had me do clomid (super-ovulator - makes your ovaries fill
up with eggs, increasing your chances for pregnancy - and multiples), put
me on low-dose thyroid meds and switched out the progesterone supposi-
tories for three shots of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). Not only
did that mean that Cathy (the biggest champ around) had to give me three
shots of hcg in my tummy, but it meant that I flooded my body with the
hormone it gives off naturally when you're pregnant, which had me feeling
pregnant for two weeks. We tried once at the clinic with no success. More
tears, more sadness, and more fear.
At this same time, we found out that Cathy got the job she had hoped for in
Oregon and we were due to move the summer of 2011. We decided to hold
off on any more baby-making until Oregon because it would be easier if I
September 2012