Today the Bold Italic brings us a new piece by local literary wunderkind Michelle Tea (Valencia, Rose of No Man's Land), who is actually not a wunderkind anymore. She's 40. She's an established S.F. writer and, like many a bohemian around her age, she suddenly heard the loud ticking of her biological clock and decided she needed to have a baby. The trouble is, like many women her age, she realized she might be too old already, and she wasn't even in a committed a relationship. "Burst into tears before your computer. Flash on the 'I can’t believe I forgot to have children!' T-shirt with the picture of the ’50s-era woman sobbing into her hands.
Being the avid memoirist that she is, Tea wrote a couple of pieces just two months ago for XO Jane about trying to get pregnant as a single, 40-year-old lesbian, and about how her friends tried to dissuade her from child-rearing in a most San Franciscan fashion. "You can’t just go and put the baby in the other room when you want to have sex," and "You like to take off and go to Paris," they said.
But Tea was determined to spawn, and she tried for a year using a children’s oral medicine syringe from Walgreens and sperm from a drag queen/activist friend named Quentin, to no avail. It turns out she had fibroids all over her ovaries and a fairly low egg count.
But, as luck would have it, she's not single anymore. She now has a terrific new girlfriend ten years her junior, and that's the chapter she now tells in the Bold Italic. Girlfriend Dashiell, who's "more like a boy than a girl," is therefore "not keen on the idea of getting pregs." So, they're going to have one of her eggs inseminated and Tea plans to carry it, and you can be sure we will hear more tales about the trials and tribulations of pregnancy and childbirth in the years to come.
