Love Song for Baby X is the moving and humorous story of a lesbian couple’s struggles with infertility as they attempt to become parents, set against the backdrop of the marriage equality movement.
While poet Cheryl Dumesnil suspects she’ll confront some formidable obstacles on her path to parenthood, she is nevertheless unprepared for what she actually encounters, including navigating the maze of the high-tech fertility business, the emotional conundrum of pregnancy loss, and the gathering steam of the marriage equality movement.
Love Song for Baby X follows Cheryl and her unlawfully wedded wife through four conceptions, three miscarriages, a temporarily legal wedding during San Francisco’s Winter of Love in 2004, a stint as poster children for the marriage equality movement, and finally the arrival of their longed-for son—after twenty-five hours of labor. Along the way Dumesnil fails often (and comically) in her attempts to cultivate inner peace. Though she struggles mightily with the opposing forces of hope and fear, in the end, she finds the middle ground between them: acceptance.
Winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of In Praise of Falling, editor of Hitched! Wedding Stories from San Francisco City Hall, and co-editor, with Kim Addonizio, of Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Indiana Review, Calyx, and Many Mountains Moving, among other literary magazines. Her essays have appeared on literarymama.com, hipmama.com, mamazine.com, and in Hip Mama Zine. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and their two sons.
Daftar Isi
Chapter 1: Prelude
Chapter 2: First Comes Love
Chapter 3: On Genetic Selection, Nitrogen Tanks, and Defrosting Sperm 20
Chapter 4: The Waiting Game 29
Chapter 5: Count Your Blessings
Chapter 6: Love Song for Baby X
Chapter 7: Every Death
Chapter 8: The Pregnant Woman as Tippi Hedren in The Birds
Chapter 9: Progesterone Blues
Chapter 10: Reprieve
Chapter 11: The Worst Possible News
Chapter 12: A Two-Woman Funeral Procession
Chapter 13: Ex Utero: A Postpartum Notebook
Chapter 14: Missing
Chapter 15: This Waiting Season
Chapter 16: Love Song for Baby #2
Chapter 17: River of Alligators
Chapter 18: Natural Selection
Chapter 19: Escape
Chapter 20: The Girls’ Club
Chapter 21: The Numbers Game
Chapter 22: Love Song for Baby #3
Chapter 23: Nemesis
Chapter 24: Runaway Rabbit
Chapter 25: Brightly Feathered Wings
Chapter 26: Six Reasons to Like Dr. Lee
Chapter 27: Now Leaving the Year of Death
Chapter 28: The Pregoholic Admits She Has a Problem
Chapter 29: Outsourcing Hope
Chapter 30: Then Comes Marriage
Chapter 31: Lesbians Don’t Have Surprise Pregnancies
Chapter 32: Hello Maybe
Chapter 33: Shotgun Wedding
Chapter 34: Because That’s What Parents Do
Chapter 35: The Flying Leap
Chapter 36: Love Song for a Maybe
Chapter 37: Ready for My Close-Up
Chapter 38: Encore
Chapter 39: Love Song for Baby #4
Chapter 40: On Divinity, Shit, and Vomit
Chapter 41: Ready, Set, Wait
Chapter 42: Crescendo
Chapter 43: Coming Home
Epilogue: 2007
Tentang Penulis
Winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of In Praise of Falling, editor of Hitched! Wedding Stories from San Francisco City Hall, and co-editor, with Kim Addonizio, of Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Indiana Review, Calyx, and Many Mountains Moving, among other literary magazines. Her essays have appeared on literarymama.com, hipmama.com, mamazine.com and in Hip Mama Zine. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and their two sons.
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