Susan QS: Full Interview

TRANSCRIPT

Susan
Interviewed by Deirdre Quill
18th May 2015

S: I’m Susan. It’s the 18th May 2015 and I identify as a lesbian.

I have one daughter. She was born at my home in Leeds and she is now 24 and working for a charity in London. I became a lesbian mum when I had my daughter and it was quite a long process to get there. I had been brought up in quite a big family and I always assumed I would have children but during my twenties – whilst I was in a heterosexual relationship – I was far too busy working, travelling, working, living my life free of children. The whole issue of having children, which came up at the end of my twenties, kind of provoked a split and I made the decision to leave the man I was living with because we had different ideas about how we would bring the children up. So then I moved to Leeds and…

Before I moved to Leeds I’d already started to get involved in the Women’s Movement, working in a refuge and I began to realise that I wasn’t comfortable around men and what they stood for and it was kind of political really, and to do with my growing feminism that I started to be attracted to women and I started to become more involved in the Women’s Movement: [sigh] Women Against Pit Closures, supporting Greenham Common, and then when I was in Leeds there was Clause 28. There were lots of really active women, active lesbians, and a lot going on.

So I was in my early 30s and I was dabbling in relationships with women and at that time I would have still called myself bisexual. But I went to visit my sister in California and spent time in San Francisco by myself and I came home completely clear that I was a lesbian, but I would call myself a ‘political lesbian’ because that’s how I came to feel strongly about my sexuality. And I wouldn’t deny any of my heterosexuality and I had very positive relationships with men before but in the mid-‘80s it was very clear to me that I felt comfortable around women and the things that lesbians in Leeds were doing at the time. It included trying to shut down sex shops and stop exhibitions that were derogatory towards women, so there was a lot happening. There were some quite difficult times. As a middle class lesbian I didn’t always feel comfortable and welcome amongst some of the working class lesbians in Leeds, but then I got involved with a working-class woman and…

So through some of the activities I was involved in I met a lot of lesbians and some were lesbian mums, so I might run the crèche or do something like that and got to know lesbian mothers and I was heading into my mid-30s. I now had a stable partner – we were living together with a mortgage – and I knew that I really wanted a baby. So I asked other lesbian mothers how they’d gone about it and I was put in contact with somebody, another lesbian, who for several years had been involved in supporting lesbians in getting pregnant through an informal network of donors for self-insemination. And so I started trying to get pregnant.

It took me four years to successfully conceive my daughter; from the age of 34 I was trying: sometimes it didn’t work because I’d get the dates wrong and I didn’t have regular menstruation; sometimes there were no donors available; and then in fact the donor service – if you want to call it that – this informal service that I’d been using – collapsed, so we had to start again looking for possible donors. And during those four years I had several, if not numerous, miscarriages so I did conceive sometimes. And on one occasion I reached the point where I was 12 weeks and I announced to all my work colleagues in my workplace that I was pregnant and then I miscarried two days later. So it was a very difficult time.

My partner at the time had not been particularly interested in having children but was willing to support me, but she realised following the miscarriage that it was something she really wanted in her life as well was a child. So it was also quite difficult supporting each other through that process and the endless rounds of month by month by month anxiety of: when am I going to ovulate? Is there going to be sperm available? And is it going to be absolutely at the right time? And then if it is, am I going to bleed? Or am I going to miscarry? Or am I in fact going to go forward and have a successful conception? So I’d say those four years were pretty tough going.

So even in the late 1980s it was really difficult to access insemination through clinics; there weren’t many places that did it and it was very expensive; it was way out of my reach and there was a lot of controversy about inseminated conception and a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of people calling it ‘test tube babies’ when all it is getting some sperm off somebody and inserting it. It sounds easy but the difficulty is finding suitable donors, men who were willing to donate and the basis that I wanted it on I was absolutely clear was I wanted it to be completely anonymous and untraceable because I was not looking for a father for my child; I was not looking for any involvement from a man who might lay claim in some way and who might want some kind of contact or access with my child. So the men who were involved in the service, that was the informal network locally, had to be trusted; they had to be trusted to be healthy; they had to be trusted to be tested, to be free from HIV and not to put themselves at risk.

This was particularly difficult because wanting an anonymous donor meant that you didn’t meet any of those men so then the trust chain was longer. For all of us it was a chain that went from your desire to have a child, to your own contact, to the contact with the other side, to the men. And we could surmise that some of those men would be gay men because they were more, generally speaking, much more willing to donate sperm and therefore at that time in the late ‘80s, the risks of HIV were higher. And we didn’t know the prognosis for HIV at that time – how it would pan out – but, then, becoming HIV positive was a very negative and destructive experience, and I myself attended several funerals of men that I knew during that time.
[…]
By the time I got pregnant I’d been separated from my partner for over a year but she still wanted to be involved if I had a child. This proved quite complicated but I wanted to make it happen, I wanted to make it possible for her – and I also, by that time, had become involved with another woman and we’d been together for some six months when I successfully conceived my daughter. So, I was really lucky to have a very supportive GP and local midwife so I had a homebirth attended by my ex-partner and my partner of the time and gave birth to a fabulous daughter.

I was really lucky because I did know quite a lot of other women at that time – other lesbians – who‘d been trying to get pregnant or had become pregnant or were about to become pregnant, so once I sort of emerged from the baby-stage of being just at home with my baby a lot of the time, I found I had a really good network of other lesbian mums with children of similar age and we made a habit of meeting up together whenever we could: we’d go on camps or we’d go on trips together; we’d have parties in each other’s gardens, barbeques, and the children all grew up knowing each other, and feeling safe and secure in the knowledge that they weren’t the only one – they weren’t the only child of a donor and they weren’t the only child of a lesbian mum, or lesbian mums.

I didn’t have any family close by so my family was really this group of lesbian mothers and they’re the people that I depended on as well as my partner and they were friends and family rolled into one. My biological family were [hesitates] as supportive as they could be from a distance and my mum was thrilled to be a grandma to a daughter she was worried might not have children because she was a lesbian. But on the whole my family didn’t talk about it very much and I think they thought that my relationship at the time – with the woman I was with at the time – would probably fizzle out. She was young; we were very different from each other. Little did they know that we’d actually be together for twenty five years and that she would be really good support to my daughter and to myself.

She chose not to be – not to try to be – a ‘mum’ to my daughter. She didn’t live with us; we lived apart, we lived separately which suited us well, but it was another aspect of the struggle really where people didn’t quite see you as being in a proper relationship and it wasn’t going to last, it wasn’t going to be there, because we weren’t living in a traditional household, a traditional setup and I think that’s one of the things some lesbians tried to do at the time – that you could live in different ways and you didn’t have to mimic a heterosexual household. But it did confuse people quite a lot; it confused me sometimes as well.

When my daughter was still a little girl she went to a child-minder while I went back to work and I didn’t feel that there was any particular animosity towards myself or my partner about this being a lesbian household, but people just didn’t talk about it at that time at all, kind of pretended it wasn’t there. There wasn’t a real sense of acceptance so much as some kind of tolerance because we existed and there wasn’t much choice about it. I think through her childhood for myself there was more internalised oppression where I kept myself quiet in certain situations; I wasn’t very ‘out’ ; I wasn’t very loud about being a lesbian unless I was around what I considered to be very safe circles.

However, when she went to primary school I specifically asked if we, my partner and I, could have an appointment with the Head Teacher because we wanted to make it clear that the little girl didn’t have a dad and that was what we’d chosen, so we were quite anxious for our lifestyle to be incorporated in a positive way in school. When we talked to the Head Teacher she was quite blasé about it and dismissive: ‘No need to tell us all about this because we have all sorts of children in our school, we have all sorts of families; we even have people who live in communes’. She didn’t really want to go there. So the importance to us of being lesbian parents and the child growing up with lesbians and without a man in her life was minimised really and we felt quite marginalised in the school because of that.

My daughter did have one particular experience in primary school where she had told another child that she didn’t have a dad and the teacher said ‘you must have a dad; everybody’s got a dad’. And she just said ‘No I have not got a dad’ and so we had to go into school to talk about that because we felt that was a really negative interpretation of what the child was saying. The thing is, even if people think everybody should have dads, there are so many children born to heterosexual mothers who don’t know who their father is – they certainly didn’t at that time – who think their father is someone different from who he actually is, or are told that someone’s their father when they’re not, or are aware of the fact that the man that they’ve been brought with up as a father isn’t their father, in terms of biological father. So, at the time there was a real emphasis on biological parenting rather than a recognition that actually your social parents are by far the most important influence on your life. That’s how I’ve brought my daughter up; that’s how my partner wanted her to be brought up: that social parenting is far more significant than biological.

This was Thatcher’s Britain. It was the time when Clause 28 meant something. It meant that schools were scared of talking about gay issues; they were scared of teaching about anything to do with sexuality whatsoever. And it was against the law to ‘promote pretend families’ and here we were presenting ourselves as a real family who wanted to be clear about the fact that this little girl was growing up in a lesbian household without a male role model, which is what people were always going on about, how important it was for children. I don’t think it was important.

She has grown into a fabulous young woman; she’s completely confident about her identify; she has never – and she would say it herself – wanted to find out or try and track down or made any suggestion that it matters to her in the slightest who her biological ‘father’ – if you want to call it that – was: her donor. She just refers to him as her donor and she has quite a laugh when she comes out to people about being a donor child and their shock and horror. When she went to university and she told this boy that she was courting that she was from a lesbian family and was born by donor insemination, he said ‘well that’s very modern’ and after all that’s only in the last five years.
Thinking back, I really, really, really wanted a little girl. I love some of the little boys I know, and other lesbian mums had little boys but I really wanted a little girl. And it was another additional factor when trying to conceive because you could read about how you could increase your chances of having a girl rather than a boy and it just became another complication really in the process of trying to successfully conceive. Of course I would have accepted and loved a baby boy, but I’m really, really happy that I had a little girl, because that’s what I wanted.

As well as meeting resistant and negative attitudes from the wider community with regard to donor-inseminated children I think sometimes our internalised oppression operates for some lesbian mothers as well and I find that very difficult. So I remember once a lesbian mother, that I didn’t know very well, asked me how she could now – when her child was a few years old – trace the donor because she had changed her mind about the anonymity for her child and I found that very difficult.

I think it’s very unfair on donors if they give anonymously for anybody to then attempt to trace them – even the children after 18. If they’ve given anonymously then that should be respected in the same way they’ve respected not trying to trace the child. But also I feel we need to be really, really clear that if we choose that way it’s because we are going to be positive about it and we’re going to show that child as they grow up that it was a positive choice on our part and that being brought up by a woman, or two women, or several women is no detriment to them whatsoever. And I do feel that we have a real responsibility to socialise our children into feeling good about themselves as donor children and recognising that there isn’t any imperative or need for them to be any other way.

Being a mother has been absolutely fantastic. I’ve really, really loved it. Being a lesbian mother has been hard; it’s been quite challenging. Being a lesbian mother not living in a traditional sort of set-up has been hard; it’s been difficult; it’s been interesting; it’s been exciting. Quite hard to identify clearly what our different roles have been as parents of this child. It’s been hard for us, so even harder for people outside to understand, but the overall experience I would never have missed it for anything, and I think my daughter would say the same. I think she’s glad to be here; I thinks she’s really glad to have been cared for – not just by myself and my partner – but by the whole lesbian community and I think she regards the other donor children like cousins – some of them – and they’re really important to her. Overall whilst it’s been a difficult experience because its hard going against the grain all the time, it’s also been absolutely fantastic and exactly what I would have wanted.

My ex-partner who was present at the birth of my daughter stayed involved in a limited capacity initially and then became what I would probably call a fairy god-mother and still has regular contact with my daughter. My partner of the time, of 25 years, contributed a lot to my daughter’s upbringing. She didn’t try to be another mum and in fact she called herself a ‘carer’. It wasn’t a common term like it is now and she did do a lot of caring. And I believe my daughter would definitely say… would refer to her as her second parent and she has been a very significant influence on her life.

Another big consideration for women using anonymous donors in an informal network was to do with race, not knowing whether the donors were black or white and other physical features that might have affected some women so, as well as the trust, there was also other aspects of risk and acceptance and for many women they wanted their babies so much they did accept whatever the consequences were going to be.

For myself when I first started inseminating I was with a white partner and I’m white but by the time that I conceived my daughter I was with a black partner, so although she was a white baby she was brought up in a mixed relationship and my black partner made a big additional contribution to my daughter’s life. My daughter had a strong relationship with my partner’s black family as well as going to an inner city multiracial school and being exposed to issues of race and integration from a very early age and… and that’s exactly what I would have wanted for her so that was very good.

[END]