Cathy Busha, the former director of LGBTQ Affairs in the UA's Dean of Students Office, has always been a great person to keep up with since her departure several year ago via Facebook. Recently, it was the first birthday of her son, Oliver. But what's worth sharing is a beautiful post by Busha's wife, Anna Deligio, on the Portland's LGBTQ Community Center's justout.com on the journey to motherhood for Busha and Deligio.

You can read Deligio's post here. A snippet I really appreciated:

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 family 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 training during this time to try to keep the parenting energy going, however it was going to happen.

Oh, and by the way, happy birthday, Oliver.