To Tell the Truth

Yesterday at church someone asked if everyone knew about the pregnancy or if we were keeping it something of a secret. It's a question we thought pretty hard about in the days leading up to the insemination. And since I've been writing about it here for awhile, we're probably the world's worst secret keepers.

There are certainly pros to keeping quiet about it in the early stages, with the biggest being that it could be devastating to have told everyone and then have something happen to prematurely end a very early pregnancy. Then you gotta "untell."

A. and I never really specifically talked about why we decided to be completely open about our journey but here's what I told the person who asked yesterday – there's so much about being a gay or lesbian couple in a heterosexual world that does not get celebrated that sometimes you just have to make a party where you can.

Most of us can't get married in a way that gives us any rights as a couple. The vast majority of us don't have an anniversary that anyone ever recognizes. Even if being a gay couple doesn't make our friends of family outwardly uncomfortable, we rarely push the envelope enough to completely tell the truth about everything going on in our lives. And we almost never do things to make other people squeamish.

And I guess that's the real reason we told.

Both A. and I – and the vast majority of gay and lesbian people our ages – spent a good part of our lives hiding the truth. We hid out of fear. We hid out of longing for acceptance. We hid because we felt like we had to.

We've spent our lives not telling people things because of fear.

And, for us, when it comes to bringing a baby into the world, we didn't want to let fear have a foothold this early. Sure, something may happen in the early stages of this pregnancy and we will have to spread the word that it's over, even if it breaks our hearts.

But we will do it knowing that we were open and unafraid from day one and that fear didn't win.