I tried to lead restorative justice in my own sexually abusive (former) t4t relationship. I did this because I am an abolitionist and know people are more than the worst things they do. What I didn’t know at the time: we should have not been the ones to facilitate the process. With leftist language co-opted, I didn’t know I was allowed to leave; I didn’t know I was allowed to have boundaries.

I hid behind instruments, computers, Whitney’s voice, Prince’s guitar. I sat in front of my computer surrounded by cassettes, illegally downloading songs, awkwardly whispering “I love you more than I know how to explain and I’m scared so here’s a mixtape I made you.”

“Selfishly, I’m worried about what will happen if I say out loud that I’m uncomfortable with all this God, if I let my brain run its anxious course. If my atheist, queer, bipolar self comes to choir with me in all its unkempt glory, will I lose my safest place?”

“We’re in Lancaster County at Erin’s family’s house, surrounded by plastic Bible quiz trophies adorned with gold crosses and family portraits taken at national parks. My bewildered partner comes to me, face slack, and tells me I need to call my mother.”

“Every day since my father died has been at least a little fucked up. There is no such thing as a non-fucked up day when you are a Daddy’s girl without a father.”

“I’m going to be a single, poor, gay, mom, and it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be amazing. I mean sure, I might date sometimes, but I don’t need a partner. Partners just get in the way. And what are the odds that I would meet a woman I would want to be with who would also want to have children with me? I can’t even picture it!”

“Suddenly I was looking at all these little boxes online, little question marks where the faces would be, each one representing another human that shared half of my daughter’s DNA.”

“I made a choice about how I would look, and didn’t realize until I’d done it how unprecedented that was.”

“It’s funny. We have legal documents declaring our marriage valid in two different states. We’ve been together and in love for years. But it was the birth of our daughter this daredevil, this personality, that really made our home feel like family.”

We’re almost there! The interminable countdown to actually having a real, live baby is almost over!

Now I start over, and rebuild, and confront fear and learn to drive alone and figure out how to secure Eli in the loft so I can still snuggle with him at night. Now I have to hang the art I’ve collected from friends over the years, find a place for my autographed Eileen Myles books, and learn to do yoga. Now I need to meet all the versions of myself hiding in this city and make friends with every single one of them.

How do we both honor our child’s memory and prepare to open our hearts again to a new child?

“If we think too hard, we’ll never do it,” Kellie said. She was right. A cost-benefit analysis would yield no practical reason to grow our family. The only reason to make a new baby was that we felt like it, and we could.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. After losing my first pregnancy at 24 weeks, how could we face the conception process again, with the added physical and emotional complications?

“If a group I was attending was still printing, distributing, and teaching from a book that was blatantly racist or homophobic, I would get up and leave and/or advocate for change. I do not give special passes for misogyny and sexism, especially in my sobriety, because my self-worth is so integral to my complete recovery.”

“The fellowship said I was thinking too hard about it, that I was stubborn, and that I was not willing to admit that there were forces bigger than me. What they didn’t get was that I did believe there were forces beyond my control, powers bigger than me. Let’s just take gravity as one of many examples. I just don’t believe that praying to gravity or the radiator or the ocean would cure me of my alcoholism.”

So maybe my pregnancy path isn’t as simple and straightforward as baby books would have you believe it should be because I’m a poor QPoC with anxiety, but it has been an interesting worthwhile journey so far. I can’t wait until I can take the next step.

Other than partying, what did we like, what were we good at, what defined us? One area that many LGBTQ individuals, including myself, struggled with was redefining what it meant to be queer. But, if being queer was synonymous with getting drunk, then how would I ever be able to define myself as anything other than a drunk?

“Whose sperm is this?” she asked me once. Maybe it was the first time. “It’s mine,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I had paid for it. No one else was coming to get it.

“Sometimes, when you’re in the business of parenting, you have to phone a friend for a bit of perspective and advice. Sometimes, you have to phone more than one.”