The First Insemination...

Romatical...

Picture this… Getting dressed all fancy like, glass of champagne in hand, beautiful dinner with your partner, good bottle of wine, dessert, and then home for a night cap and round 2 of dessert aka sexy time with your lovah.  It’s the perfect and most romantical date night you could imagine.  Sounds magical, right?  Well, this kind of date might be a reality on some nights but this was not the kind of “date” my wife and I had when we did our first insemination.  In fact, the first insemination was nothing short of horrible, awkward, laughable, and disastrous.   The idea of romance when your wife’s legs are spread eagle in the air and you are holding a syringe full of sperm is nothing short of “national geographic”.  Here’s the reality of what our “date” looked like… 

It was the summertime so my wife was actually working with me at my office a few days a week.  At least this made it ideal for us to be able to keep a close eye on her eggulation and be ready to go whenever necessary.  Yay for spontaneity!  My wife tested early that morning and saw that her ovulation was starting to peak.  We put in “the call” to our baby daddy and we set up a sperm drug deal for early that afternoon.  Since this was our first insemination, we were extremely excited, nervous, anxious and were feeling all the emotions you can feel when you are about to try and create a baby.  I was feeling fairly confident in my insemination abilities since I had worked in the women’s reproductive health industry for the past 10 years.  I had talked so many women through using a cervical cup and using a syringe at home to inseminate, I figured this would be easy for me. 

The device.

The animal...

I met our baby daddy outside, picked up the brown bag o sperm, called to the wife who was waiting in my office and then it was time to make this happen.  Here’s the catch, we were in my office, not near our home or bedroom.  Where the heck were we doing to do this?  The best option that we came up with??? My parents condo was just a block away and since time is of the essence, we figured we had no better option other than my parents place.  My first thoughts were, yuck, ewww, gross, ughhhhh, and no.  And then the instinct and reality set in and I said to myself, fuck it, doesn’t matter where we do this if we are able to have success.  So, we proceeded to walk to my parents condo, brown bag in hand and another small tote filled with sperm friendly lube, a plastic duck billed platypus (aka speculum), and needless syringes.  Ohhhhh sooooo sexy!

Sexy?  More like scary.

Upon entering my parents house, we both agreed that we would “do this” in their spare bedroom.  My wife proceeded to take her pants off and assume the position!  This position was knees up, butt scooted towards the edge of the bed with a small pillow under her butt to prop her up and she was ready for me.  As she was getting herself in position, I was also doing my own preparation and getting my "tools" ready.  This included loading the syringe with the sperm.  This was more gross than I imagined.  Again, I have touched sperm before but when you have been out of that game for as many years as I had, it brought back all those memories as to why I wanted to get as far away from it as possible.  I told her I was ready and explained that I was going to find her cervix first.  Talk about awkward and NOT sexy.  It’s like, oh hey wifey, let me accost your vagina and try and find your cervix while you lay there and do nothing.  Awesome.  And then my nerves set in.  I was struggling with all sorts of things.  I thought I had found her cervix but I kept second guessing myself.  Then it was the issue of simply not having enough hands for the job.  I had to get the speculum in, hold the syringe, hold a flashlight (yes a flashlight) so I could have some attempt at seeing what I was doing, and it was nothing short of a hot mess and disaster.  My wife kept trying to calm me down and we would have a laugh or two in between the nerves. I finally was able to unloaded the sperm into my wife and after i was done, felt like I had run a marathon.  There is this urban myth that says if a woman has an orgasm after an insemination it will help the spermies get swallowed up by the cervix.  Since there is no scientific data supporting or negating this theory, we both wondered what to do.  I mean, I was just looking inside my wife’s vagina with a flashlight, how were either of us to get “in the mood”?  We decided against the big O for now also due to the fact that we were in my parents condo.  It just didn't seem right.  My wife thought she would elevate her legs over her head for awhile to help the sperm swim in the right direction instead and so we (I) sat there trying to comfort her as she lay like a gymnast.  

Sadly and not surprisingly, that insemination was unsuccessful.  I was disappointed but mostly frustrated.  I knew it was only the first time but it was nothing short of horrifying.  And the inseminations only got more hilarious and awkward from there.  I'll share those as we continue on this journey together.  The one thing I kept thinking to myself was, there has to be something better than needless syringes and speculums…