I’m participating in a funny contest, in which the point is to blog about the most annoying pregnant and new mom questions that people get.

The contest has some rigid rules, like the question is supposed to be the post title — where we almost never made people actually ASK; we got to the point where we could tell the question was coming from the awkward silence after the “um?” And I have to end with a specific question and link to a book that I suspect may not have a good answer to this question. But there you go. And I might be wrong. And it’s a fun idea, so I’m doing it.

Also? This question wasn’t so much exactly annoying as sometimes awkward and sometimes tiring. But I do feel a certain responsibility to share with people how the life of an ordinary lesbian family works, and that includes having those kinds of conversations and demystifying things like that for perfectly nice people who never really thought about it before. 90% of the time, I don’t mind.

Back to the point.

On a regular old non-pregnant day, hardly anyone ever “recognizes” me as a lesbian. I pretty much have to be wearing a rainbow flag and holding Jill’s hand to be visible. Pregnant, I think it would have taken a rainbow flag tattoo on my forehead and making out with Jill in front of people, and even then, I’m afraid people would have thought I was one of those women who kisses her friends in bars to titillate an audience.

For things like going to the grocery store, who cares? But in conversations with people you meet and may talk with again, it can be awkward to be misperceived. It leads to too many conversations that begin, “What does your husband do?” “Is your husband excited about the baby?”

The whole flow of a getting to know each other chat is easier if the other person doesn’t feel like an idiot at the beginning, which means that I worked Jill’s name, or the words partner or wife or “alternative families” into conversation as early as possible.

Mostly that works very well.

Except for the part that — quite reasonably — generates curiousity about how lesbians get pregnant.

Mercifully, I came up with a good, short, non-embarrassing answer early on:

It’s the most surreal online shopping experience you can imagine, and the rest is boringly medical.

For people who wanted to know more, I talked with them about how we picked a donor, how expensive it is, how nice it is that you can pay for this using those pre-tax health care flexible spending accounts, etc. And for those who didn’t, or who were afraid the answer might be too graphic for their taste, it was a reassuring answer that let us move on in the conversation.

But in some cases (or some moods), it would have been nice to hand the person a book. I know that I would have liked to find a nice, accessible, inclusive book about pregnancy myself, and I hope this one is. If so, a good answer is: Don’t you wish you could have just handed them this?