Illustration: Palesa Monareng
Because no two paths to parenthood look the same, “How I Got This Baby” is a series that invites parents to share their stories.
Jordan can barely remember a time when she didn’t feel like an adult. She grew up as the eldest child in an evangelical Christian family with a mother who was often bed-bound due to health problems and a father who worked long hours outside of the house. Jordan took on child care, laundry, and other parental duties starting at age 7. She also served as her parents’ confidante, constantly kept abreast of their financial and marital woes. By the time she was a teenager, she had lost all interest in ever becoming a parent. “I’d seen what that responsibility looks like and how it could consume your whole identity,” the 39-year-old says. She envisioned her adult life as child free.
But when she started dating Blake, whom she met during a college study-abroad program, she began to reconsider. Blake had grown up with a career-driven mom, and hearing about his childhood, Jordan started to envision a different model of motherhood.
“All the men I had grown up with had very limited views of what women’s roles were supposed to be, and here was this guy who had grown up admiring a mom who was at the top of her field,” says Jordan, who has two graduate degrees and works for a startup in Boston. “I had this sense of, I’m going to be supported for who I am, who I want to be, and I how I want to grow with this guy.”
The couple married in 2015 after six years of dating. Several years later, after copious journaling, reading, therapy sessions, and consultations with friends, Jordan decided she was ready to start trying. “I decided I didn’t want fear to hold me back from something that could open up my life,” she says.
But first, she told Blake, there was one item left on her pre-kids bucket list: She wanted to open up their marriage. She and Blake had long been candid about their sexual fantasies about other people, so Jordan said, “What if we actually tried this for real?” Blake was “immediately game,” Jordan remembers. They started seeing other people together — going to sex parties where they’d swing or have a threesome with a woman or nonbinary person.
“Initially, it was a total rocket boost for our sex life. It was really hot and we were both really into it,” Jordan says. “We even framed it as: This is our last hurrah before we have kids. Let’s go wild and crazy.”
Here’s what happened next.
At first, I thought I liked threesomes with women due to the male gaze; that it was hot to be in a situation with another woman and be observed. But it shifted for me when I realized, I’m interested in women separate and apart from my relationship with my husband.
There was one woman in particular I had a strong attraction to. With men, I’d always needed to feel smaller to feel sexy, but with her, I was taller and I was attracted to that dynamic. That was a lightbulb moment. I thought, I would want to hook up with her regardless, not just because we’re in this sexy circumstance.
When I told Blake I was bi, I thought I was taking this awareness in one area of my life and integrating it — making it more meaningful and giving it more texture. I thought I was strengthening our relationship by being vulnerable with him. But he was immediately fearful. He even said, “We’re going to get divorced over this.” That was really hard to hear. I felt betrayed. I had tried to be honest, but was met with fear and anger. I left for the weekend to stay with a friend.
When I came back, we worked it out. He apologized and framed his response as an initial reaction that he wasn’t standing by. He said he was very supportive. So we resumed going to these parties and working through my sexuality as something that was going to be part of our lives that we’d figure out together.
About a year after I came out to Blake, I told him I was interested in dating other people — but now without him involved. He said he was as well. So we set boundaries: We could see people multiple times, but it was supposed to be casual — we weren’t supposed to be falling in love with other people or developing emotional attachments.
On my first date with a woman, Nora, I remember feeling nervous and hyperaware of my body. I felt very locked in with her in terms of our eye contact and easy conversation. I walked her to the train afterwards and I was like, How do I say good-bye? We had a quick kiss. It was the beginning of the summer. Soon we had that new-relationship energy and I wanted to see her all of the time. I started falling in love.
But that fall, Blake and I also started to try to conceive. We thought: We’re both done with grad school, we both have good jobs, and we’re both in our mid-30s. We also both wanted two kids, so timing-wise, I felt like, I need to get pregnant tomorrow.
I knew our sex life was in a tricky stage, but we had figured out hard things before. We’d been through moves and a parent’s death and had a good track record of managing all of that. After a few months of failed attempts, I felt my conviction to become a mother intensify. Getting my period made me really sad. I realized there had been an energetic shift within me — I’d moved away from ambivalence about parenthood.
I was in a Pilates class when I heard a little voice within me say, “It’s time to go on an adventure.” So on some level I wasn’t surprised when, later that day, I took a pregnancy test and it was positive. I had this sense that This is right where I want to be.
Blake was over the moon. He insisted on coming with me to the first appointment to confirm the pregnancy. The doctor said, “Oh, there’s two little people in there.”
I was shocked but also not shocked. One of my big fears around pregnancy had been feeling like I was in Invasion of the Body Snatchers — the body-horror aspect. Blake had always joked that he hoped I would get pregnant with twins because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to convince me to get pregnant a second time. So my first reaction was, “You manifested this.”
Blake and I closed our relationship during the pregnancy. I had been very honest with Nora that I was going to try to get pregnant in the fall and that Blake wasn’t supportive of how emotional our relationship had become, so she wasn’t surprised when I ended things. I didn’t let myself feel too upset about it. I just put it in the this-is-how-it-was-always-supposed-to-be box.
I had a dream pregnancy. I had a little nausea, but not bad. I got tired more easily, but also had an ideal work-from-home situation, so it wasn’t a problem. And even though the pregnancy was high risk because of the twins and my age, it never felt stressful because I had amazing medical care through my tech job. I’d been worried I was going to feel invaded by the pregnancy, but instead I felt connected to the babies.
Meanwhile, Blake and I started trying to understand and digest what my relationship with Nora had meant and how we were going to move on and figure out the rules post-pregnancy. He’d told me about a few of the women he’d enjoyed dating, but he hadn’t fallen in love like I had.
I also wasn’t feeling very sexual, so sex wasn’t an aspect of our relationship at that point. We thought, Let’s just focus on the pregnancy and the nesting and the excitement. Our relationship was good, but there was an elephant in the room.
During a doctor’s appointment at 34 weeks, the doctors found that one of the twins wasn’t growing anymore, and sent me to the hospital to receive the first of two steroid shots. The next day I returned for the second shot and they found I was showing signs of preeclampsia — and they wouldn’t let me go home. So all of a sudden it was like, “You’re having the babies tomorrow.” When Blake and I woke up the next morning in my hospital room (he slept on a pull-out chair bed), we sang to the babies together so they could hear our voices. It was sweet.
The doctor pronounced my C-section “textbook.” Giving birth was very surreal. Everything was super-smooth and the babies were healthy but very small, so they were whisked away immediately for tests before I could even hold them. An hour or so later, before I’d even had a meal, the clinicians wheeled a breast pump into my hospital room. I felt like, Oh, I’m just a mammal. I didn’t even get to hold both of them the first night because they needed to be in an incubator. It felt like I wasn’t in charge — it was the NICU nurses who were calling the shots, and I didn’t mind that so much, but in retrospect, I was a little bit sad about it. But I was sad about everything for a while because one baby came home a couple of days before the other baby. When one was in the NICU and one was home, I was just a mess.
In the initial weeks after they were born, it was all hands on deck — figuring out sleep and feeding schedules and getting help. It was very hard for me to bond with the twins, because I was tied to a very grueling schedule: pumping and then feeding one (with a mix of breast milk and formula, as suggested by our pediatrician) and then feeding the other (with that same mix) and then pumping again. I’d put them down to sleep and start all over. It was a blur and felt very mechanical. Plus, about six weeks into my leave, I got laid off. I had guessed that it was coming — my company had recently been acquired — and in a way, it was a good thing, because I had been itching to leave this job for a while and had only stayed because I had great health insurance. I was worried about finding a new job as a mom, but I’m also accustomed to this kind of thing. I’m an elder millennial who entered the workforce in a recession. And most importantly, I was able to negotiate a good severance package: an additional four months of pay on top of my maternity leave.
Blake was incredibly supportive through that whole process, encouraging me to find a new job that I’d like better than the old one that I’d outgrown. Our strength as a couple was figuring out all of these logistics. It was easy for us to do that and not really emotionally connect.
About three months after the twins were born, Blake returned to work and I stopped pumping. That’s when my schedule finally opened up and I was able to spend more relaxed time with the twins. I started taking them on long walks and meeting up with other moms. That felt really good, and it boosted my confidence. I was starting to bond with the twins at that point — just by being able to hold them and snuggle them more.
Blake and I also stayed very focused on seeing friends and family. One of my favorite memories is hosting Thanksgiving that first year with longtime friends. It was the first time we had hosted that holiday rather than being guests. It felt like we were establishing our own family traditions.
When the twins were 8 or 9 months old, we visited my parents. Blake and I had always agreed that I was never going to come out to my family or his family. He also had a Christian upbringing. But during this particular visit, I was struck by the fact that being closeted with my family meant I couldn’t truly be out to my kids. And if I was closeted to them, what would that mean if they ever wanted to come out themselves? I felt like a hypocrite — hiding myself but expecting my children to be comfortable with whomever they turned out to be. Simultaneously, I had the realization that I couldn’t be honest with Blake about how I was feeling since he’d always been adamant that my sexuality should be a secret.
I really started feeling this alarm in my head going off all the time. Whenever I had a moment where I wasn’t taking care of my kids or trying to find a job or actively busy, my inner self was a five-alarm fire.
I tried to have conversations with Blake, but he resisted acknowledging that we were in a crisis. After a couple months, I said, “I don’t quite know what to do here. I feel like I have to start to consider divorce.” That got his attention. We both started doing individual therapy and couples therapy.
Our biggest issue was my bisexuality: Blake didn’t think it was possible for me to come out to our families without also outing us as nonmonogamous. He knew they viewed that as very taboo, and he wasn’t willing to have that confrontation. That felt invalidating to me. Our inability to be vulnerable and emotionally connect in this one area kind of spread throughout the whole relationship.
We found we were in a reinforcing loop that locked us into miscommunication and disconnection, and each of our bids to break out of that cycle failed to land with the other person. It was heartbreaking, but we finally decided that we weren’t going to be able to figure it out. We needed to get divorced.
About six months after I started a new job, when the twins were almost 18 months old, I told my parents about the divorce and then went to visit them a few weeks later. They didn’t acknowledge the divorce. I felt isolated and unsupported.
When I came home, I wrote them an email. I came out to them as bisexual and said I needed a break from talking to them so they could digest the news. Three months later, I got on a video call with my parents and siblings. They said they love me even though they don’t agree with my “lifestyle.” In other words, they still think I’m going to hell.
I told them I couldn’t remain in a relationship with them like that — that’s not my definition of love. Since then, my parents haven’t tried to reach out to me at all.
About three months after deciding to divorce, Blake and I found a second apartment. We started bird-nesting right away, which is a way of co-parenting where the kids stay in the same home all the time and the parents switch back and forth between the two homes they share. It was really disorienting at first. I would jerk awake not sure where I was, thinking I was hearing my kids crying even when they weren’t there.
I never got back with Nora because she had moved to another city. But I did reach out to another woman I’d dated around the same time. We are now in an open relationship, and I’m deeply in love with her. I’m not dating other people right now because there’s a lot on my plate, but I don’t necessarily see myself being in a monogamous relationship ever again.
It might sound weird for someone to say they were in their 30s before they realized who they were attracted to. I had always had these emotionally rich, intimate relationships with women. And I also always thought that everyone just acknowledged that women were more beautiful than men. In retrospect, maybe I should have put those two pieces together earlier. But because of how I was raised and how early I got together with Blake, I didn’t.
The twins turned 3 this summer. I haven’t introduced them to my girlfriend, who I’ve been with for a little over a year, because I want to take things slow on that front.
I’m proud of Blake and me. It hasn’t always been easy, but we’ve put our ability to handle difficult situations and be on the same team to use. Our bird-nesting arrangement is still going strong. We’re embedded in each other’s day-to-day lives in terms of groceries and laundry and rent pay. Our custody is 50-50 too. He is a wonderful dad and a really good co-parent, even though we parent differently. I really hope he’s happy romantically, but he keeps that information to himself.
Becoming a parent has made my parents’ choices more unfathomable to me. I was spanked regularly as a child, and I’m definitely not doing any physical correction with my kids.
Beyond that, I’m doing gentle parenting — not in terms of permissiveness, but in terms of acknowledging feelings. When I was growing up, I felt I couldn’t reveal anything I was struggling with. And when I did, it became a running joke in the family. I got a lot of messages very early on that my emotional interior state was not something that there was space for. So I’m really trying to give space for what my kids feel. Toddlers have a lot of big feelings. My mantra with them is: Be brave, be curious, and be kind. When I see that behavior in them, I try to point it out.
I’m thinking a lot about how I’ll introduce my bisexuality to my children in the future. I want them to know they can be exactly who they are. I also have gratitude for them. Coming out to my family was something I did for my kids — I never would have done it for myself.
Before I had kids, I had very low expectations for the infant and toddler phase — I was more interested in what it would be like once they could communicate. But it’s surprising and humbling how much you can communicate with a little nonverbal creature. The bond that I was afraid wouldn’t develop actually did without me having to force it.
And my kids are so much fun. You can see their brains putting ideas together. I love doing things with them out in the world, even if it’s just taking a picnic to a free jazz festival in the park.
Now that they’re here, if my twins were taken away, it would be devastating. But if I hadn’t had them, I still would have had a lovely life.
The names of the subjects have been changed to protect their identities.
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