We’re From Chicago, IL – Video Story.

by Jennie Brier and Kat Hindmand

Today’s Video Story was collected on the 50-state Story Tour. Check out the blog where you can follow us on our adventure. If you haven’t submitted a story yet to IFD, or if you want to submit another one, I’d love to read and publish it. Write one up and send it in.

I’m Jennie Brier, I live in Chicago, Illinois and I’m from New York City. I’m Kat Hindman and I’m an Army brat, but when I was twenty I moved to New York City and I lived there for fifteen years and so I think of New York as my home. We approached our dear friends who are a couple and asked them, and you know we talked about it for several weeks and originally we thought maybe we’ll get sperm from both of them and whoever we get pregnant from – whatever? And one of them was into it and the way we presented it to him was, “We will raise it, we will have all the rights and responsibilities – you won’t have any of that. You can be involved as little or as much as you want, but we would ask you to sign away your rights. This will be our child.” That sort of thing. So I think he tried to keep himself detached. (Jennie) We had gone to the doctor for this big, to give this big test at twenty weeks. They test everything. And we had had the test and everything was fine. (Kat) The baby was healthy. Everything was great. (Jennie) Yeah, so I’m five months pregnant. We went to the midwife for the check up after that test and basically she did an exam and my cervix was opening. (Kat) And it was almost viable but had it been born twenty two, twenty four weeks it probably would have had a lot of issues. (Jennie) So, Bob came over that night and I couldn’t face him, because I felt so awful that I hadn’t, you know, been successful and it was so heartbreaking. (Kat) Clearly it upset him too. (Jennie) So, anyway, we took a long pause because it was just, had to recover from that. (Kat) Well, right, physically and emotionally. (Jennie) Physically and emotionally. I just remember him saying, “I’ll do it again.” (Kat) “Whenever you’re ready.” (Jennie) “Whenever you’re ready.” And it was like that moment where I knew – I mean they were our – they’ve become our good friends, but in part we chose them because they weren’t our best friends, you know? (Kat) Cause you never know how these things are going to turn out. (Jennie) And so that was the moment where I realized that they were like our family. (Kat) They were there when the baby was born and they came into the delivery room when Nate was like fifteen or twenty minutes old and I handed Nate to Bob and instead of saying, “Nate this is your uncle, it just came out, I said, “Nate this is your daddy.” And then at one point I said to Bob, later in the day, I think I was driving him home or something. (Jennie) Couple days later. (Kat) Couple days later. I said, “You know, uncle just doesn’t feel right to me. Is it okay if we call you daddy?” And he got this huge grin on his face and he was like, “Well yeah. It’s cool.” So, he’s been daddy ever since. They’re both, now they’re “The Daddies.” So, they just love him. They’re madly. There’s nothing they wouldn’t do for him. So, he’s a lucky kid. (Jennie) Yeah.

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