Hi. I am Tara Clancy. I’m from Queens, New York.

So with my first kid, it was like very – it was very straightforward. Shauna, my boy’s other mom, and I at the time went to the doctor and, you know, we sat down. We’re like, “We want to have a baby,” and he was like, “Great. Get some sperm.” Boom. We did that. We got some. They put it in. Bingo, right? Nine months later, I have this first-born kid. Great.

I had just put my head on the pillow. Like, it was like midnight, maybe, right? And I was like, “Okay, goodnight, honey.” And I put my head on the pillow and I am not kidding you that, like, the second my eyes closed and my head hit the pillow, she was like, “My water broke!”

But then she labored for, like, I don’t even know – a day and a half? Ultimately, he was a cesarean section because, you know, she just never got there.

He was like one-and-a-half and we decide, alright, we’re ready. We want to, you know, do this again. We want another kid. So we go back into the doctor’s office and Shauna was 10 years older than me. And he’s like, “Great, all right, Tara…” – me – “you should be the one to have this baby.” He starts going into medically why this is better and me being younger and blah blah blah. And so right away, of course, I am like, “No!”

But he, you know, obviously presses on with all the medical science-y reasons as to why I should consider it. And he goes on and on long enough that I actually do decide to take the night and think about it. And so I get back to my apartment and Shauna decides to just, like, give me the space, you know, in the apartment that night. Like, kind of go out and leave me alone to think about this. And so I find myself just kind of trying to hype myself into it. And so finally, I actually go over to the mirror, right, I’m, like, puffing out my shirt, like I’m imagining myself pregnant. But more than that, I’m imagining somebody seeing me pregnant. Shock of all shocks, I decide to go through with it. I decide that I will do it.

And so I go back to the doctor and they’re like, “You have to get this blood work done.” And we get the blood work done. And then I go back in again and – with Shauna, and we are sitting across from him and he takes out the results, presumably of my blood work, and he goes, “Okay, Tara, you have a fertility problem. It’s okay. It just means that we can’t do what we did with Shauna for your first son. We need to do something different.” And so for my first son, he was born via an insemination. So he was like. “This time around, we’re gonna have to do in vitro fertilization.”

It’s like when they go in and then they take out the eggs, they put them in a little petri dish, and they fertilize them there, and then they put the whole mess back in, okay? It’s unbelievably common nowadays. It’s very routine and it’s very safe. I had the one percent, possibly fatal, reaction to the first part of the IVF. And I almost died – but I didn’t. It took awhile for my body to recover but I did eventually fully recover. Now we can – we can continue.

My doctor was like, “You can you can go forward with this.” And so we go back into the doctor’s office once again, sitting across the table and he’s like, “Okay, all your preliminary blood work again looks fine. We are ready to go.” Second part, here we go.

We go and we’re like, “Great, thanks.” And we stand up and we turn to, like, leave.

And he says, to our backs pretty much, “But actually there is one more option. And that would be if Shauna carried this baby.” And he starts to, you know, continue into all the medical science-y shit that makes this the case.

I’m like, “Yeah!” Right? I am saved by the bell, right? And amazingly, she is okay with this idea. She gets pregnant with my baby. And she carried that baby for 9 months and all went well.

And then one night, you know, we went to bed. Then a couple of hours later, she wakes me up and I know what that means. I don’t even think I look at her. I just like hop out of the bed, pull up my pants, check that the hospital bag is there. I’m like, okay, great, go to grab the hospital bag. And at that point that I kinda hear her. I turn and I look and I’m like, oh shit. Like, this doesn’t look like it did the first time, right?

She has gone zero to 100, like that. So I go to her and I put her arm over my shoulder and I carry her out of the apartment and down the steps to our apartment. We flag a taxi and she is, like, in the full throes. Like, within a minute, right, feels like, she is full-blown laboring. And we’re in the back of a taxi. In fact, she gets into the taxi, she pushes the button for the window, and she puts her feet outside the – like, up out the window.

I actually go through and to, like, the driver, like, trying not to tell her but I’m like go[ing] to the driver and I’m like, “You have to go through the light! You have to go through the light! She’s going to have a baby in your cab! Go go go go go go go!” We, like, screech in, and you know, like [make screech sound effect], you know, at the hospital ER entrance. She can’t walk so I get a wheelchair in, like, the ambulance bay. And I put her in a wheelchair and I go flying all the way up to the maternity ward floor.

The maternity ward has its own triage area, and so I push her in there and I take one look at the nurse in the triage area and I’m like, “I do not have time to fill out any paperwork. You have to point me to an OR.” I turn back around and Shauna has gotten up out of the wheelchair now. She’s got her hands on the arm rest of it. She’s standing straight up. She’s lifted up her shirt. Her tits are out. She pulled down her pants. Her pussy’s out. Her ass is out. There’s like piss, blood, shit. They, like, put her in a gurney, push her into a room, and like, you know, I don’t know, one minute – maybe – later, she gives birth to a perfectly healthy, second little boy.

It’s great that we’ve gotten to a place where I can be married and I can have children and it’s great that when people typically ask me how I had children, they’re not doing so, you know, with any negativity, right? They’re just curious. At the same time, you know, dealing with that curiosity even when it’s, you know, sweet and kind and the intentions are good is a lot sometimes. You know, you’re like, Google that shit, motherfucker!

I want the information to be – to be just disseminated out into the world. And then I also really do think now people ask my sons. So, the more times that I tell this story, like, the less times somebody will ask them. So I figure, you know, tell the story, put it out there, have your kids be less annoyed. You know, obviously cumulatively. We need a lot more people to tell this story.