LGBT History Month – Featured Families: 2Brides2Mums.
Our third Featured Family segment features 2brides2mums. Sarah from the blog talks about her wife and their up and coming bundle of joy! Congratulations, ladies!
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Who are you?
We are Sarah (aged 31) and Lauren (soon to be 30!), a married lesbian couple from Birmingham, UK.
Sarah is a manager for a luxury lifestyle brand and Lauren is an amazing midwife.
When we aren’t working we love travelling (we’ve visted ten countries in ten years!) and food! Sarah is vegan and Lauren is vegetarian – and an amazing cook. Going out for meals is one of our favourite things ever!
How long have you been together?
This year we will have been together for twelve years in September, and married for three years in July.
Where did you meet?
We met in our home town of Birmingham aged 18 and 19. We were both just out of relationships and given each others number by a mutual friend. We met up for a drink one evening and the rest, as they say, is history!
We became a couple two weeks later, and two years later I moved to Leeds where Lauren was at university, to move in with her into a tiny, rainbow coloured flat!
We bought our house in Birmingham after six years together, and added a tiny puppy to the mix! Willow is a tiny cross breed who has been excellent practice for human babies!
We got engaged in Brighton, one of our favourite places in the world, with Lauren organising for the hotel we were staying at to fill our room with rose petals, champagne, and a huge bubble bath for our return. We married in 2013 in Birmingham – the absolute best day of our lives, then after spending a year exploring the world a little more, we began fertility treatment. Phew!
Do you have any children?
Our little boy (our first child) is due in June this year!
What’s the best thing about becoming a parent?
We are lucky to have lives filled with so much love – from each other, from our families, from our friends, and we can’t wait to have a child to share that with. We love seeing new places and exploring the world, and we can’t wait to give our little one lots of adventures!
What challenges are you afraid of as a same sex family?
We have probably worried about the same things as any other family – if we’ll be good parents, what school our child will go to in our area etc. During visits to our fertility clinic, scan appointments, midwife appointments, even trips to places like Mamas & Papas and The Baby Show, we have been treated the same as any other couple, so it’s hard to imagine a scenario where we are treated differently for being same sex parents. We have discussed that we want our child to be aware of different family units, and also about donor conception (which we will adapt to be age appropriate).
How will you teach diversity to your child?
We are lucky that our family and friends contain lots of positive examples of diversity – single mums, single dads, multi racial families, adoptive parents, disabilities, and same sex parents. We want our child to be open minded, without prejudice, and to judge people by character not circumstance. Its important to us that our child knows that their ‘normal’ is just that – theirs, and that its ok that others ‘normal’ may be different from their own.
What would be your message to a young person “coming out” today?
Be yourself. It sounds simple and cliche, but it is honestly the thing that will make you happiest, most free, and will attract the most genuine people to you. Life is too short to worry about what others think of you!
What would be your message to a couple starting out on the TTC journey?
Every couple is different, but for us , it was important not to rush into treatmnet despite being eager to start a family – we had been together ten years when we began our journey, as we wanted to have our own home, be married, and have had lots of baby-free holidays first!
We also wanted to ensure we had saved enough money – fertility treatment is expensive, with lots of hidden costs, and babies arent cheap either! Like most people on the TTC journey we had numerous draw backs and it’s not not to be disheartened or stressed by it. We tried to always remember our baby would come when it was supposed to, and trust that everything happened for a reason. Our succesful embryo transfer was such a relaxed, peaceful day, and we think this had a positive impact.
What does LGBT History mean to you?
I think the thing that strikes us about LGBT history is it never fails to amaze me every time I see examples in media such as YouTube of LGBT history, is how far we have came, and how far there is still to go. When we became a couple, civil partnerships didn’t exist, let alone same sex marriage. We are extremely lucky to live in a safe, tolerant country but are always aware when visiting other countries that this is not the case everywhere, and even in the UK we are occasionally disappointed by attitudes to same sex couples, particularly around marriage and parenting. It is brilliant how the laws have changed to give us equal opportunities, and even better to see attitudes starting to reflect this too.
Where can we find you?
We are on Twitter at @2brides2mums, Instagram at @SarahLovesL and @LaurenNune, and our blog is 2bridesto2mummies.blogspot.com.
This post is part of a month long celebration for LGBT history month. If you’d like to get involved, tweet using the hashtag #LGBTHM or find one of your local LGBT groups on Facebook and find out how they’re celebrating LGBT History Month.
