The Parent Trip: Tiffany Holder and Bets Beasley of West Philadelphia

All her life, Tiffany had trained herself to perform: back handsprings when she was a young gymnast, dance routines in musical theater, knee-hangs on aerial trapeze as an adult.

And when it was time to get pregnant, she and Bets planned for more than a year. They signed a contract with the friend who agreed to donate sperm. They waited while a local cryobank screened and froze that sperm for a mandatory six-month quarantine. Tiffany began charting her basal temperatures.

So why, month after month, was her body failing at the thing she wanted most?

Tiffany had always yearned to experience pregnancy and childbirth. Bets, on the other hand, envisioned herself as a childless spinster - not because she didn't love kids, but because the traditional "mother" role didn't fit. She wasn't interested in being pregnant. She didn't want to bear the primary responsibility for offspring.

"It wasn't being a parent that scared me," she says. "It was being a mom, with all that represented culturally and socially." But after she met Tiffany, while both were in college and working as baristas at Jittery Joe's in Athens, Ga., she glimpsed a more spacious vision of family, one in which two people would share housework and parenting equitably.

First, they had to try living together. After graduation, they moved to Brooklyn - not the toniest section, but an easy walk to 13 different subway lines - and discovered they cohabited easily. Later, when Tiffany enrolled in nursing school at the University of Pennsylvania while Bets entered a doctoral program in history at Yale, they managed the long-distance relationship with daily phone calls and endless Amtrak hours.

It was during that period, one Thanksgiving weekend in New York, when Tiffany proposed. In Tompkins Square Park, in the rain, she peeled off her jacket to reveal a tank top she'd decorated with rainbow paint to say, "Will you marry me?"

Their 2012 wedding, though not yet legal in Georgia, was a mini-festival, with friends performing monologues, saxophone solos, and circus routines. Even Tiffany's mother, who had taken lessons in secret, did a brief aerial act in lieu of a toast.

They wanted a donor - in this case, a family friend, a gay man who was happy to help but who did not want to be a parent - who could be part of their child's life. "The whole process of picking sperm out of a catalog - I find it unsettling," Bets says. "I wanted our child to have some direct link to the person who helped make her and not have it be a mystery."

They tried one at-home insemination, then upped the ante, and their chances of success, with intrauterine inseminations in a doctor's office. Tiffany took fertility medications that tweaked her moods and gave her hot flashes. She endured multiple blood draws, maneuvering frequent doctors' appointments around her own 12-hour shifts as an acute-care nurse.

What if her supervisor stopped being so accommodating? What if they exhausted the supply of frozen sperm? What if she never became pregnant? With each month that passed, she slipped deeper into despair.

"I was using up sick time, getting frustrated with the process; I was losing my mind," she recalls. At home, Bets picked up the slack, feeding their three cats and scooping the litter box, cooking and cleaning and worrying about Tiffany's downward spiral.

"My struggle was trying to be upbeat and manage the household when she was having a really hard time," she recalls.

Finally, after their seventh attempt, while Bets was on a research trip in Amsterdam and Tiffany was visiting her grandmother in St. Louis, a pregnancy test looked faintly positive. Just to be sure, she tried seven more tests over the next three days - each one a little more emphatic. She phoned Bets, who sent back a surprised, joyful selfie in return.

"Once I was pregnant, I was really excited and documented the entire pregnancy. I have thousands of pictures," Tiffany says. She also created an aerial dance piece about those months of hope and disappointment, and performed it in a circus show in March, when she was 17 weeks pregnant.

She performed again at 37 weeks, part of an LGBTQ theater festival in New York. This time, the mood was expectant. Tiffany had choreographed a gentle aerial routine - the trapeze hung just three feet from the ground, and she sat on the bar instead of hanging from it - to Ani DiFranco's song "Landing Gear," written when the singer/songwriter was pregnant: "For someone who ain't even here yet / look how much the world loves you."

When Tiffany's water broke a week after her due date - "just like in the movies, all over the floor" - and her contractions were already two minutes apart, the two hustled to the Birth Center in Bryn Mawr. Charlotte was born five hours later, a brisk finish to all those months of trying and waiting. Both women were so euphoric they forgot, for a few moments, to check the baby's sex.

"Can we see what kind of baby we got?" Bets asked finally. The name "Charlotte" seemed to suit her, along with "Lilyan," spelled the way Bets' grandmother had spelled it.

Now they are three - Tiffany breast-feeds; Bets changes Charlotte's cloth diapers. They trade the baby-carrier back and forth, learning to manage an infant's constant needs.

"I'm a pretty anxious person, but it's brought out some confidence in me, being in charge of someone who can't take care of herself," Bets says. She still doesn't think of herself as "mom," but "dad" doesn't quite fit, either. She hopes Charlotte will call her "Beas."

For Tiffany, the sorrow of those failed inseminations hasn't vanished, but it's softened. A year ago, she barely noticed the season; now, she can't wait to visit corn mazes and pumpkin patches, to push Charlotte's stroller through a crackle of leaves. "Last year at this time, I was really not OK. We were both really excited to enjoy ourselves, to rewrite the story for this year and see how things have changed."

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