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Late last year, it became my friend’s favourite party trick. “Rosa’s going to have a baby next week,” she’d say to a group of people who didn’t know me. I’d watch their faces as they tried to inconspicuously scan my body, detecting no sign of a bump. “Congratulations!” they’d say, smiles tight, clearly wondering what other delusions I might have up my sleeve.

I was, however, about to have a baby. At daybreak on a warm October day, our beautiful, 6lb 10oz, 19.5in‑long baby girl was born; skin pink and taut, scream wet and bright. I held my wife’s hand and head as our daughter emerged from her body – a daughter who had initially come from me.

We did what is known as reciprocal IVF: a route to parenthood that is increasingly being used by queer people. First, we each made embryos by retrieving our eggs and having them fertilised with donor sperm. With “normal” IVF, the embryo, if you’re lucky enough to have made one, returns to the body that made the eggs. With reciprocal IVF, there’s a body swap that feels a touch Shakespearean, or sci-fi. You receive your partner’s embryo instead.

Years ago, when the thought of children – or the discussion of them – still felt like playing a game, moving pieces on a board, this is how my wife, Leah, and I decided we wanted to do it. Knowing nothing could be taken for granted, the hope was that Leah would carry my embryo, then I would carry hers.

There are certain griefs you face when gay. If you are ambivalent about having children, you can’t leave it up to fate to see whether two bodies cooperate. (There are lots of self-protective jokes: have we been doing it wrong all this time? Should we try a new position?) While science might soon change this for some pioneers – mice pups have been made from two males and two females – for now, you can’t “see your faces together”.

I had fears. What if, one day, my child looked at me and said I wasn’t their real mum? (Psychological theory tells us this is a normal developmental phase, but, a more harrowing thought, what if I shared the worry?) What if grandparents, too, felt the difference? What if they showed it? What if, what if, what if – as if anything about having children can ever be controlled or predicted.

Reciprocal IVF seemed like a way around these worries. (My worries, I should say. For a worrier, Leah never worried.) This way, we would both have an irrefutable relationship with our children. Each time, one of us would be genetically related, and the other would have had a far larger impact: she would have transformed a cluster of cells into a baby. Folded into this were elements of magic we could both get behind; butterfly effects that are still the subject of young science: epigenetics – the way uterine conditions “turn on or off” genetic markers, effectively making the gestational mother a gene DJ – and also microchimerism. Through the placenta, small numbers of cells would pass from mother to baby and baby to mother, and stay there for ever.

When I described to a dear philosopher friend how Leah and I wanted to have children, he described it as “the most delightful project of mutuality”. I think of this often.

I always talk frankly about how we had our daughter – often volunteering the information before someone asks – because, relatively speaking, there are still so few models. Even in New York, in 2025, at a clinic many of our lesbian friends have used, we were still an anomaly. When Leah was pregnant, we went to a lesbian wedding, and her belly was like a billboard. So many queer couples came up to us and asked us how we’d done it. They wanted details. We gave them gladly. Long-distance phone calls with complete strangers were organised. Google docs were shared.

It felt important for both of us that we use a known donor – someone we knew personally, rather than going through a sperm bank. We thought about the qualities we were most looking for in a person who would change our lives so immeasurably: knowability (we wanted them not to feel like a mystery to us) and happiness or, at least, emotional steadiness, and, with luck, access to joy. Small things, huge things, everything. When you fall in love, your body decides for you. In this situation, you’re looking rationally, knowing that whatever – whoever – comes from the decision is the result of clear-eyed intention rather than misty-eyed intangibility. And yet there’s always a touch of the intangible, too.

We scattered seeds into the wind, without asking anyone directly. We hoped to find a donor, we told people when they asked, who was a friend, and who would become like a godfather to our children. Reactions seemed so instinctive: “Oh wow, I could never do that!” (noted) or “That would be my ideal way of becoming a father” (also noted). Sometimes a joke would be made – “Well, if you ever need … ” – and we’d try to parse if it was a genuine offer or not.

We listened to their instincts, and to our own. With the conversations that went a little deeper, how did the dynamic feel? Did we want the same things?

The dear friend we eventually chose – and who chose us, because it was an embracing yes from all involved – I finally asked more directly at a friend’s birthday. “More” being the operative word – I was still shy, elliptical – but I admitted there was a shortlist, and it was very short indeed, and of course he had long been on it; how did he feel about that? Beyond a sea of other merits – generosity, a gregariousness that seems to come from another century, a face that’s a pleasure to land on – he had always asked the best questions. All of which were about the future child, and what they might want and need.

An administrative assault course followed. Tests, counselling, consent forms and contracts, so battery-like I think I almost blocked them out. There was the donation, which involved laughter and inappropriate applause. There were our egg retrievals, less than 24 hours apart (egg retrievals are finely calibrated to a menstrual cycle, and for the first time in our eight years as a couple, as if they were in on the whole thing, our periods started on the same day that month). Then, in a petri dish in Manhattan, our eggs were combined with his sperm to make our embryos.

IVF is characterised by waiting. Fewer eggs than you start with mature, and then fewer than that fertilise, and fewer than that make it to five days, and all the while you wonder if this is how you discover you can never have a baby at all. You wonder, in our case, how you will feel if it works for one of us, but not the other. Better, you tell yourself – two wombs, two sets of ovaries, we’re lucky, we’re lucky – but you also know it’s not as simple as that.

In the end, we were lucky. We got the numbers we needed. And one day last January, one of my embryos – they gave us a photograph; a grey-scale, blurry-looking thing, like an eye floater about to hatch – was put inside Leah with a medical version of a pea-shooter. We ate the McDonald’s fries that Reddit fertility forums promise are lucky, and we waited for 10 days.

When we got the answer – at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of all places, a stick test, in the bathroom, because we couldn’t wait any longer – it was strange how shocked we felt, when so much had gone into making this happen. I looked at the faint lines and walked around the museum in a daze.

This was the moment our bodies began to separate. While Leah was continually aware of the cells doubling inside her as they moved from poppy seed to sweet pea to plum, my life was still unaffected. I entered Dad‑land. I was technically, physically, hormonally, at a distance from all of it, a particularly curious sensation as a woman. “The only mother-to-be who can celebrate with champagne and sushi,” I’d say, or, “I’m drinking for three!” (It is a miracle Leah stayed with me.)

Of course the reality was more complicated: a man might watch his pregnant partner throw up from morning sickness and think, “That looks horrible, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” I would watch Leah and think, “We made a choice for you to be the person doing this.” I’d want to be able to take the discomfort into my own body. And yet I couldn’t and I hadn’t. Not this time, anyway. I worried she was resentful. I interrogated her about this. “No,” she’d say. “This is the best thing I have ever done.” She might pause to vomit again, and then say, so confusingly to me, because she really meant it, “You’re going to really love it.”

She did love it. She was extraordinary pregnant. She ended up in nightclubs more often than she had in the whole previous decade. She wore crop tops for the first time since she was 13. She barely got out of breath walking up the five flights of stairs to our apartment. She didn’t get back pain. She hardly complained. “It’s not fair,” I would sometimes say to her, knowing I was supposed to go next, “you’re setting outrageously high standards.”

This is at once the upside and the downside. There was a fundamental understanding but also a future accord – do unto me as I would do unto you. A beautiful intertwining: solidarity, kinship, compassion but, also, comparison. Another unhelpful thing I said to Leah on a day when she was particularly tired, and I was idly thinking about the future: “When I have to do this, we’ll also have a toddler.” She did not appreciate that.

In the very few accounts I’ve read of reciprocal IVF, there are stories of insensitive comments: “Who’s the real mum?”; “Where’s the real dad?” We haven’t had many of those. On countless occasions, friends – and I truly don’t think they were humouring us – seemed to forget that Leah and I couldn’t have a child naturally. “Hope the kid gets your X and her Y,” they might say, putting our characteristics on an imaginary collage, before one of us might remind them it’s technically impossible, or they’d realise themselves.

And when people affectionately call me “the dad”, I haven’t minded. At a birth class, where all the men without fail were in baseball caps, I liked the gruff way they acknowledged me, with dips of their brims (I was wearing a baseball cap, too). I’ve found fathers more forthcoming than I would have imagined. Many have said to me, kindly, “Don’t worry if you don’t feel anything till they’re about six months old,” which I found shocking, but also generous in the frankness. “It will happen,” was their regular refrain.

It was certainly happening. Spring came, and Leah felt the first “quickening” – the baby moved, like a frog between her hands, she told me, but inside her. For a while, I had to be away from Leah, and when I came home her belly was undeniable. She took my hand to her skin – and for the first time I, too, felt movement. A shock, like a finger had flicked me from within her.

There were times I’d felt a sense of injustice that we had to involve anyone else in our family-making, but in that instant I felt this fade away. Whoever was in there was real, and coming, and it was so much less complicated than I had imagined it might be: they were so clearly ours.

I would find myself looking at Leah and our child growing inside her and feeling a second shock: that it was possible. For more than half my life I wouldn’t have imagined that. Even though I grew up in London, with liberal parents, it was a different time.

When we walked down the street, I would put my arm around Leah – protective but also possessive. A stronger desire than usual to say, “We’re not just friends.” This is my baby, too. We’ve done it.

She did it. The moments before our daughter was born, I looked at Leah and felt the most precise and sweeping love I have ever felt.

Our daughter, Mara, looks like me, especially when she frowns. When she came out, her blond hair was lacquered to her head in curls not far from mine. They say babies can’t really see much for months, but it feels as if they are given a grace period in the first hours or so. I held her on my forearm, her soft head in my hand, and we stared at each other.

I stare at her still – she is the proud owner of two bottom teeth, razor-sharp seed pearls, and she smiles at all the wrong things. I see the sideways glance that runs through my dad’s family; her delicate bird‑likeness recalls my mum. But the sum is vastly greater than the parts: she is so decidedly her own person.

Years ago, thinking about babies purely theoretically, I used to believe that “my” baby would be my genetic child, and “her” baby would be Leah’s genetic child. While Mara feels entirely like our child, if she’s anyone’s, she’s Leah’s – Leah has known her in a different, longer way. She made her with her body. When they are apart, she can feel where Mara is, as if her body were a compass and Mara were north. I watch them – one in a bed, one in a bassinet – and they sleep with their arms in exactly the same way.

My fear about grandparents was deeply unfounded, too: I have never seen a purer love than Leah’s mother’s for Mara. When Mara was a newborn, when we left them together, to shop or cook or nap, they would always be in the exact same position when we came back, no gap between them.

For all the elements of fairytale, it’s not without complications. For two women like us, whose condition is only “social infertility”, there are far less medically invasive ways to get pregnant. Any IVF pregnancy is considered higher risk, and being a surrogate is higher risk still, but both things, when it comes to two women having a family together, are understudied.

It won’t matter how you made the baby when it comes, people told us, and I think that’s right. Because when the child exists they are the child they are, and they couldn’t be any other. At the start, perhaps I was drawn to reciprocal IVF because it was the closest we could get to what straight couples can have naturally. But, in reality, it never felt like a mimic or replication. It felt – it feels – very much like its own thing. That intertwining again. An odd echo of the DNA helix but without DNA actually changing – or much of it. Unlike Leah, I don’t feel I need to be pregnant to be a mother; I’ve proved that. But I love the balance of it, the symmetry. If there’s genetic primacy, it extends the other way now: I love what it will mean to carry her child, with her genes. For her DNA to enter mine.

We do not know what the future will bring. The conversations that will be unexpectedly easy, or hard. Where initial worries have melted, fresh ones have grown in their place. The classics – when I go to her in the night will she still be breathing? – and the modern classics – new wars, and resurfacing fears about having a child in this world as a gay couple.

We are both on Mara’s birth certificate. But, to be safe, I will have to adopt my own daughter, which is both expensive and simply strange. When working out Mara’s full name for her passport, we plotted two paths: how we might each be able to travel with Mara alone and be recognised as her parent, but also how we might be able to travel as a family yet pass for straight – cousins, friends – if we needed to travel to a country where being gay is illegal.

Seismic shifts towards conservatism make having a family like ours feel political. I hold many ideas in my head: the mundanity, the miraculousness, the newness of how we did it, the oldness of what we did. This summer, the most delightful project of mutuality will hopefully continue. This time, if luck takes our hand again, Leah gets to drink the wine and eat the cheese.

• Rosa Rankin-Gee is the author of My Only Boy, published by Scribner UK on 21 May (£20). To buy a copy for £18, go to guardianbookshop.com