LESBIAN MOTHER TO BE What Makes A Boy A Boy, A Girl A Girl (She enters carrying a doll, a timer, and a pregnancy test strip) (To doll) Okay, little Paula, you hold the strip this time. (Taps doll on the head for good luck and paces as she waits for the timer to go off. After a few seconds it chimes.) Yes! Yes? Yes! I'm gonna have a baby. My own little brown haired baby. With hazel eyes and five foot two. (To her baby in her belly) I will love you! I do love you. We almost waited too long. We didn't want to have a child…in the beginning. Now I am just about out of eggs. And Paula is in early menopause. And here we are looking at our mortality. Funny how we look at life and time differently when the clock strikes old. (Pause) We changed our minds. And here I am having a baby. When I was seven years old playing house with my friends, I always played the husband. I wonder what makes a boy a boy, a girl a girl. If you've got more estrogen than testosterone, are you a girl? If you have more testosterone in your woman body but you think like a man, what are you? How do hormones tell you who you are? We don't have control over them that's for sure. (pause) We will love this child completely. This little boy or little girl. And you will have dark brown hair. That's what we checked on the sperm bank application. We decided what you will look like and sort of be like. We picked your "donor man type," the color of your eyes, your hair, your skin. It took twelve vials. 100 million sperm in each tube, quarantined for six months while the sperm bank tested the donor… to make sure he wasn't a drug addict or alcoholic or had an infectious disease or something. We were told that twenty-five percent of them would start swimming like little tadpoles / racing upstream against the tide / as soon as we defrosted them. And we had to hurry up and put them in that "turkey baster." It took six months, two vials a month. And sixteen hundred dollars. Inexpensive because we did home insemination. (With resentment) She and I didn't like those judgmental stares at the clinics. Two women having a baby. What's the story about this one who thought she was a duckWill you be a boy or girl? And then what? Sounds like nature will have her way, which ever way it goes. I just know I don't want to be punished like the swan who thought she was a duck. But what do I know? Let's go and tell Paula.