This woman and her wife are both pregnant—and due on the same day ❤️

“We actually we don’t really know who’s gonna go first, it’s kind of whoever’s ready to go first, but they’re thinking it’s Renee,” Anna told Motherly the morning before the pair checked into the hospital where they would spend their first weekend as parents.

The McInarnays live in Mississippi, a state where they know their chances of having a child placed with them through adoption are not good. They both have stable jobs as elementary school teachers, and having been together for 17 years they certainly have a stable relationship, but adoption workers were honest with them about their chances of having a child placed in their home through foster care or adoption.

As Anna recalls, one worker was warm but frank, telling her “Mississippi I think would probably go through placing everyone else before they would place a same-sex couple”, she recalls. “At that point I just appreciated the honesty.”

With adoption off the table, the McInarnays started exploring fertility at the urging of Anna’s brother, a medical professional who gently nudged the couple, at 35 and 36 years old, to explore the option sooner rather than later.

And so, the McInarnays found themselves in the waiting room at Audubon Fertility in New Orleans. At first, they just wanted to find out if either of them would be likely to conceive. When they found out that it was possible they both could, they didn’t quite know how to answer the next question.

“They asked us, ‘Okay so who wants to carry for your family?’ And Renee and I, because we had so expected them to say ‘neither one of you can conceive’ or ‘you waited too late,’ or ‘your eggs are dried up,’ we didn’t know the answer,” Anna recalls.

The fertility clinic suggested both women move forward with the process if neither were opposed, as it typically takes multiple cycles for a patient to conceive. When Renee was diagnosed with PCOS, it seemed like Anna would likely be the one to carry the couple’s child, but when both women ovulated at the same time, they continued to move forward.

Renee and Anna remember asking their nurse what the chances would be of them both actually conceiving at the same time. She told them it would be a first for the clinic and a statistical miracle. “‘Of course it’s possible,’ she said” Anna recalls. “But that’s not the possibility that you should bank on. What you should hope for is that one of you is gonna be able to carry for your family.”

And then a statistical miracle happened.

The McInarnays were in their living room when the clinic called and told Anna she was pregnant. Thrilled and excited, Anna got a jolt when the voice on the other end of the phone asked her to sit down.

“I had this moment where I thought ‘Oh my God they’re gonna tell me that all three of them took and we are gonna have triplets, and I’m going to die.’ That was literally what I thought. And so they said ‘Are you sitting down?’ We said ‘Yeah.’ I sat down, and they said ‘Anna, you’re pregnant. But so is Renee.'”

Tears of joy flowed that day, as they will this weekend when Avonlea and Emma enter the world, but before the girls entered the world, their families got to experience another magical moment.

Renee says both her mom and Anna’s mom were thrilled to hear of the pregnancies, but as the couple was open about going through fertility treatments, it wasn’t exactly a shock.

“There was not this big moment that you get to do where you give ’em a onesie that says ‘you’re gonna be a grandparent,'” says Renee, who was instead able to plan another surprise with the help of her twin sister.

That’s who took the call from the fertility clinic to learn if Anna and Renee were expecting boys, girls, or one of each. Even Anna and Renee didn’t know, so when they drove from Mississippi to Florida and shot off confetti cannons, everyone was surprised and thrilled.

As a lesbian couple, this wasn’t a moment Anna and Renee—or their parents—were sure they would get to experience, and it was doubly special. “Our whole families, siblings, nieces and nephews, they all drove in and we all were in the yard together and popped [the cannons]. And then just the pink confetti falling, it was really great,” Renee recalls.

Getting here wasn’t easy.

When Anna and Renee fell for each other as teenagers, reconciling their attraction and love was difficult. It was the first time either had non-platonic love for another woman. “We were a young couple, we were from really conservative areas, and initially we really struggled with, you know, what is this going to look like in our lives, what does this even mean, does this mean we’re gay? You know as young people back then really, you had no context for any of that,” Anna recalls.

They stayed together, but briefly broke up a few years later, each wanting to protect the other from the discrimination they knew they would face. “I think we were just really scared to come out. I mean to tell you the truth, when we think about that time that we weren’t together, it really wasn’t because there was love lost between us, it was just fear, you know?” Anna told Motherly.

When they reunited they decided they would never live in that fear again, and would do what was best for themselves and now, their family.

This has meant correcting folks around Hattiesburg, Mississippi who mislabel them as roommates, sister or “really good friends.” In a community where LGBTQ rights are a contentious topic, these two award-winning teachers have won the respect and admiration of many parents, and changed some minds in the process.

“That’s not to say that we haven’t received hateful comments, that’s not to say that explaining this to parents every year is not really, really tricky, and the way that we kind of have to phrase things is not tricky,” says Anna. “We have to be very clear and be very direct, and be just very loving, you know. And we also have had to accept that as deeply as we want people to understand us as a couple, and to be loving and supported, for some people it’s going to take some time for them to open up their thinking a little bit.”

And it’s why they’re being so open with the story of how they are starting a family. Besides, there’s no hiding the fact that the two married, female teachers both have baby bumps.

The McInarnays want to give hope to anyone who is afraid of loving who they love, and they want to give hope to anyone going through the ups and downs of trying to conceive with reproductive assistance.

“In that [fertility clinic] there were gay couples, there were straight couples, there were interracial couples, there were every type of couple that you could imagine. Sitting there, all with the same goal, trying to start families, and some of them had been there for years,” she recalls.

“It’s not lost on us that we had this really rare experience in fertility where we got pregnant on the first try, and that that’s something that the people that kind of became our friends, our family in the [fertility clinic] lobby, that they never got or that they’re still waiting for.”

The McInarnays are humbled by and so grateful for their double pregnancy. It takes a strong mama to be up and holding her wife’s hand 36 hours after giving birth herself, but we’ve got no doubt that both these women have that strength in them.