A Letter to My Donor
Dear Donor,
We’ve never met. In fact, you have no idea of my specific existence, but I think about you a lot. Sometimes on the subway I’ll see a youngish brown-haired man and wonder if we’re connected. When an older gentleman or woman passes by, I think about your folks —what they’re like and if they have grandkids. Other grandkids, that is.
See, I have a son, Isaiah, who’s two and a half, and you, my anonymous sperm donor, made him possible. For that I thank you with all the gratitude I can summon now and forever. That sounds like a corny love song lyric, I realize, but the sentiment is true. I’m so deeply appreciative that something—a little extra cash? some desire to change the life of someone you’ve never met? an inexplicable nudge from the universe?—motivated you to head to a sperm bank some years ago. With this … Continue reading
This post was sponsored by Fairfax Cryobank
You never fully understand what goes into choosing a donor until you do it yourself! I had this glamorous idea in my mind that I would have a donor party. Assemble the people closest to me, have some wine, enjoy each others company, and look through donor profiles together. After I grieved the donor party idea, I realized I had to get to work to make decisions that would best fit my needs to conceive with. Funny thing is, I started the donor search out with this long list of criteria, almost like what I would expect to find in a partner. Some of it unrealistic honestly and unfortunately found that yielded no results. So I evaluated what was most important to me….
What is it about my donor that made me pick him? How on earth do you choose a sperm donor?
In November of 1999, my mother was artificially inseminated. Twenty years later to the exact date, I found my sperm donor.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, in several different contexts. One significant example is the issues that arise out of the fact that we’ve started getting into more specific details about conception. It was a non-issue for my son to find out, or more accurately, have confirmed that the donor is his biological father, although I will admit that I haven’t emphasized that specific phrase. But I have mentioned it and also do talk at more length about the fact that the donor is the man who gave the sperm that fertilized my egg to create a baby.
Years ago, when I made the decision to become a Single Mother by Choice (SMC) and began perusing the profiles of dozens of potential sperm donors, I was clear about one thing: I planned to use an open donor. Like most people, I’d heard plenty of stories about adopted kids who yearned for details about their biological parents, and I wanted to make sure that if my child ever felt like one of those kids, she’d have the information she needed. An open donor is a sperm donor who is open to meeting the children whom his sperm produced, and when my daughter turns 18, she can contact the bank I used, and they will release contact information about her donor to her.
How does one choose the other half of their child’s genetics? On what do you base that kind of decision? In a typical nuclear family, the other half of a child is chosen by love. You fall in love and want to produce a child that is half of each of you. Well…I didn’t fall in love yet. I didn’t get married yet. I just want a child. So what do I use to pick that genetic “other half”?
If you had told me when I was 38 and picking a sperm donor that only a few years later I would not only have a healthy son, but also a wonderful husband and four stepchildren, I would have laughed you out of the room! That’s the stuff of Hallmark movies, not real life, right?