Sperm. During the first 26 years of my life, I gave it hardly any thought at all. There was this one recurring nightmare I had after our best guy friends house-sat for us where their sperm managed somehow to live on in our bed and sneak into my PJ’s to impregnate me. There was also this incident where I found a splatter of thick, creamy substance on my car after my yoga class one night and spent a week wondering if it was someone’s sperm. But apart from that, nothing. It barely registered in my consciousness as having any relevance to my existence for most of my life, and then, suddenly, it was everything.
Ok, actually, it wasn’t all that suddenly- Cari has been talking about having a baby since the day I met her. We met at a coffee shop, moved on to lunch, and then met up at the dog park later that afternoon where I walked up to her cradling Rylee, her puppy, in a newborn position and said jokingly, “You look like you need a baby.”
“I do,” she replied, bending down to plant a kiss on Rylee’s scruffy head, “I’m thinking of having one on my own…I’m tired of waiting!”
But wait she did, for four more years, while I slowly, budgingly, got on board with the plan. So while in retrospect sperm’s entrance into my life wasn’t all that sudden really, it certainly felt that way at the time.
There is this period of time during the lesbian conception process when sperm plays the starring role, makes up the ensemble cast, and even seems to direct the show. For us, the auditions lasted several months.
Each evening we’d pour over the sperm bank’s website, looking for our perfect match. We wanted someone who was a balanced blend of our physical features so that both of us could carry his babies and still have the children resemble the non-bio mom. Cari has pale, almost translucent skin that burns but never tans, reddish-blond hair, green eyes, and an angular face. I have dark brown hair, even darker brown eyes, light olive skin that tans deeply, and an oval face with a broad jaw. There is no notable combination of these features.
We are both mutts, but without any overlap. Cari has English and Irish ancestry, while I am Swedish, German, and Cherokee. Our search to find a donor who matched both of our heritages turned up a fair number of candidates, but somehow they all managed to have essays that were deeply concerning from a psychological standpoint. One, when asked to describe his relationships with his family, wrote: “My mother taught me how to copy human emotion.” Not your typical response to a question like this, and in our heightened state of anxiety, this struck us as more than a little predictive of some kind of psychopath/serial killer who might fit in better on Dexter than in our home.
We also quickly learned that the sperm bank’s distinctive feature, “Celebrity Look-Alikes,” which offers a link to Internet photos of celebrities whom each candidate resembles, was less than helpful. Most of the celebrities looked either hung over and drug addicted or aloof and unapproachable with their chiseled, perfect features. It was hard to imagine raising someone who looked like any one of them.
Once we purchased the pricey “90-day all-access pass,” which allowed us to download everything from baby pictures to “creative expression” pieces from each of the candidates, we were faced with a whole slew of new problems. Take, for example, their childhood photos. Was that stiff posture and averted gaze we noticed in several candidates indicative of Aspergers? Why, of out all their pictures, would they choose one where they were dirty and tear-streaked?
Finally, we narrowed it down to two promising candidates. A music teacher we selected based on the fact that his writing style in the donor essays reminded Cari a lot of mine, and a PhD in electrical engineering whose impressive credentials of nearly perfect SAT and GRE scores, athletic prowess, and a penchant for adventure sports seemed too good to pass up. After agonizing over the decision for several weeks, we finally called Cari’s step-dad Chappy, a retired army chaplain, for some spiritual guidance. He recommended we put out the extra cash for access to the donor’s audio downloads.
That evening Cari sat in our tiny condo’s bathtub and I sat on the bathroom floor next to her, a set of headphones strung between us. We expected that upon hearing their voices, we would suddenly know which one was The One; that the heavens would part and reveal we had found the person who would contribute half of the DNA for our children-to-be. Instead, it felt like being a fly on the wall during a really bad first date. The sperm bank employee haltingly yet flirtatiously led each candidate through a series of getting to know you questions. By the end of the interviews, we realized that what we had mistaken for an intentionally self-deprecating, humorous, good-naturedly sarcastic tone in the Music Teacher’s writing was actually a socially awkward, self-indulgent pessimism. Less than half-way through the PhD’s interview, we began to realize that to finish your doctorate while managing to master the Argentine tango, teach Martial Arts to kids, surf, snowboard, and train to vlimb Mt. Everest requires a certain level of drive so intense, so focused by nature that when combined with our own anxious, achievement-driven temperaments could be disastrous.
What we needed was someone who used their intelligence to increase their happiness rather than their accomplishments. What we needed was a slacker.
We spent the next several weeks on hiatus from the sperm bank’s website, eying instead the trio of close guy friends we had long ago identified as potential known donors, but ruled out primarily on the basis of how much we liked them and how little we relished having a conversation with them where we popped the big question and risked their polite refusal. We strategized ways to set them up in order to request the goods. Casual lunches, wine-filled afternoons, quick phone calls… no setting seemed quite right to say: “hey, I’d like you to father our baby but absolutely under no circumstances do we want you to be like a father to our baby.”
Yes, men get women pregnant all the time, and yes, a lot of them feel perfectly fine about parting ways afterwards and never looking back, but that wasn’t the kind of men these men were. And even if they were fine with not being parents to their sperm’s production now, how could we ask them to know how they would feel in, 5, 10, or even 15 years? Finally, we feared that if one of them did become the donor, we would be so busy setting up boundaries to make it clear they weren’t the parent that we would miss out on having them be uncles to our children, which we hoped for these three men more than anything.
It was back to the sperm bank, then, where anonymity protected us and the donors from any changes of heart for the first 18 years, at which point our children would be able to contact them once in accordance with the donor’s “willing to be known” contract. Most kids don’t want anything to do with their parents at that age anyway, so I knew that even if our kids did want to find their donor at 18 and idealize them for all the ways they weren’t like us, it would be easier not to take it quite so personally.
Our return to the vortex of the sperm bank’s search engine turned up only one promising new candidate: a young man we fondly came to know as “Shorty.” Several inches shorter than the sperm bank’s stated minimum height requirement, Cari took this as a sign that if we had a son, he might face rejection from her extended family, whose love of boys playing basketball is surpassed only by their love of Jesus. I, however, took it as a sign that there must have been something special about him to make it through the sperm bank’s rigorous screening process despite his height.
The son of a diplomat and an engineer, he works as a substitute teacher every other year to save up money and then spends the alternate years hopping trains across the country or couch surfing in Europe. It’s clear he was the kind of kid whose unwavering pursuit of his own dreams and ideas probably drove his parents crazy. But in response to a question about who he would like to have dinner with if he could have dinner with anyone from any place in any time in history, he said he’d like to have dinner with the friends he is meeting up with tonight.
In the end I got to choose, because I will be the one whose genetic input into our baby is limited to the selection of our donor, and I picked him.
I picked him because the values we have in common are things I identify with more than my Swedish heritage, tall frame, or Cherokee nose. Happiness, contentment, wonder, and a sense of connection to the beauty of world and all the people in it—who knows if those kinds of things are genetic, but I want to give our kid their very best shot.