Who’s Her Daddy?
A question we hear often when people find out our family dynamic, “Who’s her dad?”
My daughter doesn’t have a dad, or a father, she has who we affectionately call “Donor #14327.” Sure it doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as “daddy,” but to be fair as an almost 40-year-old woman “daddy” doesn’t roll off my tongue easy either, or maybe it should and my bank account would be healthier.
But. I get it. Two girls, one kid. You have questions, and I have answers. I want to answer them because I am not ashamed of how my family started. I want my daughter to know she results from a lot of love and planning.
If you think this post will involve a turkey baster, a college kid who is looking for cash to buy some Keystone Light, and steamy lesbian sex, stop reading now.
Let’s start at the beginning.
The good news about being two women wanting to start a family. You have two options. You sit down, stare longingly into each other's eyes and say, “So, do you want the stretch marks or you want me to take this one?” Since I already had a few, because of beer binges and 7-11 hot dogs, I said, “I’ll take this one.”
Now what?
Time for Sperm Shopping!! Eeek! My Amazon-loving, QVC-calling heart, could hardly wait!!
After doing our research we finally decided on a Cyrobank, mostly because they had pictures of the donors as kids. Let’s be honest, you want your kid to have a good start in life. BTW: the FDA regulates Cyrobanks, and they actively seek sperm donors, so it’s not your typical college kid who wants to get paid for whacking off to 1980s porn. These are well-educated, well-intended men, who want to help others, and who probably don’t mind seeing a little 1980s bush in their porn. I digress.
Shopping for a donor is a lot like shopping on Amazon. My wife and I sat down, her with a cold beer, me with a bottle of wine, and we started looking at the donors. The Cryobank came up with clever names for the donors “Eager Engineer,” and “Going for the Grammy.”
Before you get to the clever names, there’s a sidebar where you can put in things like height preference, education level, eye color, hair texture, ancestry, even a celebrity look-a-like filter. Again. Shopping on Amazon. It’s also hard sitting there with your significant other, I equate it to sitting next to your spouse going through Tinder with them. Do we swipe or not? Then you remember, you don’t have to marry this person.
We chose “Mr. Motivated” who was wedged somewhere between “Trilingual Triathlete” and “Sweet Swimmer.”
A benefit is that we know more about our donor than we do each other. We have three generations of family health history (who knows that shit), we know his SAT scores, we know that if he could have a meal with anyone, he would have a steak with Jesus (SOLD), we even got to hear his voice.
Once we ordered our motivated swimmers and had them sent to our doctor, the real work started.
Hormones, and shots, you know the whole drill if you have ever visited a fertility clinic. Go time for us was the morning of the 2017 Super Bowl. We stopped at the bagel shop and got a dozen bagels for the office; I agonized over sweet or savory cream cheese. We settled on both. Because nothing says, “Knock me up” like bagels. So, we walked into the office with our bagels and hope.
Side note: there are several ways to get pregnant. The late-night drunken sex, IVF, ICI, IUI. When working with a cryobank, you can also get your sperm washed or unwashed. We opted for washed because, eww.
We get there, Super Bowl Sunday. The room was dimly lit. A nurse came in and told me to get undressed. The stirrups were ready. She came in with two vials of sperm. Contrary to popular belief, sperm does not look like a head with a tail and sound like John Travolta. It was clear as water, and I couldn’t tell if I would get injected with Evian or sperm, but we were paying them a lot of money, so hopefully, it was sperm. Spoiler Alert: It was.
After confirming the donor number twice, the procedure was about to start. This is where, if you were expecting the doctor to walk in ready to baste my turkey, I will disappoint you. The doctor walked in, as did two nurses. My wife was sitting to my side, holding my hand. They prepared the sperm and put it in some weird catheter. In it went. My face must have done that thing it does when something is shoved into my vagina because my wife grabbed my hand a little tighter. The thing with IUI is the sperm is inserted directly into your uterine membrane. Fun, right? Here we go. My wife looked at me, and said, “Sorry this couldn’t be more romantic.” In less than five minutes it was over, much like drunken sex. We thanked the doctor, and the nurse came over and then said, “You will have to lay here for 15 minutes.” Then she hit a button and the table, my legs, and ass were proudly sticking straight up in the air. She set a timer, you know those shitty little white ones that your teachers would set for tests? Only the knob on this one was a cartoon sperm. A fucking cartoon sperm timer? Where did they find this???
We were lucky. It turns out Mr. Motivated’s sperm were very motivated, and that day my eggs were receptive to the possibility of being a mom.
That’s it. That’s how it happened. No turkey basters, no rando sex, we did, however, celebrate with a Keystone Light.
Love, Alana