About six years ago, I got pregnant after insemination with frozen donor sperm, and nine months later Lyn and I had a baby girl, Leigh. Like most parents, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Unlike most parents (but perhaps like many parents actually reading this), part of what we had no idea about was donor conception. I literally had no notion what it might mean to me, to Lyn, or to our non-existent children when I started surfing around the web, looking at sperm donors. We had briefly considered trying to find a known donor, but rejected the idea as involving too much uncertainty and too great a possibility of going badly. So I was looking at donor profiles, thinking about things like the donors’ height, hair color, responses to stupid questions, and even their blood type, but I didn’t necessarily think of them as real people, and I didn’t think about the fact that, in a way, I would be entering into a permanent and serious relationship with one of them. But like most parents-to-be, Lyn and I leapt in without knowing if we could swim, or even realizing that the water might be a little deep.
Early on I figured out that I was getting more than I bargained for because my wife, Lyn, started talking about how invisible she felt, how afraid she was for the future, cherishing the process of becoming a mother but feeling left out of it. We talked and talked, because, frankly, that’s what we do. Sometimes I heard her. Sometimes I thought she was tilting at windmills (she wasn’t). But we talked it all out, and we were ready.
Except that we weren’t. I still had no idea what it was going to be like to be a parent to a person who was donor conceived. What would Leigh think of it all in the future? Would she resent the choices that we made for her? Would she want to meet her donor or genetic half-siblings? Well, at least all of that was far in the future and we had plenty of time to figure it out.
Except that we didn’t. We had our first encounter of a sort with a donor sibling when Leigh was a few months old, and we weren’t ready. Thinking about it now, I wonder how we could have been so blind that we didn’t see that it was bound to happen sooner rather than later. When it did, it shook our world up. But as Lyn has written about, we grew and we learned and we thought we were prepared for the future.
Except that we weren’t. A couple of years later Lyn gave birth and we had a baby boy and the game seemed to have changed again. Our thoughts about donor conception shifted. We felt an openness that we hadn’t had before, and we started to think about posting on the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR) and reaching out to the other family we knew with a child via the same donor as our kids.
As queer parents, our families are threatened. There are legal threats, homophobia, and all of the external threats that can batter our families. But there are also internal threats that come from the way that we create our children, fear that a non-biological mother won’t be seen as a real mother by herself, by her partner, by the queer community, and by the wider straight community. It is this threat that led us, after Leigh’s birth, to swear that we would never interact with the DSR, and that caused us to completely flip out when we suddenly found out we knew someone who had a child via the same donor. It is this threat that has many of us clinging fiercely to our nuclear families, rejecting the possibility of connection with people genetically linked to our kids.
Genetics is important to pretty much everyone, even if we want to say it is not. Yes, love makes a family, but my love for Lyn and my desire for children with her isn’t the whole truth of how we came to be parents. The whole truth is more complicated, and the whole truth is part of my legacy to my kids. I’m confident they can sort it out – but I do want to make sure I’m on the ride with them, that I’m not asking them to do work that I’m not willing to do myself.
Lyn and I are now at a very different place than when we started down this road. We now welcome connections to donor siblings. Yes, we welcome these connections for the kids, but also for ourselves, and we are pursuing them one step at a time. But we’ve also already done a lot of the sometimes messy work of establishing a safe and secure space for both of us as non-bio-moms in our family.
So often, discussion of the DSR in queer parenting circles comes down to whether or not you are “for” or “against,” with some parents insisting we all should register and start making these fabulous connections ASAP, while others insist that any acknowledgement of a donor “sibling” relationship fundamentally undermines everything that we have fought for as queer families.
For us, and I’m sure for many families, the reality is somewhere in between. While we are now grateful have access to the DSR as a resource, and are extremely positive about the connections we’ve made, seemingly placing us in the “for” camp, I actually would prefer to see families hold off on DSR connections (especially while kids are very young) until they are absolutely sure that their families are solid, and in particular in two-mom families that the non-bio-mom feels secure and strong in her relationship with her kid(s). There’s no rush – any donor siblings out there are still going to be genetically connected to your kids if you wait a few years. In the meantime, your job is to build a great family. If you are a bio-mom, you need to be supporting your partner in being a terrific parent, doing your part to make sure she has space, time and support to fall deeply in love with her kids. The DSR can wait until she is ready.
And if you are a non-bio mom, you can get ready. You may never want to post on the DSR or meet half-bio-siblings of your children, and that really is OK. But you need to make your relationship with your kid great. You need to grind down any threat that you feel until you can hardly even see its shadow, which means being there with your kid, being out in the community as a parent, and (hopefully) getting the legal protections you need so that you don’t have to worry. That’s how you get ready. Because even if you never touch the DSR, there’s a good chance your kid will want to. It won’t mean that they don’t love you. It may mean that they want to know more about their genetic background, or that they wonder about people they’re connected to but they’ve never met, people who they might want to call family. You have to be ready because you want them to be able to walk their path without worrying about you. You want them to be able to go off and form those connections if that’s what they want or need, knowing that they’ll always be able to come back home to you, and, to quote Where the Wild Things Are, to that place where someone loves them best of all.*
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* Thanks to Clio for recently reminding us about the wonderful things that book says about “home.”
I wrote this post as part of the new Love Makes a Family Blog Carnival. Check out the next post in the carnival over at Bionic Mamas here. Also check out some great posts from last week as well.
{ 13 comments }
What a thoughtful article. Thanks!
What a lot to chew on in this post. I am relieved to hear that someone else thinks we don’t have to “decide” about the DSR Right This Minute. Sometimes it feels so urgent.
Bionic Baby Mama recently posted..Blog Carnival: Donor Sperm
I love hearing how confident and calm you feel about your own choice to ultimately connect with donor sibling families; I hope that everyone can reach this place before ultimately deciding to reach out to these modern-day relations.
I, myself, joined up with the DSR quite by accident. Someone posted a link about its existence, just when it was first beginning to gain publicity (circa 2003), and I clicked over, naively presuming that surely no one would have signed on after using OUR donor. Wrong! There were already three other families listed under our donor’s number. At the time, the DSR was free to join, and so I did right then: figuring that typing in my email address and adding my twin infants to the list of offspring did not equate making actual connections with these families. Prior to this moment, I had honestly never even thought about the possibility of “knowing” (even only virtually) some of the other children who shared my kids’ donor. But now the decision was made: I knew that they existed, I had their parents’ email addresses, I couldn’t imagine NOT pursuing knowing them.
Over the 8 years since then, our “donor sibling family” has grown by leaps and bounds. We are now connected with 30-35 (I’ve lost track of the current count!) other children, all genetic half-siblings to my own, and their parents (the majority are lesbian couples, with a few single moms by choice: definitely not what I was expecting!), who live all over the country. The kids are 50% girls, and 50% boys (another surprise, since after having four sons, I was certain our donor only produced Y sperm!), and share some physical characteristics, as well as minor medical issues and, in many cases: surprisingly similar personality traits. My own children represent both the oldest (at 8.5) and youngest (at newly 2) of the group.
When my twins were somewhere in the middle of their second year of life, we met up with two of the families (each with a single son the same age as our sons) in real life. There were no fireworks or a-ha! moments. Really, it felt just like meeting any other parents with similar-aged children at that point. Since then, we haven’t ever managed a physical “reunion,” though we share updates and photos online (via our own yahoo group and facebook page) with some frequency, and many of the families send out holiday greeting cards. But now there is talk of really getting these kids together, and I admit that the notion is fascinating to me. I am so curious as to what they will think of each other, now that they are old enough to think about it. My kids have shown little interest in information about their donor or their donor siblings (they have seen photographs), but I wonder if it would feel different to them in person, if they would recognize the physical similarities, and if it would then make them more curious about their donor himself.
Like you, this is not what I expected or thought about when I chose to conceive with anonymous donor sperm, but I am happily along for the ride, glad even, to get to be a part of this shifting definition of family.
Good post I recently helped a woman named Katleen Labounty locate her brother who had been given up for adoption less than a year before she was born. He had downs syndrome, she did not. She and her brother were fathered by different men, and both were sperm donors. You can google her and you can read about her search for her brother and her father. When I first read her story I was struck by the fact that her brothers father likely went on donating oblivious to the health of his offspring; normally people know the results of their reproductive actions and had he known he might have wanted to limit his donations to people prepared for special needs children or he might have stopped donating altogether. I wondered if there were other downs kids in his family and maybe his family would have wanted to take care of his offspring. Maybe the donor went on to have otber developmentally challenged children that he intended to raise and the health of both children would be relevant to each other.
Her story made me realize that health information is not a one way street, its an interconnected communication highway for genetically related individuals. I discovered I had thrombophilia when my son died the day he was born; both may parents were tested and my dad had it…knowing that helped my dad stay alive a few years longer because his doctor adjusted his medicine and knowing that will save my daughter 13 miscarriages and the death of a newborn baby, she will go on bed rest her first pregnancy and deliver a health 7 pound girl like I did a year after Sam died.
Normally genetic siblings all go to the same doctor, schools so parents can apply knowledge of one child to the others right? Siblings that live separately but are in contact have parents that communicate regularly share information about the physical and developmental progress of children over time have an advantage over siblings that are isolated from one another and raised as if they were only children when they belong to enormous families that rival 1800′s farm families.
Its wise to know your child’s siblings. The information shared could save your child’s life or the life of one of their sisters or brothers. Even if nothing as dramatic as that comes from the communication, small things like knowing they are all slow to talk but speak in elaborate sentences once they hit two and a half can be helpful to concerned parents. Its the normal level of knowledge a parent should have when there child has many genetic siblings.
The moral of the story should be, kids can turn out fine without parents having ongoing communication with other members of their child’s family, but not knowing something could be detrimental to the child so what harm could com from doing whatever you can to be informed and participate in that network of communication? Do it and all the children will benefit. Arm yourselves by giving the children every advantage.
I am impressed that you are now open to communicating with their siblings. Nothing outside can damage a family with a strong inside anyway.
M
I enjoyed reading your post very much.
We joined the DSR shortly after we got pregnant and also put our names on our bank’s list soon after our daughter was born. We were very excited and very nervous when our bank told us there was another family on the list. We shared some emails and were a bit relieved to learn they lived on the other side of the country. But then they came to our city on a work and visiting extended family trip so we had them over for dinner. Turns out they are lovely people and our infant daughters look nothing alike but have the exact same cry. So now we are all friends on facebook and have told our close friends and family about each others existence. We plan to let our children decide exactly how they want their relationship to work when they are old enough to do so. We think that they might really like having that link to their genetic other half when they are teenagers and think (like all teenagers) that they don’t fit in with their family or that their moms are clueless, embarrassing tools.
This is fascinating; thanks for sharing. I had never really thought much about the chances that you might stumble across people in your own social circle who share your children’s donor(s). It has me thinking about our situation with my (adopted) son’s birth sister. In our case, the connection is arguably more direct because she’s a full, biological sister who thinks of him as a brother. But I’m wondering if there are similarities, at least in the experience we have of navigating an extended notion of kinship and connection.
I really love this post both as a donor-conceived adult and the non-bio mom of a donor-conceived child. Both myself and my son are listed on the DSR. We’ve noted on his post that we’re not ready to make any connections at this time, but have posted his birthdate and donor number for information only. We’ll wait until he’s older and wants more information.
As far as how I feel about the fact that my parents used a sperm donor – I feel even more loved than ever to know that I was so wanted that my parents went to “extraordinary” measures to have a child. They were a heterosexual couple trying to conceive in the 70s. The fact that donor insemination was even an option for them still amazes me.
The DSR is a stange beast, and I have an ambivalent feeling toward it. When my son (born June 2006) was almost 3, my wife and I discovered the DSR and I could not help but check, out of curiosity if nothing else, whether there were any listings involving the same donor. There were two, and of course once one knows that, the bell can hardly be unrung. After some discussion, we thought we’d at least introduce ourselves by messaging within DSR, and see what might or might not develop as far as information exchange. It turned out that one of the two listings was placed by a SMC who bore a daughter by the same donor as our son, and then adopted another daughter. She responded right away, and after some getting to know each other by email, we all realized that we liked each other very much; we have since met that family several times, we keep in fairly close touch, we exchange birthday and holiday gifts, and our half-sib kids seem to understand what their common bond is (although they don’t yet seem to think it is a very big deal). The other woman never responded to our email or to the SMC’s, and when we pressed the DSR to make sure she had received our messages, we were told she had, but she just did not wish to have any contact with us. So, she listed her child on the registry (and is still listed), she makes no mention that she has no intention of responding to any communication whatsoever, and she accepts emails and thus learns about the half-sibs who contact her, knowing all the while that she will not offer the courtesy of any response whatsoever (not even under the anonymity of the DSR’s messaging system) — leaving her knowing all about us but leaving us clueless about who she is or what she wants with that one-sided knowledge. My wife and I quit the DSR in part because of that, as it creeped us out to suspect that someone may be there just to find out who we are so she can monitor us while remaining unknown to us. My wife and I are very open about my son’s origin in part because we want to fight the sort of cult of secrecy and shame that people build artificially when all they really should be building is a family. Falling victim to this subterfuge left us with a bit of a bad taste for the DSR, which we thought would be a safe haven from that kind of ignorance. My message to anyone who cares to hear it is that the DSR can be great, because the openness and communication it facilitates has broadened our horizons and even our sense of family, by leading us to my son’s half-sister and her wonderful family. However, I would urge people who are not yet sure of their openness or secure with their relationships to refrain from joining prematurely, lest their uncertainties and fears lead them to act irrationally and unfairly toward the families who really are there to locate each other.
Vinnie,
You make a great point, and although we’ve noted that at this time, we are not ready to make connections, we would offer the common courtesy to at least acknowledge emails. As far as going beyond that, we believe that’s a decision our son should be a part of, and he’s obviously too young to have any input at this point.
Hi Amy — By noting on your entry that you are not ready to make connections, you have alredy done more than enough to be fair, even if you later didn’t reply to a contact, because anyone who contacts you would already know your desire for no contact (and would even be violating it). I just think that since the registry exists for the stated purpose of helping people make connections (yes, it says that on the site), if someone doesn’t want to make connections and lists anyway, and hides his or her intention like the person we contacted, then he or she is essentially luring others to behave as if they are being invited to make a connection — basically, they are being tricked into letting their guard down and offering half of an expected mutual exchange that never gets reciprocated. That’s what got my goat, not the mere fact that people don’t want the connection. That’s just a personal decision that we and/or our children have to make.
Sorry for the barrage of replies (one of which I think went in as a general comment so you may not have been notified), but I also wanted to add that I am extremely respectful of your position not only just because we are all parents who mean well or we wouldn’t be here reading these blogs, but also because of your own origin, as you have a very unique perspective! Having the donor conception story on both ends will be very helpful for you in raising your son, and also gives any decisions you make and advice you have for others a layer of credibility that only experience can convey. I hope you post often.
Also, Amy –
I don’t want to seem flip about the decision to make connections with half-sib families, which I realize can be a very weighty decision. It’s just that my wife and I are very open about my son’s donor status with everyone, and we arrived at that strategy of how to deal with it after much consideration and discussion. Basically, we felt that the majority of people we encounter (parties, playgrounds, school functions, events) are open about how they got their kids and are also open about their assumptions about how others must have gotten their kids. So, their assumption in my wife’s and my case would be, incorrectly, that we are the bio parents. We don’t want my son ever to feel that there is anything wrong with how he was conceived, and we don’t feel there was anything wrong with it, so we’ve just decided that — like any alternative family who cannot hide their conception story even if they wanted to — we won’t hide it either.
Part of our decision probably relates to the fact that we are from near NYC and we have found that most people, even though somewhat ignorant about DC issues, are not hostile to the idea once they learn. And since we have chosen deliberately to maintain an openness about my son’s origin essentially akin to the openness thrust upon families who would not be able to hide behind the assumptions of the majority, we do not go to great lengths to deflect the inevitable assumptions (we will only blame my son’s blond hair on the milkman once or twice in one conversation, and under the typical NY-er’s persistence — “No, really, his hair is SOO blond, which one of your relatives is that blond? Really? Which one, I must know?” — we will just accept the invitation to teach the lesson. At that point, the interrogator is embarrassed, captive, and ultimately, educated).
Back to making connections. As you can imagine, given our open theory, my son (now 5) has always known about his conception. Like you said of your son, we want him to be the primary architect of what to make of his origin and any connections we or he may discover. In fact, we thought about waiting to make the connection we already made precisely for the reason you stated about your son. However, given our overall approach, which is kind of grab-the-bull-by-the-horns embracing of the conception story, we decided that we would make the connections when presented and just steer a cautious path so that he can develop his feelings about his origin gradually and take over the helm when ready.
I must admit that we would have had more to think about if there had been dozens of connections on the DSR, but as I said, there were only two, and one was a dead end.
An exciting but troubling development is that I recently and quite fortuitously discovered the donor’s identity, just from the paperwork freely given us by the lab. That presents a can of worms (ooh, bad analogy!) that, notwithstanding our philosophy of openness, we are just not going to open right now. While the donor was promised anonymity by the lab, I never promised him anything, and my son sure didn’t, so I’m not so much worried about the law here. However, any step taken toward a contact there could be decisive and final, and perhaps painful for my son or the donor or both. For a decision about that, I do have the sense that we need to wait until my son is mature enough to make it. So I am going to safeguard the information for the future should my son ever decide to investigate. If and when that time comes, he will have my full support.
All of the above is not at all meant to criticize your caution; we know that we are ringing bells that cannot be unrung. So far it seems to be working out according to plan for us, and I wish the same success to you!
Each of us has to make the decisions that we think are best for our family. I don’t disagree with how you have handled your situation; it’s just not the path we’ve chosen. I admire your openness with your son and the public. As a two-mom family, our son will also grow up knowing his conception was special with age-appropriate details. As far as the public, I guess it depends on the patience for personal questions from strangers that I have that particular day.
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