"...I'm starting to look into this process of choosing a sperm donor and I have no idea how to go about it. How did you decide on who you ended up selecting? What was the criteria you used? Just out of curiosity, why did you pick a Russian Jew and why do you call him Sergei? Is that his real name? How did you find out and what do you know about him?" --name withheld
Ah, yes. Choosing a sperm donor. Much curiosity around that. First of all, choosing a sperm donor was one of the most bazaar and strange tasks I have ever undertaken in my life. I don't know that there is one right way to do it. Its not like someone gives you a manual with the rules. You really have to make up your own rules that you feel comfortable with.
For me, I struggled with how to be responsible about it and also match my process with my values. On the one hand, it seemed like I could just throw a dart and pick anyone. I knew I would love whatever child came into my care. On the other hand, it is a strangely intimate thing. You are going to accept some strangers sperm into your body and commit to raising "his child." I didn't want to be careless about it, yet I also felt uncomfortable with the tendency to go almost "eugenics" with it and look for some kind of "superior" DNA.
I started by looking for a cryobank that I felt comfortable with. There were some that promised you a blond-haired, blue-eyed, Scandinavian beauty destined for the ivy-league that I felt totally uncomfortable with. Then there were others that were too small-time for me and didn't seem to have enough of a reputation to trust. I was looking for a cryobank with an excellent reputation as far as service and ethics in the process. Were there any complaints about them? Did any women catch any diseases from their donors? What was the pregnancy success rate? Things like that. I did a ton of research just on different cryobanks alone to start with. I found that I really valued those banks that offered "open" policies that allowed the possibility of offspring to meet the donors upon adulthood or if medically necessary. I also valued cryobanks who offered a sibling referral service to help connect donor siblings to each other. Another thing that attracted me was the quality and detail of information that was given about the donors. The bank I picked gave a several generation medical history, Complete blood work, a detailed questionnaire and essay filled out by the donors, a description of physical characteristics, a baby photo, staff impressions, and an audio taped interview. I was trying to give my potential children the most options that I could possibly find for them.
Once I settled on a Cryobank (Email me if you want to know the one I used. To protect the confidentiality of the donor and donor siblings, some of this information is intentionally vague.), I went on to trying to narrow down a specific donor. I tried to make it as organic of a process as possible. What I mean by that is, I was not looking to breed a super-human Aryan wonder child or whatever it seems that some people seem to go for. (The fact that I have one blond-haired, blue-eyed kid is entirely some kind of freak of nature that you wouldn't have easily guessed from the genetics of it.) I tried to think of it as a sort of cross between who would I want to conceive a child with if I were doing it the natural way (in which searching for sperm donors becomes oddly like computer dating). Also, if D were able to conceive a child, what kind of characteristics might his DNA add to the mix? I also tried to just find a good balance between what I might genetically pass on to a child. I might pass on good literary skills and bad math skills. So maybe I should look for someone who majored in mathematics? Things like that. I tried to look at the factors I did know about me and D and my family, and then see who out there might best compliment the puzzle. This process helped narrow things down to a short list. D had a lot of input into this stage of the game. It was frustrating, though. One time we found a donor that was exactly D's age, was English/Slovak like D, had a degree in engineering like D, and played in the orchestra like D. We thought it was meant to be...and then only to find out that he had reached his "quota" on pregnancies and was out of the program.
Once I had my short list, I don't know exactly how I got to Sergei. It was all gut instinct. I disqualified one guy because he just sounded like a jerk in his interview. He acted like he was giving the world a wonderful gift of his gifted DNA. The audio interviews had a huge impression on me. I knew that they would be a major piece of the puzzle that my kids would listen to. I looked for someone who seemed warm and giving in the interview. Someone who seemed to have thought about what they were doing. Sergei had a strong accent and very broken English, but he seemed like a guy that I would be comfortable with. I also liked the fact that he had children of his own. He had to have some idea of the full impact of what he was doing. It doesn't bother me that donors are motivated by the money, it is a lot of hassle and commitment to be a donor and I think they should be compensated. However, I was looking for someone who seemed to be doing it for more than just the money. My gut said to go with him, I don't know exactly all the reasons why. It just felt like it would be okay.
As far as Sergei being a Russian Jew, it wasn't a big factor to me. But it has since occurred to me that I have been a little naive about that. It seems to be a bigger deal to other people than I ever thought and I've had to re-evaluate what it might mean for the kids. At the time, he came up in our search for a person of Eastern European heritage. We only put that down because D is second generation Slovak and has a very eastern European look; the olive skin, the bigger nose, the smaller eyes and squared off jaw. I really didn't care less. I really wouldn't have cared about race either, except that I would be purposefully opening up a huge can of worms for really no good reason for my kid. I did do searches with no preference for race, and I still came up with entirely Caucasian donors anyway. There is a real shortage of minority donors and who was I to choose one and thus take them away from someone who really had reason to want one. So, when Sergei came up as Russian, it didn't really mean that much to me except that for D, he would be Eastern European.
Sergei also put down that he was no religion. And I have to admit to being a stupid-head about this as well. There is enough information in his family history to see a common migration pattern for Russian Jews and he did say that his parents were Ashkenazi Jews. At the time, I was so uneducated about this that this meant nothing to me. It meant no more to me than if he would have mentioned that his mother was a protestant.
Then, in the early stages of my pregnancy when I was still going to the fertility clinics for my appointments, I was sitting in the waiting room when a woman came out of the offices and she was crying. (Fertility clinics are interesting places. There are women crying in joy or pain at about every visit.) She sat down near me and we were the only people in the room. I gave her some Kleenex and she started talking to me and telling me about her infertility woes. She had just had another setback. She was Russian. She started asking me about my situation and I told her about it. She started telling me things about her heritage as a Russian Jew. She was very nice, but right then I just started kind of freaking out. My kids have this whole heritage from a total stranger and I know absolutely nothing about it. I started researching and also meeting some of my kids' donor sibling families who actually picked Sergei because he was a Russian Jew or because he was an Ashkenazi Jew. It became clearer to me that, because of the history of European/Russian Jews and because of their emphasis on passing down tradition and heritage, I have a bigger responsibility than ever occurred to me before. People of the Jewish faith and ethnicity are telling me that this is NOT so much the same as if he was just an American from the suburbs with a protestant mother. There is an important history there that may very well become important to my kids at some point in their lives. And I knew nothing of it.
So, I have decided that this can be a very positive thing. Since there is such a deep history and an immigration pattern, it will give my kids something to study should they want to. There are some facts about Sergei's background that I won't mention here but that are extremely compelling. They may find that studying that part of their history gives them some of the missing pieces about their paternity that they wouldn't have gotten if I had picked a donor with a more "generic" background. I will not push this on them by any means, but should they become interested in this aspect of themselves, I hope to be ready with the opportunities for them to learn more. This means that I have been trying to learn more about this myself. (And I have a lot to learn.) So what was really sort of accidental on my part, has become a very positive and interesting aspect of this donor experience.
I'm now in the easy part of raising kids from DI. They have no concept of their unusual conception, of course. What is interesting about having kids from DI is that when you are pregnant with them, especially in the early stages, you think a lot more about it. What kind of kid will come out of your body? Will he look like a total stranger? Will it be weird? But when you give birth to your child, he no longer becomes "The Child I Conceived Through Donor Insemination," he is just your kid. He is Aaron. He is Naim. He becomes his own person and the donor part seems like an almost irrelevant and distant memory. If I could make my life easy, I could just forget about this part of them and go on and even never tell them that anyone other than D has a part in their biological upbringing, but that would be making MY life easy...not theirs. I know that there are many couples who do this and though I try to understand that choice, it is hard for me to imagine having that big of a secret from my own children. I know that as they grow older and more curious, there will be new frontiers to cross in this regard and I don't have a clue what that will be like. I've learned a lot from my friends who have adopted about accepting that part of your child which needs to know and accept his biological heritage. So Sergei will have as big or as small a part in the kids lives as they decide that he will, and I will support that and do all I can to help them through that struggle. We'll just have to walk across those bridges when we get there.
An appropos reading from Church this morning:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.--Khalil Gibran
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Now for a little side story, that goes along with this but is kind of separate. How the name "Sergei" came about: It is not the donor's real name to my knowledge. I only have an identification number for him. When choosing donors, I couldn't keep track of them well by number so I named them purely for my own purposes. Then I decided to keep calling the chosen donor "Sergei," because I thought it would be easier to talk about him with my kids than to call him Donor Number XXXXX. It is not meant to personify him or romanticize him, its just meant to acknowledge and honor that there is a real, living person behind that half of my kid's genetic material, more than just a numbered plastic tube from the doctors office.
I picked the name Sergei as an homage to Russian Ballet and Figure Skating, which I am a big fan of. Specifically "Sergei" was a nod to Russian pairs figure skater Sergei Grinkov. I grew up as a child of the cold war, where the Russian Soviets were bad, horrible people who were going to nuke us at any minute. Even as a very young child, I figured out through figure skating and ballet that the picture the media painted of Russians was untrue. I specifically remember watching the Olympics and all the propaganda that was spewed about how the Communist Athletes had an unfair advantage because the government paid for all of their training and how they were just mindless robot athletes who had no real passion for their sport, they were just paid workers. (Ironic that now that we have paid athletes in the Olympics and we have the unfair advantage, we no longer comment on these issues.) I remember watching the Olympics in 1980 and being blown away by ice dancers like Natalia Bestemianova and Irina Rodnina. Their passion and drive for the sport put our dance and pairs competitors in the dust. They were simply better on so many levels. And it went beyond training. It was more about the artistic part. The love they had for the sport. I found myself rooting for the Russians, even though I knew I wasn't supposed to.
Through the years I still think the Russian style of skating and ballet far surpasses the Americans. I did particularly enjoy watching Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov win Gold in 1988 and again in 1994. For years, they just couldn't be beat.
I remember ten years ago, I was sitting in a hotel room in Lawrence, Kansas just a couple of miles from the apartment I shared with D when I found out that Sergei Grinkov had died suddenly. I was in the hotel because I had to get a load of work done and I just couldn't get it done at D's apartment. It was another time when he was having health problems of some sort and it seemed like I was being interrupted by one emergency after another. I simply had to get some projects done for school and work and I wanted him find other sources of help for his problems so I checked into a hotel for a break. (Sound familiar? I know, I know. Can I roll my eyes at myself?) I spent the whole weekend working in that hotel room, but I did turn on the TV and watch the special called "Celebration of a Life: A Tribute to Sergei Grinkov." I must have missed that Grinkov died three months before, because I didn't know and I was so sad about it. To think of Ekaterina not having him to skate with was hard to imagine. But, she decided to skate on her own. And her performance that night always makes me cry. It was that perfect Russian tradition of emotional stoicism. That way of being gracefully passionate without losing control of one's emotions. It's just a Russian cultural thing that I've always admired, hard to put your finger on.
So, for better or for worse, I think what I took from the Gordeeva/Grinkov story is that I am brave enough to have relationships with people like D and others, people who may die and leave me heartbroken. Because you can cherish what you have and let yourself have each little moment even when you know you may lose it. When it is gone, you will rise up and go on alone and be okay.
None of this has a great deal to do with Sergei, the donor, except that perhaps it leaned me a bit towards choosing him. I was very comfortable with a Russian donor, with his accent and broken English, and in naming him "Sergei" was just a split second thought; a nod towards my admiration of Russian culture and performance art.
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BONUS!!! For those who are interested. A little story in video form via some samples of Gordeeva and Grinkov.
- Together in a pro exhibition performance to Rachmaninoff's Vocalise (aka the Rodin performance.)
- Ekaterina's first solo performance after the death of Sergei to Mahler's Adagietto from Symphany #5. See if you can get through it without tears.
- Many years later, Gordeeva and daughter, Daria Grinkova, in a mother's day performance to Martina McBride's (I think?) "I Hope You Dance". (That is Artur Dmitriev at the end.)
Thanks for explaining all that! I dont really understand how people keep that stuff from their kids either - dont they ever watch Oprah?
My ex-sister-in-law has never told her son he's adopted and Im just waiting for that ticking time bomb to explode.
People slay me.
Would it be weird to you if one of the boys did that college thing where they immerse themselves in some form of their heritage - like declaing they want to be a rabbi?
Posted by: That Girl | September 18, 2006 at 07:03 AM
thanks for sharing this information about choosing a 'bank' and donor person. i am looking at most likely being a single-mom-by-choice ;) and i really like being able to read about your journey.
god help me if i have twins! hehehe
your boys are gorgeous, and are lucky to have such a great mom.
Posted by: ladybug | September 18, 2006 at 08:44 PM