Always and Never

When you’re a struggling infertile deep in the midst of treatment, you fantasize about what life will be like when you finally bring a child home.  You watch moms around you and you create this mental list of thing things you’ll “never” do (or “always” do, as the case may be), and you’ll silently chastise the moms you see violating this invisible list of musts and mustn’ts in your head.  You think that these moms you see must not know what a gift they have in their children.  Surely they must be fertile, because if she had to work for her child she’d know how precious and amazing her children are and never (or always) do x, y, or z.  We all do it. 

“I’ll never speak to my child in frustration.  My child is a gift, and I will not waste words on him/her that are anything less than positive.”
Really?  When your beautiful gift decides to scale the washing machine in order to get to the bleach up on the shelf, manage to open the childproof cap, and dump said bleach into the DRYER filled with her own clothes, I’m sure the only words out of your mouth will be calm and collected.  You know what’s fun too?  Finding a bathroom mirror covered in hair spray because your five year old daughter can’t control the irresistible urge to spray any spray bottle within a 50 mile radius of those precious little fingers.  Frustration?  No.  I love when my house smells like febreze, hairspray, and every perfume I’ve ever owned all at one time.

“My child will only eat organic food I make myself.  I’ll never let my child eat processed sugars or McDonald’s.” 
Right.  And when your littlest gift is barely on the weight chart and refuses to eat anything you put in front of her, you’ll drive through the golden arches every freaking day to get her some chicken nuggets if she would only eat for chrissakes.  What?  Gogurt?  Have 10, kid.  For the love of all that is holy, please EAT.

“I’ll never (or only – depending on your leanings) co-sleep with my child.”
Really? For a good few months my son slept in his carseat.  And the swing.  And laying next to me nursing.  For crying out loud just sleep.  I almost don’t care where.

“I’ll only breastfeed.”
Good luck with that, and by God I hope you manage it.  But guess what.  Breastfeeding is fucking HARD.  Made harder when you’re anemic from blood loss in delivery, a baby in the NICU, and being exhausted.  And your milk never actually comes in.  How about, “I’ll breastfeed if I can, and not beat myself up if I can’t, and for eff’s sake I’ll never judge anyone else for their ability or inability (or CHOICE) to breastfeed.

“Plastic toys made in China will not be in my home.”
You might not buy them.  But someone, usually a grandparent, will.  And before you can say “lead content” your lovely little one will have shoved that officially licensed, anything-but-gender-neutral, plastic piece of crap in his mouth and decided it’s his favorite toy in the whole world.  Soon you’ll be posting pictures on facebook of how cute he is asleep with it.

“I’ll never bribe my children with food/toys/treats for behavior.”
HA!  I should have bought stock in M&Ms before we started potty training.  Sometimes, food works.  Whether it’s potty training or promising ice cream if they behave in the grocery store, food can be a great motivator.  And really, you’re doing the other shoppers a public service because that ice cream promise is keeping your little guy from a royal meltdown in the middle of the produce aisle.

“I will never use the tv as a babysitter, and when/if my child watches television, it will only be educational and positive programming.”
Do you ever want to take a shower longer than 15 seconds?  Shave your legs?  Figure out if what they say about removable shower heads is true?  Then guess what?  The tv is going to be your friend.  And eventually, they will learn who SpongeBob is.  Because when they go to the dentist and they give them a balloon and a bag of goodies there will be SpongeBob toothpaste in there, and it just.  Happens.  And then they’re 5 and the last thing you want to do is watch another freaking episode of Caillou.  So you don’t mind that your son would rather watch ESPN and your daughter asks you to watch House Hunters (or Glee) because it’s nice to watch something with them that doesn’t require you to want to jam a pencil in your eye. 

Have I made my point?  Raising children is HARD.  It doesn’t matter if you got pregnant in the back of a Chevrolet Impala on prom night or spent 10 years and furnished your RE’s house twice in order to have a child.  Yes, make no mistake, children are a gift.  And we shouldn’t speak to them in frustration, and we should feed them nutritious food, and we should monitor what they watch, and make sure we protect them at every step and turn as best we can.  But for crying out loud don’t believe for a second that whatever that list of “nevers” and “always” in your head isn’t going to go straight out the window as soon as that kid(s) shows up. (PS, this also will happen with your “birth plan.”)  Sometimes, that mom in the store telling little Susie and Johnny to get over here RIGHT NOW FOR THE LOVE OF GOD is just sleep deprived, overworked, underpaid, and doing her very best.  And more often than not, she’ll finish in the store, load her littles up in the car, and spend two or three minutes crying at the steering wheel for violating her own inner list of “nevers” and “always”.  She’ll look over her shoulder and tell them “Mommy’s sorry for being frustrated, she loves you very much.”  And she’ll try to remind herself not to be so hard on herself.  She’ll climb up the stairs and check on them while they sleep and promise to try harder. 

I might be trying to be funny on some of this, but the reality is, it’s SO EASY to judge other people’s parenting.  Sometimes I think infertiles are the best at it.  I’m guilty too.  So I’m making a new promise.  I’ll focus more on MY decisions rather than second-guessing someone else’s.  And I won’t use “always” or “never” when I talk about things I will and won’t do with my kids and remind myself that it’s ok to make mistakes. 

My kids are an amazing gift.  They’re gifts that can be sweet, and loving, and frustrating, and button-pushing, and tiring.  Kids are all those things no matter how easy or hard they were to come by.  I hope you can live up to every “always” and “never” on your list.  I can’t.  And I’m a better parent because I’ve given up on some of those “always” and “nevers”.  If I hadn’t, I’d never known the joys of co-sleeping, learned how to support fellow moms who couldn’t breastfeed, watched my daughter’s eyes light up at the sight of a hideous plastic princess vanity on Christmas morning, or enjoyed singing along with my kids to the songs from “Glee” because I let them watch it with me.  Is it perfect?  Nope.  And it’s much better that way.

Donor Unknown

I had heard about the film “Donor Unknown” via a message board I infrequently post to. The Tribeca film festival was screening it on their website on Friday, and I reluctantly reserved myself a seat. I say reluctantly, because I’m always a little leery of how donor sperm issues are portrayed in the media. I’ve already had to fight the “what does their father look like” from people close enough to me, and equating our sperm donor with a person to whom my children are tied from a familial perspective always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The film is about a group of young adult, donor-conceived children who find each other and ultimately their sperm donor, through the help of the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR). We are members of the registry, and have made contact, and a small private facebook group, of families with children who are “donor siblings” of Nate & Julia. They include a set of girl twins, a daughter, two sons (two different families), another set of boy/girl twins, and us. We’ve since learned there’s another daughter, and contact has been made to hopefully have them join us on facebook.

We’ve had the pleasure of meeting one of the families in person, and our children have enjoyed time together. I would consider us friends. What I don’t consider their son, at this time in this journey, my children’s brother. While they share genetic material, they do not share parents.

The film was centered specifically around the youngest of the donor-conceived children of California Cryobank donor #150. At one point in the film, after the identity of the donor is revealed (he came forward after seeing a story in the New York Times), she finds the donor’s father and visits him, calling him her “grandfather.” This didn’t sit well with me, for a lot of reasons. One, it seemed a violation of the donor’s privacy. While I believe our children have the right to have medical information about their donors, and the opportunity to meet them once everyone is an adult, co-opting a donor’s family as one’s own seems to be overstepping this boundary considerably. Two, in my opinion, this man was not (he’s since passed away) her grandfather. He may be related to her by genetics, but her grandfathers would be the men who were fathers to the parents who raised her.

Now, here’s where my belief in what makes family may be playing too large a role in my opinions on this. Because bloodlines to me have absolutely nothing to do with family. My best friends are family to me. My friend Bianca and I might as well be sisters. I love her.  Our friendship has withstood time, falling outs, and traumatic events.  Her mother treats me like her own daughter. Heidi’s best friend’s mother is “Nana Deborah” to our children. She has not one drop of blood relationship to them.  So my inability to see the donor’s extended family as an extended family to the donor conceived children is largely a product of my inability to believe that blood is thicker than water.

What were poignant to me were the relationships that had developed between the donor conceived children. Regardless of whether they called themselves sisters or brothers, clearly these kids needed these relationships. One of the young women noted that not only were these the first donor siblings she’d met, but the first donor conceived people she’d ever met. While I believe it’s my responsibility to expose my children to other kids like them, that wasn’t always possible for these earlier trailblazers because families had no way to connect with one another. In today’s age of the DSR, gay and lesbian parenting groups, and the internet, finding other people like you is easier and easier.

Unfortunately, the film was filmworthy partially because the donor himself was a caricature. Living at Venice Beach in an old, beat-up RV; homeless by choice; his eccentricities became a strong focus of the film. One of the mothers mentioned that learning about him was almost the death of a fantasy she held in her head about the kind of person he was. I have no such fantasies about our donor. In my mind he’s a college student finding easy ways to make money while getting through school. Maybe he believes he’s helping families achieve their dreams of children or maybe he believes it’s an easy way to make a buck. The reality is I have more information on my donor’s family and health history than I have on my own. I’m disappointed that the donor in this film is the way he is, not because of some crazy dream I have about what a donor should be, but because who he is gets so much attention that who the kids are is overshadowed.

I get it. It’s much more interesting to do a movie about a wacky guy and the kids his sperm made. But like everything surrounding “alternative” family building – whether it’s lesbian families, IVF, surrogacy – the REAL stories aren’t interesting. It’s much more sensational to make movies about guys like the donor in this movie, or films about surrogates who change their minds, or IVF embryo switching. Meanwhile, mainstream people believe that these sensationalized stories are the norm rather than the exception. While it may be boring to read about what real families dealing with these things are actually like, the more we hold up movies like “Donor Unknown” as an opportunity for people to understand how are families are built, the more we do ourselves a disservice. On top of it, holding up the donor as some sort of icon in our families minimizes the completeness of our own familial unit. If we want OUR stories told, then we have to be willing to tell it. To remove the hushed whispers. To make conceiving via a donor, be it a sperm donor or an egg donor (the differences between which are so vast that deserves a whole other post), something that doesn’t make people think of some crazy guy living in an RV as your child’s “father.”

My children have two mothers. They have a plethora of aunts, uncles, friends, Godparents, and all sort of folks who have influence in their lives. Half of their genetic make up is tied to a man I’ll likely never meet. Yes, I made that decision for my children and I can’t un-make it. Will they resent me for it later? Possibly. And if so, probably only for a short time. The reality is, it’s not my kids I worry about when it comes to understanding and assimilating the information surrounding being donor-conceived. It’s the rest of the world. But the only way to change people’s perceptions is to stop producing media – be it news articles or movies – that glorifies the exceptions among us.