“Oh,” I say, letting it go. But John hasn’t. Our time is up and he stands to leave.
“Are you kidding?” he continues as he heads to the door. “In here? Peace?” His eye roll has been replaced by a smile now—not a condescending smirk, but a secret he’s sharing with me. It’s a lovely smile, luminous, and not because of those dazzling teeth.
“I thought so,” I say.
16
The Whole Package
Spoiler: After I left medical school, the rest of my life did not fall into place as planned.
Three years later, when I was nearly thirty-seven, a two-year relationship ended. It was sad but amicable and not a surprise the way the breakup with Boyfriend later turned out to be. But still, it was the worst timing imaginable for someone who wanted to have a baby.
I’d always known, in the surest possible way, that I wanted to be a parent. I’d spent my adulthood volunteering with kids and assumed that I would one day have my own. Now, though, with forty looming, I was dying to have a baby, but not so much that I would just marry the next guy who came along. This left me in a tricky predicament—desperate, but picky.
It was then that a friend suggested I could do things in reverse order: baby first, partner later. One night, she emailed me links for some sperm-donor sites. I’d never heard of such a thing and wasn’t sure at first how I felt about it, but after considering my options, I made the decision to move forward.
Now I just needed to choose a donor.
Of course I wanted a donor with a good health history, but on these sites there were other qualities to consider, and not just things like hair color or height. Did I want a lacrosse player or a literature major? A Truffaut buff or a trombonist? An extrovert or an introvert?
I was surprised to see that in many ways, these donor profiles resembled dating profiles—except that most of the candidates were college students and provided their SAT scores. And there were a few other key differences, chief among them the comments of the so-called lab girls. These were the women (they all seemed to be female) who worked at the banks and met the donors when they came in to give a “release.” (Not in the sense of “contract.”) The lab girls would then write what they termed staff impressions and add them to the donors’ profiles, but there was no rhyme or reason as to what kinds of impressions they’d share. Their comments varied wildly from He has amazing biceps! to He tends to procrastinate, but eventually gets his stuff done. (I was wary of any male college student whose procrastination extended to masturbation.)
I relied heavily on these staff impressions because the more profiles I read, the more I realized that I wanted to feel some intangible connection to the donor who would have a connection to my child. I wanted to like him, whatever that meant—to feel that if he were sitting at our family dinner table, I would enjoy his company. But as I read the staff impressions and listened to the audio of the interviews that the lab girls conducted with the donors (“What’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you?,” “How would you describe your personality?,” and, weirdly, “What’s your idea of a romantic first date?”), it still felt clinical, impersonal.
Then one day I called up the sperm bank with a question about a donor’s health history and was transferred to a lab girl named Kathleen. As Kathleen looked up his medical records, I began chatting with her and learned that she had been the lab girl who’d met this particular donor. I couldn’t help myself. “Is he cute?” I asked, trying to sound casual. I didn’t know if I was allowed to be asking.
“Well . . .” Kathleen hedged, drawing out the word in her thick New York accent. “He’s not unattractive. But I wouldn’t look twice at him on the subway.”
After that, Kathleen became my sperm concierge, suggesting donors and answering my questions. I trusted her because while some of the lab girls inflated their assessments—they were trying to sell sperm, after all—Kathleen was honest to a fault. Her standards were very high, and so were mine, which was a problem, because nobody made it through our filters.
To be fair, it seemed reasonable to assume that my future child would want me to be picky. And there were multiple factors to juggle. If I found a donor who seemed to share my sensibilities, there would be other problems, like his family’s health history wasn’t a good match with mine (breast cancer under age sixty, kidney disease). Or I’d find a donor with a pristine health history but who was a six-foot-four Danish guy with Nordic features, a look that would stick out—and might make my child feel self-conscious—in my family of short, brown-haired Ashkenazi Jews. Other donors seemed to have good health, intelligence, and similar physical features, but something else would raise a red flag, like the donor who wrote that his favorite color was black, his favorite book Lolita, and his favorite movie A Clockwork Orange. I tried to imagine my child reading this profile one day and looking at me like, “And you chose this one?” I had the same reaction if the donor couldn’t spell or use punctuation correctly.
This process continued for three exhausting months, during which I began to lose hope that I’d find a healthy donor I’d be proud to tell my child about.
And then—finally!—I found him.
I came home late one evening to a message on my voicemail from Kathleen. She told me to check out a donor she described as looking like “a young George Clooney.” She added that she especially liked this donor because he was always friendly and in a great mood when he arrived at the bank to donate. I rolled my eyes. After all, if you’re a guy in his twenties who’s about to go watch porn and have an orgasm—and you’re getting paid for that—what’s not to be in a great mood about? But Kathleen gushed about this guy—he had good health, good looks, strong intelligence, and a winning personality.
“He’s the whole package,” she said confidently.
Kathleen had never sounded so enthusiastic, so I logged on to take a look. I clicked on his profile, pored over his health history, read his essays, listened to his audio interview, and instantly knew, in the same way that people talk about love at first sight, that I’d found The One. Everything about him—his likes and dislikes, his sense of humor, his interests and values—felt like family. Elated but exhausted, I figured I’d get some sleep and handle the details in the morning. The next day happened to be my birthday, and overnight I had vivid dreams about my baby for what felt like eight hours straight. For the first time, I pictured an actual baby coming from two specific people instead of some hazy idea of a baby with half its heritage blank.
In the morning, I jumped out of bed with a burst of excitement, the song “Child of Mine” playing in my head. Happy birthday to me! I’d been wanting a baby for the past several years, and finding a donor I felt so comfortable with seemed like the best birthday present ever. Heading to the computer, I smiled at my good fortune—I was really going to do this. I typed in the sperm bank’s URL, found the donor’s profile, and read it all over again. I was just as certain as I’d been the night before that he was The One—the one that would make sense to my child when he or she asked why, of all the possible donors, I chose this guy.