...... fresh outta my own eggs ... scrambling for an egg donor 

 

 

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..Name: y
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    Monday, March 28, 2005  
    in case you forgot (DNA and dead ends)
    G's latest email has a picture of him and the wife and their little boy attached. Just in case you forgot what we looked like, he teases. He looks good, pretty much the same as when we met back in college, a few more laugh lines around the eyes maybe. But it's the kid I can't stop looking at: he looks just like G.

    G's all blond hair and blue eyes and is white as white can be. His wife has kinky black hair and dark brown eyes and skin that's like rich caramel. Their son's cutey-pie curls and smidge of tan are both courtesy of Mom's gene pool, but the rest is pure Dad. Looking into his eyes, especially, feels like looking into G's.

    That makes me smile, and then feel a little sad too.

    The boy and I used to talk a lot about what our kids would look like. We'd imagine his big round eyes mixed with my nice full lips; we'd wish for my thick glossy hair and his long lush lashes. We'd laugh about my little eyes and flat moon face paired with his big nose and pointy cleft chin. That would be hideous! -- we'd shudder. But secretly we thought our kids would get the best of each of us. We imagined the perfect mix of me and him -- half Anglo-mutt, half Chinese -- and knew it would be beautiful.

    It's a strange thing to think that my kids won't look like me. It was always a possibility anyway -- half Asian/half Caucasian children often don't seem to look obviously Asian at all -- but now that maybe's a definite. My hair, my eyes, my nose, these lips: all this ends with me. I'm a genetic dead end, and there's a certain amount of irony there, when you consider that the boy's a biologist whose main thing is evolutionary genetics.

    Genes aren't everything, the boy tells me, when I mention DNA and dead ends. Trust me, he says, I'm a biologist -- we know that environment counts for so much. The things your parents gave you, the best things, they're not about your genes.

    And so I try not to dwell too much upon what might have been, because deep down I know the boy's right. Eyes and hair and skin, that's just surface stuff. I'll have plenty of good things to pass along to our children -- even if those things won't be obvious just from looking at pictures.


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    posted by y @ 7:02 AM 0 comments

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    Friday, March 25, 2005  
    crash course: proceed directly to go


    I'm getting a crash course in high-tech babymaking.

    Before last December, acronyms and abbreviations like IVF and DE, down-reg and stim, RE and ART and ICSI were simply not part of my vocabulary. The boy and I had just barely started trying to get pregnant and we assumed, like most folks assume, that it would happen the way they told you way back when you first asked as a kid. We pictured lots of good old private us time (wink wink nudge nudge); I vowed I wouldn't be one of those people who tells everyone in the world they're trying to get pregnant. The boy teases that I like to maintain this illusion of perfection, make it look like I get everything just right with no effort at all, and in a way, I suppose he's right. But mostly, I thought that making a baby was going to be this great joyous miracle that I could hoard all for me and the boy.

    This, as it turns out, is exactly the opposite of how it will actually be, if we should be so lucky as to have things work out at all. Instead, I'm discovering that this wonderful intimate bonding experience that I'd always imagined is going to be a big complicated semi-public thing. There'll be drugs and needles and hospitals. There'll be doctors and nurses, lawyers and another woman. There'll be money, lots of money, so much money that it makes me feel faint just thinking about how large those numbers I've been quoted really are. Strangers and science and great heaping piles of cash, with me and the boy and all our love just a tiny part of a very complicated equation.

    I know I'm lucky, to live in an age where I might still be able to have a baby, ovarylessness and all. And I know there are couples who try for years to get pregnant the old-fashioned way, with no good reason for why it hasn't worked, and how heartbreaking that can be , trying to decide if and when it's time to move on to plan B. The boy and I, we can skip all that waiting and wondering; we can accept that it's IVF and donor eggs or nothing; we can proceed directly to go. And as hard as the going will be, at least I know: we're doing what we have to do, to get the family we want.

    And so: it begins. Bring on the acronyms.



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    posted by y @ 11:47 AM 0 comments

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    Wednesday, March 23, 2005  
    the family way

    They couldn't they couldn't they couldn't. And now I can't. I'm 30 years old and technically in menopause; these birth control pills I'm on now, the same ones I took before, I take because I no longer have any ovaries. Without ovaries, you get no estrogen, and without estrogen I face such fun possibilities as osteoporosis by the age of 40, vile mood swings and hot flashes now. What I don't take these birth control pills for is, ironically enough, birth control. Because without ovaries, of course, I have no eggs to meet any eager little sperm that might venture 'round those parts. An oops pregnancy, that thing I so often used to worry about, is no longer even a possibility.

    I never loved other people's children. My college roommate went through a phase senior year where she couldn't look at a picture of a pudgy baby face without sighing a heartfelt I-want-one! But I've never been one of those women: children are small, and sometimes cute, and often interesting, but I don't walk by these strange little beings on the street and feel any particular tugging at the ol' heart.

    What makes my small heart feel big as the universe is the idea of family. And while I spent most of my twenties stumbling along with no clear career goal in mind, I knew I wanted the boy to be there in my future, and for us to someday have kids. I am a good wife and the boy is a great husband and expanding our happy little family of two to three, then four, and maybe five, was never a question of if, but when, with the answer pushing ever later into the future as time as I got closer and closer to thirty, and thirty felt younger and younger.

    It's funny how as soon as you discover that you can't have something, you suddenly find there's nothing in the world you want more.




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    posted by y @ 10:30 AM 0 comments

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