Update!

I heard again from our potential donor. Let's call her D. We've been emailing back and forth for more than a week. She's not a nut. Quite the opposite, in fact. Her email came back with her full name, and I was able to find her on the internet easily -- she's a doctor in a nearby town and her husband (we'll call him Mr. D) is a brilliant PhD type. They've lived all over the world, speak multiple languages, and are finished growing their family. They seem like a lovely family. It turns out that they have 3 embryos on ice, not 5 -- they had 5 originally, but two of them became their boy-girl twins. She's been incredibly gracious and rational in her emails. Two days ago, they offered us their embryos. Eeee!!!

The Mister, oddly enough, has been more cautious than I (I'm usually the glass-half-empty person in this marriage), and Mr. D is being the cautious one on their side. The Mister wanted to make sure that D answered all of the questions our clinic told us to ask about the embryos -- how long have they been frozen (4 years), are they blasts (yes), how were they frozen (2 and 1), are there any known health concerns (no), how old was D's donor (23), etc. Mr. D is worried about legal liability in the future -- what if these strangers take the embryos and something is wrong with a resulting child and they decide to send the child back to their genetic family, like the woman who tried to ship her adopted child back to Russia? All very valid concerns, so of course D and I are doing our respective due diligence, making sure the questions are answered to everyone's satisfaction. I think we're almost there.

Mr. D is also not sure whether he is comfortable with an open relationship, which I can understand. Openness means communication and complicated emotions and how do you explain to your children that they have a genetic sibling being raised somewhere else by another mommy and daddy? For me, just the fact that I know their faces and their names and how many siblings there are is so meaningful, that if they're not comfortable with visits, I'll feel okay. With this information, I can tell our child-to-be the story of their beginnings. It's not ideal. But it's a start. And it would be similar to our situation with Squeaker's birth family. We know bits and pieces; we have a few photos and names; and that's about it. But it's enough that, when he's older, if he wants to look for them, he'll be able to. At a minimum, I want to offer our second child that same opportunity. I'd like to be able to tell our children that their genetic families chose us specially to raise them, that the children's presence in our lives is the result of a loving and careful choice. I truly believe that there is incredible value to a child's knowing that.

In the meantime, our clinic has a set of anonymous embryos on hold for us. We know the basic background info about their genetic parents (father and egg donor), their ethnicities, their occupations, their ages. And that's about it. That's all we would ever get. The clinic says that if we decide to use D's embryos, we can hold the anonymous embryos as backups in case none of D's embryos survive the thaw, or in case I'm not able to get/stay pregnant with D's embryos. I hate talking about these little frozen bundles of potential life as if they were nothing but backups, but it's not really them that's the backup, it's the situation. Anonymity is the backup to openness in my book. And if we end up with anonymity, then so be it. But at least I'll be able to tell the child that I gave openness my best shot. (The Mister says that this is silly -- if we end up with the anonymous embryos, then there never could have been openness for them in the first place and it makes no sense to talk about my efforts at openness as if it could have applied to them. He's right, from a logical standpoint, but none of this is logical, it's all crazy wild edge-of-the-known-universe stuff, and I insist on my right to be illogical about it, if that's the way I can make sense of our place in it.)

And that's where things stand right now. The Mister and I are going to continue to talk through the weekend, and I'll continue chatting with D by email. It feels right so far, and that is a really really happy thing.

Comments

[Heather]

Wow--exciting!

[Rachel]

This sounds like such an exciting situation. And while I understand your husband saying that you wouldn't mention this situation to a future child if it didn't work out, I think that in the long run we are going to have many serious conversations with our (adult, maybe) children about our fertility choices. I certainly plan to tell the fusspot about the risks we took, and how we rationalized them. Just as I appreciate my mother's generation telling me about the choices they made (mainly abortions since fertility treatments were so primitive).

[Suzy]

Great news! The universe is now lining up to provide you with lots of embryos (and to think you were just hoping for one option--now you have choices!). Yay!

[Fiddle1]

Hoping for an easy journey through all these decisions. I have to say, as well-thought out as all of your decisions have been, this sounds exactly like the whirl-wind happiness of the Squeaker post in Jan 2009. In other words, your gut is driving you here, and that's pretty exciting!