Brought to you by the Great Blog Cross Pollination: His, Mine, Ours

GUEST POST:

From the time I was a small child, forced to rely on the newspaper and non cable TV to fill my hours, I’ve always liked first person stories–and biographies especially. In fact, one of my first adult reads at 10 years old was Mommie Dearest. What, you may ask does that have to do with our dear Calliope?  Clearly, it’s not the bad stuff, but rather I got hooked on her blog because of the compelling story she has been telling, first of her quest to get pregnant, and caring for her Grandmother with Alzheimer’s, and then of her pregnancy with W and all of the lovely parts of parenting, and the sorrow of losing her grandmother. All of my favorite bloggers are the ones who respond to comments, and Cali does that in spades.

As she said in her post on my blog, one thing we have in common is our use of Donor sperm.  She comes at it from being a Single Mother by Choice, and I come to it by necessity.  Nearly at the end our quest to have a child through pregnancy, we found out that my husband has a balanced translocation .  Most people who have ever heard of this know it as a Robertsonian translocation, but alas, there are different types. Essentially, my husband’s 1st and 5th chromosomes have swapped where their long and short arms are. Works for him, but when his genes try to combine with mine (which are in a more conventional arrangement), the result is too many in one spot, not enough in another.  It took us so long to find out because we didn’t fit the profile. What typically happens is that everything is fine up through some point in the 1st trimester, and then miscarriage. For us, it didn’t work that way–I would have these unconfirmable proto pregnancies, and then pfft. In IVF, we’d get a great fertilization rate, and then lose nearly all the eggs (i.e. ended up with 3 out of 14). And in the end, it is probably that these two chromosomes make it very hard for an embryo to get beyond a very early stage of development.  As you can imagine, 2.5 years in, and a whole lot of crappy feelings about myself, my eggs, my extreme defectiveness, etc, it was a huge shock to realize that maybe I was ok. Just maybe. But of course, that opened up a whole ‘nother can of worms.

In April when we found this out, we were both in shock.  At first it was a relief, now we knew what had been holding us back, and then it because very dicey because we were at the beginning of an IVF cycle and trying to negotiate within ourselves and with each other, how to use the donor sperm. We should have waited. We were so shocked and so desperate that we didn’t really think it through, or feel it through.  One particularly awful moment happened when we were on the phone with our doctor, and talking about picking the donor, and I said “After all, he will be the father of our children.” The only thing that saved that moment, and trust me, it was barely saved, was that I said “our” instead of “my”. Oy. God that was awful.  It was a shock to realize how much there was to get my/our heads around.  We picked and rejected one donor, and then picked another, one that we’ve stayed with for our IUI’s and one IVF.

My smart husband insisted that he needed a few months to let this all marinate and sink in and to get used to all of this. It was pretty hairy. I was raring to go because I was feeling like the biological clock that had been bonging “TIME” in my hear for years got an amplifier, but I also knew that this was about us, not me. Honestly, this whole infertility treatment process was about us, but because so much of it happened to me, and because of how I lived it, it was a strange experience to not be center stage anymore.

And, of course, my husband was right WE needed time.  I needed time to make sense of our children having a genetic father and ‘real’ father.  One thing that a friend of mine said that was extremely helpful was that no matter the genetic connection, it is the mother who creates the father (or doesn’t, in the case of excluding the father). By that she meant that because of the mother’s primacy to the infant, the father, genetic or not, can be excluded to the point of not having a place to be a father to the child.  That was one of those moments that helped me to understand that yes, we would be different, and yet, we would be the same as many other families.

Fast forward through one at home insemination, one failed IVF, one IUI with low progesterone, and screech to a halt November 9th.  I had been deep in preparations for a donor egg and donor sperm cycle. I had given up on my eggs, clearly they were also part of the problem.  However, in a moment of super thriftiness so as to not waste a precious endometrian, I decided to take a pregnancy test the morning of my beta, a rarity for me, as I am not a POASer, and it came up positive.  The Beta was fabulous, as was the second beta.  My Husband, was thrilled, I was thrilled (when we weren’t scared out of our minds…oy).  In the moment of the positive test and fabulous beta’s it was Our baby.  In the following days, a couple of people, admittedly who aren’t on the blogosphere and don’t talk about these things as much and as carefully as we all do, asked how Husband felt about it not being “his”. And I was sort of taken aback. Of course it’s His.  Not genetically, but in all other ways.  It’s not a bad question, and it’s not even insensitive, for me it served as a yard stick of how far my thinking and feeling has come in this arena. I can’t think of it as any child but his child.  Many times I forget that we used a sperm donor, and I wonder if our baby will look like him with his big brown bedroom eyes, and then I remember, “Oh, right…”  At some point in the future, our feelings will shift and resettle. Feelings always do.  But right down to the core of my being I know, this is His baby. This is Our baby.

Have any idea who the guest blogger is?? Take a guess in the comments section and I will tell you at the end of the day where I guest posted (if you haven’t already found out!)