When Mrs S and I began seriously discussing creating a family together, we knew we wanted to have our own biological children.  We each hoped to carry a child because we both wanted to experience pregnancy.  Since Mrs. S is older, she was first in line for pregnancy.  This was just fine with me because at the time, I wan’t quite ready for an alien invader in my uterus.

Once we started talking in earnest about choosing a donor, I started to feel really really sad.  It hit home that we couldn’t make a baby together.  It was one of those times when being gay became very inconvenient.  We fantasized about trying to do some Jurassic Park shit and combine our eggs to make a baby, but yeah, too weird.

I know that there are lots of couples who struggle with fertility, but the fact that we never had even the option to combine our genes into a little human broke my heart.  Of course now that we have The Beast, I rarely think about it anymore but at the time it was a reality I battled to come to terms with.

Now, the cool part about using a sperm donor is that it opens the door for folks to create diverse family structures outside of the traditional two-parent household.  We had a handful of things that initially informed our conversation about choosing a donor.  First, I didn’t know my biological father growing up, so it was important to me that our child know her donor if at all possible.  I am confident that we will be two (relatively) well-adjusted loving parents, but identity is a funny thing and biology often plays a role in shaping this.  Secondly, Mrs. S has a family history of heart disease so we wanted to choose a donor with a clean family health history.  Finally, we wanted to be the only two primary caregivers in our child’s life.

With these three things in mind, we considered our options for sperm acquisition…

1. Charming and Generous Brothers – We each have a brother so we talked about using my brother’s sperm for Mrs S’s egg and her brother’s sperm for my egg.  This felt like a cool way to create the closest genetic ties between Mrs S, our children and me.  It would also ensure (barring something weird happening) that our kids would have close relationships with their donor.

2. Sickeningly Handsome Friend – Using a friend would ensure that our child would have access to her donor, while giving us more flexibility to choose someone with the health background we preferred.  Plus, this option would give our child yet another person in her life who would love and care for her, creating an even bigger circle of love for our baby.

3. Anonymous Open Sperm Bank Donor – To spoil the surprise, we ultimately decided to go this route.  We felt this was the safest in terms of legal protections for me as the non-bio parent (I could easily legally adopt The Beast without getting consent from anyone else), it created the most distinct boundaries as to who were the “real parents,” and it allowed us to be really picky about the health background of the donor.  However, this was also the least attractive option in terms of giving our child access to her biological parent early in life as she could only meet her donor once she was 18, and it’s EXPENSIVE!

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We are now almost seven months in with The Beast and we are still not confident that we made the best decision for her.  It feels weird to write that because if we hadn’t used the donor we chose, we wouldn’t have this baby.  She is amazing and I have never loved anything like I love her, so I wouldn’t actually want to change a thing.  However, I still wonder what it would be like if she had her donor in her life.  She might be less freaked out by men with beards.  It also might have made for an easier “who is my dad” conversation down the line.  Then again, families are messy and as hard as we might try to make the perfect decisions for our child, we’re still going to fuck up.  So I take comfort in the fact that my therapist tells me we just need to do a “good enough job” and I’m fairly confident that our donor is “good enough.”