Donor Chosen

I did it. I made the final selection of our donor yesterday. I have been thinking about it almost non-stop. I’ve visited the database several times a day to check on her. BJ and I talked a little about it Wednesday night while the LG was in the shower. He said he was fine with her. I told him that I needed another day. I had some things I needed to work out and I wanted to make sure no one “better” came along. Ugh, that sounds terrible.


I’m going to lay a lot out here right now and some of it might sound shallow and just plain ridiculous, but it’s how I’m feeling and I need to get it out. I have to put these thoughts on paper to better help me deal with them. Maybe what I’m feeling is not so strange. Maybe there are others that feel this way too and maybe by putting it out there I can help someone deal with their own feelings.

I have a lot of insecurities about myself. I have very low self-esteem. Fighting IF has not helped those feelings diminish. In fact, as many of you know, IF can really put a woman in a bad place. Knowing that my husband is having another child with another woman (yes, he’s really having it with me...like I said, some of these thoughts are ridiculous) is hard to handle. She’s a very cute 21 year old and I can’t help but wonder what my husband thought when he looked at her pictures. She was/is a cheerleader and one of her pictures is her in her cheer outfit. I have these horrible thoughts of my husband fantasizing about her. How sick is that? There’s no worse feeling for me than to feel inferior to another woman. I have always felt like I just wasn’t good enough, not pretty enough, not thin enough, not enough boobs, not tall enough...the list goes on and on. I hate that I have these insecurities but they are a part of my life and I don’t see them disappearing any time soon. I find it crazy that I was sitting on the couch next to my husband looking at pictures of these cute young girls trying to figure out who will be the right fit for me, for us. It’s so, so, so....I don’t know. It was so strange to ask him if he thought she was pretty...I didn’t want an answer but at the same time I wanted him to say something like, “sure, but not as pretty as you.” That didn’t happen. He just said, “Yeah”. That is a fine answer...and it keeps him out of trouble. So all this searching (all 9 profiles) brought up a lot of physical insecurities I have about myself. I know it’s crazy but I really hate the way I look right now after looking at these pretty young girls with lots of eggs and great functioning ovaries. One thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other and yet I have equated them. Nice going, TeeJay.

Some other struggles I had with this donor was that she is a cheerleader and likes to do hair and went to cosmetology school. She is only 21 so I don’t know what I was expecting but I can tell you that I was hoping for a little more. Granted, when I was 10 I wanted to be a beautician. I outgrew that by high school. Those are not very good aspirations in my book. Again, she’s only 21. When I was in school I did not like cheerleaders. They were very peppy, very pretty, very skinny, and very popular and made me feel like crap about myself. Most of them thought they were better than everyone else and pranced around as such. Boys fawned all over them and pretty much ignored me. Here we go with the low self-esteem again. The cheerleaders were very girly, which I am not. Yes, I recognize that this is a horrible generalization on my part but it was my life in high school. I really wasn’t sure this donor was right for us with all of my pre-conceived notions of her personality.

Then I started to think about the positives. She has the cleanest medical history. Her family has the cleanest medical history. Her physical traits are what I was looking for (the only criteria we entered was our skin color). She is short, blondish, green eyes (I thought blue but I was mistaken) and a nice smile. She has regular periods, states she’s never done a drug or smoked and doesn’t even drink. I am also pretty straight laced. I rarely drink and when I do I’m a light weight for sure. I’ve never smoked or done any drugs. She looks and sounds like the all-American girl. The fact that she is adopted also struck a chord with me. I started to think about that aspect of her life. If someone is adopted and willing to help another family have a child that they are not 100% genetically linked to seems to speak volumes. I started to wonder about the whole adoption thing. She stated that she knows the genetic history of her biological family so I was curious how that came about...was it an open adoption? Did she find her bio-parents when she turned 18 (or before)? I felt like I needed to know that answer for some reason. I hoped that there was a way of finding that out. Nothing really revealing was in her personal essay, either. The only thing that stuck with me was that she wanted to build her hair clientele so that she can make people feel good about themselves. The more I thought about that statement the more I realized that she seems like a very sweet girl. Being a stylist is really about making women (and men) feel beautiful and helping them to love the way they look...something I have struggled with my whole life. Wanting people to love the way they look and build their self -esteem is not a bad trait to have at all. Epiphany reached.

All of these crazy thoughts were whirling around my head and then all of a sudden the pieces just came together. There was no reason not to pick this donor. I talked with BJ again at lunch and told him that when I got back to my desk I was going to select her as long as he was still positive he was fine with her. He reiterated that he was fine with her. Then the nerves set in. I couldn’t eat my lunch. I got back to my desk and was afraid she’d be gone from the list and almost had a panic attack logging into the website. She was there and so I selected her. There was a place for me to ask questions and so I asked about the circumstances of the adoption. My coordinator contacted the donor right away and the answer is that her step-mother adopted her as a child and that she sees her biological mother all the time. Mystery solved.

My coordinator e-mailed me my confirmation with some additional follow up steps and a copy of the profile. BJ and I were talking about the donor’s adoption and I told him the story. We figure that her bio-mother must have signed over her parental rights in order for her step-mother to be able to adopt her. We wonder about the circumstances of how that transpired all those years ago. The conclusion we came to is that if she was adopted by her step-mother and still has a seemingly decent relationship with her bio-mother...she probably had a very unique upbringing and even though the money is good for donors she is still willing to give that very important cell away to 3 other women so that we may have children of our own (hopefully). She seems like the perfect choice. Anyone that can grow up in that kind of situation and still want to help others build a family in an “unconventional” way can’t be bad in my book.

And now we wait. There are 2 of us waiting and we have a 30 day window of time for the 3rd recipient to choose the donor. If that doesn’t happen, we move forward at that time. Thank you all for your encouraging words and advice. I feel good about this...even though I’m still a bit nervous and anxious about the whole thing. I think we made the right choice and I can’t wait to get started.