I need a little help on this.
One of the people Fil works with offered to donate sperm. I don’t know how I feel about it.
S is mixed race, predominantly black with a little white mixed in. He is beautiful, and he’s really quite sweet. We don’t really care about his level of education or his musical ability because, while we do think musical ability is inherited, we also believe you only need one musical parent for it to be passed on (I’m a violinist, and my dad’s a drummer, my grandfather was a pianist). So, he seems practically perfect. Right?
But I’m terrified at the prospect of having a child with his genetic information. I’m not racist, I’ve been taught all my life that race isn’t a factor in who a person is or how you perceive them, it’s purely physical. But I do take issue with the fact that our son or daughter will further be disassociated with our family. She will look absolutely NOTHING like Fil or Monster. I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of my friends and I went through a period in our lives where we didn’t feel like we belonged in our family. The only thing that kept us from searching through adoption records were the obvious physical traits that linked us to our parents. If you look at photos of myself and my parents, the resemblance is undeniable. I have my mom’s mouth, nose, ears, my dad’s eyes, his ribcage, his family’s red hair. I have my grandfather’s chin.
And the whole “you look like me” thing is such an intense sense of pride for my family. For Fil, too, because she looks at Monster and is able to pick out bits of him that are exactly like her. I don’t want my daughter or son to lose out on that pride. Because I’ll feel it, every time I look at their face, will they have my eyes? or will they have my lips or ears… but Fil won’t.
I’m scared of that. That maybe, since our children will look nothing like her, it’ll be easy for her to give up, to pick up and walk away. Or it’ll be easy for her to not love them because they don’t have her ears.
What do I do?
Do I say no, tell her that we need to find a donor with physical characteristics that are more similar to hers? Or do I let it go too far and end up facing everything I’m afraid of.
Not to mention, S’s girlfriend is a little crazy.
Tricky.
Leaving aside whether or not it’s important for your kids to look like you, the fact that this guy’s girlfriend may not be happy with this (has he offered without talking to her?) sets off major alarm bells. I don’t know about the law where you live, but in the UK, you cannot automatically cut off a known donor from their parental rights – they have to sign them away after the birth. There have been some horror stories about donors changing their mind and demanding to see the child regularly, or even successfully contesting custody. If you are going to use a known donor (this guy or anyone else) then talk the whole thing to death with them before you start, and get some kind of legal document of intention in place, even if it’s not a legally binding one.
Also, in the UK, if you are using frozen sperm, they will not let you choose a donor who differs significantly from the two of you in terms of race. They stongly feel that mixed race children need some kind of connection to their race roots and culture, from at least one parent. I think this is an important point, though maybe less so in the USA, I don’t know?
Our known donor is a black man. He offered his stuff to us when we were looking for a donor and after much soul searching on my part, we accepted. Klove got pregnant and gave birth. I was worried that the baby wouldn’t look like me. Normally I don’t think that this would have been an issue, but we were trying to decide between a member of my family who had offered (so the baby would look like both of us) and our friend who had offered, and to have Klove exhibit a strong preference for Mallow over my family member was hard.
But. Honestly, there’s more to resemblance than skin color and hair texture. Sassafras has eyes that are shaped like mine, and there are other physical traits that I can point to and say: she got that from me. Even if it’s not true.
But more than that: Sassa talks like me, she moves like me, her mannerisms are so much like some of mine that it’s like I have a little clone. And there are times when I forget that I didn’t give birth to her… when it’s hard to remember that I wasn’t the one who had the c-section. She is so thoroughly my child.
It might actually make Fil feel MORE invested in the child if she has a major part of picking the donor: this guy is a coworker and presumable friend of hers, in a way she’s providing the sperm. That’s important. My biggest complaint with our donor choice (originally) was that I felt like I had no real place in the choice: Mallow was a friend of Klove’s, it was Klove’s idea to take him up on his offer, her strong choice. That was more upsetting to me than the fact that he didn’t resemble me.
So that’s some things to think about there. But, like Vee said, the really troublesome thing is the girlfriend. If she’s not on board then you need to decline. After Sassa was born, Mallow met a new girlfriend. This girlfriend was incredibly jealous of us and of Sassa’s relationship with Mallow. It was hard enough just trying to get along with her when we weren’t TTC… when we decided that it was time to try for another child, it became incredibly miserable. I know she sabotaged at least 3 cycles. We kept up with it only because he had entered this relationship with us before she entered the picture and he was determined to do this, but if she had been his girlfriend when we were trying for Sassa, we would have given up on using him. It’s just too stressful and scary to deal with that. In your situation, where the gf is a permanet fixture in your potential donor’s life, where she’s already given him a child, her power and rights are going to be very strong. And, frankly, he should take her feelings very seriously. If she’s opposed to this and he goes ahead and does it anyway… what does that mean for any agreements he makes with you two (people he presumably likes but doesn’t love — this is assuming that he loves his girlfriend)?
Just some thoughts, email me if you want more info…
gosh… thats tough. we had a friend who kinda sorta offered.. He was of a different race. We talked it up and down and around. Then it became less of an offer… hence easier to not decide. The bigger issue might be the known donor issue… It needs to be tidied up really really well before you move forward with it. And – you need to be careful about the state you live in… We live in Virginia – one of the least friendly… good luck.