Gray Matters

You know the feeling: you're starving, and you really want a burger, but all you have is salad, so you eat the salad, and technically you aren't hungry anymore because the salad was huge and had lots of avocado and sunflower seeds and stuff like that, but it wasn't a burger, so you aren't fully satisfied.

I spoke to a friend today who asked for the lowdown on how it feels to be the mom of a donor egg baby. Is it everything that it promises to be? Is it worth the financial cost, the emotional roller coaster of hope-turned-grief, and the risk of having yet another miscarriage? Or should she consider moving forward with her life and live child-free.

She wanted an honest answer, so I gave it to her. It's kind of like a salad. It's good, but what I really wanted was a burger. And I'm not fully satisfied.

I'm not sure who these women are who say that a donor egg baby is the same as an own-egg baby. That they never think about the donor again after getting a pee-stick positive, seeing the heartbeat, feeling a kick, or whatever other milestone is met. I guess these women exist because boundless baby bliss is all I ever heard about; all I know is that I'm not one of them.

I think about the donor all the time. She's who I see when I look at my daughter's smile or wonder how I'm going to tame those crazy eyebrows. She's the person I think about when my husband talks about the family that we've built. She's what comes to mind when I see that my kid should have met some developmental skill and I wonder what consequences there'll be from being deceived about my donor's smarts on her profile.

This haunting motivated me to meet today with a therapist who specializes in infertility and third-party reproduction. I love my long-time therapist, but I'm not sure if she can help me with what I'm going through. As I mentioned in my last post, when I asked her why I'm feeling disconnected, she said that the why didn't matter and that I just needed to work on connecting with my kid. You know: "process my intimacy issues."

She's wrong, I think. I think it does matter. If I'm uneasy about qualities in my donor that I see in my daughter, I need to work through that. If my involvement in the donor egg community is making me think too much about my baby's conception, then I need to find a new distance with that world while still respecting whatever responsibility I owe my daughter. If there remains a shit ton of grief at the loss of my genetics, then I need to resolve that, too. And yes, process my intimacy issues blah blah fuck you.

So was my baby pursuit worth it in the end? I think so, but it's not exactly black and white. Raising my daughter is a thousand times better for me than being childless, but it hasn't been easy. She isn't a burger, but she is pretty damn good, and what I hope is that this work will turn these salad days into salad days.

Eat, Play, Love

Eat.

I have video footage of my baby crying while nursing my left tit because I have almost no milk. She had better luck on the right, but not much. I won't go into the details of how awful breastfeeding has been, but suffice it to say that it's been both physically and emotionally painful for both me and my kid.

Now at 5 months, she's almost exclusively formula fed. I have one last bottle of breast milk left, and I think I'll cry when I feed it to her. The few successful breastfeedings were profoundly sweet. In those moments, I felt like a mom. But still, quitting will be a relief. But also sad. But also a relief.

Play.

The truth is that I don't know how to interact with infants. Don't get me wrong: I took great care of her and held her almost constantly when she was teeny tiny, but infants are incredibly stupid, and playing with an infant isn't much different from playing with a bale of hay. You get about as much reciprocity: no eye contact and none of that cuddling that you imagine happens between mother and child. I tried to play with her as best I could, but really she was just a lot of noise and shitty diapers.

This changed over the last couple of months, and the 5-month mark was a special turning point. She laughs freely now, and it's easy to get her to smile. We spend a lot of time dancing around and roughhousing; she likes getting thrown in the air, getting tickled, and when I fling her upside-down. Sometimes our games make her throw up, but bales of hay don't throw up, so we're moving in the right direction. And I'm having fun.

Love.

For these and other reasons (hello, 5 hours of sleep!), parenting has gotten easier, but to be honest, there remains a bit of discord in our relationship: I'm not sure if I'm fully bonded with my kid, and I can't help but feel that it's because of the egg donation thing.

I don't know how parental love is supposed to feel, and maybe this is it. You hear about rainbows and unicorns popping out of women's vaginas together with their spawn, and all that came with my baby was blood and slime, so it's hard for me to tell.

It's possible that this emotional barrier is just a part of my psychology because of my broken upbringing. My childhood had a good bit of neglect and some physical abuse, so I might feel this way no matter how my child came about. I tried to flesh it out in therapy, but when I asked my therapist why I was feeling this lack of connection, she said that the why didn't matter and that I just needed to work on increasing my capacity for intimacy. (Intimacy issues? That's real original, Therapy. You fucking whore.)

I do really like spending time with the kid, but as often as not, I look at her like I'm not sure who she is. But maybe that's normal. Or maybe it's not. What the hell do I know? I still can't believe that the hospital let me take her home, to be honest. I mean, they don't even know me.

Hell. I don't know me.

B is for Baby, Blog, and Banal

Here's what's happening: I keep trying to write. Not blog, but write. Entries like the ones I used to post about Frankenstein and my grandmother. But those take an admittedly embarrassing amount of time, and I don't have that kind of time now, and consequently, I haven't been posting anything.

So if I want to keep this record of my thoughts going, I have no choice but to stop writing and start blogging. If you were following me because you were interested in what I have to say, that will continue (or resume, I should say). If, however, you were following me because of how I said it, ... sorry, but I can't finish that thought because there's a baby crying.