Venngina Monologues

Everyone is telling me that using an egg donor for my IVF is almost no different from using my own egg. Their arguments go like this:

Friends: You're going to be the one to carry it for 9 months.
Doctor: It's just a genetic seed.
Scientist father-in-law: Current research shows that the embryonic environment is just as influential as genetics.
Husband: Uh...

Of all these, it's my husband who has the most insightful line of thinking because the truth is that, while there's validity to what the others are saying, the reality of egg donation is more complicated than that.

Part of the complexity is that the experience varies for each person dealing with it. For some people involved, it's closer to a natural conception, but for others, I think it's more like adoption.

To describe what I mean, I drew a continuum and plotted each player on the line: the mother, the father, the donor, and the kid.

To answer your questions in advance,
1) Yes, this is an odd thing to do.
2) No, I don't have any personal experience with any of this.
3) Yes, I'm just making this up as I go along.

OK, here goes.



For the father, having a child via egg donation isn't too different from own-egg IVF - assuming it's his sperm, that is. His wife is pregnant, and his parents' genetic lines are wholly represented in the kid. Yes, he lives in an egg donor home, but his genetic relationship to the kid is entirely traditional. Thus he's furthest on left.

For the donor, she's just aiding a couple who is having trouble conceiving, and it's a strictly medical procedure. The donor experiences no pregnancy, no labor, and no delivery, and she doesn't place a baby in another person's home, so the process is obviously very different from a birthmother's. On the other hand, she knows that the resulting children will be genetically hers. Throughout her life, she will wonder about them, and even though there won't be an emotional bond, curiosity will tickle just like it would for a birthmother. Because of all this, I've put her on the left, although not as far over as Pops.

For the child, the emotional experience will fall closer to the middle. Yes, his mother carried him, delivered him, and nursed him, but he won't remember any of that. All he knows is that he's genetically related to his father and not to his mother. Exactly how the kid will be affected by this depends on a million factors, but to some degree, when it comes to his mother, much of what he experiences will be similar to an adopted child: there will be a level of genetic loss, grief, and un-belonging. Near to the middle he goes.

For the mother, the experience really is a lot like adoption. After the pregnancy-delivery-nursing part is over, she'll have to face lots of the same things that adoptive moms do. Strangers will comment about how the kid looks nothing like her, and people will ask about the child's "real" mother. A bit of consolation is that her child is genetically related to his father, but that can also feel painful since Mom is the only one who can't experience that bond. For all these reasons, I'm putting her nearer to the right of the continuum.

Again, I've got no hard data to back this up, but I think it sounds really good.

During my philosophizing, I came to an epiphany, and while I don't like to wax feminist, I'm going to play the card: I think the reason this all gets whitewashed is that the boy doctors are running the show, and from the male perspective, it's not at all like adoption. As far as the docs are concerned, they're just swapping one egg for another. For the fathers, there's no genetic difference. And the egg donor's experience is supervised and contained by the doctor. It's understandable, then, why these folks view it the way they do.

But for the mothers and children, egg donation has more psychological, social, and emotional similarities to adoption than to any other form of family building. To illustrate this further, I drew a venn diagram laying out the overlap. (Again, yes, I'm weird for doing this. Just go with it.)



Sure, there are distinctions, and yes, there's a lot missing, but I still maintain that no matter how complete this diagram gets, the similarities between egg donation and adoption are greater than the differences.

Ultimately, I think this is a linguistics issue. It's called an "egg donor procedure," and it produces an "egg donor baby," but this language places all the focus on the doctors and the donors. Yes, she's donating, but I'm receiving, and these phrases don't say anything about my experience. Come to think of it, this woman isn't even donating; she's actually charging us several thousand dollars (which I think is fair considering all the time, effort, pain, and risks). In light of all this, I can't help but feel that "egg donation" is a misnomer.

This is an "egg adoption." Egg adoption is an all-around more accurate term, and calling it anything else undercuts the emotional, social, and practical realities of the mother-child relationship. If you ignore that egg adoption is philosophically truer, I think that will just make it harder in the future when the square peg doesn't fit into the round hole.

I need to think of this as egg adoption so I can prepare myself for what I might face when raising a child that isn't genetically related to me. The adoption community has worked hard to create a culture of openness, integrity, and normalcy, and it has a deep understanding of the social and psychological implications of the process. It's obviously not exactly the same, but I'd be crazy not to learn from them if I'm going to consider this.

Yup. I said it. I'm considering this.

Weird.

What My Astrologer Said

About a year after my chemical pregnancy and the depression that followed, I decided to give IVF a fourth and final try. And I had good reason to be optimistic about it: my astrologer said that this time it would work.

At my last chart reading, he laid it out in no uncertain terms: July 2011 was going to find me pregnant, and March 2012 would bring me a baby.

OK, so he might not have said it exactly like that. He might have said something more along the lines of, "July is going to be a good month for you, and so is March," but being that July and March were 9 months apart, and that "good" equals "pregnant," it was obvious what he meant.

Which is why I wasn't phased when the doctor said my chances of success were between 5 and 10 percent. Yes, those odds are low, but... well,... didn't you hear what my astrologer said?

On perfect schedule, we started stims in June. Great. But a few days in, my ultrasound showed only 3 follicles growing. Cycle cancelled.

Shit. What the hell would this mean?

I wondered if my astrologer meant "around July." Or, maybe I was actually born at 9:52 instead of 9:50, which would throw my whole chart off. In either case, it was obvious that I was supposed to have an August pregnancy. No, wait; I had to wait a cycle. So, September. Obviously.

Except that when I went in a couple weeks ago for my September suppression check, my doctor found cysts, which means I have to delay yet another month.

Clearly my ovaries didn't believe in astrology.

Nor does my doctor. I clung to my paper drape after the ultrasound and tried to explain to him that I was supposed to have a baby in March, and that my reproductive system was delaying things significantly. He shook off his confusion and responded as best he could: "If you want to become pregnant, your best bet is to use a donor egg. Nine months after you start a donor cycle, you'll have an 80% chance of taking home a baby."

In the moment that he said that, it didn't occur to me that he was making this prediction without having any idea what time I was born because... donor egg?

Un(en)titled

I don’t deserve this.

I don’t deserve my infertility or the years I spent struggling with the most complex grief I’ve ever known. God knows, there are worse tragedies in the world, but there’s something about the pain of infertility that is deepened by its inherently enduring hopefulness. It forbids you to let go. I spent over 4 years living in monthly anticipation that something good would happen. “Don’t give up,” it said. “There’s still one more thing to try.” So I hung on. And on. And on. And I didn’t deserve that.

I also didn't deserve my generous and loving family, the education I've had, or the summer camps I went to when I was young. I don’t deserve a nice house, the means to travel, or to eat out when I want. I don’t deserve a husband who is willing to work as hard as I am at making our relationship beautiful, nor do I deserve access to the therapy that helped us get here. I don’t deserve my above average intelligence, my great health, or a face that still gets me carded at 39. I don’t deserve a lifetime of good relationships, loads of dear friends, and (in case I haven’t mentioned) my incredible family.

I didn’t deserve any of these things because deservedness has nothing to do it. You get what you get. Some things are good; some things aren’t. That’s just the way it is.

It’s a simple truth, but it didn’t occur to me until now: I'm not entitled to fertility. Being unable to conceive at 35 was a stroke of bad luck, but considering the context of the rest of my life, it seems pretty fair. I am absurdly privileged, and there is no reason that I should be able to have children on top of all the embarrassing number of advantages that I've had – advantages for which I was never even been especially grateful.

Until infertility. Infertility mocked my expectations. After my first failed IVF, infertility made me stand in line behind a pregnant woman while I bought cat food. Infertility flooded my Facebook feed with chubby cheeks and onesies while I was bled out a miscarriage. It ridiculed my grief and was indifferent to my tears. It made me want and didn’t let me get. Infertility humbled me.

I didn’t deserve infertility, but it taught me to recognize and appreciate all the privileges I never earned. I am grateful for how it’s changed me, but I still won't say that I’m grateful for infertility itself, because for fuck’s sake, it hasn’t changed me that much.

Down Dog, Up Dog

After my second IVF, I got mad at my body. After years and years of taking amazing care of it, I was repaid with infertility at an unreasonably early age. I felt betrayed that my body would do this to me. And I was pissed.

"Listen, You," I said to my body. "Your infertility is bullshit, and you deserve to be punished. Now, I know how much you love doing yoga, but I don't care about you right now. Not to mention, doing yoga makes me feel closer to you, and that makes me feel even more vulnerable, and I feel bad enough already, so... You're grounded: no more yoga."

The punishment stuck for about a year. Well, mostly. I would occasionally cave, but for the most part, I kept to my word. And it was good. Well, maybe not exactly good, but it was fine. OK, so, not entirely fine. I did spiral a bit. And I grieved. A lot. But whatever. I said no yoga, and I meant no yoga.

And I kept my word until a few months ago. By the end of 2010, the anger was getting exhausting, and I figured it was time for me and my body to make amends. Plus I wasn't working, and I needed something to do, so I did yoga. At first a little, and then some more, and within a couple months I was practicing 5-6 days a week.

And it changed my life.

It was unexpected; I really just stood on that mat every day because I didn't have anything else going on. And it wasn't immediate, either, but after about 4 months of daily down dogs, I was altered.
I remember reading this New York Times article a while back about how meditation changes the brain. I believed it, but I never imagined what it could have felt like. Granted yoga isn't meditation -- it's meditative, which isn't the same thing -- but still, my brain was different.

A teensy part of me feels like outlining all the incredible ways that my mindset shifted, but I'm not going to. It's not anything that can be explained, anyhow. It's more of a mood. A sensation. A kind of a filter. Or maybe it's losing a filter. In any case, I'm not going to describe it.

But, it's seriously awesome.

Sophie's Choice

People say that they love their adopted children as much as they do their biological children. That the connection between a mother and baby isn't inherently genetic, but that it's something that develops between two people: a woman who yearns to nurture and hold and bond, and a child that needs love and affection and care. They talk about how parents who have both biological and adopted children never think about which child came from where. Genetics don't matter. They love them both. And love makes a family.

I don't believe them.

I don't believe them because it can't possibly be true. There's a biogenetic impulse that makes us instinctively drawn to people that look like us. All examples of social bonding and interpersonal relationships have us searching for mirror images of ourselves. Granted this phenomenon has been at the core of every grotesque chapter of human history, and I agree that it's our social and cultural responsibility to challenge our propensity toward homogeneity, but that only serves to prove my point: everywhere from playgrounds to conference rooms to cemetery plots, we seek extensions of ourselves. We look for ourselves in our friends, we look for ourselves in our spouses, and we look for ourselves in our babies.

So when I say that I don't believe people who deny a difference between biological and adopted children, it's only because I know they're lying.

But I don't hold it against them. Of course they're going to say that. They have to say that. Any sentence that begins with "Let me tell you about my favorite daughter" will end with someone calling Child Protective Services because you aren't allowed to say that. Think about it, and be honest with yourself: have you ever loved any two things the same? No. You haven't. Because it's impossible.  Because two different things will, by definition, have differences, and those differences mean they're different and therefore not the same, and therefore you can't love them the same. And in the case of biological versus adopted children, 10 times out of 10 the child you look at with the deepest, most profound love in your eyes is the one who's looking back at you with the eyes he got from you.

So I don't want any part of the charade. I know that to adopt a child is to raise another woman's kid, and I'm not interested in raising another woman's kid. Pretending that it's mine. Changing diapers and feeding it and helping it with its homework when I know the reality is that that kid comes from someone else. It would be no more mine that it would be the nanny's, and I don't want to be the nanny, especially not to a child of a woman who doesn't even want that kid herself.

I wouldn't even be a mom. I'd be a "mom." Someone whose parentage would require legal documentation and whose role in the falsely-contstructed "family" could be challenged in a court of law. I'd fail a DNA maternity test. But then of course I wouldn't take a DNA maternity test because I'd never assert that I was the mother, because I wouldn't be the mother. I'd be the "mother."

Mother-ly. Mother-ish. Now, I happen to think that I'd be quite an adequate mother-ish figure. The next best thing to for child whose real mother didn't want it. And perhaps the child would be a passable substitute for the real child that I wished I could have.

But I'd know the truth. The real truth. The reality that - if I did adopt and then was lucky enough to magically get pregnant on my own - when faced with the decision to choose between those two kids, that I wouldn't hesitate: given Sophie's choice, I would save my real child and send the other one to the gas chamber.

Judge me if you want. Post comments below about how I'm a horrible, soulless person. I don't mind because I know that I'm voicing truth. And any person grieving the loss of having a genetic connection with a child - any woman facing adoption as the only means of acquiring kids - has asked herself: What am I going to miss out on that real mothers take for granted every day? Could I forgive this kid for being the distant-second-choice to the child I really wanted? Would I ever really love it?

So I'm not going to do it. Adoption isn't an option for me. I'll grieve and I'll cry and I'll continue to feel despair about my infertility, but purchasing another woman's child isn't my solution. And when people around me try to console my grief with "Why don't you just adopt?," I would tell them the truth:

Because when that child's pre-pubescent voice inevitably shouts, "You're not my real mom," my response will most definitely be, "Well, I never wanted you either, Kid."

~~~

Addendum, November 2011: Since posting this blog, I've written two others that - if you're horrified by what you just read - you might consider looking at. They're here and here.

Thoughts from a Bath

[June 2010]

I hate this bath. The water's too hot. There's no point. I have no point. I can't breed. Our only biological purpose. Why bother living? I'm just killing time until I die. Or kill myself. I should kill myself. I miss Merlin. My poor Mer. I can't believe you were eaten. I'm so sorry. I should have protected you. It's my fault. I wish I were eaten instead. I wish you were here. I wish I weren't here. When is this going to end? My head is sweating. Dripping into the bath. Or maybe they're tears. It doesn't matter. This water feels good. I could impale myself on top of a tree. A pine tree. Or maybe a redwood. I could fall on top of one. Feel the tip of it pierce my stomach and come out my back. A tree in my empty womb. It would be pretty up there. Falling. It would hurt. I want it to hurt. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. I wish I'd known. Infertile at 35. It's not fair. I must have done something. I didn't think I was bad. It's my fault. I deserve this. I'm a terrible person. There's no way I could get to the top of a tree. I'd have to be catapulted. Or dropped. They did that in Magnolia. Something about SCUBA diving. And a fire. Someone would have to help me. What am I saying? This is ridiculous. No one would help me. I need to shave my legs. I'm so hairy. I'm a monster. I could run the car with the garage door closed. That's a better idea. They did that on Six Feet Under. The woman left a note. I hated that show. I was glad when they all died. I wouldn't leave a note. Who would care? Kids are the only ones to leave a note for, and I don't have kids. I'll never have kids. I can't believe I'll never have kids. The garage idea is good. Better than the tree. I wonder where I fall on the suicidality scale. Strange that I could evaluate myself right now. That it's part of my job. That would make an ironic headline. Fucking local news. They do like me at work. But they don't know me. Who cares. I don't care. A knows me. He loves me. I should call A. I will. I'll call him now. No. It's late over there. I don't want to bother him. I'm probably not suicidal. I don't know. The garage idea is good. Except for the fumes. I hate gas fumes. I'd have to take pills first. I should get pills. I feel fat. Fat rolls of belly fat. Barren belly fat. I should stop eating. It doesn't matter. What kind of pills? I wish I could fall on a tree. Nothing's going to change. This water's cold. Nothing ever changes. I like the tree idea. I hate this bath. I should get out. There's nowhere to go. No version of my life that I want to live. I want to die. I want it to end. I want this to end. When will this end?

Baby Blue

I went into all this infertility stuff with a wide-open heart. N and I had just gotten back together after being separated for a year, and - being more in love than ever - I felt armed and ready for a little hoop jumping. Not even just ready: when I realized that getting pregnant would require medical treatments, I was oddly excited.

Maybe it was the lessons we'd gained from therapy; I had thought that we were such a healthy couple when we first got together, and it turned out we were as damaged as any other. But we dealt with it. We worked hard. We cried, reflected, and made ourselves as vulnerable as can be, and then we came through the other side with a closeness that I didn't know was possible.

So what if we needed blood tests and hormone checks? I didn't even mind ovarian examinations, as long as I was waxed. And providing sperm samples satisfied whatever public sex fantasies we may have had, so that part was actually kinda fun - especially that we would always go to breakfast afterwards. It was all totally cool because these hoops would just make us more prepared parents.

I was wholly optimistic. In point of fact, I'd registered for this blog in 2007, but I never wrote a single post because I thought, "Well, I'm about to get pregnant, so blogging about my experience would be disrespectful to women who were really infertile."

My Zen lasted about 2.5 years.

In 2010, it started to occur to me: this actually might not happen. I might really be infertile. And that's when I started to get a little testy. Moody. Grumpy. Depressed. Despondent. Devastated. Even (and I find the words hard to type) kind of suicidal.

Which was weird because to be honest, I was kind of disgusted by women who were dramatic about their infertility. "Oh, my god. I can't get pregnant. I should just kill myself." Dude, seriously? It's a three step process: face the facts, grieve, and move on.

Well, yes, but that second step is a bitch.