Jenn:
Today I was watching a Growing Generations YouTube video about egg donors. After I watched it, I clicked through to another YouTube video about a girl who wanted to meet her “biological mother.” Her parents had used an egg donor to get pregnant and now she wanted to meet the donor.
Watching that video filled with me intense anxiety. The phrase “biological mother” was strange to hear and brought up a lot of emotion. I struggle with these feelings frequently; knowing that I will be the one who carries her, and feels her kick. I will be the one who brings her into this beautiful world and unconditionally loves and provides for her, but I won’t be her “biological mother.”
This is incredibly painful for me. I worry that she will one day (like the girl in the YouTube video) want to find her “biological mother” and I’m not sure how I will feel about that. I wonder if that feeling will change or if that feeling will only get stronger. I guess only circumstances and time will tell, but as we go through the process of needing a donor I can only be where I am.
Today the thought of her wanting to meet or know about her “biological mother” scares the crap out of me. I struggle with telling my daughter one day for this and other reasons. We want to teach her the importance of honesty, integrity, the value of knowing your life story. How can we do this if we don’t tell her?
Peter:
When you fall in love with someone and dream about having a child with her, you never think that your child will have someone’s DNA who you’ve never met instead. It seems so strange at first.
When I first heard about the egg donor option I just thought we should adopt. I just couldn’t understand why we’d even think of doing that, but Jenn has always wanted to experience carrying a baby, feeling her kick. I’m not going to lie and say that I was fully supportive right out of the gate. I wasn’t. I talked about adoption. Yes, I even talked about rescuing more dogs instead of having a child (how do you think that one went over?).
Once I really heard Jenn though, I mean, really really listened, I got that this wasn’t how she’d wanted it either. I got that there was a lot of grieving for her around not being able to use her own eggs. I got that this wasn’t how she’d drawn it up all of those years ago when she’d known that being a mother was her life’s calling. She talked about wanting to look at our child and see some of her features, see some of her traits, in her.
I got that her heart was broken, but that she was going to be a mom regardless. I got how hard she was fighting. I got how hard she was fighting for her baby. We looked at egg donors on a third party site that our doctor recommended. We made a decision. And what I saw in all of this is what I’ve always seen: that our baby is going to have the best mom in the world.
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