No response

I haven't received any response from the donor I contacted about a week ago. As the days pass I'm more and more certain I will never hear from him. I am disappointed but not as dejected as I thought I would be. Sending the note gave me an odd sense of closure. My guess is that if he did not donate he would have sent a quick one line note saying "Sorry, you have the wrong person." So perhaps no response is a good response.

Disconnected

Have I given up?

Well,  I haven't written in a really long time and I can't say there is a particular reason for my absence other than a general sense of disappointment. After really going at it and not getting anywhere in terms of identifying a donor, I lost some of my steam. I know it could be considered selfish that I only came online to fill in the blanks of my own genetic lineage with nothing more altruistic in mind. This isn't quite the truth as I do care about helping other's in my position, but it would be dishonest to say that the donor sibling community is not based and driven on this very personal goal for us all.

So often the donor offspring "voice" is the sound of someone lost... shouting into the darkness of cyberspace.  The only thing heard in response are other voices of the lost shouting back, "I hear you, I'm lost too, can you help?" Sometimes it's soothing to hear the other voices and know you aren't alone, but sometimes it  can be depressing when you step back, stop your own shouting and listen to the cacophony of  loss.

You realize that some of the strongest voices out there, those of us blogging our hearts out, posting on list-serves likes its our job, and starting DNA warehouses, have not found our donor. It may be a presumptuous assertion, but it's likely we are all filling the void with our efforts. In that darkness, when you know the lights will never be turned on to reveal a biological parent standing before you, you make the best of it. You put that energy, that powerful instinctual hunger for a biological connection into something else.

There is something to be said about that "powerful instinctual urge"...

I'm reading the book,  How the Mind Works by Steve Pinker which despite the psychologic slant the title predicts, is actually very much about genetic heritage. Pinker talks a lot about the source of the basic programming of the mind and brain. Though highly complex, all our functioning eventually comes down to this powerful instinctual urge for our genes to replicate...to make a copy...to create another of itself. He goes on to explain how all of what we think and feel has links to the codes written in our DNA. Even things like personality and laugh, which so many of us imagine to be the result of divine inspiration can be traced back to DNA.

I can't help but think about implications of his arguments in considering artificial insemination and the experience of the donor offspring.  For us, literally half of who we are is a mystery. I can't begin to describe to you the deep-seeded desire I have to learn about the parts of me that are other. Why, for example, am I such a loner, when the rest of my family is so universally social? Why am I so analytical, nearly to a fault when others seem more comfortable with decisions?

It only makes the loss feel greater. We can't say as my mother does "it's just genes." It's not just genes, its the essence of who we are.

I could go on and on but I keep thinking of the those famous lines from John Donne

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

As donor offspring, we seek simply to know which chapter is ours in "the book" of mankind and read and comprehend it before it is torn out. Yet being unable to know completely who we are, half the pages are blank and so, our chapter cannot be "translated." We can't be connected.

So I guess what it all comes down to is that while Donne thinks, "No man is an island," I feel like I am an island sometimes.  The only heartening thought is that I'm on that island with many, many others, and we are going to work together to assure the world is aware of the isolation this causes and how they must work to prevent it in the future.

Technorati Tags: Anonymous, Children, Family, Sperm Donor, Pregnancy, Society, Women, Social, Infertility

Dr Alvin C. Weseley

So I found out today it was not Dr. Decker but Dr. Alvin C. Weseley who inseminated my mother. It's so frustrating that as donor offspring our backgrounds are kept so secret and guarded. After looking for Dr. Decker for years, now I have to change my search completely. Life can be so overwhelming sometimes.....

Books about children of donor insemination and donors

I'm doing research on artificial insemination for a graduate paper I am working on and noticed its hard to find good scholarly literature about the social and psychological implications of being a "donor offspring." Oh-- as an aside here, can we PLEASE think of a better name than"donor offspring"? I feel like a science experiment or character in a sci-fi film when I use that term.

Anyways here are few books I looked up on Amazon that are pretty good. I used Amazon Associates to post them but I did not write them nor am I associated with the purchase.

Experiences of Donor Conception: Parents, Offspring, and Donors Through the Year

Calling all Bloggers with excel spreadsheets of blogs

The custom AI google search engine is really there with about 35 vetted sites in its back end. I have gotten excellent submissions from all over but need more!

Instead of filtering the world wide web for information, let's cut things down to only those useful sites. Then we can use the power of the google algorithm to really find what we need.

If you have a list of sites, please send the urls to me in an excel spreadsheet so I can get them in there. Not only can we search but we could do analysis on what words, terms and ideas come up most frequently. We can see what the average first search is. All anonymous but useful data.

Email, Email, Email and tell your friends to email too.

Try it out its on the right side of the blog....this could get much bigger if we produce a viable solution.

Lets take technology in our own hands and rather than producing a person that will always question their existence, produce a search engine that helps us find some answers.

Looking forward to hearing from anyone who can here me :)

Seeing the world

I travel a bunch for my job and its always surreal to look out the window of the plane. When you are close enough to actually see the world beneath you, it seems so small. I especially like the little cars travelling in lines and the houses laid out like honeycombs . It's almost like an ant farm. I realize that while it seems vast, the world is not so big.

Then, like everything other time I philosophize, my mind leads me "to him." Am I flying over him. Is he maybe in his yard and, in a moment of rest, looks up to see a tiny plane flash by. "Up here....it's me."

And then its usually a pushy flight attendant offering nuts that pulls me out of day dreaming.

Why are there so many connections "to him." Why do so many of my thoughts lead to this invisible person....its almost literary...like the "eyes" in the Great Gatsby that look down on everyone or Dicken's unknown benefactors. I think the fact that he has no shape or form is what leads my mind to him most. Our unconcious minds are simple. They do not think grand thoughts or complex ideas, instead they want something simplistic, a face, an image, a mantra. But this isn't simple. How can my mind simply grasp the artificial inseminnation process and the transfering of DNA anonymously to another. My unconsious is like a skipping record or something, searching and searching for something to fall on. Ahhh the joy I would feel to have a face...just a face to hold on to.

One afternoon over Starbuck's coffee, a friend of mine commented on the fact that this "unknown" being that is my biological father almost sounds biblical, like god or something. I had to laugh, so hard actually that I spit a bit of coffee across our table attracting the attention of those around us. But then come to think about it there is an element of truth to her observation. I think the link is less religious and more faith based.

By this I mean that because you can't see this person, because in some cases like mine you have to come to terms with the idea of never knowing, you just have to have faith that he is out there. You have to have faith that while you may never meet him, he is a good person. You have to have faith that he is whatever your mom was told he was like tall, smart, and handsome.....and the only thing you have to go on is yourself. You - the only place, ironically, you can find "him" insomuchas half his DNA is written into every cell in your body. Talk about the "holy spirit" . Too bad I'm not religious or I could really take this comparison somewhere meaningful :)

But anyway....you get the drift.

Not The Man

Well, it turned out Jake was not my biological father. When I sent in my samples I opted to get the results via email - funny how technology is laced throughout this story from conception to revelation. It was a Thursday and I couldn't sleep, so I got up and brought my laptop into bed. I tried to be quiet as my boyfriend slept soundly next to me.

The results were not due for another day or two, but when I opened gmail, there it was - "DNA Results." In the middle of the darkness, my heart literally spasmed - a feeling I only remember having once before when I watched my brother just miss getting hit by a car.

The feeling was panic I think, which was so unexpected. I mean, I had been researching, blogging and corresponding for a couple of years on this topic and had been coordinating with Jake nearly two weeks, why such sudden panic? Feelings came forward that I never new were there, it was like I had repressed so much trying not to upset my parents, keeping the secret, not telling my brother. I opened the results scanning feverishly......where does it say "it"? where is the yes and no? I actually read and read the marker results with no understanding of the answer. For a moment I thought to myself that this was a metaphor for my conception a pivotal moment, a meaningful event, reduced to technicalities, to tests and medical procedures. And then:

"With 99.9% accuracy the donor is NOT biologically related"

It was as if a shot had rung out and there is that odd silence when you wonder what damage has occurred or who was shot. I actually felt physically nauseous. I started to cry......so much crying about this all. It never ends.

The only way I can describe it was that it felt like someone had died. Jake was alive and well in Brooklyn, but he wasn't my biological father and that hope, that chance to truly know myself - evaporated. I'm even crying writing this. Aside for a love of narrative writing and literature, I'm not a very dramatic person so this crying, this constant emotion is so unlike me.

My boyfriend woke up and his eyes were squinting from the laptop glow. "What's up hun?"

"It's not him" I said. He knew, he hugged me. I just cried and cried and cried.

I remember stories my mom told about finding out she and my dad could not have kids, how she cried herself to sleep, how she would breakdown when she saw children and how terrible it was to want something so very badly but be unable to have it. How the feeling just ate her up in side, consumed her.

She doesn't realize, but I understand. It is that very same carnal ache, that heart-breaking urge to have something so out of reach but so intimately linked to who you are that defines the life of a donor offspring. Sometimes I want to scream from the rooftops -

"where are you?" just let me see this person, understand myself, know that half of me exists somewhere outside of my imagination but alas - unlike my mother a sperm bank offers no resolution for this despair, quite the contrary - the sperm bank is where this mess all started.

Flirting with Identity.

Jake was the gay, liberal dad I never knew I had. Late one night I sat staring at his quirky MySpace page on my laptop in a state somewhere between elation and confusion. There he was, standing with two hands resting on the handle of a shovel stuck in the dirt. The crooked smile and deep brown eyes looking back at me from the screen seemed familiar.

Jake's post had been on the donor sibling registry board for a long time but since it said "Jewish Russian" I'd passed over it. He'd donated to the same Park Avenue clinic in which my mother was inseminated, but she had asked for a Christian, Polish donor. Hence, I assumed that's what she got. A day earlier, in a moment of lucidity I wondered how she could be so sure. I mean, what verification occurs to assure the nationality of a donor or his religion if we don't even know his name? I mean, duh.

I surfed further to his online photo album via a link provided on his profile. My hands grew a bit sweaty and my finger vibrated a bit with each click of the mouse.  I wasn't quite sure why I was so nervous. My initial exploration was driven less by the desire to identify him and more by basic voyeuristic curiosity. How could this man be bearing his soul online when I'm afraid to post my picture on a blog where I have poured my heart about a family secret? And there he was, a gay actor.

 I stared, refocused and read again.

A gay actor?

He had been with his "partner" for years. They stood together in picture after picture, sometimes at home, sometimes on vacation.

A sudden fire engine outside my apartment made me jump up and then a split second later I was struck by laughter. Not because he was gay - how cool is that - but at the sheer ridiculousness of this entire situation. From my mother's insemination by some medical intern 30 years ago, to me sitting at a laptop contemplating gentic relation via a frigin MySpace page, this was just total ridiculousness. I could just imagine my Mom reacting to the news about the donor....

"But I ordered a Catholic polish medical intern!"she would say angrily.

"Sorry Ma, looks like things went a little differently," I'd say.

God, I would need a camera when I told her.

I continued to click through pictures with a guilty pleasure. It was like I was exploring myself in some detached way. He had an entire album of family photos. While his recent photos made him look a bit worn out, my resemblance to his younger photos was uncanny.

So I wrote an email to him via MySpace:

"Hi - I saw your post on the Donor Sibling Registry and viewed your pictures.You donated to the same clinic the same year that my mom was insemminated. Here is a photo of myself and if you see a resemblance too, we can move forward from there."

Short and sweet, I thought. Not to weird...very matter of fact. I mean there isn't a book of etiquette out there on this type of stuff. It's funny because I'm normally not so rigid but for some reason I felt a need to be stern, be sterile, be emotionless, but logical. Ironically, so similar to the essence of artificial insemination itself - something so special and life changing done in a methodical medical fashion. I can never forget my mother telling me in the days before sperm freezing, the vile was brought in a brown paper bag to the office from the hospital around the corner. God, can't get more detached than that.

I waited. I checked mail every hour - as if there was any chance that he check email at 11pm at night. I obsessed about it. Was he near a computer, now? How about now? Was he opening it? I tried to visualize him opening my message. Did he have an organized desk, or a cluttered desk? A laptop or a PC? Was he a Mac guy?

The night past without response.

In off moments on busy days I would find myself thinking about my email or Jake. I would practice redirecting my mind to something else. I had perfected this practice when I had gone on that first date with some guy I was interested in but wanted to temper my excitement so I wasn't hurt..keep my options open...guard myself. Yet we weren't dating, this man could be my biological father- weird, I know. But there was a similarity, this was the first step in a potentially important relationship and I felt so vunerable.

And then, I checked my personal mail at work and saw it "Jake2134." I clicked to open it:

"Dear ---,

Fate would have that I checked my yahoo email today, something I rarely do anymore. I went to myspace and was only able to open one of your attachments. You are a very beautiful woman. Can you send the attachments to this email. I check this email daily. I do see a resemblance. The only way to find out is to do a DNA test. The test cost about 130.00 which I would be glad to split the difference. I also have copies of my DNA test.

Truly yours.
Jake."

To Be Continued.......

UPDATED - This story was continued in two later posts Confronting Identity and Not The Man

Technorati Tag: Anonymous, Children, Family, Parenting, Internet, Pregnancy, Society, Women, Social, Infertility, Gay

Long Time No See

I have not written in a while and much has happened. I thought I had discovered a potential match on the Donor Sibling Registry Boards and immersemed myself in looking at his pictures and contemplating his background via facebook. The resemblance was uncanny....the story is long and I will sign on later to explain - for now I have to go to work and get on with things.

Do they really understand?

Last night I was out with some friends and they began critiquing their facial features at the dinner table. One friend does not like her nose, the other finds her forehead too big and another said she would have dimples surgically added if she could. I thought of the uneven dimples that set me apart from my family and found myself unable to participate.

My friend's see their faces as the most intimate expression of themselves, something they accept as their own and can therefore contemplate altering. My face represents something very different to me. I can't tell you the countless hours I have spent staring in the mirror wondering what part of my face is from my biological father. It's like playing one of those magazine games that ask you to compare two pictures to find the 10 differences. I scan my nose, my eyes, my chin and think of my mother's face. What is different? I imagine my face on a man. I compare my face to my brother's, who shares only my Mom's genetic lineage and try to pull out the sameness. Faces take on a different meaning when you cannot mentally separate your features into two parts. They become a map of your confusion and for some, a reminder of your search.

Coming home from dinner a family in Yankee gear got on the train after the parade and I began tracing the features from the faces of the mother and father to their children. On the subway I find myself totally engaged when families get in the same car. Its funny how certain features blend, like the shape of a jaw but others are one or the other like noses. The Dad in this family had a very prominent nose and the Mom had a small button nose. I giggled when it struck me that it was either one nose or the other. But I digress, the point I am trying to make is that the donor sibling experience really preoccupies you with concepts of inheritance.

Yesterday I wrote about collective experience and I believe it all connects. Faces are just another way of connecting to those around us and feeling that we share something. For children of sperm donors, that relation is hard to come by.

My face is one of the few things my biological father gave me, so I won't be getting a nose job anytime soon.

But liposuction, now that's not totally out of the question :)

Google and Sperm Donation

NOTE from Girl Conceived: This was my very first post on the blog.

Most of us can claim a romantic night, a back seat romp or fun times at a concert as the moment we "came to be." But some of us are the product of a premeditated act by two individuals who have never seen each other. We are donor-conceived, born of assisted reproduction. On the surface technology seems to enable us to do a lot these days. We can sit at our computers and do things we would never do in public. We can chat about taboo subjects, explore secret areas of interest, look at porn, and blog about issues we don't want to claim in person. Yet most of this activity is not as anonymous as we think. Cookies, Web histories and behavioral tracking are just a few of the mechanisms out there designed to gather perhaps the most valuable information on the Internet: demographic and consumer data. It's disheartening but not very surprising. All major forms of media have a commercial element that help them to advance and thrive. The Internet is not much different than its predecessors like TV and radio. Ironically there are conception scenarios where far, far less is known.

As the child of a sperm donor and a Mom and Dad that were desperate to have a child, technology plays a somewhat unusual role in my life. As an adult, working in technology and managing it's benefits for corporate gain blurs the lines of my values and beliefs. My mind runs in circles when I put together presentations on "technical solutions" and I contemplate what that terms means to me, the girl conceived by reproductive technology. While technology is typically viewed as the "resolution" to so many problems, for me, it is the root of my most plaguing problems.

The concept I struggle with most often is the ying-to-yang quality of technology.Our smiling faces on Web-sites like FaceBook and MySpace expose our lives, connect and let us be known by the world. Simultaneously, genetic and reproductive technology still operate on foundations of anonymity. Sperm, and eggs are move from one body to another without the receipient knowing the shape of a donor's smile or sometimes even their name. The cells that grow new skin over our wounds or the DNA that architects the scale of our faces can be anonymously delivered via technology.

These are the concepts, ideas and questions that keep me from blissful sleep at night and inspire me to learn, explore and write. For 28 years this has been a personal and private journey but in this age of collaboration and advancement, I wonder if these questions can't be answered using the very source of their conception - technology. And so, I begin that effort today in hopes that our shared conversation can lead us somewhere that makes a bit more sense.