Do you know the movie? You know the one where “In "the not-too-distant" future, genetic engineering of humans is common and DNA plays the primary role in determining social class and ethan hawke plays a guy who fools everyone he being born without the help of genetic tinkering is discriminated against etc…anyway…where was I. Oh yeah, finding a donor.
As my husband and I looked at the donor selection – trying to minimize photos by asking the two agencies we were working with to send us PDF sans images…we started to get caught up in the stories – not the whole I like this, or eat that but the story of I paint, or I’m good at math, or I studied this and my siblings do X while my parents do Y – getting caught up in whose story is most similar to mine…and then the epiphany came…these are just stories and it really doesn’t matter what these people do (direction is so much determined by home life/circumstances/chance etc) – I see how much we influence our daughter now, see how different she is from her cousin of the same age in many respects because of how we are raising her and while genetics are responsible for a predisposition and her looks we help to guide that and foster or negate certain qualities which bring me back to this: in the end we threw out the stories of the donors just as we’d thrown out the images and went to who is the healthiest, who doesn’t have cancer, and has perfect eyesight etc (see Gattica above) and then it was easy there was only one who had such a clean slate. So we picked her. And in the game of pretending we can control anything we feel like we have someone who at least on paper will give our possible baby the best chance for a long disease free life. That and we had the nurse who chose our previous donor take a look at the photo of this donor to let us know if she thought she was compatible not with me but with the donor for our daughter. And she is. To back track I sent photos of our daughter to the agencies and had them select donors for us since we didn’t want to see the images.
And there we have it. We will do a cycle at end of August/September.
Fingers crossed.
6 comments:
fingers crossed! Oh yes, I know that Gattica feeling. Wishing you so much luck.
Loved Gattica and I hear you. I felt similar when choosing our donor. All I really cared about was that she liked to dance because it my most favorite / needed hobby. Not that it is necessarily genetic, but I was hedging my bets.
Fingers crossed for you!
I'm glad you've been able to select a donor. Good luck with the upcoming cycle. I'll be following along to keep you company. :)
Good luck - I hope your cycle is a success.
Oh yeas - and we all know families where their genetic children look totally different from them or have totally different likes and dislikes. When were deciding on donor eggs, a friend told us about the theories of epigenetics - where the espression of the genes of an embryo is influenced by the hormones other factors provided by the woman carrying it. That really touched me - the idea that even though my egg was not part of our embryo, I would still contribute to how the baby turned out.
Choosing a donor is not an easy thing. You just have to do what you guys did, which is to do what feels right for you.
Crossing my fingers and my toes.
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