Egg Donor, part 1: Eugenics meets Marketing

Published May 2, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

Choosing an Egg Donor

As I have discussed before, when we initially requested egg donor profiles from the agency, we were working on the assumption that I would be the biological father of our first (singleton) child. So we were initially asked for our criteria, we said all the things people usually say, I guess.

Healthy. Emotionally balanced. Intelligent. Charismatic. Attractive.

But we also added Caucasian, blonde and blue eyed and relatively small-framed. This was to try to make a mix of my genes and the donor’s look a little bit like it might have been a mix of my genes and Matt’s. Of course, mixing two men’s genes to make a baby is still a year or two off. The science is very optimistic, but we aren’t going to wait for that. Perhaps the next generation of gaybys will get that choice. 

We were initially sent a handful of profiles, and we began to sift.

What’s in a Donor Profile?

A donor profile starts with the basics you would expect – age, weight, race, religion (this is America, remember), occupation and marital status. Then it moves to to the slightly more detailed – hair colour, real hair colour, childhood hair colour, and starts to ask things you wouldn’t feel comfortable asking a new friend (or even some old ones) – did you wear braces? Have you ever had plastic surgery? Are you of Jewish descent? What is the exact ethnic make-up of your father? Your mother? How tall are you? How tall is your mother? Your father?

Then the profiles get into the real nitty-gritty. They ask for the full medical history of both sides of the family, including asking about a dozen different health conditions that you really wouldn’t ask in polite company. If any family member is not living, the exact details of their death are asked, and this then also extends to any and all siblings as well.

But then it got really personal. It asked about diet, exercise, sexual partners, menstrual cycle, what type of birth control has been used, have they ever had an abortion, how long do they bleed for, etc. It goes into a lot of raw physiological data and it doesn’t shy away from asking fairly intrusive questions like ‘How many sexual partners have you had?’, even.

Following that, they’re asked to provide the statistics for all their schooling and education. Whether they got A’s or B’s in primary school, what extra curricular activities did they undertake, and whether they went to one school or multiple schools.

It gave us a lot of background data about a lot of blonde Californian women. I wonder if I could re-use the data for peer-group studies, make some generalisations about Californian girls, perhaps.

And into their heads we go…

Then comes the psychological profile. They were given a series of questions about themselves to answer, which were all free-text, so they could express their personality. It starts with things that are actually related to the process  - “Why have you decided to become an egg donor?”, but it also moves quickly on to their characteristics.

To be frank, I’m not sure how I would have answered these questions if I was handed that questionnaire. It’s a bit daunting. Try some of the questions yourself:

“Please describe your personality now, as an adolescent, and as a child:”

“What are your personal goals in life?”

“What brings you the most joy in life?”

“How do you act when you get angry?”

These small samples would give you some idea of the level of depth that these forms went into. We have this profile of data on which to make our decision, and when you’re sent between four and ten of these profiles at a time, it’s a whack to read through, and a really important decision hanging over doing it right. It also asked them to describe their parent’s personalities as well, and any full-blood siblings that they have, too.

Starting from good intentions…

After reading a few of these, I actually put them all down, closed my mail and spent a couple of days delaying making a decision because I actually felt a bit uncomfortable about the process.

We’d started the process making the same statements that I am sure that dozens of different parents before us would have made. We said things like:

“We don’t care as long as they’re healthy”

“We just want a normal, happy child.”

But then there are So. Many. Profiles. to sift through. You have to make a short-list somehow. The breadth of options made us start to filter them based on other criteria that started to feel a lot more like we were straying further and further away from this. I think I realised I was automatically rejecting every candidate who had an academic record that wasn’t meeting my somewhat arbitrary criteria.

And you end up in Eugenics…

When asked to make a simple comparison: Would you use an egg donor whose family has no trace of cancer, or would you use an egg donor whose grandmother had breast cancer. Simple question, simple answer, you choose the first egg donor. Of course. That’s just making the right healthy choices for your babies.

Okay, next question. This egg donor has slightly higher grades than that one. Which? The higher grades of course.

Okay, moving on. This egg donor made a typo in her character profile, versus this one who did not. Which? Well, surely the one with attention-to-detail, right? No?

But when you have 20-40 profiles, you can get pretty arbitrary very quickly. Some of the reasons for rejecting profiles were starting to looking pretty shallow:

She is too Short.

Her grades were only “A” not “A+”.

Her Grandmother died quite young.

Her Brothers all didn’t finish school.

Her father has high blood pressure.

She had to wear braces.

She had a boob job.

Her one regret in life is “Not Being Taller, so I could be a model.”

She did a nonsense degree at University.

She looks drunk in that photo.

She’s doing duckface at the camera in this photo (I personally think that’s the most justified rejection).

These were all reasons I deleted Egg Donor profiles. Yes, by the end of the process, I was THAT shallow. It’s not like I’ve never been drunk, and at least one of my University degrees is blatant nonsense.

I have always thought that Eugenics was a bad thing. Until some very well meaning marketing people trying to sell me eggs starting making me make hard choices about which egg donors I would or would not be interested in contacting to find out about. Suddenly, I found myself right there, making distinctly morally questionable choices when selecting an egg donor of our own.

Boiling it down to basics, out of all those criteria, we still had around 4-5 profiles which we could not find any conceivable reason to reject.

But in the end our reason for selecting the one we chose was a lot more human…

…. more in part 2.

What’s in a name?

Published April 29, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

Don’t expect me to give away any secrets here, before you get excited. I know a lot of people are really keen to hear what names we’ve chosen for our children, but I am adamant that some things must wait until the day they’re born. When we introduce the children with their names, the two things will anchor together in everyone’s heads in a way that giving a name without an associated baby just wouldn’t do. People can hate NAMES, but I don’t think anyone can hate a newborn baby.

Extenuating circumstances have meant that Matt and I have had to decide on names early, because we’ve got paperwork and things to fill out, including plane tickets and court orders, and what-not. So, unlike most parents, we will not be given the luxury of deciding ‘on the day’. Instead, we needed to decide, like… now. That sped up the debate about names somewhat I assure you.

Learning that it was girls, the shock of which should probably be a post of it’s own since it stunned me into silence for about 2 months, we hadn’t yet really had any names that had really stuck. Nothing that had really stood out from the crowd as a contender.

I’m bound to offend a few people by saying this – but Boy’s names felt MUCH easier. We had boy’s names ready to go straight away, long before we even started the process. But as soon as we were told it was going to be girls, I drew a blank.

Looking at my own female role-models, none of the names really stand out for us. In fact, most feminine role-model forenames are sufficiently common that I don’t feel like I would be giving the girls something unique and precious. I would be making them simply the next in a long line with the same name.

And we had our criteria laid out. Well, all right, I’ll be honest. I had criteria and it was carefully laid out. My husband on the other hand had his own criteria, that didn’t really have much to do with mine.

His criteria were pretty simple, whereas mine were more involved. I am sure every parent can empathise with this list:

• Must be easy to spell, and spelt correctly. I don’t want my daughters to have to spell their names out over the phone twenty times a year for the rest of their lives.

• Must be easy to pronounce, and not contain phonetics (so all the Irish names like Aoife, Sioned, Siobhan are already out).

• Must be common enough that everyone has heard it before (so they can pronounce it). That means the name must be in the list of top 200-300 names being given out now.

• Must be uncommon enough that they don’t know anyone else who has that name. That means ruling out all the names in the top 100.

• Should be obviously feminine, as a ‘could be either’ name just creates confusion down the road.

• Must match up well with the family middle names we have already chosen in advance.

• Should be a classic, something which has been in use for at least a few hundred years. With all due respect, I don’t want to name our daughters something that anchor them in this decade. I want them to have a name that worked well 200 years ago, and will hopefully work well in 100 years time.

Very restrictive criteria when you add up all those. Add to that, “Must sound cool and a bit classy”, and “Matt must like the sound of it.”

Equally important to me, there are cultural and racial implications that must be considered. We can’t realistically name a girl child something that will have people automatically make assumptions about them for their entire life. An example of this would be friends-of-friends who both speak Japanese and gave their kids Japanese names. Now when someone reads out their names, they’re looking around the room for the Asian kids and don’t expect the name to belong to the blonde, blue-eyed girl. I know racism is a hot topic, but it’s alive and well, at least where I live, and we will be living in this world, so we have to accept some restrictions on that.

Rules can’t be ignored either – can’t use a name being used by a friend for their kids, and can’t use a name being used by any relative closer than 2nd or 3rd cousin. Because we all know that ends in tears. Oh, and despite some of my friends doing exactly that, it’s really not okay to re-use a pet’s name. Rover was a dumb name for a girl, anyway.

I also wanted the names to act as an anchor to time. I wanted the names to have history, in particular family history. Both Matt and I are ultimately British/Australians, with specific heritage in England (Yorkshire), Scotland and Wales. We wanted some sense of where we came from to be reflected in the names we chose for our children.

Tough call, eh?

Yet, somehow, within the last 48 hours before we had to decide, Matt and I (who rarely agree on anything, let’s be honest), managed to find a pair of names that matched all these criteria, and sound cool, and have the advantage of the fact that neither of us know anyone ever, in all our time on this planet who had those names. Of course, plenty of people exist with these names (they wouldn’t be classics without that). But the important thing is that neither he nor I know anyone who had these names.  You don’t realise how many people you hate until you start to pick a name for a baby!

So we’re now the other side of that decision, and it’s all good. We both really like the names that we’ve chosen, and we’ve committed to them in the form of paperwork, so they can’t actually be changed anyway.

And I’m amazed at how real they now seem in my head, now that they’ve got names. I can actually start to imagine the little people that they’re going to become, and picture the conversations we’re going to have. I’ve even started writing (yes, with a pen and hand-made paper) a diary of sorts for them to read when they have children of their own.

Don’t worry folks, it’s only 94 days between this post and the due date. That’s not long, really 

It’s still girls…. according to the scan!

Published April 25, 2014 | By Matt E. Hodgson-Fopp

Time is flying by. Personally I think too quickly. Lol.

It’s been 2 weeks since we were in Los Angeles with Mum and almost 2 weeks since the last lot of scans in Del Mar (San Diego -great place by the way-). Was a rather bizarre experience with 6 of us crammed into the ultrasound room. Poor Natasha was roasting, felt so sorry for  her. Was a great experience though and was awesome to see the Twinlets pushing each other around and posing for the camera. Ones definitely a princess (Twinlet B). If it’s genetic, it’s definitely from Greg.

Anyway here are the scans from 22 weeks ish. The Twinlets are now almost 24 weeks. Scary! Only 13 weeks to go :/

The List, according to “What to Expect…”

Published March 23, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

The Cutesie little Clothes

3-10 Under-shirts or Onesies* 
* open in front for newborns, until umbilical stump drops off. (FYI – that’s so gross). Then switch to ones that snap under the crotch for easy nappy changing

4-7 Stretchies with feet 
* make sure they have snaps or zippers at the crotch as we will be visiting the bottom area with alarming frequency

1-2 Two-piece outfits
* must snap together at the waist to stop them constantly exposing their girly midriffs and bringing all the boys to the yard.

3-6 Rompers
* these are one-piece, short-sleeved, snap at the crotch, feeted sacks.

3-6 Nightgowns
* must have elastic bottoms. Do not use drawstring nightgowns, and ensure they are made of flame-resistant materials. Um.

2-3 Blanket Sleepers
* Not even really sure what this is.

1-3 Hats
* one should have a brim. Should cover ears but not too tightly.

2-3 Pairs of Booties or Socks

1 Bunting or Snow-suit 
* look for a bunting that has a car-seat strap hole ? I don’t even know what this item of clothing is. I vaguely understand what a Snow-suit is, but why would a baby under 6 months need SKI GEAR, for crying out loud?

3 Bibs
* this seems like a hilariously small number.

3-4 Waterproof pants, diaper cover
* Only required if you plan to dress them in dresses that expose their undercarriage.

I’m a little confused now about the technical difference between one-sie, jumper, romper, stretchie and night-gown. I can see this is an area where my education has been lacking. I wonder if there is a “Dad’s Guide to the Confusing World of Baby Clothes Names” somewhere on the internet. I’d like to be good at this parenting thing, so I’m prepared to do my research.

The Linens

3-4 Fitted cot sheets per cot
* Can’t be too loose or too tight, must fit perfectly or baby may use it to tie into a rope and make a ladder to freedom, and subsequently escape captivity.

2-6 Waterproof pads

2 Quilted Mattress Pads
* not quite understanding the difference between these two items. Is this a mattress on a mattress?

2 Washable crib or bassinet blankets
* not actually allowed to use blankets or anything in a crib any more, but they’re for putting over a baby when they’re in the stroller or car seat, or otherwise being supervised.

1-2 Stroller blankets
* how, exactly, is a stroller blanket different from a bassinet blanket? Is one supposed to be outdoorsy in styling, while the other is themed to match the decor of the nursery?

2-3 Towels
2-3 Washcloths

12 Shoulder-protector wash-cloths
* preferably branded with your gym’s name and logo 

2-5 Receiving Blankets
* How can there really be so many different kinds of blankets. Is this the one we swaddle with?

2500 Nappies (per year, per baby)

Grooming

Baby Soap, Bath Liquid or Foam

No Tears Baby Shampoo

Baby Oil
* Used to clean a sticky bottom and also recommended for ‘cradle cap’. I have absolutely no idea what cradle cap is. But I can see there’s a wikipedia article on it, so I’ll read that if ever one of them has something on their head I can’t identify.

Baby Powder
* Apparently talc is no longer used and we use cornstarch now. Um. Talc never seemed to do me any harm, but I guess that depends on how you define harm. I did have an unhealthy obsession with the really nice smell of talc for years.

Ointment for Nappy Rash
* Ask your Doctor. So, apparently I have to go to a Doctor before they’re born and ask him to recommend a type of cream for Nappy Rash for babies I don’t have yet. That’s going to be an interesting conversation.

Petroleum Jelly
* I imagine we have some lying around the house somewhere.

A billion Nappy Wipes
* Curiously, not to be used to wipe up nappies for the first few weeks apparently. We have to use cotton balls and cool water until they’re 4 weeks old it says here.

Sterile Cotton Balls
* For eyes and arse

Baby nail scissors
* Never use adults ones which are apparently too sharp. I’m not entirely sure how a baby nail scissor can do it’s job if it’s not sharp.

Baby Brush and Comb
* Only if it has hair, which, given genetics, may be unlikely.

Medicine Cabinet

Liquid Paracetamol

Antibiotic Cream

Hydrogen Peroxide
* Not sure why we’d need this unless we don’t approve of their birth hair colour, or we’re trying to disguise them to smuggle them across a border.

Calamine Lotion
* for mosquito bites apparently. Maybe this is normal for babies who are delivered via floating reed basket on the Nile, but I’m not sure we’ll need it for Mosquitos in Zürich.

Rehydration Fluid Packs

Sunscreen

Rubbing Alcohol
* for swabbing that umbilical stump apparently. EW!

Calibrated spoon, dropper or oral syringe

Sterile Bandages or Gauze Pads in a variety of shapes and sizes

Adhesive tape
* I imagine gaffer tape will work just nicely.

Tweezers for pulling out splinters
* We’re not going to let them go near the firewood pile for about 10 years, not sure where they’d get splinters from, to be honest.

Nasal Aspirator

Ear Syringe 

Warm Mist Vaporiser
* Apparently a cold mist vaporiser encourages bacterial growth, and a hot mist vaporiser can lead to burns. So we have to get the goldilocks vaporizer that is “Juuuuuust right”.

A digital Thermometer
* They’ve recently decided that the digital ear thermometers are less reliable in infants, and so now recommend you have a temporal artery thermometer, which is placed against the forehead.

Small Penlight
* for checking pupils for dilation after head injuries. Is anyone else finding this list a little alarmist?

Tongue Depressors

Heating pad and/or hot water bottle

Feeding Supplies

4 bottles (120ml) with nipples and rings

10-12 bottles (240ml) with nipples and rings
* apparently nipples come in several shapes (I concur from my personal observations), and so do bottles. I need to get ones with angled necks and made from silicon. Bottles that is, not nipples. Or maybe both.

Bottle and Nipple Brushes

Large Measuring Jug

Measuring Cup

Can Opener
*Seriously?

Long-handled sterilisable mixing spoon 

Dishwasher basket designed to hold bottles and Nipples

A Breast Pump
* okay, I think we can skip this one

A Dummy / Pacifier / Binky
* why does this have so many different names?

I have to stop here and comment. I notice that this book is a reasonably new edition, and so should be up to date with all the latest technology. But for some reason doesn’t list the Steriliser as a must-buy accessory. I guess they assume we’re all going to boil pans on the stove-top and sterilise. But with twins, we’re looking at 20 bottles a day on average for the first 3 months, so that’d actually cost me more in electricity than buying a steriliser would.

I also notice it says nothing about a machine to mix the formula and put it to the perfect temperature. A friend (Hi, Stella!) has an amazing machine by Tommy Tippee that reduces infant formula preparation to about as complicated as a Nespresso machine. Tell it the bottle size, pop water in one bit and pre-measured formula in another bit, and you press a button, wait for 3 minutes and your bottle is ready.

Nursery

Crib
* Lead free, child-standard safety approved, convertible into a kiddy bed later. Slats must be no more than 2 and 3/8 inches apart (seriously? I send it back if it’s 2.5 inches?). Minimum rail height of 26 inches, and at least 9 inches clearance when side is down. A secure locking mechanism, no peeling paint, no rough corners and a metal support so that when the girls become “Jumping Toddlers” they won’t go straight through the bottom of the crib.

Crib Mattress
* Springs with a high number of coils, apparently.
* Apparently you can buy a mattress with a built in fan. How is THAT not an electrical fire hazard? Seriously?

Bumper
* Not really sure what this is, to be honest. Something to stop them flopping around?

Bassinet or Cradle
* Matt has vetoed the Moses Baskets thing apparently. So this is off the list.

Changing Table
* A stand-alone table must have protective guard rail, safety straps, washable padding, nappy storage (within our reach but out of grasping baby hands). I am a little bit amused at the idea of strapping a baby down while you change them. I don’t remember seeing anyone else doing that. This list also doesn’t mention changing table protectors or pads. I guess they must be implied.

Nappy Bucket
* Something that seals. Tight.

Baby Tub
* non-skid bottom kind that sits in a normal bath-tub. We could buy two. Or we could just sit them in the bottom of the bath and hose them down each day.

Bouncy Seat
* I loved this as a kid, but apparently they’ve gone high-tech these days and do everything including rocking themselves. I wonder if we can just find an “old school” one which is nothing more than a wire frame with a soft thing in it to bounce up and down in.

Rocking Chair or Glider
* Pretty sure we’ll be skipping this, even the book says “Having a Glider chair is optional”

Baby Monitor
* You just know we’re going to get the best in the range of this. It’s geeky! It’s technology! We want a baby monitor that does selfies and uploads to the internet for the old folks home residents.

Baby Swing
* Um. So this is something not the same as a bouncy seat, and people swear by it according to the book. This requires some googling. Oh, okay, one of these. Electric, swings itself. Interesting. Will we need two?

This is a Baby Swing

I can see why that might be amusing.

Night-light
* dimmable, so you can keep the light levels low so as not to wake them up properly when doing middle of the night feeds.

Portable Crib
* We have one of these already, not entirely sure why.

Equipment for Outings

We’re not done yet, we still need stuff for leaving the house with, apparently.

Stroller / Pram
* Oh my god this is a minefield. We must choose between classic, carriage, convertible, standard, umbrella, travel system or jogger. And whatever we get it has to be fit for two. This is the subject of a whole post on it’s own, but since Matt wants to be able to jog with the twins, I think we’re going to end up with something from the “Jogger” end of the scale. I wonder if we can find something like we saw in Priscilla, or something like this:

Child Safety Seat
* Another minefield, but one we’re just going to probably buy our way out of by buying the most expensive one we can find with the highest safety ratings.

Backpack Carrier and/or Sling Carrier
* These appeal to me. Apparently babies being carried are less fretful, so studies say. I like the idea of being slightly less encumbered by things to push and carry, and just having the little mini-mes strapped to me.

Diaper Bag
* These have to be custom, waterproof, washable, and have multiple air-tight parts, so you can keep dirty nappies away from sterile bottles.

And so we get to the end of the list of things we’re supposed to have BEFORE the babies arrive.

Please keep in mind that this list was compiled for ONE baby. Most of the items on the list will just have to be doubled for twins.

I think there is one last thing we should add to the list, then.

Bigger House.

Who’s the Daddy?

Published February 4, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

At the beginning, when my husband and I first started talking about the possibility of having children at all, I was the first one to say that I felt a paternal, genetic link was something that I really wanted to have.

I cannot fault his reaction. He didn’t even blink, or think about it for two minutes, or even hesitate at all and think of himself. He was utterly selfless and went “Well, you can be the Daddy then”.

I think I had half expected a tussle.

I mean, this is two people who can manage to have a meltdown if the waitress brings 3 pieces of bread to that table, or when there is only enough rice left for one of us to have seconds. We’re not a couple who are particularly prone to taking the moral high-road and just letting the other one have their fair share.

In a lot of ways, I think that’s healthy. It means neither of us is ever really in danger of becoming a doormat. If anyone is, to be honest, it’s me. When my husband inevitably reads this and decides to protest, I will feel it is necessary to remind him about the our experience with airlines meals.

This is how that works:

Step 1. The air hostess asks us what we want. He takes his first choice, and I am required to choose whichever hot meal he didn’t choose.

Step 2. We will both defoil our hot meals and examine the sundries and sides. If he decides that my hot meal looks more appetizing than his does, then obviously we swap. If he doesn’t like what he was served, then he offers it to me.

Step 3. He takes my bread roll.

Step 4. He takes my dessert.

Step 5. He offers me the slimy seafood and over-dressed salad that he didn’t want anyway as recompense for pillaging my dinner tray.

Step 6. The drinks trolley arrives and he asks me to make sure I get myself a beer as well as anything else I want to drink, so that as soon as the trolley dolly has moved on, he can have both beers.

Step 7. He takes the cheese and biscuits, but only if they’re cheddar.

Does this sound like someone who selflessly offered to let me be the paternal father of our children? And yet, when it came to something really, really important he was totally up for me to be the father, and he didn’t even seem to think about it much. 

I am incredibly proud (and more than a little bit surprised) at how beautifully generous my husband can be when it really matters.

So… I’m the Daddy?

So when we started the process, we had determined that I would be the paternal deposit provider (such a romantic term). So we decided to specify egg donor statistics and characteristics that would optimize the chances of the eventual children looking something like the two of us.

Which is why we had a list of surrogates all of which were fairly short, blonde, blue-eyed, petite-framed and with perfect teeth. Our initial goal was to make a baby which looked a little bit like both of us.

Then we spoke to the Doctors

At the time of our first appointment with Dr. Ringler, we were still quite firmly set on this course, and we told him exactly that on our initial consultation. He then patiently explained the process, which I am sure you are all now aware of thanks to my helpful posts, and we absorbed it and moved on.

Part of this explanation was where he explained to us that he recommended implanting two embryos, so as to maximise the chances of success in the first cycle. This came with the increased chance of twins, of course.

I don’t know whether it occurred to Matt, but the implications of what he said hit me pretty much immediately.

An incredibly selfish 24 hours

Over the next day or so after we had that consultation, I kept dwelling on what Dr. Ringler had said in his session with us. I wasn’t sure that what I had imagined could be done, and once I had spent some time researching the answers on the internet, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to mention it, or talk to Matt about it.

I don’t mind admitting, I was pretty overwhelmed with the whole thing. We had settled comfortably and amicably on me being the father of our child. We had tentatively said that we would probably go for a second child afterwards, with the unspoken implication being that the second child would be fathered by him, of course.

If I said nothing, then we would proceed as planned. I would be the father of our first child. Which, when matched with an egg donor who looked like Matt, would mean we would probably never bother to tell anyone who was the biological contributor. In fact, Matt and I had agreed that that would be the case – we imagined that people might guess, but we would never condone such guesses by giving them air. We would always refer to our children as “ours” and never let people think otherwise.

But further internet-based research told me that the chance of twins with a double implantation was also quite high. If we ended up with twins from just my contribution, we would have two little mini-me’s and we’d be quite unlikely to go back and have a third child. Two really is twice as many as we’d hoped or expected, let’s be honest.

A deep breath

I decided I needed some perspective, so I took a long walk home from work one night, and I called a friend and had a good chat. It was with a good friend, someone I can trust to air the selfish side of my psyche, and who I knew wouldn’t judge me for exposing that. I explained that if I said nothing, I would soon be the father of one or two children, and that Matt would have his turn to be father in a couple of years time.

I also expressed my fears. I worried that if I suggested we change our course, and that it turned out that I wasn’t the father of our first child, that Matt might get over the idea of having a second child. That it would be something that we perhaps couldn’t afford to do a second time, or which, once scarred by the first-born, we decided not to do again.

If we only had one child, and it wasn’t mine, would I be resentful? Would I be more than slightly disappointed? People who adopt seem to love their children just fine. As do people who co-parent children from previous marriages. They seem to wear their non-biological-parenthood as a badge of pride as far as I can observe from outside. It almost feels like their love for their children is somehow purer because it isn’t biological and hormonal.

I’m more selfish than them, I think. I think if I didn’t get to have a child of my own lineage, that I’d be actually totally gutted. I see traits in myself that I inherited from my parents and grandparents. Things like my Dad’s eternal optimistic outlook (that he shares with his brothers and my brother as well). My Mum’s enormous capacity for love. My maternal Grandmother’s resolve and explorer’s spirit and my paternal Grandfather’s love of music. I want to create a mini-me that encapsulates and picks and chooses from these traits and makes their own unique mix of the above and all the rest on offer in my DNA.

So I had a choice to make. Possibly one of the biggest I’ve ever made. 

Do I stay quiet and be the only father of our first child? Or do I suggest to Matt and the Doctors that we both fertilize one embryo, and in doing so, take the risk that I wouldn’t get to be a father at all? Maybe not ever?

Fertilizing one each, the chance of me being a father dropped from near 90% to near 60%. I know that sounds cold and analytic, but sometimes cold and analytic is who I am. I’m not quite sure which grandparent I get that one from. My maternal Grandfather, I suspect.

As I walked home in the freezing cold, in my head I just kept remembering how amazing he had been when I had said it was important to me. Right at the start of this whole process, he had been completely understanding of my needs, and my urges to be a father, and he had been utterly, completely selfless.

Admitting Selfishness, and accepting the risk

As soon as I got home, I mentioned to Matt the thought processes that I had been going through, and suggested to him that we both fertilize one egg from the initial two embryos being implanted.

As I knew he would, he happily and gleefully jumped on the idea and was really stoked that I had been the one to suggest it. And so that’s what we did. We would let nature decide.

It was a step for me, emotionally. I took a deep breath and let it out, and accepted that I might not be the biological father of our child when it arrived. I accepted that if life took different turns, I might never actually be a biological father. There might not be a little mini-me to carry on my Grandfather’s love of good carpentry and have his flawless ear for music, or my Dad’s robust optimism that has carried me through all of life’s corners and spills. I would still be a father, and a parent, but it might be to a little mini-Matt instead, with his unique quirks from his family and not mine.

And I let that breath out, and accepted that I was fine with that.

But I think from that moment onward, I was secretly, desperately hoping for twins. With twins, there was no downside. There was no “We might decide to stop at one”. There was no “We might not be able to afford it”, and there was no easy out clause for whoever didn’t get to be Daddy the first time around. I didn’t even really hide it much, I think everyone in the relatively small circle of friends I was able to talk to about this knew that I was dead keen for twins from the moment we went through this thought process.

I mean who doesn’t like a bargain, right?

The down-sides

There was, of course, at least one down-side to this process. We had already selected our egg donor profiles, and we were already sifting through the options and so forth. It didn’t make much sense to turn down perfectly good candidates simply because we’d chosen them for physical characteristics that matched Matt and not me.

So while we had stacked the odds in one respect, in another respect, some things were less certain.

I’m fairly sure we’re going to have blondes.