When people ask me about my two children, I tell them my kids are both extroverted, unlike my husband and me. My older daughter loves art and writing stories, and my youngest loves going to Target.
What I don’t tell most people is that they were conceived as a result of an egg donor and share half their genetics with someone I’ve never met.
After years of fertility treatments using my own eggs, my husband and I, after careful consideration, decided to use an egg donor to grow our family. We had gone through multiple fertility treatments: fertility medications timed with my menstrual cycle, intrauterine inseminations, and in vitro fertilization (IVF).
What I don’t tell most people is that they were conceived as a result of an egg donor and share half their genetics with someone I’ve never met.
We had come to realize that there was something wrong with my eggs and that it was likely I would never make a baby using them. But because I still wanted the option of carrying a pregnancy, we opted to use donor eggs. Since there was nothing concerning about my husband’s sperm, we would be able to combine it with eggs of a donor and hopefully have a baby.
Looking through the donor profiles, I knew I didn’t want someone with a mental illness or a family history of cancer. I wanted someone who ideally had other children of their own, someone who shared my skin color, and someone who was introverted like me. Often, when you decide to use an anonymous donor, you don’t get a lot of information beyond medical and family history and physical features. You don’t usually know if they love reading or cooking or if they secretly hope their kid will be a future gymnast. You get only the essential facts. I wish I could have known more.
I first chose an egg donor who looked very similar to me so that my kids might have some of my physical traits. In that way, it made the decision relatively easy. While she had a son of her own, her eggs hadn’t yet been used for a recipient family. It was a gamble, and I didn’t end up getting pregnant with her eggs.
With our last fertility treatment looming, I needed a donor who was proven, meaning one whose eggs had already successfully created a child for a recipient family.
She didn’t look like me, but what mattered was that my donor had been popular for families, which is a strange thing to write, like she’s a commodity. But seven years ago, I ended up choosing her because she’d made a lot of other families’ dreams come true; my batch of eggs was to be her last before she retired from the world of egg donation.
I thought periodically about my donor. I wondered if my daughter would feel like a stranger to me when I held her after giving birth.
I don’t remember there being a lot of agonizing over the process or second-guessing whether I’d made the right decision. By this time, I was just focused on getting pregnant.
All through my pregnancy, when I finally got pregnant with my daughter after six years of failed fertility treatments including intrauterine insemination and IVF, I thought periodically about my donor. I wondered if my daughter would feel like a stranger to me when I held her after giving birth.
Luckily, my fears were unfounded. It was like saying hello to an old friend, one I’ve known for years. I would gently touch her fists, her small knees, remembering what they felt like as they prodded me from the inside.
When my second daughter was born four years later, after we returned to the clinic to use our remaining frozen embryos, the fact that she was donor-conceived was the furthest thought from my mind. All I could think about was her hair. Her little fingers. Her first cry. How much she looked like her older sister.
I don’t think of my egg donor often anymore. Life is too busy now as a mom of two. But wherever the topic of genetics comes up, my mind goes to her.
There was one time we were talking about eye color at the dinner table. Both my husband and I have brown eyes. While it would be statistically possible for our daughters to have different eye colors from us as their parents, it would be unlikely since brown eyes is a dominant trait—that’s what went through my head as my husband explained genetics to our daughter.
There are moments it’s hard. It’s a life I chose in order to have kids, and I don’t ever regret it. But there are challenges that are unique to parenting donor-egg kids. We talk to my older daughter about her and her sister’s egg donor, though probably not as much as we should.
It feels hard to bring it up to my daughter because there’s the underlying fear of saying the wrong thing and somehow implying she’s not really mine. That she has a real mom out there. Deep down, I know they’re unfounded. I know she’s fully and completely mine.
These are issues that are mine and ones I need to work through with the help of a good therapist that specializes in these issues. I’m planning on having a few sessions about navigating these talks with my daughters. For now, we read a book about a family that used an egg donor, one that explains the process in a way a young child can understand.
We talk to my older daughter about her and her sister’s egg donor, though probably not as much as we should.
As I get further away from the process, the thoughts and worries come far less often now. And my daughter loves hearing about her roots. She knows there was a “special lady,” a term our donor egg book uses, who gave an egg to her mama from which she came. Periodically, she’ll ask me to tell her the story of the doctors and the embryos and how she was placed inside me. I keep things matter-of-fact. It can be hard sometimes to navigate the existence of this other woman, whom I deeply appreciate and feel threatened by all at the same time.
Despite these challenges, I’m grateful for my egg donor. I’m grateful for the science that exists in order for us to become a family. One day, I may reach out to my fertility clinic to get in touch with my donor. For now, it’s enough to parent my two girls.