One Saturday afternoon in the early spring of 2011, I sat expectantly at my desk, pale sun coming in a side window, waiting for my doorbell to buzz and jolt me back to now. Three friends were coming over to help me make an epic decision: they were to help me choose the father of my child.
At that point, of course, there was no child. There was only hope, and seemingly infinite possibilities about who’d sire this would-be baby and who that child would grow to be. It had taken several years of deliberation and simultaneous lack of romantic prospects to get me to the point of unequivocally embracing the idea of single motherhood, but here I was—finally.
Now, I needed to figure out whose sperm might help me realize this dream. All I knew then was that I wanted an anonymous donor. Conceiving a baby with a friend might only add complications to an already complex circumstance.
Gearing up for the fateful meeting, I consulted with a handful of single moms in my orbit about how they had come to make their donor decisions. One told me above all she wanted a Jewish donor, so that if her child ever met the biological father and it turned out they had nothing else in common, at least religion might provide them common ground. Another woman looked for a donor with musical aptitude. A third wanted someone with an interest in travel. She is herself an avid traveler, and to the extent that wanderlust falls under the “nature” umbrella, she wanted her child to grow up eager to see and understand different peoples and cultures.
These criteria made a certain sense. I wanted my child to be a global citizen, too. I also wanted her, or him, to have a sense of humor, a love of reading, gusto for exercise. These are, after all, part of who I am and how I engage with the world.
Then I had a conversation with my older sister, a frank lawyer and mother of three who brooks no nonsense. Love of travel is learned, she asserted. Sure, innate musical talent exists, but largely it comes down to practice and persistence. Your child will see you read and may or may not become interested in books.
What she seemed to be telling me is: You can only mold your child so far. He or she will have interests and aptitudes you cannot account for, and you cannot control, so don’t waste time and energy analyzing the minutiae of a donor’s personality. After all, I was not choosing a donor for a date, I was choosing him for his genes.
Her insights resonated, and I boiled my “must-haves” down to health, physique, a modicum of intelligence, and a willingness to be contacted by future offspring after said offspring turns 18. I wanted someone fit. Someone tall. Someone without a familial history of heart disease or cancer or mental illness. All the rest—an understanding of the A-flat scale, a penchant for bold colored-socks, a love of sushi, whatever—I could try to impart. And if my relatively narrow parameters wound up dictating that he or she couldn’t even bang out Chopsticks, we’d all get along well enough.
Still, the selection process turned up biases I didn’t even know I had—biases that surprised and embarrassed me. I had strong reservations about donors with German or even Polish lineage, even though I consider myself open-minded and have friends with such backgrounds. Still, I’m a Jew, and the unspoken lessons of the Holocaust endure.
On the other hand, I was drawn, as I would bet are many women, to donors with movie-star good looks. Strapping fellows with searing blue eyes and strong hands. The California-based sperm bank I was using had a curious search option I had only just then discovered: I could select someone based on what celebrity he resembled.
So, when my friends came by that day, my laptop was open to a donor bank operatives (or algorithm) determined looked like dreamy Viggo Mortensen. I tried to imagine what the offspring of a Viggo-look-alike and me would look like. Impossible to know. Even more difficult to conjure, beyond thighs as massive as Redwoods. (I thank the movie Eastern Promises for that information.) At the same time, I knew that where one person might see Aragon, I might see bug-eyed Marty Feldman. It’d be folly to choose a donor on such a basis.
Physical characteristics—eye color, weight, height—had to be objectively measurable. But, as one friend astutely pointed out, were I to conceive, I wouldn’t care a bit if my donor was blond or bald, if he was 5’7 or a 6-footer, if he was pudgy and bit his nails. To linger on these particulars was wasting time. Go forward, she counseled, choose with confidence but with economy.
Sage advice. Many months later, in summer of 2012, when I went for a sonogram, the technician asked me if my husband was very tall. The fetus had long legs. By then I was in my second trimester of pregnancy. There is no husband, I told her, a little nervous. It was the first time I had shared that intimate fact with a stranger. And I didn’t know the father’s height. By then, I had forgotten all the stats. Just as predicted, they no longer mattered.
In fact, all I could recall at that moment was how gentle the donor’s voice was. For an additional fee, the sperm bank sold audio interviews with potential donors. In listening to these interviews, I had heard the cadences that give away personality. I could make note if a voice was gruff or high, and discern humor and warmth there. To me, I remember, the voice of my donor sounded self-assured, humble, and friendly.
I reckoned that unless life dealt my donor terrible blows, some of that gentleness would endure. So if, 17 or so years hence, my child—a boy, it turned out, now one year old—elects to meet his biological father, he can judge for himself whether there is any resemblance to some bygone celebrity and which side of the family, exactly, the hazel in his eyes comes from. Hopefully too, he’ll detect the kindness and generosity that I thought I heard on that recording, and feel himself at once at home.
