My first date with my wife, Kristi, was July 11, 2012. We went to two bars and then after midnight, I asked her if she wanted to come hang out at my apartment for a little bit. We stayed up until 5 a.m. talking and kissing. At around 3 a.m., I asked her if she wanted to have kids and if she wanted to carry them. I knew that I wanted kids, and I didn't think I didn’t want to carry them. She said yes to both questions.
We dated, said “ I love you,” got engaged, got married, bought a house, and then we started talking more seriously about starting a family in 2015. From that first date, we both knew how we would have kids: she would carry them. I knew I didn’t want to carry, but I was having a hard time with not being biologically related to my children. I had the perfect solution: we would use my brother as a sperm donor. That was I would be genetically related to them and my parents would be their biological grandparents. But my wife didn’t want that. She felt weird about having my brother be the daddy uncle figure. It was her body, so it was her choice.
We made the decision to use a sperm donor, and we tried to find someone who looked and or seemed like me. We looked for someone with green eyes, curly hair, some type of creative profession or interests, and a dog lover. But we also had to consider genetics because, above all else, we wanted a healthy child, and needed a CMV negative donor, and someone who was willing to be known to our children when they turn 18. All of this narrowed the choices down a lot and the similarities to me seemed to get lost in all the other options.
We went through a few donors over a year of failed pregnancy attempts. Then we picked a donor who worked: donor 4390. His eyes are brown, not green, his hair is curly, and he is a college professor in business, not English like me, and he has a PhD, which I’ve always thought I would have, but I don’t. Maybe we are similar and maybe we are stretching the connections a little bit. His family history is almost flawless and he is not a carrier for any genetic diseases. Kristi went through egg retrieval for IVF with donor 4390, after six failed IUI attempts, and she got 11 embryos. She put in one embryo the first time and it didn’t take, so the second time she had two embryos implanted. We found out a few weeks later that she was pregnant with twins.
Kristi’s pregnancy was hard for me. I was obsessed with the thought that my wife was expecting twins and I was not. People around us just solidified that for. When people saw us together, they congratulated her even before she was showing. She was carrying the children, so she was the mother and she was the one to be congratulated. It didn’t feel good. Kristi knew how I was feeling, which took away some of the joy from her pregnancy. For that, I will always be sorry. Whenever someone congratulated her or asked questions about her children and I was around, she worried that I was feeling left out. I didn’t feel like I was becoming a parent and people around us didn’t treat me like I was becoming a parent, so the external world was feeding my internal dialogue. I worried the entire pregnancy about whether or not I would feel connected to the babies and what I would do if I didn’t feel anything.