My daughter will spend Father's Day with the man who gave her her curly hair. (Update post #30) [View all]

[Ms. Toad]

Last edited Mon Jun 20, 2016, 05:29 AM - Edit history (1)

Sunday will be a day I don't even have words for, and one we had given up on ever seeing.

Nearly twenty-seven years ago, in the first few days of November, we made our 4th and final attempt at donor insemination; one last try we begged our doctors for, since they wanted to stop out of a concern that an earlier illness had left me infertile. We wrestled with the DI requirements that selected a donor by matching my wife's characteristics or, as a fall-back, mine so we could pretend that she was our biological child (as two women, right ). More significantly that they required us to sign away our daughter's right to ever know her biological heritage. The rules echo the adoption protocols from a few decades earlier, in which the biological families of adopted children were routinely erased.

Our 26 year old daughter has always wondered about where she came from, and we have done what we could over the years to help her find her donor. But we ran into a series of carefully crafted, as well as accidental, roadblocks that seemed to make the task impossible.

But in the wee hours of Easter morning this year, my daughter emerged from her room, plopped her computer on my lap, and said, "Look at this Mommy!" One of the genetic genealogy services had matched her with her donor. The genetic match was nearly 50% (parent-child matches are approximately 50% with each parent), so there is little doubt about the validity of the match. It took less than 5 minutes to find him on social media - and confirm he had been in the right place at the right time, and that he had the ethnic heritage we strongly suspected (based on her chronic illnesses - and on the attempted match to the country of origin for my wife's family). Since then we have confirmed that he donated to the sperm bank we used - and has a daughter who, from pictures, looks remarkably like our daughter.

So, on Father's Day, our daughter will meet, and spend the day with, her donor(?), biological father (?), as well as half bio-siblings (?), step-bio-mom(?), cousins, grandfather, aunts & uncles etc. She will start the process of acquainting herself with others who look similar to her, may have mannerisms or facial expressions that are genetically inspired - but who have lived very different lives. Informally, she started referring to him yesterday as "Dad."

Coming, in the wake of Orlando, opening our family (specifically our daughter) to someone who was likely unaware his donation would be used by a lesbian couple (and may not be happy about it), feels a bit less safe than it did a few months ago when the match was made.

Don't get me wrong - I'm thrilled for her. But I'm also a bit terrified that it won't go well - or that it will go too well and reinforce her emotional distance from her other mom. Hoping it won't be too overwhelming for her to manage alone (we're not, at this point, invited). Hoping that if "Dad" isn't a good fit, that a new, perhaps not yet envisioned, role will be right. Wondering where we go from here.

And what the heck I call all of these new, not-quite-relatives, anyway?