#choiceparent

I’m back!! 

This has been a really, really shitty year. But it’s nearly over, and I think it’s time for a recap and a refocus. 

So to catch you up, I’m the single mom of donor conceived, two year old, funny little man. 

Three years ago I had the disorienting experience of finding out that my ovaries were failing as a single woman. I had a brief window of time to decide whether or not to become a mom and no ready access to sperm. Three months later, I was pregnant. Then my mom got sick. Then she died. And then a bunch of other stuff, and here we are. 

On the whole, I think my experience has been pretty unique. So I thought I would try to pen a series of posts that might be helpful to folks who are faced with similar decisions. Whether you are single and considering having a kid on your own, or facing fertility issues of one kind or another and are considering donor conception (or both), I know these are really, really difficult decisions. Most of us have a picture of how we are going to start a family some day. It's not easy to swap that image for a freezer tank with an ounce of $700 sperm and a nurse named Nancy. It's a little more than a pivot.

So I'm going to try and share some of the thoughts I had when I was first dealing with all of this. Maybe someone will find it helpful. Or not. Maybe my son will find it interesting some day. Or not.

It’s been an eventful couple of months since I last wrote anything here. I’ll post the big news now, but I want to catch up on all the details over the next few days.

Since my last post…I finally talked to my doctor, went to China, came home, celebrated my grandmother’s 100th birthday, panicked about a NOT getting one virus while fighting nausea from another, bought a whole bunch of sperm, celebrated Thanksgiving, and generally spiraled in and out of crazy town several times a day.

So some stuff’s happened.

Actually I got a call from my doctor a couple of hours after I wrote my last post. She confirmed premature ovarian failure (POF—I’m learning the lingo), but said that for the moment, I have just as much of a chance at conceiving as any 37 year old woman. For the moment. She made it clear that I don’t have any time to waste. And then she said this: “I suggest you try to conceive immediately with donor sperm.” I’m not sure if it was the word “immediately” or “donor sperm” that made me feel like my head was filled with cotton and my living room was on the moon, but I’ve definitely been in another reality since that moment.