This was not a hypothetical question to me. My sperm count is zero due to a blockage in the plumbing. We tried an operation, but it didn’t work and it didn’t seem like it would work. Plus it cost $10,000 every time we did it. This was 1994 or 5 or so. Back when 10K meant something.
I didn’t think I wanted to adopt because for me, I felt I really needed to be able to relate to my children. I have a hard time relating to other people’s children. They scare me.
So I thought maybe we would try a donor. We thought of my brother, but I decided I couldn’t really live with that. Our relationship is already problematic, and even though we’d set a clear expectation that it wasn’t his kid, he’d know and I’d know, and it would be weird.
Eventually, we settled on my best friend. He was my best friend for a reason. We are alike in many ways. We are of similar build. Though we don’t look alike. Still, I felt that I’d know his child and I’d be able to relate to it better than just about anyone else’s. So he made a donation, and we tried several times, but my wife never got pregnant that way.
To go to a sperm bank would have been very difficult. I would not really know who the father was, and no matter how much they tell you, they can’t tell you the things that make me recognize my children. There is no place my son could get his penchant for self-denigration than from me, and I don’t think he learned it because he started doing it before he was old enough to even know he was doing it.
And my daughter has a certain style of silliness that comes from both of us, but I couldn’t have known that because my wife never exhibited it until the stress of work had gone out of her life, which only happened a couple of years ago.
I could come up with hundreds of other examples of how I feel like I understand my children because they do things that only I understand because I do them.
We eventually did have our own kids, because the technology got better, and they could retrieve sperm from my epididymus, and put it together with my wife’s eggs while we made woozy eyes at each other in adjoining recovery beds.
Everybody makes their way through the sperm donor process in their own way. You have to decide what is important to you. Some people just want a kid. They’ll do anything to get one. We wanted a kid, but we weren’t going to do just anything—not, at least, after we tried it and it didn’t work. We were relieved that sperm donation didn’t work. It gave us the impetus to try to have our own children again.
But if I did use a donor, I think I’d want one that looked like me and had as many of my traits as possible, because I’d want to be able to look at the kid and identify with him or her and looks are a part of that. I’m sure it’s all psychological. I know plenty of people who have adopted and who love their kids just fine. Hell, I love their kids, too. But I can never see them and not know they are adopted and that means that there are things happening with those kids that their parents will never be able to understand. I don’t think I could parent that way, feeling like I didn’t understand my kids.
