Single Mother by Choice with a Twist

I still can’t believe this is happening and hopefully I won’t jinx it by writing it down. FOB has returned and has expressed an interest in being a known donor. The offer was completely unsolicited. I was floored. He had kind of mentioned it a few weeks prior, but I brushed it off, sure I had heard him wrong and not wanting to get my hopes up...

after all I still had no clear idea why he went missing several months earlier.

I have to be careful. I love him and that makes me vulnerable. As a rule, I try not to make business decisions based on emotions. The goal is to be logical about anything that has long term or financial implications. But isn’t making a baby, the one time I might be a little flexible on this rule? The answer is yes and no. The truth is this is what I wanted from the start, to go half on making a baby with this one. When he went missing, I just had to regroup and keep going. (Mind you, this only happened after the NTNP miscarriage. Prior to accidentally getting pregnant, I had no desire to have another child. After the miscarriage it was all I could think about. But, I digress...).

I hardly missed a step after deciding to go down this path completely all

one. I did my first home insemination in October. Before I could do the home insemination, I need sperm. Donor sperm, specifically. I chose to use California Cryobank. It came highly recommended, had higher standards and was pretty straightforward to get going. My reproductive endocrinologist had to sign and return a form letter authorizing the use of the sperm for procreation purposes. (Don’t want that DNA floating into the wrong hands). Then I took my trigger shot at home and 36 hours later inseminated myself with the STORK OTC. It was funny, sad and liberating all at once.

But how did I chose the donor? Easy! I found the picture (childhood) of a donor that looked like FOB. The donor was French Canadian and blue eyes. He was a little taller than FOB and his hair was on the reddish brown side, but it was pretty close. You don’t see the donors as adults, which is this whole other weird thing. (It can’t be normal to imagine procreating with a child, but I get wanting to keep the anonymity of the donor.)

One home insemination and four IUIs later, I still am not pregnant and the original (FOB) has returned offering to be a known donor. I’m over the moon and terrified at the same time. Now we start the tests and draft the legal documents and hope the second time with that sperm is magic. I won’t have a clear path forward until all the "t’s" are crossed and "I’s" are dotted. But I am more hopeful than I have been since starting this whole journey. I finally feel like I’m free to dream, at last.

Come on rainbow baby, mommy is waiting.