An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  Officially, I am appalled by this. It must, I think, encourage a cowboy mind-set among fertility doctors. Secretly, however, as with my entire push-me, pull-me relationship with American health care, I am delighted by the freedoms of the American system; the lack of moral judgment it implies and the amount of information I can find out about the donor. And while I watch as friends in Britain struggle to source sperm, I have access to more than I know what to do with. (Since the laws changed in 2005, sperm donors in the UK have had to forfeit their anonymity, so that children can get in touch with them when they turn eighteen. As a result, the number of donors has dropped, while the number of women seeking to use them has risen. I have friends back home who report applying to a donor bank for sperm only to discover there are only a handful of donors on the list—and far fewer identifying details than one is provided with in the United States. If you want to know how tall the donor’s siblings are or what they do for a living, tough. If you want Jewish sperm, tough, there’s a shortage and the sperm bank might not even make that information available, because, by some skewed logic, it is thought to constitute “religious discrimination.” And by the way, you can’t import it from Israel—a friend in London tried and was told the regulatory body in Britain doesn’t allow sperm into the country that doesn’t meet the country’s strict compliancy laws. “Can’t I just take it on the plane in a freezer bag?” she said to the doctor in Tel Aviv. He might’ve done it, too, she said, if he hadn’t known she was a journalist and suspected a setup. “I suppose technically it’s people trafficking.”)

  “He looks spectrumy,” I say to L on the phone one day. It is the middle of the working week and I am supposed to be writing about the war against Christmas. Instead, I am picking holes in a photo of a five-year-old boy.

  “He’s cute!” she says, looking at the screen in her office.

  “Is he?” I glance down the profile and see that he has grown up to be a twenty-nine-year-old computer analyst. “Do you think that means Bill Gates or the IT guy?”

  “What does the rest of the profile say?”

  Farther down the page, the desk clerk describes him as “shy,” evidently code for weird, even though I am shy myself and, with the exception of L, can’t tolerate extroverts. I look at him again. He is squinting slightly, looking anxiously at the camera, and it’s at that point that I feel a strange shift in perspective. As I consider this nerdy little guy in his disastrous sweater and massive glasses, I have a surge of maternal feeling. I don’t want his sperm, but if he were mine, I would kill anyone for critiquing him as I had.

  “I don’t really approve,” says Gavin. It’s Friday night and we are drinking martinis at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central station. The place was empty an hour ago. Now it’s thronged with men in suits, ties loosened, lunging toward the bar. (I’m supposed to be cutting down on drinking, but I figure one can’t hurt. After all, I’m only thirty-eight.)

  “How can you not approve, you’re a gay man!”

  “What does that have to do with it?” Every time I talk with Gavin about this he rotates between supportive and sucked-lemon face. My joke about janitor’s sperm hasn’t landed well and right now he is going the full sucked lemon.

  “It sounds like eugenics,” he says.

  “What? So I should go for the ugly stupid guys, just to be fair?”

  “But it’s so superficial.”

  “Everything’s superficial! I don’t see you picking out the monsters on Grindr.”

  “But you don’t give someone a chance to show you their charm.”

  “But it’s not a relationship!”

  “Yes. But.”

  “What?”

  “Well . . .”

  “What?”

  “I wouldn’t get picked in this kind of selection.” Ah.

  “That’s ridiculous. You have a really good degree. You have a great job in journalism. You’re really attractive.”

  “I’m too old.”

  “You’re only forty!”

  He looks depressed. “You know that in gay years that’s about seventy-five.”

  “I would totally take your sperm if I thought you’d give it to me.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  Gavin cheers up and we order another round. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  He is right, of course. It does sound awful, all of it, right down to “using” a sperm donor. The language is cold and commercial and it makes men feel bad, as if the criteria on which my choice of donor is based were a referendum on them personally. I suspect there’s an aesthetic dimension, too. Liberals are supposed to applaud a woman’s right to choose, whether that be to abort, to have a baby and walk away from her spouse, or to be abandoned and still raise her children with dignity, so that right-wing initiaves encouraging women to marry are mocked by people like me as hopelessly confused. But I know plenty of lefties who cringe at the idea of relatively wealthy women having children alone via sperm donor, either because, when they try to imagine their own lives minus their beloved fathers, it makes them feel sad, or because it seems like yet another example of privileged people gaming the system.

  “But why shouldn’t I have one if I want one?” I say to Gavin, who doesn’t believe that having a child is an inalienable right.

  “Yes, and I want a five-bedroom house in Chelsea, Emma. But we can’t all get what we want, can we.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WITH THE HYSTEROSCOPY behind me, Dr. B schedules my first round of IUI for the end of December. In anticipation, I am supposed to cut out alcohol entirely, but there are Christmas parties to attend and I tell myself champagne doesn’t count. At one of them, someone sidles up to me, ostensibly to rescue me from a man explaining game theory to me, but really to find out where I am in my process. He’s a good-ish friend I don’t see all that often and I do the mental math to figure out how he knows. Rats. I always tell one person too many and that person is always a blabbermouth.

  “You’re not—are you?” he says.

  “No!” I hold up the champagne.

  “But you’re trying?”

  “About to start.”

  I don’t particularly mind his questioning. His own domestic situation is complicated, so the conversation is more or less balanced. More generally, however, I’m still having a tough time figuring out how to talk about this. It seems to me almost impossible to give an honest account of myself that is neither too defensive, too jolly nor too grossly revealing, so that I spend a lot of that season wandering around feeling actively aphasic.

  I keep thinking about my mother. She believed in genes, rather perversely. Ignoring her father, she put her sanity down to the genes she inherited from her sainted mother, a woman who died at the age of twenty-one, when my mother was two, and of whom she had absolutely no memory. My mother was adamant that it was thanks to this woman that she escaped the hell of her father’s personality. “Strong women, strong genes,” she would say to me, indicating her maternal forebears, and I think about this a lot at my desk while I’m scrolling through profiles. Perhaps there is a genetic basis for resilience and renewal. But I tend to think my mother’s ability to break the cycle, to move away from South Africa and marry a man like my dad while some of her sisters married men like their father, was less a question of genetic programming than shrewd decision making. (Of course, there is an argument that the ability to make a shrewd decision is itself genetically encoded, but I don’t have the bandwidth to wrestle with that.) More than that, it was a question of vision. My mother understood that when you’re in a tight spot, the illusion of agency can be almost as powerful as the real thing. She couldn’t change her background but she could choose “strong women, strong genes.” She could choose to interpret her genetic inheritance as matrilineal. Above all, she could choose an idea of herself as the author of he
r own fortune.

  It is almost impossible for someone of my generation living in New York not to believe that therapy would have been good for my mother, but in its absence, she made the smartest choice of all: to recast her silence about what happened to her in childhood not as repression or denial or any of the words we use for survivors of child sex abuse who haven’t “dealt with” their experiences, but rather, as a gift. My childhood was unblighted by what had happened to her and it was only much later that I understood what she had done, a remarkable act, not just for me perhaps, but for her, too. The power to withhold has, historically, been the only one available to women but it is no less profound for that, and for my mother it was the beginning of happiness. Her life after leaving South Africa was an act of will, but more than that it was an act of imagination, an ability—a talent, really—to look beyond the experience of her background and see other possibilities.

  * * *

  • • •

  I DON’T LISTEN to the audio files. I don’t try to find the guy, even though there is so much information it would probably take me less than a day. I draw what feels like a sensible line between finding out enough and trying to find out too much. This is not gene selection; it is the selection of the story of how my child came to be and, through a combination of vital statistics, familiarity of background, a subtle but readable implication that he is a Democrat, and his use of the word “tremendous,” which signals to me a certain wryness and enthusiasm, I make my choice. In other words, on nothing substantive at all. What matters is it’s my choice and I make it.

  I pay extra for ID disclosure, enabling any child I produce to trace the donor when she turns eighteen. I decide how much to buy—enough for three cycles—then fill in a form with my credit card details and return it to the donor bank, along with payment for almost $2,000: that is, $500 per vial plus $150 to courier it in a freezer bag across town to the clinic. When I call to confirm my request, I half expect the receptionist to laugh and tell me this whole process is a prank and what on earth am I doing, trying to buy genetic material over the phone as if it were the lunch special at Zabar’s? Instead, after I mumble out “need to order some sperm,” she puts me through to the lab, where a technician will check to see if what I want is available.

  “Number?” says the man.

  I give him the donor number. There is a clacking of keys, followed by a short pause. Then, with the smoothness of a sommelier fielding a wine order at dinner, he says, “An excellent choice.”

  SIX

  January 2014

  A MONTH AFTER the operation I’m in Dr. B’s office, snow jacket limp on the back of my chair. Outside, large-scale things are happening. Russian tanks are threatening Crimea. Greece is bankrupt and thinking of leaving the EU. Edward Snowden is in Hong Kong, scattering national secrets and the Scots are deliberating on whether to secede. In here, however, there is only one headline and that is that after weeks of monitering, my eggs are ready. This is it, says Dr. B. I can come in tomorrow and, after waiting for an hour for the sperm to defrost, finally get this show on the road.

  “Oh,” he says, seeing me to the door. “One other thing.” And he asks if I’d like L to be present when the insemination takes place. He shrugs. “Some people find it nice to involve their partners.”

  For the last few weeks, everything at the clinic has been blissfully dull. Fertility treatment is repetitive. You sit in the same reception area week after week, waiting for your name to be called. You go to the blood room, roll up your sleeve, offer your arm, make conversation with the nurse, go in for the ultrasound, make conversation with the nurse, go back to the waiting room, wait to be called by the doctor and finally go in to discuss the prognosis. In between these engagements, you watch TV in the waiting room and listen to the receptionist as she shouts, “YOU GOT YOUR PERIOD? OK, COME IN TOMORROW” down the phone, roughly once every six minutes. It takes me an embarrassingly long while to realize that each time this happens, another poor woman’s hopes have been dashed for that month.

  The point of all this activity is to ascertain, to within a twelve-hour period and by measuring estrogen levels in the blood and follicle size via ultrasound, when ovulation is about to occur. I hadn’t even known, prior to this, that a woman is fertile only for a handful of days every month, nor that sperm can live in the body for up to five days. Now there is no corner of my fertility, no fluctuation in my blood, that can slink past the doctors unmeasured. There is still an element of guesswork; it is possible for the doctors to overshoot and miss ovulation, which doesn’t preclude a pregnancy, but is seen as a professional misfire. Otherwise, everything builds toward that perfect point in the month, the day before ovulation and the patient’s most fertile window: Insemination Day!

  First, however, I must survive this moment with Dr. B at the door. Being tied to a schedule this month has been such a relief that I forgot there are still things to decide. The thing is, says Dr. B, that fertility treatment, particularly when there’s a donor element, can be hard and excluding, and involving the patient’s partner in the treatment room, even to the extent of inviting him or her to operate the syringe full of sperm, can give that person a feeling of inclusion. I feel myself blush. Clearly, he’s in favor of L’s being present, either because it gives him a warm, fuzzy feeling or to neutralize some latent ambivalence he has about helping to create single mothers. I try to imagine the scene: me, stressed out and half naked on a gurney; L, holding the catheter and rolling her eyes; the medical staff, milling around trying not to intrude on our beautiful moment. I don’t think I want her there—I don’t want anyone there; it’s embarrassing—but when I imagine asking L if she wants to be involved, I realize I don’t want to give her an opportunity to say no, either.

  “Er, no, thanks,” I say.

  “OK,” says Dr. B, maintaining eye contact for half a second too long. “As you like.”

  In different circumstances, perhaps I would go in for the whole honey-you-detonate-the-plunger thing. Clearly it makes the doctors feel good and is helpful to some couples. And symbolism matters. The baby is learning to talk at the moment and he calls me Emma, or Amma, or sometimes, through early name confusion, Mamma, which makes L cross, a response I think of as ungenerous until years later, when one of my daughters goes through the same phase, and when she calls L Mummy I can’t stand it—can’t STAND it—at which point I have to laugh and acknowledge we have both been absurd. But these signifiers matter. They shape how we see things, how we decide where one of us ends and the other begins, and on that basis alone, having L involved in the insemination seems wrong. We are not doing this together. She is not my coparent. The symbolism needs to reflect that.

  There is a cold, mean streak in me that thinks trying to involve the partner in the treatment room is ludicrous under any circumstances. Surely there’s a dignity in allowing things to be what they are? In recognizing that even if the doctors hand out cigarettes after the insemination, this is and always will be a medical procedure that involves only one half of the couple. Pretending otherwise—grafting on a parody of the “normal” way of doing things—risks making the treatment seem sadder, just as choosing a sperm donor will continue to feel sad, or bad, or weird, as long as it’s tied to conventions associated with choosing a spouse.

  “Hello, hello!” says Dr. B, breezing in. It is a week before Christmas and he is full of good cheer.

  “Hello!” I reply brightly.

  “So! What’s going on? What’s the gossip? What’s the news about Edward Snowden?”

  “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you,” I say weakly. While Dr. B moves around the room, assembling utensils for the insemination, we talk about Russia, and Greece, and then Scotland comes up and I stop blandly going along with his views. “It would be lunacy if they left,” I say.

  “Not at all!” he says, holding up the vial of sperm, for me to check the details on the label. “They have the oil m
oney, why shouldn’t they want independence?” He asks me what I think about Ukrainian sovereignty and I try and fail to summon an opinion.

  “There’ll be another war,” says Dr. B darkly.

  “Right.”

  “Seriously. Figure out a strategy, because it’s coming.”

  “What’s your strategy?”

  “Ah. My strategy—my philosophy for living—is the three Gs.” He loads the syringe with a substance that is, gram for gram, more expensive than the world’s finest heroin, although less expensive, perhaps, than marrying someone you’re not into in order to have a baby—to shoot up through the catheter, to the cervix and beyond.

  “What are the three Gs?”

  Dr. B looks sideways at the nurse, who is absorbed in a task at the desk. “I’ll tell you another time,” he says and lowers his head. I look up at the white-paneled ceiling.

  Doctors, like most creative professionals, have their own distinct styles and for his part Dr. B doesn’t favor the use of any particular catchphrase at this, the potential launch of new life. On the other hand, Dr. M, his partner in the practice, is known to say cheerfully at the moment of detonation, “Swim, boys, swim.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I KEEP DRINKING champagne through the last week of December. The fact is I’m not ready to be pregnant and am banking on there being a few months of failed treatment for my mind to catch up with what my body is doing. As the year winds down and I scarcely look at the calendar, I joke to myself that if the IUI works, perhaps I’ll have an abortion. My dad and Marion come over for Christmas and we—L, the baby and I—spend a lovely day with them just north of New York, at the house of Marion’s daughter and her American family. A few days later, on my dad’s seventieth birthday, they all come into town and L throws him a bowling party, with printed T-shirts and a group photo that she solicits the waiter to take and that I know my dad, in his Englishness, finds simultaneously wonderful and completely alarming. The baby sleeps throughout, parked in his stroller a way back from the bowling lane, not even surfacing at the shriek from L as I lean in to kiss him with a mouth covered in wing sauce.