It was never a secret in my house that I was conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. For a majority of my childhood, I never really thought about him.
But when I was around 11, I went through a period of having questions. My parents β I have two mothers β gave me a photo copy of a questionnaire that was sent to them from the sperm bank they used, California Cryobank. The donor filled it out in , two years before I was born. I remember carrying the form with me in my backpack, taking it to school and studying it occasionally when I remembered I had it.
There was this sense of touch β this person had used his hand to answer these questions; I could see where he had crossed things out. The form made him concrete, if inscrutable. It also gave me the sense that there was this larger world, this process and this bureaucracy that my existence was built upon. It was a way to help me understand myself.
I knew a lot of other children whose parents had used donors to conceive because every summer we went to a camp for same-sex families. Last summer, news traveled through the community that two kids from two families who attended the camp for years had independently gone on to a registry for family members trying to connect with donors or donor siblings.
The two discovered that they shared a donor β that they were half siblings. Until that moment, it had not really occurred to me β or my mothers, even though one is an ObGyn β that I might have half siblings out there. The news about the two kids at camp made me curious to find out if I had half siblings that I did not know about. I landed on a message board for children of my particular donor and saw about a dozen cryptic user names of various mothers or children who were perhaps hesitant to reveal themselves completely.
