“You guys would make a cute couple,” my co-worker commented after observing an interaction between myself and a friend. After a pause, she continued, “You know, if he didn’t have a baby… and a wife.”
He was on my list once. I had a list of potential sperm donors that I knew. They had to be men that I respected and were in good health. And didn’t have kids. So when my friend’s wife announced her pregnancy, I had to cross him off my list. It was a pretty short list to begin with, but it keeps getting shorter. The thing is, I want to be a mother. I’ve always wanted to be a mother. I spend my days taking care of other people’s children as a teacher, and the evenings with my sister’s children. But, I’m not great at starting new relationships. I’m very caged and find it difficult to trust others. In the eleven years since high school, I’ve only been in three serious relationships.
In my mind, being a wife is not a pre-requisite of being a mother. Now, I am pretty traditional and believe in monogamy and the like. But I watched my mother raise my sister and I, and I believe that children can turn out fine even if there is not a male influence in the house. At times, I imagine life would have been less painful if my mother had said she chose me, rather than that my father rejected me. [In a future post, I will be sharing an excerpt from Trevor Noah’s book Born a Crime in which he describes his mother actively seeking to have a child, even though she was not married to his father.]
When I jokingly mentioned to my co-worker that I was going to set up a Tinder account to search for sperm donors (given the cost of a sperm bank sample), she proceeded to tell me the story of a family member who did just that. Then, I found this article online. This isn’t exactly what I am planning on doing (I’ve been around enough ex-couples to know that co-parenting can get messy), but it is still an interesting read. If anything, it only reinforces the modern idea of family.
http://www.rolereboot.org/family/details/2017-02-OKCupid-sperm-donor/
Baby Hayes 