After six months of trying to conceive a child on our own, Jessica had gone to a fertility specialist, who’d diagnosed her with low ovarian reserves. Who knew you could be practically out of eggs at age thirty-six? After two years of hormone treatments and five failed IVF attempts—punctuated by one miscarriage, a mere week after a positive pregnancy test—her doctor had said he couldn’t recommend further treatment unless we used donor eggs.
Jess had responded with anger, denial, and despair. She wants a baby that’s biologically her own. I was fine with donor eggs or adoption, but now, quite frankly, all I want is a break. Jess had insisted on going to another specialist. After reading her medical records and examining her, the second one had concurred with the first. The new guy agreed to do another round of ovarian stimulation so Brooke could freeze any eggs that might be harvested, but he only did it because Jess refused to take no for an answer. “The quantity and quality of your eggs doesn’t really justify it,” he said, “but it’s your money.”
The amount of money we’ve already spent is astronomical, but I try not to think about that. With her eggs in the bank, the doctor insisted she take at least a six-month sabbatical from any further treatments. I want to be done with them altogether. Some things just aren’t meant to be, and at some point, a person has to accept that.
I’d hoped that Jessica would get back to her old self, but the truth is, I don’t even know what that is anymore. She still looks like the smart, gorgeous woman I fell for, but she doesn’t want to discuss anything or go anywhere. Her feelings get hurt over the least little thing, she’s irritable and remote, and she has no interest—none at all—in sex.
They warned us when we started IVF that the hormones could suppress libido, but it completely erased hers, and that pretty much killed mine, too. It got to the point that I didn’t try to initiate anything because when she did agree, it felt like she was just obliging me.
She’s been off the hormones for a couple of months now, but nothing has changed. If anything, we’ve fallen even deeper into the no-sex, no-real-communication rut. I’m worried that Jess is depressed. I’ve asked her repeatedly to see a doctor about it, but she says there’s no point; she doesn’t want to do talk therapy and she refuses to take medication.
The only thing she wants to do is work. She’s the controller at a large hotel on Canal Street, and this transfer to Seattle is the first non-baby thing that’s really interested her in... jeez. How long has it been since she’s cared about anything but getting pregnant? I can’t even remember.
Anyway, she wants to move to Seattle, so we’ve flown there twice in the last month—once so I could interview at a law firm, and another time to look at neighborhoods. Both times we visited her parents, her brother, and her sister, and that seemed to perk her up.
I think it’ll be good for her to live close to her family, so I’veagreed to leave this city I’ve grown to love. We already have the condo under contract; we close on the sale in two months. Jessica’s heading back to Seattle tonight for another long weekend to look at houses. She likes to take an evening flight so she can sleep on the plane and make up the two-hour time difference.
She has an old school chum out there who’s in real estate, and she thinks he can help find us a place. She’s scheduled to start her new job in three weeks, but she may take a week off between positions. I’ll follow four weeks or so later.
As I walk down the hall toward my office, I pull my phone out of my pocket and check my text messages. There’s one from my pal Hayden—Are you running in the 5K Saturday?—and one from Jessica—Can you make it home by five thirty for an early dinner before my flight? I’m leaving work at three so I can fix my special chicken cacciatore.
My stomach does a weird flip. It’s strange that she’d want to fix a meal the night she leaves town. She doesn’t cook much. In fact, the last few times she cooked a meal from scratch, she was trying to talk me into another round of IVF. Surely she’s not thinking...
Nah. We’re getting ready to move, the doctor told her to give it a rest, and she knows I’m done with the whole thing. I stifle the thought and sit at my desk to check my business emails. I read a couple, then look at my personal messages. I scroll past a few I should probably set to spam, then freeze as I see a message from the New Orleans Cryobank. The subject line reads,In response to your recent request.
I haven’t made a recent request. Hell, I haven’t had any contact with the cryobank in... what? Seventeen, eighteen years?
I briefly donated sperm while I was a freshman scholarship student at Tulane University. Dad’s business had run into trouble, and I wanted to pay my own freight. I only did it for a short while; I stopped when a long-legged blonde I had a huge crush on refused to go on a second date when I told her about it.
“I don’t want to date a sperm donor,” she’d said.
“Why not?” I’d asked, completely clueless.
“If you don’t date someone, you won’t fall in love with him.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t want to risk falling in love, getting married, and having children with someone who already has twenty kids out there,” she’d explained. “I especially don’t want to have them showing up on my doorstep in eighteen years and vying with my kids for their father’s affections. So the best policy is just don’t date anyone who’s ever been a donor.”
“Hey, I was only asking you out for a beer,” I’d said as casually as I could, but the truth was, I’d been thunderstruck. Until she’d said that, I hadn’t been concerned about how being a donor might affect a future partner. I’d just thought,Hey, I can make up to $1,200 a month and I won’t need to hit up Dad for money. What little further thought I might have given it had been along the lines of,I’ve been through a lot of testing so I have proof I’m healthyandI’m providing a valuable service for infertile couples.
It’s nuts, how stupid a nineteen-year-old kid can be. Once I’d realized the implications of being a donor, I’d called the cryobank and resigned. I even asked about getting my swimmers back, but they told me they’d already been processed. They reminded me I’d signed a contract, and that it was past the one-month deadline for changing my mind. The best they could do was list me as a “limited donor”—meaning my data wouldn’t be actively promoted on their website, and they’d move my info to the end of their donor list, where it would be buried under more than five hundred other names. Since I hadn’t produced a lot of “product,” I suppose I wasn’t worth advertising.
I’d told Jessica about my brief foray into sperm donorship early in our dating relationship. It felt like an ethical necessity, like letting potential partners know about an STD or a stalker ex-girlfriend.
At first, Jessica acted like it wasn’t a big deal, but apparently she did some research, and a few of months later, she asked me about it. She wanted to know if I’d always remain anonymous or if I’dagreed to let donor offspring contact me when they became adults. I said I’d agreed to let them contact me when they turned eighteen.
“So do you know if you have any kids out there?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to find out?”
“No,” I’d said. “I waived all parental rights and responsibilities. I’m nobody’s father; I’m just a donor who contributed biological material, like a kidney or skin tissue or something.”
She’d dropped the subject, the relationship progressed, and a year later, we married in a big to-do in Seattle. I thought we were done with the topic, but then she’d brought it up again about a year ago, when we were in the hellhole of IVF treatments.
We were sitting at Café du Monde and a woman came in, pushing a baby in a carriage. At that point, with the hormones and constant disappointments, just the sight of a baby could make Jess cry. Sure enough, her eyes had welled up.
