Here's What I Mean

and how I have to say and hear it over and over

I am much of the time a foot-stomping this-isn’t-fair person.

And I’m also not feeling a martyr.

I truly believe that my conception is one of the very rare situations where I don’t have reason to intrude or to assert my right to know what I want, to get what I desire—desire as discussed in my last post.

When there is some kind of sex between people who are capable of reproducing, a at least one parent of the birthed person knows, or could understand, that this situation is possible. If someone donated a gamete (sperm or egg) anytime after…what year was it?…they know that they could be tracked down once we sequenced the human genome, or whatever it was we did with DNA, whenever that was.

But I was…brokered. That’s how I think of it. I wasn’t the product of an affair, nor was the sperm used to conceive me purchased or given at a time when it was conceivable (ha ha) that a secret couldn’t be kept.

I have the right to confront my parents about when/how they could have/should have told me. But with my donor—he really didn’t sign up for this. There was no signing. There was a request, and a gift, and an agreement.

He and his wife knew I was born—not my sex, or anything specific. They didn’t know who my parents were. But that’s it. This was in the late 1960s. So I could have died as an infant, be insane, or a criminal, or somewhere in between any of these things.

But I’m not. And so—this is the opposite of what I planned to write—I think he should want to know me. I know it wasn’t part of the plan. But I exist, and I’m deeply interested in who he is, and I want him to know me. I understand the reasons this may not be possible or desirable.

What I meant to say what that I hoped he would want to know me.

But—again, back to my therapist—people get to have their own relationship to this situation. I would disagree with her if I were conceived under either of the circumstances I described earlier. As it is, I get it, even if it’s not what I want.

Ever yours,

My Foot-Stomping Self