baby daddy blues

This is that moment – the one I’ve been almost glad to be working 70 hours a week to avoid. This evening I left the office at a reasonable hour for the first time in four weeks. I went to the mall and made some returns; I went to the grocery store and restocked my fridge. Then I got home, nestled into the couch with some hummus and vegetables to munch on, and opened the web page my infertility doctor wrote down for me.

I thought I would just read on the website what the hours of the sperm bank are and then figure out a time when I can go there to flip through large binders until I find my baby’s papa. But this is the 21^st century; of course the profiles are online. And it turns out they look and read a heck of a lot like match.com profiles—which is freaking me out, so I’ve closed the web page after reading about just two of the men. Or, I think I should say, two of the donors.

This is the most surreal thing I have ever done.

The write-ups feel like dating profiles; these guys sound great. It’s hard to wrap my brain around never meeting them. Around not really knowing what their faces look like, or what accents they have, or what the timbre of their voices is like. In daily life, my eye tends to be caught by people’s hands—I study the shape of fingernails, the length of fingers, the structure of knuckles. In my own family, I see all kinds of relationships in physical features like these. My forefingers and maybe thumbs are my Grandma Raia’s; my thighs and eyebrows definitely are too. My ring fingers and pinkies look more like my Grandpa Don’s; my feet, calves, and arm bones are just like my father’s. These boobs could come from either grandmother, but I think my double-F Grandma Lilli is the more likely source. This hair is Mom’s in color and Dad’s in fineness. This Cheshire cat grin, for certain, is Dad’s too, as is my brother’s. My giggle, my voice—I don’t know whom they come from; but I know my brother’s laughter is just like Dad’s, and my Uncle Tom’s is just like Grandma Raia’s. My mom sounds like her father so much of the time it’s uncanny. I want to know these things about my baby and his or her daddy. I want to know who I see in my little one when it’s not someone from my own family reflecting back at me.

To do it this way, the surreal-but-at-least-I’m-not-left-out-of-it-altogether-way, I’ll have to decide on a few factors, and then I’ll have to accept whatever they preordain without any real knowledge of their likely outcomes. The choices I’m given on the website seem so limited. I think I’ll construct a man like the ones in my family, in hopes of concocting a good blend with me. I can pick someone tall like my dad and brother, because I can pick my baby’s daddy’s height. I can pick someone with our family’s dark hair. Someone with our educational levels. From the profiles I can figure out who claims to be other things that tend to have meaning for me—whose profile states that he is poetic, or artistic, or inclined toward making music. Whose profile sounds beatific about nature. But how will I know whose heart is kind, whose arms will spawn snuggly, hug-loving arms like mine? 

What this brief visit to a website makes me realize is that what I really want to pick is an actual daddy for my little one. I know I can love the heck out of this kid, but man does it feel bad to set him or her up for a single-parent life right off the bat. Man at this moment would I like fate to finally get its shit together and put a living, breathing daddy in my and my baby’s path.