The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

(Antfer) #1

26 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022


optimal. This, I had to admit, was not
unreasonable.
The fertility clinic we decided on was
in Stamford, Connecticut. We picked it
because the professor we spoke to had
used it and because it had no age limits.
The clinic gave us access to its da-
tabase of donors. While lying in bed,
my wife and I began flicking through
photos and videos, reading health and
background questionnaires. The ques-
tions the women answered included
whether they were willing to have their
eggs used by same-sex couples and
whether they were Jewish.
A few of the young women were
very pretty. One Brazilian woman was
achingly so. I was attracted to these
women and felt confused by my desire.
Because theoretically my sperm were
going to fertilize their eggs, it was al-
most as if I were going to impregnate
them. This felt dishonest to my mar-
riage. Also, we would presumably have
a child who somewhat resembled the
donor, and so the attraction I felt to-
ward the young women seemed creepy
and vaguely incestuous.
The donors all seemed decent in a
very calm way. Almost all explained that
they had known someone who had
struggled with infertility and that they
wanted to give couples the opportunity
to have a family. A social worker we
consulted told us that donors tend to
be in the caring professions. My wife
had volunteered in orphanages in Ro-
mania, and I had known the aides who
had come into my parents’ home to help
with my brother. The egg donors seemed
similar to women we both admired. The
young woman my wife and I ultimately
selected had been the valedictorian of
her high school and had volunteered in
a nicu as a baby cuddler. I gave the fer-
tility clinic a deposit.


A


s soon as I paid the deposit, I began
having dreams in which I had
cancer and was going to die. In these
dreams, a baby existed, and, even in my
sleep, my first worry on learning that I
was going to die was for Christine and
the baby. When I woke up, I retained
the sense that I was not as important
as they were, that my life was simply a
sum of money that was there to be spent
on my family. I don’t think of myself as
particularly self-sacrificing. It was strange


to be responding in a way that seemed
so out of character.
Christine had similar dreams of
dying. She would wake me in the mid-
dle of the night and tell me that she
was worried about how I would take
care of the child if she passed. I re-
sponded that I was going to drop off
the child at the nearest fire station. 
When I told my mother my joke,
she said, “Give me the baby. I will raise
it.” She said this immediately, and it
was the first time I had heard her speak
so forcefully about the child.
During winter break, my wife and I
drove to New Jersey to stay with my
parents. The goal was to use their house
as a base for our appointments at the
fertility clinic. Thus started the injec-
tions. Every two days, I knelt beside my
wife and injected her in the hip. The
low table covered with syringes in our
bedroom reminded me of the syringes
in my brother’s room, the rubbing al-
cohol, the antiseptic gauze. I was choos-
ing to spend tens of thousands of dol-
lars so we could try to have a baby, but
the feelings I had were the old familiar
ones of not having a choice, of being in
a situation that had been forced on me.
At this time, the hormones were mak-
ing Christine emotional. She would
begin crying if the bed was unmade.
The sense of emotions being out of scale
also reminded me of my childhood, how
my mother would call me selfish and
worthless for wanting to watch TV in-
stead of reading to my brother.
Once a week, we drove to Connecti-
cut to see the fertility doctor. At the

clinic, whose walls were covered with
photos of children, I sat in the waiting
room as my wife was taken to be ex-
amined. During these appointments,
and in our bedroom when I knelt be-
side her and injected her, I felt embar-
rassed at how much she was doing and
how little I could do.
Contemplating the reality of a child

made me feel that the passage of time
was also real, that death was not theo-
retical. My mother prays several times
a day. Her afternoon prayers are per-
formed in the living room, where she
sits on a sofa and rocks slightly as she
chants, while reading from various pam-
phlets. I heard her praying one after-
noon, and I went and sat on a nearby
sofa. My mother is seventy-nine and
has had health problems. Her voice is
thin, and her shiny black hair only makes
her look more fragile. As I watched her,
I understood that she would probably
die in five or six years. My normal re-
sponse to emotion is to veer away from
it. I wanted to interrupt my mother and
ask what we would have for dinner. In-
stead, I sat and watched and listened. I
became sadder and sadder. She finished
chanting and brought the pamphlets to
her forehead, as a sign of respect to God.

W


e received seventeen eggs from
our donor in the cycle that we
had paid for. To provide sperm, I went
into a bathroom with a vial and my cell
phone. All seventeen eggs were fertil-
ized. Of the four embryos that survived
to the blastocyst stage, only two were
genetically normal. One was male and
the other female.
Neither my wife nor I wanted the
responsibility of picking. To select one
would be to not select the other, and
who were we to deprive this potential
being of the right to move around in
the world and experience life’s joys?
All our fantasies had been of having
a male child. Now that we actually had
to decide, I didn’t want a boy. I tried to
imagine the reality of a son, and I felt
toward him the impatience that I feel
toward myself. My wife had helped raise
two nieces and a nephew. She felt that
she might be a better mother to a girl
than to a boy.
Two weeks after the female embryo
was implanted, my wife was sitting
in our bedroom at my parents’ house
when her phone rang. It was the doc-
tor’s office saying that the hormone tests
showed she was pregnant. I had been
out getting gas when the call came.
When I entered our bedroom, she got
up and hugged me. “We’re pregnant,”
she said.
I couldn’t quite believe it. What did
this mean? Despite all that we had done
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