San Francisco Dreamin'

25 September 2007

Siblings - What to do...

As I have said in an earlier post, (or maybe it was a comment I made elsewhere?) JB and I have two daughters. They were conceived via what is referred to as a "known donor." What this means is that when the girls are 18, the donor has agreed to meet them. They both have the same donor-father. You see we went through a reproductive service in San Francisco. We were presented with a list of prospective donors, and we chose one that best suited our likes and dislikes. Neither of us has ever seen a picture - not allowed. But woman we worked with did know the donor, and she said he had beautiful eyes and his ancestry matched mine, which was very nice since I wasn't to be the bio-mom.

The girls have been everything we had hoped and dreamed about. They are each sweet and wonderful kids, and we are proud to be their mothers.

Fast forward about a decade... to a couple of months ago, while JB was sleeping, I was watching flipping through the TV channels. She was lying next me in bed, peacefully snoring away (as usual - heh). I stopped on channel 3 because they were teasing the next story - something about a donor siblings. It was NBC Dateline. They were doing a story about a young man, Ryan Kramer, who wanted to find out about his own donor and if he had any siblings. He is a very bright kid and he put together a website called the Donor Sibling Registry.

The possibilities came raining down on me. Our donor could have up to 10 pregnancies - is it possible that we could actually find out about the girls' half-siblings? How would the girls feel about that? We haven't yet explained to them about meeting the other half of their DNA. We haven't even thought about their half-siblings.

As soon as the show was over I went to my computer and looked up the registry. I looked up our donor, and I was astounded to find that other parents had listed the off-spring of the same donor that we used. There were five siblings already posted. Oh. My. Gawd.

In order to see the messages posted by the parents, I had to subscribe for a year. The next day JB and I discussed it, and we decided to go ahead and post the birth month and years of our daughters, and a little message about them. It was a big step for us. We took it with a bit of trepidation, but I am not quite sure why?

Fast forward again to today. This morning when I checked my email there was a message from one of the mothers of an eleven year old girl in Indiana. She says that she has exchanged email and information with other half-sibling parents. She wanted to know if we wanted to do the same? Again, should we take the next step? Is it time? Are we ready? We talked about it.

And we talked.

We decided it was time to take a small step forward and share information in hopes of finding our way with the other parents. I think it could make the road a little less lonely, if not for us, then maybe for the kids.

I'm still a little scared, but I don't know why...



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posted by Tawanda at 7:02 PM

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