Our Egg Donor

So many of you have asked to know more about our egg donor that I thought I'd indulge your curiosity.  I double-checked with the clinic, and confirmed that it is okay to share some highlights with you.  (If you are looking for a great way to procrastinate, you can see everything we know about her, including her childhood photos, by going to GIVF's donor database and looking up donor #1021.  I'm not even going to include a link but it's pretty easy to find.)  The only things we are not allowed to share with you (or even with our family) are her adult photos.  We are also not allowed to attempt to identify or to contact her, so if by some crazy coincidence, this person sounds familiar to you, please just don't tell me.  This woman gave me the chance to have another child and the last thing I want to do is to put her anonymity at risk.

As I've said before, we picked our donor based on five main factors:

• She was Caucasian


• She was available


• She had a good history of producing many eggs


• She was not shorter than 5'3"


• We liked her photos

But here are some other interesting things about her:

• She is 29 years old. (I did prefer someone in her twenties.  The clinic allows donors up to age 35, but fertility rates already start declining by that age, so I think that's risky.)


• She is a police officer and plans to go to law school (I really have a thing for lawyers, I guess).


• She is 100% Italian, although I assume she was born in the U.S.


• She is 5'5" tall, weighs 120 pounds, and is athletic.


• She has brown hair and large, wide-set brown eyes. (We really wanted a blonde, and there were a couple that looked remarkably like me, but they didn't work for one reason or another.)


• Her adult photos remind me of my best friend from childhood which is the main reason I liked her photos so much (yes, that's you, Stace!).


• She has 20/20 vision.  Now that's a nice genetic gift!


• She comes from what I guess you'd call a "blue-collar" background.  (I hate that term, but I don't know a better one.)  Her father and many of her male relatives work in construction and she is the first in her family to finish college, unless you count two of her aunts.  (Yes, they collect information on her aunts' and uncles' educational levels - crazy!)


• She loves dogs.


• She lists "reading" as one of her interests.  I still don't think genetics are relevant here, but that's a nice thing to see.


• She claims she can eat anything and not gain weight.  Of course, she is 29, but still.

I'm obsessing about these details much more now than I did during the selection process.  I wonder about her, and I go back to her photos often just to imprint her face on my psyche.  I figure that I should get familiar with her face so that if one or two of these embryos make it, I won't be shocked at the stranger that comes out of my body.  But when Sam came out of my body, she was completely foreign to me.  She didn't look anything like what I had expected.  (Read this beautiful musing about prenatal versus postpartum bonding if you want to know what I mean in a way that I can't express nearly as well.)  So I suppose it's silly, but that's where I'm at right now.  And I suppose I wrote this today, not just to satisfy your curiosity, but to satisfy my own need to share yet another important part of this whole process.