The Whole Package

Spoiler: After I left medical school, the rest of my life did not fall into place as planned.

Three years later, when I was nearly thirty-seven, a two-year relationship ended. It was sad but amicable and not a surprise the way the breakup with Boyfriend later turned out to be. But still, it was the worst timing imaginable for someone who wanted to have a baby.

I’d always known, in the surest possible way, that I wanted to be a parent. I’d spent my adulthood volunteering with kids and assumed that I would one day have my own. Now, though, with forty looming, I was dying to have a baby, but not so much that I would just marry the next guy who came along. This left me in a tricky predicament—desperate, but picky.

It was then that a friend suggested I could do things in reverse order: baby first, partner later. One night, she emailed me links for some sperm-donor sites. I’d never heard of such a thing and wasn’t sure at first how I felt about it, but after considering my options, I made the decision to move forward.

Now I just needed to choose a donor.

Of course I wanted a donor with a good health history, but on these sites there were other qualities to consider, and not just things like hair color or height. Did I want a lacrosse player or a literature major? A Truffaut buff or a trombonist? An extrovert or an introvert?

I was surprised to see that in many ways, these donor profiles resembled dating profiles—except that most of the candidates were college students and provided their SAT scores. And there were a few other key differences, chief among them the comments of the so-called lab girls. These were the women (they all seemed to be female) who worked at the banks and met the donors when they came in to give a “release.” (Not in the sense of “contract.”) The lab girls would then write what they termed staff impressions and add them to the donors’ profiles, but there was no rhyme or reason as to what kinds of impressions they’d share. Their comments varied wildly from He has amazing biceps! to He tends to procrastinate, but eventually gets his stuff done. (I was wary of any male college student whose procrastination extended to masturbation.)

I relied heavily on these staff impressions because the more profiles I read, the more I realized that I wanted to feel some intangible connection to the donor who would have a connection to my child. I wanted to like him, whatever that meant—to feel that if he were sitting at our family dinner table, I would enjoy his company. But as I read the staff impressions and listened to the audio of the interviews that the lab girls conducted with the donors (“What’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you?,” “How would you describe your personality?,” and, weirdly, “What’s your idea of a romantic first date?”), it still felt clinical, impersonal.

Then one day I called up the sperm bank with a question about a donor’s health history and was transferred to a lab girl named Kathleen. As Kathleen looked up his medical records, I began chatting with her and learned that she had been the lab girl who’d met this particular donor. I couldn’t help myself. “Is he cute?” I asked, trying to sound casual. I didn’t know if I was allowed to be asking.

“Well . . .” Kathleen hedged, drawing out the word in her thick New York accent. “He’s not unattractive. But I wouldn’t look twice at him on the subway.”

After that, Kathleen became my sperm concierge, suggesting donors and answering my questions. I trusted her because while some of the lab girls inflated their assessments—they were trying to sell sperm, after all—Kathleen was honest to a fault. Her standards were very high, and so were mine, which was a problem, because nobody made it through our filters.

To be fair, it seemed reasonable to assume that my future child would want me to be picky. And there were multiple factors to juggle. If I found a donor who seemed to share my sensibilities, there would be other problems, like his family’s health history wasn’t a good match with mine (breast cancer under age sixty, kidney disease). Or I’d find a donor with a pristine health history but who was a six-foot-four Danish guy with Nordic features, a look that would stick out—and might make my child feel self-conscious—in my family of short, brown-haired Ashkenazi Jews. Other donors seemed to have good health, intelligence, and similar physical features, but something else would raise a red flag, like the donor who wrote that his favorite color was black, his favorite book Lolita, and his favorite movie A Clockwork Orange. I tried to imagine my child reading this profile one day and looking at me like, “And you chose this one?” I had the same reaction if the donor couldn’t spell or use punctuation correctly.

This process continued for three exhausting months, during which I began to lose hope that I’d find a healthy donor I’d be proud to tell my child about.

And then—finally!—I found him.

I came home late one evening to a message on my voicemail from Kathleen. She told me to check out a donor she described as looking like “a young George Clooney.” She added that she especially liked this donor because he was always friendly and in a great mood when he arrived at the bank to donate. I rolled my eyes. After all, if you’re a guy in his twenties who’s about to go watch porn and have an orgasm—and you’re getting paid for that—what’s not to be in a great mood about? But Kathleen gushed about this guy—he had good health, good looks, strong intelligence, and a winning personality.

“He’s the whole package,” she said confidently.

Kathleen had never sounded so enthusiastic, so I logged on to take a look. I clicked on his profile, pored over his health history, read his essays, listened to his audio interview, and instantly knew, in the same way that people talk about love at first sight, that I’d found The One. Everything about him—his likes and dislikes, his sense of humor, his interests and values—felt like family. Elated but exhausted, I figured I’d get some sleep and handle the details in the morning. The next day happened to be my birthday, and overnight I had vivid dreams about my baby for what felt like eight hours straight. For the first time, I pictured an actual baby coming from two specific people instead of some hazy idea of a baby with half its heritage blank.

In the morning, I jumped out of bed with a burst of excitement, the song “Child of Mine” playing in my head. Happy birthday to me! I’d been wanting a baby for the past several years, and finding a donor I felt so comfortable with seemed like the best birthday present ever. Heading to the computer, I smiled at my good fortune—I was really going to do this. I typed in the sperm bank’s URL, found the donor’s profile, and read it all over again. I was just as certain as I’d been the night before that he was The One—the one that would make sense to my child when he or she asked why, of all the possible donors, I chose this guy.

I placed the donor in my online shopping cart—just as I might with a book on Amazon—double-checked the order, then clicked Purchase Vials. I’m having a baby! I thought. The moment felt monumental.

As the order processed, I planned what I had to do next: Make an appointment for the insemination, buy prenatal vitamins, put together a baby registry, get the baby’s room set up. Between thoughts, I noticed that my order was taking a while to complete. The rotating circle on my screen, known as the “spinning wheel of death,” seemed to be spinning for an unusually long time. I waited, waited some more, and finally tried using the back button in case my computer was crashing. But nothing happened. Finally, the spinning wheel of death disappeared and a message popped up: Out of stock.

Out of stock? I figured there must be some computer glitch—maybe when I pressed the back button?—so I speed-dialed the sperm bank and asked for Kathleen, but she was out and I got transferred to a customer-service rep named Barb.

Barb looked into the matter and determined that this was no glitch. I’d selected a very popular donor, she said. She went on to explain that popular donors went quickly and that, while the company tried to “restock” their “inventory” often, there was a six-month hold for it so it could get quarantined and tested. Even when the inventory was made available, she said, there still might be a long wait, because some people had placed it on back order. As Barb spoke, I thought of how Kathleen had called just yesterday. Now it occurred to me that maybe she’d suggested this donor to several women. Like me, maybe many women had bonded with Kathleen over her honest appraisals of semen.

Barb placed me on the waitlist (“Don’t be foolish and waste your time waiting,” she’d said ominously), then I put down the phone and felt numb. After months of fruitless searching, I’d found my donor, and my future baby had finally seemed like a reality, more than just an idea in my head. But now, on my birthday, I had to let that baby go. I was all the way back at square one.

I slumped over my laptop, staring into space. I sat there for a long while until I noticed, on the corner of my desk, a business card that I’d gotten the week before at a professional networking event. It was from a twenty-seven-year-old filmmaker named Alex. I’d spoken to Alex for only about five minutes, but he was kind and smart and seemed healthy, and I thought, with the impulsivity of somebody running out of options, that maybe I could skip the online banks and try to find my donor out in the real world. Alex fit the profile of the kind of donor I sought. Why not ask if he’d consider it? After all, the worst he could say was no.

I chose my subject line carefully (An Unusual Question) and left the email vague (Hey, remember me, from that networking event?). Then I invited him to meet for coffee so that I could ask my “unusual question.” Alex responded, wondering if I could email him the question. I replied that I’d prefer to discuss it in person. He wrote, Sure. And the next thing I knew, we were set to meet for coffee Sunday at noon.

I was, to put it mildly, nervous when I arrived at Urth Caffé. After sending my impulsive email, I was certain that Alex would say no and then tell ten of his friends what I’d done, leaving me so humiliated that I’d never be able to go to a networking event again. I’d considered backing out, but I wanted a baby so badly that I felt I had to do this, just in case. The answer to an unasked question is always no, I repeated to myself over and over.

Alex greeted me warmly and the small talk came easily—so easily that, before I knew it, we were having a great time. After about an hour, in fact, I’d almost forgotten what we were doing there when Alex leaned across the table, looked me in the eye, and asked flirtatiously, as if he’d concluded we were on a date, “So, what was your ‘unusual question’?”

Instantly my face felt hot and my palms sweaty, and I did what any normal person would do under the circumstances—I went mute. The gravity and lunacy of what I was about to do rendered me speechless.

Alex waited until I began forming words, flailing, using incoherent analogies to explain my request. I was saying things like “I don’t have all the ingredients for the recipe” and “It’s like donating a kidney, but without removing the organ.” The second I said the word organ, I got even more flustered and tried changing course. “It’s like giving blood,” I said, “except there’s sex instead of needles!” With that, I willed myself to shut up. Alex was staring back with a strange look on his face, and I thought, Life does not get more humiliating than this.

But then it did. Because it quickly became apparent that Alex had no idea what I was trying to ask.

“Look,” I managed to say. “I’m thirty-seven years old and I want to have a baby. I’m not having luck with the sperm banks, and I’m wondering if you’d consider—”

This time Alex clearly got it, because his entire body froze; even his mocha chai latte stayed suspended in midair. Other than one catatonic patient in medical school, I’d never seen a person sit so still before in my life. Finally Alex’s lips moved and out came one word: “Wow.”

Then, slowly, more words came out. “I wasn’t expecting that at all.”

“I know,” I said. I felt terrible for having put him in such an awkward situation, for bringing this up at all, and I was just about to say so when, to my amazement, Alex added: “But I’d be willing to talk about it.”

Now it was my turn to freeze before eventually saying “Wow.” The next few hours flew by: Alex and I discussed about everything from our childhoods to future dreams. It seemed that talking about sperm had broken down all the emotional walls, the way having sex with somebody for the first time can open the emotional floodgates. When we finally got up to leave, Alex said that he needed to do some thinking, and I said okay, and he said he’d be in touch. I was sure, though, that once he actually thought this through, I’d never hear from him again.

But that night, Alex’s name appeared in my inbox. I clicked on his message, expecting a nice rejection. Instead he wrote: So far I am a yes, but with more questions. So we set up another meeting.

Over the next couple of months we met at Urth so often that I started calling the café my “sperm office,” and my friends started calling it simply Spurth. At Spurth, we talked about everything from semen samples and medical histories to contracts and contact with the child. Eventually we got to the point where we talked about how to do the transfer—whether we should have the doctor do the insemination or have sex to increase the odds of conception.

He picked sex.

Honestly, I had no objection. And more honestly? I was thrilled with this development! After all, I imagined that in my future life as a mom, there wouldn’t be much opportunity to have sex with a gorgeous twenty-seven-year-old like Alex, with his ripped abs and chiseled cheekbones.

Meanwhile, I began obsessively monitoring my menstrual cycles. One day at Spurth, I mentioned to Alex that I was about to ovulate, so if we were going to try this month, he had exactly one week to make a decision. In other circumstances that might have seemed like a lot of pressure to put on a guy, but by now it felt like a done deal and I didn’t have time to waste. We’d already looked at our plan from every possible angle: legal, emotional, ethical, practical. By this point, too, we had inside jokes and nicknames for each other and had bonded over what a blessing this child would be. The week before, he had even asked if, like any other business opportunity, I had “gone out to others” or if this was an exclusive offer. I had the fleeting impulse to invent a bidding war to seal the deal (Pete is circling and there’s also interest from Gary, so you better get back to me by Friday. There’s a lot of heat around this). But I wanted our relationship to be based in complete truthfulness, and anyway, I was sure that Alex would say yes.

The day after I issued the deadline, we decided to take a walk on the beach to discuss one last time the final details in the contract we’d had drawn up. As we strolled along the shore, drizzle appeared out of nowhere. We looked at each other—should we head back?—but then the drizzle turned into a veritable storm. We were both in short sleeves, and Alex took the jacket from around his waist and placed it over my shoulders, and as we faced each other, getting drenched in the rain on the beach, he gave me the official green light. After all the negotiations, all the getting to know each other, all the questions about what this would mean for us and the child, we were ready.

“Let’s make you a baby!” he said, and there we were, hugging and smiling, me in an oversize jacket that went down to my knees, embracing this man who was going to give me his sperm, and I thought about how I couldn’t wait to tell my child this story one day.

When we got back to his car, Alex gave me his executed copy of the contract.

And then he disappeared.

I didn’t hear from him for another three days. This might not seem long, but if you’re in your late thirties and about to ovulate and your only other baby option is on indefinite back order, three days is an eternity. I tried not to read into it (stress is bad for conception), but when Alex finally resurfaced, he left me a message saying, “We need to talk.” I sank to the floor. Like every adult on the planet, I knew exactly what that meant: I was about to be dumped.

The next morning, as we sat at our regular table at Spurth, Alex looked away and began issuing the usual breakup clichés: “It’s not you, it’s me”; “I’m so unsettled in my life right now that I don’t know if I can commit, so for your sake, I don’t want to string you along.” And the perennial favorite “I hope we can still be friends.”

“It’s okay, there are other fish in the sea,” I said, protecting myself with a bad pun. I hoped to lighten the mood, to let Alex know that the rational part of me understood why he felt that he couldn’t go through with the donation. But inside I was gutted, because now this was the second baby I’d so clearly imagined and that I would never get to hold in my arms. A friend who had her second miscarriage around this time said that she felt exactly the same way. I went home and decided to take a break from the sperm-donor search because the heartbreak was too much to bear. And like my friend who had miscarried, I avoided babies as much as possible. Even diaper commercials sent me lunging for the remote so I could change the channel.

After a few months, I knew I had to get back online and resume my search. But just as I was about to sign on again, I got an unexpected call.

It was Kathleen, my lab girl at the sperm bank.

“Lori, good news!” she announced in her heavy Brooklyn accent. “Somebody returned a vial of the Clooney kid.”

The Clooney kid . . . my guy. The one who was “the whole package.”

“Returned?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how I felt about returned semen. I thought about how at Whole Foods, you couldn’t return any personal-hygiene items, even with a receipt. But Kathleen assured me that the vial hadn’t left its sealed nitrogen tank and that there was nothing wrong with the “product.” Somebody had simply gotten pregnant some other way and no longer needed the backup. If I wanted it, I had to buy it now.

“Clooney has a waiting list, you know—” she began, but before she finished her sentence, I had already said yes.

Late that fall, I was out to dinner with a group of people after my baby shower when my mother noticed the real George Clooney sitting at a table nearby. Everyone at our table knew about Kathleen’s “young George Clooney” description, and one by one, my friends and family pointed at my enormous belly, then turned their heads toward the movie star.

He looked much more grown up than he had as a young actor starring in ER. I, too, felt much more grown up than I’d been as a young executive working at NBC. So much had happened in both of our lives. He was about to win an Oscar. I was about to have my son.

A week later, “the Clooney kid” got a new name: Zachary Julian. ZJ. He is love and joy and wonder and magic. He is, as Kathleen might say, “the whole package.”

Flash-forward eight years: a déjà vu, of sorts. When Boyfriend says, “I can’t live with a kid under my roof for the next ten years,” I’ll be transported back to that day at Urth when Alex told me he couldn’t be my donor after all. I’ll remember how shattered I was, but also how Kathleen called soon after, resurrecting what had felt like the death of a dream.

The situations will seem similar enough—the blindsiding twist, plans dashed—that underneath my pain in the wake of Boyfriend’s announcement, I might expect to have hope that things will work themselves out again.

But something feels very different this time.