New Baby Jubilee Soaring High

Last Sunday afternoon a woman my husband and I barely knew, called us out of our Sunday afternoon languor and asked us a really strange but flattering question – she asked me to donate my eggs to her. Apparently she was under the impression that we’d had a baby of our own and that I was fertile but also I seemed to fit what she was looking for since I understood infertility and had many physical characteristics of her husband’s family. Honestly, I wanted and probably did, say yes to her immediately since with my own personal situation I did understand the courage and just what it took for her to ask this of us but my husband wasn’t so enthusiastic. I hung up promising to call her in a few days with our decision, DH and I talked about and I told him that this was something that I really wanted to do.
The thing is, as my close relative’s womb grows each day it serves as a glaring reminder of what I don’t have and somehow I felt that this would have helped. Of course there was the other side to this. Egg donors are usually women who are fertile and having just stopped Clomid 3-4 month ago and being unable to continue because of my inability to handle the side effects, I knew that doing this would have been a challenge. But I was on the proverbial Cloud 9, where reason is overridden by emotion; this was something I wanted to do. Did it bother me that I was about to embark on a ‘big move’ soon and thus would never see this child? More than anything this served as an incentive for me, since I thought seeing this child wouldn’t help me deal with my own infertility.

I fell asleep that night resolving that I was going to do this, planning to offer them not only one cycle but three cycles – gratis. I also talked to God that night asking Him to help me to hear His voice in this even though it may not have been something that I wanted to do. Morning broke and with it renewed enthusiasm but as noon approached, I began to truly mull this over. What if this baby got sick, say maybe had childhood leukemia and they needed a blood marrow from me, would I have been prepared to deal with that? What about my future kids, how would they have dealt with a total stranger claiming their mother after many years? Would my marriage even survive something like this? And what if after giving them my eggs and they were successful and later on DH and I decide to try conceiving and we were unsuccessful, would I be able to handle this? Being a terribly emotional person, would I feel the need to fight them for this baby?
I was prepared to meet this child probably eighteen to twenty years from now, when he or she would have been an adult and the parents less vulnerable to my involvement, but what if this child approached me ten years from now, with a story of abuse or some other sad story, I knew I wouldn’t be able to turn him away. I knew too that I would have thought of him everyday of the rest of my life, what he looked like, where he was, what was he doing. I don’t know that I would have handled that well and could have possibly fought them for this child.

As the day approached to let the couple know of my decision, I began to dread telling them that I had to turn them down. It killed me to know that after being disappointed repeatedly before, I also had to add to their disappointment. But I also realized that the only thing that they would have received from me was a free egg, and possibly, a lifetime of pain.