Movie Night

Hey, y'all. Just a quickie to let you know that the Tribeca Film Festival is streaming a documentary about donor siblings for free today. You have to register, but there's no charge, and so far I'm finding it very interesting, well made, all that. If you catch it, let's compare notes, eh?

http://www.tribecafilm.com/tribecaonline/streaming-room/donor_unknown-film32714.html

The trailer (which I haven't watched):

DONOR TRAILER v4 WEBSITE from Docs & Pieces on Vimeo.

Great Moments in Smartitude

Receptionist: Kips Bay Baby Factory, may I help you?

Me: May I please speak with Andrology?

Receptionist: Regarding?

Me: [pause] Sperm?


I mean really. Do they get a lot of calls about anything else?

Quickies

I hate blog posts apologizing for not posting, so this won't be one.

Nor do I have a proper post in me now.

But there are a couple of things I think you should know:

1. It's CD1. Yeah.

Not sure what the next course of action will be, but at the very least we will probably switch donors, since we need to order more anyway. More on that later.

Also, I need to do my taxes so that we can see if we can even afford to order more.

2. Mrs. Spock made me cry. Practically everything's been making me cry lately, so that's not much of an accomplishment per se, but she made my cry in a good way. She sent me the ...I'm looking for a word, and all I'm coming up with is "bestest"... BESTEST! sock-gram package! It arrived when I was really at the very bottom of feeling crappy about everything, and it was just the very thing. Pictures to come.

3. A toddler I hang out with has been read somewhere -- I think in a Moomintroll book, but hers are in Danish, and I can only read the third-rate, adulterated Danish we call "English" -- about creatures cheering one another up by kissing sad creatures on the nose. She has become a dutiful practitioner of this technique, which is predictably sloppy and surprisingly effective.

I'm A Lesbian And I'm Okay

I should really put my insurance on speed dial. Not a day goes by, it seems, that I’m not talking to them.

This morning, I finally got resolution on the “will you pay for this genetic test” question I put to them in…June. That’s 2 months of their losing letters, requiring codes they hadn’t asked for in the first place, requiring still more codes, and so on. Every fax takes two days to process because they convert them to microfilm before reading them. This makes the bureaucratic aspects of my health care sound more like a James Bond movie, but also seems to negate the speediness of faxing.

Now I’m on hold to find with a different branch of the company. Rather than the Mozart the main line uses, the mental health section favors silence punctuated by a firm voice saying, “Please wait.” Repeatedly. I’m calling the mental health division because apparently, I’m cruising for a nervous breakdown by being gay. News to me, but hey, I’m no doctor.

The above is an oversimplification, but near enough to the truth. Sugar and I had been thinking we’d skip the Barry White and vanilla-scented candles portion of the TTC journey in favor of the favorable if florescent-lit odds of IUIs at the Kips Bay Baby Factory. Mr. NMEBSI* has more IUI than ICI vials available, and we have been starting to think that we should face the fact that we don’t have baby-making equipment in the house, rather than let sentiment stand in the way of a better chance of conception. In the aftermath of my HSG, I had been feeling reluctant to encourage any more catheter-on-cervix action, but now I’ve had two months of the least painful periods since high school. Some private investigation indicates that I’m bleeding almost exclusively out of the side that was — to quote my chart — “perforated” at the HSG, which makes me think that totally tubular experience left my cervix more open and that an IUI was therefore less likely to require overwhelming force. So today I called the clinic IUI nurse to find out the procedures. All fairly straight-forward, except, oh, had no one told me I’d have to meet with their psychologist first? Everyone using donor sperm does.

Let me be frank: I’d rather we didn’t have to use donor sperm. I’d rather bring home a bottle of cheap champagne, line a roasting pan for Ray’s lucky Beer Can Chicken, and end up with a kidlet who looks half like me and half like Sugar. I’d also like a magical flying pony who lives in the apartment and doesn’t poop. I suppose I can see recommending a sit-down with the counselor for het couples using donor sperm, who perhaps haven’t spent more than a decade considering the ramifications of having a child who isn’t genetically related to both of them, but come on. We’ve been over this, trust me.

I find this requirement annoying if not discriminatory, but I also remember my grandmother telling me not to cut off my nose to spite my face, so I called the office psychologist and made an appointment for next week. Sugar must have been able to tell over gChat how pissed I was, because she didn’t say boo about having to miss more work. At the end of the conversation, the receptionist says, “By the way, the fee for the consultation is $450 and we don’t work with any insurance companies.”

EXCUSE ME? $450 because you’re worried that I might not have thought about being gay? $450 so Sugar and I can put on our Happy, Well-Adjusted Couple Show for you? No matter what anyone who’s known us for more than an hour might think of our parenting ambitions; clearly what you think matters most.

Since I started writing this post, I talked to a very nice woman at my insurance company, who tells me that they’ll reimburse for 80% of the fee, less my deductible, which is $363. So it would only cost me $380.40 to be gay. Bargain prices! Everyone will want to be gay now!

I say “would” because this pisses me off way too much, even if we had $380.40 we couldn’t figure out how to use (answer: sperm). I have a call in to the doctor. If he won’t waive this, we’ll go elsewhere or just crank up the Barry White after all.


*I love this name, by the way. Mr. Nmebsi sounds like he would get his oil changed by Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and perhaps respectfully consult Mma Ramotswe about his suspicion that his neighbor was pilfering from his garden.

Voice Recognition

Baby Mama and I are trying to pick a donor. Somehow I thought this would involve a lot of choice - huge numbers of profiles and audio clips to go through, baby pictures to order, etc. In reality, we have only a few donors on our list, since we are restricting to ID consent and also trying to find someone with my ethnic background. (In the WTF category - how come no one is eastern European up in here? I'm kind of from Chicago, so this just seems unthinkable to me . . . )

So we found this guy who is, in fact, partly of my ethnic background and even seems to have my interests - studying art, introverted. But his audio clip is intensely boring. It sounds like a high school essay on 'Doing the Right Thing.' Every time I hear it I'm like, really, that was your best answer?

Behind door number 2, we have Mr. Not-My-Ethnic-Background-Silly-Interests. There isn't as much to recommend Mr. NMEBSI, except that his audio clip makes him sounds like a sweet guy. What he talks about in his 30 seconds isn't very profound, but it's funny, and it sounds honest. I would rather go with him.

I have no idea if this is a good way to choose a donor. In fact, it's probably not. There's less chance that a child from Mr. NMEBSI will look like me and less chance that this child will want to major in the humanities (although, wait, maybe that's a plus . . .). The only logical thing I've thought of so far is that since we are looking for ID consent, there is less likelyhood that Mr. NMEBSI will be a tool when, 18 years from now, our child might be cold-calling him.

I just don't want to stick the sperm of some doofus who has learned how to give the right answers to pass the test (Morals and ethics my butt, you're like what, 20 years old?) into Baby Mama. Yuck. That's what we avoided by being lesbians right? We had coming-out anxiety and bizarre interactions with old friends, but not the sorrow of sleeping with some surface-y guy who later turns out to be arrogant and a little dumb.

The whole choice of donor thing feels so random. I wish it didn't have to happen at all. It seems both important and impossible. (I mentioned to Baby Mama my wish that we could just have Sperm Tuesday every month or so, when sperm would fall from the sky, but she said that would be gross . . . .) So Mr. NMEBSI here we come, I think.