Time for a little talk about family.

Family.


Talk about a loaded word. It can be such a simple thing...or not.


My children have two moms. Obviously, that means we had to get some sperm somewhere, so that we could have kids.  Kids were always in the picture for us, we just had to figure out how to have them.


So we looked for donors. We debated asking male friends (too weird) or using sperm banks (too expensive) and finally ended up using a known donor. For those of you are aren't savvy about this sort of thing (and you are lucky...), a "known" donor is someone whose name we know and who can be contacted by our children when and if our children want to contact him. 

Our donor is pretty amazing (duh, obviously, or we wouldn't have chosen him) and made the process quite easy and inexpensive. Over the years, we've occasionally sent photographs, and then we ended up meeting some of the other recipients online. Now we have a group on facebook where we can keep in touch with the other parents, share photographs and stories, and, if we want to, meet up.

To some, this is shocking. It might be more shocking to find out that Ella and Ben have 30+ half-siblings out there...it certainly was to us. But we've gotten used to it, and even embraced it.  Sure, it's strange, and probably not what I would have envisioned originally, but there it is. At least when they are teenagers, we'll have a sounding board for donor-related questions!

Anyway, one of the other recipients posted the following article tonight.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/health/06donor.html?hp


It's about a donor who has 150 offspring.

That's not the big deal (well, it is, but not what got me fired up...). The last couple of lines in the article read:

“How do you make connections with so many siblings? What does family mean to these children?”       

First of all, my kids have a family.  It actually is a pretty typical family--two parents, two kids, two pets. Two sets of grandparents. Five cousins on each side. A super-amazing GP. Sometimes, Ella gets stuck on the idea of "birth mom" and plays it up--"I'm sitting next to my birth mom today" or "Mommy and I have Wheeler blood and that's why we're so good at Sorry", but that's about the extent of it.  We love each other a lot and tell each other all the time. Even Ben can point and say "Eye (points to eye) luvv (points to belly/heart) YOU (shouts and points to the person he's loving at that moment)".  We fight and make up and laugh a LOT and work through the tough stuff and get silly at least once a day.

MY family is overflowing with love. My kids know that there are at least a dozen people out there who would do anything for them, who are their FAMILY.

And that has nothing to do with having a donor.