#24: 'by choice'
an aborted attempt at immaculate conception
A version of this was read at Moody’s Nativity Party at the Jago on 19th December. If you have the opportunity to go to one of these nights…do! They’re good fun.
Today’s entry is fundamentally about fertility. While I do not go through with any procedures so there’s no discussion of baby loss and the like, I’m aware it is a particularly fraught topic regardless so thought it worth letting you know.
Oh and this is barely about culture. There have been articles on it, and Camille Charriere was on a clip of the Shameless podcast I saw a Reel of about quitting IVF, but let’s be real: I’ve made the cultural focal point of the end of this me, baby! And if the true meaning of Christmas isn’t naked mission drift then I don’t know what it is.
The nativity is the story of the miraculous birth of a baby to a mother who didn’t have sex to conceive him. I turned 34 in November; I spent the end of my ‘Jesus year’ seriously planning to become a solo mum.
Friends were mainly supportive when I told them I was thinking of the intentionally single parent route. I’ve not been in a relationship for 12 years now and have always believed children were the future. And, despite thousands of pounds spent unpacking and processing my own upbringing, I still don’t think parenting is that difficult.
So, I got to work researching. There was no one in my life I had the guts to ask for their sperm, though I would be up for a co-parenting arrangement. Remnants of this time linger on my laptop: a pdf pamphlet from the Donor Conception Network called Closer Connections: When the donor is someone you know has been waiting to be deleted until I wrote this post.
Anonymous donation it would be then. I’m still signed up to the London Sperm Bank’s weekly emails and they sent us all a festive message today, Christmas Eve Eve. Did you know they have a Donor of the Month spotlight for someone whose vials retail at 40% off?
Selecting a donor was the bit I was most nervous about. Would it reveal my innermost, worst biases? I didn’t think my preferences would be racial, but what if I was a snob? We almost all of us have our ‘things’ and they’re often reflected in our closest friends. Most of mine, for instance, have long-term partners who also went to university. A couple of nights before the wedding of my oldest friend I couldn’t go to sleep because I worried I would be the only person I knew going without a postgraduate qualification or a partner. (I think there was maybe one exception to that, but being a filmmaker is its own category, if you think about it.)
I point this out because it’s easy to be judgemental about the trends in other people’s social circles and personal lives while studiously ignoring our own. I was recently at a party — a mainstay in the social calendar of a tightknit, longstanding group that I am firmly and quite happily on the edge of. But on my way there, my nerves saw me picturing going round in a circle and pointing at them to see if any of them had had any black people at their multiple weddings over the past few years. Like some kind of sad version of An Inspector Calls except I’m inspecting the fact I felt so undateable and unlovable last year I was basically suicidal and times where I’m surrounded by a group of people can prompt the ‘I know there is something a bit wrong or different with me, and as we’re not close you don’t see me with rose-tinted glasses so could one of you lot be a comrade and just let me know what it is!’ script in my head. The reason this would have been a bad move is multiform: in general, it’s not good to reveal you have been scouring the limited information you glean on Instagram about other people’s nuptials, much less that you’re trying to figure out ethnic representation in that way. Moreover, it’s not very chilled or Christmassy to tell people off for this sort of thing and the last time I did it, it didn’t really do much except be part of the long end of a long friendship. Also, it’s not good to point at people regardless of whether there’s mulled wine present. And who the hell did I think would be at any future wedding of mine? Very uncool to be a hypocrite about these things.
Through my searches, I was relived to discover that I was drawn to kind-hearted, laidback seeming donors, rather than those who simply listed their accolades. Only one person’s profile disturbed me: a self-described ‘clinical hypnotherapist/police officer.’ I work for a trade union, so under no circumstances would I would harbouring a mind control cop in my womb and under my roof.
And on the race/ethnicity front: there aren’t that many black and mixed-race black donors on the sperm bank. My preferred candidate, whose ‘pen portrait’ (the little biography you send about yourself) felt the kindest and spoke of his sister being his best friend etc, was out of stock in the format I required. It is such a marketplace and I think the upside to having more than one person involved in the gamete donor shortlisting game is it probably narrows down the choices. I found myself wondering if other people were put off by redheaded donors, as I definitely wasn’t, but noticed how many people looking for free anonymous sperm on facebook groups would post frantic posts about BLUE EYED BLONDE IDEALLY, CAUCASIAN men available in the next day or so. I quite liked the thought of having gingerish grandchildren; if I keep dyeing my hair we would be matching.
Sperm is costly, I soon discovered. £1300 a screened and motility-tested pop, from my memory. I set up a Monzo savings pot called ‘IUI’ (for intra-uterine insemination — colloquially known as the turkey baster method) and used a photo I’d taken of some muffins before I baked them. It was the closest thing to buns in the oven I had to visualise the whole thing.
That pot is now empty; it has probably gone on a combination of paying off some of my credit card for my flooring and also a few nice meals. And I am not with child, nor am I intending to be any time soon. Obviously, the finances of it all played a huge part: I would have to give up a third of my take-home salary for fulltime childcare, which just wouldn’t be feasible for me. You might see adverts for ‘affordable’ IVF on public transport, but those are packages for the medically easiest candidates: those under a certain BMI (I was hovering around eligibility at the time), with a certain follicular count, AMH levels (a hormone) and so on. And it does not include the sperm. I felt for the people I’d see on those seeking-donor facebook groups, clearly so eager to welcome a child into their lives they would be up for having a stranger, some of whom had been the donor to 20+ successful pregnancies, enter into a legally dubious arrangement. Several people on the subreddits, Mumsnet pages and fb groups I was on spoke about how useful Calpol syringes were, but if you use a sperm donation outside of a clinical setting, the donor can ask for parental visitation etc rights further down the line. Where I live, in order to be eligible for NHS-funded IVF, I would have to self-fund six rounds of IUI. This will go down to three self-funded rounds when I turn 36, so in a way it’s worth the wait.
But it wasn’t just the money. When I pictured me and this newfound child of mine, I saw us, just the two of us, in my living room at Christmas. Baby would be a toddler, I picture him being a ‘he’ here, not because I’m wedded to being a boy mum but to add the balance of the scene. We would have one Christmas cracker held between the pair of us. We would be wearing conical party hats in bright colours. My smile would be broad, in this mind’s eye tableau, but it wouldn’t be sincere. My baby would be lonely, given I spend more Christmasses than not away from immediate and extended family. We would be lonely because I would be frazzled and tired and therefore unwilling to let people in. The money absolutely would be part of it; not having an end in sight for when you might become less broke creates all manner of stresses. The lack of abroad holidays wouldn’t upset me, but the lack of breathing room absolutely would.
An immaculate conception, I could handle. But an immaculate, sterile life in order to secure a nuclear-ish family of my making? Absolutely not. One of the nicest parts about the process of thinking seriously about the whole thing (and thinking about it all the time, to be completely honest) was opening up to people and them opening up to me. When I joked to my former housemates that I didn’t know how anyone was supposed to describe how they look without sounding like a faux-bashful YA heroine, especially as I don’t have much in the way of unique facial features like the dimples and almond eyes and freckles given as examples on the form, one of them scrolled back to show me a photo of us from earlier that summer where I did in fact have dimples. I have friends going through IVF currently, and those who have come out the other side of it this year; friends who have had difficult news handed to them about their own fertility; friends who have decided children is not for them and friends who would quite like them, but not ardently. It turns out that married literature academics really do talk to each other how you might think they do: my oldest friend passed on some advice from her optimistic husband about not ‘[giving] enough credit to the numinous…The way in which things just work themselves out.’ She knew I likely would talk myself out of it purely via the maths of it, rather than including the maths of it.
A lot of the discussion around solo (and it is referred to as ‘solo’ rather than ‘single’ for reasons I’m sure we can unpack elsewhere…) parenting and motherhood refers to it as ‘by choice’. I think there is a distinction to be made between those people who thought they were parenting in a stable committed relationship, only for the couple to break down during pregnancy, and those who started off the journey knowing it would just be them on the birth certificate. But what is choice? I don’t know that I am single by choice, or at least that I have been single by choice this entire twelve years.
When I closed the door (and the ‘Childrearing and Oncosts’ spreadsheet — because my friend was right to know I would try to be methodical about the future outgoings) on babies for now, I wanted to make sure the life I was living wasn’t simply the consolation prize. Just as I thought of those months where I was strongly planning and weighing up my options as some of the last ones where particular freedoms might be available to me. I got a free ticket to a midnight matinee at the Globe Theatre in September; I didn’t know they did such a thing but I was excited to leave my house at 10:45pm to go watch The Merry Wives of Windsor at relatively short notice, just because I could and might not be able to next year. I have stayed out an extra 30 minutes to two hours at parties this December because I could and probably will be able to next year, but won’t be able to in 50 years’ time.
Speaking of next December, I am focusing on changing that image in my eye. I’d like to have a Christmas party here at mine, if I can. Part of the reason I chose this flat was that it has a pretty large living room for a one-bed and even if I like living on my own, I want to have the option of people coming round too. There are two simultaneous vibes in my head I want to capture, next Advent: one, a sort of midcentury Manhattan red bows and classy cocktails drunk with guests wearing velvet in the evening; the other in the daylight hours, more like About A Boy, a film whose ending is a perfect depiction of a found family being festive.
It’s an odd group assorted at Will’s Clerkenwell gaff. Some single, some with kids. Some suicidal, some in love: all nattering and squabbling over the tv and platters of food, rather than canapes. What more could I ask for? What more could I hope to host?
Merry Critmas, one and all!
On this day…
2020: Once upon a time, I was using ‘yearning’ to describe historical lesbian romance films, rather than seeing it used about Conrad Fisher. I still don’t really like the word regardless! But I am highly attuned to anything I deem too ‘precious.’
2021: ‘“We did it, Joe!” Kamala Harris squeak-drawled down the phone in running gear. “You’re gonna be the next president.” I have been saying ‘we did it, Joe’ for so many vague achievements this year (doing laundry, hanging up laundry, submitting copy without apologising in the email for the quality, folding laundry, contemplating doing my tax return), it’s hard to believe the phrase only dates back as far as January.’
Ah, to exist in a time before ‘kamala is brat’
2022: I have managed to weave this particular bit of cultural criticism, on how the unfriended millennial protagonist does not have to be the only story and collectivism and community is available to us, in my organising trainings at work this year. Consider this fair warning if you attend any of mine in 2026!
2023: One of my friends sends people this article when she can’t be bothered explaining all the reasons she hated Dear England. Happy to be of service.
2024: With Palestine Action protesters, in prison without sentences, on the longest hunger strike in the UK since The Troubles, the refeeding scenes from the tv adaptation of Say Nothing have been going around in my head a lot this week.
