Searching for my donor dad

Hana R. Alberts is searching for a sperm donor. She’s not interested in getting pregnant, she’s looking for her “donor dad”. She describes her search at Forbes.com.

“My search – which my mom blessed because, heck, she was curious, too – started off on a promising note. The two doctors my mom saw are both still practicing. I called one twice and even stood in his office lobby so I could catch him between patients. He looked at me kindly and said, vaguely, that he remembered my mom and would call me back. He never did.

So I tried the other doctor, whose receptionist, Dorothy, told me apologetically that, at the time, the doctors only knew the height, hair color and ethnicity of the sperm donor. (Mom has always told me her donor was 5’7″ or taller, had brown hair and was white.) Patients’ medical charts–not that they would have contained any identifying information–are destroyed after 20 years. Well, shoot. I am 24.

I have a hazy memory of explaining matter-of-factly to some nursery school playmate that, well, I just didn’t have a daddy, and then flitting on to some other matter of importance, like glue. There were no secrets at the kitchen table where I spent my childhood, no black holes in my sense of self.

But this search rattled it. I now harbor a somewhat subversive interest in the donor–even though it feels a little like an insult to my mom to do so when I am so damn lucky. Inane questions continue to surface. Does he also tan easily? (My mom just gets freckles.) Does he too concoct bizarre culinary combinations that grossed Mom out, like tuna fish and grape jelly sandwiches?”