Over at The AWL, a fabulously NYC-centric blog, I found writer Jack Stuef’s clever-funny-sad-ironic essay, I Am the World’s Worst Sperm Donor. Here is an excerpt:
In the end… Grant and Lee signed the treaty. It was over. I realized I was never in the battle to begin with. And I hadn’t gotten this way because the room made me cold. I was this way from the start.Like Michaelangelo’s David, I was tense and afraid. That’s because I didn’t actually want to do this.
What my mind couldn’t stop sorting out was the bigger picture: children that are going to come of this who will likely never know their biological father; a donor who would have children he’d never know. If I did get to meet them—say, under the Open Donor program, for coffee or something, after years of them growing up without me—I would have trouble looking them in the eye and confirming I got a c-note for performing a sex act in a freezing room. I would feel guilty and want to have a relationship with the whole multitude of them, however impossible. At some future Starbucks (where the wifi is in the coffee), they would tell me some of their quirks and look at me expectantly, and I would lie and pretend I share them, so as to take as much credit as possible. I already usually think children I see on the subway seem more intelligent than their parents. I don’t need my ego to make me wonder if it’s because I’m their father. I can’t go through life always knowing there are strangers around me who might be my kids—kids I should be playing catch with or whatever.
It’s rather repulsive for a proud cynic to be this sentimental and have fatherly instincts for a half-handful of bodily fluid, but here we were. The North side of my body, with its superior synapse resources, had won the war. A masturbator divided against himself cannot stand.
Read the full piece here.
-Bridget Crawford
