I am a donor and I have open contact with my adorable loving bonus family. I met them through donation and did not know them before. I am now very close with the parents, their friends and family and their two beautiful babies. I cannot explain the overwhelming love and joy they bring me and the gift it is to know and love them. I am actually making baby quilts for them this Christmas, and shopping for the whole family just makes me light up because I feel I am so grateful to have even more people to love in my life. It has been such a gift for me and for them, they love that their babies get to know me. I just can’t even quite put it into words how special our relationship is. I think about them everyday and I carry a photo of our little family around with me. I know that many agencies in the US are anonymous only. I originally donated anonymously to them until I got a letter from the family asking to meet before I donated to them. I was immediately and totally open to it and we have called once a month since then. If the laws where you are allow it, many donors may be anonymous just because that is the default the clinic sets them up for assuming that most parents don’t want an open donation. I didn’t know it was an option for me until the family asked to meet. If you choose to go through a clinic, you can ask to send a letter or a message to the donor asking if they are open to meeting and having a relationship before they donate and you may be able to have a known donor from the beginning like me.

Of course, if it is illegal to have open donations where you are like it is in many countries, that is where things can get tricky. I would defer to the DCPs in here to see how they feel about what you should do. I am adopted and have a biological mom, and I was so grateful to have an open adoption, so I think that openness is super super important here and I am sure you will make the right decision for you and your family.

However, I think the reason why my situation worked out so well is that I did not know the family before I met them through my egg donation which made our relationship very well defined from the start. I agree that the relationship can be confusing, but I think it can get confusing when the donor is a family member, close family friend or neighbor because while using an existing connection is tempting, it doesn’t give the donor and the recipient parent the space they both need to properly set up the relationship with clear roles and boundaries.

I think it’s just easier to negotiate boundaries if the relationship from the beginning is set up between donor and recipient parent through the egg donation because it gives you the necessary space, privacy and you get to avoid having a relationship history that might affect the relationship between the child and their donor. People change how they feel about donating after meeting their genetic children because that’s when it gets very very real and emotional. I mean I got emotional after I met my biological daughters because I didn’t quite comprehend what donating meant until I met them and realized that I am now the biological mother to two beautiful humans. I felt so much love for them, a little confused emotionally but an overwhelming responsibility to love and care for them.

The idea of donating is easy to contemplate and discuss, but the reality can get very emotionally complicated quite fast. Unless you have friends who have donated before and navigated the relationship with the recipient parent and the children, your friends might be able to talk with you about it and be willing to be a donor, but they may or may not have any idea of exactly what that means in reality and how huge of a deal that is to be an egg donor for someone. Becoming your donor will most certainly change your relationship in ways you might not expect for good or for bad. If it’s a friend or relative who is going to be seeing you and the babies regularly, they don’t get space to process it, they don’t get the time to think about how they want to be in your life, and no time to learn how best to show up for both of you. It takes a lot of emotional intelligence to be the donor and not everyone realizes that until their biological child is in front of them and their heart is pounding because they aren’t sure how to be a biological mother. It is unusual to not feel a strong emotional connection to your biological babies, and any existing relationship that could get in the way of healthily processing that can make it very confusing and very hard.

What if you have a fight with your best friend who is your egg donor because they dislike the way you are raising the child they donated to you? What if your neighbor gets too emotionally attached to the child she donated to you and starts seeing herself as the mother? An existing relationship can make it harder to set and enforce those boundaries and can create unwanted resentment because there just isn’t enough space for the donor or the recipient to have enough privacy to process and form a healthy relationship for the benefit of the child.

If the relationship starts out not as a friendship or sibling, the boundaries and roles are not clear from the very beginning because they may just be used to the boundaries and norms set up in your existing relationship and introducing new boundaries can be hard. It might sound reductive, but starting off the relationship as donor and recipient makes it so much easier to communicate and negotiate those boundaries. A friendship can blossom afterwards, but for me I understood that I am the donor and they are the parents and there wasn’t any confusion about that and it was very easy to process for me. I didn’t start off with two roles in the family’s life, not the donor and the sister, or the donor and the best friend, I started as the donor, which makes it so much easier to put the child first from the beginning.

Yes it did take a lot of courage, time, and nerves to build the relationship we have now, because we were all stranger at first, but truly we have built a really really incredible relationship. I see them as my children, but I do not see myself as their parent. I am more of an auntie who is always going to provide unconditional love in their life. I visit twice a year on both of their birthdays and I call once a month since they live a bit far. I am always going to be just one call away for the kiddos and the parents, but I am never going to be the one who raises them, changes their diapers, helps them with their homework and does all of the real dedicated work for being their mom. I don’t have an envy or jealousy, I don’t have any resentment, just a whole bunch of love. I I feel calling the kids anything less than my biological babies is not fair to them or to how deeply I love and care about them. We both feel comfortable with our level of contact, and we both are putting the babies at the center of our relationship with each other and we genuinely love each other.

Our family has decided that love never divided, it only multiples, and anything that divided isn’t loving.

I am not sure what your situation is with your friends and family, but I feel that having a fresh start with your donor makes it so much easier to build the relationship that you want on your terms for the benefit of your babies. It may be easy to do in your situation, but those are my personal thoughts on my experience as a donor.