Fatherhood

Where Do Babies Come From, Anyway?

After seven failed attempts to have a child through in-vitro fertilization, the author and his wife embark on the most daring adventure of all -- a quest to find their child.

By: Brooks Hansen, Photographs by: Dan Winters
[ Updated: Jul 14, 2008 - 5:12:47 PM ]

I found it kind of endearing, the no-frills approach of the "Sample Room" -- the dim fluorescent lighting, faux-leather La-Z-Boy recliner, TV monitor, stack of porno tapes, rack of dirty magazines, sink, toilet.

Finally, someone gets me, I thought.

It wasn't until the deed was done and I stepped back out into the harsher light of the situation at hand, sans chi, that the sheepishness set in. I wended my way through the clinic corridors back to the reception area, past all the couples still waiting their turn -- the men cracking the spines of their sports sections, the women all thumbing their pulses, stroking their bellies.

I followed the blue directional arrows down the hall to the pre-op area, and when I finally found my wife tucked away behind her little partition, all prepped and ready, the imbalance of our separate roles was hard to miss.

Here we were, Retrieval Day -- the day Elizabeth and I both had been working toward for 3 months, the day my wife's eggs were to be harvested and united with my fresh "sample" -- and look at us: She wore a blue smock, elastic-banded cap, and matching paper slippers and was just moments away from a procedure that bore closest comparison to some obscene alien-abduction scenario. I stood there in jeans and a sweatshirt, having completed a task that was pretty simple and one for which I'd been rehearsing religiously since I was around 13.

Was that really as much as could be asked of me?

I thought of Joseph the Carpenter -- earthly and, if you believe the hype, adoptive father of that most famous in-vitro baby ever, Jesus. Granted, there were differences between his situation and mine, but standing there, watching the nurse wheel Elizabeth off into the operating room, I did feel a curious kinship with Old Joe, patron saint of all fatherhood not "naturally" come by. Drafted by fate to play an apparently necessary but clearly marginal role in this unlikely event, asked to kneel in wonder at the cribside but not to block the light, I wondered, had his part made sense to him? Did he know in his heart this was how it was supposed to go?