For months before my third child was born, my son, then five, was adamant about his preferences.
I want a boy, he said, every time anyone mentioned the impending arrival. I tried, gently, to raise the notion that we weren’t able to choose, but there was no room for negotiation. He listened to my “must-take-what-we-get” speech. “Okay. But I want a boy.” After the birth, he tiptoed over to the cot , staring in with an expression of wonder. “It’s a girl,” I said. The resulting volte-face to this news was spectacularly unashamed. “That’s just what I wanted,” he declared.
Birth is a lottery but even so, I had to feel compassion this week for the anonymous American father who was at the centre of a sperm bank mix-up over the birth of his child. His wife, who is 43, has polycystic ovary syndrome and the couple paid “a lot of money” to an agency for IVF. The baby would be genetically theirs, but delivered via a surrogate. They were very excited as the birth approached but knew immediately afterwards that something was wrong. The baby had black hair, brown eyes and Asian features. He and his wife are both blond with blue eyes.
The man described himself as “devastated” when DNA tests proved that he was not the father. The clinic admitted a “rare” mistake and offered compensation. But money was not the issue. And neither was race, the man insisted. It was a matter of genetics. “Am I the arsehole for wanting to take legal action against the agency and not keep the baby?” he asked in an online post. “If he was white and not mine, we still would have been just as upset. We are just upset that the baby wasn’t both of us.”
But it was from one of them. It was his wife’s – and doesn’t that count for something? What is she meant to feel in this turmoil? Because this story is all about complicated feelings. For all our apparent technical sophistication, our apparent ability to shape our world and put structure in place of the chaos of birth, death and disease, we are not in control in the way we would like to be. Human emotions are messy. We are driven by what we feel and our hearts are less sophisticated than our brains.
Which is not say that we cannot rationalise what we feel, and improve upon our emotional instincts. It’s an awful predicament but how can he come to terms with the mistake? Perhaps by recognising that disappointment comes from unfulfilled expectations and it’s possible to change expectations.
What if he embraces an adoptive role? If genetics are that important to him, the child is part of the wife he presumably loves and is therefore worth treasuring. The child he longs for is right there in front of him, just in a different package to the one he anticipated. Like every father, he has a child that is waiting to be shaped, guided, influenced and, above all, loved. Is there really more to parenthood than that?
Hard as it may be, ego is best left out of the parental equation. I have never completely understood the idea that children are a legacy, our individual, left-behind imprint on the world and history. Our existence is like perfume: strong and intense while it lasts but gradually dissipating. My children are not me and I am not them – thank God, I hear them say – and I see them making their own unique imprint in the sand of life rather than being part of mine. That makes the genetics of parenthood much less important than the relational aspect of it.
As for looking “different” from the blue-eyed parents, does it matter? The comedian Michael McIntyre has created a whole stand-up routine round the notion that his surprisingly oriental appearance caused his parents difficulties. It led, he says, in his autobiography, people to question his mother’s fidelity and his father to beat up the local laundry man, Mr Wu.
The truth is that our genetic children are not always what we expect either. How many parents have speculated about whether their child was swapped at birth in some hospital carelessness? Their child – if they had only taken the right one home – would be quiet, beautiful, well behaved and intelligent. So where did this annoying, stroppy, argumentative, school-refuser come from? As the Scottish James Bond would say, shurely there must be shum mistake.
My five-year-old son and his sister ended up extremely close. “It’s okay mum, your youngest and favourite child is here, now,” my daughter says with sweet venom when he is around. “Nothing can replace the special bond of the eldest, eh mum?” says her brother evenly. As it turned out, my son did, indeed, get what he wanted. He just hadn’t known before he got it that he wanted it. Perhaps that’s the best attitude for parenthood too. You might not get what you want – but you learn to love what you get.
Catherine Deveney is an award-winning investigative journalist, novelist and television presenter
