She kept staring at the twins and then looking at me. "They look so different from each other."
I smiled at her.
She said it again, perplexed that twin boys could look anything but alike. "I mean, he looks just like you. And he... Did you get to pick?"
This caught me off guard. It was Christmas Eve at my cousin's house and his 20 year-old cousin on the other side of the family, a single mother herself to a 2 year-old boy, was intrigued.
"Pardon me?" I said, as it was sinking in what she was asking. Obviously I hadn't forgotten that my boys were conceived with anonymous donor sperm but it isn't something I had thought of recently.
"Did you get to pick?"
"Oh. Um, yes. I did."
"Did you see a picture?"
"No, I didn't see a picture first." (At least not for this donor as by the time I got to IUI #8, the fancy bank with the bells and whistles was out of my price range.)
"It's just [The Dynamo] looks just like you and [Sweet Potato]...." her voice trailed off.
"Right. He looks like the donor", I said.
"So you saw a picture?"
"No, (again) I didn't. He has the same traits."
"Oh so you know about him."
"Yeah. A little bit."
She and I were not close. I see her once, maybe twice, a year at a party or holiday. We had never talked about anything personal before. Obviously, someone told her how my boys were conceived and she was curious. I'm glad she was. I'm glad she reminded me of the questions to come. And of the wonderful thing an anonymous person did that enabled me to build my family.
