by Sami Lukis
The documentary didn’t end with me and my baby carriage. But it did end with me walking off into the sunset with a potential baby daddy. More about him soon . . .
The doco really struck a chord with viewers and I was deeply moved by the messages I received, both from women who had found themselves in a similar situation to mine, and from others who had been touched by my story:
Its nice 2 know I’m not the only one who struggles with the constant ticking clock. Thank u.
A great honest account of a career orientated 41-year-old girl faced with a common dilemma. Now my friends are onto the discussion of who would use a donor and by what age. Can of worms opened!!
Sami, you’ve scared me! At the age of 36 I still think I have plenty of time left.
Amazing journey. Gave me such a better understanding of my single friends who are going thru the same dilemma. Fingers crossed!
Great show! I’m 40, a single Mum & have never regretted it! Do it. Don’t wait. Follow your heart. Bugger others opinions. GOOD LUCK!
I also received a surprising number of messages from men who saw it as an opportunity to ask me out. These are all actual messages I received from complete strangers:
Sami, you are looking for a bloke, I’m 46 and I’m not sexy in fact I’m short, fat and ugly however I’m a very loving guy.
hi sami i think it’s wonderful what you are doing sorry us men let you down with mr right lol.
Hey Sami, any luck in the manhunt? cheers (some random:)
It seems we’re both in the same boat, not having much luck on the dating scene. I’m an independent successful 32 yo. Hope we can chat . . . Nothing to lose! Haha
Hi Sami I would be quite happy to meet you sometime take you to dinner do you like seafood
Some fellas watched that documentary and saw it as an invitation to get their sperm onboard the Sami train, ASAP. And I was strangely touched by their eagerness to offer the one thing I was so open about needing at that point in my life.
Hi Sami. This is probably extremely forward? But I would be willing to donate sperm for you if my guys are any good? It has always been something I have wanted to do to help out people who are mad keen but can’t have kids.
Could you please pass on to Sami that I would be very honoured to be the sperm donor for her baby. Of course I would be happy to have a fertility test, to make sure I’m not shooting blanks . . . haha. Please don’t think I’m some kind of weirdo . . . I would be disappointed if I hadn’t at least let her know.
One woman even emailed to offer me her husband’s sperm. She empathised with me on such a primal level that she was willing to share a piece of her own hubby – a ‘hot tradie’, apparently – to help me achieve my dream. I declined the offer, but there really are no words to describe how grateful I was to that gorgeous couple for their generosity. (I’m assuming he was aware of the proposition.)
My favourite message came from a guy who didn’t want to congratulate me on the show or ask me out or offer me sperm. He just wanted to buy my ovum.
Sami, I saw your video last night where you are looking for a child. I’m a 36-year-old man who’s looking for a child too. I’d request you, if you don’t mind donating me your ovum. Alternatively, I like to put an offer to buy your ovum if you wish to sell instead. If you are interested, we can talk more and negotiate. I am eagerly waiting to hear back from you.
While I do appreciate the fact that this request was incredibly polite, I think this guy kind of missed the point of the doco. After deep thought and careful consideration, I formulated my reply. And I can only hope that, one day, he has the opportunity to read it here:
Dear Mr Eager,
Thank you for your kind offer to rent/buy my ovum.
I regret to inform you that I am unable to assist on this occasion.
If I had any ova to spare, I wouldn’t have ended up in this fucking predicament in the first place.
Thank you again for your interest and all the best.
Sincerely,
Sami x
Some men reckon they can hear a woman’s biological clock ticking from three suburbs away. So when I announced to the nation, via a television documentary (and the associated press and media coverage that surrounded it), that I was forty-one and dying to have a baby, I thought men would run for the hills. I could almost feel the earth shift on its axis, as every available guy on the east coast of Australia bolted to the other side of the country.
Instead, it turned into a sperm stampede, and they were all coming in my direction! Complete strangers contacted me to offer their swimmers. And on the dating front, I ended up with three boyfriends in a row who all offered to be my baby’s daddy. They were three of the most intense dating experiences of my life.
Strangely, the three successive boyfriends who offered me their baby-making services weren’t even my most serious relationships. I wouldn’t even say I was in love with any of them. But they were all ready, able and very willing to put their balls (literally) on the line.
Harry came first (so to speak). I met him, completely by accident, while I was still shooting the baby doco. I had planned to press pause on the search for Mr Right while I focused on finding a sperm donor, but I met Harry at the pub, he asked me out, we went to dinner and I really liked him. So we went out a few more times.
I didn’t tell him about my baby plans right away. Telling the guy I’d just started sleeping with that I was making a TV show about my burning desire to get pregnant was probably TMI, don’t you think? I didn’t do any funny stuff either, like trick him into an ‘accidental’ pregnancy. I was just hiding a massive secret.
As things between us started to get serious, I realised it was straight-up ridiculous to spend so much time with a guy but not talk to him about the most important thing that was happening in my world. It also made the whole dating process awkward and weird. One day I had an appointment at the fertility clinic at Bondi Junction to discuss my ovulation timeline and sperm donor options, and then I popped downstairs to meet Harry for dinner and a movie straight after. It was sperm selection at four. Date with the new guy at six. Bizarre, right?
It was useless to keep dating him unless he was getting to know the real me, so I’fessed up to everything. The documentary, my fertility dramas, the sperm donors, my baby plans. The whole complicated, inconvenient box and dice. I apologised for not telling him sooner. I said it was all unchartered territory for me and, well, I just didn’t know how to handle it. And I told him I’d completely understand if he decided to stop seeing me. He dropped me home after the chat and very calmly said he’d like to take some time to process everything I’d said. I thought I’d never hear from him again.
Instead, Harry called me the very next day and said, ‘Why don’t you let me be your sperm donor?’
Just like that.
He said there was definitely a strong connection between us and he’d like to keep exploring that, if I would. He suggested there was no point in using an anonymous sperm donor when he was already on the scene. If we ended up together, he’d rather be raising his own kid than someone else’s. And if it didn’t work out between us, well, we’d just find a way to co-parent.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. We’d only been dating for about a month. It wasn’t ideal to jump in so soon, but it also sounded like a wonderfully convenient solution, with an unbelievably kind, generous, decent and respectful man. And he was definitely someone I could imagine falling in love with. One day. Maybe.
My divorced friends warned me not to do it. It wasn’t worth the risk, they said, in case he turned out to be a fruitloop, or an arsehole. After dealing with messy separations and the stress of raising a kid with someone they couldn’t stand, they said it would be much smarter to go with the anonymous sperm donor option and have the bub on my own. But I’d never felt entirely comfy with the whole sperm donor situation. Plus, my crusty old eggs weren’t getting any younger.
And the whole time, all I could hear was my doctor’s vo
ice, whispering in the background, ‘The best option at your age is to get yourself knocked up, the old-fashioned way . . . the old-fashioned way . . . the old-fashioned way . . .’
So I accepted Harry’s kind offer. And at the age of forty-one, for the first time in my life, I tried to get pregnant. It was a brand-new experience for me. I’d never had sex with the intention of trying to make a baby before. We weren’t just two horny people having sex because it felt good. We were sharing something meaningful and profound and special. It felt like I was starting a whole new and very adult chapter of my life.
I assumed I’d be up the duff straight away. I knew my ovarian reserves were dangerously low, but I thought for sure there’d be a few super-fertile eggs hiding somewhere up the back of my lady parts.
But my uterus refused to cooperate. I could not get pregnant.
It was laughable at first. I mean, come on! I’d spent my whole life trying not to get pregnant. I’d had major panics (omigod, may-jah!) when boyfriends tried to convince me to trust the exceptional timing of their not-so-trusty pull out method.
But now that I was desperate to get knocked up? Fahgettaboudit. Also, I don’t like to fail. I’ve always been a Type A personality and a high achiever. When I set my mind to something, I expect to achieve it. But the whole preggers thing? Turns out I really fucking sucked at that gig.
Anyone who’s had trouble conceiving knows that your whole life turns into a revolving two-week cycle. Two weeks of waiting to ovulate and then bonking like rabbits. And then two weeks of waiting and praying and hoping. And then, when your period arrives, it’s a tidal wave of disappointment and frustration. Then you start all over again. With the waiting and the ovulating and the shagging and then more waiting and hoping and praying. And then the fucking tidal wave is back, wiping out any shred of optimism you had managed to grasp onto, until you scream, ‘For the love of god, why can’t I just get pregnant, already?’
And then you do it all over again. And again. And again.
And the stress of failing, month after frustrating month, is excruciating. The roller-coaster of intense emotional highs and lows became too much for me to handle. I was a mess. And I took my frustrations out on Harry. I tried to fall in love with him. I really, really tried. But I couldn’t, so I turned on him instead.
Suddenly it annoyed me that he insisted on the missionary position, even though he was 130 kilograms. We were having a lot of sex at the time, and every time he finished Big Daddy would collapse on top of me like a sack of potatoes, blissfully unaware that his 130 kilograms were completely smothering my 55-kilogram frame. I could hardly breathe. It was not a pleasant experience.
Then I decided I didn’t want to be around him any more. He was a constant reminder of my failure to achieve the one thing I so desperately wanted. But I felt too guilty to break up with him. He’d been so unbelievably kind during one of the most stressful times of my life. So I just started acting like a bitch instead, hoping he’d get sick of it all and break up with me. My passive aggressive game was on point.
But Harry hung in there, like the bloody champion bloke that he is. Eventually I just couldn’t do it any more. He deserved better. I told him it was over.
My friends were right. I shouldn’t have rushed into it. We somehow took that relationship from zero to one hundred in Ferrari record time. And we certainly didn’t have the strong foundations required for a couple sharing such a stressful experience. But I honestly thought Harry was my last shot at the title. Surely there weren’t too many guys out there who would willingly try to have a baby with someone they barely knew.
I had no idea at the time that I’d meet two more after Harry. My extreme dating period had only just begun.
You’d think I would have learned my lesson after rushing into it with would-be baby daddy #1, but I had a non-refundable ticket to the maternity ward and I was not getting off that baby train until it reached the birthing suite.
Would-be baby daddy #2 appeared on the scene about six months later and he jumped on board with the whole baby-making process surprisingly quickly as well. We’d been set up by a close friend, so he was already well aware of my situation. He was also very keen to settle down and have kids, so we kind of just fast-tracked the relationship and skipped over most of the normal getting-to-know-you stages. The usual early dating chat of, ‘Tell me about your job, do you have any siblings, what’s your favourite movie?’ was replaced by, ‘Hey, I’ll be ovulating on Wednesday so could you pop over during your lunch break for a quick shag?’
I’m not even kidding. (And all the while I could still hear the doctor’s voice, over and over again: ‘The best option at your age . . .’)
So, before I knew what I was doing, I was back on the emotional roller-coaster of the two-week baby-making cycle. When the trusty ovulation kit told me I was good to go, we’d have sex four times a day. Somehow he always managed to report, ready for duty. And afterwards, I’d lie on my back with my legs up the wall, hoping that might give his sperm an express pass to my cervix. My life revolved around peeing on ovulation sticks, having sex and lying with my legs up the wall.
My close friends knew I was having a tough time, so they offered all kinds of ‘helpful’ suggestions to expedite a conception.
Karen gave me a bag of rose quartz fertility stones, which would give me special fertility powers if I carried them on my person at all times. Didn’t work.
Helen helped me research all the best sex positions for baby-making. Tried them all.
Angie suggested I pray to St Gerard, the unofficial patron saint of motherhood. Did that. Repeatedly.
Tina said if I bought myself an item of newborn baby clothing and put it in my bedside table it would will the baby into existence. I gave that one a miss. I was actually worried it might jinx me.
I did, however, spend a small fortune on appointments with the Chinese herbal acupuncture fertility specialist, Lily Liu. Lily is famous for her miraculous ability to help even the most fertility-challenged women fall pregnant. I remember sitting nervously in the waiting room before my first appointment, reading all the touching messages on her wall of thank you cards from all the new mums and satisfied customers, praying that there would be a card from me up on that wall one day. But all the acupuncture, weird herbs and putrid-tasting potions did not put a baby in my belly.
The monthly disappointments became harder to handle as my dream of getting pregnant looked more and more unlikely. I’m not trying to be dramatic when I say I could actually feel my uterus ache whenever I saw a baby. Any woman who’s ever been in my situation knows that feeling. And I truly hope that anyone who has ever managed to fall pregnant effortlessly, without a clue as to when she even ovulates, knows what an absolute miracle that baby is and how incredibly blessed she is.
Life became even more unbearable when I discovered that would-be baby daddy #2 and I were not compatible. At all. It took me a while to realise he actually wasn’t even a very nice guy. He was incredibly insecure and his ego was out of control. I think the fact that he couldn’t knock me up made it even worse. We argued a lot. It was awful. So I broke up with him as well.
I thought that was the end of my baby journey. But again, I was wrong.
Would-be baby daddy #3 was the handsome German architect I met on one of my crazy ski holidays in Austria. It was initially just a regular holiday fling (with protected sex, of course), but we broke the golden rule of holiday flinging and kept in touch afterwards. We agreed to meet up in Thailand a few months later for a tropical shag-fest.
As we got to know each other a little better on that holiday, I opened up to him about my baby dramas. And he said, quite matter-of-factly, that he’d be very happy to be my sperm donor. We’d spent a total of three nights together on the ski holiday and six nights on our Phuket fuck-fest, with a few Skype sessions in between. And I thought, Oh my god, here we go again, with a guy offering to impregnate me after I’ve known him for, like, five minutes.
We both knew
there was no guarantee that this fling would develop into any kind of relationship. The German said he had no intention of moving to Australia anytime soon and he had no interest in helping me raise the kid. So he really was just offering to be my (non-anonymous) sperm donor.
After the spectacular failure of my attempted relationships with would-be baby daddies #1 and # 2, I had planned to renew the search for a sperm donor anyway. And, on a purely superficial level, the German was about six trillion degrees of hot, way better-looking than any of the guys I’d seen on the donor list. Maybe someone upstairs had been listening after all. This guy really was the answer to my prayers.
So I said yes to the German sperm, and I embarked on Mission Baby: Round 3. This time, however, I knew the process had to be different. It was time for IVF. The old-fashioned bonk-a-thon just wasn’t working for me. Plus, the 16 000 kilometres between my uterus and the German’s pecker was going to be a major problem.
The German went home and had all the appropriate testing done at a local fertility clinic, with the intention of sending his swimmers to me in the mail, or one of those cute little temperature-controlled mini-eskies. But then, instead of letting the fertility clinic send me his sperm in the cute little esky like he was supposed to, the German announced that he would very much like to come and visit me in Sydney, and deliver his sperm, in person. His swimmers weren’t going Down Under without him.
Sure, I said. Even better! And we booked his flights to coincide with my ovulation calendar. Yep. That happened. We booked his flights. To coincide. With my ovulation calendar.
Can we just accept for a moment how utterly ridiculous that is? A guy I’ve spent less than two weeks with books his first trip to Australia to align with my menstrual cycle. I mean, holy shitballs. That’s weird, right? At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me.
I booked appointments for the sperm donation and egg retrieval at my fertility clinic in Sydney. I saw a lawyer to make sure we were both covered legally. I didn’t want the German trying to steal my baby or sue me for maintenance down the track. I also wanted him to know that all I wanted was his sperm and I had no intention of hitting him up for child support. I upped my appointments with Lily Liu to twice a week. I was on a mission to be the most fertile woman in Australia by the time Ze German landed.
