Sarah Dingle - Brave New Humans: The Dirty Reality of Donor Conception

WHAT HAPPENED IN that hospital room would mark me indelibly for years. Everything there was alive and remarkable in some way the sounds too loud, the colours off except, in the end, my father. But there was another layer to everything too, one which I couldnt see.

Despite the evidence of all my senses, what happened there that day was not the full story. That would take another twelve years to emerge, in that restaurant on a Saturday night.

After that Easter dinner revelation, I went home in a daze. I dont know how I got there. In my flat, I curled up on the couch and bawled. Theres no other word for it.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I rang my then-boyfriend, who was overseas, and choked out what had happened.

She said hes not my father, I mumbled.

She WHAT?

Hes not my, my father.

What does she mean? Did she have an affair?

They used [hiccup], used a donor.

WHAT?

On the line, my boyfriend fell silent.

I dont know what to say, he said eventually.

I wailed some more. He comforted me. Then I said what was really on my mind: Hes not my father, I hiccupped. Dad, hes not hes not mine.

Im no shrink, but I now know that when you find out youre donor conceived, there are a number of common emotional stages. As with all processes, it depends on the individual. You may skip some or linger in others.

My first stage was grief. The man I thought was my father had died when I was fifteen. Now, twelve years later, I was back at the funeral, in baking hot Adelaide, with cicadas screaming. The scene was the same, but I was different. I was an interloper, because: he was never mine in the first place.

Id always believed that when someone dies, if you love them, they are yours forever. Until now, it had been a comforting thought.

I had been tricked. I felt like a fool. I had lost even that.

OVER THE NEXT few months, I carried on as normal. I went to work. I was then a reporter with the ABCs 7.30, a national TV current affairs show. It was a job Id wanted for years. It was also a demanding job at the best of times. This was not the best of times. I tried to keep my shit together. I told a select few people. Mostly, I didnt tell people.

I was a mess.

In the mornings, I looked at myself in the mirror and I didnt know what I saw. I didnt recognise myself. When you grow up Asian in Australia, its easy to forget how different you look to those around you. Most of my friends are white. My partner is white. Advertisements, magazines, newspapers, everything on Australian television from the news to the trashiest reality TV show is overwhelmingly white. Even my workplace, the public broadcaster, is still an extremely white institution. In photos or TV footage from work, surrounded by mostly white people, Im sometimes surprised by how much I stand out. But there had always been a magnetic connection to my own face: I am different, but I am who I am.

Now that connection was broken.

The mirror was different: it was worse. I now didnt understand what I saw, as if my brain couldnt decode it. My face had become just colours and mass. Its shape was meaningless. It was not a face: it was a thing. I knew nothing about myself.

Standing in front of the mirror and struggling, I thought: maybe being only half Chinese can help me work my way back to some sort of solid ground. Because its obvious that my biological father was not Chinese. Maybe he was Anglo-Saxon, like Id always believed. Maybe he wasnt.

I studied my face again. I tried to separate the Chinese (the known) from the other (the unknown). It was impossible.

A whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, the flipside of that is: a whole cannot be broken down into those parts and still retain its meaning. With only one known biological parent, trying to work out what came from whom is like trying to reduce a cake to its original ingredients after the whole mess has already been baked.

Some mornings, I thought about it in mathematical terms: if I have the answer, can I work out what the equation is? Of course I couldnt. The equation could be anything. I could be almost all my mothers child, or virtually none. I have dark hair. I have dark brown eyes. I have light skin which can tan quite dark. I am of medium height. I have a straight nose. All of those traits could have come from either my mother or my father.

How do you take something away from a face and expect to understand whats left?

All of these thoughts would scream their way through my head every morning in front of the mirror, and then Id go to work, where I was supposed to make stories about the big issues facing our nation. It wasnt ideal. On top of all that, I was managing a chronic pain condition.

Six months before Id learned about my conception, Id been vacuuming at home in the flat with the music cranked up loud. Suddenly, there was a bolt of extreme pain across my hips, like an iron bar. Black came down over my eyes. When it passed, I staggered to the bench where my phone was. I called my mother and told her something was wrong, that she had to come and find me. Then I passed out.

I woke up on the floor. The music was still going. I tried to get up, but I couldnt raise a single limb without a giant wave of pain and fear going off in my brain. It made me pass out again, and when I came to, I just lay there. I knew I wasnt paralysed because I could move my fingers and my toes. After what I think was a couple of hours, my mother and some paramedics broke in. They got me up, and into bed.

Over the next weeks, months, years, from MRIs, CTs, physio, osteo, chiro, acupuncture, massage, neurosurgery and pain clinics I learned that I had a herniated disc. Its a common injury, although less common among people in their twenties. The disc which had slipped (such an awful term) was also desiccated it had lost its sponginess. The muscles around it had gone into spasm, and this was something that Id have to manage ongoing.

Unfortunately, chronic pain is not purely physical; to a certain extent, its inextricably linked to your state of mind. Finding out that my father was not my father, and failing to recognise my own face in the mirror, meant that I was in a lot of mental and therefore physical pain. I was extremely depressed. The pain was coalescing with all the grief I still felt for my dad. When Dad died, I thought maybe that was the worst thing that would ever happen to me in my life.

It seemed ridiculously unfair that someone could die twice.

I had to leave 7.30. Every few months, it seemed, I would be back on the floor again, paralysed, immobile for a week or more. When I was mobile and able to work, I couldnt do more than four hours a day without crippling pain. I moved to radio current affairs, trudging home early each day to spend my afternoons in agony, feeling useless. I wasnt even thirty and my life was over.

But a few things saved me. For a start, I did new things. Working only half days, I was bored out of my mind, so I enrolled in a creative writing course at night, making things up (which, after years of journalism, felt like a holiday). I dealt with the pain by lying on top of a row of desks at the back of the lecture room, while the rest of the group sat at the front. It was weird, but they bore it admirably; writers are very forgiving of idiosyncrasies.

I had heaps of leave, so I terrified myself by abandoning my support structures and went on a six-week trip to Italy to get away. If I couldnt have my dream job ever again, I was definitely going to eat good food, and if my life was over, I decided Id rather spend the rest of my cash in euros than on miserable things like MRIs. To get around the pain, I planned wacky short flights to get there, with many stopovers. I did stretches on the ground in airports, train stations and car parks. I spent a lot of time in various Italian Airbnbs, flat on my back in the room, either resting or meditating. Back in Sydney, I ended my relationship of around seven years. I moved out on my own, into share housing with strangers. I had decided that being afraid and exhilarated was better than being stuck in the wheel of sameness and sadness.