Atalist's Dungeon

 Read the previous post to get caught up to speed, but here are the cliffnotes: found out from my sister that she was donor-conceived, potentially an IVF baby she has a bunch of siblings and found out through 23andme She suspects that I am the same.  Everyone knew...  Great, now you are caught up to speed.  I decided to take a DNA test on New Year's (postal strike delayed our tests getting to us for quite a while) with 2 of my favourite people. Andy and Doug. We all spit into tubes and sent it off... I could barely wait, but while we did, all of our friends placed bets on how many potential siblings I might have. The highest guess being 69, the lowest guess being only 1 (Douglas,) which ended up being accurate according to the test. In fact, I found out that I was one of the first IVF babies in the province of Ontario out of the Life Clinic in Toronto. My parents paid $14,000 in 1983 to start the process for me. It seems wild to think about that dollar amount now. Th...

 I have been taking stock in what it means to be a parent and have landed on the question of what makes a father? I recognize it would be easy to take the smart ass way out and just say, well, when a woman and a man get together and get busy... but that is just procreation, that does not make a father. It's the actions after the fact that make a father, and it's the lifelong work of a father that makes them a good one. I have a really great one, although this year definitely rattled the cages. I was told this year that a secret had been kept from me for most of my life. I am the product of the first cohort of IVF in the province of Ontario, and my father is not genetically my dad. Admittedly, genetics shouldn't matter, but they do in different ways. It was a way for me to console myself, thinking that I am like my grandma Ada, whom I had never met. It softened the blow from being so different than the rest of my cousins, from my sister. I am extroverted, I am artistic in di...