Biodad, on tape

Heather couldn't sleep last night.  I was not to be swayed and held tight to my pillow, no matter how much she squirmed.  What happened sometime around 5am is that she decided that we ought to have the audio interview of our donor-- from now on referred to as Biodad, thanks to the wordsmithing of my friend Sarah-- and downloaded it to her iPad.  I was vaguely aware of her asking me where her headphones were, but not much else.

Around 5:03, Heather's disregard for my beauty sleep came full force.  She had listened to the interview, and it was not good.

About 8 hours earlier, H had turned to me in bed and said that she'd really expected we'd fight tooth and nail over our donor choice.  My horror at a donor's spelling or apparent pretension seemed like a roadblock that Heather's passion for sportiness and math skills might not be able to overcome.  But we came to what I'm embarrassed to say is a place of peace and contentment when we found our donor, each of us totally at ease saying yes.  Biodad was right for us.

My darling love had been boasting about Biodad to all humanity for the past week, announcing, among other things, that his very accomplished family, of Persian and Lebanese decent, all lived in America and had been educated at American universities.  That was nowhere in the paperwork, and I chimed in that we didn't know that they lived here.  Turns out, I was right, and I hate it.

Biodad speaks English as a second language.  He's getting a degree in electrical engineering, not Brit Lit.  Words are not his strong suit, and words are the deepest part of me.
I'm not sure what the source of Heather's passionate declarations about his American family was.  What difference does it make to her?  I was the jackass rejecting donors for misspellings on their forms while she blew them off in favor of SAT math scores.  She reassured me through all that, saying that language and pretension weren't hereditary, and that lord knows the kid would get a world of vocabulary forced upon him (we still say "him") no matter what.

Yet she was the first to admit, after hearing the interview, that Biodad "sounded stupid."  I said I understood what she meant, but that, for all we know, he could be incredibly well-spoken in Farsi and Malay.  I don't even know what Malay is without Googling it, so who the hell are we to question his language skills?
But she used the most damning argument of all: "I don't want our kid to hear this and think the guy is stupid."

Folks, I got nothin'.