I never considered what I will tell my children...

This was a question that was posed by a DC offspring to many other donor offspring.
Here is my take on it as it happened to me very recently in part due to the article mentioned in the prior blog post.

It's funny that I was always glad that my parents started telling me from the age of 3 but it has taken me till my daughter is the age of 6 to tell it ALL.

Anyway, for some reason when my daughter was 4 she was able to pick that the paternal person on my side (stepfather) was not related genetically to me the same way my wife's father is to her. And then when she saw the picture of my Dad (deceased) she was able to work out that we were not related either as we had just been through all that you got mummy's eyes, daddy's hair stuff and the similarities between myself and my Dad could not be much more different. She basically wanted to know who my Daddy was in the same manner that I am her Daddy and my wifes Daddy is hers and from that context it was clear that the biological and sociological were linked in those situations but not for me. Somehow I managed to sidestep the issue and we moved on, but it was quite possibly the hardest question I have EVER dealt with because my daughter wanted to know who her grandfather was and why he wasn't in her life like her other one was. This completely broke my heart and it still upsets me.

Then just recently I appeared in a newspaper article that was on the Senate Inquiry being held here in Australia, how I helped to get it going and that I was looking for my father. Of course the title read something like "help me find my father". My daughter who was excited about the story and seeing herself in the paper noticed the title and asked the question.

So I sat down and explained a bit more of the birds and the bees (had a previous small talk about it), that went along the lines of describing how myself and my wife were able to have her and her brother but that my mum and dad could not do the same so they got a doctor and another man to help out.

She immediately says without any prompting, or any influence from me on this:

"So you are trying to find your real father."

Her exact words - they are burnt into my brain.

In one way hearing it like that from my daughter was incredibly painful but also soothing and reassuring at the same time.

It still blows me away how children see things in black and white for what they really are rather than all these layers of grey that us adults choose to put on top of things. She understands what it is about and I don't know why I didn't do it sooner (makes me a bit of a hypocrit really).