Suddenly, people don’t feel so bad when their real team loses if their fantasy team wins — they might even have players on their fantasy team from the team playing their real life team that week. Fan fail. And players are well aware of this, making them even more statistics-obsessed, selfish players. Player fail.

In (seriously) related news, I cheated on my fertility clinic yesterday. And, although I genuinely feel guilty about it, I am this close to running off with a shiny new fertility clinic.

The problem is, and has always been, that I love my doctor. She and I shared about my lowest point, when she told me I have POF, and that I would be very unlikely to ever have a child who was genetically related to me. In that awful moment, she was the perfect doctor, sent down from heaven to be straightforward and not try to comfort me or hug me or anything icky like that. I wanted someone to just cut the crap and tell me the deal. She did that, and she gave me her email address, to boot. I love her.

I know she is knowledgeable, and I do still totally trust her. There’s just this little matter of statistics. My clinic’s statistic SUCK. Their success rate for donor egg IVF is about 15 percent lower than the average.

Initially, the sucky stats didn’t bother me much, due to my anti-Fantasy Football worldview. The last thing I wanted was a clinic that was obsessed with stats and tried to manipulate them, by turning away older women or refusing to do elective single embryo transfers.

Yesterday, though, it started to bother me A LOT. How could their numbers be so low? We are paying so much money, not to mention the emotional investment we are making — wouldn’t we be crazy to select a clinic with a low success rate?

Also, I started to contemplate doing our cycle in Boston, where our donor lives. That would actually lower the cost of the cycle somewhat, and there are several very good clinics there.

So, I called my donor coordinator and left a very straightforward message, saying that we were suddenly concerned about the low success rate and wanted to talk to her about it. It has been 24 hours, and the silence is deafening …

It is becoming clear to me that, for us, making babies is uncomfortably similar to renovation one’s kitchen. It will take roughly twice as long as your worst time estimate, and you will be amazed at the ways you will find to spend more than you ever dreamed along the way.

My hope, my dream, was to get some embryos up in this uterus by the end of the year. The reasons for that were many: we plan to leave our jobs and excellent health insurance so that P can go back to school, my work could downgrade my excellent health insurance Jan. 1, and I WANNA BABY NOW NOW NOW. Yeah, patience isn’t really my thing.

So, now that we plunked down $5,000 to the donor agency and $500 to the fertility clinic, delays are a-mounting, and I can see that this is about how it’s going to go.

Even if everything went exactly how I wanted, there would be miserable periods of waiting. The most famous is, of course, the two week wait between the transfer and pregnancy test. Oh, and the 9 months until we know for sure that we have a healthy baby. So, here’s where I’m going with this: in the short time that I have spent waiting so far, I have made one decision. I will be hopeful. I will believe in the process. I will celebrate every step as a step toward building our family. If it doesn’t work, I will be crushed, but I will not protect myself from that.

I don’t know how many times in my life I will get to think that I might be pregnant. I don’t know how many times I will get to share that little secret with my husband, and feel all of those possibilities in my body. From this moment in history, I don’t know if I will every get to give birth or be pregnant, but I am pretty sure I will have at least one shot to try to conceive and one little period where I can dream that it worked. I’ll take it.

Tequila for you, and four vials of blood, a cup of pee, a semen analysis, a shrink appointment and a $500 check for us. It’s the circle of life.

When I told the husband that the semen analysis results were reportedly “normal,” he was obviously disappointed. I think he genuinely expected the doc to come back with “WOW! I have never SEEN sperm of this level! They are the Michael Phelps of gametes! We would like them to teach a sperm class on sperm quality!” I truth, I too thought they might be a little impressed — these are 27-year-old, Catholic sperm we’re talking about here.He will get no sympathy from me, though. What I would give for “normal!”

We also had out program-required therapy session yesterday morning. I wouldn’t call it useful, per se, but I did enjoy it. The counselor was very warm, and it was nice to sit down and tell our story to an appreciative audience. The funny thing is that, after we said that we plan to be honest with our test tube baby from the beginning, and that we would ideally like to be able to contact the donor later in life, we pretty much stole her fire. Typically, I think she spends the sessions selling these ideas to perspective parents, so, instead, she spent much of the session praising us for out decisions. When we got outside of her office, we high-fived: We totally won that therapy session.

The best news to come of the session was that, if we choose a donor from our clinic’s program, that donor will have to meet with the same counselor. She said we can call her to learn more about her impressions of the donors. That sounds truly awesome to me.

All that is left for us right now is to choose that donor, and that’s totally paralyzing. You have tons of information about these women, but no idea which information is important. It’s like wanting to buy a house and getting the following information about it: the neighbor on the left’s occupation, the color of the tile in the upstairs bathroom, the name written in the sidewalk in front, the brand of the oven and a average age of previous occupants. Oh, and you get a picture of the house, but you can’t see it in person, and you will be with that house FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

Forget the fact that that it feels like my husband and I are trolling for a girlfriend on Match.com. And, the fact that I feel guilty and creeped out for judging all of these young women who are offering this wonderful chance for us. Like, one donor who I like had an abortion at some point. So, we wonder, does this point to a character flaw? Is she careless? Promiscuous? Irresponsible? Or, just unlucky? Or facing unknowable hardships? Even if she is a careless, promiscuous, irresponsible little minx, are those qualities rooted in genetics? And then, of course, you think, it means she has eggs! And those eggs did all of the right things! And then you feel like an asshole for dissecting this woman’s personal decisions, and then reducing her to the quality of her lady parts.

So, we end up looking for a few attributes, but mostly looking for someone we like and want to invite over for dinner. That’s right, our search for half of our child’s genetic make up looks just like the average voter’s method for selecting a president. The husband is currently campaigning for a young woman who likes cheese. I think it would make more sense to eliminate anyone who doesn’t like cheese, because that’s just crazy.

When I learned last spring that I probably couldn’t ever get pregnant or have any genetic link to our future children, I was too devastated to discuss it. I waited about a month, until I could get through a whole sentence about it without any tears, and I confided in my fabulous stepmother.

At the time, I couldn’t bear the thought of telling my dad, who has always been a close confidant. I knew he would be supportive and wonderful, but I also knew that this news represented a loss for him as a future granddaddy. My grief was too overwhelming at that point for me to imagine carrying someone else’. I told my stepmother to share my news as she saw fit. That night, I received this email:

All I care about is that you are OK.

I have total confidence that you and [husband] will figure the best thing to do.

No matter what I love you

Dad

PS

I sent this in an email so you wouldn’t, cry so don’t cry

He is so awesome. I bawled.

Anyway, I am lucky enough to have seen how little genetics can matter in a family. My sister’s biological father died when she was an infant. Before too long, my mom, who had taken her daughter out of state to attend college, met a handsome hippie who was motorcycling with his friends from coast to coast. Dad said last night that he fell in love with my toddler sister first, my mom second. But fall in love they did, and they were a family of three.

My parents waited years to have my dad formally adopt my sister so that she could fully participate in the process, but she grew up knowing two things: that Dad was her dad, and that they weren’t biologically related. When I came along a few years later, their philosophy was the same. Our parents decided that we would know our real family history long before we even understood it. There would be no announcement, no big reveal.

Home alone last night, wandering around my apartment with my cell phone, I started asking Dad about some of the fears that had been rattling around in my mind lately. When a neighbor, another parent, a coworker saw my sister with my dad, and said “she looks just like you,” did you feel pangs for the link you wished you had, I asked. Did you feel like you had to correct them?

Oh, gosh no, Dad said. I just thought, yeah, she does look like me — isn’t that cool? I didn’t feel deceptive. Sometimes we felt like sharing more, and usually we didn’t. It wasn’t heavy like that. It was just a fact, among millions of facts.

And, I asked, as she grew up and seemed different from you in various ways, did you feel like there was some sort of gulf between you, because you don’t share genes?

Well, he said, she’s different from me and you’re different from me. In her case, some of our differences are probably things she inherited from her biological father. In other ways, she is like me, because I’m her dad and I helped raise her. I’ll tell you this, he said. I wouldn’t change her. I think she’s perfect.

And I remembered this picture of the two of them. He still looks a little like a hippie, with a frizzy afro and some absurd outfit. She is a skinny four-year-old or so, in a matching tank top and underwear. They are sitting on shag carpet in a hall way, leaning against a wall. They each had their right ankles propped up on their left knees. I imagine that my mother looked over at her husband and daughter, two peas in pod, and said don’t move — I’ll get the camera!

Talking to my father was a huge relief. He really didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I was there, after all. But it felt like a huge weight off my shoulders, my soul, to hear it. Both because I was finally capable of talking about this emotionally fraught thing with one of my favorite people, and because I need help remembering that even normal families aren’t normal. And it turns out jut fine.

There is a bright side, though. We POF ladies are the grand poobahs of health insurance exceptions when it comes to fertility treatment. Whereas couples with more puzzling problems may have to toil in fertility purgatory and jump through hoops to prove that they need a little help making babies, POF sufferers get to go directly into the express line. And, while many insurance plans, including mine, require that couples first use the less effective, multiples-prone artificial insemination method before they can attempt in vitro fertilization, our broke-ass ovaries often entitle us to skip such niceties and jump right onto the IVF train. And, once POFers do board that train, chances of getting to their test tube baby destination are higher than the average fertility casualty, because we are often on the younger side of the statistical sample.

Also, by the time that many couples decide to do IVF, they have been battered by disaappoints and what must feel like near-misses. While they could get slapped around for years as they struggle to make a family, I just got one, big knock out punch. Obviously neither of these things are very pleasurable, but I guess you have to pretty much love the fertility nightmare you’re with.

So, we had our big appointment this morning, and we are now awaiting test results on for the husband’s semen analysis and a variety of STD tests. Can you imagine finding out NOW that you have HIV or Hepatitis B? I am feeling pretty confident that we are in the clear STD-wise, and if we have male-factor infertility work against us, I may just throw up my hands and buy a bunch of weird exotic pets. We’ll see.

If I’m going to make this metaphor work for me, though, someone has to sneak into my apartment one night and swipe the half-container of Q-tips I had left in the bathroom. And burn them. And replace them with fake Q-tips.

Long story short: I’m a 31-year-old newlywed, and I just found out that I have about a 10 percent chance of ever having a baby that is biologically related to me.

If my ovaries were in cartoon form, they would be a couple of dudes looking at you with their pockets turned inside out. It’s like ordering a sandwich that you have been looking forward to all day, reaching into your purse for $10, and pulling out two pesos, some lint and a piece butterscotch candy. When I was kid, a friend and I inexplicably decided to ride the see saw on our bellies. My lousy friend then jumped up and ran off with no warning, leaving me to plunge down to earth, lungs first. It’s like THAT.

I have premature ovarian failure. I’m just flat out of eggs, and I probably ran out in my late 20s. Birth control pills masked the problem for years, which is why we didn’t have any idea that anything was awry until we decided a month after we got hitched that we wanted to have a baby. When I found out, I felt embarrassed and angry and sad, so I went home and told my husband and we cried.

Basically, I have been lugging those ovaries around my whole life, and they crapped out just before I was finally going to put them to use. So it goes.