You maybe didn’t know this because why would you? but there’s a virus called CMV that infects 85% of  adults. It doesn’t do anything; it just sits there being herpes’ harmless second cousin forever BUT, if you’re a woman using donor sperm AND you’re CMV-negative, you can’t use a CMV-positive donor because of risk to the baby.

I’m negative. Goodbye, 85% of donors! Goodbye, Mr. Sensitive Multiracial#2882! Goodbye, gay rower (who claims to be straight after all)! My choices have narrowed and narrowed again — no blondes; no hunters; no undergraduates — so I’m zeroing in on “Saul,” a CMV-neg Jewish doctor. Great save! I am made entirely of win: Despite the lesbian/late-bloomer/downwardly-mobile factors at play here, I can still have a baby with a Jewish doctor!

And Saul is…so Jewish. He has mold allergies and a 4.66 valedictory GPA and a mother he describes as “a nightmare.” He’s a nebbish like you’ve never seen. I will call the baby “Kreplach Punim.”

This is quite serendipitous, because I was raised in a Jewish neighborhood with Jewish friends and thus developed a Jewish soul. If I had long-term amnesia and didn’t remember anything about myself, I’d worry that I’d missed too many Hadassah meetings during my fugue state. I can Baruch atah Adonai elohaynu melech ha’olam well enough to make Saul’s mother proud, even though she’s probably more appalled by sperm donation than by Jews For Jesus.

I wonder if she knows that Saul is on sale. A twofer deal. I can buy four vials for less than what it cost to fix the weird idling noise my car made last spring.  The mind reels.

Coming Up Next: What Happens If I Have A Boy?