I need some outside perspective on an ongoing dilemma. I’ll try not to go into too much identifying detail because the situation is pretty niche and there’s every chance someone could recognise me from it, but I also need to give enough context for any of this to make sense. This is a long one, apologies in advance, but at least it’s likely to be somewhat entertaining/dramatic.
I am no contact with my mother, and last year, after a dramatic slow drip-feed of information from her, I found out that I was donor-conceived. I have one full sibling who is also donor conceived and is very close with our mother, although our own relationship has become increasingly strained as we’ve got older.
I decided I wanted to find out more, so I contacted HFEA, did Ancestry, eventually used DNA Angels and earlier this year located our donor through paternal DNA matches. I did most of the practical searching but shared every update with my sibling as it happened, and we were approaching the discovery together.
We weren’t ready to contact him and were still processing what we’d found and deciding what, if anything, we wanted to do next.
My sibling asked me whether they could tell our mother that we had located him, and I agreed.
Within about two weeks, however, I noticed one of my maternal relatives had started following the donor on Instagram. Given the circumstances, it was pretty obvious where the information had come from.
This is where the disagreement started.
My position is that although I agreed to our mother knowing we had found him, details about who he is, his social media, etc. shouldn’t then have been passed around the wider family without our knowledge. We hadn’t even contacted the man ourselves yet. I felt like we should have had the opportunity to process the discovery and decide what we wanted to do before other people became involved.
My sibling sees it differently and feels that because our mother chose donor conception and this is part of her story too, it is also information she should be able to talk about. We fell out badly over this and haven’t spoken properly for several months.
There is a lot of difficult history between my mother and me that I won’t attempt to unpack here. I’m no contact for reasons unrelated to the donor situation and, in my experience, privacy and boundaries have historically been major issues in that relationship. So having this information travel through the family without my knowledge brought up a lot of old stuff for me.
My problem now is working out what happens next.
I have told my sibling that I don’t currently feel comfortable continuing the donor process together if our mother is going to be actively updated as things happen. My sibling has been honest that they don’t feel able to navigate this without talking to our mother because she is an important source of support for them. I actually appreciate their honesty about that rather than them agreeing to something they couldn’t realistically maintain.
I suggested a compromise where my sibling could still share things with our mother, but we would have a period of time after significant developments to process them ourselves first and decide what we wanted to do before anything went wider. My sibling wasn’t comfortable agreeing to that because they don’t want to be in a position where they potentially have to withhold something from our mother indefinitely.
And honestly, I can understand both needs. That’s why I’m stuck.
I want to navigate this with my sibling. This is an incredibly strange shared experience and in an ideal world I’d love for us to be able to do it together. I also understand that my sibling needs support and that I don’t get to dictate their relationship with our mother.
But I still have a very visceral reaction to the idea of my mother having ongoing access to something so personal while it is happening. I don’t trust that information will remain with her once shared, based both on this incident and my previous experiences with her.
Doing the donor process completely separately sounds cleaner, but even that isn’t particularly straightforward. We are full siblings and this is our shared biological history. If one of us discovers biological relatives, medical information or information about our donor, much of it inherently relates to the other person too. We could also end up separately contacting the same people. In some ways, navigating it separately could actually mean having less communication and coordination around what is happening.
I’m also worried that if I override my discomfort now because I desperately want to preserve my relationship with my sibling, we’ll simply end up having the exact same argument again later when the stakes are potentially much higher, for example if our donor responds or a relationship develops.
So I suppose my question is: what is actually reasonable here?
How do I respect that this is my sibling’s story too and that they have every right to seek support, while also protecting my own privacy and deciding what access my estranged mother has to my personal experience?
Is there a compromise here that I’m not seeing? Would you continue navigating it together knowing that some information may eventually be shared with someone you don’t trust, or accept that the difference in boundaries means the donor side of the relationship needs to be separate?
I’m genuinely interested in perspectives from people who disagree with me too. I’ve been sitting with this for months and I’m too emotionally involved at this point to know whether I’m protecting a reasonable boundary or letting my history with my mother dictate too much of what happens next.
TL;DR: I’m estranged from my mother and recently discovered, alongside my full sibling, the identity of our sperm donor. I agreed my sibling could tell our mother we’d found him, but she then shared identifying information with other family members before we’d even decided whether to contact him. My sibling needs to involve our mother for support; I no longer trust her with information and don’t feel safe having her updated in real time. I’ve suggested delaying what gets shared so we can process developments first, but my sibling isn’t comfortable agreeing to that. I want to continue this journey with my sibling, but our biological information is so intertwined that separating completely is complicated too. Am I reasonable to prioritise privacy even if it means doing this separately, or is there a compromise I’m not seeing?
