Jeremy was a catch in every sense of the word. He was gainfully employed and loved his mother—like, a lot. Maybe even more than most. But you know, there was nothing wrong with a strong parent-child bond, even if the son was in his late twenties. Right? I mean the fact that I found it even remotely creepy spoke more to my less-than-stellar relationship with my own mother than it did Jeremy’s with his.
And don’t even get me started on my father. Let’s just say he wasn’t in the picture—nor on my birth certificate. My father was nothing more than a vial of sperm, yet he’d still managed to wreak havoc on my personal life. In fact, if my dad hadn’t been such a Lothario in his early years, I wouldn’t be in this predicament with Jeremy. And, yes, I understood that made me sound like I was shifting the blame for my own bad behavior onto my father, but his bountiful right-handed tug-and-pulls in the sterile back room of a fertility clinic really was the bane of my existence.
Last night was a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Within minutes of the start of the date with Jeremy, I began noticing little things about him… eerily similar things. The way he used ‘so’ as a filler between pauses. The way he traced his finger along the tabletop. The color of his eyes. The brightness of his hair. The dimple in his cheek. It was then I realized—Jeremy and I could be siblings. And once the thought permeated my brain, there was no shutting it off. Suddenly all I could do was picture us finishing each other’s sentences, and not in the cutesy, unrelated sort of way. Or us celebrating the birth of our future daughter, who would arrive in this world sporting an extra nose protruding from her belly button. Dating in the city was hard enough without having to worry that every man I met might actually be my brother.
The sound of the blender next door pulled me out of my thoughts.
“Chad,” I mumbled under my breath, steam venting through my ears.
Every morning, like clockwork, Chad’s NutriBullet roared to life, and given that the wall separating my neighbor and me was as thin as a seaweed wrap, I got to be right there for the action. Living next to Chad was like interactive live theater. If he was watching sports, I heard the cheers. If he was taking a shit, I heard the plops. And if the muscleman next door was making a protein shake, I heard the high-powered crushing. What the hell was he grinding in that thing anyway—a sliding glass door?
When I first moved in, I’d tried to give Chad the benefit of the doubt, even slipping a reverse-psychology ‘good neighbor’ contract under his door, promising to keep my noise levels down for his comfort—when in reality he was, and always had been, the problem. Not that the strategy worked. If anything, the contract only made him louder and more difficult. The guy had an ornery side to him that I found nearly as off-putting as the shaggy brown carpet covering nearly the entire landscape of his face. But why stop there? Since I was currently on the subject of Chad, I’d be remiss not to mention some of the weird shit he did, like avoiding all face-to-face contact. Look, I’m all for maintaining some distance, but this guy’s aversion to eye contact bordered on obsessive, especially when he covered his face with his hand as I walked by.
Um…okay, weirdo. You do you.
I’d originally just shrugged off Chad as one of those antisocial video gamers who’d been weaned off the teat not with a pacifier but with a controller in hand. I imagined the poor guy had only recently discovered the outside world. It was a plausible theory, for sure, but it didn’t account for the muscles I spied every time he came home from the gym. Nor did it explain that heavenly voice of his when he sang along to his guitar. Or the tattoo sleeve that traveled up his arm and over his broad shoulder. Or those striking aqua-blue eyes that occasionally peaked out from under a feather duster of lashes.
Wait. Why was I thinking about my hairy, jacked-up neighbor? Chad was nothing like clean-cut Jeremy—my possible genetic twin. Oh, man, I had to stop thinking of him in those terms.
Repeat after me: Jeremy is not your brother.
I mean, come on. Get a grip, girl. There were four million people living in Los Angeles. What were the odds I was related to a good percentage of them? Deflating at the thought, I realized for the average girl, the odds were very slim, but for me the probabilities were surprisingly high.
See, I was the offspring of a woman who was too picky to settle down with ‘just any man,’ so instead, she’d handpicked the perfect one—Sperm Donor 649. Don’t get me wrong—I’d never had a problem with my artificially inseminated beginnings. On the contrary, I was proud to share my story, even playing the papa game with the other kids in school until the principal called my mother into the office and put a stop to it. My dad’s a doctor. My dad’s a fireman. Yeah? Well, my dad’s a test tube.
Yep, it was all fun and games until I got an email from a lawyer two years ago warning me that just as my mother had found Sperm Donor 649’s profile irresistible, so had lots of other women—in total birthing one hundred and eleven artificially inseminated offspring. To date, I had forty-four confirmed half-siblings. Plus, thanks to the rise of the DNA testing sites and our accompanying Facebook page, The Lucky Swimmers Club, the numbers were continuing to rise. And because more than half of us had yet to be identified, that made Jeremy guilty until proven innocent.
Certainly, my life on the dating front would have been so much easier if my dear ol’ test tube dad hadn’t financed his college education one ejaculation at a time. I don’t want to brag or anything, but the man was a bit of a rock star in the semen-seeking world. Who knew in the mid-90s that blue-eyed med students with above average intelligence and six-foot-one frames would be all the rage? My prolific pop’s ‘contributions’ were so sought after, in fact, that an unscrupulous doctor kept his seed in rotation long after it should have been retired, making Sperm Donor 649 the unwitting commander of a small army.
Sometimes I imagined my father and wondered if he knew he’d had a part in bringing so many humans into the world, but more specifically, I wondered what he’d think of me. My whole life, I’d tried to live up to his ideals, excelling at school and getting a degree. Would he be proud? God knows, my mother never was. It really didn’t matter what I did in life; it was never good enough for her. Hell, I could bring home Neanderthal Chad to meet the fam and that still wouldn’t come close to the disappointment she’d felt when I’d failed to get accepted to medical school.
But then I went and totally ripped her heart out by refocusing on another profession—teaching. I swear my mother would probably have preferred I slide up and down a pole rather than have to tell her friends I taught first graders Common Core curriculum and modeled for them how not to hold their crotches when they had to go pee pee. If I was going to disappoint, Mom wanted it to be something grand, something she could then blame on my father’s side of the family. Obviously, Danielle got her severe acne from her father’s side of the family. Or, Of course Danielle is a stripper. What did you expect when her great-great-grandmother, on her father’s side, liked the feel of metal between her legs?
Don’t get me wrong—my mother could be sweet and loving. If the sun and moon aligned just right. But it was her disappointment in all things ‘me’ that had led to our mini estrangement and my accepting a job in Los Angeles, where the inflated rents forced me to seek out cost-effective housing and live next door to a dunderhead like Chad.