A great article by Olivia Montuschi on the emotional aspects of donor treatment:
Being ‘different’: Feel the fear and do it anyway
Posted on January 12, 2016 by oliviasview
Someone posted a blog on my Facebook page the other day from a mum to egg donation conceived twins about her ambivalence around ‘telling’ them about their beginnings. It reminded me how very difficult most parents find starting the story…in fact how normal it is for there to be anxiety and mixed feelings around this task. I don’t know anyone, including myself, who has not had a dry-mouth, stomach lurching moment when first sharing the information about donor conception either with a child or with someone else.
I think what may lay behind this nervousness is how we feel about ‘difference’ and a concern about just how ‘different’ the person hearing the information may perceive it to be. Of course if a child is very young and has no knowledge at all about how babies are made, then having some help from a ‘nice man or nice lady’ constitutes no contrast to anything else. In fact many donor conceived children get to six or seven assuming that everyone was made the same way as them. But having the rational knowledge that your child won’t know any better rarely stops parents from feeling anxious about speaking the first words to start telling the story. And this is because, in the words of a donor conceived young adult I know, there is a ‘different story to tell’ and all of us will have had experiences of what ‘difference’ means for us.
More here