Wednesday, July 24, 2019

한 가정이 형성된 실상: 형제들,자매들 그리고 이상한 사람들로 구성된 가정

한 가정의 실상:형제들, 자매들 그리고 이상한 존재들.

아래의 에세이는, 모르는 사람으로 부터 정자를 기증받아 태어난 본인이 직접 작성한 내용들의 일부이다.
인간세계가 동물의 세계와 다른것은, 직접 자신을 통해서 자손을 갖고져 하는 욕망이 이루어지지 못할때, 그래도 자기의 존재감을 남겨주기위해, 남의 씨를 이용하여 후손을 탄생시키는, 인위적인 Family root를 만들고 있다는점을 보게된다. 다른 한편에서는 한때의 사랑으로 태어나 버려진 생명들이 누군가에 의해 양육되기를 기다리고 있는데.... 정말로 이상한 존재들이다.

Photo essay by Eli Baden-Lasar
Text by Eli Baden-Lasar as told to Susan Dominus

June 26, 2019

우리가정에서 "나"라는 존재는 익명의 Sperm 기증자의 도움을 받아 세상에 태어났음을 모두가 다 알고 있다. 대부분의 내어린시절에는 나는 한번도 아버지에 대한 생각을 해본적이 없었다. 그러나 내가 11세가 되었을때, 나는 때때로 나의 존재에 대해 의문을 갖었었다. 내부모님은-나는 두명의 어머니가 있다- 정자를 기증해준, 캘리포니아 Cryobank라는 곳으로 부터 보내온 설문조사서 한장을 나에게 주었다. 기증자는, 내가 태어나기 2년전인,1996년도에 그설문서를 작성한 것이다.

나는 내책가방속에 넣고 다니면서, 학교수업시간에 가끔씩 내책가방속에는 그설문서가 있음을 기억하곤 했었다. 이런 느낌이 있었다. 이사람은 이설문서를 작성하기위해 그의 손을 이용했었다는것을, 즉 넘어서는 안될선을 넘었다는점을 느낄수 있었다. 그가 어떤 사람이었을까?를 상상해 보는것은 나에게 너무도 절망적이었음을 말하는것은 아니다. 다만 그는 실질적으로 나와 인연이 맺어지기위해 존재했었던 사람이라는 점을 확인하는것으로 충분했었지만, 그런데도 그설문서에 있는것과는 전연 별개였었다. 설문지는 그가 확실히 존재했음을 보여줬지만, 우렁이속처럼 확실한것은 없었다. 또한 나의 상상을 초월하는 넓은 세상이 존재한다는 감각을 나에게 심어 주었다. 이러한 과정과 체계를 거쳐 내가 존재하게 됐음을 인지하게 됐다. 이과정을 거치면서 나자신을 이해하는 방법을 터득한 것이다.

Eli Baden-Lasar. The photographer, sitting on his
mother’s bed in the home where he grew up in Oakland. 나는 현재 20세이다. 나는 32명의 이복 형제 자매들을 갖고있다. 아래의 사진은 나의 가족들이다. 나는 항상, 어떤 낯모르는 사람의 정자를 기증받아 이세상에 태어났음을 알고 있다. 그러나 나는 그것이 무엇을 뜻하는지를, 내가 직접 내 형제들과 자매들에 대한 추적을 하기전까지는, 전연 알지도 느끼지 못했었다.

이러한 가족관계는 과연 축복받을 일인가? 아니면 그반대로 생각될 일인가? 태어난 본인들에게는 축복일까? 그반대일까? 얽히고 설킨 그실타래의 본 뜻은 무엇일까? 더 자세한 내용은 아래의 에세이를 들여다 보자.

I knew a lot of other children whose parents had used donors to conceive because every summer we went to a camp for same-sex families. Last summer, news traveled through the community that two kids from two families who attended the camp for years had independently gone on to a registry for family members trying to connect with donors or donor siblings. The two discovered that they shared a donor — that they were half siblings.

Until that moment, it had not really occurred to me — or my mothers, even though one is an ObGyn — that I might have half siblings out there. It makes no sense that we didn’t think about that, because my parents deliberately chose a donor whose sperm had successfully produced at least one live birth, whose sperm had, in a sense, “worked.” I think they were just so focused on thinking about the new family they were creating that they never stopped to think about the implications of the huge, inadvertent social experiment they were joining.

The news about the two kids at camp made me curious to find out if I had half siblings that I did not know about. So that same month, last August, when I was 19, I dug up the questionnaire, went to the sibling registry for California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the nation, and typed in the donor’s number. I landed on a message board for children of my particular donor and saw about a dozen cryptic user names of various mothers or children who were perhaps hesitant to reveal themselves completely. One jumped out at me — it said jplamb.

[Sperm donors can’t stay secret anymore. Here’s what that means.]

I grew up in Oakland, but I spent a semester in high school at a program in New York for kids interested in experiential learning, and one friend I made there, I knew, had two mothers who used a sperm donor to conceive him. His name was Gus Lamb. Right away, I texted him to ask if he had registered on the California Cryobank. He said he had. We exchanged donor numbers, and then we knew: We were half siblings.

It was a moment of glee but also of horror. I knew that as a story it was mind-blowing, but it was also disturbing — to have the script switched, to go from friends to brothers. In our experiential-learning program, we were constantly being asked to write personal essays to try to understand our lives. For four months, we were doing that and reading each other’s work and sleeping on the same floor of a dorm, all the while not knowing that we were half brothers — the perversity of that was not lost on either of us.

Sheepishly, we both wondered how that was possible: How could we not have somehow known? But at the same time, we both recognized that it didn’t seem so obvious. I had this suspicious feeling that scientists were conducting an experiment, had taken a lunch break and then forgotten to check back. But no one was watching through the two-way mirror, and instead we were stuck looking at each other, reflected and refracted, different people, but the same, mouths agape. If it was an experiment, the variables had not yielded some thrilling result. There had been no instant connection or unbreakable bond, and we easily lost touch when the program ended.

We got on the phone, me in California, Gus in Massachusetts. Gus told me that he had never been especially drawn to learning more about the donor siblings. His sister Izzy, however, who had the same donor, had done research for medical reasons after having her appendix out. “There’s tons of siblings,” Gus told me. That was another shock. Many of them, he said, had been in touch for years. Gus and Izzy even had video-chatted with a few.

When we hung up, I told my parents what I’d learned, and they were equally stunned. I felt both curious and anxious about these people and what they exactly meant to me. The sheer quantity of them gave me a feeling of having been mass-produced.

Even as I was trying to take this information in, I was realizing that one way I could maybe make sense of all of this was through photography, a medium I’ve been interested in from a young age. I could use the camera as an excuse to meet each sibling and maybe the process of making pictures would help me find some sort of stability, even as I also recognized that conflict, discomfort and maybe even a kind of love would be part of the experience.

The first people I planned to shoot were Gus and Izzy. My younger sister, Ruby, who was conceived using a different donor, traveled with me to their home outside Boston. Hanging out with Gus felt familiar and alien at the same time. Our time at that school together was a prologue; now we were beginning again, and this time I was learning about him in a different way. There are some things about a person you can’t understand without seeing the place where they grew up. It’s a type of access and point of view that allows you to see someone in a very vulnerable state: This was their given life, messiness and all, not necessarily the life they want to build for themselves.

Isadora, 16, and Gus Lamb, 20, in the yard of their mother's home in
Jamaica Plain, Mass. She is in high school; he will attend college in the fall. “I used to be very uncomfortable having so many half siblings. l never knew how much time to put in. Was I supposed to choose the coolest on the internet? Meeting some of them in person has completely turned around my mind-set. I’m much more intrigued and excited by it than I used to be. Whenever I meet half siblings, we’re very gentle with each other.” — Gus

Sydney Hall, 18, in her bedroom in Upper Chichester, Pa. “I got in touch with the group about a year ago. I learned that there are so many of them it’s hard to feel included. I’m an only child and was expecting a sibling relationship, not just like, ‘‘Hey, cool, we have the same blood, whatever.’’ I told myself that it wasn’t a big deal that I had siblings, just to numb the pain.”

Alexis Clay, 20, in a common room at her college in Vermont. “As a kid, I had this burning curiosity to find out who my donor was. When I first found I had half siblings, it was a source of comfort. But as more and more half siblings were introduced into my life, it made me feel like a statistic rather than an actual person. I feel drowned out with the numbers.”

English Jackson, 21, in Grottoes, Va., where she grew up; she attends college nearby.

I knew I wanted to try to photograph all the siblings in the environments in which they were raised, and I knew I wanted the images to convey a sense of drama even when depicting quotidian scenes. I decided to learn how to use a view camera, which is a large-format, old-fashioned-looking film camera with bellows. It requires a lot of technical fiddling, focusing and refocusing and finding the right angle, which makes taking pictures incredibly, if not painfully, slow — usually at least an hour. For the siblings, I think taking that kind of photograph was strange, but it also allowed them to sit still and concentrate on the picture as much as I was. The camera makes images that are rich and detailed. I wanted something that was going to feel like the opposite of mass production, that would have none of the slickness that I was starting to associate with the sperm bank. It has a clean, simple, commercial message about helping families and ads that present donors as superheroes, their future babies as geniuses. I wanted to produce something that would be exhaustive and overwhelming, that would complicate the industry’s message — that would refute any simple narratives.

In the picture of Gus and Izzy, they are posed in red plastic lawn chairs that look like blown-up versions of toddler’s chairs. I was after this combination of both a formality — in their almost regal posture — and a whimsy or childishness, as if the chairs had grown up with them.

Gus included me in a group chat that about half the siblings use. From there one led me to another and another until I was in contact with all of them. I kept those exchanges brief, because I wanted to feel the potency of our first encounter.

I took Gus and Izzy to the next shoot. It was the first time I met a sibling that I hadn’t already known, and I was suddenly more nervous than I expected. When we all got out of the car, my hand began to tremble so much that I dropped my keys. The physiological betrayal rattled me, because I knew I was going to have to do this about 30 more times. As a way of managing my nerves in the early meetings with siblings, I was immediately focused on the work, on figuring out where we would take the picture and what kind of image would be powerful. We would walk together through various rooms in the house, contemplate our options, before finally deciding on the right place.

When I met Sadie, a college student in Portland, Ore., she was living in a single room in a small guesthouse, so there was just one place we could take the picture. We spent most of our time talking and listening to “Best of Motown” from a massive speaker she found on Craigslist. She started hunting through things she had bought in thrift stores that we could use in the picture, like the half-moon visible above her head in the photograph. But she also showed me things about her life that we knew were not going to be in the image: her own photos, an album she made of other people’s abandoned shopping lists.

By then, it had become clear to me that 90 percent of the time that I spent with each sibling needed to be unrelated to the photograph itself. It needed to be about our getting to know each other, about my trying to understand the other person’s life. It couldn’t be rushed. The emotional labor of the project was intended to be almost reparative — a response to the transactional nature of the sperm bank and the financial exchange our parents made in order to create us.

Ben, 20, and Julia Berman, 17, in Julia’s bedroom in San Anselmo,
Calif. He attends college in Louisiana; she is in high school. “We were on our way to a cousin’s wedding when I was little, and my mom said to my brother and me, ‘‘When you’re dating, you’ll have to be careful and take a DNA test to make sure it’s not your half sibling.’’ I was like: ‘‘Mom, what are you talking about? I’m 7!’’ But it was something that was definitely on her mind.”

Zachary Osborne-Schaefer, 20, in his mother’s
tropical-fish store in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Nick Leonard, 20, a college student, in Eugene, Ore.

Neylan Griffy, 19, a college student, in the home where her mother grew up in Fowler, Colo.

Sadie Pearson, 20, in an apartment in
Portland, Ore., where she attends college. “When I first met everyone, it was more magical because we were younger. In the beginning there were seven main siblings who talked. Now, when we find new ones, I’m kind of numb to the fact that there are more siblings. How is it going to be now? How will I be close to everybody?”

Lily Supovitz, 21, in the living room of an apartment
in Bend, Ore., where she attends college. “Since meeting my siblings, I’ve become more confident of my identity. I’m no longer wondering, Who am I? And being connected to that side of my genes really helped me feel less alone, because a lot of the siblings, when I first met them, were going through similar struggles. And honestly, more excited for life — because you just never know what’s going to happen.”

So many of these kinds of half sibling relationships that I’ve heard about are hard to sustain because they’re built over text and social media — the geographical separations become too great, which can make it easier for people to distance themselves. You can’t really get to know someone online, this space where we make our lives more consumable for one another. By meeting in person, there was no hiding.

Over 10 months, I traveled to 16 states to meet and shoot the 32 siblings. (One did not participate.) Sometimes I spent an afternoon, sometimes a few days. I decided not to bring an assistant to help with the light or make the process run more smoothly — even if that would have helped produce the best images possible, technically.

Looking through the camera, I had a feeling I couldn’t shake: that these people were all versions of me, just formed in different parts of the country — but were also strangers who might as well have been picked out of a hat. The camera gave me an excuse to study each person — to look deeply at them in a way that without a camera would have been uncomfortable and socially unacceptable.

Every once in a while, I would see something eerie about myself in one of the other siblings that could completely scramble my sense of self — the way that one’s neck became splotchy when she was uncomfortable or the way another one bit his lip. Once, I heard a sibling laugh, and it was so much my own laugh that it made the hair on my neck stand up.

In December, I made a trip to Honolulu, where I visited Kelsi Ikeda at the home in which she grew up. It was the first place I traveled by plane, and I remember waking up in her house that first morning feeling disoriented. It was hot, I could feel the breeze of a fan, it smelled different, and I was in a bunk bed. It took me a while to realize where I was. And I remember thinking: Why am I here? Whom can I hold accountable for this feeling? The bank? My parents? The donor? Myself? What am I doing exactly? And what am I trying to accomplish?

At times, committing to a project like this has felt masochistic. I’m generally an introverted person, and it was hard to feel as if I constantly had to be on, performing the most appealing version of myself. Though the feeling of performance quickly dissolved, I still had a recurring sensation of being in a confused state of just-waking-up, of trying to find my place in all these different parts of America as well as in this strange social landscape.

I spent four days with Kelsi and her family, enough time that by the end I felt a real affection for them all. In her picture, she’s wearing her prom dress from junior year of high school. It feels funny, even tinged with a hint of embarrassment, to try on the clothes of our past selves. But it helped us get acquainted.

During the time I spent with my half siblings, we exchanged secrets. People get very confessional around a stranger who has no stake in their life on a day-to-day basis. We had a connection, which meant they could trust me, but I wasn’t a potential future friend they needed to impress. I was something else — some third thing.

Kelsi Ikeda, 20, a college student in Southern California, at her childhood home in Honolulu. “I am not super close with any of the siblings. Even though we are related, we are sort of just strangers. I’m the only Asian one I’m aware of. I feel like if there is another partially Asian person, I might connect more with them.”

Bradley Holland, 20, at his home in Lake Forest, Calif.

Mickey Mann, 21, a recent college graduate,
in a home she sublets in Bellingham, Wash.

Matt Holland, 20, twin brother of Bradley, in the yard of his
family’s home in Lake Forest, Calif.; he attends college nearby.

The following month, I met Daniel Claypoole, who could be described as the great connector: He seeks siblings out and sort of holds the group together. He’s social and extroverted and rallies people around the idea of this being a group.

He lives in Savannah, Ga., where he had been going to art school, but I met him in Albuquerque. His two younger brothers, Zeke, 14, and Grayson, 4, who both share our donor, live there. His sister, who is 9, and who does not share our donor, was there, too, and she was trying to explain to Grayson who I was. I don’t know if he understood.

I knew I wanted to make Grayson’s picture on that beanbag chair in their living room. You can’t see it in the image, but the entire wall is covered in a pattern of crosses. I set up one continuous light and instructed Grayson, a typical frenetic little kid, to stay still. Amazingly, he did. Many people find the hot light uncomfortable, but he seemed warmed by it. When we left, he cried, and I felt a pang of guilt. I’m sure he was crying over Daniel, but I also wondered what he made of the word “brother,” which was thrown around when we were introduced, because I knew I would most likely not see him again for a very long time, if ever.

Daniel and I drove to Clovis, N.M., to visit the house he grew up in with his grandmother, grandfather and great-grandmother. I wanted to incorporate biographical details in the photograph, like the painting hanging on the wall of his great-great-grandfather, a man with piercing eyes who, he had been told, was the chief firefighter in Clovis. On the bottom left of the photo you can see a dictionary in which his great-grandmother stores the family photos — the wedding and baby pictures are loosely tucked into random pages.

Even though Daniel has been in touch with other siblings for many years, I was the first sibling from outside the family that his grandparents had ever met. We felt very close by the end of the visit. I felt so grateful for the way that his grandparents welcomed me, just as so many other families had, giving me a place to sleep, a seat at family dinner. It’s strange to think that I have been in all of their homes, but none of them have ever been in mine or met my parents.

Daniel Claypoole, 19, older brother of Zeke
and Grayson Barrett, in the living room of
the house where he grew up in Clovis, N.M. “Mattie, one of my donor half sisters, and I have been inseparable since we first met at a donor sibling meet-up when I was in eighth grade. We both enrolled in SCAD, a top school for design, and we live in the same building. She’s still in school, but I had to drop out for financial reasons. It can be hard to see Mattie doing what I want to be doing, but I know I’m going to find a way to keep being creative. I’m working as an assistant wedding planner. It’s strange how many of the siblings are artists or musicians.”

Zeke Barrett, 14, at his home in Albuquerque.

Grayson Barrett, 4, at his home in Albuquerque.

Anna Grace Bond, 19, in a field between her mother’s and grandparents’ home in
Wiggins, Miss.; she attends college nearby. Fletcher Bond, 19, is currently in the Air Force. “My granny had been encouraging my mom to tell my twin brother, Fletcher, and me that we were conceived by sperm donor. Finally, my mom told us at a McDonald’s drive-through. We were 17. My brother’s reaction was, It doesn’t change anything. He’s close to my dad. For me, it was like — life crisis. The very next day, I made my mom help me find the donor number, and that was how I found the siblings. They were so welcoming — like, ‘‘Hey, sister!’’ I was like, ‘‘This is so cool.’’ To me, it’s not healthy to have to keep how you’re made a secret.”

I’m always hesitant to call anybody a brother or sister. But many of the other siblings use that language very loosely. I don’t, probably because I already have a sister, and she will always be most important to me.

But I have been struck by the closeness that comes from the intensity of the time that we spent together or, who knows, maybe something more than that. I spent about 12 hours with one of the siblings, Neylan Griffy. She drove me from Denver almost all the way to Kansas to show me where she is from. It was pitch dark, and we talked the whole time. When I was leaving Colorado, and we were saying goodbye, she said, almost with trepidation: “I don’t know if it’s too early to say this, but I heart you.”

She didn’t want to push me or expect anything; she was just expressing her feelings. She was one of the first siblings to connect with others, so she may be more comfortable with that. I laughed and said, “I heart you, too.”

One of the last siblings I photographed was Dawson Johnson. One of the others found him on 23andMe in January and connected me with him. He’d never communicated with a sibling before me. I took Gus on my trip to visit him, and the three of us met at an IHOP. He pulled up in a massive black truck with oversize wheels. He’s muscular, a taekwondo instructor who was a serious high school wrestler. I wanted to portray that side of him in the picture but also to capture something about his manner, which was gentle. In the photograph we made, I placed him shirtless and beneath the truck, in this vulnerable state.

Dawson Johnson, 20, near the home where he grew up in
Memphis; he works as a taekwondo instructor in Jackson, Tenn. “I always knew my sperm donor was white; I really don’t know why my mom chose the way she did. For the longest time, I wanted a dad, but I didn’t get one. Meeting all the siblings helped me see a little bit more clearly what my mom did and why she did it . I used to see it as, My mom didn’t give me a dad. Now I see it as, Wow, she wanted me so badly.”

Josh Lambert, 19, outside his family’s apartment
in Long Beach, Calif., where he attends college.

Mattie Overmyer, 21, an art-school student, in Savannah, Ga.

Kyle Luzzi-Dundon, 20, in his parents’ home in Haydenville, Mass. He lives in Avon, Colo.

At some point, in each sibling encounter, we would inevitably end up talking about the donor. He represented this absence we all had in common, almost a spectral figure hovering above our lives. Some siblings, once they turned 18, had written to the donor and received long letters back. A different sibling told me that although he wasn’t interested in actually contacting the donor, he wished he had the ability to be invisible, to watch over him for one day as he went about his life, a sort of inversion of the dynamic.

At one point, Izzy got her hands on an audio interview of the donor that the bank made and that another sibling’s mother had. (You can get more information about the donor from the bank — more extensive questionnaire forms or an audio recording — if you pay extra for it.) She, Gus, Kyle Luzzi-Dundon (another sibling) and I listened to the recording one night, huddled in a circle in a sort of séance.

The bank asks the donor at the end of the audio interview whether he has anything he would like to tell any children conceived with his sperm. Our donor’s response: “I wish them all the luck.” One sibling scribbled that on his bedroom wall during high school in colorful chalk as if it were an inspirational quote. I heard it more as an irreverent provocation: My job here is done. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Trying to understand what the donor means to me has been complicated. I never planned on trying to contact him, but I ultimately did to let him know about this project. He declined to be a part of it at this stage. To me, it is more interesting for him to remain the missing and invisible figure he has always been. I don’t think he had any idea, at the time he donated his sperm, that he was creating a kind of time capsule that could potentially explode.

For me, there is a strange pleasure in being able to collapse space and time by putting all these people from all these different locations next to one another. For the viewer, there might be intrigue in searching for the similarities and differences among each of us or even just knowing that we are all connected on this deeper, genetic level.

Nik Morgan, 21, a college student in
Boulder, Colo.; he grew up in Aspen.

Jack Shiley, 20, in a garage where his band practices
in New Lenox, Ill.; he works at Guitar Center.

Hannah, 17, and Jonny Schulman, 19, in the backyard of their family’s home
in Troy, N.Y. She’s a high school student; he’s in college in Binghamton.

Grayson Klages, 19, a college student in Portland, Ore.,
in the bedroom of his childhood home in Boulder, Colo.

Nate Savinar, 20, in his apartment in Denver,
where he was born and raised, with his
training dummy; he teaches Krav Maga.

These pictures also capture a transitional stage in most of our lives — we are at the close of adolescence, on the brink of becoming our adult selves. The basketball hoop has fallen in the front yard; the prom dress has been tucked away in the back of the closet; the bicycle with training wheels will soon be thrown out or given away.

The project has no determined end, because other siblings may emerge in the next weeks, months and years. Once, two siblings who hadn’t met yet but who’d seen photos of each other discovered that they were in an airport at the same time. This incident seemed to confirm our paranoia that we might be walking by siblings all the time without knowing it: in the streets, on the subway, at our liberal-arts colleges.

Since finishing the project, or at least this phase of it, I sometimes feel this haze state fall over me, in which other people start to look like me. One day recently, on the subway, a young man about my age sat down across from me. Medium build, dark auburn hair, full lips, one of the most consistent features in all the siblings. I looked at his hands — they were knuckly and slender. They looked so much like mine. I continued to stare and found myself on the brink of asking him an uncomfortable question. But I didn’t, and instead I thought about what it means to be able to see yourself in strangers — if, in the course of this project, my capacity for empathy has grown, has opened me up, or if the whole thing has been secretly rooted in self-interest, a fixation with understanding who I am.

The photographs have been developed, selected, printed; I stare at them now, see them side by side, I think about the work that made them — and still I’m not sure.

[Sperm donors can’t stay secret anymore. Here’s what that means.]