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the birds, the bees and the petri dish the day my parents’ jokes got the better of them words dani lurie photo leah bernhardt We were in the car when our parents told us that we were made in a petri dish. I’m not sure why they chose that particular moment, waiting outside my grandparents’ house on our way to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Maybe it seemed as good a time as any. I recently asked my brother and sister if they could remember the finer details of the time we found out we were IVF babies. We agreed that the year was 1995, which puts us at nine or ten years old. Emma said that we were actually on our way to a pan-Asian vegetarian buffet. What we all remember is that none of us believed a word of it. You see, our parents are liars. They’ve always been liars—in the nicest and most loving way possible. They’re fond of jokes and pranks and teases. As children, we heard the phrase, “I’m only pulling your leg,” so often that had our legs actually been physically pulled every time it was said, we might not be as short in stature as we are today (and we really are all quite short). On birthdays, there would always be some sort of decoy: an elaborately-wrapped box would be revealed to be empty, only to find the real gift placed neatly onto a bed when our heads were turned. Masters of misdirection, our mum and dad. Not that I’m complaining—those were some of the best times. We had a lot of fun. We spent our childhood shocked and grinning. The thing is, after years of staging those benevolent deceptions, our parents were never going to be the most trustworthy of sources. We were more than a little wary when they revealed that we did not arrive on this earth in the traditional manner. The whole birds and bees business had already been carefully explained in books like Where Did I Come From?, with its arsenal of euphemisms and cheery illustrations of cartoon genitalia. To then add that we were actually created in a laboratory instead— that they took some of this and some of that, mixed it around and put it back in— seemed incredulous. Nice try, Mum and Dad! I think it took them all night to convince us. We canvassed testimonies from family members and other adults. We needed confirmation. Had the internet been available then, I suppose we would have jumped on to Wikipedia or searched for “the Great Test Tube Hoax”. It wouldn’t have been in any encyclopedia that we could get our hands on back then. We were in the first wave of test tube babies, only seven years after the first, and IVF wasn’t talked about as it is today. These days, I have a friend who has gone through IVF treatment herself. She too has friends who’ve created their children through all sorts of methods: a legacy of eggsharers, surrogates and biological donors. The reproductive game is a funny old thing. My friend has started telling her daughter the story about how she came to be and I take on a kind of mascot role. “You and I are the same,” I tell her. “A lot of children are made with one mummy and one daddy, but our parents wanted to love us so much that they made us in a very special way.” In the end, it really doesn’t matter how you get here.
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the birds, the bees and the petri dish the day my parents’ jokes got the better of them words dani lurie photo leah bernhardt We were in the car when our parents told us that we were made in a petri dish. I’m not sure why they chose that particular moment, waiting outside my grandparents’ house on our way to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Maybe it seemed as good a time as any. I recently asked my brother and sister if they could remember the finer details of the time we found out we were IVF babies. We agreed that the year was 1995, which puts us at nine or ten years old. Emma said that we were actually on our way to a pan-Asian vegetarian buffet. What we all remember is that none of us believed a word of it. You see, our parents are liars. They’ve always been liars—in the nicest and most loving way possible. They’re fond of jokes and pranks and teases. As children, we heard the phrase, “I’m only pulling your leg,” so often that had our legs actually been physically pulled every time it was said, we might not be as short in stature as we are today (and we really are all quite short). On birthdays, there would always be some sort of decoy: an elaborately-wrapped box would be revealed to be empty, only to find the real gift placed neatly onto a bed when our heads were turned. Masters of misdirection, our mum and dad. Not that I’m complaining—those were some of the best times. We had a lot of fun. We spent our childhood shocked and grinning. The thing is, after years of staging those benevolent deceptions, our parents were never going to be the most trustworthy of sources. We were more than a little wary when they revealed that we did not arrive on this earth in the traditional manner. The whole birds and bees business had already been carefully explained in books like Where Did I Come From?, with its arsenal of euphemisms and cheery illustrations of cartoon genitalia. To then add that we were actually created in a laboratory instead— that they took some of this and some of that, mixed it around and put it back in— seemed incredulous. Nice try, Mum and Dad! I think it took them all night to convince us. We canvassed testimonies from family members and other adults. We needed confirmation. Had the internet been available then, I suppose we would have jumped on to Wikipedia or searched for “the Great Test Tube Hoax”. It wouldn’t have been in any encyclopedia that we could get our hands on back then. We were in the first wave of test tube babies, only seven years after the first, and IVF wasn’t talked about as it is today. These days, I have a friend who has gone through IVF treatment herself. She too has friends who’ve created their children through all sorts of methods: a legacy of eggsharers, surrogates and biological donors. The reproductive game is a funny old thing. My friend has started telling her daughter the story about how she came to be and I take on a kind of mascot role. “You and I are the same,” I tell her. “A lot of children are made with one mummy and one daddy, but our parents wanted to love us so much that they made us in a very special way.” In the end, it really doesn’t matter how you get here.