I never thought I’d be one of those women whose prime directive is the fruitless pursuit of a baby, but it’s happened. I was 38 when I met The Fella. We married in the summer of my 40th year, and began our life together in hot pursuit of creating another life. Fun, carefree sex morphed into timed, regimented mating – BD, or “baby dance” as they call it on TTC (Trying To Conceive) forums. Ugh. Time sped by but we got no further in our pursuit.

I started out cavalier about our chances; after all, my mom didn’t go through menopause until she was in her late 50’s, so surely that meant that I’d take after her and be fertile well into my middle age. Looking back, this is so incredibly naive. I found out the hard way that it doesn’t exactly work that way, and in fact she urged me through my 30’s that I should really have a baby sooner rather than later (this all during the time I was with a boyfriend she hated). That wasn’t in the realm of possibility at the time, but I now see what she was getting at.

We did it all: fertility specialists, acupuncture, herbs, dietary changes, charting, exercise, no exercise, surgery, IUI, IVF. I read all the books about fertility and getting pregnant, and pinned my hopes on the women who said that it could be done after 40 and that the doctors are wrong. But four and a half years and two miscarriages later, we were still standing at the station. We had run as fast as we could, but still we missed the train.

Not only is this whole process heartbreaking, frustrating, and all-consuming; successful or not, it’s exceedingly expensive. To date we’ve probably spent somewhere around $50,000 trying to have a baby. (Don’t ask me where we got that kind of money; I’m not exactly sure. We’re far from rich). Some people spend more. Sometimes it seems that we literally flushed all of our money down the toilet. The fertility industry deals in hope, and quite often it’s false. Before we embarked on our second IVF, I grilled my doctor about the reality of our situation. “How many 44 year old women have you treated that have had successful pregnancies with IVFs?” I asked her. She was hesistant. She explained that while there was a small chance for me at 44, there was almost no chance at 45 or later. Even knowing that I was playing a shell game, I had to try one more time. I was hooked in to that tiny hope that I would get lucky.

It’s been six months since that last IVF, and since then I’ve turned 45 and have finally come to the realization that it ain’t gonna happen, at least not the way I always heard it should be. We still have options, though, and for that I’m grateful. We are now looking for an egg donor – something that 30 years ago would not have been an option. It’s taken us a long time to wrap our heads around the idea that if we successfully have a child going this route, that it won’t be my dna that gets passed along. We mourned this reality for quite a while, but just in the past few weeks I’ve begun to see this as a positive thing.

I mean, how many people get to pick the traits that their child will have? You can pick your partner, and hopefully the things that you find attractive in him or her will also be things that you would like to see passed down to your child. This is one of the big reasons that I wanted to have a child with The Fella – he’s wonderful, kind, handsome, intelligent, funny – the list goes on. There are a few traits of my own that I would have liked to pass on to my kid – olive skin, musical ability, (supposed) smarts – but quite a few that I would gladly jettison. Family health history? Terrible eyesight? See ya! Short stature? Big nose? Adios! Klutziness, absent-mindedness? Don’t let the door hit you on your way out!

So now begins the process of choosing the baby-momma, as it were. There are hundreds of agencies with cloying names like “Family Creations” and “Conceptual Options” that deal in a different kind of hope: the egg-trade, plying young women desperate for money to older women desperate for their last chance at motherhood. Each agency has a searchable database of women between the ages of 20-30 that have already been vetted (to a certain extent) and who will gladly go through a month of discomfort in exchange for $5-$8,000 (for pain and suffering; you can’t legally buy human body parts in the U.S.).

Looking for an egg donor is very much like online dating, (and I find it somewhat ironic that I met The Fella online as well – my life is very post-modern). The better agencies have the girls fill out extensive questionnaires about their family health history, their childhood, their hobbies, how they’ve done in school, their aspirations, and even their reasons for donating (as if that really matters). There are pictures of the women as adults and as children, and sometimes they post pictures of their own children, if they have any. With each profile, I find myself going through small stages of hope and disappointment; very often the ones with the physical traits I’m looking for don’t necessarily have the right talents or education, or vice-versa, but occasionally I’ll find someone who is exactly what I’m looking for, and then I’m madly in love and making plans before we’ve even met – imagining long walks on the beach, talking for hours in a cafe, making her mix tapes…. Invariably, those girls are already spoken for, so unless I want to wait another six months before they are available again, I have to move along.

In the course of this process I can’t help but feel just a little bit lecherous. In my mind’s eye I’ve become this gnarled old crone beckoning young girls to my gingerbread house. Recently we went to an in-store at a local record store which brought a throng of 20-something hipsters, with whom we stood in line for a half hour waiting to be let in. I found myself greedily eyeing the young women standing in front of us, sizing up their height, weight, figures, skin, hair, and listening in on their conversations to see if they were intelligent. I asked myself if one of these girls could be the one. Everywhere I go, in fact, I notice young women in a way that I never have before.

Once you find the girl of your dreams, be prepared to plop down another small fortune: we might well spend the equivalent of what we’ve already forked out on fertility treatments in the last 4 years in one shot. So in addition to dealing with the grief of our past failures and potential of future ones, we have to wrap our brains around spending the equivalent of another down payment on a house, and still there’s no guarantee that I’ll become or remain pregnant.

I’d like to say that looks and other things don’t matter to me, but they do. I’ve spoken to a few people who have gone through this process, and amazingly, many say that looks don’t matter; they just want a healthy baby, and of course I want a healthy baby more than anything. Still, It’s odd to think that in a way you are replacing yourself when you have a child, but in this case, I’d like to replace myself with a slightly better version – I mean, why settle for the 3G when you can get the 4G? Of course I’d like my kid to be taller, smarter, more talented, more focused – the list goes on, and on. The question of “nature vs. nurture” has begun to loom large for us. It seems like athleticism is something you’re born with (I am decidedly not athletic), but what about non-visible traits? Is intelligence inherited, or can genius be cultivated? Could a child that would have done horribly in school or ended up in a gang become a highly successful doctor/lawyer/teacher/clothing designer/golfer/rockstar given the right circumstances? Everybody has these expectations and hopes for his or her kids, but when you actually have a certain amount of control over the situation, the choices are daunting. It’s so hard to tell, even with the amount of information you’re given, what a woman is really like without meeting her and spending time with her; online profiles are still very two-dimensional. Some women will agree to meet you before you commit to egg donation, but others, understandably, want to remain anonymous.

And even if we do find a woman who has all the perfect traits, we still don’t know what we’re gonna get. DNA can be sneaky. And I’ve learned through all of this that not only do you not always get what you want, you can hardly ever get what you expect. All we can do is try to choose the best route and hope we get on the train this time. So let me ask myself: Am I feeling lucky, punk?