We picked their donor from an online portal. I’ve sat with that sentence for years and I still don’t know how to explain it to someone who hasn’t been there. There was a spreadsheet. There were hundreds of donor profiles. There were essays about childhoods and dreams and what they hoped to pass on. There were pages of medical history and staff impressions and photos you had to pay extra to unlock. And then there were Brit and I, sitting on our bed together one Tuesday night, eating cereal, deciding. The clinic called it “donor selection.” We called it the strangest, most intimate, most impossible decision we’d ever made together. We weren’t choosing a dad. We were choosing a story our kids would carry for the rest of their lives. Now I look at this family we’ve built — 5 kiddos in 7 years, each of them themselves in ways that astonish me — and I see pieces of a person we’ll never fully know. And somehow that’s okay. We’re a donor-conceived family. It’s not complicated. It’...