Welcome to strangers from KCW's independent producer project and storycentral.org.

My name is Leah Tao. In the Christmas before last, I was back home in Denmark. We were at my mom's house, my hometown, just a day after Christmas, and my step-sister Anna,

got up and said, I have to go back to Copenhagen right away because I am ovulating.

She was 38 and single.

She wanted a baby, and she decided to go it alone, as we now seem to call it in our 21st century lingo.

Like so many of my girlfriends who were pushing 40, Anna was tired of the insane pressure it puts on a first date when all you want to do is blurt out.

So do you want to have kids? Because if you don't, I really can't waste my time on you.

But if you do, are you busy tomorrow?

When she first started thinking about how to do this, Anna scanned her roster of male friends

for someone who might be a good co-parent, you know, who'd

want to do this with her.

And she decided that there was only one really good candidate, her handsome, smart, charming,

gay friend, MES.

It's a Danish name.

Don't try to figure it out.

In her ideal scenario, Mess would be the father and they would share the child so that she would have a co-parent and her child would have a dad.

But, you know, it's not the easiest thing to ask someone, so she floated the idea to a mutual friend of theirs.

And he said, yeah, but, you know, Mess really does not want children ever.

And she was like, okay, bummer. I guess I'm moving on to the next

best option, the sperm bank. It wasn't exactly how she wanted to do it, but you know, she's a

proactive go-getter woman of the 2000s, and when the Holy Ghost didn't land on her window sill,

well, she decided to go find him. So she went to the sperm bank and she planned out the whole process.

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