It occurred to me this morning when posting a reply to the American Fertility Associations latest blog on disclosing to one’s child his or her conception story and after having posted a reply to Andy Vorzimer’s blog on  inappropriate speculation about Kelly Preston’s newly announced pregnancy that I had a thing or two about my own story to share. I was not donor conceived, of course I wasn’t, I was born in 1965. I was born, however, to a 43 year-old mother and 2 years later, my brother followed; he was not donor conceived, either. I had the oldest mother in kindergarten (although I certainly didn’t know that), she was the oldest brownie leader and later, the only mother with gray hair diving the waves and body-surfing along with me and my teen-age friends. To my knowledge, no-one asked or even quietly gossiped about how it was that my mother came to conceive in her mid-forties. As the stories were told to me, everyone simply shared in my parent’s joy. Disclosure? Folks didn’t talk much about matters such as infertility back in the day when my parents were hoping to build a family. Married in the 1940s, matters of their bedroom were not for public discussion. But news of my birth? I’m told that the word spread quickly through Little Italy (my entire family, both my mother and father’s side all lived within a few blocks of each other). Folks came from all over to my grandmother’s flat to share their good wishes and to celebrate. As a young child, whenever hearing this story (and I heard it quite often) I conjured up images of my aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors, paisanos (as they say in Italian) all gathered around my grandmother, popping champagne and throwing confetti…I was young, I had an indulgent imagination. But as I got older, I came to understand that my parent’s respective ages and the amount of years they had waited for my brother and I were simply part of the prologue to their story, details needed to lay the foundation for what they truly wanted to convey to me as their sheer joy and their sense of having been blessed. They did not hide their infertility (although that word was never used), I knew my mother had suffered many miscarriages and much emotional pain but the arc of the story, if you will, was that a healthy baby was born and was welcomed into a home, an extended family, a community with a sense that something miraculous had happened….no one, to my knowledge, wondered (at least, out loud) how.