We Thought IVF Would Deliver a Daughter. Boy, Were We in for a Surprise.

We were walking side by side, hand in hand, after finding a quiet moment at the glowing neon carnival of Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert when the most unexpected sentence I have ever uttered came tumbling from my mouth: “I think . . . I want to have a daughter with you.”

This was shocking news not only to me but also to my audience—my wife. When we’d started dating nearly a decade prior, there was that rapid-fire, energetic series of discussions that punctuate any new relationship. We talked about how we wanted our lives to unfold, how we wanted asymmetrical, exciting careers. How we wanted to live in New York City. How the idea of fixing up and running a boutique hotel in an exotic foreign country sounded like the ideal retirement plan.

Not once did we discuss having children. That lack of family planning continued after we got married and our jobs went into overdrive—hers in venture capital, mine in publishing, consulting, and filmmaking. By the time I made my Burning Man proclamation in 2017, we were both working as much as sixty hours a week, and the idea of caring for a baby in our two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco sounded ludicrous.

I’m not sure what pushed me to blurt out a desire to reproduce. More than likely it was several clichéd factors: I was closing in on forty, our marriage was strong, and, erm, shortly before our walk, I had consumed 120mg of MDMA. In Molly veritas. After my declaration, she stopped, looked at me, beamed, and without missing a beat said, “Hey, I’m down.”

My vision was simple: A mini version of my wife who would hold my hand while asking me to sit and do crafts with her. Reality would prove much more difficult. This conversation sent us on a yearslong journey that included multiple miscarriages, in vitro fertilization (IVF) and all its glorious side effects, and tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills. And it revealed that even in 2025, when so much is possible in the fields of gene optimization and medical science, there is only the illusion of control. Creating life cannot be optimized; it remains messy and stressful. Which is to say, my wife and I are now the proud parents of three sons.

The advice I give anyone embarking on any extreme experience is to not make any life-altering decisions for at least two weeks afterward. No quitting jobs, no new tattoos, and definitely do not try to create human life. Upon returning home, we waited more than a month and then did a gut check. Yes, we still wanted this. Yes, we could make it work with our careers. Yes, we could even figure out a way to raise a baby in the two-bedroom apartment.

My wife and I at Burning Man. My advice: Never make a life-altering decision right after an extreme experience—especially one involving MDMA. Take a beat. But a month after my declaration, we checked in with each other. We still wanted this.

The process of having a kid au naturel was undoubtedly covered in middle school health class. But here’s what they don’t tell you: When you’re a couple in your mid-to-late thirties, things don’t always go smoothly. Our first three pregnancies ended in miscarriage within weeks of our seeing a double blue line.

In the spring of 2020, we got our fourth positive test. While I was speaking on the phone with my father, Dad offered a number of predictions about everything from the lockdowns (“This might go on longer than people think”) to the consequences of Trump’s bungling of the pandemic (“He’ll be a one-termer”). Exasperated by the chaos and uncertainty of the future, I mentioned that my wife was pregnant once again, almost as an afterthought. “This one is going to stick,” he offered. “I just have that feeling.”

Turns out Dad’s intuition was right. But the whole daughter thing was not. We received the news from UCSF Medical Center: The healthy little embryo was also a little embry-bro. Months later, after an incredibly difficult pregnancy that included gestational diabetes and a placenta previa that caused several alarming bleeding episodes, our first child, Leo, named after my hard-fighting, hard-drinking grandfather, was born more than a month early in January 2021.

Leo lives up to his namesake. Not so much the boozing, but he is strong-willed and silly, and has his great-grandfather’s and grandfather’s and father’s penchant for hell-raising. He is a frighteningly intelligent, intensely focused ball of kinetic energy who lights up our house with full-throttled joy. We expose Leo to virtually every flavor of the cultural rainbow—musicals, fashion, art, cooking, film—and while I would be absolutely delighted if he wanted to knit sweaters and play with dolls all day, he is very firmly a boy’s boy. Born with enviable levels of coordination, he began riding a bike sans training wheels at three and then riding it down the stairs not long afterward. Evenings and weekends are often punctuated by lightsaber battles, baseball games and soccer matches (often started in the living room), and boisterous wrestling. My wife, with endless grace and patience, laughs and rolls her eyes, instructing us to play Wiffle ball in the garage if we knock too many line drives into the Nelson bubble lamp.

One evening when Leo was about three, we were watching YouTube clips of rally cars weighing thousands of pounds flying hundreds of feet through the air. My wife looked over to us and said, “Hmm, maybe it’s time for some feminine energy in this house.” We had been talking about adding another little one to our brood, mostly because we enjoy having siblings ourselves and believe wholeheartedly that only-children can (sometimes!) turn into weird, isolated freaks.

Because that first pregnancy had been so fraught, we decided the safest option for us would be to conceive our second child through IVF. The process, while physically taxing and highly expensive, can not only screen for birth defects but also select the embryo with the best chance of survival. Also, unlike places like Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands, where gender selection is prohibited for nonmedical reasons and generally seen as unethical, in the United States you can select the sex of the baby. The daughter that I had originally envisioned years before seemed like she was just a questionnaire away, not much different from selecting the toppings on a pizza using DoorDash.

The ineffable experience of having a daughter was appealing for a number of highly selfish reasons. Mostly, my wife is an elite-tier spouse—hardworking, hilarious, and beautiful in a way that is sometimes difficult to comprehend. I wanted to see what form a girl would take with my wife’s qualities combined with my excellent sense of balance and coordination. (My wife is many things, but let’s just say she didn’t go to college on an athletic scholarship. Her assessment, for full disclosure: “True, but I’m not the one who recently fell down a flight of stairs and hyperextended a knee.” Also true.)

It’s one thing to watch YouTube clips about how exigent IVF is; it’s another to experience it. Every evening, my wife would dutifully inject herself with a stinging cocktail of hormones that would hopefully coax her body into releasing healthy eggs that could be collected and fertilized later in a lab. Somehow, she dodged the mood-swing bullet, largely remaining steady, sane, and upbeat throughout the process. That was until the universe decided to inflict a big fat “fuck you” in the form of persistent, incredibly itchy hives, a by-product of the artificial hormonal imbalance. For months, she endured irritating raised welts that covered her torso while I stood by with calamine lotion and the over-the-counter allergy medication approved by her doctor that only kinda, sorta worked. If given a choice, I think she would have opted for mood swings. After witnessing her degree of suffering, I might have, too.

Then there were the frequent trips to the fertility clinic. Blood. Scans. Assessments. More blood. Money. Even more blood. Even more money. Each IVF session can cost up to $20,000 and is not always covered by health insurance. Oh, one more thing: There’s no guarantee any of it will work.

Finally, eleven eggs were extracted, and the fertility team at UCSF paired them with my little swimmers. For a few weeks, my wife and I patiently waited to hear how many of the eggs were fertilized. Would we have the starting lineup for a baseball team? Maybe the starting five for a basketball squad?

The email came through. Out of the eleven eggs, six had been successfully fertilized. Out of those six, four had turned into embryos. And out of those four embryos, two were healthy enough to be implanted. Two! But neither was a girl.

There was a pang of disappointment. I had built up in my mind what a little girl would be like—a counterbalance to the insane masculine energy that seemed to permeate every corner of our house. That’s not to say girls can’t be little hellions, but we would never get to witness how our genes would manifest in the form of a daughter.

The idea of going through another round of IVF seemed arduous and unnecessary. We had a couple of hearty embryos. Why not welcome another boy? We decided to go ahead and transfer a single male embryo.

A few weeks after the implant, my wife and I got into a rare argument. The reasons were silly. She was considering retirement from her stressful job, and I didn’t think this was a great time to rock the boat financially. Bagawd! We need the medical insurance. I left the house in a huff, and she headed to her six-week checkup. A few hours later, she called me on the phone—something she never does—and I immediately picked up, fearing bad news.

“I’m, uh, more pregnant than we thought,” she said.

“Oh, you’re further along?”

“No. No, no, I’m pregnant with identical twins.”

I started laughing. She had obviously been crying. Identical twins occur when a single fertilized egg, in the early stages of pregnancy, splits into two. Same DNA, same sex. Two more sons on the way.

And just like that, our family had grown: My wife’s ultrasound images showed twin boys. We’d need a bigger house and probably better home insurance. No drywall would be safe.

For weeks afterward, we attempted to wrap our heads around a life with identical twin boys. Every scenario we imagined included just two children. Now, all of a sudden, there would be a third person, a third mouth, a third car seat, a third college education. We would eventually need a bigger house and probably better home insurance. No drywall would be safe. Eventually, shock melted away to acceptance and then, finally, giddy excitement. We joked about which one would turn out to be the evil twin. Halloween would obviously be infinitely more fun; we could dress them up in highly embarrassing costumes for the next five years at least. I told my five-foot-three wife that in the not-so-distant future, she would never have to move a piece of furniture again, never have to reach for something on a high shelf.

Doctors at UCSF went over our options, including twin reduction. “Selective termination”—or, put simply, terminating one fetus to better the survival chances of the other—is not available in every state and, in the states where it is allowed, is generally offered during high-risk pregnancies where complications threaten the life of one or both fetuses or the mother. That decision was easy. We would not Sophie’s Choice anyone. What I did come to realize was that the IVF process is a mirage that convinces parents they have a measure of control over many pregnancy factors. A study by the Centers for Disease Control found that with IVF, women aged thirty-eight to forty have about a 15 percent chance of a live birth per cycle. This drops to 8 percent by ages forty-one to forty-two. Even with the healthiest embryos and genetic testing, the odds don’t guarantee a baby. Also, the likelihood of twins increases with IVF. Monozygotic identical twins occur in about 0.4 percent of natural pregnancies. With IVF, the rate varies from 2 percent to as high as 12 percent, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Last year, Slate ran an article titled “The Parents Who Want Daughters—and Daughters Only,” detailing a trend among well-heeled people who overwhelmingly opt for girls when doing IVF. The subjects profiled in the piece, largely affluent Silicon Valley knowledge workers, all had different reasons for selecting girls. Some of it was because of what fertility clinics often refer to as “family balancing,” when parents who already have a son want to even out the sexes with a daughter. Others pointed out that daughters tend to be closer with family as time goes on, more likely to assist aging parents. One parent-to-be didn’t even bother being diplomatic: “When I think about having a child that’s a boy, it’s almost a repulsion, like, Oh my God, no.”

Raising a child regardless of sex or gender is an incredibly demanding experience (just ask your parents), but raising boys comes with its own special set of ever-evolving challenges. Boys have a statistically higher likelihood of being involved in violence, it’s often difficult for boys to emotionally regulate, and mounting evidence points to boys having a rough time succeeding in school. Boys are also more likely to be taken in by flimflam con men like Andrew Tate. Fewer young men are going to college. When they get out into the world, men are more likely to be unemployed.

But there was something else underpinning the Slate article. For more than a decade, I have lived in Silicon Valley, where I’ve had a front-row seat to the freak parade of start-up founders, tech executives, and budding broligarchs. Not all their lifestyle ideas are bad. Cold plunges, drinking less booze, and getting more sleep are all things that are scientifically proven to be good for you. But each person profiled in the Slate story seemed to espouse one of the Valley’s worst attributes: endless optimization.

This is the grindset mindset that gave birth to companies like Meta, which use powerful algorithms to drive engagement—a polite term for making us stare at our phones. It’s why in places like San Francisco there are restaurants with a monthslong waiting list because the tasting menu was written up in a high-profile magazine like, ahem, Esquire. It’s a system of belief that fetishizes efficiency. But in the process of squeezing the last remaining bits of optimization out of any one thing—the restaurant, the start-up, the sex of the child—you also inadvertently sacrifice joy.

Parenthood is messy and unpredictable. Thankfully, when the twins were born, the process was neither messy nor unpredictable, thanks to the efforts of the doctors at UCSF. Daniel Alexander and Donovan Francisco came into the world without a single complication in late October of last year. The universe, it would seem, also has a sense of proportionality. Both babies are little Fonzies, chill dudes who hardly ever cry, who sleep through the night and eat voraciously. Leo is obsessed with them, and so far has shown no signs of turning into a weird, isolated freak.

That’s not to say things are peaceful. The chaos inside our home is unbelievable at times. People will call and hear what sounds like a pack of velociraptors screeching in the background. But strangely, even though I’ve found myself with hardly any remaining free time, with meals often eaten above the sink, I have achieved a state of calmness I didn’t think was possible before. My wife has, too, no doubt in part because she did indeed quit her job and take a year off. Redirecting so much of my energy to entertaining and managing a trio of madcap toddlers—and seeing the world through their eyes—puts everything else in perspective. Little things that used to irk me—getting cut off in traffic, long lines at the DMV—no longer move my rage needle.

And it’s not to say that things aren’t stressful. This summer the five of us went on vacation to a far-flung international locale. As is proven time and time again in parenting, even if you plan out every worst-case scenario, something will come along and blindside you—often in the form of poop. For instance, did you know that if you introduce a new diet high in olive oil, your children may well proceed to explode from various orifices on the way to the airport? You haven’t truly lived until you’ve had a four-year-old projectile vomiting while another child blows his diaper out in a van where the windows don’t roll down.

To unwind in the evening, I’ll often listen to a talk by sixties philosopher Alan Watts. One of my favorites is called Lecture on Zen, in which Watts explains that when you fight too hard against the natural ebbs and flows of life, it tends to bring suffering:

When you’re thrown into the water after being accustomed to living on dry land, you’re not used to the idea of swimming. You try to stand on the water, you try to catch hold of it, and as a result you drown. . . . And to swim, you relax, you let go, you give yourself to the water. . . . And then you find that the water holds you up; indeed, in a certain way you become the water.

I have become the water, friends, though even with this newfound sense of serenity, I’m not sure what the future holds for me and my boys. But I do know this: Years from now, when all three of them can use a porta-potty unassisted, I will bring them to Burning Man. One night we’ll go on an adventure far beyond the thumping music and the glowing neon carnival. Maybe my wife will come with us; maybe we’ll do the kind thing and let her sleep instead. Side by side, hand in hand, we’ll find our own quiet little spot out in the cold of the desert. I’ll have them form a little circle, take a deep breath, and let it out. Then I’ll say, “This is it boys, this is why you are here.”

They will almost certainly groan and roll their eyes. And that’s exactly how it should be.