A new generation of kids asks, 'Where did I come from?'

SEATTLE -- At 7, Nora and Emma don't understand all the science it took to create them.

What they do understand is that there are two very important women in their lives.

One is Mom: Carrie Carpenter, the white-haired, gentle woman who gave birth to the beautiful, blue-eyed fraternal twins when she was 47.

The other is the woman they call their Egg Mom: Lorraine Wilde, the tall, brainy college teacher who was once a strapped grad student convinced her smart, healthy genes had hit a dead end.

The two women never met at the fertility clinic where Carrie received Lorraine's eggs. There, in an industry that depends on donated egg and sperm, the watchword is "anonymous."

Through small, meaningful gifts and notes passed through the clinic, they corresponded. Anonymously. Finally, through a card with a phone number, blacked out carefully by the clinic but faintly discernible when held to the light just so, Carrie and Lorraine met.

Over the next five years, the two forged a friendship, intertwining their families.

Lorraine and her husband, Mike, who now have bright, bouncy 3-year-old twin boys, include the girls on their Christmas cards; Nora and Emma pinned the boys' photos on the family-picture wall at school.

Together for the boys' birthday, the kids hug and play while the moms catch up.

A few months after they first met, Carrie wrote again to Lorraine: "It is so important to me to know you and to have Nora & Emma know you."

Even so, Carrie acknowledged her fear. "Part of me feels like this is that dangerous territory when you fall madly in love and think, 'Is this real?' I guess what is so powerful is the fierce (and I don't think possessive) love we both have for Emma & Nora."

It's a relationship that often prompts questions from acquaintances. "I say, 'Several years ago, I donated some of my eggs; I have a relationship with the girls who were born from that,' " Lorraine says.

Together, Carrie and Lorraine are pioneers in openness. The alternative, secrecy, wasn't a good fit for either.

Carrie recalls a childhood friend who grew up with an older "brother" who was really her father. "The whole town knew, and she didn't." Carrie's own father, adopted twice in the 1920s, died without knowing his genetic origins.

"The girls have said, 'If we didn't know Lorraine, that would be our deep, dark secret,'" Carrie says. Instead, "They know there's always going to be that relationship."

In a clinic high in Seattle's 1101 Madison Tower, reproductive endocrinologists Lorna Marshall, Lee Hickok and Diane Woodford ride the crest of rapidly advancing technology: In the past few years, success rates have skyrocketed. Now, Hickok says, a patient at Pacific Northwest Fertility who receives two embryos created with donated eggs has a 75 to 80 percent chance of getting pregnant the first time around.