Hey, what ever happened to karma?

That's not quite what happened.

Initially, our problems were logistical. Our first "window of opportunity" happened to coincide with our camping tour of the Australian Outback. What with group hikes, group meals, group kangaroo feedings and tentless sleeping arrangements, Paul and I couldn't even escape for a quickie.

A couple months later, my fertile window opened on the very day my 93-year-old grandma fell into a coma; after a lengthy vigil alongside Grandma's waxy, yellowish, deteriorating body, Paul and I weren't exactly in the mood. The month after that, my window overlapped with my husband's long-scheduled fishing trip back East with his dad. "Do we really want to lose another month?" I asked Paul. "Maybe I should I bring my vagina to Virginia." But we decided not to interrupt his father-son time; my vagina would stay in Oregon.

As months passed and my biological clock ticked louder, the obstacles multiplied. After six solid tries on our own, we turned to intra-uterine insemination. (Paul had the pleasure of producing sperm samples in my ob/gyn's bathroom, in view of a poster about domestic violence.) Four IUIs and two miscarriages later, we turned to in-vitro fertilization.

It was at this point I realized infertility and singlehood have much in common. Both predicaments elicit annoying advice from strangers ("Just relax, it'll happen") and from relatives ("You know, you're not getting any younger"), and both demand patience, perseverance and the ability to maintain perspective. It's important to remember all that you're grateful for in life. Sure, your situation sucks, but it sucks a lot less than, say, being kidnapped by terrorists or contracting a fatal disease.

Just after my 39th birthday, our doctor finally pinpointed the problem: my eggs were already past their use-by date. After a round of IVF, we learned, via genetic testing, that all 11 of our embryos - not unlike my first 40 or so blind dates - were defective.

And so we moved on to Plan B (or was it Plan G?): IVF with an egg donor. Talk about déjà vu. A few years earlier, I'd plucked my husband from the sea of single men on match.com. Now, once again, I was fishing online, this time for the woman who would contribute half of my future child's DNA.

Our donor-egg hunt took us to four websites, where we perused countless profiles of fertile twentysomethings. I have to say the prospects were considerably more appealing than those match.com guys. After much consideration, we settled on an athletic, 28-year-old teacher who seemed like a fine substitute for me. Better yet, she seemed to lack the hair frizz, bunions and mechanical ineptitude that have plagued my family for generations.

Finally, karma came through: Using Paul's sperm, our donor's eggs and my uterus, I got pregnant on the first try. My twin boys are due in July.

Suzanne Schlosberg is the author of The Essential Fertility Log and The Curse of the Singles Table: A True Story of 1001 Nights Without Sex.

www.suzanneschlosberg.com