Mommy Man

by Jerry Mahoney

  Sure, that was one possibility. But even if things never rose to the level of a hate crime, how would a professional athlete tell his drinking buddies that his wife was having a baby for a couple of queers?

  I knew the subject was nagging at Drew, too. It was the elephant in the womb. I had to say something.

  “So, um, Eric . . . how are you going to tell your drinking buddies that your wife is having a baby for a couple of queers?”

  Eric was taken aback. Was it possible he was just now realizing that we were gay? Then he laughed. “I don’t really know anyone who would care.” He displayed a very laid-back, surfer-like mentality. We seemed cool to him, so, like, whatever. It turned out he was only six years younger than we were, but he made us feel ancient, like homophobia was a problem of our generation, not his.

  We realized Eric wasn’t the kind of guy who got in a lot of fights—first of all, because he was bigger and stronger than most other guys, so no one would dare to challenge him. But second, he was too darn sweet. He was a puppy—a giant puppy but a puppy nonetheless.

  Now that we were asking tough questions, Tiffany had one for us: Why did the Womb of Steel reject us?

  And that led us to Susie. Drew choked back tears as he told the story of his sister and her offer. Tiffany teared up, too. “She sounds amazing. What’s she like?”

  “Well,” Drew said, taking a long pause, “she’s a lot like you.”

  We had both been feeling it. Tiffany and Susie were the same age, twenty-eight. Both were introverted, sensitive, and staggeringly kind. They were the same height, they dressed alike. They even looked similar. It was almost spooky.

  Now the tears were flowing freely. Drew admitted that he felt a strong connection to Tiffany because of the resemblance. He really wanted the two of them to meet. He was sure they’d be besties.

  It was my worst fear. We were bonding, hard. It felt stronger than it had with Kristen, but maybe that was just setting us up for an even bigger heartbreak. Drew practically had Susie on a plane out here to meet this couple. What if this was the last time we ever saw them? What if Monday morning brought a call from Andrea saying, “I’m sorry, they said no, but we’ll keep trying”?

  It was time to end this, now. I asked for the check. Before it even showed up, Eric was reaching for his wallet. It was totally unnecessary, of course, but it was a nice change from Kristen and Paco. Was Eric just being nice, or did he feel guilty because he knew this wasn’t going to work out?

  We walked together to our cars. Despite living all their lives in southern California, neither Tiffany nor Eric had spent much time in L.A. We made sure they knew how to get back to the freeway, and we said our good-byes with a hug. Then this beautiful young couple climbed into a shiny new Mercedes. Their luxury car confirmed something we’d already guessed: They really weren’t doing this for the money.

  When Drew and I got into our Honda, we couldn’t wait to rehash everything that had just gone down. We loved Tiffany and Eric, but that frightened us. “I don’t know what I’ll do if she says no,” I confessed.

  It was Friday afternoon, and since the agency’s Alabama office was already closed for the day, we knew it would be Monday before we heard Tiffany’s verdict. The weekend ahead was going to be agony.

  We followed the Mercedes to the exit and waited behind them at the cashier. As their car pulled ahead, the attendant waved us through. Eric had paid for our parking.

  We waited for the Mercedes to turn and speed away from us, perhaps forever. Then a strange thing happened. They stopped.

  We figured they needed us to go over the directions again or that they wanted us to point them toward a Starbucks. We watched through the window as the two of them talked for a moment. Then their passenger door flew open, and Tiffany jogged back to our car.

  I rolled down my window, ready to make a joke about how they’d managed to get lost already. Then I noticed that Tiffany was crying.

  “I didn’t want to wait all weekend,” she said. “I wanted you to know I’m going to say yes.”

  11

  Into Their Bodies, Out of Our Hands

  By the time I returned from Iceland, Susie was bracing for hot flashes. She had begun taking a medication called Lupron, which drained her estrogen levels to those of a prepubescent girl. The goal was to keep her from ovulating until Tiffany’s body was ready to accept her eggs. But in effect, she also got a sneak preview of menopause.

  Tiffany’s meds did just the opposite. She was pumped full of hormones, a signal to her uterus to gear up, because it was baby-making time. Both women were placed on active birth control pills in order to synch up their cycles. The only way an embryo transfer would work is if Tiffany’s reproductive system was primed to take over right where Susie’s left off.

  It was during all this that I realized Drew and I were pretty much done. My sperm were banked, the trust was funded. We may have been pursuing a nontraditional means of having a baby, but even our way, it was women who got stuck doing all the hard work.

  After a couple of weeks of Lupron, Susie started taking two more drugs, Menopur and Follistim, which signaled her ovaries to go into overdrive. And like popcorn exploding in hot oil, eggs would suddenly start ricocheting around her belly.

  She only needed to come to L.A. for two days—one day for the egg extraction, the next for her body to sort out what the hell just happened. (The doctor called it “rest.”) But she decided to stay with us for two full weeks. That way she would still be around when we transferred the embryos to Tiffany. She wasn’t needed for that, but it would be nice to have her there.

  I can only imagine what it was like for Susie asking her boss for all that time off.

  “So, yeah, I’m going to L.A. for two weeks to help my brothers make a baby, and you have two choices as to what you want to do about it. You can either just give me the time off with no hassle, or you can fire me. And I know you have every right to fire me, because that’s a lot of time off, and this isn’t much notice and you probably need somebody to fill in for me while I’m gone. But either way, I’m going, so here are the dates. Just let me know your decision.”

  She got the time off.

  Susie’s favorite TV show at the time was Jon and Kate Plus 8, so we filled up our TiVo with episodes for her to watch. I’d never heard of it before, but I sat down with her a few times to check it out. It struck me as strange that, as we were going through this process, Susie’s form of escapism was watching a show about the two most horrible people to ever go through fertility treatments. “Do they fight all the time?” I asked. “He’s disgusting. She’s shrill and insane.” “I don’t know whose side to take.” Susie pretty much agreed with me, but I think she just liked watching the kids.

  Drew was coping in his own way, with wildly inappropriate humor. He teased Susie about setting her up with a hot guy from his office, wondering what would happen if she had unprotected sex right now. She could be the first woman ever to deliver centuplets, which is probably the term they would invent for a hundred babies, if all the eggs inside of Drew’s little sister were to fertilize at once. We laughed about her being an addict, constantly in need of her next injection. Drew even made up a song about the egg retrieval procedure, which began like this:

  “We’re gonna stick a wand inside your cooter, and then we’ll do a number count!”

  The rest of the song consisted merely of us all shouting out our guess as to how many eggs the doctor was going to find in Susie’s lady parts. He had told us that, given Susie’s age and good health, we should expect to extract around three dozen ova. But that didn’t stop us from speculating higher, sometimes up to a million or two.

  Finally, it was the day before the Big Day. Egg Extraction Eve. To celebrate, we took Susie out for dinner at our favorite restaurant. Like every other night during a Susie visit, we had friends meet us there so we could show Susie off to them. Th
is time, though, there were two very special guests waiting for us.

  “Omigod, hi!” Tiffany squealed as she threw her arms around Susie. All they’d ever seen of each other were a few pictures on Facebook, but they hugged like BFFs from high school, reuniting after their first semester at college. Their bond was one none of us quite anticipated or understood, but it was definitely unique. They were two women from opposite sides of America who had come together to help Drew and me make a baby.

  Drew was already tearing up, just from the sight of them side by side. “It’s so wild,” he told Tiffany. “I see so much of Susie in you.”

  The waiter must have come four times before we were ready to order. Nobody wanted to look at a menu. There was too much to discuss. The women compared medications and side effects. Drew told embarrassing stories about Susie as a little girl. We talked about Tiffany’s upcoming birthday, on September 11.

  Tiffany was a different person that night, nothing like the shy, nervous girl she’d been when we first met her at Rainbow Extensions. She was a giddy, gossipy woman, outgoing, inquisitive, and hilarious. Drew was different, too. Quieter. There was no need for him to play talk show host that night. He would have slowed things down if he had.

  My one fear about surrogacy was that it would turn having a baby into a business transaction, something cynical and cold, where the baby became nothing but a product to be haggled over. But there was nothing businesslike about moments like this. You could say the night was perfectly ordinary, just an evening out with people whose company we enjoyed. Yet there was something truly special about it, too, something we all felt. This was bigger than us, bigger than the baby, too.

  On our way out of the restaurant, Drew ran into an old colleague and friend named SallyAnn. She was there with her elderly mother, who had just arrived from Long Island for a visit.

  “Hi, I’m Drew,” he said, introducing himself to the polite older woman. Then he turned to the rest of us. “This is my partner Jerry, our surrogate, Tiffany, Tiffany’s husband, Eric. And this is my little sister Susie,” he beamed proudly, throwing his arm around Susie’s shoulders. “She’s getting her eggs extracted for us tomorrow.”

  It was the first time we had all been together and the first time we’d been introduced this way, like a family. I couldn’t help but smile.

  We might have expected the elderly woman to do a spit take or roll her eyes at her daughter’s wacky L.A. lifestyle. But SallyAnn just happened to have created the reality show Jersey Shore, so her mother had long since lost her capacity to be shocked.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said, grinning, and a minute later, we were on our way home.

  Even though there was only one line to the song, we sang “Wand Inside Your Cooter” all the way to the doctor’s office the next morning. This time, our guesses on the number count took on a more serious tone.

  “You’re feeling pretty swollen, right, Susie?” I asked. She nodded. “Okay. I’m going to say. . . forty-eight.”

  “Wow, that’s high,” Drew said.

  “What? You don’t think your sister is incredibly fertile?”

  Susie shrugged. “He said the average was thirty-six, right? I’ll say thirty-six.”

  We knew Drew would come in low, cautious as ever. We waited while he mulled it over.

  “I’ll take two dozen,” Drew intoned, confidently. “Assorted.” On the way to the doctor’s office, we stopped at a donut shop to get some goodies for the staff. It was something Drew did virtually everywhere he went—the dentist, the accountant, his shrink. If you did any kind of business with Drew Tappon, he brought you donuts. It was his way of ensuring you’d remember him and treat him well. And it worked. Whether it was because of the donuts or just his charm, Drew got VIP treatment everywhere he went. Even his mechanic never cheated him.

  Drew still hadn’t given us a number for Susie’s egg count, and whenever I asked, he dodged the question. “What’s up?” I asked him finally.

  Susie was out of earshot. He lowered his voice, and his confident, jokey façade drained out in an instant. “I’m just . . . nervous.”

  “Nervous? Why?”

  “Because she’s my sister.”

  The office was empty when we arrived. We were the first appointment, at 7:00 a.m., and though the doors were open, there didn’t seem to be anyone there. Did Dr. Saroyan forget that this was the most important day of our lives? I wondered if it would be rude to open up the donuts before we gave them to the staff. The smell of cinnamon was driving me crazy.

  “Gerald, you’re here!” we heard finally. I found it a bit odd that the first nurse we saw was looking for me, not my sister-in-law, the one with the eggs.

  “Yeah, Susie’s here for her appointment.”

  “I know. Tell me, were you going to be using a fresh sample today?”

  “Sample?”

  “Yeah, your sperm.”

  “No, I thought we were just going to use the leftovers.”

  “Oh, I don’t think we knew that, because we didn’t save any.”

  “What?”

  I hadn’t expected to be called on to perform that day, but it turned out, I had a function there after all.

  Two minutes later, I was sitting in the specimen room on the half couch, half bed, holding an empty cup. I had no choice but to use the office’s materials this time. It turned out they had plenty of gay porn, an entire plastic bin full of it. Just another thing Rainbow Extensions got wrong. I popped in a DVD of two beefy blond wrestlers tussling on an athletic mat. Their match started off like any other, but it continued long after most wrestling matches would have come to an end, as the intensity heated up and their uniforms got torn in revealing places. It was a well-made film, but I was having a difficult time focusing on it.

  It’s not like I hadn’t done this before—in this very room, no less. It’s just that, well, the cavorting Greco-Romans on screen and I were about to create human life. Ever since adolescence, I’d been doing this at a strictly amateur level. Now, without warning, I was thrust into my professional debut. I’d spent my whole life practicing. Now I was in Carnegie Hall.

  I thought about how many untold trillions of sperm I’d wasted over the course of my life. Who knows how many potential Einsteins I’d flushed hastily down the toilet, how many Mozarts I’d wiped away with a wash cloth and wrung out in the sink, how many Ghandis I’d wadded up in a ball of tissues and dumped down the trash chute of my senior dorm with a spritz of Lysol to mask the odor. This time would be different. These sperm were actually going to do the thing that sperm were created to do. Much like the wrestlers on screen, they would continue on where so many before them would have stopped.

  I could only hope they were up to the task. My future kid might be floating around inside my body at this very moment, waiting for his big chance. I prayed my wad wasn’t full of Saddam Husseins or Snookis. This time, I was even more careful not to spill.

  As I rejoined Drew and Susie in the waiting room, Dr. Saroyan was just coming out to greet them, wearing scrubs and ready to begin.

  “Hello, guys! How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “I’m so nervous,” Drew confessed.

  Dr. Saroyan rolled his eyes. “Why are you nervous? You don’t have to do anything! You know who should be nervous? Me. This is a very complicated procedure!”

  Drew cackled, instantly relaxing. I’d never been more grateful for Dr. Saroyan’s sick sense of humor.

  “I’m just joking, of course,” he continued. “This is very routine. Susie will be given some mild anesthesia, and we’ll be done in about ten minutes.”

  As Susie stood up, we hugged like she was shipping off to Baghdad. We told her we loved her as many times as we could before she disappeared down the hall out of sight.

  Then, while we waited, our thoughts turned to politics.

  It was August 29, 2008, th
ree days before the start of the Republican National Convention. A TV in the waiting room of Westside Fertility was tuned to CNN, which was just about to announce whom John McCain had picked as his running mate. As two gay men in the midst of reproducing, Drew and I were particularly concerned about this decision and what it might do for the tenor of the campaign. I was having uncomfortable flashbacks to 2004.

  In his first term, George W. Bush had failed at just about everything—the economy, the war on terror, basic human diction. But he and Karl Rove cooked up a scheme that would get him reelected anyway. Who were the only people in America more hated and feared than Bush himself? The gays. So they made sure everyone knew those child-raping AIDS spreaders from San Francisco were looking to invade their homes, their workplaces, and their classrooms and that Democrats were standing there holding the door open for them. And it worked. The most disliked president in history was swept back into office on a tide of homophobia. (Historians will probably cite other reasons as well, including the suckiness of John Kerry, but that’s the way I saw it.)

  Bush’s second term was equally disastrous, so I was bracing myself for a repeat of those same scare tactics from the Republicans. McCain’s choice for V.P. would be the first indication of what we were in for. Would he pick Mitt Romney, the anti-gay governor of Massachusetts? Maybe Mike Huckabee, the even more anti-gay governor of Arkansas? Or perhaps Charlie Crist, the super-anti-gay (allegedly) gay man who ran the state of Florida? I held out for someone like Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who’d once voted to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation—before admitting nine years later that he regretted that vote. In the Republican Party, that qualified him as a moderate on gay rights. Go Pawlenty!