“Tiffany will have a room. That’s what Labor and Delivery is for—recovering mothers.”
“Right, but she’s not the mother.”
“For our purposes, your surrogate is the mother.”
“So Drew and I can’t have a room?”
“I assure you, it’s just an issue of space. One baby, one room.”
“But we’re having two babies.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not suggesting you throw a pregnant lady out on the street, but my partner and I would like an opportunity to bond with our kids when they’re born.”
“And you’ll have that. You’ll be able to visit them in the nursery.”
“Of course,” I said. “We’ll have wristbands.”
I could see the logic from both sides. Ann had a hospital to run, and rooms were for people who needed medical attention. Then there was my side of the argument, which was that it broke my heart to think of spending our children’s first night on Earth in a motel down the street. After all we’d been through, hadn’t we earned the right to be awoken every fifteen minutes by our crying twins? Wasn’t that one of the reasons we chose surrogacy in the first place, because we wanted to be present for all our kids’ crucial moments, such as their first pee, poop, and late-night feeding?
Finally, I understood the point of the hospital tour. It wasn’t so I could check out the hospital. It was so they could check me out. This was very possibly their first-ever surrogate birth, and they were in no way prepared for us. I thought back to our first conversation with Wes, when he called us pioneers. In twenty-first-century America, this was what being a pioneer meant. It meant dealing with a world that has no procedures in place for a family like yours, that has yet to understand and respect your situation, where no one has yet fought for and won your equal rights.
I knew Rainbow Extensions would be no help. If Drew and I wanted what we felt we deserved, we were going to have to win it for it ourselves—and fast.
At exactly thirty-five weeks, or roughly around when Drew saw the Sandra Bullock-Ryan Reynolds romcom The Proposal for the second time in theaters, Dr. Robertson called an official end to Tiffany’s bed rest. She was allowed to stop taking the medication that suppressed her contractions and could roam around her own home freely. If she went into labor, no one would try to stop it. That meant two things for Drew and me: one, that we could be dads any day, and two, that Susie was now relieved of her Tiffany-minding duties. We headed down to the Irelands’ house to pick her up. Drew was ecstatic his little sister would be staying with us for the remainder of the pregnancy. Not only could she help us decorate the nursery, but he was dying to have someone new to see The Proposal with.
What none of us expected is that we’d have to fight to get Susie back. As we lugged her suitcase to the front door, Gavin came screaming across the house. “NOOOOOOOOO!”
He lunged for her bag and held on with all his might. “Susie, stay!” he demanded.
Drew got down to reason with him. “Aw, Gavin. It’s okay. Mommy can take care of you again. We need Susie to come with us.”
“Nope!” Gavin yelled. “Sorry!” He refused to budge, his tiny hands clawing the canvas of Susie’s luggage.
None of us had realized until that moment how attached Gavin had grown to Susie. I looked at Susie to see if she had any ideas of how to calm him down, but she was hiding her face. Crying. The separation, it seemed, was hitting her just as hard.
“Just go,” Tiffany urged. She crouched down on Gavin’s level and pried his hands from the bag. “Trust me.”
So we did, hurrying out the door to the sounds of a little boy sobbing and his mommy trying to comfort him.
By Tiffany’s next doctor’s appointment, she was fully embracing her newfound freedom. I’d never heard anyone so excited to describe a trip to the supermarket or Quizno’s. Emboldened, she was setting her sights even higher. “Does this mean I can . . . go?” she asked Dr. Robertson.
We all knew where she meant. This had been the longest period of Disneyland withdrawal of Tiffany’s adult life.
“I’d wait another week before you do that,” the doctor said.
Five days later, Tiffany drove to Anaheim, advising us to wait by the phone. It was time to realize her dream of giving birth in Mickey’s homeland. She could practically taste the golden lifetime passes Sutton and Bennett would be granted, the early welcome they’d receive into the realm of Disney elite.
The irony of bed rest ending was that it did nothing to speed the delivery along. Now off her anticontraction medication, Tiffany was actually having fewer contractions. Even a day spent waddling across Tomorrowland did nothing to jolt her uterus into action. All it did was exhaust her so much that she spent the next day mostly in bed, though at least this time it was by choice.
It was disappointing to me, too, because if nothing else, a Disneyland birth would have meant not having to deal with Ann and her procedures. Surely, Drew and I would have full visitation over Bennett and Sutton if they arrived on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Would Cinderella kick us out of her castle the night our kids were born? I think not.
It was a fun dream, but it wasn’t going to happen, not for us. Damn it, our kids would be born in a hospital after all.
At thirty-seven weeks, Dr. Robertson brought up a previously unthinkable idea, that we might actually have to induce labor. Drew and I waved off the notion. We would have preferred to leave the kids in as long as possible, both for their sake and so we could squeeze in a screening of Inglourious Basterds before they were born. At the first mention of the word “induction,” though, Tiffany was ready to check into the hospital. “Can we do it today?” she asked.
We settled for an appointment at the thirty-eight-week mark. That was generally considered full-term for twins, and seven more days was about all Tiffany felt she could last.
The day before Tiffany’s induction, Drew’s mother flew out from Rochester for the second time in three months. Together with her and Susie, we checked into a motel five minutes from the hospital.
It was here that Drew and I would spend our last night of childlessness, within ten feet of an ice bucket and eighty of the Riverside freeway. We’d probably be up all night, or so I thought, until Drew pulled out a Xanax a friend had given him. It was supposed to help him sleep. Instead, the thought of taking a nonprescribed medication was just adding to his anxiety. “I don’t know how I’ll react to it! What if I can’t wake up tomorrow morning?”
He rolled the little pink pill over and over in his palm. “Do you want half?”
“No way. I’m not taking pills I don’t have a prescription for! Besides, I don’t think I’ll have any trouble falling asleep. I’m exhausted.”
ZzzzzzzsnAAAAAAARRRRFFFF! ZzzzzzzsnAAAAAAARRRRFFFF!
Twenty minutes later, it was Drew’s snoring that was keeping me awake, along with a surge of anxiety. It didn’t seem fair, so I jabbed him in the ribs.
Zzzz—“HUH?”
“Hey,” I whispered gently. “You up?”
Drew growled. He had decided not to take the pill, but he was still in too deep a slumber to respond.
“Drew! Drew!” Yes, I felt like a jerk for waking him, but this was a mental health emergency. I was officially freaking out.
“Oh my God,” Drew grumbled. “It’s happened.”
“What’s happened?”
“You’ve become the crazy one.”
“I’m not crazy. I’m just worried.”
“Why?”
I looked around the room. “I’m scared of spending our kids’ birthday in this motel.”
“That’s it?” Drew laughed.
“Yeah. What? Don’t you care?”
“Dude,” Drew said. He only called people “dude” when he was at his most relaxed and confident. “I’ve got it covered.”
T
hen he rolled over, and a few seconds later, he was snoring again.
24
Pioneers Again
Drew’s plan began, as his plans often do, with breakfast. When we arrived at the hospital on induction morning, the staff got to know us not as “the gay dads” or “those cranks who want to rewrite the rules and hog up all our beds” but as “those guys who brought us a shitload of bagels, bless their hearts.” Not just bagels but lox, schmears, muffins, a veggie platter, giant carafes of coffee. Drew had basically walked into the bagel shop and said, “Give me twelve of everything.” We dropped it all off at the nurses’ station and let everyone know that today’s daily grind would be generously catered by the family in room 303. If they weren’t already talking about the two dads and the surrogate carrying twins, they would be now.
Drew made sure to learn every nurse’s name and to tell them he worked on The Bachelor. By the third time I heard someone say, “I can’t believe Jason dumped Melissa!,” I knew he was working his magic.
He also paraded his sister around like a celebrity. “She was our egg donor!” he bragged, and anyone who showed any interest got to hear the ten-minute version of our baby story.
No one responded better to our narrative than the head nurse, Karyn. She was cheery but officious, with a warm smile and a bubbly laugh. She had Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck on her hospital scrubs. Drew asked if it would be okay to give her a hug, and she let him walk behind the counter to do so. “Anyone who feeds my whole staff earns a hug from me!” she giggled.
Once again, I was in awe of my boyfriend’s superpowers. Already, I felt confident asking the big question. “Do you think there’ll be a room for us to stay in after Tiffany delivers?”
Karyn’s bright smile shrunk away. She bowed her head at me and sighed. “It all depends on how crowded it is. We’ve been pretty full lately.”
I decided to appeal to her sympathy. “We’re just really hoping we can spend time with our children on the night they’re . . .”
“We understand,” Drew interrupted. “You do what you can do.” He gently motioned for me to hush my mouth, pronto. I had clearly jumped the gun.
Karyn came in personally to make sure Tiffany was as comfortable as a woman surrounded by beeping, chattering medical appliances could be. “Just let me know if I can getcha anything,” she said.
“Yeah, an epidural!” Tiffany shot back.
We all laughed—except Tiffany. “I’m serious,” she said. “I want an epidural.”
Karyn giggled. “When the time comes, Honey.”
Tiffany had mentioned the epidural to us before—about five thousand times, in fact. She wanted one when she gave birth to Gavin, but the nurses kept telling her it wasn’t time yet. As she was being shoved into the delivery room, she asked again, only to be told it was too late. As a result, she learned firsthand how excruciating an undrugged labor can be, and if that meant she had to ask twice as often this time, that’s what she was going to do.
I don’t know what I expected to happen after the hospital induced labor, but what actually happened was nothing. Inducing labor isn’t like inducing vomiting. It takes a while.
In the waning days of bed rest, Tiffany and Susie had taken up an interest in Rummy 500, so to pass the time, we bought a deck of cards from the gift shop. This gave us our first glimpse of the hypercompetitive side of Tiffany that Susie had been lamenting for months. “You guys better watch out,” our sweet little surrogate warned as she shuffled the deck. “’Cause I’m takin’ you all down!”
All I knew about the process of labor came from TV sitcoms, where the joke was that the pain turned some sweet, subservient housewife into a screeching, sailor-mouthed psychopath who shouted all the worst obscenities the censors would let her get away with. “Shoot damn hell! Get this monkey-flipping baby out of me, Dr. Huxtable!” Now I realized the reality was much worse. Our mild-mannered surrogate had fully morphed into Kanye West.
From that point, Tiffany turned a simple, civilized game into an ultimate fighting smackdown. I hadn’t played rummy in ages, but the strategy came back to me immediately. I won the first round, and Tiffany was not happy about it. She didn’t pout or say a word. She just glared. It was a vile, hungry glare, the kind that was usually followed by a live gazelle being ripped to shreds, its organs sprayed hundreds of feet across the savannah. And I was the gazelle.
I just happened to be a gazelle who was very good at Rummy. Once I took round 2, Tiffany accused me of cheating. “I need to check this deck,” she said. By the time I won the third round, she wasn’t joking. She grabbed the deck and sorted through every card, checking for dupes. She made me remove my sweatshirt to ensure I didn’t have anything stashed up my sleeve. “Where did you say you bought these cards again?” She held them up to the light, checking for hidden marks.
I realized that it didn’t serve me well to anger the woman who was about to give birth to my son and daughter, so I decided to throw round 4. As Tiffany slammed down her hand and yelled, “Gin!,” it was as if she’d just been crowned champion of Wimbledon. “Oh yeah! You suck! You suck! You suck!” Well, if she was a Wimbledon champ, she was John McEnroe.
Every round she won ratcheted her cockiness upward by a thousand degrees. Susie shot me periodic glances, as if to say, “See what I was talking about?” I constantly checked the scores because I was counting the moments until she hit 500 and this torment could end. Periodically, a nurse would enter, take some readings off the machines, and scribble down a few notes before leaving.
“Don’t forget my epidural!” Tiffany would demand with increasing confidence.
Finally, we played the hand that gave Tiffany her 500th point. I was nervous how she might top off her poor sportsmanship at this moment of ultimate triumph. All we got, though, was a polite nod. “Good game, everyone,” she offered, pleasantly. It almost made it worse, as if she actually believed herself to be a gracious winner. I hoped my kids weren’t paying attention.
Still, I shook her hand, relieved to be done. Instead of packing away the deck, Tiffany shuffled again. “Let’s play to one thousand!” Sure, why not go into a second round with her already up 200 points on the rest of us? Somehow, though, we all agreed. It’s not like we had anything better to do.
Before I knew it, Rummy 1,000 had stretched out to Rummy 1,500, then Rummy 2,000. The entire morning disappeared with no sign of our twins. I was a little suspicious that maybe Tiffany was squeezing them in so she could trounce us further at cards. Every once in a while, she would close her eyes, grimace slightly, then announce, “Another contraction!” Other than that and the fact that we were using her belly as a discard pile, we might as well have been hanging out at a bar on a Friday night.
Friends were emailing us constantly, begging for updates. By now they were sharing the kind of horror stories you would never disclose directly to a pregnant woman. “You know I was in labor for sixty hours, right?” one friend wrote. “It was hell.”
I started to wonder if this might go that long—or worse. Maybe the labor would never end. What if our kids just grew up inside Tiffany? They’d lose their baby teeth, learn their alphabet, go through puberty—all within the confines of our surrogate’s uterus. Once a year we’d shove some birthday cake up there, and they’d make a wish. Then, seventeen years from now, Tiffany would poop out two college applications, and Sutton and Bennett would become the only fetuses in the Harvard class of 2032. A couple of uterus-bound IV twins raised by gay dads? Talk about ideal diversity bait.
The Pitocin may not have been producing any noticeable results, but at least Drew’s schmoozing was bearing fruit. At one point, Karyn came bursting through the door, breathless. “Oh my God!” she shouted, collapsing against the wall. We wondered what could have happened in the maternity ward to provoke this reaction from a nurse. An immaculate birth? Alien baby? Nope—apple muffin.
“You have to tell me where y
ou got them!” she exclaimed. “That was the best muffin I’ve ever had! I hid the others from the other nurses. I’m keeping them all for myself! Hahaha!”
“Excuse me, Karyn?” Tiffany said.
“Yes, Tiffany. Your epidural.”
By roughly Tiffany’s four hundredth request, a nurse came in with the biggest needle I’d ever seen. It looked more like a shish kabob that could pierce straight through this tiny woman and come out the other end. “Yay!” Tiffany cheered.
While the nurse prepared to dull Tiffany’s pain with the surgical equivalent of a samurai sword, Drew and I quietly excused ourselves. “Hold on,” Tiffany said. “I want to talk to you before I get all doped up and you just think it’s the drugs talking.”
“Okay.”
“I just want to say thank you.” She turned her head and wiped her eye. “I don’t want to cry!”
“Why would you thank us?”
“Because I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this, and I couldn’t have asked for better IPs than you guys. You’ve been so good to me, and I’m so excited to see you become dads.”
“We feel the same way,” Drew gushed. “I can’t imagine what it’d be like if we’d gone with that first surrogate. You mean so much to us.”
“I just have one more request,” Tiffany said. “You know I can’t wait to meet these babies, but when they’re born, I don’t want the doctor to hand them to me. When they gave me Gavin in the delivery room and I held him for the first time, that’s when I bonded with him. Make sure they hand the babies to you. Then later on when I’m in my recovery room, you can present them to me, as Aunt Tiffany.”
There seemed to be so much more to say, but there was a woman standing next to us with a very large needle, waiting very patiently. We pulled back Tiffany’s curtain and excused ourselves from the room.
Drew and I used the break to buy about $200 worth of dinners from a Panera Bread across the street. Once again, we were greeted like heroes at the nurse’s station. This time, Karyn gave us both hugs.
Mommy Man Page 23
