Mommy Man

by Jerry Mahoney

  Again, I didn’t see who cut her umbilical cord. It was snipped off and dumped into a biohazard bin before I even noticed. There was no time for ceremony. Our daughter lay under a heat lamp, three deep in medics. Was she even in there? Was she even alive?

  The room fell eerily silent, and I realized what was missing: the sound of a baby crying. Sutton had yet to take a breath. Drew and I stood near Bennett, just a few feet away, utterly helpless. Our son twisted and gyrated, feeling around for his sister. This was the farthest he’d ever been away from her. He was probably wondering why he could no longer feel her touch—and if he ever would again.

  It all happened in a matter of seconds, seconds that felt like lifetimes—and they were. Two lifetimes, albeit brief ones, yet to take any kind of shape. So far, this tension was all our kids knew.

  Then, finally, we heard her. “Eeeaaaaah! Eeeaaaaah! Eeeaaaaah!” It was impossibly high-pitched, like a pterodactyl screech or a dog whistle set off by a teakettle. Loud and urgent. It was the sound of our daughter crying, the most wonderful thing I’d ever heard. A wave of relief washed over the room. Doctors practically high-fived each other.

  Drew couldn’t hold back anymore. Tears cascaded down his cheeks, and he whimpered like a puppy. His knees gave out, and he fell into my arms. Our children were less than ten minutes old, and we’d already endured one of those heart-stopping moments of anxiety that other parents had warned us about. They were supposed to happen on a jungle gym at the playground years from now, not in the hospital the moment they were born.

  As the huddle surrounding Sutton dissipated, I could see her at last. She was tiny, even smaller than Bennett. She was curled up, as if still unaware that she’d been freed from the confines of the womb. She had a tiny cap of dark, matted-down hair. She seemed far too beautiful to have come from my genes.

  “Congratulations, guys,” Dr. Robertson said as he strode past us. He removed his surgical gloves and headed for the door, a sure sign that the uncertainty had passed.

  “Is she all right?” I asked, just to be sure.

  He nodded. “She just decided to give us a scare on the way out.”

  We bent over Sutton, and she stared up at us with her big eyes wide open. Unlike her brother, she was in no hurry to explore. She was studying us, these two dudes hovering over her and blubbering like children. Like I did with Bennett, I stroked the back of her hand gently with a single finger.

  “Don’t you ever do that again!” I said.

  Introducing Bennett and Sutton to Aunt Susie was like watching them be born all over again. Drew and I each took a baby and wheeled them in their warmers back to the room where we’d spent most of the day playing cards. Tiffany and Eric were already there, telling the story of the delivery. Mrs. Tappon, the only other one among us who’d ever given birth, was aghast. Three pushes and out came the first baby. Three more pushes and out came the second. Except for the spine-chilling uncertainty of Sutton’s birth, it was an exceptionally smooth endeavor.

  As soon as Susie saw us, her face scrunched up, like someone who dared to stare directly at a solar eclipse and was blasted by more light than a human being could handle. The compression of every muscle at once served to wring out a Niagara of tears. Her eyes weren’t sure where to look—one baby, the other baby, one daddy, the other daddy. She spoke only with hugs and gasps. I’d watched her cry so much over the last couple of years, it was nice to see her finally shed some tears of joy.

  Just a few feet away, Tiffany waited patiently for her turn. This was how she wanted it—Drew and I introducing our kids to her, as if she were just another visitor who came to congratulate us rather than one who was lying in a hospital bed, dilated and physically spent.

  “I want to talk to that Bennett!” she said. We laid our swaddled son down on her chest, and she wagged her finger at him. “So you’re the one who’s been giving me all that trouble! You’d better never kick your sister like you’ve been kicking me.”

  As always, I marveled at the way she was able to tell these two babies apart when they were still inside her womb. She always knew who was jabbing her in the ribs and who was lying upside down, and she had developed feelings toward them based on their time together. I admired and envied her for the unique bond she’d already formed with my kids, and knowing she’d stay part of our lives made me feel closer to them.

  “Sutton, this is Aunt Tiffany,” Drew said, as he laid our little girl across Tiffany’s forearm. Tiffany was the first one to hold both infants at once, which seemed fitting.

  If I had been worried about maintaining boundaries before, I wasn’t anymore. Seeing the three of them together seemed so natural, so familiar, yet not at all maternal. Their relationship was different, unique to the three of them and beautiful in its own way.

  When the babies started crying, Tiffany had no trouble handing them off to Drew and me. “Here you go, guys!” she said. “Good luck!”

  We couldn’t stop talking about what had occurred in the operating room, though we mostly focused on what a pro Tiffany had been.

  “I need to thank that nurse,” Tiffany said. “She made all the difference.”

  “Which nurse?” Drew asked. We jogged our memories as to who had been in the room. There were so many.

  “The one who kicked you guys out of here,” she replied.

  “Betty?!”

  Drew shook his head, astounded. “I almost punched her when I saw her talking to you. She was so mean.”

  “She was so mean,” Tiffany agreed. “It was just what I needed.”

  “What did she say to you?”

  “Well, she leaned down into my ear.” Tiffany sat up a bit to do her impression of Evil Betty. She was really getting into it. “She sounded like a drill sergeant, and she said, ‘Girl, they’re getting ready to cut you!’“

  “No she didn’t!”

  “Yeah. She said, ‘This baby needs to come out of you right now, or they’re going to cut you open and take it out. I don’t want them to cut you, so the next push better be the hardest push ever!’ I didn’t want a C-section, so I pushed so hard, and Sutton popped right out!”

  I realized I’d judged Betty all wrong. She wasn’t power-mad or homophobic. She was a nurse whose job was to take care of women. When she met Tiffany, she saw a woman at the mercy of far too many men—me, Drew, her doctor. We didn’t have a stake in what happened to her or her body, and because of that, she would never fully trust us. Betty had been present at countless births. She’d probably seen doctors perform C-sections just for the sake of expediency. None of us men knew what it was like to be the one in the stirrups, the one left with a permanent scar on her belly, so Betty wanted to make sure the pregnant lady was taken care of and that emergency surgery remained a last resort.

  Once we’d heard Tiffany’s side of the story, we tracked Betty down to thank her. It was clear she didn’t receive a lot of gratitude, because her gruff demeanor melted instantly. She even hugged us. Just a few minutes earlier, we would have thought her incapable of affection.

  “They come in to move you yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  She shook her head. “I know her room’s ready. What are they waiting for?”

  She shot off down the hall, as much to check on the room as to cut the lovefest short. She had a soft side, but her tolerance for sentiment was clearly low.

  Whatever she did definitely goosed things along. A few minutes later, a nurse arrived to transfer Tiffany to the recovery wing. Eric grabbed one side of her bed, and the nurse grabbed the other. As they wheeled her toward the hallway, I wondered how she must be feeling.

  “You can come back and see them anytime you want,” I assured her.

  She smiled. “Honestly,” she said, “I’m so glad not to have two babies to take care of tonight. Have fun!” With that, she was gone.

  We had no idea what would happen n
ext. Would Drew and I be kicked out? Would the babies be ripped from our arms and taken to a nursery to spend the night? Maybe the staff would forget we were in here and we’d just be able to stay until the shifts changed again.

  That would have been a great plan, if only the kids had played along.

  “These babies are hungry,” Mrs. Tappon said, as their wailing built in intensity. Twenty minutes had gone by, and no one had checked on us. Maybe we would be able to stay all night, but only if we starved our children.

  I had to step up, to do the fatherly thing. I flung open the door of room 303 and strode confidently to the nurses’ station.

  “Um, can we get some, like, formula or something?”

  It didn’t come out with quite the authority I’d hoped, but it did the trick.

  “We’ll send someone in to show you how to feed them.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “As soon as your room is ready.”

  “Our room?”

  “You wanted your own room, right?”

  “Yes! Yes! Thank you!”

  It took a few minutes before they moved us down the hall, but in the meantime, they set us up with our wristbands—one for Drew and one for me. Each one had the word “Father” printed on it and came with full visitation privileges.

  After all my fear, we were treated like parents, both of us, with as much respect as any other couple that came through these halls to experience the most important day of their lives. Ultimately, I don’t think it was the bagels or our story that won people over. I think most people are just basically good at heart, and when presented with an unfamiliar situation, even if it may be slightly outside their comfort zone, they’ll tend to react in the most humane way possible. This was the world I’d chosen to raise children in, and in that moment, I had no regrets and no fears. Sutton, Bennett, and their two dads were going to be just fine.

  27

  The Lottery

  I was perfectly convinced that a baby could thrive in a family with two dads until precisely the moment there was no one around to care for our newborns but me and Drew. Tiffany was asleep in her own room, six doors down. Susie and Mrs. Tappon had gone back to the motel for the night. It was just our family now. Two dads, two babies, no mom. What the hell were we thinking?

  Drew and I quickly developed a system. We were each responsible for one baby. When your kid woke up crying, it was your job to feed, diaper, swaddle, or panic. Those were pretty much the only four options. Most times we would go through various permutations of all four before we finally got the squirmer back to sleep. Our confidence in ourselves was extremely low, but our determination to succeed couldn’t have been higher. We felt like we had something to prove, not to the people who think gays shouldn’t have kids. Fuck them. But to ourselves—and more importantly, to Bennett and Sutton. They were stuck with us now. The least we could do was fool them into thinking we knew what we were doing.

  We did have one very special woman on our side. “Knock-knock, Daddies!” she would announce, and an instant later, a sliver of light would bisect the room and the door would gently creak open.

  Georgia was our night nurse. It was her job to monitor every baby in our wing, though I think she made a few extra stops by our room to check in on Drew and me. Whenever she peeked in on our new little family, inevitably, at least two of the four of us would be crying. She never lost her cool, never puzzled over what to do or which twin to help first. Effortlessly, she’d pick both of them up at once and throw one over each shoulder for simultaneous burping. Those tiny hiccup sounds would be a huge relief to all of us, and within minutes, all was calm again in room 325E.

  It was like picking up a tennis racquet for the first time, then having Andre Agassi show up to coach you, or finding yourself in a magical mushroom kingdom, facing down a spiky-shelled reptile fifty times your size who’s madly chucking fireballs at you, when you suddenly hear a voice behind you calling, “It’s-a me, Mario!” With Georgia, we knew instantly that we all were in good hands.

  Her awesome proficiency could easily have made us feel inadequate, convinced us that the only way we’d ever get the hang of this parenting thing was to get nursing degrees and spend a few years working the overnight shift in a delivery ward. But thanks to her nurturing spirit, it was an inspiration. We never got the feeling that caring for our twins would be easy, but as long as we knew it was possible, we’d get it done. We’d probably never be the best at it, but so what? Fred, Velma, and Daphne were the ones with the skills and the self-confidence, but it was usually Scooby and Shaggy who solved the mysteries.

  “You guys are doing fantastic,” Georgia would assure us, in a voice five octaves above my highest falsetto. She was that kind of person—small, mousy, and impossibly cheerful, like the Good Witch of Orange County. With her tight black curls, Georgia was a dead ringer for Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Gos, though she was probably too young to know who that was. Any voice-over artist would kill to cast her as a kitten or a busty canary.

  I wasn’t expecting to bond with Sutton and Bennett that first night, but thanks to Georgia, those early hours were filled with countless tiny triumphs. Every suck of every shot glass-sized bottle, every whisper-like belch and every gentle sleeping breath the twins made in my arms felt like a validation of my parenting. These weren’t just selfish blobs carrying out the involuntary activities of new life. Every action they made felt like a subtle acknowledgment of trust in Drew and me. They accepted us as their caregivers. Even in those sticky, tar-like meconium poops that filled their size 0 diapers, there was love.

  Like any group emerging from a traumatic experience together, be it the siege of Normandy or a 5:00 a.m. spinning class, the four of us were permanently bound together that night. Drew and I made it through the biggest challenge of our lives. We learned to care for our children without once yelling, “Mommy!”

  In Los Angeles, asking someone to brave more than half an hour of freeway traffic to see you is like asking for a kidney, so I wasn’t expecting a huge influx of visitors for our babies’ first full day of life. Somehow, though, our kids always had a warm lap to sit on, a friendly hand to rub their bellies, a camera shutter clicking in their vicinity. I was relieved there were two of them to go around, but there were times that didn’t seem like enough. “I haven’t held Sutton in a while,” I’d announce. “Gimme!”

  Some people swore Bennett was my twin. Others thought Sutton was 100 percent the girl version of Drew.

  My friend Victoria was the first to mention what was probably on a lot of people’s minds. “Is it okay if I point out how much they look like Susie?” she asked.

  She was right. Susie’s link to the twins was unmistakable. It was there in Sutton’s eyes and Bennett’s chin. I could understand why people wanted to be sensitive about the subject, but I’d noticed it, too, and it was part of what made these babies so perfect. We chose Susie as our egg donor because we wanted to see her when we looked at the kids. Just laying eyes on them was a constant reminder of her gift and a promise that they themselves might inherit all the many qualities we loved in her.

  If anyone was uncomfortable with the comparisons, it was Susie herself. “I think they look like their dads,” she insisted, whenever anyone would bring up the resemblance. Then she would lean down and let Sutton or Bennett wrap their hand around one of her fingers. She knew only as much about baby care as Drew and I did, but she had a level of patience we both envied. She loved to feed them, talk to them, and to rock them gently to sleep in her arms. There was something so beautiful about seeing her with our kids—yet, admittedly, so painful.

  Susie had already agreed to stay with us for a few weeks while we adjusted to our new life. Still, there would come a day, not far off, when she would return to Rochester. The kids would still be infants, and she’d still be a virtual stranger to them, an aunt to two babies she loved dearly, three thousand miles away from her. It
was hard not to feel like she deserved more. If Susie felt the same way, she never let on, but then again, Susie wasn’t one to complain.

  All day long, no one made as big an impression on us as the visitors who traveled the least.

  “Can I see them?” a voice called as the door slowly swung open. It was Karyn, our favorite nurse from the day before, along with another nurse named Jody, who ran a close second. Their arms were loaded with presents wrapped in duckie paper. Staffers in a maternity ward spent their own money to buy baby gifts for our kids. Now they were using their break time to visit them. It was almost more kindness than I could handle.

  Drew had now perfected his telling of the delivery story. He knew all the dramatic beats and pauses to hit. The nurses were riveted. Their favorite part was the revelation that Betty had been Tiffany’s savior.

  “You should write a letter,” Karyn suggested.

  “Yeah,” Jody added. “I don’t think she gets a lot of compliments.”

  “Oh, we’re writing a few letters,” Drew assured them. “Starting with one for our night nurse.”

  “We thought you’d like Georgia!” Karyn said. She and Jody looked at each other and shared a conspiratorial giggle.

  “We made sure they assigned her to you.”

  “Isn’t she a doll?”

  “She was so good with the babies. Does she have kids of her own?”

  Karyn sighed and bowed her head. “She’s been struggling. She had a couple of miscarriages.”

  Jody added, “We’re really pulling for her around here.”

  At that moment, I added another woman to my list of personal heroes. I couldn’t comprehend the strength it must take Georgia to take care of other people’s babies every night, when she wanted so badly to have one of her own.

  “Let’s give her one of ours,” I said finally, to break the tension. “Drew, you pick.”