by Sara Connell
I swallowed a dry lump in my throat and reached for the stool. The baby had grown so big inside my mother now that her belly was wide through the middle and took up most of the tape Katie used to measure the length of the bump. My mouth contorted into a smile. I remembered a colleague, a recovering alcoholic in a twelve-step program, saying he always watched in meetings for the moment when addicts became grateful for their addiction because it brought them to a new way of life, a life that bore gifts beyond breaking the habit that had brought them in. “It always comes for people who are open to the idea,” he’d said. “There are gifts in everything.”
I was not unconditionally at a point where I felt grateful for my body’s inability to carry our children, but our path had already revealed undeniable gifts. I was experiencing a physical intimacy with my mother that I had likely not had since I was inside her womb. The love I felt seemed to burn away what had caused us pain, through misunderstandings of the past. I’d heard clients speak of experiencing such relational transcendence when they were with a parent as the parent died. Yet we were being given this experience while bringing in a life.
Katie and my mother were still chatting.
“I like to think of the baby as being in Sara’s old room,” my mother said, making Katie laugh.
“I want to take you home with me,” Katie said.
She invited me to roll my stool over and put my hands on my mother’s belly while she set up the stress-test apparatus. She stuck white plastic sensors to my mother’s stomach and sides. Once the sensors were attached, they snapped into a blue Velcro belt that went around my mother’s middle. Katie switched on the machine and we waited and watched, trying to discern activity and a heart rate on the belt of paper flowing out of the machine’s mouth.
Around the ten-minute mark, Katie came back into the room and stood looking over the tape. She motioned for us to be quiet. After another moment, she nodded and told us everything was normal.
Dr. Socol put his stamp of approval on the test.
“You’re so close,” he said. “You’re viable. Now we want to do everything we can to get this baby into the world alive.”
The fact that any other outcome was still possible continued to torment me at night. We did our best to keep things light on the days of our stress tests, singing Christmas carols on the drive downtown and joining in on the ballads of whatever crooner was piped through the speakers on our floor of the Northwestern parking garage.
At our last appointment before Christmas, my mother and I sat next to each other in the La-Z-Boys in the stress-test room and listened to the sloshing sounds of the baby’s movements through the sensors. My mother sipped heated soy milk while I read her an article from a magazine someone had left on the chair. A moment later, Katie and Pat hurried into the room with Dr. Socol. My mouth went dry. I rushed over to my mother.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, my mind racing and wild.
“We’re just checking,” Dr. Socol said, his voice even but short. His shoulders hunched as he bent over a paper printout on the machine. I focused my attention on the sound of the baby’s heartbeat. I wasn’t sure, but I thought it sounded fainter than it had on other days. The inside of my body went cold, like river water under ice.
“Just keep an eye on it,” he said to Katie. “Bring me the results at the end of the half hour.” The doctor, Katie, and Pat shuffled out. Katie returned two minutes later. My mother’s face was pale. My hands and arms were shaking.
“It’s probably fine,” Katie said. “We don’t want to scare you.”
Too late for that, I thought.
“What’s the issue?” I asked.
“The baby’s heartbeat sounded irregular,” she said. My mind raced to grasp on to anything I might have read about that would show up in the seventh or eighth month. My brain offered up a blank screen.
“We just want to see if it happens again. We’ll know in a few minutes.” My mother gripped the side of my hand with her fingers.
“How about we pray?” Katie suggested. She launched into an impassioned prayer of thanks to and faith in “the Lord God” for protecting this baby and my mother; all was well with this baby now, and his heart and every other organ in his body were expressing only the full perfection and wholeness of life.
“God gave you this vision,” Katie said to my mother. Then she turned to me. “Now we trust God to fulfill it.”
Dr. Socol determined that the irregularity had been a fluke, probably caused by the machine.
“Still, let’s have you come twice a week from now on,” he said before we left.
“Whatever we need to do,” I said. My mother nodded.
“Quite a prayer,” my mother said in the car on the way home. The sky was heavy with clouds, and although no snow had dumped on the city that week, meteorologists were predicting a white Christmas.
“I’ll take every prayer anyone wants to give us,” I said.
We stopped at a raw-food restaurant for lunch. My mother said she wanted something healthy and small. She tried the raw ravioli, and I ordered a nonpizza pizza with olive tapenade and fresh spinach over a “cheese” made from macadamia nuts. I offered my mother one of the small triangles of my pizza, and she agreed it was a preferable choice. Outside, we watched snowflakes fall in white lumps and start to pile on the sidewalk outside the café.
“I can go to some of the appointments on my own,” she said, “now that we’re moving to two appointments a week. You and Bill have a lot of work booked in these next two months.”
“I want to go to all of them,” I said. I put my fingers around a glass bud vase on the table and began moving it back and forth across the tablecloth.
At the beginning of the pregnancy, I had vowed to be at every appointment—partly to support my mother, but also for myself. I felt that I was more of a participant in the pregnancy if I went to every appointment and every meeting. As I would have if I’d been carrying, I found ways to be flexible in my work. I opened up more sessions in the evenings, when we wouldn’t have OB appointments scheduled. I booked workshops and talks on weekends. I saved every extra dollar in a maternity fund. If we went full-term, I would have three months of my salary saved in the bank by February 1.
My father and youngest sister came to Chicago for Christmas. We decorated a tree with blue balls and clear glass ornaments and ribbons of the tartan from Bill’s ancestors in Scotland. I stayed up late watching movies with my sister, both of us reciting the lines to When Harry Met Sally and Elf.
At our Infant Care 101 class that month, we sat in a room with ten couples to practice dressing, bathing, diapering, and feeding a doll. My mother came along. From the minute we arrived, I felt prickly and on edge. The instructors eyed our triumvirate quizzically, and I hurried to the closest available table, sitting with my shoulders hunched, not wanting to take off my coat. I cast a glance around the room. Every other woman swelled at the belly and looked strained in her very pregnant body.
“They all look miserable,” Bill said. He glanced at my mother, who was eating a banana. She looked entertained and content. “You are such a pro,” Bill whispered to her across the table.
I said nothing. The women did look miserable; two of them were bloated in the face and appeared seasick. A blond woman who told the class she was thirty-nine weeks and six days put her head on the table for a nap, and the wife in an Indian couple behind us snapped at her husband, before sending him to the cafeteria to get her some pizza.
And yet their bodies all did something mine could not: They all carried their babies to term. I kept my coat over my lap for the first hour and spent the remainder of the class feeling jealous.
My antidote to the jealousy, when it arose, was to focus on my mother and the baby. When I was sitting with them, running an errand, reading to the baby, I felt at peace. In a surrogacy, it was easier to remember that I was not in control of this or any other life. In the presence of my mother and the baby, I connected to love.
; As we entered the eighth month and the threat of premature labor disappeared, I fantasized about being able to tag into the pregnancy. I watched my mother slow down just a bit, panting sometimes after walking from the car or up a flight of stairs. I wanted to relieve her of the strenuous final stretch. Having now made it to full viability stage, I felt empowered and could imagine myself successfully participating more.
The night of the baby class, I dreamed that my mother and I were in the stress-test room at MFM. The fluorescent ceiling lights had been replaced with blue tubes, and the room glowed indigo. The wall behind the Lay-Z-Boys melted into a small operating room with tables and trays of surgical equipment. Two nurses I didn’t recognize were there in scrubs, and Dr. Socol was washing his hands at a sink.
“We’re going to transfer the baby now,” he said, motioning for the nurses to lift us onto adjoining operating tables. My mother rested on her table, and I felt Dr. Socol attach a cord from her uterus to mine. I felt a flood of anticipation as I realized the baby was about to come into my body. My belly inflated as Dr. Socol cut through my midsection and peeled back my skin to make space. I experienced no pain, only a singing note of elation, as I felt the little body settle into the cushion of my womb, our hearts, mine and the baby’s, beating as one.
In the eight month, the longing continued to lift when I was with my mother. Her energy remained high, and we kept our commitment to regular outings and artist dates. One Friday in January, we drove to Vogue Fabrics in Evanston to pick out material for a quilt for the baby. Another day we loaded up on specialty ingredients at the Spice House and baked Mexican wedding balls and quadruple-ginger cookies. She came along on errands with me, just to get out of the house. Later that week, my friend Krista, who had a ten-month-old named Oscar, invited us over for tea.
“What’s been the best part?” she asked me when my mother went to the bathroom, “besides that you are having a baby?”
“The intimacy with my mother,” I said.
“And the hardest part?” she asked.
“Not carrying the baby in my body,” I said.
“I know it sounds crazy,” I continued, voicing something that had only just occurred to me after the dream, “but something I’d really, really love would be to nurse.” We had walked from the living room into the kitchen, where Krista had put on some hot water for tea. Krista shifted Oscar to her left hip and walked to her laptop over the kitchen table.
“It’s not crazy,” she said. “I am sure the woman who taught my birthing class mentioned that adoptive and surrogate mothers can nurse.”
“What?” I said, stunned. How had I not come across this in all the reading I’d done? The kettle began to sputter and screech. I snapped it off the heat and moved it to a cool burner.
“The process had some name—I’ll give you the instructor’s card,” Krista said. “She is also a lactation consultant.”
Krista found the card, and I held it in both hands as if it were a golden ticket.
On the drive home, I daydreamed about nursing. I wanted the physical, primal connection with my baby. My body had brought forth milk once before. Maybe, even without having the baby physically in my body, it could again.
Bill was not enthralled with the idea of consulting another expert. We stood in the kitchen talking after my mother had gone to bed. In the past month, we had become organization freaks, clearing shelves in the pantry, emptying cupboards and closets, working our way through the house, slowly, slowly, toward the room that would become the nursery. I placed the hand-washed pots back in the cupboard.
“I just want to try,” I said.
“Okay,” Bill said, “but if they so much as mention the term ‘herbal tincture,’ we’re out of there.”
The lactation consultant, Jamie Simms, came to our home the next day.
“We’ll need total commitment and to work quickly if we’re going to get milk,” she said. She wrote out the protocol for induced lactation, which involved taking a medication called domperidone, a drug created for gastrointestinal irregularity but that had the side effect of lactation in some people. I would also need to start pumping with a breast pump six to eight times a day for the six weeks leading up to the baby’s birth. At the end of the appointment, she recommended an herbal blend called Mother’s Milk that was available from Whole Foods.
“Thin ice,” Bill whispered in my ear, as I wrote out a $75 check for the consultation.
“You’ll need a prescription for the pump from your doctor,” Jamie said. “Prentice rents them out on a month-to-month basis.”
The second week in January, my mother accompanied me to my annual visioning workshop. Twice during the afternoon I stole into the bathroom and pumped while the workshop participants created their vision boards. At the end of the afternoon, I invited my mother up to the front of the room to share the story of her vision board from two years earlier. As she reached the point where she had offered to be our surrogate, she pulled her shirt close to her body and swiveled to each side, providing a lateral view of her belly.
“So, be really conscientious about what you put on your boards,” my mother said. “You could end up pregnant with your grandchild.” Even though she was attempting to be funny, several people in the room had begun crying. One woman, a photographer who worked out of a studio in Ravenswood, asked if she could do a portrait of us.
“I’m doing a mother-daughter project,” she said. “Yours is exactly the kind of story I want to shoot.”
The twice-weekly stress tests at MFM became routine. The baby’s heartbeat was regular, and he usually finished the three periods well before the half hour was up. I toted the breast pump to and from appointments, affixing the plastic cups to my breasts as the baby kicked in the chair next to me.
The doctors and nurses in the practice were all very interested in the process.
“Any milk yet?” Katie asked whenever I saw her. I shook my head.
“The lactation consultant told me it would take six weeks minimum—just in time for the baby,” I said.
“Does it hurt?” Katie asked.
I described the sucking motion the machine made and then acquiesced that it was in fact painful for the first ninety seconds or so, until my nipples became slightly numb.
“Just like nursing,” my mother said.
Every time the doctors checked the baby’s position, he was head down. Dr. Socol, whom we seemed to see most often, was delighted by this news and never failed to mention that it was optimal for delivery. The doctors were all excited about the likelihood of a vaginal delivery.
We met Dr. Peaceman at our thirty-seven-week appointment. He was a short, energetic man who was on the faculty of Northwestern’s Feinburg School of Medicine.
“I’m going to check the position of the baby,” he said, pressing hard into my mother’s belly.
“Ow,” she said, and shot up from the table. I jumped.
“This baby is head up,” Dr. Peaceman said.
“We had an ultrasound four days ago,” I said. “Dr. Socol said he was head down.”
“This isn’t good,” he said. “They can’t turn again after thirty-seven weeks. If he’s breech, we’ll have to do a C-section.”
“That’s okay,” my mother said. “We just want to get the baby here safely.”
Dr. Peaceman didn’t cite my mother’s age as an increased risk, but he seemed averse to a C-section, so I had to wonder.
“Whatever is safest for my mother,” I said, still standing.
“If the baby hasn’t turned by Friday, I’m going to try to turn him manually.”
We looked up instructions for a manual turning procedure on the Internet that night. My mother grew distressed as she read. People on the website reported it to be painful and said the procedure could bring on immediate labor. “Go with your bags packed,” one website said.
“It seems extreme,” my mother said. “Are we sure this is what he was talking about?”
At the bottom of the page, th
e website listed exercises women could try to turn a breech baby. My mother knelt on all fours and rocked back and forth, the way we saw in the pictures. I dug my reflexology book out of a box in my office to confirm the point on the foot that was said to make a baby turn. I worked the reflex on the side of the pinky toe by pressing my thumb into the skin and massaging the point with my knuckle and then thumb.
When I woke up the next morning, my mother was sitting in the kitchen, sipping a cup of tea.
“I felt something,” she said, her face hopeful. “I don’t know for sure if he’s turned, but at two in the morning he was moving so much that I wondered if I was going to start having contractions.”
Dr. Peaceman ordered an ultrasound.
“He’s head down,” he confirmed, as he slid the ultrasound roller over my mother’s belly.
“Whoo!” I called out.
“Wow!” my mother said. Dr. Peaceman handed the ultrasound roller back to Kenisha, the same technician who had performed our twenty-week ultrasound, and said he would meet us in the regular exam room to finish our appointment as soon as Kenisha finished measuring the baby. As soon as Dr. Peaceman left the room, my mother said she was convinced the baby had turned on request.
“I told him last night to do whatever was perfect for him, but said if going head down was just as good, Grandma would so appreciate it.”
“The baby looks good,” Kenisha said, moving the roller around to try to give us a 3-D view from the front. My mother and I watched the screen together. The baby was scrunched up in a ball with his hands up, covering his face, like a boxer.
“But whew,” Kenisha said, letting out a low whistle.
“What?” I asked, startled. I relaxed my hands, which had been clenched. I was not going to feel calm until this baby was out, breathing, healthy, and in my arms.
“He’s all good,” Kenisha said. “But that baby is big.”
