by Sara Connell
Finn was now awake on the bed and making smacking sounds with his mouth. He’d freed his arms from the swaddle blanket, and every few minutes he would lift them in unison, holding them over his head in a move we had nicknamed “the maestro.”
In the three weeks since Finn’s birth, I had not slept more than three hours at a stretch, taken regular showers, or eaten a regular meal. And yet I felt amazing. I remembered talking with Kaitlin once, in the scary days of our miscarriages and my stillbirths: “Won’t it be awesome when we call each other to complain about being exhausted because we were up with a baby?” she’d said.
The ecstasy I had felt the night of Finn’s birth continued, even intensified, once we were home. In those first days, even months, every maternal task was a joy.
When Bill or my mother took a shift watching him, I would nap. When I woke, I would half-run into the nursery or down to the guest room, still hardly able to believe he was there, that we had a child to burp and feed and dress.
Later, when we weaned Finn to a crib, Bill and I still sometimes raced each other from the bedroom to be the first to arrive in the nursery.
Friends asked if motherhood was everything I had envisioned, perhaps wondering if it would be one of those things that reality tempers a bit. I answered truthfully that it was better than I had imagined—and I had imagined a great deal. “Likely a gift from a seven-year journey,” I said to friends who said they’d thought about giving their children back after three months or more of not sleeping.
My mother’s milk had stopped enough that she no longer needed to bind her breasts with a sports bra or Ace bandage. At night, she sweated so profusely from postdelivery hormone withdrawal that once or twice she had to wring out her clothes. The night sweats had the advantage of expelling the excess fluid she’d been carrying from the surgery, so that by the third week postbirth, she was no longer wearing maternity clothes. A friend who’d had a cesarean the week before Finn was born said she couldn’t believe how quickly my mother had recovered. “You’re in better shape than me,” she told my mother when she stopped by with her baby to meet Finn.
“It’s different when you don’t have to take care of a baby all day and night,” my mother said. “I feel as if I’ve been on vacation.”
She and my father were leaving the next morning. When I thought of her going, I felt a wrench of sadness in my chest. She would be back in Chicago for her eight-week checkup, and Bill and I planned to take Finn on his first plane trip to D.C. Mother’s Day week. I knew that the bond we had forged during the surrogacy could never be undone. Still, the separation felt profound—the cutting of a cord.
My mother confessed to feeling a sense of groundlessness as she approached the return to her life in Alexandria. “Every birth is also a rebirth,” I remembered the counselor I spoke with saying after the twins died. The coach my mother had worked with during the pregnancy had given her a homework assignment to journal about what she’d like out of the next chapter of her life.
“I’ve never liked journaling,” my mother said, sighing. I’d told her I could sit with her while she wrote. She kept setting down the pen she’d picked up on top of her leather-bound journal.
The Chinese lamp we’d placed next to the bed cast a pink beam of light onto the blankets.
“We could do a visioning,” I suggested. “Like in my workshops.”
“Let’s!” she said. Her eyes lit up with hope.
We propped Finn between us on a pillow. He blew a bubble out of the side of his mouth. I offered my finger, which he sucked at with his lips, confirming he wanted to eat. I reached to the side of the bed, where I’d placed a warm bottle.
My milk had not come in, which had initially felt disappointing. The lack of it seemed to open a pocket of unfinished grief. But then I’d had the grace to remember that three years ago, in the nadir of our experience, I would have clawed through a jungle naked to have a child and would not have wasted a moment caring whether or not I could breastfeed. “Big picture,” Bill had said when I’d cried my few tears about nursing. I’d nodded and smiled. And we surmised, based on the kind of miraculous way Finn had come into the world, that if it was in his best interest to breastfeed, we would have.
We’d continued to read to Finn every day. I would pull out Harry Potter or a Shel Silverstein book, and my mother would hold Finn while I read. When I started, he would stop wiggling, widen his eyes into circles, and form his mouth into a big O.
My mother was so impressed by this unusual display of attentiveness that she took photographs and emailed them to her friends. Subject line: “incredible.”
My mother did some meditation breaths to prepare for the visioning while I fed and burped Finn. Under her tutelage, I had grown adept at this basic skill and was able to bring up the burps with more forceful claps than Bill or I would ever have been comfortable with on our own.
“Ready to vision?” I asked my mother, once Finn was resting again on the pillows.
“Ready,” she answered.
A trickle of afternoon light seeped through the high windows above the bed, and Finn seemed transfixed by the dust particles in the air. I spoke an intention: that we could both hear whatever was useful in the visioning, especially that my mother would receive inspiration for her path.
“Let’s vision for you, too,” my mother said.
I assumed the next few months for me would entail more of exactly what I was doing now: caring for Finn in the family nest.
I asked the standard visioning questions I used in my practice: “What is the highest vision for our lives now? What must we now release? What must we embody? Anything else?”
When we’d finished writing our answers in silence, we shared.
“Lots of writing,” my mother began with what she had seen for me. This tickled me, since in the visioning I’d seen several images of Finn in the Moby wrap while I typed at my computer.
“I saw you speaking to a group and teaching a class,” I said to my mother. I spoke quickly, knowing how averse she had been to public presentations.
“Ha,” my mother said, without explaining.
“I saw you sharing about following your vision,” I continued. “Maybe even leading visionings yourself.”
“I saw myself teaching, too,” my mother said, “maybe a course at my church. A year ago I wouldn’t have considered such a thing.”
I lay my hands in my lap. I felt happy thinking about my mother teaching a class.
“I felt one more thing for you,” my mother said, breaking the silence. She stopped again before continuing. She picked at the trim on the blanket, not looking at me. “It came like a message, during the last question.”
I sat up straighter against the cushions. The skin on my neck pricked.
“I’ll just say it,” she said. “Tell Sara: You are chosen, not broken.”
I looked at my mother. Her eyes were wet and full.
I began to cry.
I’d heard more than once that it is not the events of our lives that upset us; it is the stories we make up about them. And the story I’d made up about my childhood trauma and infertility experiences was that I was a broken mess. I wondered now if the story I’d believed myself was a lie.
Jungien psychologist Caroline Myss told a story once that I never forgot, about a Native American man captured during World War II and held in a POW camp. He was tortured and starved for months, and then, on the brink of his death, he was fed maggots from a dirt floor by one of the guards just before the camp was liberated. When he returned home to his tribe, he wallowed in grief and self-pity and likely a fair amount of PTSD. The tribe left him be for a while and then took him to the edge of a large lake with a stone tied around his neck.
“You can either choose to forgive and live,” they said, “or die. There are only two choices.”
The man walked into the lake, intending to choose death. He started to sink, when his life force seized him and he began to forgive. As he struggled to the surface,
he faced the final situation he’d endured: the guard who had shoved the maggots into his face, moving his jaw so he was forced to swallow, encouraging the other guards to laugh at and humiliate him. It was too much, he felt, to forgive this man. He let go of the rock so he could drown. At the last second, before all his oxygen had gone, a watery light entered his mind and he saw that same man reading a book while the other guards slept, reading about a way to keep someone alive using the protein from bugs in the earth. The soldier had not been tormenting him, it turned out, but saving his life.
Caroline Myss said that before we label a situation, we must consider the possibility that we may not have all the information. Before you name them as broken and bad, consider that there may be something profound and important—not just for you, but for a greater good—that could not come any other way.
I imagined that, like the soldier in Myss’s story, I did not have all the information. I liked the idea of being open to chosen-ness, contemplating how even the broken-seeming parts of my story were and could be a portal for good.
Perhaps I had been chosen. Perhaps we all had been.
“Thank you,” I said to my mother.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“Thank you,” she said.
Finn, who had fallen asleep during our visioning exercise, now stirred. My mother lifted him to her shoulder and patted his back. I made a note in my sketchbook; the visioning had given me an idea for a lecture. I’d been invited to give a talk on Mother’s Day at an organization in Lincoln Park. The founder of the organization told me that they had handed out flowers to the mothers in the audience in years past, just like they had at the church I’d attended the previous year. Inspired, I dialed the center’s number and reached the office manager. I asked how many people typically attended the talks.
“Three to four hundred,” he said.
“Could we give out three to four hundred roses?” I asked.
“We can,” he said, without asking for an explanation.
On Mother’s Day, I would give a rose to every person who attended the service. I would share the message I felt from the Great Mother—that we are all part of her. And I would ask, no matter what each person had labeled as broken in themselves, that the lie be healed and that they might know that they had been chosen.
That talk was still two months away, though. I put down my sketchbook and leaned my head back onto the bed. My mother and I had one more afternoon and evening together. The hum of the electric heater lulled me to rest.
I wanted to sit here one more minute without saying anything, locking in the exact shade of cream paint on the walls, the tiny timbre of Finn’s voice, my mother’s strength next to me, so close I could touch her.
We each put a hand around Finn, our fingers touching. And I felt that the Divine Mother was holding us now, the way she could anytime but was so tangibly, in this moment of initiation, holding us together, where she had brought and would continue to bring us home.
A Conversation with Grandma and Surrogate Kristine Casey
What was it like to read about the experience from Sara’s point of view?
I had many emotions in reading the book. I was sad to revisit the struggle and pain in the early portions of the book. I learned things about Sara’s perspective on our relationship that were hard. I was struck that even though we were very close throughout the pregnancy, her story, the thoughts and emotions around the facts, are uniquely hers. I’ve been thinking about that perspective in many of my relationships since then.
My favorite part of the story is seeing Finn’s little face when Sara read the end of the Harry Potter book. In that moment, I knew that he knew who his mommy was. How beautiful!
Did you ever doubt the pregnancy would happen or turn out successfully?
Yes, from the beginning there was no illusion that I could make this work by anything I could control. Even the very idea of the surrogacy seemed to come from outside and beyond my own mind and will. At each step we just went one step forward and then waited. There seemed to be a lot of waiting, time suspended between hope and resignation. Even as he was being born, I was just praying for him to breathe. It was all such a gift.
What were people’s reactions when they saw you pregnant?
Mostly it was winter in Chicago and people really couldn’t tell—so I experienced fewer reactions than I might have otherwise. If they did notice, most people kept their reactions to themselves—maybe they thought I carried weight in my middle. People that we did meet in stores, when trying on maternity clothes, for instance, and in the OB waiting room typically looked surprised and then were moved and wanted to hear the story. Most of the people that heard the story seemed to go into themselves to see if they would do the same. Like a chance to stop and smell the roses, many spent a moment connecting with the love they had for their own mothers and daughters.
Would you encourage others to take on this kind of surrogacy experience?
That’s a hard question to answer. It was an amazing experience for me. And I’m sure I’m not unique.
I think surrogacy is a beautiful example of the old truth, “It takes a village to raise a child.” If a woman has the health to nurture a new life, I think it’s such a privilege to do that, even when you are not going to be the mother of that child. But a surrogate needs to be very clear about her motivations and expected outcomes.
What was the most difficult part of the experience for you?
Being away from home, husband, family, friends, activities, and routines for four months was the most difficult part. Contrary to popular belief, it’s actually hard to sit around for that long. I was interested to see how much of my identity was wrapped up in what I spent my time doing at home.
Although I could have stayed at home during the pregnancy, I really wanted Sara and Bill to experience as much of that time as normally as possible. I know that they were worried and we were all in foreign emotional territory, so it was well worth it to be able to see, talk, and touch them each day.
What was your husband’s very first reaction to the idea?
He listened to the whole idea—my excitement, why I wanted to do it, how the idea had come to me. He said he could see it was a very important calling for me and supported pursuing it from the beginning. I think/wonder, in that first moment, if he thought there was any real possibility I would actually be able to do it.
What were the key differences between having a baby in 2011 and having one in 1975?
So many things were different this time. Medical technology; seeing ultrasound pictures several times along the way; and, of course, being a high-risk pregnancy, I saw the doctors so frequently. This time my relationship with the doctors and staff became personal and supportive. I loved every office visit for the medical wisdom and friendly excitement that things were gong so well.
In 1975, I saw the doctor at four months and then monthly till the end of the pregnancy. I’m not sure he knew my name. I didn’t know if the baby was a boy or a girl. No discernible ultrasound photos. And when it came to labor, I was in a city hospital with one communal labor room full of women mostly having natural childbirth; it was loud and extremely low-tech. The dads were in the delivery room but didn’t stay overnight with their new families. Our room at Prentice suite was palatial.
How did you view your relationship with your daughter before this experience, versus now?
I would have said that we had a normal mother-daughter relationship. Sara was a really fun kid. She was funny and excited by things and always ready to go and to do. In her teen years and twenties, when we were not as close, I took that as part of normal individualization—Sara was finding herself. Now, I feel very close to Sara. We’ve shared quite a journey. We don’t talk every day, but we can pick up at any point and feel connected and loved.
What’s been the response of people hearing about your experience?
Amazement. Amazement that this was medically possible and that when I came home,
I was walking around and doing all the things I used to do. Women fall into two camps: those who say they would do the same and those who say absolutely not. Many men are totally perplexed and speechless. Some people love the family story when I can pull out the baby pictures at the end. Others ask questions about the spiritual and psychological journey. There’s a lot of food for thought there.
Do you feel you have a special relationship with Finn, versus other grandchildren?
I am delighted to have a second grandchild, born also [in 2011], so I can actually answer this question: I feel the same kind of grandmother love for both. They light up my life!
However, I will remain forever grateful that Finn turned at thirty-seven weeks. He was taking care of Grandma on that one.
Would you do it again?
I’m so grateful that I could do this once. If I had an intuition as strong as the first one, I would never turn it down. But I don’t. It’s the furthest thing from my heart right now.
What are you going to do next?
I’m interested in the answer to that question, too. I’ve been meditating and enjoying the possibilities. Life is good.
Reader’s Guide
Questions for Discussion
1. As a young adult, Sara feels distant from her family. By the end of the book, she is experiencing great intimacy with her mother. Have you experienced transformation in a relationship that you thought would never change?
