Chip insists that my doubt is too old-fashioned for today’s enlightened world. Thankfully, he can’t see inside my brain to the relentless vortexes of apprehension, the questions that swirl in my mind in spite of myself. Who’s going to help two gay men bring a child into the world? Is it even fair of us to attempt to raise a kid in this kind of family? Will our child be ridiculed every single day for having two daddies? I want to believe that attitudes and society at large have evolved, that Chip and I aren’t just living in some progressive bubble where we’ve surrounded ourselves with likeminded individuals and have been able to remain blissfully ignorant of lingering prejudices in the world at large, but I can’t wrestle down the uncertainty.
“You look nervous,” Melanie says after she’s taken her seat behind the desk. Her eyes are on my face, not Chip’s, as she singles me out. “You’re right to be nervous.” Lovely. “This is a long, arduous process we’re about to delve into, but if you want it badly enough, I am the person to make it happen.”
Melanie is an attorney. She is also a “surrogacy agent,” meaning she finds surrogate mothers to carry babies for couples who are unable to have a child on their own for one reason or another. A modern-day matchmaker, she can draw up surrogacy contracts, oversee the surrogacy process from start to finish, and bring joy to those who expected to be perpetually childless. She is also the mother of twins who were born through surrogacy. She has long sections on her website about LGBTQ family building and about the warm and open environment her office provides for same-sex couples. I believe that we are in a safe space here. And yet. Is anything about trying to conceive a child with the help of a stranger “safe”? I can’t help thinking about all the potential disasters, all the ways this process could end up shattering my heart into a zillion pieces.
Chip takes my hand and squeezes.
“We have questions,” he tells her, his tone polite, upbeat.
“Good parents always do.” She half smiles as she waits for him to continue.
“We’re very excited to start this process,” he begins, “but we would both like to contribute genetic material. Can we try to find a surrogate who might be willing to work with us twice, and an egg donor whose eggs we could use for both the first and second pregnancy, so that our kids could be genetic half-siblings on their mother’s side?”
“Wow.” Melanie shakes her head a little and I know there’s a judgment about to be shared. “You guys are real go-getters, huh? Over-achievers like everyone else who lives on the Upper East Side, am I right?” We actually live in the Village, but we are planning to move uptown once we become fathers.
“What do you mean?” I ask, already defensive and likely failing to hide my irk. But in a breath, I remind myself that I am not angry at this woman who has already classified us as a “type” in her mind; I am petrified by the possibility that I might never be a dad. Certainly, copping an oppositional attitude with Melanie Collier is not going to help.
“You haven’t even started the process for the first child”— she rises suddenly to adjust the window treatment on the opposite wall, starts fiddling with the blinds’ tangled cords—“and you’re already talking about the second. I love it. There’s nothing better than enthusiasm. It’ll help keep us going during the more exhausting parts of this process.” She finishes with the blinds and sits back in her chair. “Now how about this.” She folds her hands into each other and leans back in her swivel chair, her silk blouse straining slightly across her chest.
“A more practical solution might be to find a surrogate who’s willing to carry multiples and an egg donor with a high egg-retrieval yield. Should the stars so align, we can then have the harvested eggs separated into two groups, where 50 percent of them are fertilized with your sperm, Chip, and the other 50 percent with Donovan’s. We then implant the viable embryos, maybe two from each of you. This is all subject to best practices at the fertility clinic, but if we’re lucky, the plan works, the embryos take properly. You get multiples who are genetically related to each of you, and they are also genetic half-siblings, like you said.” She pauses for us to digest what she’s described and then adds, “Some people call these kids ‘twiblings.’ Cute, right?” She seems utterly thrilled.
“We’d get four kids?” Chip asks, incredulous but not altogether horrified.
Four babies at once might be worse than none at all, I think.
“No,” Melanie clarifies, sitting forward again to explain. “The embryos probably wouldn’t all attach, and if they did, well, my recommendation would be to find a surrogate who is willing to reduce in that scenario. You do run the risk of ending up with two children fathered by one of you and none by the other, but you can do what some of my other clients have done, and just agree not to find out who is the father of each child. Then you simply proceed as though you are each the father of both of the children, which is as it should be anyway, no?”
Chip and I look at each other. His light eyes are wide, questioning, wondering what I think of this suggestion. He shrugs almost imperceptibly, like it’s up to me.
I have to admit, I kind of like the sound of this plan.
“What if there’s a medical emergency?” I ask. “Wouldn’t you need to know who the father is, like for a kidney transplant or something?”
“Well, yes,” she allows, “that’s the fly in the ointment. But for most people, something like that never comes to pass. Or by the time it does, so many years have passed that when you find out which one of you fathered him or her, it no longer matters at all.”
We spend another hour and a half with Melanie after this, going over all the details of the work that needs to be done before we can find ourselves holding a new infant, or two, in our arms. We need to choose our fertility clinic, find an appropriate egg donor, meet with a social worker, review profiles of potential gestational carriers, have a phone call with the potential carrier, meet her and hopefully love her, sign contracts, fund an escrow account, send legal clearance to the clinic, pay for the carrier to travel to our clinic for testing, do the embryo transfer, file for a pre-birth order so our names can be on the birth certificate immediately following the birth, travel to the state where the surrogate lives to be there for the birth, travel home with our new family. Sounds totally simple. I think I’m going to vomit.
Melanie explains that she will begin the search for our gestational carrier, or GC, as she keeps saying, by running ads throughout the country, ads that will appear on paper placemats in waffle houses, in the back of PennySavers in supermarkets, in college newspapers and women’s magazines. It seems implausible to me that this is the way carriers are found, but she promises she has had a great success rate in the past.
“Yes, you do have to weed out many of the people who call in,” she responds to my question. “There are always people looking to get something for nothing, but we know what we’re doing. By the time we present you with a file of applicants, they will be only serious candidates who have been well vetted. There will obviously be medical testing, which will rule out drug and alcohol addiction, and even diseases that could affect her ability to carry safely. You’ll see. But first, we have to figure out what is important to you.” She takes a sheet of paper from inside the file folder on her desk—some sort of checklist. “Do you care about the race of the carrier?”
Chip and I look at each other and both shake our heads no.
“Religion?” She asks next.
Again, we shake our heads no.
“Would you want the carrier to terminate the pregnancy in the event of serious genetic defect?”
“Potentially,” I answer cautiously.
“We’d have to see what it was first,” Chip says, pragmatic as ever.
After several other questions like this, she starts asking about finances. We are obviously going to be responsible for all medical costs related to the pregnancy, as well as any travel expenses, but then she starts asking about things I hadn’t thought about at all.
“Man
y intended parents pay for extras like maternity clothes, or someone to clean the GC’s house so she doesn’t have to overextend herself during the pregnancy. Maybe she’ll be put on bedrest at some point and will need additional help in the house or with any children she already has.”
The list goes on and on. My head is spinning, but I’m also beginning to feel something akin to an electrical current running through my body, like this is a real, legit possibility. Despite all my prior expectations to the contrary, I might truly end up becoming the father of my very own child.
Chapter 7
MAGGIE
FEBRUARY 2005
A droplet of my own pee falls onto my hand and I don’t even bother wiping it away as I stare at the two lines on the pregnancy test, stunned. This is the third test I’ve taken since getting home from my long day at the animal hospital, and I keep getting the same result. I don’t know why I’m so surprised. I didn’t even realize I was late until I overheard a woman in the waiting room at work ask one of the vet techs if she should expect her new dog to menstruate and get blood on the floor of her house. By the way, I’ve learned that the answer is yes, dogs that haven’t been spayed do indeed bleed, and it can get quite messy.
It’s only been four months since Nick walked into the veterinary office holding someone’s lost Cavapoo, a designer puppy that he hoped had been microchipped with the owner’s information. I checked them in at reception, and he didn’t blink when he saw me behind the desk. I figured he didn’t remember me from the Grand Canyon six months earlier. While he and the puppy were in the exam room with Doctor Turk, I ran my fingers through my hair and dug for the lip gloss at the bottom of my purse anyway. After the exam, Nick lingered in the front room until the dog’s owner arrived, even though I told him it was unnecessary for him to wait.
He leaned an elbow on the reception desk as he looked down at me. “How could I leave now?” he asked, eyes narrowed. “We still haven’t had a chance to talk through the benefits of tattooing an omelet on your arm.”
I sat up at full attention and tried my best to formulate a witty response, running the gamut of jokes in my head about the fork tattooed on his arm, but I came up with nothing, and he continued talking.
“Well this is some kind of kismet, don’t you think?” he asked.
Kismet happens to be one of my favorite words, one of my favorite phenomena. Did that make it extra kismetic? I didn’t mention that I’d thought about him several times since that day at the Canyon, that I continued to feel as if it had been a missed opportunity, a chance for something important. I didn’t say anything about the fact that he was better-looking than I remembered or that I had, just this morning, repeated that statistic about peanut butter and the Canyon floor to my roommate, Kiara. Instead, I just let my eyes shift back to his tattoo, the one I’d thought about too many times over the past few months.
Well, fork me.
It feels like it was only a hot second from that moment at the vet’s office until this one, where I’m standing on the cold, hard tile of the tiny bathroom, staring down at this undeniably positive test. I’d be lying if I said that up until this shocking development, I hadn’t been patting myself on the back lately. After moving from LA to Phoenix, I had found myself not only a steady job at the animal hospital and a peppy, responsible roommate but also a successful boyfriend. I had begun saving a little money, still hoping to make it to back to school for a teaching degree. I thought that I was finally lining up all those ducks, getting my life on track. Over the past few weeks, I’ve even been considering reconnecting with my parents, now that I believed I was nearing a place where they might be genuinely proud of the life I’m building.
This whole child-out-of-wedlock situation is clearly going to throw a wrench in that plan.
I try to imagine what Nick will say. I have to tell him, but our relationship so far has been mostly hot sex, tasty meals, and mediocre movies. We aren’t really ready for ultrasounds and dirty diapers. Amazingly, I feel a surprising excitement about the baby anyway. Maybe after so many years being on my own, I’m ready to have someone dependent on me, someone I’m responsible for, unconditionally. Would it be crazy to say that I feel the tiniest inkling of love for the little pipsqueak already? Maybe it’s just the idea of the baby that I’m loving— but either way, and despite all the drama that is inevitably on its way, there is no possibility that I am doing anything other than keeping this baby.
There is a knock from the outer hallway, and I don’t even drop the pregnancy test before scampering out of the bathroom to open the apartment door. Nick is standing on the other side, right on time, in a crisp, black button-down and dark jeans. I take in his polished, freshly shaven appearance and wonder again how I could ever have considered him average looking.
He notices my outfit—scrubs from work, still covered in cat hair—and his dark brow furrows. “What’s wrong?” he asks, clearly wondering why I am not ready to go to the “Un-Valentine’s Day” party at his friend Darren’s, whatever that is supposed to be.
“Oh, come on,” I joke, “if this outfit doesn’t scream ‘over it,’ I don’t know what does.” I laugh self-consciously, wondering how to phrase the little bit of news I need to share.
“What’s that?” His eyes are on the pregnancy test. He knows what it is.
I hold it up and we both look to the results window.
“So, um, it’s positive,” I say, unnecessarily.
His eyes widen and I can see his mind working through this information. He kicks the door closed behind himself and cocks his head to the side as he considers me.
As the silence stretches, I brace myself for whatever’s coming next.
“Let’s get married!” He nearly jumps as he says it, startled, as though the idea has popped out of his mouth of its own accord.
“What? No!” I can’t marry someone I’ve only known four months. This isn’t reality television.
“No, seriously,” he says, stepping toward me and taking my free hand into both of his. “You know we’re a great fit, and we were probably going to end up getting married anyway. We’ll just do it sooner so we can raise this kid together, be a family. And we’ll never tell anyone that I proposed on Valentine’s Day, because I am not that cheesy.” His lopsided smile is so hopeful, so enticing, that I have to talk myself down. Marrying someone I’ve known less than half a year is something the old Maggie would do—but not this me, not anymore.
He starts getting down on his knee, I guess thinking to propose properly.
“No, no, no, no.” I yank him back to a standing position. “Don’t. Don’t do that. Let’s not. This isn’t . . . we can’t get married. It’s too much. Too crazy, too much all-at-once insanity. Let’s think this through.” I pull him over to the denim-covered sofa, one of the many items of furniture Kiara already owned before I moved in to take her old roommate’s place.
“Sit,” I instruct. “Let’s just take a minute. A breath.” I lean out from the couch to place the pregnancy test on the glass coffee table. It makes a startling clatter as it lands, as if I threw it, like I couldn’t wait to get it away from me.
We both stare dumbly at the test stick for another moment.
“What if,” I say as I look back at Nick, “we don’t get married, but we try living together? We could wait until after the baby is born.”
“What if,” he counters, his eyes darting away from the coffee table and back to me, “we try living together, but we don’t wait until the baby is born?”
“Move in together—like, now?”
Nick nods.
I suppose it’s less extreme than marriage. And it would allow us to adjust to living in shared quarters before the baby comes. I don’t know if I’m ready for this, but maybe that’s the whole point. “One transition at a time does make more sense to me than doing everything at once. Except . . . I can’t just leave Kiara. I committed to living here for a year, and I still have six months left.” I don’t add that Kiara has become my
closest friend in Phoenix, and I feel a little blue at the thought of dissolving our arrangement early.
I do some on-the-spot calculations in my head and then offer another idea. “So, let’s say I move in—but not until September, when my lease term is up. There should still be a month left before the baby is born.”
“We wait until September to move in,” he parries, “but we get married when the baby turns one.”
“Three. Three years old.” I’m worried that if we make an agreement to marry each other when the baby turns one, it will be all we think about. “The first year is supposed to be the hardest with a kid, right? So why would we want to judge our compatibility entirely on that year?”
“Really?” Nick’s brows scrunch together as he studies me.
“You should see these people who come into the office with their new puppies. They’re totally shell-shocked. They’re overwhelmed by the responsibility, sleep deprived, and just generally freaking out. One lady was wearing two different shoes. And that’s puppies.”
At first he looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, but then he starts nodding slowly.
“Okay,” he says, taking my hand. “Maybe what you’re saying makes a little sense, in a totally roundabout, Maggie kind of a way.” He takes my hand and continues. “I like you. Really, really like you. So maybe it makes sense that we take the pressure off. Since I don’t want to blow my chances with you entirely, I’m willing to wait you out. Unless this is just a secret ploy to let me down easy, and ‘not yet’ is easier for you to say than ‘no way, never you’?”
He Gets That from Me Page 5
