Designer Baby

by Aaron Elias Brunsdon

  Designer Baby

  Designer Baby

  A surrogacy journey from fashion to fatherhood

  AARON ELIAS BRUNSDON

  First published in 2017 by Impact Press

  an imprint of Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff, NSW, 2027, Australia

  www.impactpress.com.au

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Aaron Elias Brunsdon 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Author: Brunsdon, Aaron Elias

  Title: Designer Baby / by Aaron Elias Brunsdon

  Category: Memoir

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-21-5 (print)

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-22-2 (ebook)

  Cover and internal design: Cheryl Collins Design

  Cover Photography: Carlotta Moye

  The paper in this book is FSC® certified. FSC® promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

  For my son,

  Roman

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Part 1

  Conception

  1. Singapore Jew

  2. Fashion Designer

  3. Charlotte’s Hens Night

  4. Life is Beautiful

  5. The Brand

  6. Testicular Cancer

  7. 60 Minutes

  8. Surrogacy Saviours

  9. Bio Mum

  10. Surrogacy Australia

  11. Kay, the Thai Agent

  12. “We Have News”

  13. On Our way

  Part 2

  9 Months

  14. “Welcome to Bangkok, Thailand”

  15. Dr Pisit

  16. Songkran

  17. Surrogate Mother

  18. Porn

  19. “Your Eggs Aren’t Ready, Sir”

  20. Results

  21. Prenatal Depression

  22. Trimesters

  23. “Surrogacy is Dead in the Water”

  24. Last Trimester

  25. Nursery

  26. Press Hound

  27. Baby Whisperer

  Part 3

  Birth

  28. Last Christmas

  29. Phyathai Hospital

  30. Family Values

  31. The Delivery

  32. The Embassy

  33. Baby Roman

  34. Good and Bad Journalists

  35. Mothers

  36. iBaby

  37. Going Home

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  I remember our first date with such clarity, as though it were yesterday. Yet it was eighteen years ago now. On that first date in April 1999, Jayson Brunsdon, my life partner, took me to the movies to watch Life Is Beautiful, an inspiring story about a father and son in a Nazi concentration camp. Although surrounded by misery and death at the camp, the father's imagination and a convincing made-up game allows the young boy to survive. As I am of Judaic faith it was a subject close to my heart. I bawled my eyes out throughout the film, moved by the father’s unconditional love for his son.

  The film triggered something deep inside me and from that moment, I dreamt of being a father. I remembered holding and loving the babies my mother looked after when we were young. My mother loves babies and I had inherited the love. I would play with them and pretend to be their father. I was only six years old, and already I wanted to replicate my own father.

  I didn’t know when it would happen; neither, in 1999, did I know of a way. But one thing I knew for certain: I was going to spend the rest of my life with the man seated next to me, the one who comforted me throughout this emotional film. I knew I would be a father and have a child with him some day. It was a premonition, an unexplained awakening.

  “One day we will have children,” I said at the end of the film and, rather than shudder at my first-date revelation, Jayson smiled. It was no easy thing for male same-sex couples in Australia to have babies back then. Few in our country dared to even contemplate it. And though adoption was a prospect to consider, it was a slow and gruelling process, regulated heavily by the system. And there was surrogacy using in vitro fertilisation, the new reproductive technology which involved someone else being implanted with an embryo and gestating the baby, limited in practice in Australia since the inception of the technology in 1978.

  Jayson looked up at me and said, “Anything is possible, one step at a time.”

  Those words still ring in my head today.

  In 2016, they remember us as the Sydney fashion designer couple, determined and brave, despite all obstacles, to have a baby from the non-traditional method of full surrogacy. This was a difficult, challenging journey that took us more than five years to accomplish and led us to Bangkok, Thailand, where we were shattered halfway through the gestation when the country outlawed surrogacy, putting a stop to Asia’s burgeoning enterprise.

  Every step of the way, we discovered fresh determination and new strength. Never did we lose sight of our goals and vision to become fathers. Every day we made new discoveries, on a learning curve, grateful for the gracious people and courageous professionals who helped us fulfil our hopes.

  We promised ourselves to document everything, and when it was over to write a book to share our personal experiences — hoping to benefit others facing similar challenges, but most of all to inspire another to fulfil his or her one basic human right: the right to love and give life to this world.

  Designer Baby is our story, our very personal and intimate journey to parenthood.

  Aaron Elias Brunsdon

  Part 1

  Conception

  “We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from.”

  William Shakespeare

  1

  Singapore Jew

  The Spanish Inquisition in 1492, led by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and his wife Queen Isabella, eradicated the Jews from Spain, some 200,000 of them, forcing them either to convert to Christianity or be banished. Consequently my ancestors were driven from their country, ending up in various parts of the Arabic world. We were known as Sephardic Jews, “Sephardic” being the Hebrew word for “Spanish”. My ancestors fled to Italy before settling in Baghdad, where they were known as Baghdadi Jews. After three generations of living in the Middle East – and in fear of religious persecution once again, this time from the Ottomans – they set sail on a boat with precious belongings and whatever else they could salvage from Persia. Settling in the mid-1800s in Singapore, which was under the governance of Sir Stamford Raffles, proved to be the right choice as they soon flourished. Widely known as the founder of modern-day Singapore, Raffles had established the island city-state in 1819 as a trading post.

  My maternal ancestors were merchants of the date fruit, a staple food of the Middle East, believed to have originated in Iraq and cultivated in Mesopotamia since ancient times. They were entrepreneurs, traders of the schmatte (rag trade in Yiddish) but also renowned for the fresh dates they had farmed in Baghdad, using the fruit to make wine and cookies from ancient recipes that had been kept in the family for generations and remain in the family today. Every year, I still look forward to Jewish New Year, “Rosh Hashanah”, where we savour the kakka babbas, the Arabic name for the cookies of my ancestors that my mother now bakes. My ancestors had preserved their traditions, belief and Jewish Sephardic customs, creating a new life in British Malaya.

  My father Abraha
m was born in 1933. His mother Hilda Joseph, only thirteen at the time of his birth, was forced to give him up for adoption to her uncle. She was a child bride and her new husband deserted her after hearing of the pregnancy. My father never knew his biological father, who we believe was of Chinese descent. His adopted father Aaron, after whom I am named, loved my father as his own. He adored Abraham, who frequently went to watch him perform lead roles in the Wayang, the Malay staged street opera. Aaron was a famous entertainer of his day.

  Prior to the end of the Second World War in 1945, there were about 1,500 Jews in Singapore. Most of them, including my father, were interned during the Japanese occupation at Siam Road Camp. My dad was twelve years old when he was interned at the camp. Stories have it that Dad was given the nickname “Yam”, as he frequently crawled under the camp’s fence late at night to steal raw tapioca (also known as yam in Asia) from the nearby trees. Dad was younger and smaller than the others, and the name “Kecil” was added later, meaning “small” in Malay.

  Shortly after the war, in 1946, he went to India. Many other Jews from Singapore migrated to Israel, Australia and the United States. Members of both my parents’ families left for Sydney in the ’70s and ’80s. After his father’s passing, Abraham, still a teenager, returned to live with his mother. She remarried a Dutchman named Sunny from Amsterdam and together they had eleven children. My father studied to become a school teacher and began his profession in 1955, aged twenty-two. He gave his entire wage to his mother, practically raising his siblings.

  In 1961, my father fell in love with the attractive fifteen-year-old Matilda, my mother-to-be, whom he first set eyes on running across the grounds of the mahallah (Arabic word for neighbourhood) in Prinsep Street, which had been a Jewish area for over a century. She was barefoot, wearing a jumpsuit with a bloomers-style pant. The dilalah (Arabic word meaning guidance or instruction, slang for matchmaking) was discussed by both sides of the family and when Mum turned eighteen in 1964, they married in the Jewish Synagogue on Waterloo Street. Fifty-three years later, they remain married. My maternal grandparents were very poor and they struggled to provide for their nine children. They felt my father would give my mother a better life.

  Despite my mother’s love for children and attempts to conceive, my parents remained childless for the first six years of their marriage. Doctors pronounced that my mother had fertility issues and may never bear a child. Heartbroken, she took solace by looking after orphans and poor children in the neighbourhood, daily offering them food and shelter. They also tried to adopt their niece Suzanna, whom they had been looking after for some years, but when it came to signing the adoption papers her biological mother had a change of heart and migrated with the child to London. Crushed, my mother cried for days and was so ill with headaches she couldn’t get out of bed.

  Two weeks later, during a visit to the doctor for her illness, she was told the reason for her ill health: she was pregnant. In 1970, she gave birth to my sister Florence. Two more children followed my sister’s birth, myself as the middle child, bearing the name of my paternal grandfather Aaron Elias – it being a Jewish custom to name your child after a deceased relative – and my brother Yahya, named after my mother’s father.

  I was born in 1972, into a middle class family in Singapore. My father was the sole breadwinner and my mother a stay-at-home mum. We grew up in Selegie House, a small two-bedroom housing development flat. (Singapore’s high-rise government subsidised housing for its citizens.) I shared a room with my siblings and some of the other kids in the neighbourhood, who came daily to seek refuge.

  My father, the total disciplinarian, never stood for any nonsense, especially when it came to our studies. We used to have tutorials with him after dinner every night. He always stressed the importance of a good education.

  Managing his oldest son was a full-time job. I played pranks almost daily. I misbehaved and drove both my parents mad and it was normal for the neighbourhood block to witness Yam chasing me from our sixth floor apartment to the ground floor, trying to catch me. Guests who came to visit us would discover upon leaving that their shoes were missing, to be found later at the ground floor of the high-rise. It was a profound joy of mine to see the shoes plummet down six floors from the top of the high- rise, better still if one of them landed on some poor passer-by. I was out of control and no one figured out why I was such an awful kid.

  We observed all the Jewish holidays, attended Talmud Torah (Jewish Sunday school) every week, and celebrated my bar mitzvah when I turned thirteen. Our Sephardic community was closely knit. There was segregation between the classes but a strong sense of community. All the Jewish boys and girls came together during the high holidays. I loved the fancy dress festival of Purim, where we dressed up to compete in a masquerade for a gold-plated trophy. My mother came up with the ideas and once transformed me into Carmen Miranda. I paraded in front of the whole Jewish community in drag, wearing a tutti-frutti print bikini top and sarong with plastic fruits on my turban, lip-syncing to “I, Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi, I like you very much”. I know I started my fascination with drag queens early, but I won the fancy dress competition every year without fail.

  “Not that Elias boy again. Would they just give the trophy to someone else?” members of my community sniped.

  I went to a Catholic school, excelled academically and learned to speak three languages fluently. Coming from a minority group, I found life in Singapore difficult and I couldn’t relate much to my heritage. I was classified as “other”, meaning not Chinese, Indian or Malay. My peers were oblivious to my culture, origins and practices, commonly mistaking me as Indian. Their ignorance of my faith, which my family and I were so proud of, forced me into exclusion at school. I was exempted from Bible studies and chapel prayers, instead spending the time writing poetry and short stories while my peers took Communion.

  From the age of seven, repeatedly and for several years, I became a victim of sexual abuse. The incidents were so traumatic, I buried the heinous crime deep beneath the surface of my young mind, promising never to let it rise again.

  As a teenager starting to date girls, I couldn’t relate much to my sexuality. I struggled, hating the world, my parents and everything in life for feeling the way I did. I was heading for a serious depression, as all the wounds and trauma I thought had long disappeared resurfaced. Like the time my abuser sodomised me in a public toilet. I ran in the rain afterwards to hide – ashamed of my soiled pants, shivering wet, crying my eyes out.

  One day, when life felt unbearable, I attempted suicide, taking two bottles of my mother’s prescribed sleeping pills. I was found the next morning, unconscious with froth in my mouth. I was rushed to hospital in an ambulance. The pills were pumped out of me. I was close to death but lucky to have survived. I was ordered to see a child psychiatrist and spent the next four years in intense weekly therapy. This period with my psychiatrist saved my life and helped me bury the abuse once and for all, giving closure to the sufferings.

  Together, we worked through each and every incident. They were hard to relive, but slowly I released the memories with him – every single abuse, however painful, described in precise detail. Week after week, emotionally drained, making progress or sometimes regressing at each session. My doctor’s persistence paid off, because after four years I felt more confident to embrace life and my sexuality. Though the memories of what happened will never fade away completely, I have chosen to put it all behind me and found closure for my abuse. But there are days when I feel a deep sense of remorse. I can’t help feeling the loss of my innocence, that I was robbed of my childhood – something so personal ripped away from me without a choice.

  At eighteen, I was enlisted into National Service. This is compulsory in Singapore for males. We are required to spend two years in National Service, and some of my peers were only allowed to go home once a week during the term. I felt it was a waste of an adult’s prime time in life – two years of boring training to fight a war that would probably n
ever eventuate. I spent the entire time in clerical duties, dreaming of leaving Singapore and vowing to go to Australia the minute I finished military service. I imagined Australia to be a place where I would make a new life for myself, drive a car like the other richer members of my community, find myself and live my dreams. In March 1993, at the age of twenty, with eighty dollars in my pocket and only three weeks after finishing National Service, I bid farewell to friends and family and set out to Sydney, Australia, vowing never to return.

  Oh, Sydney. I landed on the end of Dorothy’s rainbow, my ruby red slippers intact. In awe, I felt alive again. At first I did odd jobs, like working at my Aunt Sally’s two-dollar store in Randwick. I met, and dated for a while, a hot barman named Kendal who worked at the famous Albury Hotel, a drag bar institution on Oxford Street. I went to the gym five times a week and my skinny Asian-boy body transformed itself into a ripped muscle queen. The eightpack was hard to miss under the mirror ball. It was the ’90s – pumping iron, bulging chests and biceps were a big trend.

  Later, I did night classes in business management and applied to university. I wanted to do a degree in mass communications. As I eagerly awaited the response to my application, I took a part-time job as a sales assistant in Giorgio Armani’s flagship boutique in the city, fashion being my next biggest passion. I needed to fill in time that summer and making some extra money selling designer clothing was a good way. I was nearing twenty-three when my best friend Jason Potas and I, born on the same day and year, threw the biggest joint party ever, like a debutante’s arrival into society, at the famous DCM nightclub on Oxford Street – the place to be seen in those days. But to fill the club, we needed at least 500 people to attend. How to do this? I didn’t know but in the weeks leading up to the party, Potas and I printed invitation cards, pictures of us both semi-nude on the invitation’s front, and headed to Oxford Street and the clubs nightly – inviting and luring strangers, acquaintances and anyone we deemed remotely fitting to attend our party. Potas distributed invites to his university friends and I gave them to the entire staff of Giorgio Armani, promising everyone a night to remember. We rehearsed a major choreographed show and asked friends to participate, become dancers in fancy costumes, and debut the show on the night.