“We are going to be parents.”
At last, our dream is living. When we settle slightly, we make some calls. First stop, Rebecca, and then we ring our parents, several other family members and close friends. We are only in the earliest stage of pregnancy, so we must confine the news to only a handful of people.
“It is sensible not to be jumping the gun,” Mum says, because the first trimester is a risky time.
“Anything can happen,” she stresses to me over the phone.
I didn’t know sharing the news would be such a challenge. I mean, who do you tell? When I told relatives back home we were planning to have a baby, I got numerous unwanted responses. A few gave me looks as if to say, “I am so lost”, and “But you’re both men.” Did this mean I’d have to explain the whole damn thing about how it is done all over again?
My family in Singapore, with an Asian mentality, even the ones who have come to terms with my sexuality, still prefer us to be discreet about it. “Sweep it under the carpet” is the general attitude.
Later, with great satire, I tell some silly relative we are expecting. I do this while rubbing my belly and I watch with curiosity her uncalculated response. It is for my own amusement because, knowing she had issues with my relationship, I am dying to see her reaction to my baby news. She stares at my stomach throughout the day in complete confusion, poor thing, trying to work out where this baby is growing inside me.
“See what I mean? Look what I am dealing with here,” are my cousin Raphael’s famous words about his mother. When he told her he was gay “like Aaron”, she asked him if he would be wearing women’s clothes from now on. Poor Aunt Rachel had no time to save face and became the subject of snicker and murmurs when she went to the synagogue.
We want discretion, worried that if news leaks to the Australian press, the issue will haunt us throughout our pregnancy. Past experiences of the power of the media still haunt me. I can’t help it; I am paranoid. We are newsworthy, that I realise.
“Leading Australian designer and his long-term partner pregnant.”
“Surrogate baby in Thailand for designer and partner.”
I ruminate about possible newspaper headlines. My imagination never ceases to run wild. After discussing with Jayson, we agree that we may have broken the news to one too many.
“You have a big mouth. I told you to keep your mouth shut,” he says.
“But I only told six people and they have been sworn to secrecy,” I reply boldly.
These six people I have tortured and tortured about the superiority of being one of six who know, apart from our immediate families.
“If news gets out, you will personally be held accountable,” I tell them of the responsibility they wish I’d never granted them.
But keeping the news to ourselves isn’t fun. Limiting it to a handful of people in our closely knit circle of friends is boring. We are overjoyed, like all parents-to-be are. We want to share it with the world. We assure ourselves our friends aren’t the kind of people that would indulge in idle gossip, especially when it concerns us.
“Keep your mouth shut and tell no one,” my mum always says. “Because if you tell one person, expect ten more to know. This one will tell his best friend and his best friend will tell someone else, and it spreads. Before you know it, the world will come to know about it,” she affirms like a cautioning Jewish mum.
We do the maths and because we told 15 people, by the end of the week roughly about 150 people know. By the end of the month, people are coming out of the woodwork asking for confirmation of our expectancy. Every time Jayson and I go to a work function or an event, someone asks questions about the current state of play. Some people are discreet and tactful in broaching the subject while others tactlessly ask outright. My two all-time favourites are from acquaintances I had not seen in years, and one corners me in a shopping mall.
“You know, a friend of mine said she saw you from a distance at Babies R Us last week. What were you doing there?”
“Shopping for my godchildren,” I say, adding “idiot” under my breath.
The second, while looking serious, asks me, “I hear a Jayson Brunsdon babywear line is on the way with Myer. Is this true?”
“No, you got it wrong, darling. It’s designer petwear, for animal lovers. Canine dresses made out of silk charmeuse. The European designers are storming the market with the concept.” Not the pet lover am I. We laugh about it later.
I am always guarding myself from the gossiper, never confirming the secret they seem to think they know. At a Myer racing event, Myer Ambassador and former Miss Universe Jennifer Hawkins ventures a question. The list goes on and on. But if the person is close (like Jennifer), Jayson and I take the time to explain to them what we are doing. I ask, in return, for the assurance of our privacy. Most people are obliging. As Mum said, the news of our pregnancy spreads and it is not long before it lands in the ears of Mr X, one of Australia’s top and most infamous gossip columnists.
On a Monday morning in June, Jayson receives a call from the columnist. One should shiver when he rings – guaranteed anything revealed would end up in one of Australia’s most read tabloid columns.
“Jayson, I hear the stork has come,” he says heartily, with a chuckle that sounds like a camp hyena.
“Really? Where did you get that from, because it’s not true.” A not fully candid response, hoping to avoid further questions.
“That’s odd because a really close friend of yours told me that Aaron and you are expecting and that Aaron’s sister is carrying the baby,” he says, repeating the half-factual news.
“That’s news to me, because Aaron and his sister are estranged.” There is truth in that.
If he had mentioned the surrogate in Thailand, Jayson’s answer would have been different. Fortunately, Jayson’s years of experience with the press have given him an advantage, and he has learned diplomacy in dealing with them. The columnist, we thought, must have received the news from a public relations agent. No names mentioned, but this was our person of interest. It’s not uncommon for some PR heads to do deals with columnists, especially gossip columnists, to spare their own clients by feeding them with news about someone else. It is a barter trade and barter was feeding us to him.
He has nothing to work with and with no viable comment from Jayson, he can’t pursue the story.
That weekend morning we get up early to see if he has attempted the story, but to our relief there is nothing. The column is dominated by the story of Australian fashion designer Jodhi Meares, the former Mrs Packer, overturning her car and consequently facing a drink-driving charge.
The experience with him teaches us a great deal. “Trust no one!”
From that minute on, we are selective with our news. There is always one big blabber mouth out there who will let the cat out of the bag and “break your chutzpah”, as we say. Chutzpah, in Yiddish, means the quality of audacity.
21
Prenatal Depression
Throughout the whole process, every parent we know keeps telling us the same old things:
“It is going to be difficult.”
“A big change in life.”
“Look out!”
“No more freedom.”
The comments bore me to tears, like a broken record that frustrates us to a point of no return. We are warned countless times of the struggles ahead. Like sleepless nights and being confined to your home.
“There will be no more holidays alone!” my masseur Ros says.
“Everything you did before will change from the minute your baby arrives.” My florist also has his piece.
Many have a negative slant and though many others are positive, there are always buts.
“But it is a big step you’re taking.”
“But you will find it hard to manage.”
“Now it is exciting. But just you wait till it comes.”
No one prepared us for the term of the pregnancy itself. The ups and downs. The daily worry
, the anxious waits for the clinic’s monthly reports. Eager to know the baby’s heartbeat still exists with every report. My anxiety levels go haywire, not knowing how my surrogate is handling her pregnancy. The distance between us adds to the unwanted stress. The worries are countless and my anxiety levels soar to new heights faster than a speeding bullet.
Worst of all, the grief from the death of our close friend and matchmaker Charlotte Dawson a few months ago has finally hit me. I have not come to terms with her death. After suffering a long battle with depression, she had committed suicide by hanging herself in her living room a week before Mardi Gras. I was deeply crushed and words alone will never express the sadness that clouded my world for weeks. I was having lunch with Esther when Jayson rang to tell me the awful news he had just heard on TV. I broke down in tears at the table.
“Not Charlotte, of all people. She didn’t need to die,” I cried to Esther who consoled me.
I had left lunch to go home so I could be with Jayson and our close friends, many of them Charlotte’s friends too. I was very sad for weeks and I regretted having made no time for Charlotte except for the few times I saw her at our fashion shows. Suicide of any kind, and especially when a friend takes her own life, leaves feelings of deep remorse and regret. Memories came flooding back of when I lost my first boyfriend Kendal (the hunky barman) through suicide. I refrained for many years to talk about it because it happened after we broke up and I felt responsible in some ways for what he did. I only wished I could have stopped him. He had stabbed himself in the heart with a kitchen knife and bled to death in the bathtub (symbolic, the death, like the painting “The Death of Marat”). My world came tumbling down and the grief that struck me was incomparable. I remembered Charlotte saying to me at the time, “It’s his choice. He did it because he wanted to be in a peaceful place.” She stood by my side and for weeks would ring to check on me.
With Charlotte, I felt responsible for not being there for my friend when she was going through the dark times. I was so over-consumed with my own shit, I didn’t make any room for her. Had I known or been there for her, like she was for me many times, maybe she would have altered her decision. Losing Charlotte was like losing a big part of our lives, which are embedded with memories; our relationship’s DNA was locked in with her. We lost the memories we hadn’t yet made of our Charlotte who, on April Fools’ Day, introduced us both to each other.
For days and weeks, stories of Charlotte appeared everywhere, in magazines and newspapers across the country – constant reminders to us both that our dear friend was gone. She went out with a BANG. There would never be another time I could hold her and tell her how much I love her. Charlotte is at peace now. Her death and departure from our lives sends me spiralling down a tunnel of deep depression months later. I guess it is a delayed emotional response to having to face the fact that my friend is never coming back.
I am grief-stricken. One minute, on top of the world with a pregnancy, the next a dark hole, heading for a foreign breakdown. I enter into a depression. The reason given is “antenatal depression”, commonly diagnosed in expecting mothers but also affects one in ten fathers pre-birth. I add to the statistics. I have in the past (when young) struggled with depression. I am a higher risk now that I am about to take on the new lifetime role of fatherhood. The uncertain times and Charlotte’s death make me more susceptible. I am grieving for my friend.
Suddenly low and sad, irritable most of the time, I withdraw from life. I am not handling things and wake up crying like a baby. I don’t want to go out or see my friends, but exclude and shut myself off from everyone in my life, including my family, and especially Jayson and Rebecca. I eat less and lose 5 kilos in two weeks. Getting out of bed is difficult. I hate work and find any excuse in the book not to go into the office. My body has shut down, experiencing enough drama in the last few months to last me a lifetime.
“I am not that kind of person in general,” I explain to Rebecca.
“No you aren’t, quite the difference to how you normally are.”
I struggle daily with paranoid feelings and worry about trivial things around my ability to be a good parent. Bad memories, like my traumatic childhood abuse, resurface. I constantly wonder how I’ll protect my child from such evilness. I would want to kill the perpetrator with my own hands if it was my own child who suffered.
Two weeks pass and the problem lingers.
“Take him to see a doctor,” Rebecca urges.
Jayson forces me to go and reluctantly I see Dr Dick, who has been treating me for over fifteen years and with whom I have a very open relationship. I always feel free to discuss my problems and illnesses with him. He is the perfect apparatus to download my woes to.
At first, Dr Dick is shocked to see me.
“What is going on here? What’s troubling you?” He sees a different person that day. Not the normal happy chappie and bubbly-natured person he knows. Immediately, he diagnoses clinical depression, possibly triggered by the anticipation of becoming a parent. The truth is that reality hasn’t sunk in till now. Changes are moving rapidly beyond my control and the little me inside crashes.
“I don’t know how to cope,” I tell him. I am exasperated.
“There is a lot of getting used to with many parents-to-be. You have no guide books to prepare you for these early stages of pregnancy,” he says.
Our chances with the pregnancy are slim, with many setbacks along the way. It is hurdle after hurdle.
“Sounds like you have been under major stress dealing with the ups and downs of the process. You see, it’s like an emotional roller coaster and this can be quite taxing on anyone,” he says.
“I am also petrified of losing our baby. I imagine awful things happening like a miscarriage,” I say. I am feeling particularly vulnerable in the first trimester when everything is still up in the air.
Dr Dick refers me to a therapist immediately. He would rather I do that than start antidepressants. He wants to see how the sessions with the therapist pan out first.
I go to see Dr Clark, a therapist who specialises in the field. It takes a month of intense weekly therapy sessions and I bounce back again like a proud expecting father!
My bout with prenatal depression goes as swiftly as it came – and boy am I glad!
22
Trimesters
The one important thing we do is journal the details of our pregnancy in the first two trimesters. I ring Kay regularly to check on Porn and how she is handling the pregnancy. Our advanced technological world, with Skype, WhatsApp and Viber, gives us various ways to check regularly on our unborn baby.
It is important for me to know the norm at each stage of the pregnancy. I check references from Dr Pisit’s and Kay’s reports. “What is the current normal heartbeat?” “Why is Porn taking this medication?” I ask questions like these all the time.
Everything has an answer; we just have to know what it all means. I educate myself in the process and learn the medical terms. We make it a point to keep in contact with Dr Pisit. I scrutinise each one of his reports with a fine-tooth comb and we google the information. The answers we need are right in front of us.
“Our surrogate is so far away from us,” I lament.
I hate this distance. But the clinic is thorough with their frequent medical reports. Each report includes heartbeat graph analysis and blood test results, Porn’s weight and current overall health status, along with a picture of herself. It is interesting to watch how she grows in shape over the course of nine months, transformed in size and shifting in her appearance, which I think looks more motherly as the months progress.
“We want to know every single detail about our baby,” Jayson tells Dr Pisit, and from that day forth we become even more a part of everything.
Each time we receive a scan or an ultrasound report, I carefully scrutinise the details. I study the scans of the gamete, blurry images of our unformed baby, trying to spot any body organs. I familiarise myself with our baby’s progr
ess. I reach out to it in a telepathic way. I once read on the internet about how a biological mother communicated telepathically with her baby, who was being carried by a surrogate. She would rub her belly each time she saw the ultrasounds. This way she felt included. Although she didn’t carry the child, its composition and DNA were part of her anatomy, and she felt connected. She believed the baby was responding to her telepathically. It may sound ridiculous, but the act involved her in the pregnancy and offered her some form of consolation for the separation.
Jayson and I communicate through prayers. It is prayers that keep us sane each time anything goes slightly off the radar. Jayson goes to St Mary’s Cathedral, a stone’s throw away from our home, to light a candle. Every night I close my eyes and say a prayer. I pray for Porn and for my baby’s wellbeing. We aren’t religious but prayers offer a form of structure, which allow some peace of mind.
It works well for us. We are all about non-traditional. Our approach is to go with what works best for us.
7 WEEKS
“Look, it’s a graph showing heart rate,” I yell out to Jayson. “Can you see the tiny sac, the egg shape?” Jayson runs over to see.
“I think that is our baby or babies in there,” he replies.
I am guessing our tiny little gene is parked comfortably in the wall of Porn’s uterus. How many have been floating among her molecules in the last few weeks, I am unsure. We had been so consumed with excitement we had forgotten to ask how many we were expecting.
“We can’t see limbs or body parts yet.”
“Nah, way too early for that. It looks like a cocoon. It’s a little bigger now than the last scan,” Jayson agrees.
“We will probably see a stronger form next time.”
Dr Pisit has prescribed Poluton shots for Porn. I think it is meant to aid growth. He will see her again next week. I guess she has to see him every week in this trimester.
“How many babies do we have?” I ask Kay in an email.
“One baby, because there is only one sac,” she replies almost immediately.
Designer Baby Page 17
