Inconceivable (7 page)

“Carolyn, I’m coming home.”

When Sean came through the door, I was out of bed and standing in the kitchen with my head in my hands. The concern on his face was tender, but I did not want his comfort. He didn’t deserve my rage, and he couldn’t help me in my sorrow. Mary Kate deserved a buddy, just like Drew and Ryan had in each other, and I wouldn’t be able to give her that, not with the baby that was inside me or any other to come. There would be no more to come. Sean tried to hug me, but I pulled away suddenly.

“This is my last pregnancy. After my third C-section with this baby and my history, the doctors are going to say, this is it.”

“We will need to speak to the doctors about this.”

“The other family is going to get a baby out of this, and we may never get a chance again.”

I could see from the look on Sean’s face that he had not yet connected the dots between the mix-up and the end of our chance for another child of our own. He was the consummate planner, someone who could project possible outcomes six, nine, twelve months ahead. Yet each day this pregnancy revealed a new problem. How many dimensions did this crisis have? His arms were still open, still holding the space where he had tried to hug me. I saw his eyes drifting over to his BlackBerry, which was flashing with calls from his office.

“You should go back to the office, Sean. There is nothing you can do for me here,” I said.

“I don’t want to leave you,” Sean replied.

“There is nothing you can do to help me!” I said. “Just go.”

God love Sean. I know I do. His reaction to me rejecting him and sending him off to work was to find us a therapist. He was right that we were going to have a difficult time dealing with the emotions as they arose. There was no map for this experience, not as there was for a family crisis like a death or an illness. He remembered a therapist named Kevin Anderson whose articles he’d seen in
The Catholic Chronicle
and whose spiritual take on marital challenges he had liked. I’d heard Kevin Anderson speak before. I remembered him as a peaceful, soft-spoken man with a Zen-like quality. He seemed like a perfect fit, as I needed some Zen in my life right about then.

MK had thrown up Wednesday night, but by Friday morning she seemed on the mend. Our appointment with Kevin Anderson was at noon, and I had no choice but to bring her along. I packed her diaper bag, strapped her in her car seat, and made the twenty-minute drive to the church where Kevin had his office.

I toted MK in her car seat into the lobby near his office door. When I lifted her out of her carrier, I noticed she was wet. On closer inspection, I realized the source of her wetness: a total diaper blowout. My precious baby girl was completely covered. Luckily, I had a spare outfit in her diaper bag. I went around a corner, laid her on her changing pad, and began to undress her. As I got her clothes off, the extent of the mess became abhorrently apparent. I started to sweat—five minutes to the appointment—as I realized that I didn’t have enough wipes to thoroughly clean her. Just then, Sean came through the door and around the corner.

“Holy s—!”

“Literally!”

I sent him to find some paper towels as I continued to wipe MK down, hoping and praying that Dr. Anderson would be running late. No such luck. I heard his office door open. I’m sure the stench hit him before he even realized we were hiding behind a corner changing the most heinous diaper in the history of mankind. I heard
his footsteps approaching, and I wanted to disappear. He rounded the corner as I looked up. “Sean, Carolyn?”

“Hi, Dr. Anderson. Nice to meet you!” was all I could say as I tried to remove MK’s blowout from her hair. “I’m so sorry. We seem to have had a diaper emergency.” I could feel my cheeks burning.

“Oh, man. Been there, done that. I have five kids. No worries.” He smiled, got me a garbage bag, and showed me where the bathroom was.

Kevin was a tall man with broad shoulders, and his size could have been somewhat intimidating if it hadn’t been for the sweetness of his demeanor. He had a full head of brown hair that blended seamlessly with his full beard and mustache. A serene and open spirituality was reflected in his bright blue eyes, which seemed to shine with a deep inner compassion for all living things. I could sense this even if I couldn’t focus on the specifics of the conversation he was having with Sean. I confess I don’t remember much of that appointment.

While Sean brought Kevin up to speed, I became transfixed by a poster he had on the wall facing me in the office. It was an M. C. Escher drawing of fish and birds, with the dark shapes of the fish at the bottom level gradually becoming lighter and thinner as the same silhouette transformed into the outline of birds in flight at the top layers. That was us right now. Sean and I were the fish in the dark at the bottom. This man was as gentle as I remembered him being when I heard him talk, and his voice was so soothing. I hoped he would be able to help us shed our scales and fly away from this darkness.

We left feeling relieved. We had someone to help us. Sometimes I look back on that moment when he rounded the corner and laid eyes on us for the first time, while I was up to my elbows in…well…shit, and think that it was fitting. We would have a lot more of that to dig out of by the time this mess was over.

By Friday night Mary Kate was so dehydrated that the doctors
admitted her to the hospital. (Our cup runneth over.) In the hospital, she lay in a crib as Sean and I looked in. For a period of time our focus was solely on her, and that, oddly enough, gave us a slight reprieve from our grief.

Late that night, after Mary Kate went to sleep, Sean and I sat back in the hospital chairs and looked at each other. How could one week have been filled with so much? We held hands. Then we agreed that Sean would go home to tend to the boys while I stayed at the hospital. As Sean hugged me good-bye before starting home, he asked the one simple question both of us were thinking: “What is next?”

C
HAPTER
5

Heartbeat

CAROLYN

M
ARY
K
ATE HAD BEEN
just under three pounds when she was born, and she has always been tiny for her age. She’s a good sleeper, though, and slept through the night from the time she was only a few months old. Most moms would have been thrilled by that and would have left her undisturbed. Yet I always gave her a bottle before I went to bed because I believed she needed the extra calories. This was even more important after she lost so much weight during her illness.

As I sat in the rocking chair with her in my arms that first Saturday night after we found out I was pregnant, I held her tightly. MK, our miracle baby, getting stronger and bigger every day. I thought about how much I loved her.

Those snuggles and cuddles were the moments that I cherished, the reward for pregnancy and childbirth. I knew I would never get a moment like this with the baby I was carrying. It was then that I realized tears were streaming steadily down my face, darkening the front of my robe. In the days since the news, I’d had plenty of practice crying quietly in my bed or with my eyes shielded by sunglasses as I drove about town on errands. I didn’t want to disturb the world
with my tears or to invite any questions. I couldn’t ask anyone but Sean for comfort, and he too was overwhelmed. Plus, he’d fallen ill with the same virus MK and I had. All of us were weak and tired, but only two of us knew I held the source of our stress.

We’d known about this mess for only a week, and I was already getting sick of lawyers. I respected them, and I understood that they were necessary and that we were getting prudent advice, but the way this was all shaved and sorted seemed wrong. The language they used to discuss what we were doing was so cold. Mary told us that we had no legal claim to the child that was growing inside me. But my heart had a claim. This baby could not survive without me, but judges had ruled repeatedly that my contribution to this life was irrelevant. How could that be? There would be no baby without me.
I’m not just an oven. I am not nothing to this child. Right?

The next day, when the boys were at school and MK was playing quietly at my feet, I began researching the question online, trying to find just one legal scholar who backed up what my heart felt. I pored over laws and rulings. It seemed that, in most states, a birth mother is the biological mother. But if challenged on the grounds of genetics, DNA wins. I grew more and more upset, reading opinion after opinion that said I was indeed nothing to this child. I was an incubator, an oven. My feelings, my family, were meaningless. It wasn’t that I was hoping to find an excuse to stake a claim to the baby. But I desperately wanted to read something that said I mattered.

Finally, I found some essays written by a Cornell law professor about our very predicament. Her opinion was the only one that recognized the value of my contribution to this life.

I didn’t know whether to feel vindicated or abused. In fact, I felt both. There would be moments when I felt sweet pride at being the steward of a life. Then, in an instant, I would be slapped by the knowledge that my act of generosity was seen by the official world as irrelevant. My life mattered not at all, while at the same time this baby could not have a life without mine.

The next thing I knew, consumed with anger, I called Sean. Before he could get a word out, I started in.

“I can’t do this. I don’t want to give this gift. Why can’t they give the gift? Why do we have to sacrifice? Why can’t they sacrifice?”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“I don’t think I can go through with this. This is too much for me. Why can’t the other family allow us to keep the baby?”

“Look, I’m coming home,” Sean said.

“Don’t. Stay at work. Coming home won’t help,” I said.

“I know this is so hard, but we will get through it together,” Sean said.

I didn’t know how I would get through this day, let alone the next eight months.

“I looked at all these opinions, all these different papers on the subject, and there is only one that says I matter,” I continued.

“Carolyn, what does that matter, really? Our situation is unique.”

“Yes, unique. That’s a great word! Great! That doesn’t mean that they can’t use all these laws and decisions on me.”

I must have sounded like a lunatic because Sean was speechless. I waited for a response from him, but there was only silence.

“Forget I called. Just forget it.” And I hung up. I felt stupid for having a tantrum over the phone. I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish, and in the end I think I just stressed Sean further.

As my emotions continued to flare, practical care was moving forward. That next day Dr. Read ordered an ultrasound much earlier than would have been done under normal conditions: exactly three weeks after the transfer. She wanted to know how many babies I was carrying. My blood work suggested a multiple pregnancy. We were scared to death that I was carrying triplets.

In the more than ten years I’d struggled with fertility, I’d spent a lot of time with Dr. Read’s sonographer, Linda, who is a mini-celebrity among the doctor’s patients. Whenever friends heard that Dr. Read was my obstetrician, they always commented, “Don’t you
love Linda?” The lights in her ultrasound room were dimmed, but she had decorated it with Christmas lights and a cheerful bulletin board tacked with pictures of babies from appreciative parents. Linda had an ease about her that made everyone smile. You couldn’t help but greet her with a big hug, even if you knew when you entered her room that you might be facing bad news. Petite, graying, and fit, Linda was quick on her toes and had a witty sense of humor. Sometimes, when I’d fire rapid questions at her during an ultrasound, she would tell me, “Cool it, kiddo.”

I held my breath while her internal ultrasound wand searched for evidence of the baby or babies. This ultrasound was so early, we knew there would be no heartbeat, only a gestational sac and a yolk. There were both, and only one of each. She searched my tubes to make sure there were no ectopics, and then we were finished. She printed a picture, handed it to me, and admitted that she didn’t know what to say.

I grabbed the ultrasound image of the little one, and wondered,
Who are you?

A few days later, Ryan was home sick, down with the bug that was traveling through our family. He was in the basement curled up with a blanket in front of the television. MK was getting whiny and needed a nap. I had just put her on the changing table and removed her diaper when I felt what I feared was a huge gush of blood. I instinctively crossed my legs and bent forward.

I got MK dressed quickly and laid her down haphazardly on the family room floor. I shuffled to the bathroom for some privacy, praying that I was wrong, but my worst fears were confirmed. I was bleeding.

“Damn. We hadn’t even seen a heartbeat!”

I screamed for Ryan. He didn’t respond at first, so I screamed louder. I think I scared him. He came flying up from the basement, and I asked for the phone so I could call Sean. Through the bathroom door, I directed him to pick MK up and put her up in
her crib for her nap. I called Sean, whispering so that Ryan didn’t hear me.

“I’m bleeding.”

“What?”

“I’m bleeding. You need to come home.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Afraid to move, I called Dr. Read from the bathroom. She told me to come in for another ultrasound.

I cleaned myself up as best I could and hobbled up the stairs to change my clothes. Once dressed, I lay down on the bed and waited. I feared I was losing someone else’s baby. How would we explain this to the other family? They would blame me for this. Oh…and my fertility clinic. They’d be ecstatic. The loss of this baby would be a bullet dodged for them. My stomach flipped over with a wave of nausea. I didn’t want to vomit, because I thought that would make me bleed more, so I willed it away.

I heard Sean come in through the door to the garage.
The force of raising my voice might hurt the baby
, I thought, so I lay quietly until he found me.