Mommy Man (11 page)

Drew nodded. “Half Asian babies are gorgeous, aren’t they?”

Kristen was very active in the surrogate community. She was a fixture on message boards, frequently offering advice to “the other girls.” That morning, she’d logged on, and all her surrogate friends had sent her encouraging messages for this meeting. She stressed to us how she couldn’t wait to be pregnant again. She was hoping to get started right away.

“That’s so sweet,” we told her.

It turned out there was a special reason for her rush. “Only got two more years ’fore I’m too old, and I wanna have two more babies.” We hadn’t realized it until then, but Rainbow Extensions had an upper age limit for surrogates. Once you turned thirty-eight, you were forced into retirement. Kristen’s surrological clock was ticking.

We tried to include Paco in the conversation, but for the most part, Kristen answered his questions for him. Drew would say something like, “How do you like your job, Paco?” Paco would shrug and grunt, then nod his head toward Kristen. She’d swallow whatever was in her mouth and say, “Pays the bills.” It became clear that this wasn’t some act Paco was putting on to intimidate us. He was extremely shy and awkward, and he believed fully in Kristen’s ability to handle the conversation for both of them. Paco was like the me of their relationship.

I could picture us taking a kind of secondary family portrait that included them so that our kid would always know how he or she came into the world. We’d do it every year on their birthday, when Kristen’s kids would mingle with ours in a bounce house in our backyard. By year three, Paco might even put his arm around us.

We were getting ready to pay the bill, when Kristen asked the only question she had for us. “What’s your egg donor like?”

Drew and I glanced at each other nervously.

“We’re still finalizing our decision,” I said, diplomatically.

Kristen seemed concerned. “Ya don’t have a donor?”

“It’s the agency’s fault,” I assured her. “They told us we didn’t need one until after we found a surrogate.”

“They only gave us access to their database a week ago,” Drew added.

Kristen leaned in and lowered her voice. “Don’t tell anyone I said this,” she whispered, gazing over her shoulder as if someone might be listening in. “But you gotta watch ’em.”

“Who?”

“Rainbow. Watch ’em close. Watch ’em real close.”

It was serious and a little chilling, like we were in a bad spy movie. What was she talking about?

“Let’s say they got a habit of double billin’ ya for stuff.”

“Did they do that?”

“I’m just sayin’, check yer invoices. I don’t think they do it on purpose. They’re just kinda . . .”

Drew nodded. “Total fucking morons?”

“HA, HA, HA!” We all glanced over at Paco, who was actually laughing. Loudly. Oh, Paco. I knew we’d break through.

Drew turned back to Kristen. “I feel like I can really trust you,” he said. “So I’m going to tell you something we haven’t told the agency yet. We’re thinking about asking my sister to be the egg donor.”

I didn’t know if Drew was serious or just stalling. I thought we had taken Susie off the table.

“We just need a week or two,” I assured Kristen. “We’ll have it all sorted out.”

Kristen nodded and slurped the last of her iced tea.

9

More Than an Aunt, Less Than a Mom

“F
uck Kristin Lander!
Fuck her and fuck her husband and fuck her fucking womb!”

Drew was on the phone with his mom.

“You know what she is?” he shouted. “A piece of trash!”

Kristen dumped us.

It was Monday morning, and Maxwell had just dropped the bomb. The Womb of Steel had spent the weekend on the surrogate message boards, and all her cyber friends told us that Drew and I were IP poison. Their concern was the same as hers: our lack of an egg donor. They warned Kristen that we could keep her uterus locked in limbo for six months or more while we flailed about for our personal vision of perfection. If she moved forward with us, she could forget about her goal of getting pregnant two more times before she turned thirty-eight.

All of that we could understand. But what really upset Drew was that Kristen had betrayed our confidence.

“She said something about one of your sisters possibly being an egg donor?” Maxwell asked.

Drew snarled. “I told her that was private information!”

“Well, if you could lock her in fast, you might get Kristen to reconsider.”

When we got off the phone, I delicately raised the topic. “Should we think about asking Susie? We don’t want to lose Kristen.”

Drew was furious. “I wouldn’t let her have a baby for us if she paid us a hundred million dollars!”

It was an odd choice of words, given that Kristen had just turned us down on terms that were considerably more favorable to her. But I got it. Drew had already moved on from denial to rage. It was time for me to join in the fun of the Kristen Pile-On.

Drew: “I’m going to tell Rainbow Extensions she’s been trash talking them.”

Me: “Yeah, and tell them to stop double billing!”

Drew: “Can you imagine having to break it to our kid someday that he came out of that wench? She’s disgusting.”

Me: “What does Paco see in her?”

Drew: “Did you notice they didn’t even offer to chip in for lunch? I mean, of course, we were going to pay, but they could’ve offered.”

Me: “They didn’t even say thank you.”

Drew: “They’re assholes.”

Me: “They’re rude!”

Drew: “I’m sending her a bill! I want that $40 back!”

“I want those chocolates back!” I shouted. “Those were an anniversary gift from Mindy!”

Drew’s mom took the news pretty hard. Well, not as hard as Drew.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” he screamed into the phone. “I love you, Mom.” And he hung up.

Less than a minute later, his phone rang again.

“Hello?”

“You know you can have my eggs if you want them, right?”

“What?”

It was Susie. “I said you can have my eggs if you want them.”

It was that swift, that casual. Something we’d quietly debated for months she blurted out in an instant. “You can have my eggs if you want them,” as if she were offering to loan us her hair dryer or Ani DiFranco CDs rather than a part of her womanhood.

“I have to go. I’ll call you later.” Drew hung up, stunned.

Only a few minutes later, an email arrived. “I was serious about supplying eggs,” Susie wrote. “And it would be a matter of me handing the eggs over and washing my hands of the situation. And if for some reason the kid turns out unattractive, we could blame that cunty egg donor that nobody knows.”

Among the many things Susie shared with her older brother was a tremendously foul mouth.

Her offer changed everything. Our fear was that if we asked her, she would have felt pressured to say “Yes.” Now she was kicking off the conversation with “Yes.”

We were equal parts excited and terrified. Was this really in Susie’s best interest? Thankfully, we knew one person who could help us sort this out, someone who had counseled egg donors before, who knew all the issues that might arise and could help talk Susie and us through this enormous decision. We made an appointment with Mindy, and within minutes, Susie had booked her plane ticket.

“You’re fuckin’ with me!”

This was yet another Tappon, Drew’s brother Peter. We had him on speakerphone so we could share the good news.

“No, seriously, Susie’s going to donate her eggs,” Drew explained. “Jerry would obviously donate his sperm, so the kid will be a bit Tappon and a bit Mahoney. It’s kind of exciting.”

“You’re fuckin’ with me!”

We realized Peter wasn’t being playful. Drew took the call off speaker.

“Peter, I’m serious. Susie offered us her eggs, and we said yes.”

“You can’t do that!” Peter shouted. “That’s fucked up! Seriously. Fucked! Up!”

Drew ended the call, shaken. His little brother’s opinion meant a lot to him.

The Tappons were an unusual family, to be sure. Drew was gay. His younger brother Matt was gay. Susie was a free-spirited college dropout. Peter was the straight man, in every sense. A good, hardworking heterosexual and a productive member of the community, he was the white sheep of the family.

Peter knew a lot about families. He was a social worker in Philadelphia. When he explained his job, you could see the pride he felt. He was one of the good guys. The government would come in and take kids away from their parents. His agency helped the parents get their shit together so they could resume custody, under the philosophy that the best place for a kid was with his own family. Peter had dedicated his life to helping families stay together.

Now he was telling us that our hypothetical kid deserved better than we were offering.

It certainly didn’t come from homophobia. Peter had earned his cred all through adolescence, when he was constantly forced to defend his gay brothers to his tough-guy buddies. He was fully behind us becoming dads, and he was excited to be an uncle. But our plan to use Susie’s eggs struck him as incestuous and weird. I’d never heard him this worked up before.

If Drew’s own brother felt this way, surely strangers would, too. Our family was going to be unusual enough with two dads, and now we were heaping on an extra helping of odd. It’s like if the Addams Family also did Civil War reenactments. You’d want someone to step in and tell them they were overdoing it in the creepy department.

Would everyone we met secretly be thinking, “That’s fucked up”? Would people look at our kid with pity, or derision? “You aunt’s your mom, huh? Sucks to be you!” Would our own kid resent us for the choices that led to his birth? Would she feel like an outcast forever?

We’d allowed ourselves to get so excited. Now we were having major doubts again, and Susie was on her way to see us.

Whenever Susie would visit, it was like summer vacation from school plus Christmas multiplied by puppies to the power of Disneyland. It was easily the thing Drew and I looked forward to the most all year—and we usually only got one Susie visit a year, so we did our best to cram 365 days of bonding into a week or so. Drew would take time off work. We’d play Wii and go shopping and see Harry Potter movies with large popcorns and extra, extra large drinks. We’d go to all our favorite restaurants, show Susie off to all our closest friends. Drew was never happier than when he was with his little sis.

We were determined to make this just like any other Susie visit, but Rainbow Extensions had their own plans. They set up a meeting to put Susie through their standard screening procedures. While she was there, they subjected her to a battery of psychological exams—even, against our wishes, an IQ test. They gave her a contract to sign, which said, in legalese, about a hundred different ways, that she would have no rights over any fetus created from her donated eggs. She couldn’t come anywhere near the baby without our express permission. The language was far harsher than anything we would have allowed if they had shown it to us first, but Susie signed it.

Things went smoother at Westside Fertility. We were eager for Susie to meet the head physician, a jovial middle-aged man named Dr. Saroyan, whom we’d grown especially fond of. We admired his honesty and his expertise. Drew and I waited while he gave Susie an ultrasound, and then he sat the three of us down to share the results.

“Your ovaries are perfect,” he began. “You have beautiful, beautiful follicles. You are perfectly ready to make babies, but are you sure you want to do it for these guys?”

One other thing we loved about Dr. Saroyan was his dickish sense of humor.

“I mean, you could do a lot better than them,” he went on.

“Yeah, but he’s my brother,” Susie played along. “I kind of have to.”

With a plaster replica of the female reproductive system and a tiny wand, Dr. S explained to Susie exactly what she was signing up for. Every month, a fertile woman produces dozens of eggs from her follicles. Typically, only one of these eggs will become viable. All these budding eggs duke it out, until one becomes so dominant that it absorbs all the others. That egg gets sent to the uterus for possible fertilization. This was sounding less like what I’d learned in high school health class and more like an ovarian cage match.

In vitro intervened at the point in the process before any one egg could be crowned champion. All the egglings were nurtured and allowed to grow to the point of viability. Typically, Dr. Saroyan would harvest upwards of thirty eggs from a single cycle. Then we’d stir in my 107 million sperm and hope to get a dozen or so fertilized embryos. Of those, we’d take the healthiest one or two and transfer them to our surrogate.

To get all those eggs, Susie would have to take hormones. A lot of them. And they had to be injected. By her. In her butt. The side effects could include nausea, abdominal pain, and general moodiness.

“How bad are the injections?” I asked.

“I’ve never had anyone drop out because of the drugs,” Dr. S assured. “But it’s a pain in the ass.”

Susie only had one question herself: “When do we start?”

Dr. S smiled, then he leaned in for a rare moment of seriousness. “What you’re doing for your brother is a beautiful thing, Susan, and you are a clearly very special person. I’m going to take good care of you.”

While Susie was at the fertility clinic, a nurse took a blood sample to test for genetic diseases. The only hurdle left was making sure Susie and I weren’t predisposed to any of the same horrendous maladies.

Well, there was one other hurdle, too—Mindy.

“So what do you expect out of this arrangement?”

Susie shifted in her seat across from Mindy. “I just want to make my brothers happy.”

I was kind of hoping when Mindy met Susie that she’d jump up and shout, “She’s awesome!” like she did with us, but clearly, it wasn’t going to be that easy, even if Susie was prepped for all the standard questions. She’d talked so much about donating her eggs this week that she stayed composed and confident through even the toughest queries.

“It’ll be their kid, not mine.”

“I’m not ready to have a kid. But I’m ready to be an aunt.”

“Because I love them. They’re my brothers.”

Susie aced the interrogation, but Mindy was suspicious. She started digging deeper.

“Why is it you never learned to drive?”

“I guess I just don’t want to grow up,” Susie confessed.

“Really? Because this is a very grown-up thing you’re doing for Drew and Jerry.”

Pretty soon after that, the Kleenex came out. We talked about Jack a little, but mostly we talked about Susie. Her life and her dreams. Her pride and her sadness. Her desires and her demons. I was so impressed with how she handled herself—and so nervous about the decision we were making.

Mindy had the right idea. If we wanted to be sure Susie was doing the right thing, we had to play hardball.

“We’re going to need boundaries,” I said, “and we should talk about them. Susie will be more than an aunt but less than a mom. I love you, Susie, but if we have this kid, you’re going to have to watch us make a lot of mistakes and know that you don’t get a say in it. We’ll decide where he goes to school, what she wears, whether we circumcise, how to discipline, what to buy them for Christmas, all the billion decisions parents have to make. And you’re not going to like everything we do. We’ll probably screw this kid up a million different ways, but they’ll be our million ways.”

All I wanted was for Mindy to give us her thumbs-up, but as the clock ticked away and our session came to an end, she conspicuously avoided saying “yes.” She didn’t say “no,” either, which was just as frustrating.

What she said was that it would be complicated. Forever. We were entering into a gray area. Like Rainbow Extensions had told us, we were pioneers. Sometimes, pioneers got lost.

On our way home from the appointment, we were more confused than ever. That’s when Peter called—for Susie. They talked for a long time. He asked her questions even tougher than the ones Mindy had asked. He knew just what to say because he knew Susie so well. She cried some more. And gradually, Peter came to understand. He’d grown up in an unusual family himself, and he loved them all dearly. He would get used to our unusual family, too.

Peter let Drew know that his opinion had changed. “I think what you’re doing is pretty cool,” he said. “I’m really happy for all of you.”

I realized that other people might share Peter’s initial response. There would always be strangers who would think we were a bit fucked up. But that didn’t mean we shouldn’t proceed. It just meant we’d have to educate people, to show them what a functional family we had and demonstrate that our family, like any other, was built out of love.

For Susie, nothing had changed. She had made up her mind, and she was going to help her brothers. Drew and I decided we were ready as well. We were going to make a baby with Susie.

It was time to hitch up the wagon and head into uncharted territory.