Mommy Man (12 page)

10

What’s-Her-Womb

S
usie flew home.
It had been an emotionally raw week, full of tears, laughs, and the kind of squinty-eyed, staccato wheezing that’s hard to identify at first but that usually ends up being tears. We had discussed every aspect of Susie’s home life, her work life—and, with toe-curling awkwardness, her sex life. In meetings with doctors and shrinks, I learned everything I never wanted to know about Drew’s little sister and was terrified somebody might ask. I heard about her ovaries, her hormones, and the glorious womanly flow of her menstrual cycle, all the murky female potpourri being gay was supposed to exempt me from. I listened as the doctor described how he planned to retrieve the eggs by lubricating a rubberized wand and inserting it gently into her—okay, I couldn’t handle any more. This wasn’t how I’d expected making a baby would be. It was all so intimate.

Thankfully, we could put that behind us now and start imagining what our baby might look like. A little kid who was biologically related to both Drew and me. The possibilities fascinated me. Would she be tall like a Tappon or mousy like a Mahoney? Would he have Drew’s handsome brown eyes and warm smile or my cowlicks and swirling freckle patches? How would our unique features merge into one warbling little miracle?

Project Infant had evolved. For the first time, we could imagine having a kid with roots in both our family trees. We could hold up our own baby pictures and marvel at the resemblance. The feeling was overwhelming, a mixture of euphoria, curiosity, and more than a little narcissism. It was a feeling, we realized, that straight couples experience all the time.

Choosing our egg donor was a major step for sure, but thanks to Kristen Lander, we were still in a holding pattern. There was no way Susie could carry the baby for us. That was just too complicated, too emotional, and besides, she wasn’t interested in being knocked up. So we were back to womb hunting. The excitement of making our huge decision was muted by the reality that we were still missing a gigantic piece of the puzzle. Even with three adults ready to make a baby, we remained one short.

My mind wandered to Kristen. For all I knew, she regretted dumping us. Maybe she thought about us every day, stared at our application photos, and pined for our embryos, ever more convinced she’d passed up on her Messrs. Right.

The solution was obvious: crawl back to her in tears, a broken man begging for a second chance.

“But we’ve chaaaaaaanged!” I’d wail. “We have an egg donor now. C’mon, baby! It’ll be different this time!” Maybe I’d hold up a boom box on her front porch or rush to intercept her in an airport, something bold and psychotic like in a romantic comedy.

It could work. I knew it could. But just to make sure, I did what any snubbed ex would do: I cyber-stalked her. Using an assumed identity, I logged onto a surrogate message board that I knew Kristen frequented. Yes, it had come to that.

And there it was, at the top of the screen. An item titled “Finally matched!” Kristen bragged to her surro-friends that she’d found the world’s greatest IPs and was prepping for her embryo transfer.

It was too late. She’d moved on. If I was a spurned ex-boyfriend, then I had just read the love of my life’s wedding announcement.

Then came the worst part, Kristen’s sign-off: “I’m so excited to be working with guys that have their act together.” Aw, so she was still thinking about us.

Maxwell from Rainbow Extensions had more bad news. Susie’s blood tests were in, and it turned out she was a carrier for Tay-Sachs disease, a gruesome genetic affliction whose sufferers had a typical life expectancy of four. My blood would now be tested, and if I was also a carrier, that meant no baby with Susie.

Maxwell told me not to worry, that Tay-Sachs wasn’t common among people of Irish ancestry, like me. He actually seemed to know what he was talking about. He was thoughtful and empathetic. Maybe Rainbow Extensions finally got their act together.

Maxwell promised to call me with the test results in two weeks. When I didn’t hear from him, I started to worry.

“Rainbow Extensions. How may I direct your call?”

“Yes, can I speak to Maxwell please?”

“Who?”

“Maxwell.”

“Maxwell who?”

Oh, shit. Was this really happening again?

“Maxwell Denver, my caseworker. Is he there?”

“I’m sorry. He no longer works here.”

This couldn’t really be happening. For a moment, I wondered whether this entire episode of my life was a prank, someone’s elaborate revenge on me for Fu-Ling. Maybe Rainbow Extensions was an accounting firm my friends converted into a surrogacy agency during the boss’s lunch break. Maybe the actress portraying “Kristen Lander” had a hard time keeping a straight face during our “meeting.” Maybe I was being
Truman Show
’ed. It seemed more plausible than the next most likely theory, that Rainbow Extensions was run by the absolute dumbest people on Earth.

Eventually, I got someone on the phone who explained why Maxwell had left. It seems the upper management had finally realized that a shake-up was in order, so they were moving their corporate headquarters away from the L.A. office and asking all their caseworkers to relocate. And where had this gay surrogacy agency decided they could operate most efficiently?

Alabama.

Maxwell refused to move there, probably because he was gay himself and probably because it was insane. But that left me with a big question.

“So who’s our new caseworker?”

“You won’t be assigned a new caseworker until you’re matched with a surrogate. Until then, you’ll have the same caseworker.”

“But you just told me our caseworker is gone.”

“Well, you’re kind of in between stages, so I think you’re going to have to wait until you’re matched to be assigned somebody new.”

It was frustrating, but I’d almost forgotten the reason I called. “Can you tell me the results of my blood test? I need to know that I’m not a carrier for Tay-Sachs, or we’ll need a new egg donor.”

“I’m sorry. Only caseworkers are supposed to give out that kind of information.”

Yes, without a doubt, Rainbow Extensions was full of idiots. “I don’t have a caseworker!” I shouted.

“Well . . . I guess it’s okay.” She put me on hold for a minute. When she returned, her voice was grim.

“Mr. Mahoney. I have some bad news. You tested positive.”

“What? Are you serious?”

“I’m afraid so. You’re a carrier for cystic fibrosis.”

“What?”

“It’s very common among the Irish.”

“I wasn’t calling about cystic fibrosis.”

“It’s okay. As long as your egg donor doesn’t also carry it, you’re fine.”

“She doesn’t have that. She has Tay-Sachs!”

“Oh, well then you should get tested for that.”

“I did! That’s why I’m calling.”

“Oh. It must be negative or it would say here. I’ll have your caseworker look into it.”

I hung up the phone.

I didn’t hear much from Rainbow Extensions for the next couple of months. Not only were we in caseworker limbo, but we were three thousand miles and two time zones away from their new main office.

When we did manage to speak to someone, they assured us we were on the waiting list for both a surrogate and a caseworker and that an appropriate person would call us at an appropriate time. Until then, we should just go away.

So I decided I would go away.

To Iceland.

Everyone tells you when you’re having kids to do all the things you won’t be able to do once you’re up to your neck in bibs and butt cream: dine in nice restaurants, see movies, hit the beach in Cabo. So I made an inventory of goals I wanted to accomplish before becoming a dad, a baby bucket list. And at number 1 was Iceland.

A few years earlier, I had been looking for an exotic setting for a screenplay I was writing. The more I learned about Iceland, the more perfect it seemed, not just for my story but for me. It was a tiny, untamed nowhereland, only a small fraction of which was inhabitable. The rest was made up of mountains and glaciers, volcanoes and lava fields, geysers and waterfalls—one breathtaking freak show of nature after another. There were only three hundred thousand people in the entire country, yet they had their own language, currency, and culture. And all of it was positively adorable.

Icelanders socialize by soaking in outdoor pools heated naturally by red-hot magma, even in the chill of Arctic-adjacent winter. Everyone’s last name consists of their father’s first name along with the suffix “-’s son” or “-’s daughter.” If I had been born in Iceland, my name would have been Jerry Jerrysson. Instead of Santa Claus, Icelandic children believe in the Yuletide Lads, thirteen mischievous gremlins who traipse across the country each December perpetrating holiday shenanigans. They include Hurðaskellir, who gets his jollies slamming doors, and Bjúgnakrækir, who hides in the rafters of your house to steal smoked meats. And, cutest of all, a majority of the population believes in elves. Elves! After learning that, I wanted to pinch the entire country’s cheeks until its pudgy little face turned blue.

If none of that sounds the least bit interesting to you, then perhaps your name is Drew Tappon.

His ten gajillion Facebook friends would never know it, but my boyfriend is a closet agoraphobe who is truly comfortable only within ten feet of the living room couch. Three years earlier, I dragged him to London, and even that was too foreign for him. Money he didn’t recognize. Streets he couldn’t navigate. “Mind the gap” and “Way out” and “Cheers.” Aero bars. Shepherd’s Bush. Sir Cliff Richard. We spent the entire week looking for an IHOP. It is international, after all.

At least England could pretend they spoke the same language as we do. In Iceland, every word is required by law to be at least eighty-three letters long, with a minimum of four umlauts per syllable. For my boyfriend, it was an über-non-starter.

If not for the baby bucket list, I probably would have shrugged off the whole idea. But I thought of the old adage about why the man climbed the mountain: because it was there. Well, Iceland wasn’t going to be there much longer, at least not for me. My youth and my freedom were rapidly vanishing. The time for adventure was now. Before Drew could talk me out of it, I went online and bought myself one round-trip ticket from LAX to Keflavík International Airport. I was set to leave the first week in June, just in time to enjoy the annual puffin migration.

It was outrageously expensive, but so what? I was buying much more than one week of travel. The 331,000 Icelandic krona also provided an extended treatment for my baby fever. Instead of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, I began reading tour books, searching for hot spots both social and geological. I reserved a single room in “The 101,” Reykjavik’s hip downtown district. I mapped out the local McDonald’s just in case I had trouble finding a restaurant that met my narrow dietary preferences (i.e., no puffin). I even learned how to pronounce those weird letters that exist only in the Icelandic alphabet, like ð and þ, both of which, it turns out, are variations on “th.”

I barely thought about Rainbow Extensions, the surrogate, or the baby Drew and I might someday have. I skimmed or ignored emails, like the one that assigned us a new caseworker, Andrea. Andrea assured us of two things: one, in the next few weeks, we would be matched with our replacement surrogate, and, two, shortly thereafter, we would be assigned yet another new caseworker. I didn’t even bother getting annoyed. I was too busy corresponding with a man named Borkur to set up a day trip to Landmannalaugar and the volcano Hekla.

Sure enough, Andrea was a woman of her word. Three weeks later, she sent an email titled “Profile for Your Review.” Attached was an encyclopedia of trivia about a new woman, neatly organized and illustrated with her personal photos. Unlike with Kristen, I didn’t feel any panic this time. I just flipped through the application to make sure this candidate met our main qualifications. She was within two hours’ drive. She was drug free. No visible swastika tattoos. Sold.

I’m not sure Drew looked at the application at all. It wasn’t that we didn’t care. We wanted so much to believe this new surrogate was The One, but we were petrified of having our hearts broken again. No matter what, we weren’t going to let ourselves get attached this time.

Andrea told us the surrogate was dying to meet us. She’d already taken an afternoon off from work and arranged to have a neighbor watch her son, freeing up a few hours in her hectic life to drive to L.A. Of course, we assured Andrea, we would do whatever we could to accommodate the woman who was offering us the use of her lady parts. There was just one problem. At the time of the appointment, I would be in Iceland.

Andrea wouldn’t even consider rescheduling. The match was made, the meeting was set, the wooing of the womb had commenced. Did we really want to risk turning off another surrogate? If we blew this one, we were going to start getting a reputation around the office. I called the airline, which was perfectly happy to change my flight for a fee of $800. Not a lot of planes fly to Iceland, so those that do can pretty much charge whatever they want.

To my surprise, Drew was firmly in my corner. He still didn’t quite “get” my need for this frosty vision quest, but he “got” that it mattered to me. He was willing to turn down the meeting, even if it meant letting the surrogate slip away.

We called Andrea’s bluff. I left her a message, letting her know that if she couldn’t make the meeting work around my vacation, then we’d just have to go back on the waiting list.

The next morning, my phone rang. We had a new meeting time, the Friday before I left for Iceland. The surrogate had changed her plans.

The night before our big meeting with the surrogate, I was 100 percent ready—for Iceland. My bags were packed. My tour books were precisely stacked atop my suitcase. Day trips were booked. Receipts and confirmations were sorted in a folder in the order in which I would need to reference them. My camera, laptop, and Nintendo DS were fully charged, extra batteries and international voltage converters tucked away in easily accessible pouches. I would have no problem filling my seventeen-hour travel time with Mario Kart, the Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and, of course, the Iceland Playlist on my iPod.