Mommy Man (21 page)

“Kathy,” my mother elaborated, “they’re like the king and king here. They know half the world.”

The two of them had visited me many times in the past, but this was their first trip where they met most of my friends. It struck me that they still thought of me as the sheltered, lonely teenager I used to be. This new Jerry came as a bit of a shock to them.

“I’m really glad you’re here in California,” my mom said. “It’s good for the kids.”

“How’s that?”

“You would have a lot of trouble with a family like this in the Midwest. Here, people actually think this is normal.”

Kathy cut her off. “I think what she means is it’s nice to see you have so much support.”

I knew what she meant. “You’re worried about your grandkids, Mom. It’s okay. I am, too. Most kids have moms, even here in L.A. We’re kind of in uncharted waters. But Drew and I wouldn’t be having kids if we didn’t think we could give them everything they needed. You saw it yesterday. These kids aren’t even born yet, and already, they’re so loved.”

“Jerry,” she replied. “They’re gonna be fine.”

We started talking about parenthood. My sister, a mom of three, was full of anecdotes and advice. My mom was happy to remind both of us of all the headaches we gave her when we were growing up. We all tried to imagine how I’d handle the challenges ahead. We laughed, worried, and wondered. It was one of the best conversations we’d ever had.

Just as our food arrived, my cell phone began to vibrate. I almost didn’t answer, but I decided I should at least see who was calling. The ID came up “Eric Ireland,” so I picked up. He wasn’t a chatty man, so whatever he wanted, it would be quick.

“Hi, Eric.”

The connection was terrible, and the street noise didn’t help. I caught a few words here and there. “Tiffany . . . strong . . . drove . . .” I couldn’t make sense of it.

“Hold on, Eric. I can barely hear you. Where are you?”

His next sentence came through loud and clear:

“The emergency room.”

21

Tiffany’s Replacement

E
ric spoke in a calm,
reassuring manner. Nothing in his tone suggested cause for alarm. He urged me not to panic.

Tiffany had gone into labor, that was all.

“They gave her some medication to stop the contractions,” Eric explained. “They’re doing a test now that will determine if she’s going to deliver in the next two weeks.”

“Um . . . what? How do they know when she’ll deliver?”

“They can’t tell exactly. But somehow, they can tell if it’ll be in the next two weeks. We’ll know the results in two hours.”

“Should Drew and I come down there?”

“No,” Eric insisted. “I mean, not unless it comes back positive. Then . . . yeah.”

I raced home to be with Drew, googling “contractions 25 weeks” on my iPhone all the way. As I suspected, the results weren’t encouraging. I found a few articles about preemies who’d survived at this stage, but—there was always a “but.”

The more encouraging stories were the ones of women who went into labor at twenty-five weeks but scored negative on this test. Many of them went on to carry their babies full term. That was a much, much better outcome to hope for.

Meanwhile, we had two hours to wait. To wait—and to curse the very notion of surrogacy. This was supposed to be the easy way for us to have a baby, the one that put us in the driver’s seat. Instead, it felt more like we were banging around in the trunk, bound and gagged. First we found out Susie’s eggs were no good, now Tiffany’s womb was suspect—again. Our babies, who weren’t even born yet, had already lived through more adversity than I had in my entire life. This was hardly the ideal way to make a family.

I felt like a fool for believing I could be a dad, for naming two little bundles of cells who might never even take their first breath, for throwing a fucking party to celebrate my good fortune. We should have held off longer before announcing the pregnancy, like until the kids were in preschool. I wondered if this was a sign God existed because he’d found a way to jerk me around after all.

To say it was the longest two hours of my life would be inaccurate because it was exactly as long as two hours were supposed to be. I know because I was staring at my cell phone the whole time, eyes transfixed on the clock, watching each minute tick away exactly sixty seconds after the last one. It was two hours of my life, the same as it was for people who spent that time waiting in line for Space Mountain, or watching the extended season finale of
The Amazing Race
, or pushing out their own little miracle just a few floors up from Tiffany in Labor and Delivery. Two hours—hardly any amount of time at all and yet forever.

Kathy and my mom went back to their hotel so Drew and I could be alone. We didn’t say anything as we sat on the couch, waiting for my cell phone to vibrate. Every conversation we would have for the next few months would be predicated on the call we were about to get, on a simple yes or no that determined the fate of two babies and all the people they’d already touched just by attaching to a stranger’s uterine wall. The silence was broken at last by a gentle buzz. In front of us on the coffee table, my iPhone was quivering.

“Hello?”

“It’s negative.”

I doubled over onto Drew’s chest, wrapped my arms around him, and squeezed as tightly as I could. It was exactly what I would have done if Eric had given the other answer instead.

If the baby shower had been like our wedding, then the honeymoon had just been abruptly canceled. Dr. Robertson ordered Tiffany on full bed rest. No work, no walking, not even any standing if she could avoid it. She filed for a leave of absence from her job, and Drew and I didn’t need to reread our surrogate contract to figure out what this meant. We were on the hook for everything—not just her lost wages but housecleaning and child care, too. For the remaining trimester, Tiffany’s entire function in life would be to incubate our fetuses. As a result, she was going to have to hire someone else to be Tiffany for a while.

She deserved every penny, of course. She’d endured so much more than she signed on for, without ever complaining. We just weren’t sure exactly where the money would come from. After all the other expenses of surrogacy, we were broke.

As it turned out, the solution to all our problems came from an entirely predictable source.

“I’ll do it.”

Drew was on the phone with Susie. “Do what?”

“I’ll be the person. The one who lives with Tiffany and takes care of her.”

“Susie, she lives here, in California.”

“So I’ll fly out.”

“For three months?”

“Why not?”

“What are you going to do about your job?”

“Quit.”

“Susie!”

“It’s just a job.”

“No. You don’t have to do this.”

“This is family. Family’s more important.”

Before Drew could convince his sister not to throw her life away for our benefit, Susie was on a plane to L.A. No one was more excited than Tiffany. She had already logged what felt like ten thousand hours on her living room couch, and now she’d imagined having to open her home to some crotchety old woman who barked at her to lie completely still at all times. Susie would be more like a roomie, a chatty girlfriend who’d keep her morale up.

We picked Susie up at LAX and drove her to the Irelands’ house. Only as we lugged Susie’s suitcase over the threshold did the surrealism of the situation hit me. These were two women from different walks of life, brought together by fate to live together so that they could bring two babies into the world and hand them over to a pair of gay men to raise. Forget
Tiffany’s Uterus
. This was our sitcom,
Wombmates
.

The Irelands’ home was perfect for a family of exactly three. Susie would need to be squeezed in, but she didn’t mind sleeping in Eric’s home office, underneath the shelves of trophies from his pro ball days. In many ways, it was preferable to living at home with her parents. This would be an adventure.

For Drew and me, it felt a little like we were dropping our daughter off at college. I had to assure Drew that his little sister would be all right. “How well do we know these people?” he asked.

“Well enough to let them give birth to our children.”

Around this time, I was highly tuned into the news of anyone else’s pregnancy. I stopped being one of those people who groaned at all the ultrasound photos expectant parents would post on Facebook and instead began commenting on every single one. “Aw, look at his unfused cranial cortex!” “That’s a good healthy placenta there! Way to go!”

One night, Drew told me the story of his friends Doug and Peggy, who’d just had their first child. Peggy had such a rough C-section that afterward she couldn’t even hold her own baby, much less feed her or sing her lullabies. Stories like that always broke my heart, though quietly I sighed in relief that these kinds of scenarios didn’t apply to Drew and me. No matter how difficult Tiffany’s delivery ended up being, Drew and I would come into our kids’ lives well rested and raring to go.

With Peggy out of commission, Doug was forced to snap into action. When his daughter screamed her head off, Doug tried everything he could think of to calm her. He changed her, fed her, cradled her, but she was inconsolable. What finally did the trick was
Goodnight Moon
.

All throughout his wife’s pregnancy, Doug had been reading the book to her belly. As soon as his newborn daughter heard the sweet, calming poetry, in her daddy’s familiar voice, she felt safe. She stopped crying, and she looked up at Daddy with big, loving eyes. In an instant, Doug bonded with his daughter. Drew could barely finish the story, he was so choked up. It was a gorgeous anecdote—touching and hopeful. It was the tale of a dad, without any help from a mom, saving the day. No sooner was Drew finished than I flew into a raging panic.

“Why would you tell me that!” I shouted.

“What do you mean? It’s the most beautiful story ever!”

“Yeah, and it’ll never happen to us! We’ve never said a word to those kids!”

Drew’s story resonated with me for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t our voices the babies would recognize. It was Tiffany’s and Susie’s. Let’s face it. Eric wasn’t very chatty, so his voice was unlikely to make a big impression. Our kids, destined to be raised by two men, would be used to hearing only the voices of women. Oh my God. The first time we spoke to them, they’d be terrified!

A nightmare scenario leapt into my head. We’re in the delivery room. It’s the happiest moment of our lives. But when the doctors hand us the babies, the two of them treat us like strangers. They won’t stop crying. Then they hear Tiffany’s voice, and finally, they calm down. It’s only when she holds them that they’re at ease. Instantly, all the biology in the world becomes irrelevant. They welcome Tiffany like a mother and come to regard us as the jerks who took them away from her.

Then I pictured an even more alarming scenario. What if the voice they were drawn to wasn’t Tiffany’s but Susie’s? She had the biological connection, and now she had the proximity, too. They would know her much better than they would know us.

I’d heard so many stories about the agony that comes with adoption. Birth mothers crying for hours or days. Adoptive parents wracked with guilt and torn apart by a swell of sympathy, even as they’re celebrating the arrival of their child.

Surrogacy wasn’t going to spare us that kind of pain. It would only shift it into different forms, onto different people. I finally realized that we weren’t going to get through this without crying some sad tears as well.

“I don’t want Susie in the delivery room,” I said to Drew. The topic had never come up, but it seemed obvious now that it would. Susie was living with Tiffany, so she was sure to be around when the babies arrived. She’d want to witness their birth—who wouldn’t? Drew would want her there, and Tiffany probably would, too. To me, though, it just didn’t seem right. Susie was quickly becoming more important to our babies than we were. All the boundaries we swore we’d draw were quickly disappearing. It may have been the cruelest thing I’d ever done—it certainly felt like it—but it also felt necessary. At that moment, I probably would have kept Tiffany out of the delivery room if it were possible.

“Okay,” Drew said. That easily, he gave in. I was stunned that he didn’t fight me. He’d always been so protective of Susie, such a compassionate big brother. Now, though, he had an even bigger concern—in fact, two of them.

I felt guilty, conflicted, and yet pettily validated. It was a new emotion to me. Fatherhood, I figured. That’s probably what it was.

22

Fourth of July with the Family

W
hat do you say to someone
you’ve never met, who doesn’t speak English, and whose brain is approximately the size and consistency of a lump of personal pizza dough? Add to that the fact that you won’t be speaking to them directly but rather through the protruding belly skin of a woman you’ve known for less than a year. And go!

I had decided to record a message for Tiffany to play to my kids so they would know my voice. Suddenly, though, I’d found myself with a severe case of Daddy’s block. I couldn’t steal the
Goodnight Moon
thing. I’d feel like a fraud to my own kids. What else was there?
Green Eggs and Ham
? The libretto to
Miss Saigon
? At least I knew that one by heart. How about that paper I wrote for my college Shakespeare class on the notion of nothingness in
King Lear
? That was a solid A-minus, if I remembered correctly. It’s not like it mattered what I said anyway. The kids wouldn’t understand the words. The idea was that they would find comfort in the sound of my voice. My squealy, whimpering nerd voice. I tried to forget how much I hated the sound of it on tape and just hit “Record.”

“Well, hewwo there, everyone! It’s your Daddy! How’re my wittle fwiends today?”

Stop. Ugh, did I just do that? Baby talk? Erase! Time for a new take.

“This is a message for the two best babies in the whole wide world!”

Stop. Yuck. Pandering. These fetuses are going to walk all over me if they hear me talking like that. I needed to sound more natural.

“Yo! Daddy here!”

Stop. Just stop. I didn’t need to talk down to my kids just because they were roughly the size of gerbils. Even their precognizant mush brains deserved a little respect.

Nothing I said sounded right. I didn’t want to force my kids to listen to me rambling nonsense night after night, much less my sister-in-law and my surrogate. They’d think it was sweet at first, but after a few weeks, it’d be a regular nuisance. Ugh, time to play the tape again. Susie and Tiffany would probably work up an impression of my baby tape and crack each other up by doing it. “Yeah, Tiff, you really nailed his awkward pause that time!” Together, they’d swipe my heartfelt sentiments and turn them into catchphrases to use behind my back. Why not? It’s what I would do.

My baby tape would be only one of dozens of things bonding Tiffany and Susie. From the sound of things, they were getting along famously. When Drew called his sister to check in, she always had a ton of stories to share, usually with Tiffany guffawing in the background.

For years, Tiffany had been making Eric a thermos full of coffee to keep him awake during his night shifts. When they were out of cream, she grabbed the closest thing she could find—Bailey’s Irish Cream. She didn’t realize until Susie pointed it out that her dairy substitute was 17 percent alcohol. Of course, Eric never complained.

Tiffany would tease Susie constantly about finding her a boyfriend. “You’ll make a great wife someday,” she assured her. “You’re so homely.” She had meant to say “homey,” of course, but by misspeaking, she provided them with one of their favorite running jokes. They’d also discovered the computer game Plants vs. Zombies and would kill hours together by killing the walking dead.

“Did you get to the ones who ride dolphins yet?” Tiffany would ask.

“No, I’m stuck on the pole vaulters.”

“Block them with the giant nuts!”

Nothing was more entertaining to the stars of
Wombmates
than their wacky neighbor, Mrs.—well, nobody actually knew her name. Nobody knew much about her at all. She was ghostly and rail-thin—or maybe she was morbidly obese. She was in her late seventies or eighties, or perhaps she was only thirty-five. It was hard to tell much about her when all anyone ever saw was the faint glow of her irises peeking out from behind her curtains. All anyone knew for sure was that she was obsessed with the Irelands. Though she never spoke to them, she watched them the way other recluses watch QVC. Instead of ordering herself a lot of cheap crap, she sent the cheap crap to her neighbors.

Every few days, she’d drop off some bizarre gift on the Irelands’ doorstep. A plate of donuts, a can of off-brand cola, a dying potted plant. When Tiffany’s belly started to show, the goodies took on a prenatal tone. One day, it would be a trial-size can of Similac, the next a handful of newborn diapers or a set of feeding spoons rubber-banded together. She left a coloring book, presumably for Gavin, about being a big brother. Who knows what she thought of Susie. The gifts were unwrapped, save for a plastic Target bag. There was never a note or card. She didn’t ring the doorbell. Her packages would appear when the Irelands were away or in the backyard, as if by magic.

When we first met Tiffany, she reminded us deeply of Susie. Now the few differences they’d had seemed to be melting away. As Susie grew closer to our surrogate, so did we. Tiffany told us about her frustrations with work and how she was dreading turning thirty. To qualify for surrogacy, a woman has to agree that she’s not planning to have any more kids of her own, but Tiffany confessed to us that she really wanted another baby. Eric didn’t. If we’d known that before we chose her, it might have given us pause. At this stage, though, we trusted her fully with our kids.

Three weeks into Susie’s stay, we all decided that she’d earned a weekend off. Drew and I arrived on Saturday morning to pick her up. She would be gone only a day and a half, but from the way she hugged Tiffany good-bye, it was as if one of them were being deployed overseas. They were verging on inseparable.

I hopped in the back of the minivan, and we waved to the Irelands as we drove off.

“Woohoo! Weekend off! Let’s party!” I shouted, but nobody shared my enthusiasm. In the front seat, Susie had her head in her hands, trying to keep from sobbing.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Drew rested his hand on her shoulder. “You’re miserable, aren’t you?” It was then that whatever tears Susie had been holding back came out in a flood. “Oh, honey . . . ,” Drew said.

Was it possible I’d misread the entire situation? Clearly, Drew knew his sister better than I did. He’d seen through her brave face when I hadn’t. She was a champion at masking her pain, just like her brother. No wonder he knew she was faking it.

“Is she mean to you?” I asked.

“No!” Susie insisted. “Tiffany’s great.”

“Are you homesick?” She shook her head. Susie took a moment to collect herself, then she told us the part of the story she never felt comfortable sharing in Tiffany’s presence.

Many of her complaints were typical new job gripes. She was feeling overworked and underappreciated. With Tiffany always on the couch, Susie never had a moment to put her feet up. She was constantly mopping, scrubbing, changing diapers, playing board games, and, most exhausting of all, trying to stay upbeat. One night, Tiffany and Eric teased her about a lackluster dinner she’d prepared, and afterward, she closed the door to her room and bawled. Susie was also struggling with standard roommate issues—a lack of privacy, differing schedules and interests. Even Plants vs. Zombies had become a trial. It turned out Tiffany was hypercompetitive, turning each Flash-powered game into a showdown on the scale of Ali vs. Frazier. All Susie wanted to do was to slaughter zombies. Tiffany wanted to slaughter her new houseguest—and rub her face in it.

But the real problem wasn’t her—it was him.

“He hates me,” Susie confessed through her sobs. “He doesn’t like anything I do. He barely talks to me. I know he doesn’t want me there.”

Susie had a new nemesis, and he was only three feet tall. She may have been a hero to us, but to Gavin, she was Lex Luthor, a devious villain intent on taking over his world and destroying his hero, Mommy. Susie made scrambled eggs for him, changed his diapers, and played trains with him—all the things Mommy was supposed to do. She put him in time-out when he misbehaved, told him when to go to bed, and she made his peanut butter sandwiches all wrong. Mommy no longer did much of anything for him. When Gavin wanted something, Mommy’s response was, “Ask Susie.”

Our unique plan for making a baby had confused a lot of people, but none more than the little man whose life had changed the most of all. He could point at Mommy’s belly and say, “Drew and Jerry’s babies!” But when he pointed at Susie, he’d shout, “Go home!” To his two-year-old mind, Susie had been brought in to replace Mommy, and he was going to fight her with every weapon in his arsenal—tantrums, tantrums, and super-tantrums.

Gavin was at the age where he’d perfected that ear-piercing squeal only toddlers, teakettles, and suffocating dolphins make, the one that makes grown-ups give in instantly just so they’ll stop. That excruciating sound was just about the only thing Susie ever heard from him. That and “I don’t want you here!” More than once, he dragged her suitcase with all his might to the front door and demanded she leave his house, now. “Bye!” he’d shout.

“Gavin, I’m not . . .”

“Bye! Bye, Susie!” Then he’d shove her so hard she’d almost fall over.

The hardest part for Susie was that Tiffany did very little to stop Gavin’s defiance. It wasn’t just that she was bedridden and unable to chase after her kid. On some level, Tiffany must have appreciated the attention. With all the bed rest restrictions, she wasn’t even allowed to pick her son up or get down on the floor and play with him. The two fetuses she was carrying came between her and her favorite job, being a mother. Gavin’s fierce loyalty to her was one of the few things she was still able to enjoy. She never noticed how much it was hurting Susie.

Susie’s status among our friends had now eclipsed sainthood. She had taken on the aura of a mythical superhuman-like creature and was revered with goddess-like devotion by everyone we knew. Everyone except Rainbow Extensions.

“Well, good for her, but I would never do anything like that for my brother.” Our caseworkers may have changed, but their cluelessness was one constant we could count on.

I called them to make sure they were taking care of Tiffany financially. I knew how unreliable their accounting department was and how reluctant Tiffany was to complain. It seemed wise to step in.

“We haven’t paid her anything,” caseworker number 4283 told me. Not surprising, but what did shock me was the reason. “She hasn’t asked. In fact, I was going to ask you if you’d heard from her. She won’t return our calls.”

Tiffany had confessed to us before that she couldn’t stand Rainbow Extensions. They phoned her regularly to check in, but the calls were awkward and forced. They never knew what to say to her, and she never knew how to respond. When she saw Rainbow Extensions’ number pop up on her caller ID, she sent the call to voicemail, then deleted the message without listening to it.

We’d always been slightly amused by her attitude toward them, mostly because we wished we could do the same thing. Now, though, we were worried. She was losing a huge amount of money on bed rest. The Irelands may not have been destitute, but they weren’t rich either. Losing Tiffany’s salary was a big blow to them. How were they getting by?

We realized we were going to have to have a very uncomfortable talk with Tiffany, about the one subject surrogates and intended parents were never supposed to discuss: money. I knew why it was off limits. It devalued the whole arrangement to acknowledge the price tag. On some level, Drew and I were consumers purchasing a service from Tiffany, but it was better to talk about the other levels—the sacrifice, the goal, the gift of life. Pregnancy inspired happiness. Money inspired cynicism.

“Are you doing okay?” we asked Tiffany in her kitchen one day. “You know, financially?”

“Oh yeah. I’m fine, thanks for asking.”

“It’s just that Rainbow Extensions told us you never asked for your lost wages compensation.”

“Oh, I don’t want you guys to have to pay that.”

“But we want to!” Drew insisted. “You’re making babies for us. We want to take care of you.”

“You deserve it,” I added.

“If you don’t like dealing with the agency,” Drew said, “we can pay you directly. I’ll write you a check right now.”

Tiffany smiled and waved him off with her hand. “I don’t need it. I filed for disability.”

“You can get disability? How come Rainbow Extensions never told us that?”

Tiffany shrugged. “Because they’re idiots.”

Not wanting to deal with the agency, Tiffany had found her own solution to the problem, one that paid her 100 percent of her lost wages and saved us thousands of dollars. After all our worrying, it turned out she was the one taking care of us.

I realized that by sidestepping the subject of money, we had only been allowing the cynicism to flourish, to suppress our discomfort at the thought that when Tiffany looked at us, she saw dollar signs. It didn’t feel that way any longer. Now I knew for sure that we were on the same side.

We spent Fourth of July weekend with the Irelands, doing all the things people do on the Fourth of July. We cooked hamburgers on the backyard grill. We sat on lawn chairs and waved tiny American flags. We watched from a safe distance while Eric set off fireworks at the bottom of the driveway.

For weeks, Tiffany had been talking about how much the babies kicked. One time, Bennett wailed on her so hard she expected to see his foot poking through her skin. They just never seemed very mobile when I was around. Somewhere amid all the revelry and the crackling of M-80s, Tiffany reached out and nearly yanked my hand off my arm. “Now!” she shouted. “Here they go!”

She pressed my palm hard against her belly. I waited and waited but felt nothing.

I started to pull my hand away, convinced I had missed the tossing and turning once again, but Tiffany wouldn’t allow me to let go. “Wait!” she commanded. She laid back and relaxed, like she was trying to will the babies to move with her mind. A moment later, there was a rumble, like a tiny earthquake with an epicenter at her belly button. Then I felt it—a forceful thump rippling beneath my palm. Thump. Thump. The baby seemed to appreciate the resistance my hand created, because the first kick was followed by two more.