Mommy Man (23 page)

24

Pioneers Again

D
rew’s plan began,
as his plans often do, with breakfast. When we arrived at the hospital on induction morning, the staff got to know us not as “the gay dads” or “those cranks who want to rewrite the rules and hog up all our beds” but as “those guys who brought us a shitload of bagels, bless their hearts.” Not just bagels but lox, schmears, muffins, a veggie platter, giant carafes of coffee. Drew had basically walked into the bagel shop and said, “Give me twelve of everything.” We dropped it all off at the nurses’ station and let everyone know that today’s daily grind would be generously catered by the family in room 303. If they weren’t already talking about the two dads and the surrogate carrying twins, they would be now.

Drew made sure to learn every nurse’s name and to tell them he worked on
The Bachelor
. By the third time I heard someone say, “I can’t believe Jason dumped Melissa!,” I knew he was working his magic.

He also paraded his sister around like a celebrity. “She was our egg donor!” he bragged, and anyone who showed any interest got to hear the ten-minute version of our baby story.

No one responded better to our narrative than the head nurse, Karyn. She was cheery but officious, with a warm smile and a bubbly laugh. She had Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck on her hospital scrubs. Drew asked if it would be okay to give her a hug, and she let him walk behind the counter to do so. “Anyone who feeds my whole staff earns a hug from me!” she giggled.

Once again, I was in awe of my boyfriend’s superpowers. Already, I felt confident asking the big question. “Do you think there’ll be a room for us to stay in after Tiffany delivers?”

Karyn’s bright smile shrunk away. She bowed her head at me and sighed. “It all depends on how crowded it is. We’ve been pretty full lately.”

I decided to appeal to her sympathy. “We’re just really hoping we can spend time with our children on the night they’re . . .”

“We understand,” Drew interrupted. “You do what you can do.” He gently motioned for me to hush my mouth, pronto. I had clearly jumped the gun.

Karyn came in personally to make sure Tiffany was as comfortable as a woman surrounded by beeping, chattering medical appliances could be. “Just let me know if I can getcha anything,” she said.

“Yeah, an epidural!” Tiffany shot back.

We all laughed—except Tiffany. “I’m serious,” she said. “I want an epidural.”

Karyn giggled. “When the time comes, Honey.”

Tiffany had mentioned the epidural to us before—about five thousand times, in fact. She wanted one when she gave birth to Gavin, but the nurses kept telling her it wasn’t time yet. As she was being shoved into the delivery room, she asked again, only to be told it was too late. As a result, she learned firsthand how excruciating an undrugged labor can be, and if that meant she had to ask twice as often this time, that’s what she was going to do.

I don’t know what I expected to happen after the hospital induced labor, but what actually happened was nothing. Inducing labor isn’t like inducing vomiting. It takes a while.

In the waning days of bed rest, Tiffany and Susie had taken up an interest in Rummy 500, so to pass the time, we bought a deck of cards from the gift shop. This gave us our first glimpse of the hypercompetitive side of Tiffany that Susie had been lamenting for months. “You guys better watch out,” our sweet little surrogate warned as she shuffled the deck. “’Cause I’m takin’ you all down!”

All I knew about the process of labor came from TV sitcoms, where the joke was that the pain turned some sweet, subservient housewife into a screeching, sailor-mouthed psychopath who shouted all the worst obscenities the censors would let her get away with. “Shoot damn hell! Get this monkey-flipping baby out of me, Dr. Huxtable!” Now I realized the reality was much worse. Our mild-mannered surrogate had fully morphed into Kanye West.

From that point, Tiffany turned a simple, civilized game into an ultimate fighting smackdown. I hadn’t played rummy in ages, but the strategy came back to me immediately. I won the first round, and Tiffany was not happy about it. She didn’t pout or say a word. She just glared. It was a vile, hungry glare, the kind that was usually followed by a live gazelle being ripped to shreds, its organs sprayed hundreds of feet across the savannah. And I was the gazelle.

I just happened to be a gazelle who was very good at Rummy. Once I took round 2, Tiffany accused me of cheating. “I need to check this deck,” she said. By the time I won the third round, she wasn’t joking. She grabbed the deck and sorted through every card, checking for dupes. She made me remove my sweatshirt to ensure I didn’t have anything stashed up my sleeve. “Where did you say you bought these cards again?” She held them up to the light, checking for hidden marks.

I realized that it didn’t serve me well to anger the woman who was about to give birth to my son and daughter, so I decided to throw round 4. As Tiffany slammed down her hand and yelled, “Gin!,” it was as if she’d just been crowned champion of Wimbledon. “Oh yeah! You suck! You suck! You suck!” Well, if she was a Wimbledon champ, she was John McEnroe.

Every round she won ratcheted her cockiness upward by a thousand degrees. Susie shot me periodic glances, as if to say, “See what I was talking about?” I constantly checked the scores because I was counting the moments until she hit 500 and this torment could end. Periodically, a nurse would enter, take some readings off the machines, and scribble down a few notes before leaving.

“Don’t forget my epidural!” Tiffany would demand with increasing confidence.

Finally, we played the hand that gave Tiffany her 500th point. I was nervous how she might top off her poor sportsmanship at this moment of ultimate triumph. All we got, though, was a polite nod. “Good game, everyone,” she offered, pleasantly. It almost made it worse, as if she actually believed herself to be a gracious winner. I hoped my kids weren’t paying attention.

Still, I shook her hand, relieved to be done. Instead of packing away the deck, Tiffany shuffled again. “Let’s play to one thousand!” Sure, why not go into a second round with her already up 200 points on the rest of us? Somehow, though, we all agreed. It’s not like we had anything better to do.

Before I knew it, Rummy 1,000 had stretched out to Rummy 1,500, then Rummy 2,000. The entire morning disappeared with no sign of our twins. I was a little suspicious that maybe Tiffany was squeezing them in so she could trounce us further at cards. Every once in a while, she would close her eyes, grimace slightly, then announce, “Another contraction!” Other than that and the fact that we were using her belly as a discard pile, we might as well have been hanging out at a bar on a Friday night.

Friends were emailing us constantly, begging for updates. By now they were sharing the kind of horror stories you would never disclose directly to a pregnant woman. “You know I was in labor for sixty hours, right?” one friend wrote. “It was hell.”

I started to wonder if this might go that long—or worse. Maybe the labor would never end. What if our kids just grew up inside Tiffany? They’d lose their baby teeth, learn their alphabet, go through puberty—all within the confines of our surrogate’s uterus. Once a year we’d shove some birthday cake up there, and they’d make a wish. Then, seventeen years from now, Tiffany would poop out two college applications, and Sutton and Bennett would become the only fetuses in the Harvard class of 2032. A couple of uterus-bound IV twins raised by gay dads? Talk about ideal diversity bait.

The Pitocin may not have been producing any noticeable results, but at least Drew’s schmoozing was bearing fruit. At one point, Karyn came bursting through the door, breathless. “Oh my God!” she shouted, collapsing against the wall. We wondered what could have happened in the maternity ward to provoke this reaction from a nurse. An immaculate birth? Alien baby? Nope—apple muffin.

“You have to tell me where you got them!” she exclaimed. “That was the best muffin I’ve ever had! I hid the others from the other nurses. I’m keeping them all for myself! Hahaha!”

“Excuse me, Karyn?” Tiffany said.

“Yes, Tiffany. Your epidural.”

By roughly Tiffany’s four hundredth request, a nurse came in with the biggest needle I’d ever seen. It looked more like a shish kabob that could pierce straight through this tiny woman and come out the other end. “Yay!” Tiffany cheered.

While the nurse prepared to dull Tiffany’s pain with the surgical equivalent of a samurai sword, Drew and I quietly excused ourselves. “Hold on,” Tiffany said. “I want to talk to you before I get all doped up and you just think it’s the drugs talking.”

“Okay.”

“I just want to say thank you.” She turned her head and wiped her eye. “I don’t want to cry!”

“Why would you thank us?”

“Because I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this, and I couldn’t have asked for better IPs than you guys. You’ve been so good to me, and I’m so excited to see you become dads.”

“We feel the same way,” Drew gushed. “I can’t imagine what it’d be like if we’d gone with that first surrogate. You mean so much to us.”

“I just have one more request,” Tiffany said. “You know I can’t wait to meet these babies, but when they’re born, I don’t want the doctor to hand them to me. When they gave me Gavin in the delivery room and I held him for the first time, that’s when I bonded with him. Make sure they hand the babies to you. Then later on when I’m in my recovery room, you can present them to me, as Aunt Tiffany.”

There seemed to be so much more to say, but there was a woman standing next to us with a very large needle, waiting very patiently. We pulled back Tiffany’s curtain and excused ourselves from the room.

Drew and I used the break to buy about $200 worth of dinners from a Panera Bread across the street. Once again, we were greeted like heroes at the nurse’s station. This time, Karyn gave us both hugs.

“I’ve been working on getting you guys your own room,” she said. “I’m gonna try.”

Just then, Eric stepped into the hallway. We asked how Tiffany was feeling, and he hung his head.

“Not good.”

“The epidural didn’t help?”

“It made her worse. She wants someone to come check on her.”

Karyn jogged into Tiffany’s room. We wondered if this was a sign that things were progressing, but when she came back out, it was clear that it wasn’t.

“Those babies of yours are very stubborn,” she told us. “I don’t think they’re coming tonight.”

“How’s Tiffany?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. I think she just needs to rest.”

Drew put his arm around Eric, and I smiled a devious little grin. “So she probably shouldn’t play cards then, right?”

As we sat at Tiffany’s bedside, nurses kept stopping by to thank us for dinner and to wish us well. It was clear Drew had done exactly what he set out to. We were like celebrities to the hospital staff, and they were all rooting for us. It was only around the fifth thank you that I noticed something strange. Everybody who stopped in to see us was back in their street clothes.

Even Karyn was changed out of her Looney Toons scrubs the next time we saw her. “Just wanted to say good luck tonight!” she peeped.

“Are you leaving?” I asked.

“Yeah. Shift change.”

I don’t know why we hadn’t anticipated this, but the nurses we’d spent all day wooing were on their way home. They were being replaced by a new batch, with nothing left in the break room to greet them but the end stubs of bread loaves and a bunch of trash. We were going to have to start all over again.

“Any idea who our new nurse is going to be?” I asked.

Karyn shook her head, consolingly. “Yeah, you’ve got Betty.”

“What’s wrong with Betty?”

Karyn patted me on the shoulder. “She’s a wonderful nurse. You’ll get great care.” Something in her tone wasn’t at all reassuring. She looked over her shoulder, as if Betty might be stalking up behind her. Then she whispered, “She’s not the friendliest.”

As usual, Karyn was overly polite. I tracked Betty down in the hallway half an hour later, while she was reading another patient’s chart. A short, thin African American woman with thick glasses, she was all business.

“Betty? Hi, I’m Jerry in room 303.”

“I’ll get there when I get there,” she rasped, never taking her eyes off her clipboard.

Before my brain could respond, my body had instinctively taken five steps backward. Betty was smaller than I was, but I’d never met anyone so intimidating. “Oh, okay,” I muttered, then I crept quietly back to Tiffany’s room.

Before Betty came in, Dr. Robertson swung by to check on Tiffany. “Still nothing, huh?” Tiffany told him how the epidural had only increased her pain. After a brief exam, he determined the shot hadn’t been administered properly, and he ordered her another epidural, stat. Tiffany smiled. I was starting to like him at last.

After the next injection, we saw a noticeable difference in our surrogate. She was calm and relaxed, with a doped-up expression on her face. I had no idea how strong the shot actually was, but whatever its effect, she was definitely grateful. I thought of challenging her to a rematch of Rummy 500 now, to see if she played nicer.

Then a voice rang out behind me. “WHAT ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE DOING IN HERE?”

I whipped around to see Betty, finally making an appearance. Drew smiled and extended his hand.

“Hi, I’m Drew. This is my partner, Jerry, my mom, and my sister Susie. She was our egg donor!”

Betty looked right past him, focused only on Tiffany. “I don’t care who you are!” Betty shouted. “This woman needs her rest. Everyone but the husband needs to leave. Now!”

I turned to Tiffany, but she was no help. She was still reclining in bed, blissing out on her epidural. I waited for Drew to work his charm, but he said nothing. When I looked around, I realized why. He had already fled the room. So had Susie and Mrs. Tappon. Other than Eric, I was the only one standing there, and Betty was boring through me with her eyes. “Okay, bye,” I whispered.

By the time I reached the waiting room, Drew was freaking out. He had left Tiffany’s room so fast that he forgot his Blackberry. It had only been a minute or so, but this was already the longest he had ever gone without it.