Because I Said So (45 page)

When I pass her the blue bonnet to cover her hair, she jokes about her newest, most immediate concern: to make it through the end of the procedure when, after having sipped four glasses of water in the last hour, she will finally get to pee. I tell her that I would happily trade her my trip to the bathroom for the Valium she got half an hour before.

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2.

Four months ago,
after reviewing several profiles from potential surrogate mothers, my husband and I met with her and her husband for brunch on a Sunday morning near their home. I was up at dawn with plenty of time to prepare, or so I planned. What do you wear to meet the woman who will decide whether or not to carry your baby? I tried on several outfits, but instead of confirming my choice, the mirror gave me back the sheer panic on my face. How would I be able to tell, from
her
physical appearance and a first meeting, whether she would honor an agreement to relinquish my baby?

The lawyer from the surrogacy agency would draft a contract between the surrogate (sometimes referred to as the “birth mother”) and us (for the duration of the pregnancy, the “intended parents”). The scope of the agreement would be mainly financial, with stipulations for the compensation the surrogate would receive and all the other medical and personal expenses to be covered by us. The contract would also state our parental rights over the baby after the birth and over the medical decisions that might arise during the pregnancy.

Biologically—or more specifically, genetically—the surrogate would have no connection to our baby. The series of procedures required to achieve this pregnancy would be a blunt reminder of that, but how would that knowledge play out once she actually became pregnant? Although both parties would agree that we would become the child’s parents at the moment of birth, it would not be until near the end of the pregnancy that our legal petition to be named on the birth certificate could be finalized.

Surrogacy is a new and unsettled area of the law; there is a chance, however minute, that if the surrogate changed her mind, the agreement could not be enforced. Trust, and trust alone, is the very axis of surrogacy.

I had already talked to other surrogates and intended moms, trying to understand a surrogate’s perspective and to anticipate what might worry mine. As hard as it was for me to imagine, one
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of the most consistent anxieties among surrogates is the possibility that the intended parents might split up and refuse custody of the baby after the birth, forcing the surrogate to either put the baby up for adoption or keep it herself, as was reported in a recent case.

When my potential surrogate arrived at the restaurant with her husband, I stood up to greet her. She smiled and waved, signaling me to stay at the table. She and her husband sat down across from us, holding hands under the table.

Throughout the lavish brunch we hardly touched, the four of us exchanging abbreviated and somewhat rushed stories about our lives. The meeting was an obvious, reciprocal interview.

Though lively, the conversation sounded almost as if we were checking off bullet points of curriculum vitae.

Born in northern California, my surrogate and her husband had lived three blocks from each other during most of their childhoods, but did not meet until they were in their late teens. They had been together ever since. She works as a teacher’s aide in her son’s school and he as an electrician. They both have large extended families living close by. Acting as a surrogate was her way of contributing to her family’s dreams—they were saving to buy a house—but it was also a way to help another couple experience the joy she and her husband knew through their own children.

She asked me for medical details about the partial hysterec-tomy I had undergone months after my son was born. “Did you have any form of cancer?” were the words she chose in lieu of,

“Are you going to get sick and die after your third baby is born?”

I responded to what I suspected was her real question, explaining the chronology of our decision to do a gestational surrogacy: the funky results of a routine Pap smear, the carcinoma in situ found in my endocervical canal, and the recommendation to remove my uterus as a preventive measure to secure my health. Once over that hump, free simply to learn more about us, she asked me about Buenos Aires, where I was born and raised, and Spain, where my parents are from and where we still spend many summers visiting my extended family. We talked about my husband’s
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childhood in Moscow and about how we met in New York, where I had emigrated alone at twenty-one. (A maternally protective confession: I have changed my age to thirty when I tell this story to my two children, for the same reason my husband flatly assures them that the disco-inferno motorcycle helmet they found in the attic was, in fact, just a collector’s item, not something
he
ever used.) She was curious to know about my previous life as a TV journalist and how my husband had emigrated at sixteen, a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, to study physics. After more than twenty years in the United States, he is still sometimes homesick for his roots, for the comfort of an extended family and the easy familiarity of an existence in one’s own land. I knew that his desire for another baby, like mine—undiminished by the obstacles we faced—was in part because our children had anchored the fragmented pieces of our lives. They had become our center of gravity in the world.

The four of us were still casually yet diligently adding some colors to the applications we had both filled out for the agency.

As my husband began telling the story of how we had moved to San Francisco after half-jokingly scanning a map of the world and circling the cities where we would like to raise a family, I pulled the pictures of my seven-year-old daughter and four-year-old son from my wallet.

That did it.

She let go of her husband’s hand and produced several pictures of her own children, also a boy and a girl, close in age to mine, from her handbag. We lost ourselves in a slower conversation, shamelessly wallowing in stories of the children who had changed our lives. She told me how motherhood had affirmed and renewed her desire to go back to her teaching career, regardless of how thankless that profession can sometimes be. Without knowing how I got there, I was telling her about a cherished, intimate moment after I gave birth to my daughter, my firstborn.

Earlier that day, after twelve hours of induction medication in my IV, I had dilated from one to ten centimeters in less than two hours. The baby came out after three pushes. It was like one of
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those weird plane rides traveling west when you end up arriving at your destination an hour before the time of your departure.

Transition time between
no baby
and
baby born
: minus zero.

Immediately after, the doctor gave my daughter to me, and she latched onto my breast.

Hours later, with my husband curled up in a chair—dozing off the epidural that had not worked on me!—I lay in bed wide awake, dimly aware of the “It’s a girl!” balloon wiggling above the ventilation outlet. As I held my daughter that night in the quiet of my room, I felt her warmth against my skin, the boundaries of my body contracting as my whole being expanded to welcome her, and the creeping sense that the very “foreignness” that had blanketed my existence for the last ten years was shifting.

The dawn hours after my daughter’s birth ushered in for me an easier connection to this country, as well as a renewed homage to my ancestry. Half a world away, I felt the closest I have ever been to my mother: As she did thirty years before, I had given birth in a foreign land to a daughter whose faintly familiar noises finally rocked me to sleep.

3.

My mother, unwittingly,
had been the one who first exposed me to the concept of surrogacy. Of all aspects of the complicated decision to let another woman carry my child, the question that kept popping into my head was: who are these women? I longed for a general profile, something reliable and time-tested, along the lines of those detailed descriptions of personality types used by career counselors.

On our last trip to visit my family in Spain, my parents and I sat in my grandmother’s kitchen in the stillness of siesta time, sipping our coffee. We talked about immigration, cultural assimila-tions, and the containing power of families through that life-long process. That’s when I broke the news about pursuing a gestational surrogate to my seventy-year-old parents, who now live in a country where surrogacy is taboo and, until recently, illegal.

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I rambled through “the profile” I had constructed from books and conversations with doctors, psychologists, family advocates, and people who had gone through the experience. The picture that emerged was of a woman who was already a mother, had easy pregnancies, and was thinking of the financial gain of surrogacy as an investment in her own family’s future; above all, these women wanted to help other women become mothers. Some of the surrogates cherish the fantasy of giving the gift of life to a childless family. Others prefer to work with families who already have children—they embark on the journey as one family’s labor of love for another family. Many surrogates have carried children for other couples more than once.

“The ‘tit surrogate’ coming to help you,” my mother said.

Of course,
I thought. She had told that family story several times to my brother and me, usually as an illustration of my brother’s famously insatiable appetite, but she had never used the term “tit surrogate” before.

After thirty-six hours of labor, two hours of pushing, and a for-ceps delivery, my brother, at eleven pounds, was born. At that time in Argentina, after a baby’s delivery the new mothers were put in rows of beds separated by curtains in the hospital maternity ward.

Families were allowed two hours of visitation time. Once in her

“room,” my mother tried to nurse my brother, who made it loud and clear that colostrum barely passed as an appetizer. The nurses repeatedly told my mother, who was now crying together with her baby, to breast-feed him and try to hush him, because the rest of the mothers needed their rest. After some time, a woman standing behind the curtain whispered to my mother to let her in. She had two children at home and had labored a stillborn baby two days before. She offered to nurse my brother.

“He slept through the night and then some more, in time for my own milk to come in. I was overwhelmed with gratitude for this woman, for my baby, and for what she did for me,” my mother said. “Women have shared bodies for a long time,
Nena
,”

she added, gazing inwardly, now contemplating this old memory in a whole new light.

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In the hospital the next morning, my father woke my mother with a bunch of roses. She asked him to deliver them, instead, to the other mother. But she was already gone. Even though my parents explained to the staff that they just wanted to send flowers to this woman, the hospital never disclosed her name.

Could a woman
really give up to another woman a baby she has carried for nine months? Yes, answered all the surrogates I spoke with. The tigress instinct I already know from being a mother myself wondered,
how
? I asked a “repeat” surrogate. She told me that she felt as protective of the baby as she had felt when pregnant with her own children. She did everything she could to ensure the baby’s health. However, she recalled the moment right after the delivery as her happiest memory from the experience.

She felt infinitely successful, proud, and moved beyond words as the intended parents held their baby in the delivery room, and the genetic mother cut the umbilical cord.

4.

I was driving across
the Bay Bridge from San Francisco’s East Bay, where I had gone to the lawyer’s office to pick up the signed contracts with the surrogate, when it hit me full force. What am I doing to her family? How are her kids going to understand this?

Fear, the sheer terror of having metamorphosed into a desperate monster, ate at my whole being. I bungled in my bag for the cell phone and dialed her number. Then I froze at the break of another, equally disturbing thought: Why do I assume I know better? How do I get off with the moral superiority to question her choices or her family’s? I could barely see straight. I found a parking spot as she picked up the phone. What would be the quickest, most polite way to tackle this?

“I wonder how you are going to present this to your children?” I asked, fumbling for words. What I really wanted to say was: How are you going to tell your children that you’re carrying
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someone else’s baby? And when that baby is born, that it will be going home with me?

Pause.

“Are you really asking how you should present this to
your
children?” she questioned me gently.

I guess I was. Is motherhood now negotiable? Will my children feel threatened by a sibling who, to their minds, instantaneously appears? Will they feel more or less special because they came out of my body, requiring no superhuman efforts to bring them into the world? How will they think of the mysterious woman who gives birth to their sibling—is
she
the mother? What will they think of
me
? For two years I had argued these nagging issues with my husband, my family, my friends, mainly with myself. As reconciled as I mostly was to the idea of surrogacy, still there lingered these worries.

Since our first meeting over brunch, my surrogate and I had stayed in constant contact, having almost daily conversations over e-mail or on the phone. I got to know her. I went from skepticism to admiration and gratitude for her willingness and excitement to carry my baby because I knew she, too, had deeply considered what surrogacy really meant to us both. Somehow, we had found ourselves committed to it together, despite how “unnatural,”