Because I Said So (46 page)

counterintuitive, and weird it was.

We talked for a while about different suggestions that we had both heard of, yet neither of us would consider. For instance, we could use a recently published children’s book on sexual education that illustrates the mechanics of surrogacy and other assisted reproduction technologies without going into too much detail.

However, on the following pages, there are elaborate explanations and graphics of masturbation and other equally uncomfortable parent-child topics we both hoped to delay a bit longer, thank you very much.

Because we live in diverse communities, our children already live among different kinds of families. We both marveled at how naturally they had reacted when we explained to them what surrogacy was about. They were more blasé about the idea of one
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mother growing a baby for another than most of the adults we had talked to. We tried out our own ideas on each other, in preparation for conversations with our kids about the joint journey our two families would now be embarking on. Once again, we treaded on the common ground between us.

“Will you let your daughter come to visit with mine once I get pregnant? I am afraid she won’t have any other friend to talk with about this,” she said.

“Of course,” I assured her. “Listen, my baby will miss your body after the birth . . . the noises of your children, the rhythms of your home . . .”

“I know,” she said, pausing. “I have an idea,” she continued, sounding as clear and close as if she were sitting in my car with me. “Make a tape with your children’s voices, yours and your husband’s, and I will play it for the baby when I am driving by myself.”

The lawyer’s contracts were still on the seat beside me, but the bond I could feel was taking place elsewhere, in a place without words. The regimen of fertility drugs would soon make us a team, our bodies cycling as one. Emotionally, we were already in sync.

5.

The nurse comes
into the changing room and smiles at me with routine understanding. My surrogate emerges from behind the curtain and the three of us walk into the room where the doctor will transfer three of my embryos to the top of her uterus. To be present at the transfer procedure is my way to “conceive” this pregnancy, so different from those intimate moments I had previously shared solely with my husband.

Once she lies down on the stretcher, I cover her with extra blankets. The nurse places her feet in the stirrups, making sure she is comfortable enough so she will not move during the transfer, then dims the lights and turns on the sonogram machine before she leaves the room to get the doctor and embryologist. I can feel the chilliness in the room, the unique temperature of antiM y S u r r o g a t e

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septic environments, of shiny, gelid instruments. As I look at her lying on the table with her eyes closed and her legs open, I want to cover her with even more blankets, to protect the body she is surrendering so I can have a baby.

In preparation for this day, for the past three weeks, miles away from each other but in perfect unison, we have each locked ourselves in the bathroom after putting the children to bed, mixed a line of tiny vials of powdery drugs into one of distilled water and injected it into our bodies. In the mornings we have popped pills and gone to doctor’s appointments for blood tests and sonograms, all the while trying to stay focused (or at least pretend with authority) in the pick-up lines at school, while supervising homework, at sports practices. For an entire menstrual cycle, her body and mine shared a “protocol calendar”: we acted as one unit—(surrogate’s uterus) + (mother’s eggs) + (father’s sperm) =

baby—of an unconventional equation.

So much is going through my head, so many things I would like to say to her, but we are united in silence. Words might dilute the staunch female will we hold together inside our fragile equation, the primal instinct, two tigresses watching over a cub. For a fleeting moment, we share the same body.

“Find a place to sit, honey, so you can watch the screen,” the nurse says as she returns to the room. “Is your husband coming in as well?”

“No, he’ll stay outside with her husband,” I answer. She nods, betraying nothing but professionalism, and proceeds to unwrap the speculum and other medieval-looking instruments women know too well. I move my chair closer to my surrogate’s bed and offer her my hand. She holds it tightly.

What do men do while their wives are in an operating room together, trying to conceive a baby?

Her husband had elected to sit in the waiting room, where a game of football was playing on the TV. “I’ll be here when you come out,” he said before kissing her good-bye. My husband hadn’t known what to do. He had wanted to be at the transfer, but what if her husband wasn’t there? What if he was? Either
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way, it would have been awkward. So he sat with her husband in the waiting room, mystified by football like many foreigners, trying, as he explained to me later, both to “blend in with the furniture and make small talk about the game.”

Inside the transfer room, the embryologist cradling the catheter now walks up to the doctor. Following standard and legal procedure, speaking into a tape recorder, he says my name, my husband’s, the surrogate’s, and the names of the three embryos to be transferred: #2, #8, and #14. The doctor then introduces the catheter into the uterine cavity, where the embryos are released. “Watch out for three dots on the screen. You cannot see the embryos but you will see the three bubbles of air in between,” the embryologist says, soon handing me a printout of their picture taken under the microscope. I show it to my surrogate. “Look. Smart, huh? They look like three little brains,” I say.

She smiles.

Two hours later, I hold the door open for her and my husband, who carries her bags. Her husband waits inside their car with the engine running, looking ahead. As she steps out onto the parking lot, she squints to the noon sun, then turns to face me.

We lock unguarded eyes, hers glassy and steady, a blue surrender to the unleashed new life inside of her, and mine, vulnerable—the eyes of a mother relying on another mother’s womb.

“Please call me for whatever you need. Promise?” I whisper in her ear as we hug.

“Yes,” she nods, then gets into the car.

My throat closes on me as she drives off with my three embryos.

6.

Ten days after the transfer,
my surrogate would go in for her first blood test, where she would be tested for the base level of the pregnancy hormone HCG. A rise in the hormone level would mean that implantation had occurred (“chemical pregnancy”).

Once these results were confirmed by ultrasound two to four weeks later, it would become a “clinical pregnancy.”

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For now, it was time to wait.

During those ten days, I dreaded the hours while my husband was at work and my children at school. To concentrate on my daily routine was virtually impossible. These days were definitely not going to be “normal.” So I tried to teach myself to knit. I did yoga, baked, took several baths, and cleaned closets. I reread the IVF cycle review chapter from the booklet published by the fertility center—several times, as if it were some kind of oracle. I avoided newspapers and their bad news, and pretty much avoided everybody but my surrogate.

“I think we’ll hear good news soon. I am so tired, just like I’ve been in my previous pregnancies,” she said in a hollow voice.

In the back of my mind, I knew that fatigue, like other symp-toms of pregnancy, is also a common side effect of the proges-terone injections she was still getting daily. But I chose not to give in to that possibility.

7.

On the afternoon
when we would get the result, I sat at a restaurant downtown across from my husband, checking my phone every two minutes to see whether I was still getting cellular reception. The phone rang, and I saw on the screen that the call was coming from the fertility clinic.

It was the nurse. She explained, again, the meaning of the results of the first blood test. “Unfortunately, Charo . . .”

I heard no more; nothing, for the rest of the day.

8.

That night
our doctor spoke in detail with my husband.

According to the results of the test, the HCG levels were flat, suggesting an immunological problem with our surrogate. The doctor was confident the results could have not been caused by a problem with the embryos. Could our surrogate be treated? Yes, but she would have to undergo a complicated treatment involving
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medications derived from blood products, which could compromise her overall health. After a long and hard consideration of our case, our doctor recommended that we change surrogates.

9.

The nurse at my clinic
offered to explain the diagnosis to my surrogate, but I wanted to do it myself. She had already called the lab for results and had left a message on my cell phone, asking me to call back. I wondered whether it would be better to get together in person to talk. I was drenched in a sadness that left me wearing my loss inside out. There was still some time before I had to pick up my children from school that day, then I would not be back home until the evening. I decided to call her from my car and offer to meet her later.

“I am so sorry. I feel so bad, so guilty. My body could not hold your three ‘best’ embryos,” was the first thing she said. I do not recall what words of consolation I must have mumbled. What I remember most distinctly was the sound of the wind tunneling along the street past the sides of my car. She preferred not to meet in person. It was time, we both knew, to say good-bye.

The complementary piece we had been to each other for the last six months crystallized for a moment. “I will miss your calls, sharing this with you.” Her voice trembled. Instead of bonding with the baby as I had feared, she had bonded with me, with the unique warmth and intimacy of our unconventional equation of trust: two mothers sharing their bodies to bring forth a new life.

At the mercy of unyielding nature, the unit we had become began to dissolve. I told her how sorry I was for the new diagnosis she was walking out with.

“I am not going to worry about this immunological thing.

I’ve gotten pregnant easily before,” she said, protecting me from the only thing she could: the guilt of having put her body through so much, to end with no reward. There was no shielding either of us from the stark emptiness left by our hope for a baby for me.

I asked her what she was going to do next. As she spoke
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about her future plans—of how she would give all of this a rest before deciding what to do next, of how she now needed to spend time reconnecting with her children and family—I also thought about my family, my future. Now, it was time to let go.

“Thank you,” I said. “I am forever grateful to you and I will always remember you.”

“I know,” she answered, claiming her body back.

It was my turn; I had to settle back into mine. During the weeks that followed, I was too raw to recognize what I would soon know with every cell of that same body. The disappointment ran so deep, it illuminated the opposite—I couldn’t give up.

Six months later, I would fly to Los Angeles to sign new contracts with another surrogacy agency. Three months after that, at a different restaurant, I would meet another surrogate and her husband. Once we talked about our children, I would look into her eyes and know.

Then, with trust as the only guarantee, one mother relying on another, I will hold her clothes outside the changing room.

The Belly Unbuttoned

S u s a n S t r a i g h t

It’s not the stomach
we see everywhere now, not the innocu-ous soft abdomen or even the dimple of navel, the vestige of our infancy and need. No. What we see—on college girls at the university where I teach, on girls at the high school and junior high my daughters attend, on elementary school girls who stand on the stage with my youngest daughter to perform in “Mice from Outer Space”, on Catherine Zeta-Jones in her cell phone ads—is not the stomach, where our food lands, where undignified gastric breakdown and distribution occurs.

What we see now is the belly. We see sex.

The expanse of skin not above the navel, but below it, the smooth skirt of flesh between hipbones, the concave bowl where babies will curl. We even see the taut cords of muscle that lead to the groin. We see the shining rim of a cup, the allure of what’s below.

And it’s accessorized, of course, in this age of over-accessorization.

The navel with jeweled rings, the front hipbones with “tan tattoos”

(a decal is placed on the skin before the subject enters the tanning salon, leaving a white image of, say, a Playboy bunny, as on a twelve-year-old girl who plays in the junior high band with my daughter), and the back belly—oh, there we have butt cleavage accentuated with the de rigueur real tattoo (your name, someone else’s name, Celtic symbols, roses and birds and dolphins all rising from the cleft between your buttocks). Don’t forget the top of the
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thong, which might show to the point that the pockets of skin below the stretchy material are also tattooed. (How do you plan for that?

Squat in front of a mirror and see what is exposed on a regular basis when you sit down?)

We know all this. But I’ve tried, at junior high band performances or high school orientations, or just walking around the mall, to figure out why these bellies are not the bellies of my young womanhood, and how the belly itself became the new icon of sexual allure, the part of the body that girls and even their mothers are showing off.