Authors: Carolyn Savage
I am not sure they liked this approach, but I described our decision as strongly and with as much conviction as I could.
As the meeting was breaking up we promised to keep them informed about the pregnancy. They asked for contact information, but we declined to give it to them. I knew we would eventually, but I explained that we wanted to discuss how the meeting went and how we would move on from here. Shannon frantically wrote down every phone number they had, and their address, and handed the information to Carolyn. We thanked them for coming and wished them a safe drive home.
When the door shut behind them, we all let out a collective sigh of relief. “They seemed nice and normal, and the meeting went as well as could be expected, don’t you think?” Mary said. We talked with the lawyers about the meeting for an hour or so before leaving for home. In the elevator, Carolyn looked exhausted.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked her.
“I think I’m glad it’s over. I’m still pregnant with a baby that I’m not going to be allowed to keep. Now at least I know who is coming to take the baby away.”
“Do you feel better about anything?”
“I’m proud of us. I got through it without crying. We probably made them feel better.”
“It went well. I wonder what will happen next?”
“I don’t know, and frankly,” she held up her hand to demonstrate the quiver that was still controlling it, “I am really wondering how long it will take me to stop shaking.”
As we made our way to our car Carolyn seemed to start relaxing and even showed a smile. Maybe being in the fresh air and out of that building gave her a sense of release.
“Shannon has beautiful blue eyes and a kind smile,” Carolyn remarked. She too was reviewing the meeting and trying to find reassurance there. “I can tell she has a lot of energy in her. Seeing as how she is a teacher of eighth graders, she’s probably a very patient person. I bet if she and I worked in the same school, we’d be friends.”
If meeting the other family gave Carolyn some peace and helped Paul and Shannon, then the encounter was a success. They were now real to us, just people in an extraordinary situation, probably hoping and praying that they wouldn’t say or do the wrong thing. The meeting had made them less of an unknown. As we got in my car, I was starting to think that maybe we could all work together to get to a better place.
Sharing the Hurt, Feeling the Love
CAROLYN
T
HE FEELING OF RELIEF
we got from our initial meeting with the Morells was short-lived, eaten up by the pressure around revealing our predicament to those we loved. The ordeal would take two days, starting with our parents, moving from there to Sean’s siblings and their spouses, followed by phone calls to my brothers. The next day we planned to tell the boys, shortly before we called our friends together in a meeting room at our church. The schedule was exhausting, but once these two days came to a close, I wouldn’t have to hide our secret anymore. Best of all, I could finally stop dressing like we lived at the Arctic Circle.
For Sean, the most intimidating meeting of the four was going to be the one where we told our parents, particularly my dad. Sean remembered clearly the day in the hospital corridor when my father looked him sternly in the eye and said, “No more babies.” We also remembered the look on his face when he found out I was pregnant with Mary Kate. He loves MK with all his heart and is a wonderful grandpa to her. But when he found out we were taking on another pregnancy, I could see that he was surprised and not jubilant.
My dad was a university attorney and did a little bit of every kind of law. The cases that really rattled him were those in which
he defended the university hospital against malpractice suits. He’d seen the catastrophic consequences of medical sloppiness and carelessness. There was no predicting how he would act when he found out about this situation. I just hoped he could contain his temper when he found out that his daughter was the victim of such a careless error. So did Sean. When he rehearsed this meeting with Marty Holmes Sr., Sean sweated through his shirt. We hoped that if we had my dad in the room with my mom and Sean’s mom Kate, Dad wouldn’t completely blow his stack.
We came up with a great reason to get my parents to come from Michigan to visit us. Drew was competing in an important 5K race at school that he was likely to win. We invited them to be there when he crossed the finish line. The race was a yearly tradition at the kids’ school, the culmination of a week of inspirational talks about not using drugs and taking a “Positive Direction” in everything in life. Drew had been training hard and was running well. Sean thought he might even break the unofficial race record, and my parents were glad to be asked to witness this event. I asked them to arrive at 1:00
P.M.
the day before to baby-sit MK so I could attend “a parent event” at Drew’s school. I lured Kate to the house at the same time under the same pretext. I felt bad lying to them, but there was no easy way to get them together at that time.
That afternoon my mom and dad arrived right on schedule. We chatted for a few minutes, then broke off when Sean came in.
“Taking long leisurely lunches these days, Sean? Uh…I thought you would be back at the office guarding my money!” My dad joked with Sean because he knew Sean never took lunches.
“Well, Byron, that is the beauty of having ‘people,’” Sean said with a wry smile. “I guard your money most of the day, but when I’m gone, I assign my employees to guard it in two-hour shifts. We are on watch twenty-four hours a day.”
We were all laughing when the door opened again, and Kate walked in.
“Byron? Linda? What a surprise. What are you all doing here?”
And there we stood. Our parents looked confused as to why all of them were there, while I looked like the cat that ate the canary.
“Well, we have something to tell you. There is no event at Drew’s school today,” I said. “We just wanted to talk to you together, and we couldn’t think of another way to get you here without tricking you. So, sorry. Please, sit down.”
I could see how frightening this sounded. The proof was all over my mother’s wide-eyed face. Obediently they walked into the family room. My mom sat on the couch next to me. Dad pulled a wooden rocking chair from the corner, and Kate sat in a chair. Sean sat down next to her.
“No one is sick, we’re not getting a divorce, and no one is going to jail,” Sean started off.
“Well, that’s good, I guess,” my dad said, still looking scared.
“Look, this is not easy to say, so I’m going to say it. You all know that MK was conceived through IVF?” Sean said.
They nodded.
“Well, we had leftover embryos from that IVF that were frozen. This past February, Carolyn and I did a frozen embryo transfer, and she is now sixteen weeks pregnant.”
My mom squealed with joy.
“Hold on, Linda. This is not good news. Apparently, when they thawed the embryos, they pulled the wrong ones. They transferred another couple’s embryos into Carolyn. She is pregnant with another couple’s baby.”
I had been staring at the floor the entire time, feeling my cheeks burn with nervousness. When Sean finished, I looked up at my dad, whose jaw was hanging wide open. His face was beet red, as if he was struggling to contain his temper. Kate had her hand over her mouth in shock.
“Oh, Carolyn!” my mom said softly, her voice cracking as her eyes filled with tears. She shook her head back and forth, refusing to accept this was so. “Is this true?”
I shook my head up and down indicating yes.
“And the other couple wants this baby,” I continued, trying to erase any erroneous thought they might be having that we were going to get a baby out of this. “They are going to take this baby upon delivery, and we have agreed to allow that to happen without a fight.”
Sean described how we found out about the error, told them the doctor had asked us to abort but we refused, and added that we had met Paul and Shannon and they were nice and truly wanted this baby.
“Where are your embryos?” my dad blurted out.
“We have been told they are still in cryopreservation. We are working on moving them to a different facility,” I said.
“Your health comes first, Carolyn. You know that, right? Your health comes before this baby’s.” My dad wanted reassurance that I wasn’t going to martyr myself. “You have three other children to raise, and you are very important to those children.”
“Of course, Dad. Just like my other pregnancies. My health comes first.”
Sean continued to explain everything that we had done to protect ourselves, how we were proceeding legally with reputable attorneys in Brian McKeen and Marty, and how we had chosen to keep this a secret for as long as we could.
“You were pregnant in Florida?” my mom asked, incredulous. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell us. I can’t believe you went all this time keeping this to yourselves. I’m so sorry you were alone in this.”
“You don’t know how many times I wanted to call you,” I said. “But we had to keep this a secret in case I miscarried. We didn’t want you to be upset unnecessarily if I lost this baby.”
An hour later we were still answering questions, particularly my father’s questions, about malpractice and the legal process, when MK woke from her nap. I brought her down to play on the family room floor while we continued our conversation. While I was sitting next to MK, I looked up at my dad and saw that he was thumbing through
Brown Bear, Brown Bear
, a children’s board book, as he listened. He turned page after page, pretending to look intently at the illustrations. I realized he was in shock. He held that book the entire time. He was sad. We were all sad. We were a pitiful bunch that afternoon.
We wrapped up the meeting before the boys got home from school, as we thought they’d find it weird that all of their grandparents had been summoned to their home for…what? an afternoon cup of coffee? Before Kate left, we asked her if it would be okay to call an emergency meeting of all of Sean’s siblings and their spouses at her home that evening. We didn’t want to meet at our house because we weren’t going to tell the boys until the next day after school. Kate agreed, and Sean immediately made eight phone calls requesting that his siblings and their spouses be at their mom’s at eight o’clock that night. Sean thought if he gave his siblings only a few hours’ notice, we would limit their worry time. He told each of them what he had told our parents: that we weren’t sick, getting divorced, or going to jail.
Although we’d just dropped a considerable bombshell in our living room, we had to resume our “everything’s just fine” posture for a carbo-loading dinner with Drew that his school was hosting. It was the special “night before the run” meal, and the school always invited an outstanding inspirational speaker to address the crowd before dinner. The original speaker had a family emergency and had to cancel, so the replacement speaker was going to be a surprise.
Drew, Sean, and I arrived at the very last minute so we could avoid any small talk before the event started. We slid into a seat in the back and heard the crowd buzzing with speculation about the speaker. When they announced that it was Mrs. Jackie Frisch, I couldn’t believe my luck, as I was sure she would have a message that I needed to hear that night. Jackie is the mother of ten boys and suffers from a rare and debilitating disease that threatens her life daily. In the face of her ailment, Jackie and her husband found the strength in their hearts to adopt seven Haitian orphans—all boys—now her
sons. Last year, in an episode of
Extreme Home Makeover
, the wizards from that show whipped up a beautiful new home for Jackie and her family. She is also an ordained minister, and one amazing lady.
That evening Jackie talked about gratitude and love and how grateful she was that God had chosen her to suffer from her sickness. Her illness made her love every single minute of every day she spent with her family in her home. She talked of her seven Haitian boys and three biological sons, who now filled her life with love and ate her out of house and home. Yes, her life was tough. Yes, they didn’t have much money, and she worried about her health, but she exuded love. And the love made her happy.
The amazing thing about hearing Jackie talk was that it made me think that I needed to catch her fever of love. I needed help leaving my own pity party.
You need to be peaceful like her. You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. If she can get up every day and face her fears, you surely can get through this pregnancy.
We left the carbo-loading dinner a little early, telling Drew we had to meet up with some friends. We dropped him off and headed to Kate’s for our next meeting.
SEAN
Carolyn and I spoke little as we made the two-mile drive to my mom’s house on a perfect spring evening. We planned to arrive at her house a few minutes after 8:00 so we wouldn’t have to make small talk as we waited. I parked in front of Mom’s, and Carolyn and I paused to take one last look at our reflection in the car window before we entered the house.
As I surveyed the living room, I counted my siblings and their spouses, most of whom were dressed casually in workout gear, to make sure that everyone was there. We are an athletic family, a family of runners and basketball players, but the feeling in the room
wasn’t our usual jocularity. We were gathered in the same room where year after year we had opened Christmas presents and hunted for Easter eggs, but the mood that night was nervous and a bit somber. When the whole family is together with the grandkids, we are forty-strong. My mom and dad have quite a legacy. They raised us kids to be fiercely independent, but as exemplified that night, if anyone needed help, we would drop everything at a moment’s notice. My family knew that a meeting being called like this had to be about something serious.
Everyone had instinctively formed into a circle around the two chairs that my mom had positioned in a corner of the living room. They looked like the “hot seats.” My mom told us that one of my brothers was running late. To avoid awkwardness, Carolyn and I ducked into the nursery that my mom keeps for her grandkids. I was so nervous in that nursery. I just wanted to get this over with. Soon after that, everyone was seated, and we entered. Dusk was beginning to settle outside. The room was chilly and dim, lit only by a few lamps.