Inconceivable (9 page)

They do understand how anxiety ridden your clients must be regarding the health of their unborn child. The only thing they can communicate to ease your clients’ fears is that they will treat this unborn child as if it was their own. They have superb medical care and are following the advice of their physician.

Lastly, my clients have agreed to receive a list of questions that your clients may have for them. Please forward the list to me as soon as your clients have it completed.

Respectfully Yours,
Mary E. Smith

CAROLYN

I had never felt so stifled in my life. At a moment when I needed support more than anything, I wasn’t allowed to share my burden with my friends and my family. The only people I could talk to about my heartbreak were Sean, the lawyers, and Kevin Anderson, thank goodness. All of them were in agreement that I should say nothing. I had never lived in such an interior world. At the same time, I’d never had so much to say.

My mom and I chat on the phone several times a week. Besides the family gossip, I know her thought process about every decision she’s made to redecorate the house. I also know, before the guests arrive, the menu of every dinner party she’s ever had. After she’s filled me in, she wants to know everything about me. We talk about the kids first. At some point in the conversation, I put her on speaker to sing to MK. My mom doesn’t have what you would call an ear for music, but she loves to sing, and MK loves it too.

Since we found out about the pregnancy, each time I talked
with my mom on the phone, right before I hung up, I wanted to say, “Wait, wait…help me…please,” but I never did. We would tell them as soon as Dr. Read deemed the pregnancy viable. I was counting the weeks until then. Meanwhile, on our winter vacation, we were walking into a situation that would test my ability to keep my mouth shut.

Shortly after the lawyer sent that letter to the other family, we were scheduled to make our annual visit to Cape Coral, Florida, where my parents spend the winter. While we love visiting my parents, we have always been sensitive about not crowding them in the modest place they rent, so we rent a condo on nearby Sanibel Island. That way, we can see them as much as we want but not cramp their style. After Dr. Read cleared me to travel, I tried to visualize visiting my mom and not breathing a word of what was going on inside of me. It would be sort of like being a teenager all over again, minus the door slamming.

I knew this trip would be tough because it wasn’t just my mom who would have her eyes on me but also the Corey family, my parents’ best friends since I was a small child. When I was young, my family spent weekends on our sailboat in Sarnia, Canada. Among the few constants on those weekends was knowing that if there was wind, we would be under sail. The second was that, if we were under sail, we were racing the Coreys. Their boat was docked three slips down from ours, and they had three kids around the same ages as my brothers and me. Tip and Jean Corey were also going to be in Cape Coral during our vacation.

The Coreys might provide enough of a social life for most women, but not my mom, a woman who can make friends absolutely anywhere she goes. We have often joked that if my mom were ever incarcerated, she’d have a gourmet group, a book club, and a garden club up and off the ground within her first few days in the clink. Over the winters my parents have spent at Cape Coral, she’s increased her circle of friends well beyond the Coreys. As Sean and
the boys packed the car for our drive to the airport, I was hoping that Jean and my mom, or any of the many other people in Cape Coral who have seen us over the years, would be unable to pick up anything different about Sean and me on this visit.

When we arrived in Florida, the weather was heavenly. Every day after sleeping in, I would venture down to the pool to soak in the glorious sunshine as I sat on the steps and splashed around with Mary Kate. The condo resort had some seasonal residents who met daily under the awning at the pool. I enjoyed eavesdropping as they discussed the new manicurist or some woman’s botched hairdo. They were also pretty opinionated on the subject of whatever current event had usurped the television talk shows the night before. I wished that was the most important thing on my mind.

One morning, while I was sitting on the steps of the pool playing with MK, one of the “awning ladies” swam over to talk.

“So, what do you think about that lady who had eight babies?”

I paused for a moment, trying to figure out the right way to respond to a question about Nadya Suleman. I suddenly realized that I took observations about the “OctoMom” personally.

“I think she was under the care of an incredibly irresponsible fertility doctor.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, 85 percent of women who get pregnant using IVF give birth to a single baby. Ten percent have twins, and the other 5 percent may end up with triplets or more, but octuplets? The doctor who thought it was ethical to transfer six embryos into a woman in her thirties who already had six children should lose his medical license.”

She thought about this for a moment, while doing her water aerobics.

“I’ve never heard of a woman using IVF and only getting one baby,” she said.

I held up MK.

“Well, she’s an IVF baby, and we only had one.”

I was a little annoyed, but I knew that her misinformed opinion about the likelihood of multiple births with IVF was common.

She commented on what a beautiful baby MK was, and then bounced away from me, sensing that she had struck a nerve.

I watched her climb out of the pool, and head back to her friends under the awning. I knew I was getting talked about, since they were all suddenly trying not to stare at me. I imagined what she was saying: “You see that mom down there with that baby. That baby is an IVF baby, and she only had one. Can you believe that?” I thought to myself,
Oh, woman, if you only knew.

And if she knew that this time next year, she might be hearing our story in the news, would she treat me differently?

What if I had been free to tell anyone I chose what was really happening? Maybe that woman at the pool wouldn’t have looked at me with such wide eyes, as if MK were some kind of medical curiosity. She might have hugged me and told me what a good thing I was doing. That’s what I wanted from my mom and dad. I wanted them to be able to hold me in their arms the way I held Drew, Ryan, and Mary Kate. I wanted them to tell me that it was going to be all right, that they were there, and that they too would make sure no harm came to me or my baby.

I saw my mom and dad every day, and I was grateful that those occasions were busy. If it was dinner at my mom’s, she was the demon of the kitchen producing one incredible meal after the other. When we went out with the kids in the afternoons, the kids took center stage. I was relieved when we’d made it all the way to Wednesday without Mom and me getting a chance to have some time alone.

With no girlfriends to chat with, and the pregnancy taking up most of my energy, my thoughts often drifted to the genetic mom. I thought about how worried she would be if she knew what had happened when we thought we’d lost the baby. What if she had been trying for years to have a child and this was the first success, but the pregnancy was in some other woman? I bet her mind was whirling
too. Maybe it was good that we couldn’t communicate with each other right then. Who knows what we would have said?

On Wednesday we were all eating lunch in the condo when I heard the
ping
of a delivered e-mail on my computer. I opened it immediately and found a message from our lawyer informing us that she had attached a letter from the genetic family. I hesitated before reading it, as Mary had included a warning. “Think carefully before reading this, Carolyn.” Was she worried that it could be hurtful?

Do I really want to hear what they have to say? Of course I do. Plus, we already explained to them how upset we are. We invited them to send us a list of questions, so surely that is all this is. I should read it.

I took a deep breath, opened the attachment, and read the letter quickly. As my eyes scanned the three-page letter, I realized, to my surprise, that this letter was much more than a list of questions.

Wait! I’m not ready for this. This is too much.

My gut was telling me to stop reading, but my eyes couldn’t help but pour over the information that the genetic mother of my baby provided.

After reading it once I was in shock. My heart was racing, my arms and legs were numb, and I was shaking.
Calm down, Carolyn. It’s okay. You read it too fast. Read it again. Surely, you are misunderstanding something.

I read the letter again, searching for something that I felt wasn’t there. I desperately wanted to read that she felt terrible for us, that she couldn’t imagine our despair, that they’d do whatever they could to help us. As I reviewed each sentence, the sentiments of the letter were slamming into me like bullets piercing my heart. Those thoughts, those feelings that I wanted to hear were surprisingly absent.

I must have been visibly upset because, before I knew it, Sean was at my side, reading over my shoulder.

Read it again and read it carefully. The messages you long to hear are there! You are just missing them.

I started over at the beginning, but after reading the letter a third time, I was exasperated.

“I can’t believe this!” I blurted out. “This woman sent me a laundry list as to why this is so horrible for her. My God, they are getting a baby out of this.”

“Hold on, Carolyn. I have to read it again.”

“Sean, you can read this letter a hundred times and it won’t change the fact that it’s heartless.”

Sean studied the words on the page, but my anger boiled over. I grabbed my sunglasses, stomped out to the beach, and took a seat at the water’s edge.

I reviewed the letter in my head. I had invited them to send us a list of questions. Instead, the genetic mother, Shannon, sent a letter telling me about how she was going to lose her privacy, how Shannon was going to have to explain this to her co-workers, and how Shannon thought she might have gotten three babies if the embryos had been transferred to her womb. And worst of all, Shannon decided that God did this. “God for some reason decided that another woman would carry this baby for me.” That stung worst of all. Where exactly did Shannon think that left me and my family in God’s eyes?

As I dug my toes into the sand, I tried to shake off the first impression this letter gave me. How could she have written me such a self-focused letter? Was she trying to convince me that she had it worse? And if she was, what does that say about her ability to show compassion to us as this situation unfolds? I shut my eyes and took a few calming breaths.
Carolyn, slow down!
I told myself.
Try to understand where Shannon was coming from when she wrote the letter.

I tried to imagine how frightened Shannon was about not knowing who we were. I’m betting she was trying to encourage us to reveal ourselves so she could know more about the situation. Unfortunately, her strategy backfired because the letter placed a fear
in my heart that had not existed before. Could her sentiments be proof that what we were doing to give them a baby did not really matter that much? Could she be saying that once the baby was in their arms, their first goal would be to erase everything we had done in order to claim this child as truly their own? I shivered at the thought of us being removed from the equation of this child’s life. I had spent a lot of time trying to convince myself that after I delivered this baby, we would mercifully be given the opportunity to know him or her forever. Now I wasn’t so sure.

SEAN

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Carolyn’s mood changing as she read. She was shifting in her chair as she got more and more angry.

I wondered what she could be reading that was upsetting her so much, so I went over to the computer and started reading over her shoulder. As I read, she got up and paced back and forth. I was surprised at the inward focus of the woman who wrote it, but tried not to take too much offense. I knew it was normal for people to spend almost all of the time thinking about themselves. I cut Shannon some slack because she did not know us. She did write that she appreciated that we were continuing the pregnancy.

Carolyn was searching the letter for something that wasn’t there. Simple sentences on the page were like blows to her heart. She was so vulnerable then, tired, distraught, and not herself. My goal in Sanibel was to take care of everything for Carolyn in the hopes that rest and relaxation would soothe some of her anxiety. I took the early shift with Mary Kate and kept the boys out of the condo once Carolyn was up. When she and MK napped, I tended to do stuff from work. I hoped that, if I kept to this schedule, Carolyn could get more than ten hours of sleep a night and a lot of rest during the day. I knew a healthy mom helped make for a happy baby, and I
wanted to support both.

Perfect. Well, not really. The trip brought Carolyn and me in close proximity for twenty-four hours a day, but we were hardly close. If she wasn’t sleeping, she was there with us but somehow far away, her mind lost in some other space where she was trying to comprehend what was happening to her. I missed her. And rest alone was not enough to calm her.

“C’mon, Carolyn, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for now,” I said.

“She’s not thankful to me, Sean. She thinks I’m her surrogate!” Carolyn said. “She can only think about how hard this all is for her.”

“She said she was grateful,” I said. “They don’t even know us.”

“She didn’t say she was grateful, she expressed her gratitude,” Carolyn said. “Passive voice, like she’s saying it against her will. I hate this letter.”

“Hate the letter?” I was surprised. “Carolyn, you are not a hater! What you are doing is beautiful, a beautiful expression of your love of life. When they understand everything we are doing for them, they will love and admire you.”