Bringing in Finn (32 page)

“When a woman loses a baby late-term,” she'd said, “the old emotions of that loss, along with heightened anxiety and grief, can surface—similar to what people experience on the anniversary of a death.”

I wondered, as the day approached, if this would be true in a surrogate pregnancy. I didn't notice increased anxiety as we rounded the twenty-week mark, nor did I feel a decrease in the levels of anxiety that I'd now accepted was part of the pregnancy experience for me. From the beginning, fear would strike erratically. I would feel peaceful for several days and then find myself being pounded by uncomfortable chest flutters, or a fit of spontaneous crying that would last for a few minutes and leave me feeling vulnerable and tense.

Nighttime was the worst. One night, when I was sleeping in the basement during the sixteen-week visit, I heard the floorboards squeaking upstairs. My mother had gotten up to use the bathroom,
but by the time I'd raced up the stairs I was convinced I'd find the lights blaring and see bedclothes soaked in blood.

I charged toward the bedroom and almost bowled into her in the hallway. She jumped in her cotton pajamas and put her hand to her chest.

“Honey!” she said. “I am just going to the bathroom. You have
got
to calm down.”

Back in Chicago, I thought about what I could do to relax. I began doing relaxation meditations morning and night. A colleague, Angela, who'd gone through coaching training with me, told me about a woman she worked with who'd given birth to a stillborn baby at full term. “During her second pregnancy, she bought a heart rate monitor so she could listen to the baby at home,” Angela said. “And she created a mantra:
It's different this time. It's not the same as the first one.
She repeated it many times a day.”

I wished the mantra would work for me, but my mind did not feel calmed by “different.” “Different” didn't equal live birth. Different left too much space for possibilities.

I invented my own mantra:
The anxiety I'm feeling has nothing to do with this pregnancy. It has nothing to do with this baby.
I tried it for a few days, and the words sung like truth in my bones.

The following week, my mother unknowingly provided a key to allow me to lighten up. We'd begun book two of
Harry Potter,
and when I began a new chapter, she yelled for me to stop.

I had no sense of what was happening on the other end of the phone. I stopped and waited, the seconds counting themselves one by one in my head.

“Now read the next line!” she said. I remained perplexed but assumed she and the baby were okay if she wanted me to continue.

I resumed where we'd left off, speaking slowly.

“He kicked!” my mother said. “The baby kicked! He's kicking at the sound of your voice!” I attempted to continue, but I couldn't
concentrate. I'd worried secretly sometimes, mostly at night, that the baby wouldn't know me, that I would be a stranger after nine months inside someone else. And yet here he was, ostensibly recognizing, or at least responding to, me—my voice.

“Has the baby kicked other times?” I asked.

“Nothing like this,” my mother said.

My mother referred to the baby consistently as “he.” She said she meant it as the universal pronoun, to avoid saying having to say “he-she” or, worse, the impersonal “it” for nine months. Bill was convinced we were having a girl and used “she” if ever a pronoun was needed. I'd intended to think of some kind of gender-neutral nickname, but since early on—I think ever since we'd started reading
Harry Potter
and “The Boy Who Lived”—I'd had the feeling the baby was a boy.

The next day when I called, my mother placed her iPhone on her stomach while I read; she thought the baby would hear better that way. This time, the baby kicked the phone so hard that it bounced off her stomach and onto the floor. I heard a
thunk
and then my mother's laughter.

 

The following Monday,
my mother sent me a text to call her right away. Again, nothing emergent was happening with the pregnancy.

“You will never believe what I found,” she said when I reached her. In one of her TV marathons, she'd come across a show called
Pregnant at 70.

“It's one of those low-budget reality shows, like
A Baby Story,”
she told me. “And, okay, most of the women are in their fifties or sixties, but one woman from India was over seventy—and these are all people who are planning to parent. They're not surrogates! I've watched every episode I can find. I even made your father
watch with me. Can you imagine—seventy and pregnant!” she said. “I feel so young!”

 

Although Dr. Gerber
had told my mother to move to Chicago by week twenty, we negotiated another plan as a family in October. My mother would fly out for the twenty-week ultrasound, and if all was well with the pregnancy, she would go home for one more month and move to Chicago near the first of November. My father was happier to have another month with her, and I think we all felt relieved to have thirty more days of our regular routine before we moved in together for the final trimester.

The night before my mother flew to Chicago for the twenty-week appointment, I received a package from my friend Sandy in Santa Fe.

Out of a large packing box filled with tissue paper, I pulled a box hand-painted with swirls of copper and gold. Inside were two pacifiers, one pink and one blue. An accompanying note explained that if we were planning to find out the baby's sex, we could bring the box to our twenty-week ultrasound and have the technician put the pacifier that corresponded to the baby's gender in the box. I liked the idea, and Bill and my mother thought it would be fun to bring props.

We arrived at the ultrasound appointment with the pacifier box and in a state of high anticipation, eager to find out the exciting detail about who was inside.

We gave the box to Kenisha, the technician, and asked if she would hand the corresponding-colored pacifier to Bill once she confirmed the gender. Kenisha, a new mother herself, seemed amused by the request.

I'd forgotten how many images and measurements the doctors required. As Kenisha swiped and clicked her mouse around the screen, my excitement gave way to trepidation. I forgot about finding
out the baby's gender and began to pray that our baby was simply alive and developing normally. Bill's hand clenched mine as we looked at the screen.

My mother lay turned toward the screen. I could not see her face or know what she was thinking. Ten minutes became twenty, and Kenisha was still quiet, angling the roller along the baby's image from seemingly infinite angles. Bill's hand began to sweat. The moisture ran onto mine. I remembered the same sensation the day of our wedding, when Bill's hands had grown slick against mine in the chapel in Scotland where we'd said our vows. I'd saved the gloves I wore; the leather bore a salt line from his hands.

Bill broke the silence and asked Kenisha directly if the baby was okay.

“I've been told I look very serious when I take the images,” she apologized. “The baby is just fine. Would you like to know the sex now?”

Bill fell back into his chair; relief pooled at my feet. My mother turned from the ultrasound screen and looked at our shaken faces.

“I so wanted this to be easier on you, since I'm carrying the baby,” my mother said.

“It is, Mom,” Bill said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Think what shape we'd be in if you weren't.”

Kenisha mimed a drum roll on the side of the machine and then held both pacifiers, pushing one and then the other out in front of Bill several times. She extended the pink one almost to the tip of his hands and then switched fast, delivering the blue pacifier into his upturned palms and saying, “You're having a boy!”

Bill and I shrieked in the exact way I imagine we would have if we had heard we were having a girl. Our baby was okay, and we now knew it was a he. Bill went into the hallway to call our brother-in-law and his business partner while my mother changed. She did not get up right away. She lingered at the screen for another
moment, looking at the center, where Kenisha had saved a lengthwise image of the baby.

“A boy,” my mother said, marveling. “I kept saying ‘he,' but part of me thought the baby would be a girl, since that's what I've always had.”

“You finally get to carry a boy—as a grandmother,” I said.

My mother continued to stare at the screen, a look of amazement on her face.

We walked together to our next appointment, where we were scheduled to meet Dr. Julien. MFM aimed to have each patient meet all the doctors in the practice by the end of the pregnancy. If the action had been even remotely appropriate, I would have done cartwheels down the hall.

Dr. Julien was a sturdy woman with a good sense of humor who informed us she was four months pregnant herself.

“But I look seven,” she said, and made a joke about her size.

She reconfirmed that everything was progressing ideally with our pregnancy and that she had embarrassingly few things to check at the appointment.

“I
will
check your blood pressure,” she said, strapping the black cuff to my mother's upper arm and squeezing the rubber pump at one end.

“Incredible,” Dr. Julien said. “You have lower blood pressure than most nonpregnant thirty-year-olds.”

I felt like early snow melting onto a warm sidewalk. Muscles I didn't know I'd been tensing relaxed. For the second time that morning, my body flowed with relief. For the moment, everything was fine. My mother could return to D.C. for a month. And in a period of weeks, we would enter the place where we were banking on my mother's body's being able to do what mine had not: carry our child to term.

More emotions would come. For now, though, I felt only sincere, depthless gratitude and the greatest hope I had known since we became pregnant with our twins.

It was the gratitude that ameliorated the separation pangs I felt at the thought of so much distance between my mother and the baby for the next month. My bond with our child felt as strong to me as it ever had with the twins. Having seen the baby so vital on the ultrasound screen allowed me to trust more. I also knew it was the last time we'd be apart. When my mother returned to Chicago at the end of October, the three of us, along with Bill, would be together until the birth.

 

During what we
came to call our bonus month, my parents rented a house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and spent a week at the ocean with friends. Bill and I went to Arizona with his father and stepmother, to a resort built into a red desert mountain.

“It's your babymoon,” they said, waving to us as they dropped us at a private cabin on the property and told us they'd see us at dinner, if we wanted to come.

“We want you to fully enjoy your last trip as a couple before the baby arrives.”

We swam in the pool, I went to yoga, we hiked in the mountains surrounding the resort. The place was holistic and soothing. Still, I found it difficult to let go for more than a few minutes. My attention gravitated constantly to my mother and the baby. I felt a pull to them, tethered by an energetic umbilical cord. It was often only after I called for story time, my feet dangling in the tepid water of the pool, having heard my mother's voice and a report on the baby's kicks, that I would allow myself to jump into the water or take a nap or make love with Bill in our cool desert cave of a room.

By the end of the week, I felt as if we were (sort of) like any other couple expecting a baby: excited, hopeful, and certain that life as we'd known it was about to change.

“I think I really did relax, finally,” I told Bill in the car on the way to the airport.

“Good,” he said. “Because we need to get ready. Your mother moves in on Sunday.”

 

My father was
attending a conference in Boston, so my mother's friend Lissa, the one
responsible
for this whole thing, as my father liked to say, drove with my mother from D.C. to Chicago.

They broke the trip into two days, stopping to see my cousin in Hudson, Ohio. When my mother revealed the reason for her trip, sweeping aside her coat to reveal her basketball-shaped baby bump, my cousin and her husband were stunned and thought she was pulling some kind of prank. My mother said she enjoyed the looks of shock on their faces as the fact that she was actually carrying their second cousin inside her that very moment took form in their minds.

“It kind of brought me back to the beginning of the vision,” she told me later. “I've grown so used to the idea, I'd kind of forgotten there was anything unusual about what we're doing.”

My mother and Lissa estimated they would arrive at about five o'clock in the evening on October 30. It had rained briefly that afternoon, and our front walk was wet and matted with red, yellow, and orange leaves. Bill made a fire of birch branches and twigs, and the air smelled of chicory and spices.

Any apprehension I'd had about living with my mother for four months had dissipated, but I felt a twinge of nervousness as I tidied the last of the pillow shams and towels in the guest room and straightened the stack of books and movies I'd collected to entertain her during her stay.

“I would lose it within a week of living with my mother,” a friend of mine had said as I was preparing for my mother to come. “Aren't you worried you'll drive each other crazy?”

I thought about how I would have thought the same thing five years earlier, how the entire situation would have seemed a ludicrous
impossibility. I remembered Bill's and my forty-eight-hour rule: no visits longer than two days. When I thought about my mother's arrival now, however, the overwhelming emotion I felt was joy. Of course, my mother and my baby were inseparable at this point. I ran the vacuum cleaner one last time over the rug in what would now be my mother's bedroom and thought about the conference we'd attended in Albuquerque and the afternoons we'd spent making art and reading sections of books together over the past three years. I would have been excited to have her come live with us for four months even if she weren't carrying our child.