Mommy Man (25 page)

27

The Lottery

I
was perfectly convinced
that a baby could thrive in a family with two dads until precisely the moment there was no one around to care for our newborns but me and Drew. Tiffany was asleep in her own room, six doors down. Susie and Mrs. Tappon had gone back to the motel for the night. It was just our family now. Two dads, two babies, no mom. What the hell were we thinking?

Drew and I quickly developed a system. We were each responsible for one baby. When your kid woke up crying, it was your job to feed, diaper, swaddle, or panic. Those were pretty much the only four options. Most times we would go through various permutations of all four before we finally got the squirmer back to sleep. Our confidence in ourselves was extremely low, but our determination to succeed couldn’t have been higher. We felt like we had something to prove, not to the people who think gays shouldn’t have kids. Fuck them. But to ourselves—and more importantly, to Bennett and Sutton. They were stuck with us now. The least we could do was fool them into thinking we knew what we were doing.

We did have one very special woman on our side. “Knock-knock, Daddies!” she would announce, and an instant later, a sliver of light would bisect the room and the door would gently creak open.

Georgia was our night nurse. It was her job to monitor every baby in our wing, though I think she made a few extra stops by our room to check in on Drew and me. Whenever she peeked in on our new little family, inevitably, at least two of the four of us would be crying. She never lost her cool, never puzzled over what to do or which twin to help first. Effortlessly, she’d pick both of them up at once and throw one over each shoulder for simultaneous burping. Those tiny hiccup sounds would be a huge relief to all of us, and within minutes, all was calm again in room 325E.

It was like picking up a tennis racquet for the first time, then having Andre Agassi show up to coach you, or finding yourself in a magical mushroom kingdom, facing down a spiky-shelled reptile fifty times your size who’s madly chucking fireballs at you, when you suddenly hear a voice behind you calling, “It’s-a me, Mario!” With Georgia, we knew instantly that we all were in good hands.

Her awesome proficiency could easily have made us feel inadequate, convinced us that the only way we’d ever get the hang of this parenting thing was to get nursing degrees and spend a few years working the overnight shift in a delivery ward. But thanks to her nurturing spirit, it was an inspiration. We never got the feeling that caring for our twins would be easy, but as long as we knew it was possible, we’d get it done. We’d probably never be the best at it, but so what? Fred, Velma, and Daphne were the ones with the skills and the self-confidence, but it was usually Scooby and Shaggy who solved the mysteries.

“You guys are doing fantastic,” Georgia would assure us, in a voice five octaves above my highest falsetto. She was that kind of person—small, mousy, and impossibly cheerful, like the Good Witch of Orange County. With her tight black curls, Georgia was a dead ringer for Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Gos, though she was probably too young to know who that was. Any voice-over artist would kill to cast her as a kitten or a busty canary.

I wasn’t expecting to bond with Sutton and Bennett that first night, but thanks to Georgia, those early hours were filled with countless tiny triumphs. Every suck of every shot glass-sized bottle, every whisper-like belch and every gentle sleeping breath the twins made in my arms felt like a validation of my parenting. These weren’t just selfish blobs carrying out the involuntary activities of new life. Every action they made felt like a subtle acknowledgment of trust in Drew and me. They accepted us as their caregivers. Even in those sticky, tar-like meconium poops that filled their size 0 diapers, there was love.

Like any group emerging from a traumatic experience together, be it the siege of Normandy or a 5:00 a.m. spinning class, the four of us were permanently bound together that night. Drew and I made it through the biggest challenge of our lives. We learned to care for our children without once yelling, “Mommy!”

In Los Angeles, asking someone to brave more than half an hour of freeway traffic to see you is like asking for a kidney, so I wasn’t expecting a huge influx of visitors for our babies’ first full day of life. Somehow, though, our kids always had a warm lap to sit on, a friendly hand to rub their bellies, a camera shutter clicking in their vicinity. I was relieved there were two of them to go around, but there were times that didn’t seem like enough. “I haven’t held Sutton in a while,” I’d announce. “Gimme!”

Some people swore Bennett was my twin. Others thought Sutton was 100 percent the girl version of Drew.

My friend Victoria was the first to mention what was probably on a lot of people’s minds. “Is it okay if I point out how much they look like Susie?” she asked.

She was right. Susie’s link to the twins was unmistakable. It was there in Sutton’s eyes and Bennett’s chin. I could understand why people wanted to be sensitive about the subject, but I’d noticed it, too, and it was part of what made these babies so perfect. We chose Susie as our egg donor because we wanted to see her when we looked at the kids. Just laying eyes on them was a constant reminder of her gift and a promise that they themselves might inherit all the many qualities we loved in her.

If anyone was uncomfortable with the comparisons, it was Susie herself. “I think they look like their dads,” she insisted, whenever anyone would bring up the resemblance. Then she would lean down and let Sutton or Bennett wrap their hand around one of her fingers. She knew only as much about baby care as Drew and I did, but she had a level of patience we both envied. She loved to feed them, talk to them, and to rock them gently to sleep in her arms. There was something so beautiful about seeing her with our kids—yet, admittedly, so painful.

Susie had already agreed to stay with us for a few weeks while we adjusted to our new life. Still, there would come a day, not far off, when she would return to Rochester. The kids would still be infants, and she’d still be a virtual stranger to them, an aunt to two babies she loved dearly, three thousand miles away from her. It was hard not to feel like she deserved more. If Susie felt the same way, she never let on, but then again, Susie wasn’t one to complain.

All day long, no one made as big an impression on us as the visitors who traveled the least.

“Can I see them?” a voice called as the door slowly swung open. It was Karyn, our favorite nurse from the day before, along with another nurse named Jody, who ran a close second. Their arms were loaded with presents wrapped in duckie paper. Staffers in a maternity ward spent their own money to buy baby gifts for our kids. Now they were using their break time to visit them. It was almost more kindness than I could handle.

Drew had now perfected his telling of the delivery story. He knew all the dramatic beats and pauses to hit. The nurses were riveted. Their favorite part was the revelation that Betty had been Tiffany’s savior.

“You should write a letter,” Karyn suggested.

“Yeah,” Jody added. “I don’t think she gets a lot of compliments.”

“Oh, we’re writing a few letters,” Drew assured them. “Starting with one for our night nurse.”

“We thought you’d like Georgia!” Karyn said. She and Jody looked at each other and shared a conspiratorial giggle.

“We made sure they assigned her to you.”

“Isn’t she a doll?”

“She was so good with the babies. Does she have kids of her own?”

Karyn sighed and bowed her head. “She’s been struggling. She had a couple of miscarriages.”

Jody added, “We’re really pulling for her around here.”

At that moment, I added another woman to my list of personal heroes. I couldn’t comprehend the strength it must take Georgia to take care of other people’s babies every night, when she wanted so badly to have one of her own.

“Let’s give her one of ours,” I said finally, to break the tension. “Drew, you pick.”

When Karyn and Jody left, it felt like the last day of summer camp. “We’ll keep in touch!” we swore. We traded emails and promised to friend each other on Facebook. We opened their baby gifts, but it wasn’t until after they left that I peeked inside Karyn’s card:

To the Tappon-Mahoney family,

Every once in a while I get to meet someone that just “feels right.” You were it. I knew I was going to like all of you from the moment you came in with those muffins (just kidding). You were so nervous, excited and full of love that it reminded me of what life is all about. We all need to be reminded of that sometimes.

I want to thank you for letting me be a tiny part of your day. It was my pleasure to meet you all and I look forward to updates.

Take care of yourselves. Eat, drink lots of fluids and sleep when you can. They will sleep through the night soon, they do stop crying for long periods of time eventually and just about the time you start asking yourself “what were we thinking,” they will throw their little arms around you and tell you they love you and you will feel refreshed and renewed.

Love,

Karyn

Once again, I was reduced to tears. We’d started off the day before just hoping to score ourselves a room for the night, but to our surprise, we’d actually made friends.

It was mid-afternoon when Tiffany swung by to visit us. We hadn’t expected her to be on her feet so soon, but it was her appearance that truly shocked us. Relaxed, refreshed, vibrant. She was practically as fit as she’d been the day we met her, but with a much bigger smile. Any postpartum adjustment we feared she might suffer had yet to surface. Like Susie, she was full of joy, perfectly at ease with this new family we’d made.

She had some big news for us, too: Less than twenty-four hours after popping out twins, she was headed home. The doctors had given her the option to stay another night, but she turned them down. She’d accomplished her goal, given us our family, and now she wanted to go back to hers. She was eager to lift Gavin up and dance him around the room. It had been far too long since she’d been able to do that.

Once again that night, Drew and I were alone with our children. We didn’t say much, not to each other at least. We were too busy talking to our son and daughter, telling them all the amazing things we couldn’t wait to share together as a family—bedtime stories, their first day of school, maybe someday a trip to Paris. In one of the rare moments when they were both asleep at the same time, when Drew and I were both awake and off duty, he turned to me. We had so many things we wanted to say to each other, but all Drew could get out at that moment was a simple, “We’re so lucky.”

He didn’t need to spell it out in detail. We both knew what an understatement that was.

I thought about Georgia, how loving and maternal she was and how much she deserved to experience this kind of joy.

I thought about Susie—and Dr. Saroyan’s devastating assessment of her fertility.

I thought about Bernie and his wife, all they’d gone through to have a baby and how much hope they still had that their dream would come true.

I thought about all the gay couples who couldn’t have kids because they lived somewhere the law didn’t allow it, and all the gays and lesbians from previous generations who never even considered the possibility.

I thought about all the scares we’d gone through, about how Tiffany defied everyone’s expectations and her own body by carrying our children full-term.

I thought about Rainbow Extensions and how the one thing they’d managed to do right was to bring Tiffany and Eric into our lives.

I thought about the unlikelihood of Drew and me meeting in the first place.

I thought about a teenage boy who was miserable in his own skin and how he could never have imagined a future that looked anything like this.

When we started the process of having kids, I wanted to have a truly remarkable story to share with them about how they came into the world. Now I had that. It was a story full of love and surprises, of fear and of the greatest happiness imaginable. It was uniquely ours—the tale of our family—yet in another way, our journey was just like anyone else’s. Isn’t that how every baby comes to be, through a million little moments of serendipity, coincidences of geography, and the completely unforeseeable whims of the human heart? These babies were no more special than any other, and yet they were the most important creatures in the world because they were ours.

The odds of experiencing this moment, of there being a Bennett and Sutton Tappon-Mahoney, seemed so astronomical, but then again, it felt like a forgone conclusion. Of course we had a family. Like Karyn said, it couldn’t have felt more right.

I put my arm around Drew and looked down at our two sleeping babies, swaddled so tightly that only a tiny segment of each of their faces was exposed. “I think we won the lottery,” I said. “Twice.”

As we prepared to leave the hospital the next day, we received our children’s birth certificates. On the line marked “Father/Parent,” the name “Andrew Tappon” was filled in. Below it, the line “Mother/Parent” read “Gerald Mahoney.”

Hospital regulations required new moms to leave in a wheelchair, holding their infant in their arms. No one was quite sure how that applied to us, but eventually, the administration decided that one of us would have to exit in a wheelchair, holding both babies, for liability reasons. Having already accepted my role as the “Mother/Parent,” I volunteered.

I settled into the wheelchair, making sure to get myself comfortable because I knew once I held the babies in my arms, I wouldn’t move a muscle. Susie handed me Bennett, and Mrs. Tappon handed me Sutton. I cradled one in each arm as Karyn grabbed the handles and pushed me toward the elevator. “Here we go, guys,” I said to my kids.

Outside, Drew pulled our minivan up to the patient loading zone.
Pioneers
, I thought.
In a Honda Odyssey!

Sutton and Bennett squinted, gently taking in the sights of the outside world but bristling from their first exposure to sunlight.

We strapped them very carefully into their car seats, snapped the car seats into the bases, made sure they had pacifiers and blankets and that the seat-back mirrors were aligned so we could see them from up front.