Bringing in Finn (23 page)

“When do you start IVF?” Stacy asked.

I shared our November 1 appointment date.

“That's tight,” she said. “The legal process is typically six to eight weeks.” But she promised to prioritize our contract and aimed to complete the first round by October 10.

As she walked us to the elevator, Stacy said, “You picked a good state to do this. Illinois is one of the only states in the country that recognizes biological parents as the parents, regardless of who carries the baby.”

If we were to have the baby in D.C. or Virginia, we would be required to file paperwork similar to that of an adoption.

“That
is
lucky,” Bill said, as we rode the elevator down to the street level.

We stepped out into the sunlight that cut between the high-rise buildings and the press of morning commuters who populated the offices in this part of the city. At the crosswalk, I stood next to Bill
in a sunny patch on the sidewalk and allowed myself to feel gratitude for this small blessing. If—or, I tried to think,
when—
our baby was born, my name would be the one on the line that read “Mother” on the official birth certificate.

 

My mother returned
to Chicago again for the psychological evaluation and baseline ultrasound with Dr. Colaum. Although we were still waiting for our legal documents to be completed, my mother could start her precycle monitoring. Once we began officially, I would undergo the full IVF cycle of injections and oral medications, until it was time for them to retrieve my eggs. While my injections stimulated my follicles, my mother would start whatever combination of hormones Dr. Colaum prescribed to create a nice, thick lining in her uterus. We scheduled our ultrasounds the same morning and then had back-to-back psychological evaluations with Dr. Lee-Ann Kula, one of the approved psychiatrists on Dr. Colaum's list.

My mother, who had been therapy-averse most of her life, kept asking what I thought the psychiatrist would ask.

“We're not going for therapy,” I reminded her. “I think she just has to verify that we're sane.”

Normally, I would have been happy to speak to a psychiatrist. In my heart, and in our cozy discussions around our dining room table, I believed, the way my father did, that our vision was authentic and soul-inspired, but I also knew that to an outsider the idea could sound crazy. I hoped Dr. Kula was an open-minded sort of person.

We needn't have worried. Dr. Kula met us at the door to her office with open arms that turned into a full two-arm embrace. She wore a peasant-style skirt with a wide leather belt, and her office was adorned with hanging plants, swirling colorful artwork, and a jumbled bookshelf overflowing with self-discovery and therapy books.

She motioned for us to take a seat on a low white-leather couch and said, “I must hear how you came to this incredible idea.”

My mother looked on guard. I wondered if she thought Dr. Kula's effusive behavior was a technique to get us to say something that would cause her not to approve us.

“I've been so excited to meet you,” Dr. Kula continued. “I actually cried when I heard your daughter's phone message.”

She sat in a well-worn chair opposite us and took a long sip of tea from a mug. “Why don't you start, Sara?”

Telling our fertility story was beginning to feel like singing a sad ballad from my first album, one that I hoped to grow beyond but that was always requested at concerts. Dr. Kula made loud
tsk
-ing noises when I came to the part about the twins' being stillborn and said “shit” when I told about the miscarriage. I was surprised and pleased by her transparent emotions. I decided I liked a therapist who swore. She also disclosed personal details about herself, telling us that she had tried to get pregnant for years, before, at age thirty-nine, adopting her son and then getting pregnant two years later. “My children have been my greatest gifts,” Dr. Kula said.

My mother and I nodded, understanding why. As Dr. Kula continued, she unfolded her hands and placed her bag next to her on the couch.

“And now you, Kris,” Dr. Kula said, turning her gaze on my mother. “How did you come to this vision?”

“It's interesting you should use that word,” my mother said, seeming to release whatever reservations she had come in with. She told Dr. Kula about the vision workshop, her meditations at her rock in the woods, and the letter she wrote us offering to carry our child. She also said some things I had never heard before.

“I saw Sara suffering. And I thought,
I don't know if I can carry a baby, but I can get in there with her. She doesn't have to do this alone.”
She
put her hand over mine. I couldn't bring myself to look at her directly. My throat tightened around a hard knot of tears.

“Mom,” I whispered, starting to cry, not really caring what Dr. Kula thought or decided.

Dr. Kula handed me a box of Kleenex.

“I have another reason for doing this,” my mother said after we'd re-grouped. “If I am completely honest, I want to have this experience for me.” I felt a rush of gladness hearing my mother share this fact. It was something she'd shared with me, but it wasn't something I'd heard her say to anyone else.

“All my life, I wanted to be called to something heroic, but I could never think what,” she said, her hands unclenching at her side.

“
This
is heroic,” Dr. Kula said. “You'd be giving a gift, literally, of life.”

For a couple of seconds, no one spoke. Dr. Kula looked between my mother and me, perhaps waiting to see if there was anything my mother wanted to add.

She looked at a digital clock on her bookshelf. We'd been in her office for close to two hours. She still needed to have a brief conversation alone with each of us, so we took turns waiting in the hallway while the other spoke to Dr. Kula alone. At the end, Dr. Kula hugged my mother while I wrote out her check.

“I'll be faxing my approval to Dr. Colaum's office and your lawyer's as soon as I speak to your husbands. Bill's appointment was the following day, and Dr. Kula had approved my father to do his consultation over the phone. “I especially cannot wait to meet your other half,” she said to my mother.

“I passed!” my mother said as soon as we got into the car. I smiled as she recounted our discussions, but I had to struggle to concentrate on the road. I felt spent from the day of appointments, and the emotion of retelling about the stillbirths and miscarriage.

The afternoon traffic was heavy coming out of Evanston, and we slowed to a creeping pace. My mind poked at something Dr. Kula had told me during my individual consultation. During her attempts to become pregnant, she'd met with an unorthodox doctor from South America who was doing a new kind of fertility treatment. “He took the low bottom cases, those everyone else had written off,” Dr. Kula had said. “When I went to see him, he put his hand on my shoulders, looked me in the eyes, and said, ‘You will be pregnant within three months.' I had my second son later that year.”

As I drove, I wished I could go see that doctor. I wished he could offer me that kind of assurance.

“You know what Dr. Kula said to me at the end of my session?” my mother said, interrupting my reverie.

“What?” I asked.

“She told me she thinks this is going to work. She said, ‘This is going to happen.'”

 

My parents flew
back to Chicago together for a “signing party” once our legal contracts were finally processed. We also scheduled our first IVF appointment at RMI that week.

My parents told us that they had shared the surrogacy idea with exactly one couple, friends of theirs for over twenty-five years. “Janine's first reaction was disbelief,” my mother said. “When she realized I wasn't joking, she cried. And when she overcame her shock, she had so many questions.”

She'd asked my mother if my parents thought it would be hard not to keep the baby after carrying him or her for nine months.

“I am so clear that this is Sara and Bill's baby,” my mother had said. “What I want now, more than anything, is to be a grandmother.”

Janine had continued to stare at my mother as if she were speaking to a stranger.

“There are lots of parents of grown children who want grandchildren,” my mother had said, trying to make a joke. “Maybe I'll start a trend.”

“Don't count on it,” Janine had replied, continuing to look at my mother in awe. “I don't think most of us would do it.”

Meanwhile, Bill and I had told no one—not even Bill's business partners, Kaitlin, Amanda, or any of our friends in Chicago. We'd experimented in our previous IVF cycles, telling a lot of people, or very few. This time, I fantasized about waiting to share the news until the baby had arrived. “Hey, look! It worked. Meet our baby!” Or at least until we were seven to eight months pregnant, long past the twenty-two week mark, when the baby would be fully developed and capable of surviving on its own even if it were to be born that day.

 

On Monday morning
Bill, my mother, and I drove to RMI to do our infectious-disease panels. We were thrilled to confirm (again) that we did not have HIV, syphilis, chlamydia, TB, or genital warts. We wrote a check for $15,000 and had an opportunity to show off our updated knowledge from the legal meetings, using the term “gestational host” instead of “surrogate.” (In an email, Stacy informed us that a surrogate traditionally involves a woman's providing an egg and carrying the baby, while “gestational host” is the term used when a woman carries another's couple's biological child.) “I like it,” my mother said. “I'm the host. It's like I'll be babysitting for nine months.”

Bill waited in the reception area while Dr. Colaum administered my mother's and my ultrasounds. We decided to stay in the room for each other's examinations. “We're doing this pregnancy together,” my mother said. “The group approach. Plus, we can save you a few minutes and some table paper each time we come.”

Dr. Colaum shook her head and looked like she was trying not to laugh.

“You guys are funny,” Tracey said from her post at the counter.

The exam was the first time my mother experienced an internal ultrasound. “Now,
that
is a fantastic uterus!” Dr. Colaum said, calling Tracey over to look. I tried to see what made it different from, say, mine, the only other one I'd seen on-screen. All I could tell was that it looked bigger. I felt a tug for a moment, a pang of grief that perhaps her body really was more suited to carry a child (even at her age) than mine. I continued to look at the screen and decided I liked the look of her uterus, too. Even in fuzzy black-and-white pixels, it looked inviting and safe.

“We're going to start you on estrogen pills, twice-weekly estrogen injections, and progesterone,” Dr. Colaum said to my mother. “Tracey will give you your calendar, Sara. We're going to go for growing the maximum number of eggs.”

I posted my IVF schedule on the side of our refrigerator with a magnet.

“You have so many injections,” my mother said, comparing our medication charts.

“But you'll be doing them from transfer on, Mom,” I said. “Believe me, if we get pregnant, you'll take plenty of shots.”

This cycle, I administered all of the injections myself, taking Lupron in my stomach in the morning and Follistim at night, and even mixing the Repronex chemistry set every other night in weeks four and five.

November brought cool winds and crunchy brown leaves that carpeted the patches of grass and scraped the sidewalk as they blew past. When my mother was in town, Bill cooked hearty autumn meals: French onion soup, beef bourguignon, and oven-baked squash with brown sugar and butter.

When she saw that her IVF regime was so minimal, my mother flew home to Virginia for a week in the middle of the six-week cycle. My egg retrieval was scheduled for sometime the week of December 7. The transfer to my mother would be three to five days later.

“I cannot believe it only takes two weeks of medication to prepare me for a pregnancy,” my mother said. “Two weeks to kick-start the uterus after ten years of dormancy.”

Dr. Colaum had explained that really the primary thing necessary was a thick, healthy uterine lining, and the key ingredient the body needed to achieve that was estrogen. “Of course, we don't know what your body will do in response,” Dr. Colaum said conservatively.

A week before the retrieval, my mother and I drove to Evanston for our next appointment. The outdoor lot that housed a summer farmers' market had given way to bales of golden hay heavy with pumpkins of varying sizes, dried cornhusks, and horns of plenty spilling over with knobby gourds.

“At first I was so afraid my body wouldn't respond at all,” my mother said, looking out the window at the pumpkins. “Now I can feel it.” She pressed her fingers into her lower abdomen. “Did you feel all bloated and puffy?”

“I usually did midcycle for a few days,” I said, “but I was on all the other medications, too.” My mother's mouth dropped at the corners.

“Do you feel okay?”

“I feel strange,” she said. “Then again, I'm guessing my body is a bit perplexed. I imagine it's a bit of a shock to be called into active duty after being retired for ten years.”

To distract our minds, we decided to play a game. We'd read
Eat, Pray, Love
and decided to do what Elizabeth Gilbert did before her divorce papers were signed: call to mind all the people who would be ecstatic if the surrogacy—or, in Gilbert's case, the divorce—worked.

“Your great-grandmother would get a real kick out of this,” my mother said.