Bringing in Finn (33 page)

My friend Jane seemed to find this fact as incredible as the surrogacy. “When I met you, you never spoke about your mother at all,” she said one afternoon when she'd stopped by for tea. “If anyone asked about her, your face clouded over and looked pained.”

“For a time, I felt separate in the relationship,” I said. “I felt lost.”

“It means there's hope for all of us,” said Jane.

The doorbell rang. I ran to the door. I flexed my arms preparing to help carry the “half a carload of stuff” my mother had warned me she'd felt compelled to bring. My mother and Lissa stood on the doorstep, wearing turquoise T-shirts and matching teal-sequined gangsta hats that looked like they belonged in a rap video. They both stretched the fronts of their shirts down so I could read the words they'd bedazzled on themselves in glitter paint. My mother's read: I AM CARRYING MY SON-IN-LAW'S BABY, and Lissa's read: IT WAS MY IDEA, with an arrow pointing toward my mother. They gave me a moment to read the messages and then doubled over, my mother holding her belly and Lissa slapping the side of my mother's arm with her hat.

“We needed some entertainment after all the hours on the road,” Lissa said. They'd found the sequined hats outside of Gary, Indiana, Lissa continued, and the inspiration had just flowed from there. “We've been laughing for three hours.”

Bill was amused by the shirts and began taking in armloads of my mother's things from the car.

“I'm so embarrassed,” my mother called to Bill as he returned from a seventh trip. He'd brought in a TV table, a quilting frame, a photo scanner, grocery bags of DVDs, and a large duffel bag full of books.

“I brought lots of projects to keep me busy during the day,” my mother whispered to me as Bill took everything up the stairs to the guest room. He's probably afraid I'm never leaving.”

“You're carrying our child, for god's sake,” Bill said, when we'd emptied the last items from the trunk and my mother had apologized again. “You can take over the whole house, as far as I'm concerned.”

Lissa flew back to D.C. the next afternoon. Bill, my mother, and I handed out candy to trick-or-treaters in the neighborhood. Bill made chicken soup from his own stock; the smell of garlic, carrots, and leeks hung in the air. I carried the bowls to the dining room table, and we sat for a moment, waiting for the soup to cool.

“This baby is so lucky to be coming into a home where he gets to eat like this every day,” my mother said.

“Cheers,” Bill said, holding up his glass. As of that week, we were now farther along in a pregnancy than we had ever been before. And each day that passed brought us a day closer to this baby's actually being born.

 

Our twenty-three-week appointment
was uneventful. We met Dr. Grobman this time. He was the youngest member of the practice and had full pink cheeks that reminded me of a cherub's in a Renaissance painting. He asked if my mother had moved to Chicago yet, and we nodded yes, grateful that he did not ask the precise date of her arrival.

My mother's blood pressure was low to normal—about 100/70, the place it hovered for most of the pregnancy.

“You have good genes,” Dr. Grobman said. My mother's belly had grown to the appropriate girth for five and a half months, and Dr. Grobman could think of nothing else to discuss.

“You feel good?” he asked.

“Just tired,” my mother said. The fatigue had lifted significantly, yet many days she lay in bed, as she had done at her house in Virginia, rolling from side to side, logging hours of home-makeover shows on TV.

Before bed each night, I would walk down the hall to the guest room and read
Harry Potter.
We were halfway through the second book, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione were on the brink of discovering the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets.

I loved being close to the baby just before we went to sleep, lying in the dark with my mother for a moment, before returning down the hallway to my room, where Bill was reading in bed. I knew it was supposed to be strange that my mother was carrying our baby, but to me it felt natural now.

When we had first contemplated the surrogacy with my mother, Bill had said it would be the next-best thing to my carrying our child. In quiet moments at night, after I read
Harry Potter
to the baby, I would slip underneath the duvet back in my room and wrap my arms around Bill's chest. I did not feel as if this pregnancy constituted a “second-best.” Maybe “different” did not have to mean “lesser,” I thought. Or perhaps I was just trying to convince myself that what we were doing was as good as a traditional pregnancy because I was so tired of feeling broken and inadequate.

All I knew as I lay in the dark, listening to Bill's breathing, was that this pregnancy felt positive and hopeful and right. And I knew that the nightly ritual with my mother—story time, my face resting on the place where the baby kicked—felt like a real pregnancy and it felt holy.

At five months, we started seeing the OB every three weeks instead of every month. At six months we would increase our appointments to every two weeks. In a typical pregnancy, women see their doctor two to three times total before the thirty-week point. At five and a half months, we'd been to the OB eleven times, counting the early prenatal appointments with Dr. Colaum. The frequency was standard in high-risk pregnancies.

“The primary symptom we're still looking for is preeclampsia,” Dr. Grobman informed us at the twenty-six-week appointment.

My mother asked if there was a particular reason they were so focused on preeclampsia. Her blood pressure that day was 100/70.

“Even though your blood pressure has remained low, the blood volume will close to double as the pregnancy continues,” Dr. Grobman said. “At any moment, we may need to intervene with bed rest or closer monitoring in the hospital.”

“I can't imagine what difference bed rest would make,” my mother said that evening, helping herself to another of the crab cakes Bill had made for dinner. “I've been on self-imposed bed rest since week one.”

 

We saw Dr.
Julien again. She was now five months pregnant, and her round belly bumped up against my mother's as she leaned over the exam table to measure her stomach. She asked if my mother was seeing floaters or having interrupted vision, knife-edge-painful headaches, or any intense cramping—new signs of preeclampsia that could emerge at this stage.

“You look good,” Dr. Julien said. “At our staff meeting this week, Dr. Gerber said she wished she had tolerated her pregnancy half as well as you have; she was on bed rest for months.”

“Oh, I'm doing bed rest,” my mother said. “Let me be clear: I had all of these grand intentions of exercising, making photo albums and a quilt for the baby, reading a book a week, but I haven't touched a thing. I am the definition of sloth.”

“Yeah, Mom,” I said. “You should really be out accomplishing more. Just think: All you do all day is sit around being pregnant at sixty years old. You're quite a slacker.”

Dr. Julien laughed and handed my mother a pamphlet with some stretches she could do in case her low back started hurting.

“I'll just call in my live-in masseuse if that happens,” she told Dr. Julien. “Do you know I have a live-in personal chef and a reflexologist in the house? These kids really know how to take care of me.”

“When can I come over?” Dr. Julien asked.

 

A week before
our six-month appointment, I went to see my mother in her room. I'd finished with client sessions for the day and had brought
Harry Potter
with me for an early story time. My mother was sitting blankly against the pillows on the bed. The skin on her face was blotchy, and she looked as if she had been crying. I dropped the book on the floor and approached the side of the bed. She scooted over a foot so I could sit down next to her on the duvet. The streak of light that had illuminated the sky a moment before was now gone, having dropped below the horizon line. The room was dark.

“I'm probably just hormonal,” she said, wiping the corner of her eyes with her sleeve. “I feel fine physically. But I'm so tired and I feel so consumed with the physical experience of this pregnancy that I haven't done a single one of the projects I brought with me. I feel isolated and cut off.”

“It makes sense that you're lonely, Mom. You're here away from Dad and your routine and your friends. What can we do?”

“Talking about it helps,” she said. “I wondered if you had a colleague you could recommend, someone I could see for some coaching?”

I felt my neck tilt back and my eyes widen. I righted myself, doing my best to conceal my surprise. Even though my mother had come to one of my workshops and we now shared an interest in
personal growth, she still, to my knowledge, remained skeptical of individual counseling. My heart brightened at the idea of her having special, dedicated support. I'd longed to suggest the idea before, especially in earlier years when she'd talked about her struggle to find a passion and a calling in her life.

I imagined the less I said at that moment, the better. I scribbled down the names of a few colleagues, both coaches and therapists I thought my mother would like. As we ate dinner that night, Bill joined in to brainstorm ways my mother could feel more supported. We planned a lunch date with her at least once during the week. I suggested we try for a joint artist date on Friday afternoons as well.

“I will come up with things to do on my own, too. I'm not really as infirmed as I've been acting,” she confessed.

When I came in to say hello the next morning at eight, my mother had showered, packed a bag and a book, and put on a new purple maternity turtleneck and sweater. She'd already called one of the coach-therapists I'd recommended and had an appointment that morning.

“I already feel better for having something to do,” she said.

That night, I walked upstairs after my last session, surprised to feel trepidation. I fought with my desire to ask about my mother's session with my colleague. I suddenly feared that she would discover that she regretted her decision to carry our baby, or need to spew about how awful it was living with Bill and me. The worry struck me as ironic. When I'd asked to go to therapy my senior year of high school, my mother had seemed cagey and upset. “Did they ask about the family?” she said when she picked me up from the first session. “Did they ask about me?” She'd seemed so concerned that a therapist would fault her for any problems I might have. At my next session, I had told the therapist that I'd decided not to continue.

Now, I resolved to respect my mother's privacy and committed
to honoring any feelings she chose to discuss or keep private. I found her sitting in her usual spot on the bed, surrounded by little squares of fabric. She waved me over to the bed.

“I had a great day,” she said. The heat had been turned up high all day, and the room was warm. My mother's cheeks were pink, and she looked happy. “It was so wonderful meeting Joelle,” she said. “I think seeing her is really going to help me.

“Let me tell you about my session,” she continued. I interrupted.

“That's for you Mom, I don't want—”

She cut me off: “I'll just share what I want. Not all the things I said about you.” I felt a tremor of insecurity and then, seeing the grin on her face, started to laugh. If she needed to vent about me, that would be okay. Our relationship could take venting.

“I actually told Joelle I love that I can share what I really feel with you and Bill,” she said.

“I feel really able to be honest with you, too, Mom,” I said. “If you do ever want to work through anything, I want to be available to do it together or in a session.”

“Thanks, sweetie, but today the focus was on what I am going to do with myself for the next three months. This, for instance,” she said, pointing at the squares of fabric on the bed, “is the material for the quilt I started for your cousin's baby, who, as you know, is coming up on nine months old. I have to finish this one so I can make one for this baby.” She poked a finger at her belly.

“It's beautiful,” I said, lifting a few squares of the woven black-and-white fabric that would make the border.

When my father called for his nightly check-in, my mother put the phone on speaker. “I'm doing my coaching homework!”

“What have you done to your mother?” my father asked me, laughing. Previously, my mother had expressed the same reservations about counseling to him as she had to me. My mother shrugged her
shoulders, as if she couldn't imagine what either of us was so surprised about, and began stitching the next square onto her quilt.

 

We hadn't seen snow yet, but the sky was heavy with chalk-white clouds the day we drove to Northwestern for our six-month appointment. Other than her belly's protruding a bit more, my mother felt just as she had at the five-month appointment: steadily low blood pressure, fatigue, and what she called laziness. Her only new symptom was that her feet had begun to swell in the evenings.

The levels of the parking garage at the Northwestern Medical were marked by old music legends. We parked on level five, Tammy Wynette; the sounds of “Slow Burning Fire” drifting through a speaker in the ceiling kept us company in the elevator bay. We discovered that we could make our way to MFM without going outside if we exited at the second floor and took the enclosed walkway into the Galter Pavilion.

“This will be handy moving forward,” my mother said, eyeing the heavy sky.

“Yeah,” I said. “This may be the best weather we have for the rest of the pregnancy.”