Instant Mom (6 page)

• 5 •

“I Have Bad News”

I am staring at
his mouth. It’s as if I can see the words he’s just said floating in between us. I want those words to unform. I want the letters to scramble, go back into his mouth, and come out as a different sentence. I want his face to go soft and then grin so I can know he is playing a joke on me. But he is not.

Something terrible has happened and I am trying to comprehend it. The embryo specialist, next to the fertility doctor, is standing in the doorway. The specialist now closes the door with one hand; his face is filled with anguish. I am terrified, and yet I can feel the palpable sorrow coming from his eyes. It’s difficult to tell anyone something they don’t want to hear. But he’s not just telling us bad news. He is telling us he has made a mistake.

I am woozy and afraid I will faint. I feel Ian’s arm behind me, keeping me upright. I have just completed yet another round of treatment. It was an especially difficult one. I am so bruised from needles I can’t be touched. I’m bloated from the drugs and I feel sick all the time. Five days ago, Ian confessed he wants me to stop. He said it’s just too much for him to watch me suffer anymore; he doesn’t want me to continue. But I cannot stop. I have to beat this thing. I just have to. So I completed the round of needles, and the eggs were the healthiest the doctors had ever seen. The embryos divided more than they ever had and were very strong. So we came to this room and got ready for the next step. The kind surrogate was prepared, lying down and waiting to have the embryos implanted.

And a moment ago, the embryo specialist came in and said he’d made a mistake in the lab and my embryos had accidentally fallen into the incubator and been destroyed.

There is just no way to describe this black pit of silence. The absence of sound feels hollow and unreal. Everyone is still. No one yells, no one cries. We are numb as we try to absorb the news. This has never happened before. Ever. The embryo specialist hangs his head, and the fertility doctor comforts us. The embryo specialist now takes me into his lab and lets me look through the incubator with a microscope—there isn’t any sign of my embryos. They’re gone.

We silently leave the clinic.

Later, I get very upset. What else can happen? Why is this not happening for me? But this is not a story about anger.

Days later, I receive a handwritten letter from the embryo specialist. It chronicles exactly what happened. The letter surprises me because he has put the incident in writing and I am holding a beautiful and heartfelt apology. I keep reading it, profoundly sentient of the courage it took to write it. And I am fully and painfully aware that in this litigious society I am holding something that can be used in court. I could wreak havoc on that clinic; I could make them all pay for my years of anguish. But this is not a story about revenge.

Soon after, I am summoned to the clinic for a meeting with its panel of doctors. When I enter the clinic, it’s quiet. The sterile fluorescent lights hurt my eyes because my entire body feels exposed and susceptible. I don’t want to be here.

I round a corner and there he is—the embryo specialist. Without hesitating, we collapse into each other and just hold on. I tell him I accept his apology and more importantly I forgive him for what it was—an accident. This man has brought babies to so many people; he has given happiness to so many. He is a good soul and a kind person and I want to release him from any guilt for his one mistake. Standing here in this hallway, I feel intensely relieved that I can let go of the anger. I feel light. But this is not about mistakes and forgiveness.

It is a story about knowing when it’s time to move on.

• 6 •

The Road to Adoption

It’s 2:00
A.M.
and
I am on an adoption site, scrolling through the pictures . . . of Petfinder.com. I am taking that fertility doctor’s advice and looking for a dog. I click on one picture of a magnificent yellow Lab. Brown eyes smile back, as if to say, “Pick me.” To be honest, I can’t say I feel anything. My heart feels dead.

It’s been more than a year of trying to adopt.

At first, I did a lot of research. A barrage of unfamiliar terms had hit me. I couldn’t see the difference between domestic infant adoption and private adoption. I didn’t know if open adoption is what we wanted, or what it was, really. I didn’t know if the statistics on drug-addicted babies were correct. I learned that in some states the birth mother can change her mind for up to six months. So I’d finally get a baby and then have to give it back, like in a Lifetime movie?

If you do an Internet search on “adoption,” you get taken to sites that look credible. Many are. And many are not. Some have words that make you think,
Oh,
this company is real,
but after getting on the phone with them and finding out they want a $75,000 retainer with no guarantee of a “match,” ever, you start to wonder how the adoption process can be so unregulated. It was impossible to know which website might actually match you with an out-of-state birth mother and which one would lure you to a hotel room to harvest your kidneys. I’d stumble on sites that showed videos of babies playing in a crib. Cute babies in a foreign orphanage! It was so adorable it looked Pixar-animated. I’d watch for hours. I started to look into hiring an interpreter to try to adopt from Romania. But then a friend went there to be matched with a baby she saw on the website. When she got there, she was told that baby had just died. Just. Died. Of AIDS. She shook her head in disbelief at this very convenient story. Then they tried to convince her to go back to the States with a four-year-old boy. It took six weeks to go through the red tape and . . . she did it. Days later, she found out he had a nine-year-old half-brother. She took him too. They’re both children with special needs. I admired her. I considered doing it. My family told me they’d support whatever I wanted to do. My siblings were all parents by then and I could tell in their sympathetic eyes they’ve discussed my situation and would support anything I tried. I got us on the waiting list for Greece, even though I was advised the wait from an orphanage was four years.

But nothing worked. Every site I registered with didn’t pan out. I met several people who adopted Romanian and Russian children and had very good experiences. I took down the name of the agencies they used and got us on the waiting lists.

I was surrounded by positive stories of adoption, but of course the scary ones kept me up at night. And the media did a good job of it too. It’s just human nature to pick up on the things that cause us anxiety. I could hear a hundred fantastic adoption stories in a row and then be stopped in my tracks by the negative one. There was always some story of some drifter who’d decapitated a store clerk because he’d once been adopted. Or wasn’t adopted. Or something. Googling “adoption” took me to strange places. It was all a late-night Internet search haze.

Ian and I had written our profile, attached a pleasant picture of ourselves, paid a fee, and registered with many domestic adoption agencies, in many states. I dug for info and found out “open” adoption means contact with the birth family after the infant is placed. “Closed” means the birth family does not know where the infant is placed. “Adoption Agency” means a licensed group who matches prospective parents with birth mothers. “Private” means parents and birth mothers are matched via an attorney. I learned the amount of time a birth mother has to change her mind varies from state to state, and, many people assured me, a birth mother taking her baby back is actually quite rare. But it happens, so I worried about it. Another thing I learned is that it’s the birth mother who chooses the potential parents for her baby.

We’d waited a whole year for a birth mother to pick our profile. We then changed our profile picture, hoping we looked more appealing in the new one. We waited on many countries’ adoption lists. We waited to be matched. We waited to be parents.

The phone rang a few times. We’d listen carefully to the case presented to us by the adoption agency: “This Illinois birth mother has two kids with the same guy, and he is in prison on a seventeen-year sentence. This last baby was conceived on a conjugal visit and she hasn’t told him because she wants to leave him. So this baby is up for adoption. Do you want him?”

Uh . . . we asked if we could think about it. Privately, we admitted we were a little scared of a felon who would eventually get out of prison and find out about his youngest. It’s not as if we thought our own eccentric families’ DNA was so superior, but what was this birth father in jail for? And how about when that child wants to meet the birth father? The adoption worker called us back to convey they found out the birth mother lied about a lot of things, including who the actual father is and when the baby was conceived, and she’d also refused a drug test. To say we weren’t relieved when the worker called back a few days later to tell us we were not matched would be a lie. A few weeks later, we found out someone we knew had been successfully matched via that same agency with a high school girl in Oklahoma who didn’t feel she could keep her baby and go to college. That sounded ideal. We did not get a call like that.

The phone rang again. It was another agency in another state: “These two boys, aged three and eight, have been brought over from Germany. The adopting parents are now divorcing and don’t want the children. Would you be interested?”

We said we were interested. But the story didn’t make sense. I knew firsthand what it took to immigrate; why would two adults go through all that paperwork and neither take in the children? We asked more questions. The woman at the adoption agency told me “it happens” and I’d have to speak to her supervisor if we wanted to take the next step. We said we did.

We waited. During the two days we waited to get more information, we thought about the logistics of having two boys living at our house. We have nephews. Boys are fun. We thought our quiet house could use some madness. From all the visits, we had quite an accumulation of crayons and half-used bottles of bubbles. To be candid, adopting two boys whose language we didn’t know wasn’t the most prudent path, but we were frantic to be parents. We felt we could do it. Finally, the supervisor called me back: “The boys have a history of violence, and the older one tried to attack the adopting mother. The younger one tried to light the house on fire several times.”

Ian and I are just two dumb actors; we’re not equipped to take on two children with such intense psychological problems. I mean, of course we could do it and we actually wanted to. We were so desperate to be parents that we thoroughly discussed every case. We were willing to do anything. But on the phone with the supervisor, before I could go on, she said the agency would only place these children with experienced parents anyway. I blurted out that made sense to me and couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.

Having heard so many simple and successful adoption stories, I now wondered: Where’s my call from a foreign country? Where are all the bubbly infants born to corn-fed North American college girls? I encountered people every day who had adopted infants in a beautiful and smooth way. They would tell me their successful story and I could visualize the women’s-cable-network lighting of the scene. I kept thinking: How do I get my hands on one of those babies? Why are we not being matched?

I gave in and finally met with a Celebrity Adoption Attorney. I capitalize it because that’s how he referred to himself. He said for a “Certain Fee” (yes, he air quoted it) we could have a “match” (yes, this too) within a very short period of time. A matter of days, he winked. I didn’t fully understand. He said there’s a list and if I paid the Certain Fee, I’d be moved to the top of the list.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That someone else who had been waiting would then be moved down a rung as I walked away with their baby because I threw a bunch of money down? Yeah, that’s what I thought. I said his method sounded like human trafficking to me. That didn’t go over well. He leaned forward, offering me a bowl of dusty mints from his desk, which can only mean one of two things: I had bad breath or he was stalling. Probably both. Anyway, I said, “How can you guarantee a birth mother who’s been working with another couple would then switch—” He cut me off quickly, saying, “There’s no guarantee. I never said there’s a guarantee; I said you’d go to the top of the list.” I thanked him for his time and left. And later found out a famous actress I knew had been on his Certain Fee list . . . for six years.

But there’s something I felt about all these situations that intrigued me: I didn’t feel right about any of them. I cannot explain this. None of them sat right with me. I felt like I was on the wrong path.

Another thing I know about myself is I need to talk things out. But at the time, I kept this all in, confiding in very few people. It’s because it’s a seemingly endless path of sadness without good news. I’m used to a more carefree and fun environment of laughing and good times. Inside, I felt like a drag. So I just didn’t talk about it with Core or many people. Because nothing was working.

We quietly approached our super-hot friend Kathy Najimy (humble-brag alert: people think we’re sisters) and her equally tremendous husband, Dan Finnerty, of the Dan Band, because they know Rosie O’Donnell, who I’d heard might be able to help. Plus Dan is adopted. Dan is a remarkably well-adjusted person and has a healthy relationship with his mom and his birth mother. I had watched Dan be in the same room with them both and it didn’t seem exceedingly painful for anyone. That evening at their home, I didn’t want to reveal much, but Kathy and Dan were excited to hear we were considering adoption. Kathy said, “There is something fantastic coming we could never imagine” and kept feeding us hummus and pita bread in her kitchen, knowing the way to get anyone ethnic to talk is through a full stomach. Dan kept jumping up and down, saying, “Do it, do it!” He pointed to himself. “You could get this!” I then asked Kathy to connect me with Rosie O’Donnell, who discreetly led me to an adoption counselor: a facilitator.

Ian and I sat
on the couch in her small office and the facilitator started by gently asking what had brought us to consider adoption. I started to explain everything that had happened. Or hadn’t happened. The miscarriages, the fertility treatments, then not one, but two surrogates, then not being matched through means that had worked for other people. I realized two things. First, I now knew why I was keeping it quiet: I couldn’t talk about my experience without loudly snot-bawling. And second, I discovered that, interestingly, while I could see myself very clearly as a mother, I didn’t necessarily see myself with an infant. The facilitator seemed intrigued by that vision and told me there were other options. This was the first time Ian and I discovered we don’t have orphanages in North America. In the United States alone, we have over 500,000 children living in foster homes. Of these, 129,000 kids are legally emancipated. This means the parental rights have been terminated. And these children can be adopted.

The facilitator looked me right in the eyes and asked if I would be open to adopting an older child from the American foster care system. I didn’t blink. That actually made a lot of sense to me. It felt like the right fit.

But I’ll be honest—emotionally, I was a mess. Except in this office this one time, I had never taken the time to just face what I’d been through because I was afraid I’d sink into a funk. I kept it all at bay and tried to press on, hungrily pursuing adoption research, but never allowing myself to digest what had happened. From fertility treatments I had quickly rappelled into the adoption world because I was so afraid I wouldn’t ever be a mother.

But any decision made in fear is a reaction, rather than an action.

On the way out of the office, I pondered taking time off to just think it all through. I wondered if I even wanted to be in a movie. I had said no to everything that came my way. I was so angry at myself for missing opportunities in films and on Broadway during the years of staying close to the clinic. But now I admitted I truly didn’t feel like acting in anything. I thought perhaps I should officially take some time off. I wondered if I dared step back for a bit. And grieve.

Grief is an inevitable part of processing information. You can’t push grief down and pretend it’s not there. It will stay close by like an annoying sibling tapping you on the shoulder, saying, “Look at me, looooook at me.” Until you do.

So I did.

What happened next was
completely out of character for me. I stepped back from being an actor for a while. After years of making my living as an actor, I just didn’t act in a film, put myself through clothes fittings, or pose on a red carpet.

I said no thank you to every invitation that came my way. No to films. No to attending any press event, from the Golden Globes gift suites to Oscar parties. I said see-you-later to the sparkly life for a bit. Now let’s be clear—it’s not like Scorsese called me and I said no. It’s not like Sofia Coppola was a-begging me to be her muse. The roles I was being offered were not life changing, so it was pretty easy to slip away. The hilarious thing is . . . uh, no one noticed. It’s not like TMZ was going through my garbage wondering, wait a minute, how come she’s not acting? Nope. I just slipped under the radar.

One thing I really appreciated is that Core friends didn’t ask questions. I never explained what I was doing or not doing because I needed respite from it all. I needed to just not be asked about fertility and adoption and what my next move was. It seemed as if we all had a tacit agreement that I was going through something and it was private. I appreciate that my friends, family, and representatives were supportive.