Mommy Man (20 page)

19

Bye Bye, Bubble

B
abas & Booties
was the perfect preparation for the next stop on our parade to parenthood: Orange County. As any good L.A. homosexual knows, Orange County is where they hunt gays for sport. It’s also where Tiffany’s ob-gyn was located.

“Oh, he’s very nice,” she assured us. “He delivered Gavin.”

“But is he gay-friendly?”

Tiffany shrugged. Of course. How would she know that? It’s not something straight people think about when they meet other straight people. Hmm, I wonder if he’ll throw a rock through my window if he finds out who I sleep with? That’s purely a gay person concern. It’s pretty much the first thought that goes through my mind anytime I meet anyone, ever. The ability to spot enemies is the one thing more important to the modern homosexual than gaydar. It’s homophobe-dar, and it can save your life—or at least spare you a few moments of awkward conversation with an asshole.

It turns out I didn’t have to get very far into the doctor’s office to get my first hint of the man’s inclination.

“Oh my God, do you see that?”

Drew stopped short. He was just about to open the door to the ob-gyn’s office. “What? The nameplate?”

“Yes, the nameplate. I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before.” Drew looked back at me blankly. “Tiffany’s doctor’s name? See?”

“Dr. Robertson?”

“Patrick Robertson. Drew, our babies are going to be brought into the world by Pat Robertson!”

Drew sighed and pushed me into the waiting room.

By now we’d come to anticipate a certain kind of reception when we first met new people and shared our arrangement with them. “Oh my God, that’s incredible! I’m so happy for you all! What an amazing story!”

I believe when Tiffany introduced us to her doctor, the conversation went something like this:

“This is Drew and Jerry. They’re the dads of the babies.”

“Hello.”

The “hello” came with a half nod, but no handshake. Homophobic? Who knows? The man made his living inspecting vaginas. Maybe we just weren’t properly equipped to get his attention.

He was nice to Tiffany, and that was more important. He asked her how she was feeling, what she was eating, and how often she was puking. While his hands kneaded her belly like a lump of bread dough, he made gynecological small talk. “You’ve never had a C-section, right?” “You getting enough folic acid?” And finally, the big one. “Are you going to learn the sex?”

Tiffany shrugged. “Ask them. These are their babies.”

Dr. Robertson chuckled, as if she’d made a joke.
Their babies! Ha ha! Good one, pregnant lady!

Quick to defuse any awkwardness, Drew jumped in. “Yes, we want to find out. We can’t wait!”

“Make an appointment for the eighteen-week ultrasound,” Dr. Robertson said, again addressing Tiffany. “They’ll be able to tell you.”

“He hates us,” I said to Drew, once we left the office. Tiffany was at the receptionist’s desk, making the ultrasound appointment. It was the first time we had a minute to talk.

“What? He was totally nice,” Drew said.

“Are you kidding? He didn’t even look at us.”

“Well, he’s her doctor.”

“He’s a homophobe!”

“What are you guys talking about?” Tiffany asked, rejoining us.

“Nothing!” I said, instantly. “When’s the appointment?”

Finding out our babies’ sex was a no-brainer for us. We’d had enough surprises already, and the delivery would be incredible enough without the added zing of Dr. Pat Robertson deadpanning, “It’s a . . . !”

More than that, we felt the need to mentally prepare ourselves for whatever was coming. We hated to admit it, but the time had come to face our fears: We were terrified of having a daughter.

Drew and I aren’t “girly” gays. We have no interest in makeup or hairdressing. We don’t know how to tie pigtails or throw tea parties for stuffed animals. We don’t know Sleeping Beauty from Cinderella, and we groan when we see those little girls traipsing around Disneyland in their Snow White ball gowns. We couldn’t even imagine how we’d deal with puberty. Sure, we could swap notes with our daughter about which boys we thought were cute, but we feared all her questions about getting her period would send us running to Wikipedia or trying to find whichever
iCarly
episode covered the topic. No, she deserved better than that. There was no way we could have a girl. We’d be such a crushing disappointment to her.

The only thing worse than having a girl would be having a boy. Drew and I aren’t “manly” gays either, not the kind of Schwarzenegger-slash-Schwarzkopf tough guys a little boy wants to write his “My Dad Is My Hero” essay for school about. We’ve never owned baseball cards or G.I. Joes. We wouldn’t know how to hold a gun upright, let alone sideways the way Keanu Reeves does in
The Matrix
. We don’t like monster trucks or mud. And no matter how hard I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to get a football to do that cool twirly thing real dudes can do so effortlessly. What would we say when our teenage son came to us with girl troubles? “Eh, sorry kid. Not our forte!”

The ultrasound room was down the hall from Dr. Robertson’s office, with an entirely new staff to gawk at us. Tiffany giggled excitedly the moment she saw us. “Well . . . ,” she said, “what do you think they’re going to be?”

“It really doesn’t matter,” I replied, though in the back of my head, the rest of that sentence was, “because either way, we’re screwed.”

As nervous as I was, it was calming to see Tiffany so at ease with the pregnancy at last. The cramps and nausea had subsided, and she could feel the distinct presence of two tiny people inside her. She looked rested and happy. She was as excited as we were, eager to show us her ever-evolving baby bump.

“Tiffany Ireland!” the nurse called. Eric stood up instantly to accompany his wife. Drew and I hung back. We never knew how naked Tiffany was going to have to get at the appointments, so we always waited for the okay to join her.

“Come on!” she smiled, waving us in. We stood up, collected ourselves, and strode confidently to the doorway. This was it. The big moment. The unveiling of our unborn children’s genitalia.

“Uh-uh!” a nurse scolded, blocking the doorway. “Only the husband can come!”

Never ones to defy authority, Drew and I stammered. We could see everyone looking at us, the receptionists and patients, wondering who these two other men were. We felt like intruders, exposed and ashamed.

“But they’re the dads,” Tiffany explained. It was so casual, as if the situation needed no further explanation. Yes, I’m carrying two babies, and this is my husband, but those two men will be raising them. Why are you looking at me like that?

I could feel the pain of a half dozen tongues being bitten simultaneously, but the nurse stepped aside and let us through. “No talking,” she warned, as if to get in a parting shot.

As we entered the ultrasound room, a technician was busily preparing the machine. Tiffany lay on the table, with Eric at her side. Finally, the heavyset woman looked up, staring uncomfortably at me and Drew.

“Hi!” Drew beamed, extending his hand. “We’re the dads!”

The tech sneered at him. “Ugh, I can’t have all these people in here!” She stomped across the room and threw open the door, as if looking around for someone to complain to. “Ugh!” It was like she suddenly remembered some sensitivity training the staff had been forced to endure for our benefit. She slammed the door.

“Stand against the wall, and don’t say a word!” she barked.

She didn’t introduce herself, but the ultrasound screen identified her by her license number, R423A. She squirted Tiffany’s torso with goo from what looked like an old mustard container and began the procedure.

There they were. Our kids. Baby A and Baby B. It had been weeks since we’d seen them, and I just now realized that I actually missed them. I knew almost nothing about them, but I’d grown so attached. They were so much bigger now, so much more human-looking. I could almost picture the day Drew and I would bring them home.

R423A was examining Baby A very closely, nodding and grunting occasionally. She took a still photo, then leaned over the keyboard to type something on the screen.

“B-” she typed.

I squeezed Drew’s hand, misting up. It was a boy!

“L-A-D-D-E-R.”

Huh? I looked at the whole word. “Hmm . . . bladder looks good,” R423A grunted. Then she rubbed her wand over another part of Tiffany’s belly.

A minute later, she stopped and took another snapshot. “L-I-V-E-R,” she wrote.

It went on like this for ten minutes. “One kidney,” she counted, then, five seconds later, “Two kidneys.” She went through the entire digestive, circulatory, and respiratory systems, then she started over with Baby B.

R423A sure knew how to keep us in suspense. We’d been in her office for twenty minutes, during which she’d subjected us to the world’s longest sonographic striptease.

“Can you tell us the sex?” I asked, finally.

Drew glared at me. How dare I anger R423A? It didn’t matter, though, because she ignored me completely.

Finally, I noticed the distinct butt crack of Baby A. This was it. The tech hovered over the crotch, nodding and making notes but saying nothing. I had no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t see anything that looked like a penis, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a bladder or a liver either, and the kid apparently had those.

“You wanna know the sex?” R423A asked.

Drew and I clutched each other’s hands. “Yes! Please!”

She drew a circle on the screen around something that was supposed to be a giveaway. She looked at me to see if I’d figured it out, but all I could do was shrug. She bent down over the keyboard and typed in, excruciatingly slowly, “I-T-apostrophe-S, space bar, A, space bar . . .” Yes? Yes?

The instant the letter “B” popped up on screen, I gasped. “A boy!” I cheered. “Ah, so that’s a penis!”

“O-Y,” R423A typed. Then she printed out another snapshot.

Drew and I smiled at each other. A boy! It was amazing. With every detail we learned about Baby A, he became more real. He was a boy, with lungs and a stomach and a spleen! In that moment, there was no fear about having to coach his little league team or help him pick a prom date. That could come later. For now, we were just happy to learn a little bit about our kid.

R423A spent a few minutes checking out Baby A’s junk and making notes before she switched over to Baby B. She once again paused over the fetus’s groin before asking, “Any guesses?”

From where I was standing, this crotch looked exactly the same as the last one. Apparently, though, I was missing something.

“It’s a girl!” Tiffany squealed.

The technician confirmed her guess by typing “IT’S A GIRL” on the screen. The second I saw Drew’s tears, my own came pouring out, too. Tiffany was crying. Eric slapped us on the backs triumphantly. A boy and a girl. A boy and a girl! It was the biggest shock since we found out we were having twins, but this time, there was no blood in the uterus to dampen our enthusiasm. It was the kind of thing life gives us far too seldom—pure, solid, perfect, completely unspoiled good news. This was a moment to savor.

It took a few moments before we realized R423A had switched off her ultrasound machine and wiped the goo off Tiffany’s skin. She lowered her glasses down the bridge of her nose and glared at us, as if wondering why we were still standing there.

“We’re done,” she said. “Go.”

As quickly as we could scramble out the door, we moved our celebration to the hall.

20

The Wedding We’d Never Had

N
o one was more aware
of our impending parenthood than the UPS man. Every day, he arrived with between one and five squijillion packages full of adorable crap for our twins. It seemed like the entire inventory of Babas & Booties was shifting from their San Fernando Valley location to our West Hollywood condo, one cardboard box at a time. Drew’s generosity toward his friends had been one of the things that made me fall for him in the first place. I felt doubly lucky that I got to be there when he finally cashed in.

Of course, Drew’s good-heartedness had its downside in that everyone who expressed the slightest goodwill toward us was scoring a shower invite. Waitresses, yoga instructors, book club acquaintances. They would all be among our well-wishers.

“Didn’t Jessica tell us to keep the guest list to fifty?” I asked Drew, knowing it had ballooned to almost three times that number.

“I’ll deal with Jessica,” he insisted.

I’d always been under the impression that a baby shower was something you only went to grudgingly. Getting that pastel blue or pink invitation in the mail meant a pregnant friend was shamelessly groveling for gifts, and you’d feel like a jerk if you didn’t show up with a steamer trunk full of crib toys. Nobody seemed to see our shower that way, though. People we barely knew were calling us to ask if they could come. “I won’t eat anything or take up much space,” they pleaded. “I just want to be there!”

“Of course you can come!” Drew would say, and I’d quietly cringe in anticipation of Jessica’s inevitable meltdown.

For me, excluding people was much easier, especially when it came to one guest in particular. Things were still tense between me and Bernie, so when the guest list began to swell, he was the first name I crossed off. He’d asked me to be a groomsman in his wedding. Now I was declaring him unwelcome to bestow me with a baby gift at a party someone else was paying for. It felt harsh but also satisfying. This is what you get for voting against my rights, jerk!

It would have been easy to get away with—if not for Drew. “I wish he were coming,” Drew sighed more than once when Bernie’s name came up. It was two weeks before the event, and fate had nudged my number one frenemy to the forefront of my boyfriend’s conscience. By a frustrating coincidence, they’d just spent a week together on jury duty.

For days, they sat next to each other, ate lunch together, watched each other’s stuff during bathroom breaks. They were forbidden from discussing their case and forced to talk about absolutely everything else. Inevitably, Bernie opened up about his and his wife’s struggle to have a baby. As I’d suspected, they’d given up on in vitro.

“Did you know they’re adopting?” Drew asked me.

“No. Really?”

“They’re pretty far along in the process, actually. They might be parents before we are.”

The shower was only days away, and suddenly, I was having second thoughts about snubbing Bernie. I thought I’d put the decision firmly behind me. I’d weighed all the arguments of whether to invite him and come down firmly with a verdict of “fuck him.” There was a strong case indeed to be made for “fuck him,” so why did I feel so guilty? I wondered if there was an even stronger case to be made for “enlighten him.” He had a good heart. Maybe he’d appreciate our gay family more if he saw it at its most celebratory.

Drew finally broke me down. I decided to rise above the vindictiveness, to be the bigger man. I sent Bernie a lying email telling him his invitation had been returned to me because Jessica had mistakenly put the wrong address on it. Damn Jessica! “I’m so embarrassed, and I’m sorry for the short notice, but of course, I’d love it if you and your wife could join us.”

Now I’d have Jessica to deal with myself.

When the big day finally arrived, we rolled up to the shower in style—in a sleek, shiny new minivan. For most people my age, minivans are the great evil, a sign of youth dying, of admitting that you’re satisfied to be identified as a parent rather than as a human being with good taste. For me, that stretched-out super-car with the sliding doors was a symbol of triumph. Drew and I had spent two years and a veritable fortune trying to make babies, and we did it. Yes, my youth had died—and hooray for that. Youth sucked. Bring on middle age! This gay’s got kids, everyone! Climb aboard, there’s room for eight!

The only thing slicker than our new ride was our friend Lauren’s house, where the party was held. Her home was a stunner, a masterpiece of modern architecture you could hardly believe was real as you were walking through it, all bold angles, high ceilings, and sunshine. It wasn’t the design that made it the perfect place to celebrate, though. It was its hard-partying pedigree. One of the home’s previous owners had been the movie producer Don Simpson, known for his raging cocaine keggers in the 1980s. There was no telling how many hookers had turned up dead in the pool in those days. This was a more subdued occasion than wrapping principal photography on
Top Gun
, but it was comforting to know that the ghosts of awesome parties past were smiling down upon us.

We wanted everyone to have a good time, of course, but no one was more important to us than four guests in particular: Tiffany, Eric and their tiny, intrauterine plus-ones. Usually, the person at a baby shower who gets the showering is the one with the baby inside her. At our shower, that woman would be a virtual stranger, and it would be up to us to make her feel welcome.

Before the shower began, we presented Tiffany with a few gifts of her own. Maternity clothes, flowers, a gift certificate for a pregnancy massage. That way, she wouldn’t have to go home empty-handed. She was also the first to hear our big announcement, the babies’ names. Drew and I, like so many annoying straight couples, had been brainstorming baby names pretty much since our first date. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation about something completely different, I’d interject with a name that had just popped into my head—“Buster?”—and he’d know just what I meant. “No!” he’d reply.

After eight years of dating, we had exactly seven boy’s names to choose from and four girl’s names. From those lists, we made our selections.

Our son would be Bennett, our daughter, Sutton.

We tested them out to see how they sounded. “I’m so proud of you, Bennett.” “Nice diorama, Sutton!” “Bennett and Sutton, stop smearing pudding on the wall!”

They were perfect—to us, at least.

“Sutton?!” Tiffany said. “Where did you come up with that?”

“We just liked it.”

“Did you make it up?” Eric asked.

“No, it’s a real name. Ever heard of Sutton Foster?”

“Who?”

“What about Bennett? Are you going to call him Ben?”

“No. We’re going to call him Bennett. Why?”

“Nothing.”

“Drew!” I needed help, desperately. I was doubting my own children’s names. I waved my boyfriend over and pleaded for him to do the explaining. “Tell them about the names.”

“Bennett and Sutton?” he said. “They sound rich!”

Tiffany and Eric laughed. “Now that’s a good reason!” I knew instantly I’d be using that line for the rest of my life.

Despite being the last guests invited, Bernie and his wife were among the first to arrive. They brought with them an enormous gift basket full of children’s books. Like everyone else, they were beaming, so happy for me and Drew.

“Bennett and Sutton,” Bernie said. “Love those names!”

In that instant, all was forgiven. We talked about how perfect it would be if the twins could have playdates with their kid someday, and they let me in on a secret they hadn’t told anyone else yet.

“There’s a birth mother who liked our application. Nothing official yet. She apparently thought it was cool that I worked in Hollywood.”

“Does she know you write voice-overs for car crashes?”

“Hey,” Bernie said. “We have glamorous jobs.”

I’d been worried that seeing them at the shower would be awkward. They’d struggled so hard to have a baby, and now I was rubbing their noses in the fact that my boyfriend and I were having two. Instead, it was the best talk I’d had with Bernie since before Proposition 8. We had more in common than either of us ever expected, and each of us was genuinely happy for the other.

I only spoke to them for a few minutes because there were so many other guests to greet. All of Drew’s siblings had flown out, as had his mother, who hated to travel and hadn’t visited L.A. in fifteen years. Just about everyone I cared about in the world was in Lauren’s house, and I was determined to hug them all.

In our eight years together, Drew and I had never thrown a party before, certainly not one that celebrated us personally. Now here we were with an open bar, a five-person catering crew, and a cake the size of Rhode Island. There was a guest book and a gift table sagging under the weight of far, far too many packages tucked inside stork-themed wrapping paper. We hadn’t asked people to wear anything fancy, but even our hippiest friends washed their dreadlocks and put on their best puka shell necklaces for the event. As I gazed around the room, I was stunned to see people from different factions of my life—family, friends, coworkers, Drew’s and mine—all mingling effortlessly. My mother and sister conversing with Drew’s old boss, my guy friends talking baseball with Eric Ireland, Tiffany bonding with the women from my old writing group.

I suddenly realized that this had become far more than a baby shower. No one even knew these babies yet. That wasn’t who brought them here. They had come to celebrate us, me and Drew, in high spirits and business casual attire. At some point, this little party grew into the wedding we’d never had.

“EVERYBODY IN THE KITCHEN! MOVE IT!” Though a hundred fifty people were chattering at once, no one had any problem hearing Jessica.

As the guests shifted en masse, Jessica became impatient. “WHERE’S JERRY? WHERE’S JERRY!!!”

There was no point trying to avoid her. I struggled to slink through the crush of people to get to where she could see me. Jessica was by far the shortest person at the party, and I was fairly well dwarfed by my tall friends, too, so it wouldn’t be easy.

Somehow, I found my way next to Drew, who was standing over the cake with Susie, Tiffany, Eric, and most of our immediate families. Jessica was choked up, struggling to contain herself so that she could begin. It was speech time. Jessica took a deep breath and actually talked in a normal voice.

“I’m not going to cry, but I want to say something.”

She gazed around the room, which resembled a Mumbai subway car at rush hour. “There are TOO MANY FUCKING PEOPLE HERE!” Everyone laughed, except me and Drew. We knew she was only half kidding.

“You know, it really says something that so many of you came here to celebrate the fact that Drew and Jerry are having kids. It says that DREW AND JERRY CAN’T FUCKING FOLLOW DIRECTIONS! I TOLD THEM TO INVITE FIFTY PEOPLE!”

“It’s my fault!” Drew confessed.

“SHUT UP!” Jessica snapped. “It says a lot about Drew that he invited ten thousand people to his baby shower, but it says even more that you all said yes. And I know it’s because you care as much about these guys as I do, and the fact that they’re having twins just makes you feel like sometimes, life happens the way it should. Good things happen to good people.” Jessica shoved Drew, hard. “OH MY GOD, DREW, STOP LOOKING AT ME, OR YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE ME CRY!”

Drew stared at her, all but daring her to break into tears. It worked.

“FUCK IT. I’M DONE!” Jessica waved her hand and disappeared back into the crowd.

All eyes in the room were on Drew and me. One of us had to say something. “Go ahead,” Drew said. “You’re the writer.”

“But I didn’t write anything. You’re the talker.”

That was all the prodding Drew needed. He thanked Jessica and the rest of the Shower Planning Supercommittee for everything they’d done to make this day so perfect. He thanked everyone for coming. He thanked the bartender and the kitchen staff and, though they weren’t present, the bakers who’d made the cake. As he was talking, I realized I did have something I wanted to say after all. I tapped Drew on the shoulder, and he gave me the floor.

“When Drew and I started thinking about having kids, it was because we really wanted to make a family, and nothing went exactly the way we planned. Most of you know the story by now. Susie offered us her eggs, and the surrogacy agency matched us up with this amazing woman, Tiffany, and her amazing husband, Eric. For a long time, it didn’t look like we were really going to have a baby at all, but somehow now we’re having twins. And our lives have already changed so much. We’re closer to Susie than ever, and we’re so grateful to know Tiffany and Eric. I’d been worried about having a baby with a surrogate because I didn’t know what to expect, but when I look at these people now, I realize we’ve already made a family, and it’s one I can’t wait to share with my kids.”

By now, everyone was sobbing—not just the easy targets like Drew, Susie, and Tiffany but Eric and me, too. Our families and friends—and somewhere in the crowd, Jessica.

Packing up the car with all the gifts took almost as long as the party itself. We filled the entire minivan and had to ask Tiffany and Eric to follow us home in their car with the spillover. With Gavin at home with a babysitter, the Irelands stayed the rest of the day at our condo, helping us open packages. They even bought us a few gifts of their own: some baby clothes and our very first case of diapers and wipes.

The whole day had been so overwhelming—such a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of emotions—that it was a bit of a relief the next day just to bask in the aftermath. By then, all of Drew’s family had left, and among the out-of-towners, the only ones who remained were my mother and my sister, Kathy. While Drew caught up on work, I took them to a restaurant down the street for dinner.

“That baby shower was nuts!” Kathy said, as we sat down. A day later, the party was still the only thing we could talk about. “That was bigger than my wedding. C’mon, how many people were there?”

“I think . . . a hundred?”

“That was more than a hundred. It was one-fifty, easy.”