Relentless Spirit

by Missy Franklin

  Later that day, Mom came back from a student council meeting to her office in the student union . . . and there was Dad. She had no way of knowing how long he’d been sitting there, and he just stood and held out his arms and collected her in a big hug. (No broken ribs this time!) He said, “It doesn’t matter. I love you. We’ll get through this.”

  Basically, he said all the right things. Which, knowing my father, was some kind of miracle.

  They were married seven months later. By some other miracle, Mom’s father made it to the wedding, very nearly sober. Her bridesmaids had to send their husbands to the psychiatric hospital in Nova Scotia where my grandfather had been admitted, and they managed to clean him up and bring him back to campus for the reception, which was held at the student union. My parents paid for the reception themselves, for a grand total of $600. For their honeymoon, a car dealer Dad used to work for gave them a loaner vehicle so they could drive down to Cape Cod for a few days.

  It was September 1971, almost a quarter century before I entered the picture.

  Jump ahead ten, fifteen, twenty years, and it was still just the two of them, working hard, traveling the world, living their lives to the fullest. Mom went on to medical school and became a doctor. Dad went to work as an executive at a string of companies, including 7Up, Head, Coors, Reebok, and Telecommunications Inc. They lived in Halifax, Toronto, Kansas City, Atlanta, Saint Louis, Boston, Denver, and Boulder, Colorado, before settling in the Denver area for good. (Have I missed anyplace?) They traveled all over the world, on business and for pleasure. In almost every respect, they had a great life, a great marriage, but my mother felt like something was missing—more and more, as time went on. Every once in a while, the subject of children would come up, usually in an abstract way. She’d catch herself looking at other families and one of them would make a remark, say something about how things might have been, how they might be still. Sometimes, Dad would look over at Mom and catch her staring at little kids, on a plane, at the beach, in a restaurant, wherever.

  To hear them talk about this time in their lives now, I get the feeling that Dad would have been perfectly okay never having children. But Mom kept coming back to the idea. Or, I guess, the idea kept coming back to her. When it was something she could put off, until the time was right, she found a way to be okay with it, but as time passed, she kept returning to the idea, more and more. She started clipping articles she’d read about adoption and surrogacy, always looking to keep her options open. She even got Dad to begin the adoption process a couple of times, but they moved around so much in those days they’d have to give up on one application and start on another, because every state had different regulations, different procedures.

  Time was running away from them—and yet, they were happy, although I like to think their happiness might have been a little incomplete, missing one teeny-tiny detail.

  Here’s how my mom remembers that time in their lives. . . .

  MOM: I’m a doctor, right? So I knew all about surrogacy. I knew all the options. And I knew, deep down, that adoption wasn’t really right for Dick. He never said as much, but it was clear. He was open to it, but I think there was a disconnect there. Plus, I don’t think his heart was in it to raise someone else’s child. He was going along just to go along, just to make me happy, so I guess a part of me set that whole idea of adoption aside. As much as I wanted to be a mother, I didn’t want to push Dick anywhere he didn’t want to go. And then one afternoon I was flipping through a copy of People magazine. There was a cover story on Deidre Hall, the soap opera actress, telling all about the child she’d just had with a surrogate. I’ve kept the magazine, all this time. It was the September 28, 1992, issue, and it laid it all out, everything she’d been through. I’d known all this stuff, of course, but I guess only in a clinical sense. To see it in the pages of a magazine, with a focus on a real family, holding this beautiful little baby, it made it all seem possible. And it told me that people were becoming so much more accepting of surrogacy. There it was, on the cover of People magazine, like it was an everyday thing.

  Dad thought this whole surrogacy business sounded weird, but Mom kept after him. And it’s not just that it was weird or out there or unfamiliar—it was also worrisome. He thought there were a ton of things that could go wrong. The surrogate could change her mind, midway through the pregnancy. There could be some unforeseen health issue. There were just so many variables. But then, when you think about it, there are just as many variables in a traditional pregnancy, so many things that can go wrong. Mom kept after him to focus on all the things that could go right for them instead of stressing over what could go wrong. Eventually, he came around to the thinking that if they were ever going to have a child, he’d have to start looking at things from a glass-half-full perspective.

  Here’s the thing: when the possibility of surrogacy first came up in Mom’s mind, she was thinking she could use her own eggs. Her problem was with her uterus, after all. Her eggs were fine. But she’d been circling around the idea of having a child for six or seven years, and by now she was forty-two years old. (Sorry, Mom, but these details are key. We can go back to lying about your age after this book comes out!) Anyway, Dad was not a big fan of the whole adoption thing at first, and now with this surrogacy option there was no guarantee that Mom’s eggs would be viable. Since the costs of in vitro fertilization were so high, about $10,000 per attempt (on top of the surrogacy fees), it didn’t really make sense to go that route. This meant it made the most sense for them to use the surrogate’s eggs—that was the simplest way to go about it in those days. All they had to do was match up with a surrogate and they could finally start trying for a family.

  Trouble was, it wasn’t so easy to find a match. They worked through an agency, of course, and the first person they found turned out to have some health issues. The second person who came up in their search turned out to have some personal issues that gave my parents some concern. The way it works is, the agency finds a suitable candidate, and the prospective parents work with a psychologist and a doctor and it’s a pretty thorough process. It can take months to make sure there’s a good fit, including a couple of back-and-forth visits. And then, if it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, it can take another few months before the agency identifies another suitable candidate, so the whole thing can drag on. And it’s not just the prospective parents who are deciding if the surrogate is a suitable match; the surrogate is checking out the prospective parents, too; there has to be a good fit all around.

  My parents had been married more than twenty years by this point, and if you’d have asked my father he would have probably said a baby just wasn’t in the cards for them. He loved the life he was living with my mom. But more than that, he loved my mom, so he kept going through these motions to make her happy. He was fine with how things were, but he wasn’t fine with the hole my mother was feeling in her life. He knew he had to do whatever it took to help fill that hole, even if his heart wasn’t totally in it—at least, not at first. Still, he didn’t think this would happen. They’d been around and around so many times on this, first with the stops and starts on the adoption front and then with their surrogacy search, it was starting to feel like they were spinning their wheels.

  And then the stars aligned and God smiled.

  Okay, so that’s the big drumroll setup to the revelation at the heart of this book. My mother had learned early on that she couldn’t carry a child to term, and by the time she and my dad were ready to have a child her eggs may not have been viable and it wasn’t clear she would have even been able to get pregnant, so I guess you can say I’m a child of science. Make no mistake, I’m also a child of my parents, through and through, but I was brought into this world with the help of a generous, compassionate surrogate and her family. I don’t want to mention her by name in these pages, because I don’t want to draw any unwelcome attention to her, or to upend her life in any way. But she knows who sh
e is. We know who she is.

  This woman was a godsend, really. She came into our lives on the third try—and right away, my parents knew. Already, on paper, they knew. Before they flew to this woman’s home to meet with her and her husband, they were sent pictures, a health workup, a general questionnaire. Together, she and her husband decided they wanted to share this gift of family with another couple unable to have children on their own—a beautiful, selfless decision that absolutely floors me every time I think about all the different factors that went into it. I mean, who makes that kind of sacrifice? What kind of wonderful do you have to be to put the wants and needs of strangers ahead of your own? To put your life on pause for nine months, so the life of another family can have a chance to start?

  Such a blessing! Such a kindness! Really, my parents were overwhelmed by the warmth and generosity of these good people. Mom remembers that their first visit ran way longer than anyone had planned. Everybody just hit it off. They talked and talked. They seemed to share the same values, want the same things.

  I hear these stories now and it feels to me a little bit like people talking about a party I wasn’t invited to. But I was there, in a way. I was certainly a topic of conversation—the topic of conversation.

  As origin stories go, this one’s pretty cool, don’t you think? I’m no superhero, but I’ve always loved taking in the backstories of these great characters in comic books and action movies. It’s so fun, so thrilling—the way we find out how they got their starts, where they got their superpowers, who helped to shape them. Here I listen to my parents revisit the details of this first meeting with the woman who would be our surrogate and I feel some of the same thrill, so I’ve come to think of these twists and turns as my origin story. This is where it all started for me. How it all started for me. If Mom and Dad had flown out to meet this woman and her family and things had gone differently, then I wouldn’t be here. But they did, and they formed this beautiful, meaningful connection, almost immediately, and out of that they all decided to move the process along.

  Out of that, they decided to make me!

  MOM: These were good, generous people, but of course we covered all the agency fees and the surrogacy charges. Whatever it cost, it cost. For people out there considering this option, you should know that it’s expensive, but you should also know that the women who step up and take on this blessing aren’t motivated by money. Not at all. You can’t put a price on this gift—but, yes, it does come at a price. We were just so happy that we’d found this family and that everybody got along, everything checked out. We were so excited. The first insemination didn’t work, but they’d told us it could take a while, so I was prepared. I got it in my head that the second insemination wouldn’t work, either, and it just happened that we had a trip planned to Maui, and we were going to come back and do the third try after our vacation. But then, just as we were getting ready to leave, I got a call from the surrogate, and I could hear it in her voice that she had some happy news. She said, “We’re pregnant!” And I just about dropped the phone. I decided I’d tell Dick on the plane. By this time, I had the pregnancy test, so I handed it to Dick after we’d taken off. He looked at it and just sort of scanned it. It didn’t really register. He was so used to consoling me, since we’d had so many disappointments, I think it became his default mode. He said something like, “We’ll try another insemination when we get back. It’ll all work out, you’ll see.” So I said, “No, you don’t understand. We’re pregnant!” Finally, it sunk in, and for the first time I could see this look of pure joy come over him. He’d been half expecting something to go wrong since we’d started on this road, so I don’t think he ever let his heart fill with the possibility, and here it just filled and filled. He was just bursting with the news. We both were.

  My parents were so excited. Like, over-the-moon excited. They got to the hotel in Hawaii and there was a bottle of champagne waiting for them that my aunt Deb and my uncle Harry (my godparents-to-be!) had sent. It had this big card that read, “Congratulations on your pregnancy!” Anybody could read it, so I’m sure my parents got these weird looks, taking the bottle up to the room. Maybe the concierge thought my dad would drink it all!

  Before I was born, my parents used to send these little notes to each other, make cards for each other. Apparently, this was a thing—there was a kiosk set up at the local drugstore, where you could make these custom greeting cards. Mom saved them all. She saves everything! Mom would sign her cards “L.W.” for “Little Wife.” Dad would sign his cards “B.H.” for “Big Husband.” Kind of corny, but hopefully you can guess by now that I’m all about being corny.

  They were sending cards back and forth to the surrogate, too, and Mom’s saved all of those as well.

  “We talked quite a bit,” Mom says of her relationship with the surrogate.

  Mom did the whole nesting thing during the pregnancy. She picked out a crib, some furniture, got the whole nursery ready. Dad went to Africa during this time, and he ended up taking a whole bunch of pictures when he was on safari, and Mom blew them up and used them to decorate my room. I wasn’t even born yet, and there was this whole Noah’s ark thing going on—two elephants, two hippos, two lions. A lot of people, when they learn about surrogacy, they think the birth mother is doing all the work, and they’re not wrong, she is, but there’s a lot of heavy lifting going on for the soon-to-be-parents as well.

  At first, Mom thought I’d be a boy. No reason, just a hunch. Dad had come from a family of mostly boys, so that was part of her thinking, but when she closed her eyes and imagined our lives going forward she saw herself as the mother of a little boy. Soon, though, she learned I was a girl, and she was thrilled all over again. My parents started calling me J.J., for Jessica Jeannette, but that didn’t stick. Eventually, they settled on Melissa, and whenever our wonderful surrogate sent a card or a sonogram picture, she’d sign it from “Melissa,” like it was me, reaching out to Mom and Dad. When my parents started referring to me as “Missy,” the surrogate started signing my name that way, too.

  So I was Missy before I was born.

  I finally arrived on May 10, 1995. My parents were there in the delivery room, of course. Dad cut the umbilical cord. Mom was the first person to hold me, and she gave me my first bottle. In fact, Mom and Dad stayed at the hospital and handled almost all my feedings, right from day one. They changed my diapers, bonded, made googly eyes, got me ready to go home to the nursery they’d decked out with all those animal photos from Dad’s safari.

  Oh, there was some paperwork everybody needed to fill out, birth certificates and adoption papers for my mom, and other legal documents I’ve never bothered to learn about. But if you set all that stuff aside, I was like any other child, born to any other overjoyed, overwhelmed set of parents in the hospital that day. From the moment I hit that delivery room, kicking and screaming, I was Missy Franklin, Dick and D.A.’s kid. We were a family, at long last, and it didn’t matter how we became a family, only that we were a family. That we are a family. And the woman who carried me to term, even though she was my biological mother, immediately became more like a deeply cherished family friend, on the back of this incredible, unfathomable kindness. We’re connected, but it doesn’t feel to me like a biological connection. It feels more like connection by choice—and we all choose to keep in touch, even though we see each other infrequently. Still, this noble, bighearted woman and her family will always be a part of our family, because they will always be a part of me. But when I think of my immediate family, it’s just me and my mom and dad. There’s no room in that picture for anyone else. No room in my heart for anyone else.

  Now, I realize I’ve raced over a lot of the details of my birth here, although in fairness to me, it’s not like I have any firsthand memories of that time in our lives. (Sorry, guys . . . I wasn’t exactly taking notes.) But I’m also keeping this part of our story brief because we don’t want this to be a book about surrogac
y. It’s not who we are as a family. It’s not who I am. Surrogacy might have jump-started me, but it doesn’t define me. It made my family whole, and it fills me with gratitude and grace, but that’s it. The woman who carried me is the woman who carried me. My parents are my parents. End of story. Or, I should say, beginning of story.

  But I do want to take the time here to reflect on what the circumstances of my birth meant to me when I started high school, when faith started to take on a whole new role in my life. See, my parents had never been overly religious. The church had been a part of each of their lives, growing up, but never in a deep or fundamental way. It was there, more backdrop than anything else. And that’s how it was in our house, throughout the early part of my childhood. But everything changed during my teenage years. That’s when I started attending Regis Jesuit High School, a Jesuit, Catholic school in the Denver area. I’ll write about my decision to attend Regis a little later on in these pages. It was a swimming decision, mostly, but it came to be about so much more, and it brought with it a renewed sense of faith and spirituality. It also left me thinking—for the first time, really—about how I’d come into this world, and how the circumstances of my birth might be viewed by my new classmates and in the eyes of God.

  I can remember sitting in one of my classes during one of the first weeks of school. The first few times I walked through the doors at Regis, I had a taste of that feeling of less than that my mom had always talked about, of being somehow other, on the outside looking in. I didn’t tell a lot of people that I’d been born with the help of a surrogate, but it was like an open secret in and around town. The taller I got, the less likely it appeared to all the world that my mother had given birth to me. Really, she’s such a tiny thing, so the bigger my successes in the pool, the more eyebrows we started to raise in the larger swim community. Back home, folks had known us forever. They’d seen me grown up, so everybody seemed happy to take it on faith that I simply favored my father over my mother, in terms of stature. In terms of demeanor, a lot of people said I was just like my mom.