An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

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  • • •

  ALL I HAD to do was figure out what that was. For example, would I use a friend as a sperm donor, or a stranger? If the former, who? If the latter, how would I go about making that choice? Would I move back to London to try to wangle free treatment on the NHS? (Which, to the horror of the right-wing press, now offers fertility services to single women and lesbians—or LESBIANS, as per tabloid house style.) Or would I stay in America and spend tens of thousands on something that might not even work? How much was I willing to sacrifice to pay for this? My London apartment? My 401(k)? My shirt?

  There was one question that, depending on the answer, might render all other questions moot, and that was whether I could even conceive. I suspected not. In most areas of my life I didn’t feel particularly female and it seemed to me unlikely I would be successful in this, its purest biological expression, without a struggle. This was, perhaps, a weird assumption on my part; the idea that unless certain proprieties of being female are observed—a hunger for marriage; a willingness to take more effort with one’s appearance than I was willing to take; an engagement with the question of whether women can or should “have it all,” etc.—the rewards would be withheld. I wasn’t ashamed of the situation in which I found myself as my late thirties approached, but I was ashamed of that lack of shame, which felt to me like a failure of femininity. And I felt shame about feeling this, too.

  The thing to do, I had heard, was to get one’s eggs counted. If I had only a few left, I’d better knuckle down and start thinking—really thinking, not shove-it-off-to-one-side-again thinking—about whether I had the gumption to do this. If there were dozens and dozens, I could shilly-shally about for a bit longer. The day before my thirty-seventh birthday and feeling tremendously organized—look at me! Consulting with doctors as a precautionary measure! I had practically had the baby already—I went to see an ob-gyn.

  In London, if you need a doctor, you shuffle along to a local GP allocated by zip code, who, if you have a serious problem, refers you to a specialist. In New York, you go online, decide what’s wrong with you, consult New York magazine’s annual best doctors in New York list, ask friends and relatives for recommendations and, after finding the most expensive doctor approved by your insurer, ring his or her secretary to wheedle an appointment.

  And then, my god, you pay for it. It’s a source of bafflement to some Americans that Brits in the UK don’t visit the doctor more often. How is it, American friends ask me, that given our free health care, we aren’t constantly getting our thyroids checked or popping in for blood tests? It would never in a million years occur to a British person to go to the doctor to ask for a “mole map,” for example, the anti–skin cancer protocol that those in New York who can afford it demand of their dermatologists at the start of every summer. (No one in Britain who isn’t actively shedding layers has a dedicated dermatologist.) This is not, as Americans sometimes suppose, because of hospital waiting times or the “grubby” facilities, but because of how we regard our relationship with the NHS: not as that of client to service provider but of beneficiary to birthright. One of the first and most unnerving things I learned when I came to America was how to collude with my primary care physician against my insurers, just to get my claims through.

  The ob-gyn came recommended by a hypochondriac friend whose referrals I take seriously and was exclusive, with a clinic on Park Avenue that felt like a private members club—all thick carpet and dim lighting, with an oil painting of a horse on the wall. After a fifteen-minute wait, I was shown into the consulting room, and a moment later a woman in her fifties swept in and began conducting the examination. Timidly, I asked her about counting my eggs.

  “That’s not something we do,” she said briskly and looked at me as if I’d asked her to put on her hat and read the television news.

  “I’m thirty-seven tomorrow. Shouldn’t I be panicking?” I felt ridiculous, like a made-up case study in a women’s magazine article.

  “Not at all.” She paused. Then she asked me kindly about my work, my life and my plans for the future while I mumbled noncommittal responses.

  “I don’t think you have to start worrying about this issue for at least another year,” she said and smiled in a way that struck me as reassuring at the time, but that I suspected I might look back upon with mixed feelings, like the record of the Red Cross during World War II.

  “She’s crazy,” I said to friends afterward—everyone knows you have to hit the panic button at thirty-five—and then I found myself thinking, well, if a doctor says it’s OK to wait, it must be true. (That’s another thing about the British; we never seek second opinions. Our personalities aren’t set up for it.) And I liked her for trying to counter the general hysteria around female fertility. I thought—I knew—she was probably wrong, but I appreciated her for trying.

  At the desk on the way out, I handed over my credit card to pay the $380 bill.

  “Can I give you chlamydia?” said the receptionist.

  “Um. Can it not be an STD?”

  “Fine. Yeast infection?”

  “Perfect.”

  She filled in the code for my insurers, signed the form, stamped it and handed it back to me, smiling.

  “See you in twelve months.”

  Over the next ten months, I did a lot of things. I handed in my book. I went on vacation with L to Puerto Rico. I doubled my output for my newspaper. One night, at a bar in Midtown, I jokily asked my friend Dan, “Hey, wanna be my baby-daddy?” (“Sure,” said Dan, and the next day sent me a computer-generated image of a baby’s face made up of our two faces, plus our friend Sarah’s, plus Hitler’s.) Apart from that, the most I could manage was to look through my fingers at a few sperm bank Web sites, then stare at the wall in despair. On good days, going ahead with the baby plan felt like a foregone conclusion. On other days, it struck me as an impossibility up there with climbing Everest or shouting out random words on the subway. Meanwhile, my thirty-eighth birthday loomed and panic rose around me like the skirts on a Hovercraft.

  Toward the end of 2013, I went on a series of book tours, first to South Africa, then around the United States, finally winding up at the book festival in Edinburgh, where Rosemary and I order one last round from the waiter, whose contemptuous politeness suggests we are more drunk than we think. And it is now, a few hours before dawn, that we get to the heart of the matter. Rosemary is adopted and has a better understanding than most of the shallowness of the debate around nature versus nurture. Even so, in the dying embers of our evening together, she and I fixate on what everyone fixates on in the early days of considering having a child via some kind of donor: not what people will say or think; not even whether it will work; but what the kid will look or act like if it doesn’t look or act like us. What happens if, thirty years down the line, a stranger’s genes surface and I find I’ve produced someone I don’t recognize from the way I have raised them?

  “What’s the nightmare?” says Rosemary.

  “Merchant banker,” I say. “You?”

  There is a long, thoughtful pause. “Tory Christian,” she says.

  TWO

  Origin Story

  MY MOTHER had me a month shy of her forty-third birthday, a jaunty move in 1975. She was in good nick—five foot nine, slender, could pass for ten years younger and did, until I found her passport one day when I was about ten years old. “I thought you’d figured that out long ago,” she said breezily, as if I’d come tragically late to the party, but I know it bothered her. “Older mothers make very good mothers,” she would later say, somewhat sadly and echoing what the obstetrician at the Hammersmith Hospital had told her. “They just sometimes run out of steam.”

  It was a source of sorrow to my mother that she didn’t have more children, such a rare admission of regret on her part that to me, growing up, it put motherhood in a singular category: as one of the few things you couldn’
t get for yourself via hard work or enterprise. It also left me with the impression that I might have trouble conceiving. By the time I was in my twenties, it was clear to me, even without my mother’s example, that the way women like me had kids was at forty-three after three rounds of IVF, two on the NHS, one in the private wing of UCH, before scaling down their jobs to three days a week and leaving the office at six p.m. on the dot, so that two thirds of the population around them—the men, the young people, the women without children—resented them for not doing their share. As a punishment, they were forced to talk about work/life balance for the next twenty years, a debate so boring one might forestall having children just to avoid it.

  And of course that’s if they could get pregnant at all. I remember an older woman in my office who’d had a child in her late thirties and been unable to have more going on an impassioned rant to me about how women my age had been sold a lie; how all those you-go-girl pieces in the magazines about women having kids in their forties downplayed the sheer size of their gamble. I thought she was mad. Having “only” one child sounded fine to me, but in any case, I could barely imagine being thirty, let alone forty. The only thing I couldn’t work out was this: after the amazing two decades I was about to have working and traveling and writing books and learning about myself, what if I didn’t “meet the right person”?

  You might think that a story about the path to single motherhood would list all the exes I burned through, the ones who got away, whom I should’ve or could’ve had kids with but didn’t. Instead, my emotional life in my twenties and early thirties was arranged almost entirely around my friends, with the mushroom cloud of my mother’s death in the middle of it and interrupted by my move to America. For a long time, I couldn’t even decide if I was primarily dating men or women. I spent a lot of demoralizing nights out trying to work out if he was boring me because he was boring or if he was boring me because he was male. (Looking back, it was often both.) “What did you like about him?” friends would say the morning after I’d been out on a date, and I would have to think hard. “I liked his gray cashmere sweater.”

  Eventually, after an unhappy period of kicking people out in the middle of the night and generally messing around every single man I went out with—apologies in particular to the visiting student from Cambridge, whom, after he’d traveled for three hours on a bus to have dinner with me, I ejected at two a.m. on the coldest night of the year because I couldn’t bear to wake up with him—I came to a reckoning: that while I can find men attractive, and even date them for a while, I’m much better suited sexually and emotionally to relationships with women. (If this can be rationalized, which it probably can’t, I think it’s because women are less romantic and more pragmatic than men, although it amuses me to note that things I would find insufferable in a male date—gold Rolex, sports car, an obsession with SoulCycle—I will admire in a woman as the fruits of empowerment. It’s possible my feminism has a way to go yet.)

  The larger point is this: even though, by the late 1990s, the feminist pendulum had swung away from an emphasis on self-sufficiency and back toward the equality of choice—specifically, a woman’s right to choose to stay home with her kids and not be judged wanting by her feminist peers—my female friends and I all knew that some choices were more equal than others. Sex, marriage, motherhood, all mattered; they just didn’t matter until they mattered. In the meantime, I was like every other self-respecting twentysomething woman who’d read Cixous at college and secretly rooted for Sigourney Weaver’s character in Working Girl. I got my kicks at work.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN I GRADUATED from college in 1997, the only people I knew my age who were in a position to have children were old school friends who hadn’t moved to London after university but had returned home, married to their college sweethearts, having missed the memo that our generation of women didn’t have to do that anymore. We regarded them with scorn; those who can, do, we thought, those who can’t, breed. Fifteen years later these people would have their revenge: those who can, breed, those who can’t, are screwed. But it didn’t feel like that yet. At twenty-two, it felt like this period would go on forever.

  I had graduated wanting to write for a living and made a list with the Guardian at the top and two trade papers, Cage and Aviary Birds and Metal Bulletin, at the bottom. I still half wish I’d had the chance to write about metals or birds. (I had a fantasy about becoming the first breakout star of avian journalism, in which my stunning piece about parakeets caught the eye of a national newspaper editor and vaulted me to the big time.) Instead, I went to Edinburgh to take up a job at the Scotsman, the national newspaper of Scotland, run by English people whom the Scots on staff hated and housed in a scruffy building on North Bridge that is now a boutique hotel. I was the youngest on staff and also the worst dressed. Of the three pairs of trousers I owned, one of them was made of brown leather.

  Years later, when I came to consider having a baby alone, one of the phrases that ran through my head was “The meaning of life is three phone calls away.” It was something an executive from News International had told me during a careers day at college, and although she was being glib—a useful mind-set in the field, it transpired—it stayed with me because it turned out broadly to be true. Journalists may or may not be the smartest guys in the room. They may be able to write, or not, speak other languages or not. They rarely get rich unless they go into management or move sideways into TV and they are often disheveled and socially inept. What they do understand, perhaps better than anyone, is that there is no defense that can’t be breached if you hammer it hard enough or find a sly enough angle of entry. It was one of my mother’s longstanding convictions that she would lose me in a kidnapping, and I sometimes think my entire career has been an effort to put myself in a room full of people who, when the masked men finally come for me, will know which three phone calls to make to get me out again.

  In those early days in Scotland, not only did I have no idea whom to call, I had no idea whom to call to find out whom to call. I didn’t know what any of the government agencies were called or how to extract official comment from them. I didn’t know the difference between the civil service and the civil list. I was forever being told to get in touch with a celebrity and had no idea how one went about doing it, and when I did finally did get hold of one, I had no idea how to bring up the matter of their cosmetic surgery/conviction for shoplifting/terrible new film without getting thrown out of the interview. On my third day in the job, I was put in a cab and told to doorstep the wife of a cabinet minister who’d left her for his secretary. (“Why don’t you leave her alone?” said the cab driver when I gave him the address. “She’s already had some dickhead from the Sun climbing up her drain pipe this morning.” And he left me in a downpour, outside her house in a suburb of Edinburgh, trembling with fear and ignorance.) I think I’d have been happier if she’d slammed the door in my face. Instead, after I stammered out a question that managed to avoid the words “husband,” “secretary” and “affair,” she looked at me with a sort of withering compassion and shut the door slowly. My leather trousers took three days to dry out.

  For the next two months, between the hours of ten a.m. and six p.m. daily, I ran around Scotland chasing the requisite two case studies per story of people who’d had threesomes; nightclub bouncers on drugs; people who didn’t let their kids watch TV; anorexics; bulimics; alcoholics; amputees; victims of prison rape; ex-SAS men turned mercenaries; Americans living in Scotland who’d had bad dental work; “anyone from the Buccleuch family” (Scotland’s biggest landowners); tax avoiders; Masons; celebrity chefs; expert witnesses who’d been discredited at trial; women addicted to tanning machines; Scotland’s oldest mothers, Scotland’s youngest mothers, Scotland’s surrogate mothers, Scotland’s lesbian mothers, mothers of triplets, women who’d had multiple miscarriages; adoptees reunited with their birth families for the first time who would let me sit in on
the meeting; people who lived on boats, in tents, in council houses marked for demolition. In my desperation, I learned the value of calling people at random from the phone book or stopping them in the street—“Hi, sorry, I know this sounds really weird, but you don’t happen to know someone who stepped on a land mine and survived, do you? I can’t pay them but I can buy them a drink”—or going round the back of the office to the pub, one of those hard-core drinking dens where from twelve p.m. onward there was always someone drunk enough to spill the beans on himself or refer me to someone whose category of trauma matched the thing I was looking for.

  I learned that if you look demoralized enough, people will take pity on you and help, and that being a woman assists with this, not because they think you are stupid, but because they think you are harmless. When, at the end of this period, I got a job at the Guardian, the terror of not knowing what I was doing had been replaced by the slightly less debilitating fear of simply doing it badly.

  The Guardian was supposed to be a step up, about as far from the tabloid-management style of the Scotsman as you could get this side of the Church Times. It was the newspaper my parents had read until they switched to the Independent because, said my mother, there was something wrong with the Guardian’s printing presses and too much ink came off on her fingers. At the Guardian, no one came out of their office at six p.m. to shout and wave their arms around. No one ever threw a punch in the newsroom or called anyone else a cunt, at least not to their face. And although the lead times were short, they weren’t that short. At college, I had done all my essays under self-imposed exam conditions, in three hours flat before my weekly tutorial, and I was starting to wonder if I might be one of those people who can function only under pain of a tight deadline.