by Emma Brockes
When the baby was six weeks old, my book launched in the United States. L persuaded a friend of hers to lend me her art gallery, found a supplier for the champagne, swelled the guest list by inviting her out-of-town cousins, and on the afternoon before the party, she stood in her kitchen with the baby strapped to her front and made cucumber sandwiches for seventy. At five a.m. the next morning, a car took me to the airport to fly to South Africa. For the next fortnight, I talked exclusively about my mother. I talked about how funny she was, how good, and kind, how impatient of weakness. I talked about how much she loved me. I told all the stories she had never told me herself: about how she had had her father, the child molester, arrested and brought to trial for abusing his children; about how the trial had collapsed and she’d left South Africa, almost never to return. Over and over I said these things, to South African women who looked and sounded like my mother, tough old boots who came up to me after events and said “That’s my story, too” in a way that made me wonder where they had buried the bodies. My mother believed that the only guaranteed love in a life is for one’s child, on whose account another adult might be loved, loathed or simply tolerated, but who would never come close to being loved the same way. I realized I believed in this the way I believe in sunlight and air.
When I got back from South Africa, I almost immediately went on another book tour in the United States. In a bookstore in Boston, a woman stood up and, covering her mouth with her hand, said shyly, “I don’t usually wish ill on anyone, but I heard recently that my abuser died.” She removed her hand to reveal a broad smile. “I was so happy.” The entire room burst into applause.
There was one story I didn’t tell on publicity tour. It was about a cousin of mine, a few years older than me, who ten years earlier had been on the brink of marrying a man she wasn’t sure about. A few months before the wedding, she had come to stay at my parents’ home in Buckinghamshire. It was the summer my mother was dying and I was living at home, periodically traveling up to London to show my face at work, then hurrying back on the train, sick with dread at what I might find.
My cousin’s mother was long dead, and although she didn’t know my own mother well, she asked her for advice about the wedding. My mother was woozy on drugs and secondary brain cancer by then but she suddenly became as sharp as a pin. “Do you want a child?” she said, leaning forward in her chair and fixing the younger woman with a ferocious look I knew well.
“Yes,” said my cousin. “Very much so.”
“Well, then,” said my mother. “You must do whatever is necessary.” And she sank, exhausted, back into her chair.
The absences from L and the baby were hard. I missed them, not with the acute longing with which I would one day miss my own children while traveling, but with a deep sense of connection I hadn’t experienced before. I rang as often as I could, from hotels and airports, and was relieved at the end of the summer to fly to Edinburgh for the last event in my schedule. When I got to the hotel, I opened the suitcase to find that L had placed, without my knowledge, a tiny clean diaper on top of my clothes. I sat on the bed and burst into tears.
When I got back to Brooklyn, it was to a familiar feeling of relief that my travels were over and of not yet quite being home. I could never figure out what I was homesick for in these moments. Not for my flat in north London, nor for my dad’s house in west London, where he had moved a few years after my mother’s death. It wasn’t for L and the baby, either. I had missed them enormously, but even the anticipation of seeing them the next day didn’t altogether staunch my unease. Home is where the mum is, I thought stubbornly, a childish mantra that had run through my head ever since my own mother’s death. As I stood in my living room in the late afternoon light, staring at my books and my furniture, at the painting done for me by friend Alexis that, although she swore this wasn’t her intention, looked like an abstract of the Virgin Mary and child, this phrase drummed through my mind with new urgency. My eye fell on some cheap pink plastic shot glasses left out on the counter. Someone had given them to me for my thirtieth birthday and they had somehow made their way into one of the crates shipped from London. Home is where the mum is, home is where the mum is. Look at those, I thought vaguely; they would make good cups for a child having a tea party.
THREE
The Selfish Gene
CONCEIVING ALONE IS, by necessity, an inorganic process. There is no easing your way in by chucking out your contraception and six months later, if nothing has happened, sitting down with your partner and considering your options. Instead, one day you are going about your business as usual, the next you’re crashing up against words like “treatment schedule,” and “artificial insemination” and, most unhappily of all, “sperm donor,” only to slam into retreat, like a boat trying to dock in bad weather. A million choices have to be made before you can get going and each choice feels as if it will result not only in a different person’s being born but in an entirely different story of where that person has come from. I had thought the biggest barriers to having a baby alone would be physical and financial, but that fall, I encounter something that halts women in their tracks more surely in this situation than dwindling egg supplies or bad credit: a failure of imagination.
After the meeting with the ob-gyn on Park Avenue, I decided there was no point in getting my eggs counted until I knew what I was going to do with them, and so, one evening that fall, I head to an Italian restaurant in the Village to have dinner with friends, a no-nonsense couple who have managed to produce a startling three children from a combined parental age of around ninety. L doesn’t come with me. In some ways, things are simpler between us than when she was trying to get pregnant; she already has her baby and is less inclined to feel threatened or excluded, as I did when the roles were reversed. But it’s complicated, too. I don’t know if I can get pregnant, and if I do get pregnant, I don’t know if L and I can survive, and if we do survive, I don’t know in what form that might take. But if, by some miracle, we ever do get to the point of—what even to call it? Parallel parenting? Proximal parenting? Parenting in each other’s general direction?—the one thing that seems likely is that it will be harder for both of us if my decisions differ too wildly from hers.
“Hmph,” she says, when I mention my friends.
“I’ll let you know how it goes.”
Like a lot of lesbian couples half a generation older than me, my friends conceived via what is mockingly referred to as the “turkey baster” method, an informal arrangement between parties at home, keeping costs down and, in countries with harsh fertility laws, allowing single women and lesbian couples to avoid the clinics and the interference of the state. Using a friend as a donor also offers the thinnest connective tissue to the conventional family. Everyone is better off in this scenario, it is said, because the child has an identifiable father and so “knows where it comes from.”
At first, my friends go along with this. Yes, they say, it is reassuring to know who he is. No, of the two of them, the one who didn’t give birth doesn’t feel marginalized, although it took awhile for them to figure out the family dynamic. Yes, they tell me, the kids have contact with their father and derive something meaningful from that. The tone of the conversation becomes increasingly fraught and as more wine is brought out with the entrées, they crack.
“The truth is we hate him,” says Rebecca.
“What?” I say.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” says Tanya. She says this with such vehemence the candle on the table flickers. It is, she says, tremendously difficult having a third wheel in the family, particularly one who, over the years, has asserted his connection to the children more and more aggressively. There are legal provisions in place to protect my friends’ sovereignty as parents, but it is morally complicated, figuring out what access to give him and how much of his interference to tolerate.
“Shall we say it?” says Tanya, and looks at her wife.
&nb
sp; “Go on, you say it,” says Rebecca.
“OK,” she says. There is a long pause. “We sometimes say that if it could be painless, and not hurt anyone, and if it wouldn’t damage the kids, life would be better if he just . . . disappeared.”
I know how this sounds. It’s how a lot of women talk about their ex-husbands and is the source of much bitterness on the part of those men who feel their contributions to their children aren’t adequately recognized. It also echoes something I am starting to hear from other people that fall; that increasingly in New York, ob-gyns are discouraging single women from conceiving with a friend in favor of using an anonymous donor. Emotionally, it’s less complicated. You don’t have to budget for a man setting eyes on the baby and reconsidering his resolution not to be involved. It can be easier for the mother, too; no matter how many times you tell yourself you are doing this alone, if there is an identifiable father, some lizard part of your brain will insist he should be helping. As for the argument that the child is better off knowing who the dad is, if he isn’t available as a dad, it can potentially open the door to a lot of feelings of rejection.
All of this makes sense to me intellectually. But at dinner that night, I find myself thinking, well, my friends obviously chose badly. I wouldn’t make the same mistake because my male friends aren’t douche bags. A few months earlier, when I had asked Dan if he wanted to be my baby-daddy, I’d been more or less joking, but posing the question even flippantly felt like a form of due diligence. Didn’t I owe my hypothetical child at least that, a stab at what, from the outside, looked like the more normal arrangement? Have a baby with someone you know and you might at a glance be divorced. You might simply have gotten drunk one night and hey presto. Or maybe you made one of those cute pacts between friends that form the basis of rom-coms, the ones in which college buddies determine that if they’re both single and childless at thirty-eight, they’ll go ahead and have a baby together. This is, obviously, very bad reasoning from the point of view of what psychologists would call owning your situation. But in spite of that fact, and in spite of knowing all the downsides—the possible unfairness to the friend, the logistical headache, the sense of ickiness that comes, one imagines, from two millennia of evolution bearing down on me for even thinking of having a baby with someone I’m not sexually attracted to—it still seems a lot less frightening than having a baby with a blank space.
There’s an interview I keep thinking about that I did for my newspaper ten years ago. It was with a woman called Diane Blood, who had lobbied all the way to the House of Lords for the right to conceive using her dead husband’s sperm. Stephen Blood had died of meningitis at the age of thirty, and while he was lying in a coma, his wife, Diane, had asked doctors if they could extract his sperm, so she could have his baby at some point down the line. They duly extracted the sperm and litigation began.
It was a complicated, unusual case that set a precedent unlikely to be much called upon, hinging as it did on the right of a surviving spouse to conceive using her dead partner’s sperm, and to have the deceased’s name put on the birth certificate. Blood was a ferocious campaigner, who, after a lengthy battle with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, finally won the right to take the sperm abroad for fertility treatment. She had two children by her late husband in this manner and succeeded in getting the law changed so that he was officially recognized as the father.
What still amazes me about this case is the level of vitriol directed at her. She was ridiculed in public. Religious people compared her baby with Dolly the sheep and accused her of assaulting her husband while he lay in a coma. The HFEA, in a moment of almost comical philosophical overreach, asked Blood what her dead husband would have wanted, the rights of a dead man apparently superseding those of his still-living wife. (Oddly, this was a question Blood was able to answer. By coincidence, she said, not long before her husband’s death, they had come upon a magazine article about another woman wanting to have a child with her dead spouse and Stephen had said that in the event of his own death, she should go for it.) None of this satisfied the critics. The fact is, said a politician blithely on the radio one day, Blood’s son “should never have been born,” a remark she overheard while in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where her premature baby lay fighting for his life. Ten years later, recounting the memory to me, she was still raw with the shock of that moment. “We are real people with real feelings,” she said.
I was twenty-seven at the time of the interview and Blood was the age I was in the fall of 2013—thirty-seven—and although I was sympathetic to her in print, privately I remember thinking what a lot of people thought at the time: “ew.” It was creepy. Why saddle your kids with that kind of legacy? She didn’t deserve the abuse, of course—nobody did. But there was something mad about the enterprise, something fanatical. For god’s sake, I thought; just how badly did this woman need children?
* * *
• • •
THE WORLD HAS MOVED ON since then and my circumstances are completely different from Blood’s. At least—and there is always an “at least” in these scenarios—I’m not trying to have a child with a dead man. But as I try to move forward with my decision making that autumn, there it is, standing like a brick wall between me and the future: Ew. Gross. Ew. There are days when I feel shame in so many directions at once, I don’t know what to avert my eyes from first. It is shameful to visit an absent parent on a child. It is shameful to look ahead at a childless future and be horrified. It is shameful to have the sneaking suspicion that in spite of the terribly hard things going it alone might entail, it will be easier than doing it with L. The very fact that I am considering going to these lengths in order to get pregnant must mean I want a baby to a much greater degree than I care to admit, and therefore that it might be a hard thing to unwant. And this is shameful, too.
Even my consolations are shameful. With any luck, I think, I’ll squeak in with a baby just under forty (good!). But I am a single woman (bad!). I am in a relationship (good!). But we aren’t doing this together (weird). Also, it is same sex (bad). On the other hand, a sperm donor is more “natural” than an egg donor, which is more “natural” than adoption, which is more “natural” than surrogacy, which is more “natural” than no children at all, a domino run that ends at the foot of the towering black tombstone marked “childless spinster.” When a friend tells me about a woman she knows who used a service in which the sperm donor came round to her house and actually had sex with her, in a burlesque version of a “normal” relationship, I am over the moon. People might think what I’m doing is odd but that—that—is genuinely crazy.
I know these comparisons are spiteful. I also know that by focusing on them, I’m appealing for relief to the very thing that is causing me harm. Still I keep doing it. Moral superiority is quick and easy and it’s kind of fun, too. Haven’t we all, in low moments, reached for the comfort of despising other people and bolstered that need with stuff from the newspapers? Looking for something to be furious about? Not tempted by immigration, welfare queens, executive pay or the Middle East? Then how about an issue with bilateral appeal that has been reliably causing outrage for two thousand years—what women are doing with their bodies and how YOU can get involved!
Some easy points of entry:
Women who have only one child are selfish.
Women who have a child alone are selfish.
Women who don’t have children: SELFISH, because—wait, how can not having children be selfish? Oh, right, because they have more time to lavish on themselves, flopping about on the sofa all day eating bonbons and never truly learning the meaning of self-sacrifice.
Women having children and then working full time: selfish.
Women having children, not working and expecting the taxpayer to foot the bill: selfish.
Women having children, not working and complaining that child care is so prohibitively expensive that it makes no sense fo
r them to go back to work, even though they want to: selfish.
Women waiting until they are forty to have a child: selfish.
Women having a child at seventeen: selfish.
Women having an abortion: selfish.
Women having a child in the context of a same-sex relationship: selfish. Also, gross. Come on. That’s not what god intended. It’s unnatural. (A couple of things on that point. Chemotherapy is unnatural. So is electricity, shampoo, air travel and five-a-side football. The hairpiece worn by the pastor is unnatural, as is the imitation-wood pulpit he clings to.)
And the mother of all selfish endeavors, the creation of a child using biotechnology. In the last thirty years, as IVF has become commonplace, so the term “test-tube babies” has died out, to be replaced by the new pejorative, “designer babies,” implying wanton use of fertility treatment and the choosing of things better left to chance or god’s grace: hair and eye color, IQ, and the sex of your baby. Never mind that the majority of these things are neither legal nor in some cases possible, nor that, at most clinics in the West, you can’t choose any of your baby’s characteristics beyond the broad stroke of selecting an egg or a sperm donor, a choice as calculating as choosing a man with a Ph.D. from a dating Web site, or hitting on a guy with blond hair in a bar.
I have read references in the press to gay men having babies via surrogates as “consumer choice,” as if their urge to reproduce isn’t driven by the same primal impulse that strikes everyone who wants kids, but is instead an extension of the desire for accessories. That’s what gay men do, right? For them, babies are just a higher-maintenance version of the Philippe Starck juicer.
Yes, says the Greek chorus, but what about love?
Shortly followed by: why don’t you just adopt? (Or get a dog.)
And finally: say what you like, it still isn’t normal.