An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  It doesn’t matter that my entire social circle is liberal. As anyone over the age of thirty who has ever been to a dinner party knows, parenting flushes out weird pockets of fanaticism in otherwise reasonable people. In Britain, something as simple as whether you choose to send your child to public or private school can make half your social group hate you, so that having a baby alone, or in the context of a same-sex relationship of indeterminate status, is likely to tip at least some of my peers over the edge.

  I feel the first intimation of disapproval at dinner that night, when after asking me lots of questions about L—what we are doing, how we are doing it, why we aren’t doing it differently, none of which I am able adequately to answer—I see my lesbian friends exchange glances. I know what they think. They think we are resisting merging households and becoming a nuclear family because of some internalized resistance to being “gay parents.” Better to present as two single women helping each other out than as something from the pages of My Two Mommies. I give this some thought afterward—not much, but some—and wonder if L and I are not, as we believe, motivated by pragmatism and superior self-knowledge, but by some deep, homophobic self-loathing. Perhaps what we’re doing isn’t daringly modern, but actually depressingly retrograde. Then I think about the time we tried to put a bed from West Elm together and didn’t speak for a week. I think about how unsuited we are to reaching mutual decisions. When the stakes are low—Indian or Chinese? Bridge or tunnel?—we can just about manage it, but it is hard to imagine either of us ceding to the other on the issue of what’s best for a child. You can argue about the unfairness of this until the cows come home, but the fact remains: if, in most conventional families and even in progressive ones, there is typically a lead parent, the mother, and a deputy parent, the father, then two alpha mothers under one roof don’t go.

  * * *

  • • •

  OVER THE SUMMER, I had let my timetable slacken as I flew around promoting my book. Now, with the resolve that fall brings and the cost of fertility treatment potentially on the horizon, I say yes to every job that comes in. I interview people I’ve interviewed before. I interview people I know personally and shouldn’t be interviewing. I interview supermodels and actors who have been repeating themselves for decades, jobs that would ordinarily depress me, but that now fill me with a martyrish purpose. Here I am, asking a movie star what attracted him to his role in Speed Demon IV, as a piece of bona fide self-sacrifice for my future child’s diaper fund.

  One of the jobs I say yes to involves a trip back to London to interview a British actor who is very au courant that season. We sit in a hot restaurant in Piccadilly, trying to ignore the stares of the other patrons while talking about his TV show. I ask him about his childhood and his acting training and his wife and family and then, to run down the clock and because it is the polite thing to do, he asks whether I have children. There is a school of thought—the right one—that in these circumstances the journalist should divulge nothing of herself and steer the conversation swiftly back to the interviewee. But it’s a funny thing about famous people; I can say anything I like and, because journalists are to celebrities what PRs are to journalists—interchangeable units belonging to the world’s most irritating subgroup of humanity—it will never, ever come back to haunt me, for the simple reason that five minutes after we part, he will have no idea who I am.

  “My partner just had a baby but we’re not doing it together,” I blurt. He looks taken aback, briefly jolted out of his publicity setting. “Gosh,” he says. “How does that work?” And so I tell him: about the dynamics of spending large amounts of time with someone who has a baby when I don’t; about what it might mean if I have a baby of my own; about how I’m trying to decide how to do that. I say all this in a spritely tone quite at odds with the way I actually feel and that, even as I do it, I understand to be flirtatious in a way that is demeaning to both of us. From the outset, I believe it’s important to be able to talk about all this, but this is not the same thing as knowing how to talk about it. “I don’t know why you’re interviewing me,” says the actor when we part, “your own life sounds much more interesting!” not a line he believes and neither do I. Nobody wants an interesting personal life. Interesting is what you call it when you can’t call it what you want to, which is messed up.

  Something happens when I fly back to England from America: for the first few days, I continue to operate under the guise of my expat persona. I’m more impatient in line than a regular English person, more strident in the face of bad service. I don’t send food back in restaurants, but I torment bus drivers by inviting them to have a nice day and generally present myself as someone aflame with efficiency, who has moved on from the sluggish ways of the old country. So it is that, after returning to my dad’s house in west London after the interview, I pick up the phone to call Tessa. If anyone knows how to get me moving on this, Tessa will.

  “Oh, darling, how fabulous of you!” she says, when I tell her I’m gearing up to follow in her footsteps. I’m sitting on my dad’s bedroom floor with my back to the dresser and the landline—I only ever use a landline when I’m at my dad’s—pressed to my ear while looking up at the room’s assortment of furniture. My dad got rid of an awful lot when he downsized after my mother’s death, but every room still contains at least one outsize piece—in this case a standing mirror in heavy dark wood—that if it fell on you would kill you. “Have you got a pen?” says Tessa and gives me the number of a woman she says I should go to before I do anything else.

  “Will she count my eggs?” I say.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “She’ll give you a blood test and a lot of advice. She’s sort of a guru. She got me through my second pregnancy. And tell her you’re a journalist; she might have media rates!”

  Even though Tessa is the only person I know with older children conceived by anonymous donor, I don’t ask her how things have turned out. I don’t need reality right now, I need hope. I need cheerleading. I need someone to tell me, without judgment or caveat, that I can do this thing and it will all turn out OK.

  * * *

  • • •

  OH, AND SPERM. I need sperm.

  One of the things I’m discovering about making these decisions is that it is incredibly hard to be rational. I live in New York, but my emotional center of gravity still tilts toward home, and so, although it would be madness to choose a London-based donor, I reach for familiarity over practicality and, high on the spirit of Getting Things Done, after hanging up on Tessa call William.

  I’ve been friends with William for fifteen-odd years and he’s among the cleverest people I know, a former boy maths champion who is in the final year of a fast-track medical degree. He speaks passable Russian. He paraglides off cliffs. He has beautiful hands and wrists and a noble aquiline nose and green eyes and a sense of humor. Unlike almost every other man I know, he can distinguish one end of a wrench from the other.

  I mention all this because, although we have never dated, in the days leading up to our dinner I find myself tailoring vignettes from our friendship into what can be described only as a romantic montage. A decade earlier, we had run up a huge tab at a horrible bar on Old Compton Street and tried to skip the bill, falling out of the door and running up the street doubled over with laughter. When I first moved to New York, William came to see me, went out drinking on his own and got in at three a.m. still wearing his suit, tie loosened and askew like a young Frank Sinatra. A year later, he diverted from a business trip to see me out in the Hamptons, swaggered across the deck like the hero in a bad Richard Gere film and threw himself into the lake, sending up a huge and not altogether flattering tidal wave. We have done a lot of boring, ordinary hanging out, too, but by the time I have finished editing these scenes, our friendship looks like something from Breakfast at Tiffany’s—or rather from the movie Green Card, only the person I am trying to convince
of our relationship isn’t an immigration officer but myself.

  What is this? I haven’t, ten years into our friendship, suddenly contrived a deep-seated passion for William. Nor am I trying to talk myself into one. Instead, what I seem to be doing is shaping my memories to fit the backstory required of two people having a baby. I haven’t even asked him yet and already, and without fully realizing it, I have gone from thinking of William as my cherished old friend to kitting him out as my charming ex-husband.

  And haven’t I done well! A soon-to-be doctor, brainy but strong, sensitive but practical, beautiful but brawny. This whole donor business flushes out some extraordinarily reactionary biases in me. Not only does William conform to 1950s standards of masculinity but—and this is the really insidious calculation—he is a good man, who if something were to go badly wrong with the baby would surely ignore everything I’d said about doing it alone and spontaneously leap to my rescue. This is why conceiving with friends can be such a bad idea: it opens the door to a lot of shoddy and treacherous thinking.

  We meet in south London, at a basement Thai restaurant where most of the other diners are students, their bikes parked three deep at the railings outside, and where the paper tablecloths are spotted with wax from the tea lights. For the first hour, we catch up over spring rolls and noodles. William tells me about his recent breakup, the hell of being a student again and having no money, and how medical people are the pits with no social skills. I tell him about the publication of my book and my trip to South Africa, and about the joys and difficulties of being with L and the baby.

  Toward the end of dinner, I say to William, “I have something to ask you.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  I ask him.

  “What do you think?” I say.

  “I don’t know. I did wonder if that’s what this was about.” He gives me a soppy look and takes my hand across the table, which I consider wonderful at the time but that looking back screams to me, BOUNDARIES! “I’ll have to think about it,” he says. “But I’m pleased that you asked.”

  I don’t tell anyone about my conversation with William. It feels too bizarre, too potentially shaming. These are early days, but I am discovering one of the unhappy truisms of the fertility world: that unless it’s to a therapist (or a celebrity) people don’t talk about it much, even if they’re the kind of people who talk about everything. On any given day, I can open a newspaper and find someone I know writing about their depression, their waistline, their marathon training, their grief. When my mother died, I wrote a book about it. When my friend Alex moved from Britain to southern Italy, she wrote a book about it. When I return to New York from London, L asks how my friend Jake is after the death of his dad. “OK,” I say. “He’s thinking of writing a book about him.”

  “You people are gross,” she says.

  Actually, Jake is one of the few people whom I do talk to about it. He and his girlfriend have two kids, the first of whom took awhile to come along, so he has some experience of the world I am entering. A few days after my dinner with William I meet Jake at the South Bank, where we sit on benches outside the National Film Theatre, eating upmarket kebabs from the van.

  “It all sounds like a nightmare, I’m glad I’m not you,” says Jake.

  “Thanks.”

  “Why don’t you and L just move in together and have a gaybie? Why are you being so selfish and weird?”

  “We don’t want to live together.”

  “Nobody wants to live together. You just have to do it.”

  “We don’t. My baby doesn’t have to be related to anyone I don’t want it to be.”

  “What about”—Jake pauses to replenish the hot sauce on his sandwich—“the dad.”

  “It’s not a dad, it’s a donor.”

  “You could just clone yourself,” he says. “Isn’t that what you want anyway? Or have a baby with Oliver. Go on. It’d be hilarious. It’d come out of the womb arguing with itself. Hey, do you want my sperm? Actually, you can’t have it. Emily wouldn’t like it.”

  “You’re too old. I don’t want your old sperm.”

  “Yeah but”—Jake raises his eyebrows a couple of times, Groucho Marx style—“top-quality stuff.”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I wouldn’t touch your sperm with a ten-foot barge pole.”

  Look at me, I think later. Being all jaunty, avoiding the commonplace difficulties of marriage and children for something so much bigger and potentially more ruinous. Being with Jake lightens my mood and I feel suddenly quite giddy. I don’t want to be “interesting” in the context of gossipy small talk, but there is a self-importance that comes with acting outside of the mainstream that after lunch with my friend, makes me preen and find myself almost unbearably fascinating. A few days later, when I turn up at the clinic of Tessa’s guru in west London, I am still in high spirits.

  They sink almost immediately. Seeking private health care in Britain feels illicit no matter the cause, as if one were cheating on the NHS, and the clinic, which is in a converted house that looks less like a doctor’s office than one of the shabbier foreign embassies, makes me feel instantly shifty. The reception area is full of products stamped with the guru’s photo, and when I pick up a leaflet I see that while it is advertised as an IVF clinic, a large number of the services have to do with counseling and nutrition.

  One thing I have to be mindful of here is that what works for some people doesn’t work for others and this woman’s counsel obviously works for some people. Over the course of an hour’s consultation, she says lots of sensible things about the stresses of trying to get pregnant. She asks about my moods and my objectives and my expectations of motherhood. When I try to explain to her that L and I aren’t doing this together—that to us, stability and continuity mean loving each other, helping each other, maybe even raising our families alongside each other, while retaining the right to make independent decisions—she brushes it swiftly aside. No, no, no, she says. Before I choose a donor, or find a doctor, or do any of the things at the top of my to-do list, I have to Work On My Relationship. Conventional coupledom must be my ultimate goal. It’ll be better for me, she says, and better for the baby. She is very firm about this. Single motherhood is hard enough, but not-quite-single-motherhood-we-don’t-know-what-we’re-doing is practically criminal.

  I nod and agree. Through long professional habit, I have a very good poker face. I’m also highly suggestible. In the heat of the moment, there is almost nothing I won’t agree to just to keep the person talking, and while the guru has the entire weight of Western thought about relationships behind her, all I have is my ambivalence and shame. Yes, of course. Conventional coupledom. That must be my goal. I must stop messing about and commit.

  I had been thinking along these lines ever since my dinner with William, which I’d gone into leaning toward the view that a known donor is better than an anonymous one, and come out of less sure. William hadn’t come back to me with an answer yet, but the encounter had left me uncomfortable. Something about it didn’t feel right and now, as the guru lectures me, I think of our tender exchange at the candlelit dinner and feel queasy with guilt. What on earth am I doing, canoodling with William when I should be going all out to move closer to L?

  “Relationships take work,” says the guru and for a second our connection wavers. I’ve never been a fan of this axiom, which it seems to me is only ever directed at women as a reminder that large areas of their lives are going to suck and they needn’t say they weren’t warned. She looks at me expectantly.

  “Right,” I say. “No, you’re absolutely right. We just need to work harder to figure it out.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I DON’T REMEMBER anything medical about my conversation with the guru. And while her tone is never less than sympathetic, afterward I see it as a throat-clearing exercise resting on vague assumptions of emotion
al disorder. The message seems clear; I am being at best perverse, at worst reckless. I had expected a clinical meeting about how to conceive. Instead, the whole thing felt like the prelude to a high-end backstreet abortion.

  It was depressing for other reasons, too. I got a whiff of lifestyle evangelism from her, a sense that a large part of my success in getting pregnant would come down to a positive attitude and willingness to eat broccoli. I’m not against alternative treatments. During my mother’s chemotherapy, Stoke Mandeville Hospital gave her free aromatherapy and reflexology and it was a lovely thing, a luxury and a break from the chemicals being pumped through her veins. But we were under no illusion that it did anything to alleviate the illness. We never got sucked into buying a juicer and trying to save her with pulverized cabbages, and the suggestion that these things work, for fertility as for cancer, makes me furious.

  After the consultation, I hand over my credit card at reception, pay the £150 fee and walk down the street to the clinic’s partner GP service, a private practice that feels even sadder and dodgier than the clinic itself and where, for another £150, a doctor gives me a blood test. A few days later, the results come back indicating that my hormone levels are on the low end of average for a woman my age, a finding that, without a treatment protocol in place, even I understand to be meaningless.

  And that’s it. Just like that I’m over the hump. All of this—my excruciating conversation with the actor, my dinner with William, the guru’s advice, the nonsensical blood test—unite to trigger my Oh, For Goodness Sake reflex. I may not know what I want yet, but I know what I don’t want. I don’t want counseling and I don’t want kale. I don’t want another six months of hand wringing and I don’t want whatever the guru is selling. What I want is to go back to America, a place that may not, ultimately, be the place I think of as home, but where the medical establishment is at least on my side. In Britain, as a single woman seeking a child, I am the subject of concerned official guideline and head-shaking dismay. In the United States, I am simply a consumer in a marketplace, not because I want a designer baby, but because that is how health care works, period, and for a short spell—a very short spell—this strikes me as the most wonderful thing in the world. In America, it’s not for them to ask me questions, it’s the other way round.