An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  Except, of course, that it won’t because I am not going to have them. To be pregnant with twins when you’re pushing forty and after months of fertility treatment is to live with the constant expectation that you will lose one or both. February 6 will not be their birthday. They will not be Aquarius. I will not have to move house and change lives and figure out how one person cares for two babies. L will not be forced to have another kid just to even things out. (Although, it does cross my mind that if I do have twins, and if she does try to have another baby, what if she then becomes pregnant with twins, making it three to my two and escalating an arms race that climaxes in our having nine kids between us and scoring the reality show of Dr. B’s dreams?)

  Over the next fortnight, the two blobs on the ultrasound take on stable identities, Baby A and Baby B. The former is cramped into the basement, the latter stretched out up top. Carrying two babies dilutes some of the obsessiveness of early pregnancy. It’s a less intimate state, a gang instead of a couple. Rather than mooning over “my baby,” I have the impression of two friendly strangers hanging out in my uterus, each doing his or her own thing (dividing cells) while I do mine (shoving handfuls of spinach into everything I eat and trying to avoid sudden movement). I run to the toilet ten times a day to check for the onset of miscarriage; whenever I sneeze or bend to pick something up, I agonize at the possibility that I’ve killed one of the babies. Every week, I wait for the ultrasound technician to tell me a heartbeat has gone. But the two blobs keep beating.

  My friends receive the news with incredulity, then hilarity, as if I’ve come up with an ingenious new way to entertain us all. “I can’t believe we were joking about twins and now it’s happening,” says Merope, on the phone from London.

  “Sorry, I can’t help laughing,” says my friend Janice. “Imagining your face when they told you.”

  “You’re going to look like one of those snakes that have swallowed a cow only standing on its end,” says my friend Jake. “You will BURST.”

  “You’re pregnant!” says my friend Selina. We are at a bar in Park Slope watching England play Italy in the World Cup.

  “It’s water retention,” I say. And it is, mostly; I am still fat from the lingering effects of the OHSS.

  She looks at me witchily. “No, it isn’t.” Selina and her husband have two children, both conceived spontaneously after umpteen failed cycles of IUI. When I tell her it’s twins, she says, “Oh my god, I’ll have one and I’m not even joking.” Then she sobers up and shakes her head. “Brutal.”

  “It’s only eight weeks. They might not stick.” I say this apologetically. My pride in my superpregnancy is cut with equal parts shame. To paraphrase Wilde, to become a single mother of one child is unfortunate; to become a single mother of twins may be regarded as carelessness. I feel like the walking punch line to a joke, an illustration of the maxim “Be careful what you wish for.” I am also laboring under the delusion that the more casual I am about the pregnancy, the less likely I am to lose it. Selina’s superstitious machinery works differently from mine, however, and she looks horrified. “Why would you even say that?”

  Over the next few weeks, I wait for the idea of carrying twins to normalize, but it doesn’t. For minutes at a time I forget that I’m pregnant, then remember with the force of the original shock. What are they doing in there, these two people? Banging up against each other like bumper cars? Conspiring against me? For L, meanwhile, dismay slowly gives way to the satisfaction of telling me what to do. Pregnancy is a condition in which she is more expert than I and she throws herself wholeheartedly into the role of project manager, buying me vitamins and reeling off banned foods. When I fly to L.A. for work, she makes me promise to tell the TSA agent I’m pregnant and ask for a pat-down instead of the X-ray machine. (I do this on the way out, the words “I’m pregnant” sounding outrageous to my ears, but on the way back I’m too embarrassed and go through the machine as normal, then spend five hours on the plane worrying that I’ve radiated my passengers.)

  The benefits of being ministered to by someone who has been pregnant herself are hard to overstate. I have watched friends go through pregnancies and spend half of the nine months reassuring their husbands that their input is priceless and that everything will be OK. By contrast, L’s care is calm and practical and not predicated on the idea of pregnancy as an unfathomable experience. She isn’t in a state of panic or awe at the idea of giving birth, nor does she need reassurance that her support is worthwhile. Her help is divested of reciprocal need, partly because she believes, as a matter of course, that she knows what’s best for other people, and partly because, having had a baby already, she understands in ways I do not just how vastly I am about to need her—far more than she needs to be needed.

  She is also uninterested in indulging the routine discomforts of early pregnancy. You might think a female partner would be more, not less, sympathetic to the aches and pains of pregnancy, but that is not my experience, and every afternoon, when I lie down in abject exhaustion, L rings me from work and is completely unmoved. On the weekend, she lies beside me and glances at my still-flat belly. “Hi, Baby A,” she says softly. “Hi, Baby B.”

  Others are less sanguine. One day in May, I have lunch with an old friend I haven’t seen for a while. I know he’ll be shocked by news of my pregnancy and he is.

  “Oh my god,” he says.

  “Yeah, so.”

  “Wow. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks!”

  “I’m not being funny but: who’s the father?”

  I am generally quite even tempered, but when I’m not, the turnaround time between calm and Incredible Hulk is regrettably short. “Are you fucking kidding?” I say. “Who do you think the father is? What do you think—that L and I fell apart and I went out and randomly shagged someone? Who’s the father? For fuck sake. There is no fucking father.”

  Then I feel bad and pick up the check. It takes twenty minutes for him to pluck up the courage to ask another question. “How’s that going to work?” he says.

  And there it is, the question we’ve been avoiding since L’s pregnancy. If I have these babies, how will we arrange things? What will the babies be to L and what will she be to them? The answer is only partly to be found in the relationship I have with her baby. There is no honorific to describe what I am to him, no list of responsibilities or duties, and there is no word for what he is to me. He is not the price I have to pay for my relationship, but neither is he my child or my stepchild. He is at the center of us, the miracle over whom we both marvel, but I have no moral, financial or legal responsibility for him. Neither do I perform many of the most basic parental duties. I don’t change his diaper, make his lunch, take him to the doctor or even babysit much, partly because L, still in the first flush of maternal anxiety, prefers to do everything for him herself and partly because she prefers to do everything herself.

  I have always known this lopsided arrangement would be tolerable only as an interim stage until I had a baby of my own. What I hadn’t anticipated are the ways in which its limitations would also prove to be strengths. There is something Kate, my best-friend-from-college, once said about godparenthood—that it should cater to the needs of the child not the adult. It makes no sense, she suggested, that when we have kids, most of us dole out godparent status to our best friends, establishing the role as one in which the godparent’s primary relationship is with the child’s parents. Surely it would be better for the child to have an adult in her life who wasn’t a parent but whom she might consider to be exclusively “hers”? I think about this a lot in the early days of my pregnancy. In the year since his birth, my relationship with the baby has evolved to be oddly free-floating from my relationship with L. He is my friend, my buddy, a child in whom I have no stake other than love. That it’s a love I’m not bound, by law or biology, to feel makes it all the more precious.

  On the other hand. What am I doing poten
tially bringing two further children into a situation it takes almost half a page to explain? I can just about rationalize to myself why a woman without a child (me) might want to maintain a degree of separation from a partner with a child (L), given the vast difference in lifestyle between women with and without children. But two women in separate households with babies of a similar age who hang out on the evenings and weekends? If we’re not a blended family then what on earth are we? If I have the babies and move apartments but remain living in Brooklyn, can we be said to be anything to each other at all?

  The fact that I’m even considering this—moving within Brooklyn to be nearer Oliver and my friends rather than closer to L in Manhattan—is less a function of my doubts about the relationship than a vestige of my social obedience, a sense of what I am “allowed” and not allowed to do. Clearly, at this point, the proper course of action would be either to give up this nonsense of separate households, separate children and lobby to move in together, or else to do the decent thing and call it a day. There is no middle way, not even a word for it. Or perhaps there is a word for it and that word is selfish. It’s selfish to carry on along parallel tracks, denying the children a second parent and creating two single-parent families. It’s selfish, practically, morally, financially and environmentally, to maintain our independence while being together, like driving two cars to a single destination. And while my relationship with L’s baby is full of sunlight and joy, how can it survive once I have my own children and am unable to travel back and forth to see him?

  For the first time, I start seriously to question why I want to do this alone. It isn’t just that L and I have conflicting ideas about parenting—very broadly, I am too mean in her eyes, and she isn’t mean enough in mine—it’s the historical weight each of us puts on those differences and our assumptions about where they might lead us. We both have a highly developed sense of self-preservation, for different reasons and expressing itself in different ways, except, perhaps, in this one mutual belief: that the way one protects children from harm is by controlling who is permitted to have access to them. I don’t see a pedophile under every rock like my mother did (under every other rock, perhaps), but I do have a sense of unease about environment that I imagine falls outside the normal range. Have a baby with someone, split up, look on as the other person gets together with someone else, and before you know it, your child is spending large amounts of time with people over whom you have no power of veto. Or, have a baby with someone, don’t split up, but fall out and raise them in the middle of a war zone. Or, have a baby with someone a long way from your country of origin and be effectively forbidden from moving home, because she doesn’t want to move, or the courts won’t allow it in the event of joint custody. The only thing more frightening to me than not having a baby is having a baby in a hostile environment.

  It might seem strange to focus so relentlessly on the negative when, during the early days of my pregnancy, L and I have never been closer. And over the course of an average week, I go through many cycles of thinking this is good, we can do this, we can move toward something that makes more obvious sense. But a single sharp word and I am thrown back on my instincts: that, irrespective of whether I trust and love L, the only way to control for conflict around my kids is to have a front door to which only I have the key.

  There is something I do when I’m feeling dysfunctional. I call my mother’s family in South Africa. My aunt answers the phone—“Hold on. Hold on? Let me move my coffee”—and for forty-five minutes gives me a rundown of the family news, including the rumor that a seventy-year-old relative of ours has had a baby with a teenage prostitute, so that by the time we get round to my pregnancy, I feel like the most conventional woman alive.

  “Twins, how wonderful,” she says, not sounding remotely surprised. My aunt has long given up on being astonished by life, but in any case, as one of eight children, with a paternal aunt who had twelve, and a grandmother who gave birth to seventeen, many of them twins, she has never doubted my ability to conceive.

  “When are they due?” she says.

  “February sixth.”

  “Aquarius. Good match with Sagittarius.”

  “They’ll probably come early, though; twins do.”

  “As long as they’re not born on January twenty-fifth.”

  “Why?”

  My aunt laughs at the magnitude of what she is about to say. “Don’t you know? That’s my father’s birthday.” I yelp like a small dog being stepped on. My grandfather, the convicted murderer and child rapist, has been dead for sixty years, but I will move heaven and earth to avoid giving birth on his birthday.

  My aunt’s accent is broader than my mother’s, but the inflections are the same, as is her undisguised happiness to have me on the phone. It doesn’t matter what we say; to be talking to each other is reward enough. My mother’s family was such a source of agony to her, so unresolved in its guilt and dysfunction, that it is only while talking to my aunt about my pregnancy that I realize how free I am from that pain. Without the example of my mother and her siblings’ resilience, and without my own fury at the shame they were made to feel when they had done nothing wrong, I’m not sure I would have had the nerve to overcome my own shame and get pregnant. They survived the worst and came out of it wry, damaged, funny people, but loving, always loving, and if the babies I’m carrying ever come to fruition, they will have a stake in a history in which I feel only pride. As I say good-bye to my aunt, I experience a swell of emotion—not only toward her, but toward the idea of my children as descendants and heirs. There is nothing like new life to bind us more powerfully to what came before.

  One warm Friday morning, I make my way up from Brooklyn to Manhattan for the last time. For the sake of nostalgia, I buy a bucket of coffee from Starbucks. I sit on the sofas beneath the framed pictures as the receptionist yells down the phone to someone who just got her period. The place looks very small and very ordinary, a small business run by people simply doing their best rather than what, at the height of my treatment, had seemed like an industrial machine. The doctors look different, too. Not so godlike; more like middle-aged men in white coats. In these, the early days of my pregnancy, when all I can feel is the roar of my own engine, I’m disinclined to give credit to the guy who jump-started the car.

  Dr. B, it seems to me, is sensitive to this shift in dynamic and greets me with a wryness acknowledging that I no longer need him. Later, I write him a letter, thanking him for his kindness and expressing the profound hope that I never, ever have to see him again.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE BOUNDARY for Advanced Maternal Age is thirty-five, which means that even if I wasn’t pregnant with twins, I’d need a high-risk obstetrician. I am also being counseled by L, for whom all situations are, at some level, high risk. “You need to hurry up,” she says, as I cast a reluctant eye, once again, in the direction of the doctor dating pool. “All the good ones go early.”

  This time at least, the selection is made easier by the fact that because my pregnancy will be covered by insurance, the vast majority of doctors can also reject me. Dr. K doesn’t take my insurance. Dr. P doesn’t take any insurance. Dr. F, who has a “good reputation” based on his Yelp reviews, operates out of a city hospital L says is staffed exclusively by hippies and gives new mothers a hard time if they have trouble breast-feeding. (This is the kind of thing she seems intuitively to know about the city, like how to order at Katz’s and that the reason New York bagels are so good is “because of the water,” which always gives me a pang for London, where I know things—where to catch the night bus; why you should never eat a hot dog from the cart in the street—too.) Dr. Y, the third doctor I call, does take my insurance but his secretary isn’t sure she can find room on his list. He is an eminent high-risk ob-gyn, specializing in multiples and based at New York’s number-one-ranked hospital, and I suddenly want him with the same passion I once wanted a limi
ted-edition cardigan made by Missoni for Target. “Please. I won’t be any trouble.”

  The hospital is on the east side of Manhattan, buttressed by the East River on one side and York Avenue on the other, a huge complex taking up an entire city block. The obstetrics department is on the ground floor, at the end of a corridor leading off a giant marble atrium. On the morning of my consultation, the waiting room is sparsely populated, mostly with other women on their own, a few accompanied by older women whom I take to be their mothers. On a TV fixed high on the wall, a commercial for a no-win, no-fee lawyer encourages users of a product called “vaginal mesh” to get in touch for a possible lawsuit.

  Dr. Y has a large, kind face and a brusque manner I instinctively trust, but he appears close to retirement age and in the treatment room I brace myself for some cross-questioning about where these babies have come from. No such questioning occurs. There is no pastoral yammering, no chitchat to establish rapport. He doesn’t ask who the dad is or why I’m at the consultation alone. He merely glances at my paperwork, says, “No IVF?” (“Just IUI,” I say, preening), then tells me to lie down for the pelvic exam. I am delighted. If I want psychotherapy I’ll pay for it. All I want from Dr. Y are two healthy babies.

  I have been warned by a friend whose baby Dr. Y delivered that what comes next will be bad. But pain, like boredom, can’t be imagined in advance, and even as the nurse looks down at me sympathetically, I assume my friend was playing it for laughs when she said that Dr. Y, while brilliant, has a quirk of physiognomy that in his line of work constitutes a serious drawback. Huge hands.