An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  “You have a good pelvis,” he says and for a moment I am too shocked to speak. My god. If this is how painful the examination is, what on earth will childbirth be like? I am suddenly flooded with gratitude to be pregnant with twins, for the increased chances it gives me of having a C-section.

  “What are the characteristics of that?” I say eventually.

  “Of what?”

  “A great pelvis.” Dr. Y frowns as if this were a piece of impertinence and says something about the distance between one bit of bone and another. Then he tells me my chances of a natural delivery are 50 percent. I get dressed and inform him that whatever happens, the babies can’t be born on January 25. He smiles as if indulging a lunatic. “Guess what?” I say to L afterward. “I have a great pelvis!”

  A week later, I start bleeding. It is slow at first, accompanied by cramps. “Call the doctor,” says L but I don’t dare; it is a Saturday morning and I have some unresolved Englishness about bothering doctors on the weekend. By Sunday, however, the bleeding is heavier. I lie down on L’s bed, wrapped in cold dread, and will it to stop. Maybe I’ll be lucky. Maybe one baby will survive. I get up and go to the bathroom, reeling with the realization that at some point over the past few months, the idea of losing one baby has become as devastating to me as that of losing the whole pregnancy. It is greedy to want these two babies so badly and yet, as I sit down on the toilet, I make a bunch of lightning-quick offerings as to what I’ll give up for them both to survive: Anything. Everything. Health, wealth, ten years of my life. Complaining. Ingratitude. Fighting with L. Recreational whining about my job, which when it comes to it I really do love. I won’t be afraid, or guilty or ambivalent about the future. If my babies survive, I will stop looking away and make plans. I’ll be strong and brave and unapologetic. I’ll live my best life. I cut myself off here as it becomes apparent that, at some level, I’m not appealing to god but to Oprah, and just then I feel something loosen and fall out of me. I reach down to catch it and, without looking, sense that in size and weight it is exactly as I imagine a four-month-old fetus might feel like. Sitting there, bloody hand between my knees, I burst into jagged sobs. L comes running down the hall.

  “I can’t look. I think it’s a baby!”

  “Let me see.”

  “I think it’s a baby!”

  “LET ME SEE!”

  Looking away, I hold out my hand.

  “Ew.” She makes a retching sound. “It’s not a baby.” She carries on choking until eventually I look down.

  “Ew.” In my hand is what looks like a large and very bloody piece of uncooked liver. Abruptly, I stop crying.

  Toward the end of my mother’s illness my dad called me one Saturday to break some hard news. I was in the kitchen of my friend Suzanna’s flat in north London and we were about to head out to lunch. The cancer had spread, said my dad, from my mother’s lungs to her brain, and the doctor had just told them she had two months to live. I hung up the phone, crumpled into the wall and cried for thirty seconds. Then I snapped off the tears and said, “Let’s go to lunch.” Suz was at a loss. “Shouldn’t we cancel?” she said. “No. I’m fine.” And we enjoyed our day as if nothing had happened.

  There are drawbacks to this approach. It doesn’t generate vast reserves of sympathy for other people’s tears. Neither does it make it easy to invite help from others. In the case of my mother’s death, it probably prolonged the grieving process, because it meant that for a long time I persisted in the delusion that sadness will go away if you simply ignore it. In the end, I traveled to South Africa to see my mother’s family and confront the sadness head-on, after which it slowly started to recede. But I still maintain that, in the first instance, the circuit break has its uses, allowing me to transition rapidly out of a state of panic and back to a semblance of normality, whence I can reassemble myself in relative privacy. Sitting on the toilet, I become eerily calm while L runs to the kitchen and comes back with a Ziploc. “Here, put it in here and take it to the doctor,” she says. “And don’t leave it in the fridge or Anita will eat it.” (Anita: her son’s babysitter, from whom no leftovers are safe.) Then she stands in the doorway and claps her hands to her face. “It’s a baby! It’s a baaaaby!” she wails. We both collapse into hysterical laughter.

  Later, on the phone to the hospital, the on-call doctor tells me that unless I am in severe pain, I will have to ride it out and wait until Monday. Her voice is gentle and resigned and I realize she is trying to communicate a truth about miscarriage: that in most cases, there is nothing anyone can do. That afternoon, when L and I take her baby for a walk in the sunshine, I have a head rush that could almost be mistaken for joy—the thrill of confronting the possibility that the worst has come true, and that I am under no further obligation to fear it.

  * * *

  • • •

  AS IT TURNS OUT, the bleeding isn’t miscarriage. “It could be the result of dying fibroids,” says the duty ob-gyn on Monday morning, after the ultrasound.

  “Dying fibroids?” It sounds like a bad feminist rock band.

  She shrugs. “We’ll keep an eye on them, but they’re nothing to worry about yet.”

  “Do you want to see the blood clot?” I lean over the side of the gurney and eagerly offer her the bloody Ziploc. “I have it here.”

  “Um.” She frowns. “I think we’re OK.”

  Over the course of the following weeks, I have several more false alarms, all of which end in unscheduled trips to the hospital and none of which turns out to be serious. Each time I go in, I drop another five hundred dollars on scans, with the result that just as my fear of miscarriage recedes, another fear pops up in its place: bankruptcy.

  This is not an exaggeration. The maternity allowance provided by my insurers is capped at fifteen thousand dollars, a sum which, if you’d presented it to me before I got pregnant, I would probably have thought sounded generous. Now I know better. At the rate I’m going, I will have exhausted the pot long before the delivery. I could live in America for one hundred years and this would never get less shocking to me—the role played in life-or-death decisions by shortfalls in one’s insurance, and the amount of time one is obliged to waste worrying about it. In my case, if either of my babies is born with one of the serious birth defects my insurers claim not to cover, I will have, somehow, to get us all back to England. In the meantime, I find myself nurturing the bizarre hope that when it comes to the birth, I will face something sufficiently life threatening to qualify for “emergency care”—triggering hundreds of thousands of extra funds in coverage—but not so severe as to kill me or the babies.

  The costs are higher because it’s a twin pregnancy, but after the initial panic, I never wish it wasn’t twins—or rather, it’s only once that I have a pang for how things might have been. This is a few weeks later on a work trip to Chicago, one of the last work trips I’ll take, probably for years. I don’t mind this. I’ve always been a grumpy traveler. I like having been places in retrospect and occasionally I have a good time while I’m there, but before a trip I tend to do everything I can to try to get out of it. I want to do this particular interview with a novelist in Chicago, however, not just because I need to earn as much money as possible before the babies arrive, but because it’s where my cousin lives, the one who visited us all those years ago at my parents’ house in Buckinghamshire and whom my mother counseled to have a baby by doing “whatever is necessary.” Our mothers were only second cousins and never met, but I have seen photos and they looked startlingly alike. I would like to see Caroline, my closest relative in the United States, before the babies are born.

  We meet in a French restaurant not far from the lake. Caroline took my mother’s advice, married, had a baby and is now divorced and the single mother of a six-year-old girl. I watch them across the table. My cousin’s daughter is much older-seeming than six. She reminds me of myself at that age—self-possessed, a little sh
y, basically forty—and the two of them together remind me of my mother and me. My cousin is solicitous without fussing and the bond is so strong you can almost see it shimmering across the table. Having one baby tends to be spoken of only in terms of deficit—like being a single mother—but that was not my experience and for a moment I envy them, the unique closeness of the mother to her only child. “Twins,” says my cousin, a little enviously, too, then looks at her daughter, love of her life, and smiles back at me across the table.

  When I get back to New York, it is to the first round of blood tests to check for fetal abnormalities. If I want, says the nurse, I can have a sex test, too.

  “You bet.”

  “Your insurers might not cover it.”

  “How much is it?”

  “Couple of hundred dollars.”

  I tell her to go ahead. I have never understood people wanting to be surprised by the sex, which seems to me like turning up at the airport not knowing if you are traveling to Iceland or Australia. A week later the hospital rings. The tests all look fine, says the nurse. “It’s twins, right?”

  “Yes.” There is a pause.

  “Two females.”

  “Oh, my word.”

  I am standing in my office and abruptly sit down in my chair. Two girls. So frozen have I been by the possibility of losing them, I haven’t given much thought to what they actually are. Now I realize I’ve been suppressing a preference. “I wish you’d been twins with auburn hair,” my mother would say, a reference to the red hair of her youth and her belief that the only way in which I could have been improved upon was if there’d been two of me. I loved her to tell me the story of the day the hospital rang with news that she was expecting a girl; of how she got off the phone and ran into the kitchen to tell my dad; of how, in her excitement, she chucked the last of the holiday champagne into the washing-up bowl, where she’d been washing the dishes before the phone rang. “It’s a girl, it’s a girl, it’s a girl!”

  Given the unpredictable nature of DNA, all babies are “random,” but babies conceived the way mine were are particularly vulnerable to that charge. In the early days of my treatment, I had worried that having a baby via sperm donor might make that baby seem strange to me, the arbitrary result of a series of arbitrary choices. Now it feels as if everything in my life has led me to this. Every decision, every chance turn, every time I went out instead of staying in and stayed in instead of going out, was a step closer to this foregone conclusion. I have just spent twelve months making what felt like an endless stream of hard decisions, but now it seems to me that nothing about this pregnancy was a matter of choice. Of course I am pregnant with twins and of course they are female. How could it have been otherwise? The two strangers in my uterus disappear overnight. They are and always have been my girls.

  * * *

  • • •

  L SAYS IT’S SIMPLE. I should move to Manhattan, somewhere within her neighborhood, so she can come round as often as possible. Oliver says, hang on. Maybe there’s an argument for staying in Brooklyn, closer to a larger number of people with a smaller investment in me. And there is the third, nuclear option, which is to move back to London to be near my dad.

  I’m not doing that last one. That would be insane. I love my dad dearly, but the idea of moving back to be near him, quite apart from the hassle, seems to belong to an earlier iteration of single motherhood, one in which the cost of having a baby alone is to give up one’s adult life and effectively crawl back to the parental spare room. This seems particularly outdated in light of how old we all are when we start having our kids. If we’re ancient, our parents are doubly so, and asking them to pick up the slack seems unfair. Besides which, for once, I would like to make a decision based not on the elimination of unpleasant alternatives but on something I actively desire. I just can’t see what that is yet.

  What I can see, as I enter my fifth month of pregnancy, is something I have not clearly seen until now. One parent, two babies. Not one parent, two abstractions, or one parent, two fetuses, but two actual babies, out in the world, who, as I know from L’s experience, are going to scream and puke and need feeding approximately every two hours. This seems to me so lurid a proposition, so obviously absurd, that I can’t believe it’s actually legal. Why hasn’t Dr. Y rung child services? Why isn’t anyone shaking me and screaming “What the fuck have you done?!” What on earth did Dr. B think he was doing congratulating me for this outcome, let alone giving me the drugs to enable it in the first place?

  More to the point, why has it taken me so long to clock how ludicrous this scenario is? For weeks, L has been hassling me about how I can’t have two babies on my own and live in a walk-up and I have been snottily resisting her by pointing out that if an elevator building was a precondition of having a baby, the cities of Europe would be empty. Now I see she is right. What am I going to do—leave one baby in the street while I hoick the other one up the stoop to the apartment? How will I even get a double stroller up the stairs? I can order most of what I need for the babies online, but what if I miss the mail—how will I carry large boxes of diapers back from the post office when my hands are full pushing two babies? A door in my mind flies open and all the images I’ve been trying to avoid tumble out. Of being alone at three a.m. with a baby turning blue and no one to cry out to for help. Of trying to breast-feed two babies for months on end, slowly dying of loneliness and fatigue. All my ideas of self-reliance, of making a “positive” decision about where we might live, go out the window to be replaced with a single, desperate calculation: who, once the babies are born, can I anticipate getting more help from, the person who owes me because I helped her with her baby, or my oldest friend in New York?

  If this calculation sounds unromantic, it is. Romance, the basis on which women have been making bad decisions for millennia, is not much of a factor here and I make no apology for it. Once you uncouple the becoming-a-mother part from the being-in-a-relationship part, romance is relegated to one of many considerations and not the most important, at that. I need help, I need love and I need a large degree of autonomy, although on that last one, I’m seriously starting to waver.

  Only once, I think, does L raise a possibility that, in spite of my better judgment and hers, makes my heart leap at the idea of rescue.

  “You could always move in here,” she says.

  It would be so much less frightening. It would be so much cheaper. I have no real sense of what it might be like to care for two newborns, so I don’t even factor in the enormous benefit of a second pair of hands. Instead, I rehearse what cohabitation might actually look like. Slowly, my relief starts to wane. I imagine bringing the babies home to an apartment not designed for five people. I wonder what it would be like to have no space of my own. I worry about the implications of leaning too heavily on L, in a way that would make it infinitely harder, should it prove necessary, not to.

  There is something else going on here, too, which I grope to define as having the courage to honor our relationship on its own terms. Marriage with children is the standard from which L and I might be said to fall short, and yet, in our case, it’s merging households and becoming a “regular” family that feels to me like the failure. I don’t want to make huge emotional decisions on the basis of cost, or to move in with someone because I’m either too afraid or too blinkered to imagine the alternative. The more I think about it, the more I realize that my fear of being alone with twin newborns is less acute than my fear of forcing L and me into something we’re not. Children need clarity, and in a funny way, clarity is all L and I have. No blurred lines. No joint assets. No question of where do I stop and she begins. The line “I need space,” like “It’s not you, it’s me,” has become a euphemism for let’s split up, but in our case it means what it says. It may be eccentric, and it lacks the most basic descriptors to reassure us it has a right to exist, but I’m finally starting to understand something about our relationship:
that I like it fine as it is.

  “I could,” I say in response to her suggestion, and there is a long pause.

  “Nah,” we both say, in unison.

  * * *

  • • •

  EARLY SUMMER is a good time to be pregnant. I’m not so heavy as to feel the heat as oppression, but I have a bigger surface area to soak up the sun. Standing on the street corner, waiting for the lights to change, I feel the warmth on my skin like a magnet drawing me upward. Things start to happen—not the eureka moment as to where I should live, but small, gratifying things. People give up their seats for me on the subway. (There is a definite social and racial pecking order to this. By far the quickest fellow passengers to offer me a seat are black men, followed by black women, followed by white women, followed by white men, particularly young ones in suits who tend to stare fixedly at their screens whenever someone old or pregnant hovers into view.) Strangers tell me how amazing I look and, in spite of my anxiety, I do feel amazing. I pity anyone who isn’t pregnant or who isn’t as pregnant as I am. For the first time in my life, I feel voluptuously, extravagantly female. Every time someone congratulates me, I hold up two fingers to indicate twins and milk them for extra applause. People want to touch me, not just the reflex pat on the bump, but, as a friend who had twins noted, “They want to touch you like lucky heather.” When she was pregnant, a woman in the street actually gave her a pound, “For the little ones.”

  “And you went straight to the bank and opened an account for them, right?”

  “No, I went and bought myself a latte on Broadway Market.”

  One day my friend Laura rings from London. “You’re on the front page of the Daily Mail, did you see?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve just e-mailed you the link.”

  I open the page and read the headline. NHS To Fund Sperm Bank For Lesbians: New Generation Of Fatherless Families To Be Paid For By YOU. Britons are familiar with the identity of YOU, the notional Daily Mail reader who spends his time trimming his hedge, setting fire to pedophiles and fighting off illegal immigrants with a pitchfork, for which Americans might substitute any fan of Fox News.