An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  Dan has cooked Jamie Oliver’s roast chicken with rosemary potatoes and two vegetable dishes, plus a starter and dessert. I go back to the living room, while Dan spends another twenty-five minutes on his and Jack’s cucumber mojitos.

  “February,” I reply, in answer to Jack’s question, as Dan reemerges and puts the drinks on the table.

  “That makes them Pisces?” says Jack.

  “Aquarius.”

  “Aquarius! Interesting. Tricky. What are you?”

  “Sagittarius.”

  “Also tricky.”

  Jack thinks he might want kids one day but Dan isn’t sure and they’re both curious to know how I made the decision. “It’s so momentous,” says Jack. “How did you know?”

  “I just knew,” I say. This seems to me true when I say it. “I wanted kids and it got so the idea of not having them became scarier than having them.”

  “But to do it alone,” says Jack.

  “She’s not really alone,” says Dan.

  “I am,” I say. I refuse to be cheated of the kudos of having no second income or guaranteed help. “But I’m moving downstairs from L,” I add. “This week, in fact.”

  “Yeah, what is that?” says Jack.

  It’s two nights before moving and I have no idea how to answer. Over the table during dinner I watch Dan and Jack. They are awkward, as newish couples are, and occasionally superawkward, as are newish couples in which one half only recently changed sexual proclivities. There is a tense moment when Jack tries to tease Dan about a trip they’re taking in the fall. “I’m not paying for you!” he says archly, and I see Dan bristle at the implication that he is the lady and Jack is the man. Regarding L and me, I’m not the lady, I think, because I’m repressed and emotionally evasive. L is not the lady, she thinks, because she can fix things and get lids off jars. I have never thought, about these babies, that I have to be “both” parents—male and female—because I have always assumed that whatever I am, I’m enough. But it’s sad, I think, how no one wants to be the lady, not least because now that I am, by any definition, very much the lady, I have never felt more powerful.

  On this particular question, however—“How will that work?”—I have no ready answer and shrug.

  “What star sign are you?” I ask Jack.

  “Pisces with Capricorn rising, which is why I’m not insane. I feel like my whole life has been an effort to check the Pisces in me.” He sighs.

  “Dan?” I ask.

  “Libra,” he says.

  “Very straightforward,” says Jack and takes a sip of his drink. “Isn’t it lucky we have the science to explain all this?”

  * * *

  • • •

  A WEEK LATER, I fly to London. It is the last trip I will take before the babies are born and I see a lot of people who hadn’t known I was pregnant and most of whom, being English, have the good manners to wait until I’ve left the room to speculate on what my deal is. I run into my friend Jake in the office and as we head out to lunch, he stops to say hi to a colleague. As we walk away, he whispers, “She had a kid on her own but nobody’s supposed to know.”

  “There should be a special handshake,” I say.

  A combination of the energy generated by the pregnancy and panic at my forthcoming financial doom means that for the first time in ages I’m in love with journalism again. A few days after my lunch with Jake, I do a job at an actor’s house in a suburban street in north London, where I’m kept waiting for thirty minutes on the doorstep. It’s raining slightly, a refreshing summer rain, and instead of being annoyed, I sit on a chair on the porch with my belly on my lap and have an almost plantlike feeling of contentment. I go down to Devon for a few days to interview a playwright and find everything charming, the spriggy hedgerows, the hot sun, the taxi charging through the close country lanes—even the overcrowded train on the way down, full of cheerfully drunk men in rugby shirts, which gives you an idea of just how out of my mind on hormones I am. I had caught the train in Oxford after spending a few days with Kate, my best-friend-from-college, who had come down from Birmingham to see me. “Baby A and Baby B,” I said, introducing her to the lumps in my abdomen. She put a hand on each and burst out laughing.

  “They look like two mice running under a carpet.”

  Being pregnant in England is different from being pregnant in the United States. Against the bone-deep familiarity of my old life, the journey seems greater, the outcome more amazing. I’m more sensitive to criticism, too. After eight years in New York, I can still look around and think, after all, what does any of this have to do with me? I can never tell from people’s accents where they come from, and when they tell me, I never know what it means. At the guesthouse in Devon, by contrast, I take one look at the owner, a bluff man in late middle age, and am blinded by data, not just about the man—retired, from Surrey, of a type I can imagine enjoying putting a ship in a bottle—but about the assumptions he is almost certain to make about me. A pregnant woman traveling alone is a curiosity. A pregnant woman traveling alone for work is cause for mild excitement and against all my better instincts about chatty landlords, that evening, when I crunch up the gravel driveway after dinner at the pub, I pass him drinking sherry on the patio and accept his invitation to join him. “Twins and working, good for you,” he says. “What does your husband do?”

  The only surprising thing about this question is that I haven’t been asked it before—that, and the fact that it still catches me off balance. There are so many potential answers: no husband, I’ll be a single mother; no husband, I have a female partner; no husband, I have a female partner but we don’t live together and we won’t be coparenting; no husband, I have a female partner with whom I won’t be coparenting but we are about to become neighbors so maybe she’ll be a kind of aunt if that didn’t sound so spinsterish?

  “He works in finance,” I say.

  “Hmph,” says the landlord approvingly.

  I have a friend, Tiffany, a music journalist, who is a much better lesbian than I am—married, with a hyphenated surname she shares with her wife. As a matter of principle she never, ever lies about her life, except for this one time. Tiff was in Rome interviewing a rock star when a member of the publicity team asked her the same question the landlord asked me. Because Tiff had the measure of this woman, and because she was anxious about the interview and wanted to move on, she said, “He’s a teacher.” Her wife is, in fact, a teacher, but of course that’s not the point, and when Tiff got back to New York, she felt so bad she confessed. When she told me this story weeks later, my first response was why on earth did you tell her? And second, why do you feel bad about withholding your life from some annoying PR? Tiff’s wife, meanwhile, went up the wall and gave her a long lecture about cowardice.

  I still don’t know which of us was right. In the case of the landlord, I tell myself lying was a simple matter of expediency. He was drunk—to the point of giving me a lot of unsolicited life advice based on where he went wrong with his sons—and that made it imperative to end the conversation before he moved on to his marriage. I didn’t owe him an account of myself, nor did I fear his disapproval—if anything, I could see he’d have gone the other way and been far too into it. Later that night, however, as I lie in the bed after removing the Union Jack throw cushions, my spirits sink. There’s a certain shame in being unable to explain my situation succinctly, and while the landlord might not have disapproved, it would, I think, have replaced the impression he had of me as Super-Successful International Writer Lady with Woman Who Doesn’t Know What She’s Doing, or worse, Woman About Whom the Most Interesting Thing Is the Slightly Odd Way in Which She Had Children. This shouldn’t have mattered. I wanted to be strong and brave and above caring what people thought, but equally, I didn’t want to offer myself up as an object of titillating interest to a tipsy old man in a blazer.

  This is how it goes, that night and in th
e following weeks, when I parry questions about my pregnancy with answers that veer wildly on the spectrum between truth, half-truth, lie by omission and outright falsehood. It’s not that I want to lie, exactly. It’s more that I don’t have my story straight, not even when I tell it to myself, and in the coming years, I see friends in similar positions to mine repeat the same pattern—the journey from denial to defensive anger to that particularly British refuge “brittle cheer.” One of these is a great, old friend with whom I meet up for dinner when I get back to London. She is single and trying to get pregnant via sperm donor and is still, by my reckoning, at the denial stage, whereas I am done with denial and elbow-deep in brittle cheer—with a few last vestiges of defensive anger in my system. That night at dinner, my friend tells me she has been to see a fertility consultant who has advised her that if she does manage to get pregnant, she should consider withholding the details from people, so she can pretend to have “shagged an ex” when asked about the father.

  Over the cooling remains of my chicken tikka masala I am instantly, convulsively furious. Why, I ask, is shagging an ex seen to be the more respectable option? How is conning a man into having a kid he doesn’t want, saddling both of you with a connection that will never, ever expire and visiting on the child a father who might or might not want to be involved with him, considered better than having a baby alone? For that matter, why is being married considered better than not being married? Surely it’s just a question of taste? For god’s sake, if you’re that ashamed of what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it. On and on I go.

  “Wow, you’re really angry,” she says, taken aback. I return to my dinner, embarrassed.

  It’s not my friend I’m angry with. I’m not even angry with the fertility consultant. (Actually, that’s not true. I think she’s a louse.) I’m angry at my inability to give an account of myself that simultaneously (a) tells the truth, (b) avoids shame and (c) answers a casual questioner without inviting twenty-five thousand bug-eyed follow-up questions. There’s no point in railing against that last one; the unfairness of one set of circumstances being considered neutral and another deviant or deficient is just how the world is, although for a while it is all I can focus on. I am a huge hypocrite, too, taking solace in the idea that my life is interesting, then shutting down anyone who shows any interest. In my head, meanwhile, I reply to anyone whose questions offend me with a loopy barrage of questions of my own. Like, while we’re on the subject, how many times did you and your partner have sex before you conceived? Was it an accident? If one of you had turned out to be infertile, would the other have stuck around? Does it bother you that neither of your children looks like you or your partner? Does it make you love them less? Are you going to tell your child that his parents met on shag-bandit.com and somehow turned a one-night stand into a lifelong coparenting commitment? Or will you pretend you were “seeing each other” for six months before you conceived? How does your mother’s undiagnosed mental illness affect your self-image as a parent? Is the twenty-year age gap between you and your partner in danger of stigmatizing your child at the school gate? Is your underpowered husband an adequate male role model for your children? To what extent do you think your children will be damaged by the fact that, in spite of both parents holding down demanding jobs, most of the domestic duties still fall on their mother? Is the fact that there’s a nine-year age gap between your children a source of regret or indifference? Why was that, by the way? Was there a problem? What kind of problem? Whose problem was it, you or your partner’s? How much did it cost to fix? If it wasn’t for the children, do you think you would still be together?

  The next morning, I call L from my dad’s house. I don’t want to tell her about my dinner explosion over shagging-an-ex. She gets quiet about these things, less demonstrably angry than me, but more anxious and upset. “How’s it going?” she says cheerfully and I suddenly miss her with every fiber of my being.

  “Great,” I say. “But I’m ready to come home.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THERE IS ONE THING I have to do first. Tessa moved out of London to the home counties for similar reasons to those of my parents in the 1970s, which is to say the schools, the space and the countryside. Unlike my parents, however, she is a single mother with two kids conceived via sperm donor. No one is going to torch a cross on her lawn, but make no mistake, this was a brave move. Only once in its history has my hometown gone against the grain politically and that was in 1650, when Oliver Cromwell based his operations in the pub there, since when it has been solidly right wing. Almost everyone is white, almost everyone is married to someone of the opposite sex and almost everyone voted Conservative in the 1997 general election, when the entire rest of the country voted for Tony Blair. There can be something expansive about small-town life—you can’t avoid people the way you can in the city—and assumptions of bigotry can be unfair. On the other hand, Tessa isn’t merely the town’s sole single-mother-with-kids-conceived-via-sperm-donor, but the sole single mother at her kids’ school, period. No one else is even divorced! In 2014! By the standards of the world in which I was raised, the way she—and I—have had our kids is sheer lunacy.

  On a warm, dank day, my dad drives me out to see her, as either he or my mother would drive me around every weekend, to matches and swimming galas and the kinds of field-based fixtures I assume my city-raised children will never have. When we get there, my dad goes off to have a beer on his own in the pub and I buy some wine from the Tesco Metro opposite Tessa’s house. From her doorstep, I can see down a leafy lane toward a park. When I was publicizing the book about my mother, Americans would ask me to describe where I grew up and I would say the nearest equivalent I had found in the United States was Darien, Connecticut. It always got a laugh, that line; I made “Darien, Connecticut” sound prissy and ludicrous, as a way of explaining how funny it was that my mother, of all people, had wound up in its UK equivalent, and to curry favor with an audience by owning my privilege. The thing I never said is how much the place meant to me. I might fondly disparage the conventional world I grew up in, but it contributed to the security that would, one day, enable my babies.

  “Hello!” says Tessa, standing in the doorway, her two children peering out at her sides. “Remember I told you Emma was coming?” She ushers them outside, locks the door behind them and, walking four abreast, we make our way down the road to the park.

  “Emma is pregnant with twins who were conceived the same way you were,” she says to the kids. They look at me curiously.

  “What are they going to be called?” says Alex, who is ten.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “What do you think?”

  “Charlotte and Nettie,” he says firmly.

  “What do you think?” I ask the six-year-old.

  “Dustpan and brush,” she says, giggling.

  “Bucket and spade,” says Alex and they run ahead laughing.

  Tessa had her first baby alone when she was in her early thirties, a single heterosexual woman who assumed she would meet a man and settle down before the decade was out. (She didn’t.) The reason she jumped the gun, she says, was that she had been diagnosed with polycystic ovaries and knew conceiving was going to be difficult. It seemed to her foolish to prioritize getting in a relationship over having kids, when having kids mattered to her more. A relationship could wait. Having children, with her health history, couldn’t.

  The first doctor she went to was in private practice in Harley Street and, she says, could barely disguise his disapproval. It was his receptionist who quietly recommended she go to one of the private wings of the big London hospitals and this was much better; they were professional and disinterested, although, in line with medical guidelines in the UK, they did make her go to see a counselor before committing to treatment. Tessa also saw a hypnotherapist who made her cry by asking “Isn’t it selfish to want children?” then charged her £110.

 
There was no open market for sperm. Everything had to go through the hospital, which gave her a choice of three donors, about whom she was told almost nothing beyond what they did for a living. (She boggles at the amount of information I have been able to get about my donor, including how tall his parents are and what all his siblings do for a living.) Her first child was born after a single IVF attempt; the second took more than five years to conceive and the entire exercise set her back some fifty thousand pounds. Back then, the NHS wouldn’t treat single women wanting a baby, but in any case, says Tessa, she doesn’t believe the state should pick up the tab for what is essentially a lifestyle choice.

  I’m not sure I agree. It’s true that not having kids doesn’t kill you and the NHS is broke and there will always be higher priorities. Still, limiting access to fertility treatment to rich people feels a little too much like social engineering. There is, of course, always adoption, or, as some people like to suggest casually, “Why don’t you just adopt?” (These people, I notice, are rarely if ever adoptive parents. If they were, they would understand that there is no such thing as “just” adopting; the demands of the adoption process are as onerous if not more so than fertility treatment, and as fraught with difficult decisions. For example, would you adopt from abroad? If you are a white parent and there are no white babies in-country, would you adopt a baby of another race, even though many adult adoptees of transracial families are at best ambivalent about it? Would you adopt an older child? Would you go through an agency that put pressure on a teenage girl to have and then give up her baby rather than to have an abortion? If you went looking for a baby at an orphanage in China, what measures would you take to ensure the child’s birth parents were actually dead and not merely too poor to look after him or her? If it turned out they were alive, would you consider writing them a check so they could take home their baby rather than simply moving on to the next child on the list? I don’t have answers to any of these questions, but they are unavoidable for those seeking to adopt. And all of this is before you get to the fact that, if you are single or gay and living in large swaths of the United States, adoption can be ferociously difficult.)