Drew wasn’t any kinder to my list of alternates. “Buck teeth, twelve chins, walrus whiskers!” he moaned as he went through the options.
I fought for a few. “But Missy spends her school breaks distributing mosquito nets in Senegal!”
“Pfft! You sure that’s a woman?”
I realized we were approaching this process completely differently. As a writer, I’m drawn to characters with intriguing quirks and heart-tugging back stories. But for Drew, who spent twelve years overseeing reality programming for MTV, this was just another casting session. If she wasn’t good enough for Date My Mom, she wasn’t good enough for us.
I’d never felt so shallow before, but then again, a certain amount of shallowness seemed necessary for the task at hand. If some physically flawed donor gave our son or daughter Spock ears or a cauliflower chin, the poor kid might never forgive us. It’s not like I’m under the illusion that Drew and I have such pristine genes. All the more reason we needed someone above average to balance things out.
There had to be other options out there. I pleaded with Google for help: “egg donor tall smart pretty” . . . I’m feeling lucky!
0.11 seconds later, Google answered my prayers.
A company called Grade A Fertility promised eggs of a higher pedigree. Each listing boasted of the woman’s SAT scores and alma mater. Almost every girl was an Ivy Leaguer, but if she went to a safety school like Tufts and she looked like a cast member from Gossip Girl, they let her squeak through.
Each head shot looked like a Neutrogena ad, a medium close-up of some fresh-from-the-salon stunner lounging on a jetty and staring wistfully into the sunset. The essays read like excerpts from New Yorker profiles of particularly fascinating individuals. Their credentials were impeccable. You got the feeling that the first through fifth female presidents were all listed on this Web page.
There was just one big catch: the cost.
The federal government recommends an $8,000 fee for egg donors. It seems like a fair amount of compensation for the time and discomfort required to donate eggs, and most companies, Rainbow Extensions included, charge exactly that. But it’s merely a suggested retail price. It’s not legally binding, and individual agencies are free to mark up as much as they choose. Only a few are ballsy enough to do so. Grade A was the ballsiest of all. Along with each woman’s remarkable resume came an eye-popping price tag.
Heather graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth. She was a Rhodes scholar and a second-year student at Harvard Business School. She was also blonde and blue-eyed and had an absolutely perfect figure. Price: $25,000.
Monica was a Junior at Princeton and a violin prodigy who’d played with the Pittsburgh Philharmonic at age ten. She got a perfect score on her SATs, spoke four languages, and translated ancient Greek poetry as a hobby. She bore a remarkable resemblance to the actress Scarlett Johansson. Price: $30,000.
Diane was tall with perfect bone structure and flawless skin. She was an editor of the Yale Law Review and had clerked for the Supreme Court. She was a member of MENSA and an alternate on the Olympic shotput team. Diane was African American. Price: $12,000.
Each listing boasted how many times that particular young woman had donated successfully. Heather had done nine transfers and was ready for number ten. This statistic was supposed to assure you she was up to the job, but it made Heather seem kind of easy. Like naming your kid Madison, having a Heather baby was a sure way of ensuring there were three other kids in the preschool class just like her. Growing up, we played shirts versus skins basketball. Kids today probably played Heather DNA versus non-Heather DNA.
Not that Heather cared. She’d earned almost a quarter of a million dollars passing on her genetic material to strangers. Unlike at Rainbow Extensions, there was no pretense that she was in this to help infertile couples. It was a get rich quick scheme, nothing more. You wondered why she even needed business school anymore. She’d struck gold with her genes. If she kept this up until she was thirty, she could retire comfortably and still have time left to make ten kids of her own.
Still, it was hard not to be sucked in by the stats. We all want our kids to have the best, and being beautiful and intelligent gives you a big head start in life. There are no guarantees that a Rhodes Scholar’s eggs are going to make your kid smarter or that Scarlett Johansson’s DNA will make your kid prettier than Kellykins88, but it sure couldn’t hurt. This was possibly the most important decision we’d make about our child. How would we feel if we cheaped out and, as a result, our kid’s dreams were always frustratingly shy of his reach?
Then again, did we really want a miniature reflection of stuck-up Heather’s snotty little face gazing up at us from our Baby Björn? Who was she to think she was better than Kellykins88? If we used Heather’s $25,000 eggs, we could just as easily be saddling our unborn child with the greed gene. And how would we explain it to him? “Your egg donor was top of the line, son. We got you, and she got a Porsche.” Or, “We wanted you to be taller, but anything over five-foot-nine was out of our price range.” Was that what we’d have to substitute for, “We picked your donor because she was a good person?”
We’d already made our peace with the ethical gray areas of surrogacy, but these so-called premium eggs were a minefield of moral dilemmas. It was like eugenics or something. No, it wasn’t like eugenics. It was eugenics.
Even Drew was turned off by the idea. He would have killed to get any of these girls on The Real World, but he didn’t want one as his daughter.
Plus, of course, we didn’t have the money.
Grade A was out, and so was Rainbow Extensions. I wasn’t sure we’d ever find someone who satisfied us.
“We should just ask Susie,” I said one night, in frustration.
Drew’s answer was not what I was expecting. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
Susie was as close to the ideal woman as I could imagine. She was kind, beautiful, smart, a gifted artist, and, at twenty-eight, practically at the peak of her fertility. She was pretty enough for Drew and good-hearted enough for me. She was somebody we could proudly tell our kid about someday. She was what we dreamed of finding, and she was right under our noses. Susie was Drew’s little sister.
Despite being nine years apart in age and on opposite sides of the country, Susie and Drew couldn’t have been closer or more alike. They talked on the phone nearly every day, laughed at the same dirty jokes, had the same mercurial temper. Their mother was constantly remarking about how similar they were, how Susie made the same facial expressions Drew did, how she had the same attitude he did at her age, the same frustrations. They weren’t just brother and sister. They were kindred souls—and best friends.
We thought of Susie as our princess because nobody deserved a fairy-tale life more than she did. Unfortunately, she seemed permanently trapped in the part of the story where she was stuck doing menial chores while everyone else went to the Prince’s ball. Instead of scrubbing the castle floors, she was stocking shelves part time at Lord & Taylor. She liked having a position where she didn’t have to think and where she could listen to her iPod all day. When she went home at night, it was to her childhood bedroom in her parents’ house. She had a phobia about driving, so she walked miles back and forth to work, even in the harshest winter weather. She spent most nights at home because she simply couldn’t get to wherever her friends were hanging out. Drew called her a wounded bird.
Susie was too proud to accept anyone’s help. She turned down rides, job leads, cash, and gifts, just about anything that had the whiff of charity. But at the same time, she was outrageously generous in return. It was yet another way she resembled her brother. Each holiday season, she turned her family’s attic into her own version of Santa’s workshop, using her creative skills to make gorgeous gifts for everyone on her list. She once loaned a boyfriend thousands of dollars to buy furniture, money none of us even knew she had and which he fl
aked out on repaying after they broke up.
This was another running theme in Susie’s life: loser boyfriends. Everyone in the family remembered the stoner who came over for dinner and sat down in the dining room barefoot. We all witnessed the pretentious jerk who ruined Christmas by mocking a painting she’d made for him. Her dating history was a who’s who of Rochester’s Least Wanted.
She was the kind of young woman parents worry about—She’s so wonderful, why can’t she meet a man worthy of her? Then, a year ago, it finally happened. Prince Charming breezed in from out of town and swept her off her feet. His name was Jack, and he was sweet, handsome, and loving. Susie was a perfect fit for his glass slipper, and he never treated her like less than his queen. Jack had the most family-friendly career imaginable: nature photographer. He got paid to fly around the country and take pictures of animals. His idea of a fun date was to take Susie bird watching. To Drew’s mom, who’d had their suburban backyard declared a wildlife preserve, he was better than a doctor or a lawyer. He was a nice man, who had arrived to rescue our wounded bird.
Susie and Jack talked about moving in together, and pretty soon, that became talk of moving away together. Jack wanted to go to Berkeley, on the other side of the country, to start a new life, just the two of them. It was exactly the Happily Ever After that Susie had been dreaming of.
They didn’t like being away from each other, so when Jack went home to Iowa to visit his family, he promised to call every day. Her phone never rang. At first, Susie figured he was just busy catching up with old friends and spending quality time with his family. A day went by, then another. Jack didn’t return Susie’s voice mails or reply to her texts. She was heartbroken, terrified, and completely paralyzed. She didn’t know how else to contact him. All she could do was wait.
Finally, an email arrived. It came from Jack’s mailbox, but it was written by his father. He used Jack’s cell phone to compose a message to everyone in his son’s address book. The list of recipients went on for pages. Susie was as unknown to this man as any of these miscellaneous contacts. “To all those who knew my beloved son,” it began. She couldn’t bear to read further.
Instead, she looked up a phone number for Jack’s best friend and frantically dialed him to find out what the hell had happened. It took all of Susie’s strength just to keep the phone to her ear as he told her the story.
In Iowa, Jack had been hanging out with some of his old buddies from the neighborhood, guys he hadn’t seen in years. They convinced him to partake in one of their favorite pastimes from back in the day: shooting heroin. Susie had no idea Jack used to be a junkie. It was the kind of detail someone might hide if they were enjoying the rush of a new love and trying desperately not to mess it up. Apparently, when he was using, Jack had built up quite a tolerance to the stuff and needed a really strong dose to get sufficiently high.
Nobody told Jack that, after you’ve been clean for a while, you can’t go back to that same dosage. While his friends floated away to their happy place, Jack’s body began to shut down. He O.D.’ed.
Susie’s worst fear was confirmed: Prince Charming was dead.
Susie never suspected a trip back home could end in her boyfriend’s funeral. She was stunned, furious, and heartbroken, all at once. She kept a tiny picture of Jack taped to a corkboard in her bedroom. He was standing in the woods, a camera bag slung over one shoulder, a weathered brown hat on his head, laughing. It reminded her of the way she knew him. Keeping it up was a necessary torture for her. The pain reminded her of the joy, and that was all she had left of the guy who was going to change her life. Months after Jack died, Susie still cried every day. All you had to do was ask her how she was doing, and she might tear up.
Years earlier, Susie had told Drew and me that she’d give us her eggs if we ever wanted them. She blurted it out casually, the way people say, “When I win the lottery, I’m going to buy you a house.” It was natural, as we were searching for a donor, that her offer would spring to mind, but the timing just didn’t seem right. How would the conversation go? “Hey, Susie, you know all that happiness you deserve and have been struggling so hard to find? Well, great news. We’ve figured out a way you can have it . . . and immediately give it away to us.”
We knew exactly what would happen if we popped the question. Before we even finished asking, Susie would answer yes. Whatever Drew might need from her, she’d be happy to give. Her own emotions were secondary at best. She’d always been more interested in other people’s happiness than her own. But was it really the right thing for her to do?
It was the night before our meeting with Kristen Lander that we finally forced ourselves to decide. To ask or not to ask.
“I’m leaning toward yes,” I admitted, smiling nervously.
Drew sighed and closed his eyes, struggling with his conscience. “I’ve made up my mind,” he said, finally. “I can’t do it.”
With that, the decision was made. Drew knew his sister, and I trusted his judgment. I dreaded the thought of returning to the online databases. Maybe I could think outside the box—place an ad on Craigslist, set up a “Men Seeking Egg Donor” blog. There had to be a solution.
All of that would have to wait, though, because we had a meeting to prepare for. We opened Kristen Lander’s file for a quick refresher course on a woman we’d come face-to-face with in just a few hours.
8
How We Met Your M-Word
On the morning of my fifth anniversary with Drew, I woke up with a strange man in my bed.
“She’s going to hate us! She’s too perfect! Why are we doing this?”
He looked like Drew. He smelled like Drew smells in the morning. He was even wearing that pit-stained, torn-up English springer spaniel shirt Drew wore to bed every fucking night. But this was not the man I’d fallen in love with.
“I’m such an idiot! I’ve built my hopes up too high! We want this too much!”
Over the last five years, I’d seen Drew hit this level of panic a few times before. When we bought our condo. When he left MTV to start a new job. When he left that job to start another new job. He didn’t handle major life changes well, and I’d made the mistake in the past of trying to talk him down. The best thing to do was to stay calm, agree with everything he said, and be the one thing in his life that’s not aggravating the hell out of him. That was my surefire recipe for an anxiety exorcism.
The problem was, we didn’t have much time. In four short hours, we would be face-to-face with the woman who might someday make us dads. So it was that we kicked off a milestone day in our relationship with a trip to couples counseling.
“What if she finds out we can barely afford this? What if she learns what a shitty school district we live in? Do you know Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker are having a baby with a surrogate? Why would anyone pick us, when they could have a celebrity baby?” Drew clutched his hands so tightly around a throw pillow that I was sure I was about to get hit with flying goose feathers.
Thankfully, this was Mindy Stanhope, M.A., we were talking to, the woman who gleefully declared the first time we met her, “You guys are awesome!” She listened patiently while Drew voiced his ten bajillion fears, not at all concerned for her upholstery.
“I can’t do this. Let’s adopt! Let’s just be uncles! Why are we having kids at all? I’m not sure I believe gays should have kids. There, I said it!”
“How much do you know about her?” Mindy asked, calmly.
“Everything! It’s all on her application!”
“And don’t you think she learned a lot about you from your application?”
Drew shrugged. “I don’t know. He filled it out.”
As Mindy tamed Drew’s demons, I zoned out. I had too much on my own mind, like wondering if we’d get to meet Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker at the Rainbow Extensions family picnic. That would be so cool.
By th
e end of the fifty minutes, Mindy had worked her magic. Drew was back to his old self, still nervous but ready to turn on the charm and win Kristen over.
On our way out the door, Mindy wished us luck, then scooted back to her desk, giggling. “One more thing, guys!” she squeaked. She handed us a box of fancy chocolates, wrapped beautifully with a decorative bow. “Happy anniversary!” she beamed.
I threw my arms around Mindy and squeezed her tiny frame. It was so generous, so thoughtful. It was the edible equivalent of, “You guys are awesome!” For the first time in therapy, I almost cried—and I started to wonder: Had we overlooked the most obvious egg donor of all? It seemed so unethical, but if a therapist could gift us with candy, why not an ovum or two? I had to shake myself out of it. This wonderful woman had done something nice for us, and here I was mentally fertilizing her with my eyes. What had I become?
Drew and I shook our heads as we got into the elevator. “That was so sweet of Mindy,” Drew said.
“The sweetest.”
“I just fucking love her.”
I looked down at the box. No one had ever given me fancy chocolates before, and I never knew how happy it could make me feel.
“How’d ya know I’s a chocaholic?” Kristen warbled, as I handed her the box in the conference room of Rainbow Extensions. She tore the ribbon off and started poking around inside with her index finger. “Any rum nuggets in here?”
We had just sat down in the Rainbow Extensions conference room. Kristen looked just like her pictures, only less smiley, slightly thinner, and her mouth less perfectly formed to say, “Cheese.”
She sat beside her husband, Paco, who slumped so far backward in his chair he was practically using it as a bed. He said hello with a barely perceptible nod of the head and a rhino-like grumble. He steadfastly refused to get up, as if to let the gay guys know there would be no hugging whatsoever.
Mommy Man Page 9