Icelanders socialize by soaking in outdoor pools heated naturally by red-hot magma, even in the chill of Arctic-adjacent winter. Everyone’s last name consists of their father’s first name along with the suffix “-’s son” or “-’s daughter.” If I had been born in Iceland, my name would have been Jerry Jerrysson. Instead of Santa Claus, Icelandic children believe in the Yuletide Lads, thirteen mischievous gremlins who traipse across the country each December perpetrating holiday shenanigans. They include Hurðaskellir, who gets his jollies slamming doors, and Bjúgnakrækir, who hides in the rafters of your house to steal smoked meats. And, cutest of all, a majority of the population believes in elves. Elves! After learning that, I wanted to pinch the entire country’s cheeks until its pudgy little face turned blue.
If none of that sounds the least bit interesting to you, then perhaps your name is Drew Tappon.
His ten gajillion Facebook friends would never know it, but my boyfriend is a closet agoraphobe who is truly comfortable only within ten feet of the living room couch. Three years earlier, I dragged him to London, and even that was too foreign for him. Money he didn’t recognize. Streets he couldn’t navigate. “Mind the gap” and “Way out” and “Cheers.” Aero bars. Shepherd’s Bush. Sir Cliff Richard. We spent the entire week looking for an IHOP. It is international, after all.
At least England could pretend they spoke the same language as we do. In Iceland, every word is required by law to be at least eighty-three letters long, with a minimum of four umlauts per syllable. For my boyfriend, it was an über-non-starter.
If not for the baby bucket list, I probably would have shrugged off the whole idea. But I thought of the old adage about why the man climbed the mountain: because it was there. Well, Iceland wasn’t going to be there much longer, at least not for me. My youth and my freedom were rapidly vanishing. The time for adventure was now. Before Drew could talk me out of it, I went online and bought myself one round-trip ticket from LAX to Keflavík International Airport. I was set to leave the first week in June, just in time to enjoy the annual puffin migration.
It was outrageously expensive, but so what? I was buying much more than one week of travel. The 331,000 Icelandic krona also provided an extended treatment for my baby fever. Instead of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, I began reading tour books, searching for hot spots both social and geological. I reserved a single room in “The 101,” Reykjavik’s hip downtown district. I mapped out the local McDonald’s just in case I had trouble finding a restaurant that met my narrow dietary preferences (i.e., no puffin). I even learned how to pronounce those weird letters that exist only in the Icelandic alphabet, like ð and þ, both of which, it turns out, are variations on “th.”
I barely thought about Rainbow Extensions, the surrogate, or the baby Drew and I might someday have. I skimmed or ignored emails, like the one that assigned us a new caseworker, Andrea. Andrea assured us of two things: one, in the next few weeks, we would be matched with our replacement surrogate, and, two, shortly thereafter, we would be assigned yet another new caseworker. I didn’t even bother getting annoyed. I was too busy corresponding with a man named Borkur to set up a day trip to Landmannalaugar and the volcano Hekla.
Sure enough, Andrea was a woman of her word. Three weeks later, she sent an email titled “Profile for Your Review.” Attached was an encyclopedia of trivia about a new woman, neatly organized and illustrated with her personal photos. Unlike with Kristen, I didn’t feel any panic this time. I just flipped through the application to make sure this candidate met our main qualifications. She was within two hours’ drive. She was drug free. No visible swastika tattoos. Sold.
I’m not sure Drew looked at the application at all. It wasn’t that we didn’t care. We wanted so much to believe this new surrogate was The One, but we were petrified of having our hearts broken again. No matter what, we weren’t going to let ourselves get attached this time.
Andrea told us the surrogate was dying to meet us. She’d already taken an afternoon off from work and arranged to have a neighbor watch her son, freeing up a few hours in her hectic life to drive to L.A. Of course, we assured Andrea, we would do whatever we could to accommodate the woman who was offering us the use of her lady parts. There was just one problem. At the time of the appointment, I would be in Iceland.
Andrea wouldn’t even consider rescheduling. The match was made, the meeting was set, the wooing of the womb had commenced. Did we really want to risk turning off another surrogate? If we blew this one, we were going to start getting a reputation around the office. I called the airline, which was perfectly happy to change my flight for a fee of $800. Not a lot of planes fly to Iceland, so those that do can pretty much charge whatever they want.
To my surprise, Drew was firmly in my corner. He still didn’t quite “get” my need for this frosty vision quest, but he “got” that it mattered to me. He was willing to turn down the meeting, even if it meant letting the surrogate slip away.
We called Andrea’s bluff. I left her a message, letting her know that if she couldn’t make the meeting work around my vacation, then we’d just have to go back on the waiting list.
The next morning, my phone rang. We had a new meeting time, the Friday before I left for Iceland. The surrogate had changed her plans.
The night before our big meeting with the surrogate, I was 100 percent ready—for Iceland. My bags were packed. My tour books were precisely stacked atop my suitcase. Day trips were booked. Receipts and confirmations were sorted in a folder in the order in which I would need to reference them. My camera, laptop, and Nintendo DS were fully charged, extra batteries and international voltage converters tucked away in easily accessible pouches. I would have no problem filling my seventeen-hour travel time with Mario Kart, the Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and, of course, the Iceland Playlist on my iPod.
To prepare for the surrogate meeting, I brushed my teeth.
Drew and I decided we wouldn’t bother bringing an ass-kissy gift this time. Kristen walked off with our fancy anniversary chocolates, and what did we get? A tab for her lunch and the cold sting of rejection. Screw that. Our new policy was baby first, candy second.
It was only as we walked out the door that I realized we were missing something.
“Did you print out her application?” I asked Drew.
“Why?” he grunted wearily.
He was probably right, I figured. It was too late to read it now.
We were in the car, halfway to Rainbow Extensions, when I finally thought of the obvious follow-up question.
“Do you know her name?”
“I think it’s Andrea.”
“No, not the caseworker. The surrogate.”
Drew practically swerved off the road. “Ohhhhh,” he moaned. “Shit.”
Now, finally, we freaked out.
This was embarrassing. Helen? Hortense? Hezekiah? They were all equally valid possibilities. I wanted to scream. My memory was positively bursting with names: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Maddox Jolie Pitt, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, Peter Scolari, Brigitta Von Trapp, supporting actress nominee Sophie Okonedo, Survivor runner-up Kelly Wigglesworth. I could name my state comptroller, everyone from my tenth-grade homeroom, and all three of the Thompson Twins, pretty much everyone except the current most important woman in my life.
We had practically earned doctorate degrees in Kristen Lander. We pored over her application, devouring every detail, visualizing each anecdote, etching the outlines of pages and pages of photographs into our minds. But Surrogate number 2 was a blank, a shadow, a stack of unread papers. She was What’s-Her-Womb.
We entered the agency to find two women staring at us. Pop quiz, hot shot: one was the surrogate, the other was the company assistant assigned to take us into the meeting.
I looked back and forth between them. One was smiling professionally. The other looked confused and out of place. It was almost too easy.
“It’s great to finally meet you,” we said to the smiler.
Ding ding ding! Right answer.
I sized her up in an instant. She seemed petite, but she was taller than I was. Thinner and prettier, too. There was nothing phony about her, at least none of the usual fake things you encounter living in L.A.: boobs, skin, smile. Maybe she dyed her hair. I wasn’t sure. But she didn’t look like she was overly concerned with impressing people, and to me and Drew, that was the most impressive thing about her.
Very meekly, she extended her hand. She opened her mouth and said something but at a volume too low for human ears to record. She was sweet, she was curious, she was terrified. Where Kristen Lander was a tiger, this woman was a kitty cat.
Beside her was her husband, a tall, skinny, clean-cut dude whose look and demeanor screamed California cool. His clothes were preppy, his hair spiky, his footwear flip-flops. He spoke in a voice even softer than his wife’s.
It was the worst-case scenario: They were nice. Now we really felt guilty.
The assistant introduced herself as Becky, then led us to a conference room. There, Andrea waited on the other end of a speakerphone call from Tuscaloosa. Becky let us know she’d be taking part in the call just so we’d have a human connection in the room. It was the last time we heard her speak.
“Is everyone there?” Andrea asked from the dimpled triangular doodad on the table. The four of us couldn’t help feeling like Charlie’s Angels, although the twenty-something couple next to us was probably picturing the 2000 remake with Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore, damn them. “Drew? Jerry? Tiffany? Eric?” Whew, Tiffany and Eric, I thought. Remember those names.
Tiffanyanderic. Tiffanyanderic. Tiffanyanderic.
Andrea lobbed the first question at Tiffany.
“Tell us why you want to be a surrogate.”
Silence. It was the standard icebreaker, but Tiffany stayed frozen. She looked to her husband for support, then she looked at us with a half shrug. It was a query that was simultaneously too easy and too deep for her to answer.
If Andrea had been in the room with us, she would have noticed how overwhelmed Tiffany was. She might have been able to smooth things over, to rephrase or transition to a less weighty topic. Instead, she mistook the silence for a bad connection.
“Hello? Hello? Are you still there?”
Nobody was sure what to say. Becky squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. Only Andrea was talking. “Hello?”
It was then that the sky opened up, dramatic music played, and a superhero swooped in to save the day.
It was WonderDrew.
“We read Tiffany’s application,” he insisted. “We already know this.”
It was masterful. It was magical. It was a complete lie, but so what? It ended the agonizing silence and got Andrea to move on. The crisis was over. We were in good hands now.
Andrea launched into a drawn-out statement about the sensitive nature of the questions she would be asking and the importance of covering difficult topics up front blah blah blah.
Those of us in the room all knew who was in charge now. As our so-called moderator yammered on, Drew leaned over and muted the phone.
“Here’s the deal,” he explained to the frightened couple beside us. “This is a horrible way for us to meet. They need to tell us everything that could possibly go wrong, and it’s fucking terrifying. But none of it matters, none of it’s going to happen. They just have to go into it for legal reasons. Once we get through this bullshit, we’ll go to lunch and just talk.”
Becky averted her eyes, unsure how to respond. Drew hadn’t forgotten she was there. She didn’t scare him one bit.
At last, Tiffany warmed up—to us if not to Andrea.
The questions were all repeats from our Kristen Lander meeting, an increasingly chilling and absurd rundown of prenatal horror stories. What would you do if we implant an embryo and then learn the fetus has no toes? What if the eggs split ten times and there are a dozen babies? What if one of those twelve babies is part wolf?
This time, though, the roles were reversed. Now Drew and I were the old pros tasked with setting the newbies at ease. We responded calmly to each nightmare scenario. We’d mute the phone when saying something that was not for Andrea’s ears. We bonded with Tiffany and Eric over how annoying this woman was. We’d answer her questions, then shoot each other eye rolls or make gagging motions.
That was how we got through it. The inquiries were designed to break us, to coldcock our optimism and ensure we were prepared for the bumpy road ahead, to confirm that, at the lowest points of this journey, we would all be on the same team. And it was Coach Tappon who held us all together.
We passed the test, and Andrea sent us on our way. For the four of us, this meant the beginning of an even more daunting challenge: getting to know each other.
We went to the same restaurant where we’d lunched with Kristen and Paco. Tiffany and Eric were as shy as I was, if not more. Twelve wolfen babies was nothing. Chitchat was our true fear.
Thus began the Drew Tappon Talk Show. Instantly, my boyfriend transformed into that gregarious TV host I fell in love with on our first date. He warmed up with a monologue, some snarky cracks about the agency that set us all at ease. Then he delicately shifted the spotlight to our dining companions, starting with every parent’s favorite topic: their kid. Tiffany and Eric smiled, bragged and showed us pictures of their two-year-old son, Gavin. Drew was our Oprah—fascinated, caring, and oozing warmth through it all.
Within minutes, this scared young couple was sharing their life stories. When Tiffany was nineteen, she heard a report about surrogacy on the radio, and it made her cry. She swore to her mom that someday she would be a surrogate herself. Her mother probably figured this was just a good-hearted, impulsive young girl’s fantasy, something she’d move beyond as soon as she heard the next radio report, about the Olympics, and decided she wanted to take up the javelin.
Years later, Gavin was born, and Tiffany had a living reminder of her pledge. She bonded with him instantly in the delivery room, the moment the doctor placed her son in her arms for the first time. She wanted to share that experience with someone who would never experience it otherwise, even if it was a complete stranger. After talking to her husband, she went online and googled surrogacy agencies. The first hit in southern California was Rainbow Extensions.
It seemed so funny to us. Here was a company that spent countless thousands of dollars in outreach, placing ads in local papers and doing who knows what else to try to recruit potential uteri. And then, one day, this sweet young woman just calls them up and asks for an application.
It was beautiful. It was also the perfect answer to Andrea’s very first question, about why she wanted to be a surrogate. We wondered why Tiffany didn’t share her story then. She just shrugged. “I didn’t like her.”
Tiffany thanked us for taking control of the conference call. She couldn’t believe how relaxed we were through all those awful questions. We fessed up that it wasn’t our first time hearing them. We told her about the Womb of Steel, about how we’d had lunch with her at this very restaurant, practically at this very table. How we were ready to have a baby with her, how excited we were when we left the meeting and how devastated we were when she rejected us.
“No pressure or anything,” we laughed. It was a risky joke, but Tiffany and her husband both chuckled. Whew.
Tiffany told us the agency had sent her a stack of intended parent profiles, but she knew right away that we were the ones she wanted to meet.
“Why us?”
She giggled like a young girl. “Duh. Disney.”
It turned out Tiffany was a major Disneyland freak. Huge. She took her son there a couple of times every week. The way most people might swing by the park down the street to climb the jungle gym, Tiffany and Gavin were queuing up for the Jungle Cruise. She boasted
how, at two, her fearless little guy was already riding the Matterhorn. Tiffany’s dream was to give birth on Mouse property, earning her newborn a lifetime pass to the Happiest Place on Earth.
Drew and I shared a puzzled, very nervous glance. What gave Tiffany the impression that we were Disney people? We certainly never mentioned Space Mountain in our application. Truth be told, Drew didn’t even like Disneyland, and if you waterboarded me, I could maybe spit out the names of two or three dwarves, tops. Dopey, Sneezy— um, was there a Twitchy?
We had forgotten about the pictures.
Among all the photos you include with your application, the agency suggests you throw in a couple of you having fun with kids—smiling, laughing, not touching them inappropriately. So we tossed in a shot of us with my sister’s three daughters, standing in front of a shrub trimmed into a Mickey Mouse shape somewhere in the Magic Kingdom. It was purely coincidental, but apparently that was what won Tiffany over.
“Sure,” we said. “We loooooooove Disney.”
Eric, to say the least, was a supportive husband. As long and lanky as he was soft spoken, he had spent several years as a minor league pitcher. It was clear what had drawn Tiffany to him. In addition to his charm and good looks, he worked nights as a roller-coaster mechanic at Disney’s California Adventure. While most of us slept, Eric was hanging upside down like Spider-Man, hundreds of feet off the ground, checking pressure and tightening bolts on California Screamin’.
He was as sweet and polite as his wife. Although towering and muscular, he was one of the nicest, least intimidating people I’d ever met.
Yet Eric scared the shit out of me. He was a jock, a straight guy, the kind of dude who got his varsity letter in fag bashing. Back in high school, guys like Eric threw spitballs at guys like Drew and me while we performed our exhaustively rehearsed selections from Bye Bye Birdie at the mandatory assembly. Even if Eric agreed to this arrangement, even if his wife got pregnant with our baby, I could imagine spending nine months in constant fear that he might one day just leap up and flush our faces down a toilet, like a pit bull who was always so good with children—until the day he snapped and snacked on a second grader.
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