Mommy Man

by Jerry Mahoney

  By now, everyone was sobbing—not just the easy targets like Drew, Susie, and Tiffany but Eric and me, too. Our families and friends—and somewhere in the crowd, Jessica.

  Packing up the car with all the gifts took almost as long as the party itself. We filled the entire minivan and had to ask Tiffany and Eric to follow us home in their car with the spillover. With Gavin at home with a babysitter, the Irelands stayed the rest of the day at our condo, helping us open packages. They even bought us a few gifts of their own: some baby clothes and our very first case of diapers and wipes.

  The whole day had been so overwhelming—such a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of emotions—that it was a bit of a relief the next day just to bask in the aftermath. By then, all of Drew’s family had left, and among the out-of-towners, the only ones who remained were my mother and my sister, Kathy. While Drew caught up on work, I took them to a restaurant down the street for dinner.

  “That baby shower was nuts!” Kathy said, as we sat down. A day later, the party was still the only thing we could talk about. “That was bigger than my wedding. C’mon, how many people were there?”

  “I think . . . a hundred?”

  “That was more than a hundred. It was one-fifty, easy.”

  “Kathy,” my mother elaborated, “they’re like the king and king here. They know half the world.”

  The two of them had visited me many times in the past, but this was their first trip where they met most of my friends. It struck me that they still thought of me as the sheltered, lonely teenager I used to be. This new Jerry came as a bit of a shock to them.

  “I’m really glad you’re here in California,” my mom said. “It’s good for the kids.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You would have a lot of trouble with a family like this in the Midwest. Here, people actually think this is normal.”

  Kathy cut her off. “I think what she means is it’s nice to see you have so much support.”

  I knew what she meant. “You’re worried about your grandkids, Mom. It’s okay. I am, too. Most kids have moms, even here in L.A. We’re kind of in uncharted waters. But Drew and I wouldn’t be having kids if we didn’t think we could give them everything they needed. You saw it yesterday. These kids aren’t even born yet, and already, they’re so loved.”

  “Jerry,” she replied. “They’re gonna be fine.”

  We started talking about parenthood. My sister, a mom of three, was full of anecdotes and advice. My mom was happy to remind both of us of all the headaches we gave her when we were growing up. We all tried to imagine how I’d handle the challenges ahead. We laughed, worried, and wondered. It was one of the best conversations we’d ever had.

  Just as our food arrived, my cell phone began to vibrate. I almost didn’t answer, but I decided I should at least see who was calling. The ID came up “Eric Ireland,” so I picked up. He wasn’t a chatty man, so whatever he wanted, it would be quick.

  “Hi, Eric.”

  The connection was terrible, and the street noise didn’t help. I caught a few words here and there. “Tiffany . . . strong . . . drove . . .” I couldn’t make sense of it.

  “Hold on, Eric. I can barely hear you. Where are you?”

  His next sentence came through loud and clear:

  “The emergency room.”

  21

  Tiffany’s Replacement

  Eric spoke in a calm, reassuring manner. Nothing in his tone suggested cause for alarm. He urged me not to panic.

  Tiffany had gone into labor, that was all.

  “They gave her some medication to stop the contractions,” Eric explained. “They’re doing a test now that will determine if she’s going to deliver in the next two weeks.”

  “Um . . . what? How do they know when she’ll deliver?”

  “They can’t tell exactly. But somehow, they can tell if it’ll be in the next two weeks. We’ll know the results in two hours.”

  “Should Drew and I come down there?”

  “No,” Eric insisted. “I mean, not unless it comes back positive. Then . . . yeah.”

  I raced home to be with Drew, googling “contractions 25 weeks” on my iPhone all the way. As I suspected, the results weren’t encouraging. I found a few articles about preemies who’d survived at this stage, but—there was always a “but.”

  The more encouraging stories were the ones of women who went into labor at twenty-five weeks but scored negative on this test. Many of them went on to carry their babies full term. That was a much, much better outcome to hope for.

  Meanwhile, we had two hours to wait. To wait—and to curse the very notion of surrogacy. This was supposed to be the easy way for us to have a baby, the one that put us in the driver’s seat. Instead, it felt more like we were banging around in the trunk, bound and gagged. First we found out Susie’s eggs were no good, now Tiffany’s womb was suspect—again. Our babies, who weren’t even born yet, had already lived through more adversity than I had in my entire life. This was hardly the ideal way to make a family.

  I felt like a fool for believing I could be a dad, for naming two little bundles of cells who might never even take their first breath, for throwing a fucking party to celebrate my good fortune. We should have held off longer before announcing the pregnancy, like until the kids were in preschool. I wondered if this was a sign God existed because he’d found a way to jerk me around after all.

  To say it was the longest two hours of my life would be inaccurate because it was exactly as long as two hours were supposed to be. I know because I was staring at my cell phone the whole time, eyes transfixed on the clock, watching each minute tick away exactly sixty seconds after the last one. It was two hours of my life, the same as it was for people who spent that time waiting in line for Space Mountain, or watching the extended season finale of The Amazing Race, or pushing out their own little miracle just a few floors up from Tiffany in Labor and Delivery. Two hours—hardly any amount of time at all and yet forever.

  Kathy and my mom went back to their hotel so Drew and I could be alone. We didn’t say anything as we sat on the couch, waiting for my cell phone to vibrate. Every conversation we would have for the next few months would be predicated on the call we were about to get, on a simple yes or no that determined the fate of two babies and all the people they’d already touched just by attaching to a stranger’s uterine wall. The silence was broken at last by a gentle buzz. In front of us on the coffee table, my iPhone was quivering.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s negative.”

  I doubled over onto Drew’s chest, wrapped my arms around him, and squeezed as tightly as I could. It was exactly what I would have done if Eric had given the other answer instead.

  If the baby shower had been like our wedding, then the honeymoon had just been abruptly canceled. Dr. Robertson ordered Tiffany on full bed rest. No work, no walking, not even any standing if she could avoid it. She filed for a leave of absence from her job, and Drew and I didn’t need to reread our surrogate contract to figure out what this meant. We were on the hook for everything—not just her lost wages but housecleaning and child care, too. For the remaining trimester, Tiffany’s entire function in life would be to incubate our fetuses. As a result, she was going to have to hire someone else to be Tiffany for a while.

  She deserved every penny, of course. She’d endured so much more than she signed on for, without ever complaining. We just weren’t sure exactly where the money would come from. After all the other expenses of surrogacy, we were broke.

  As it turned out, the solution to all our problems came from an entirely predictable source.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Drew was on the phone with Susie. “Do what?”

  “I’ll be the person. The one who lives with Tiffany and takes care of her.”

  “Susie, she lives here, in California.”

>   “So I’ll fly out.”

  “For three months?”

  “Why not?”

  “What are you going to do about your job?”

  “Quit.”

  “Susie!”

  “It’s just a job.”

  “No. You don’t have to do this.”

  “This is family. Family’s more important.”

  Before Drew could convince his sister not to throw her life away for our benefit, Susie was on a plane to L.A. No one was more excited than Tiffany. She had already logged what felt like ten thousand hours on her living room couch, and now she’d imagined having to open her home to some crotchety old woman who barked at her to lie completely still at all times. Susie would be more like a roomie, a chatty girlfriend who’d keep her morale up.

  We picked Susie up at LAX and drove her to the Irelands’ house. Only as we lugged Susie’s suitcase over the threshold did the surrealism of the situation hit me. These were two women from different walks of life, brought together by fate to live together so that they could bring two babies into the world and hand them over to a pair of gay men to raise. Forget Tiffany’s Uterus. This was our sitcom, Wombmates.

  The Irelands’ home was perfect for a family of exactly three. Susie would need to be squeezed in, but she didn’t mind sleeping in Eric’s home office, underneath the shelves of trophies from his pro ball days. In many ways, it was preferable to living at home with her parents. This would be an adventure.

  For Drew and me, it felt a little like we were dropping our daughter off at college. I had to assure Drew that his little sister would be all right. “How well do we know these people?” he asked.

  “Well enough to let them give birth to our children.”

  Around this time, I was highly tuned into the news of anyone else’s pregnancy. I stopped being one of those people who groaned at all the ultrasound photos expectant parents would post on Facebook and instead began commenting on every single one. “Aw, look at his unfused cranial cortex!” “That’s a good healthy placenta there! Way to go!”

  One night, Drew told me the story of his friends Doug and Peggy, who’d just had their first child. Peggy had such a rough C-section that afterward she couldn’t even hold her own baby, much less feed her or sing her lullabies. Stories like that always broke my heart, though quietly I sighed in relief that these kinds of scenarios didn’t apply to Drew and me. No matter how difficult Tiffany’s delivery ended up being, Drew and I would come into our kids’ lives well rested and raring to go.

  With Peggy out of commission, Doug was forced to snap into action. When his daughter screamed her head off, Doug tried everything he could think of to calm her. He changed her, fed her, cradled her, but she was inconsolable. What finally did the trick was Goodnight Moon.

  All throughout his wife’s pregnancy, Doug had been reading the book to her belly. As soon as his newborn daughter heard the sweet, calming poetry, in her daddy’s familiar voice, she felt safe. She stopped crying, and she looked up at Daddy with big, loving eyes. In an instant, Doug bonded with his daughter. Drew could barely finish the story, he was so choked up. It was a gorgeous anecdote—touching and hopeful. It was the tale of a dad, without any help from a mom, saving the day. No sooner was Drew finished than I flew into a raging panic.

  “Why would you tell me that!” I shouted.

  “What do you mean? It’s the most beautiful story ever!”

  “Yeah, and it’ll never happen to us! We’ve never said a word to those kids!”

  Drew’s story resonated with me for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t our voices the babies would recognize. It was Tiffany’s and Susie’s. Let’s face it. Eric wasn’t very chatty, so his voice was unlikely to make a big impression. Our kids, destined to be raised by two men, would be used to hearing only the voices of women. Oh my God. The first time we spoke to them, they’d be terrified!

  A nightmare scenario leapt into my head. We’re in the delivery room. It’s the happiest moment of our lives. But when the doctors hand us the babies, the two of them treat us like strangers. They won’t stop crying. Then they hear Tiffany’s voice, and finally, they calm down. It’s only when she holds them that they’re at ease. Instantly, all the biology in the world becomes irrelevant. They welcome Tiffany like a mother and come to regard us as the jerks who took them away from her.

  Then I pictured an even more alarming scenario. What if the voice they were drawn to wasn’t Tiffany’s but Susie’s? She had the biological connection, and now she had the proximity, too. They would know her much better than they would know us.

  I’d heard so many stories about the agony that comes with adoption. Birth mothers crying for hours or days. Adoptive parents wracked with guilt and torn apart by a swell of sympathy, even as they’re celebrating the arrival of their child.

  Surrogacy wasn’t going to spare us that kind of pain. It would only shift it into different forms, onto different people. I finally realized that we weren’t going to get through this without crying some sad tears as well.

  “I don’t want Susie in the delivery room,” I said to Drew. The topic had never come up, but it seemed obvious now that it would. Susie was living with Tiffany, so she was sure to be around when the babies arrived. She’d want to witness their birth—who wouldn’t? Drew would want her there, and Tiffany probably would, too. To me, though, it just didn’t seem right. Susie was quickly becoming more important to our babies than we were. All the boundaries we swore we’d draw were quickly disappearing. It may have been the cruelest thing I’d ever done—it certainly felt like it—but it also felt necessary. At that moment, I probably would have kept Tiffany out of the delivery room if it were possible.

  “Okay,” Drew said. That easily, he gave in. I was stunned that he didn’t fight me. He’d always been so protective of Susie, such a compassionate big brother. Now, though, he had an even bigger concern—in fact, two of them.

  I felt guilty, conflicted, and yet pettily validated. It was a new emotion to me. Fatherhood, I figured. That’s probably what it was.

  22

  Fourth of July with the Family

  What do you say to someone you’ve never met, who doesn’t speak English, and whose brain is approximately the size and consistency of a lump of personal pizza dough? Add to that the fact that you won’t be speaking to them directly but rather through the protruding belly skin of a woman you’ve known for less than a year. And go!

  I had decided to record a message for Tiffany to play to my kids so they would know my voice. Suddenly, though, I’d found myself with a severe case of Daddy’s block. I couldn’t steal the Goodnight Moon thing. I’d feel like a fraud to my own kids. What else was there? Green Eggs and Ham? The libretto to Miss Saigon? At least I knew that one by heart. How about that paper I wrote for my college Shakespeare class on the notion of nothingness in King Lear? That was a solid A-minus, if I remembered correctly. It’s not like it mattered what I said anyway. The kids wouldn’t understand the words. The idea was that they would find comfort in the sound of my voice. My squealy, whimpering nerd voice. I tried to forget how much I hated the sound of it on tape and just hit “Record.”

  “Well, hewwo there, everyone! It’s your Daddy! How’re my wittle fwiends today?”

  Stop. Ugh, did I just do that? Baby talk? Erase! Time for a new take.

  “This is a message for the two best babies in the whole wide world!”

  Stop. Yuck. Pandering. These fetuses are going to walk all over me if they hear me talking like that. I needed to sound more natural.

  “Yo! Daddy here!”

  Stop. Just stop. I didn’t need to talk down to my kids just because they were roughly the size of gerbils. Even their precognizant mush brains deserved a little respect.

  Nothing I said sounded right. I didn’t want to force my kids to listen to me rambling nonsense night after night, much less my sister-in
-law and my surrogate. They’d think it was sweet at first, but after a few weeks, it’d be a regular nuisance. Ugh, time to play the tape again. Susie and Tiffany would probably work up an impression of my baby tape and crack each other up by doing it. “Yeah, Tiff, you really nailed his awkward pause that time!” Together, they’d swipe my heartfelt sentiments and turn them into catchphrases to use behind my back. Why not? It’s what I would do.

  My baby tape would be only one of dozens of things bonding Tiffany and Susie. From the sound of things, they were getting along famously. When Drew called his sister to check in, she always had a ton of stories to share, usually with Tiffany guffawing in the background.

  For years, Tiffany had been making Eric a thermos full of coffee to keep him awake during his night shifts. When they were out of cream, she grabbed the closest thing she could find—Bailey’s Irish Cream. She didn’t realize until Susie pointed it out that her dairy substitute was 17 percent alcohol. Of course, Eric never complained.

  Tiffany would tease Susie constantly about finding her a boyfriend. “You’ll make a great wife someday,” she assured her. “You’re so homely.” She had meant to say “homey,” of course, but by misspeaking, she provided them with one of their favorite running jokes. They’d also discovered the computer game Plants vs. Zombies and would kill hours together by killing the walking dead.

  “Did you get to the ones who ride dolphins yet?” Tiffany would ask.

  “No, I’m stuck on the pole vaulters.”