When Karyn and Jody left, it felt like the last day of summer camp. “We’ll keep in touch!” we swore. We traded emails and promised to friend each other on Facebook. We opened their baby gifts, but it wasn’t until after they left that I peeked inside Karyn’s card:
To the Tappon-Mahoney family,
Every once in a while I get to meet someone that just “feels right.” You were it. I knew I was going to like all of you from the moment you came in with those muffins (just kidding). You were so nervous, excited and full of love that it reminded me of what life is all about. We all need to be reminded of that sometimes.
I want to thank you for letting me be a tiny part of your day. It was my pleasure to meet you all and I look forward to updates.
Take care of yourselves. Eat, drink lots of fluids and sleep when you can. They will sleep through the night soon, they do stop crying for long periods of time eventually and just about the time you start asking yourself “what were we thinking,” they will throw their little arms around you and tell you they love you and you will feel refreshed and renewed.
Love,
Karyn
Once again, I was reduced to tears. We’d started off the day before just hoping to score ourselves a room for the night, but to our surprise, we’d actually made friends.
It was mid-afternoon when Tiffany swung by to visit us. We hadn’t expected her to be on her feet so soon, but it was her appearance that truly shocked us. Relaxed, refreshed, vibrant. She was practically as fit as she’d been the day we met her, but with a much bigger smile. Any postpartum adjustment we feared she might suffer had yet to surface. Like Susie, she was full of joy, perfectly at ease with this new family we’d made.
She had some big news for us, too: Less than twenty-four hours after popping out twins, she was headed home. The doctors had given her the option to stay another night, but she turned them down. She’d accomplished her goal, given us our family, and now she wanted to go back to hers. She was eager to lift Gavin up and dance him around the room. It had been far too long since she’d been able to do that.
Once again that night, Drew and I were alone with our children. We didn’t say much, not to each other at least. We were too busy talking to our son and daughter, telling them all the amazing things we couldn’t wait to share together as a family—bedtime stories, their first day of school, maybe someday a trip to Paris. In one of the rare moments when they were both asleep at the same time, when Drew and I were both awake and off duty, he turned to me. We had so many things we wanted to say to each other, but all Drew could get out at that moment was a simple, “We’re so lucky.”
He didn’t need to spell it out in detail. We both knew what an understatement that was.
I thought about Georgia, how loving and maternal she was and how much she deserved to experience this kind of joy.
I thought about Susie—and Dr. Saroyan’s devastating assessment of her fertility.
I thought about Bernie and his wife, all they’d gone through to have a baby and how much hope they still had that their dream would come true.
I thought about all the gay couples who couldn’t have kids because they lived somewhere the law didn’t allow it, and all the gays and lesbians from previous generations who never even considered the possibility.
I thought about all the scares we’d gone through, about how Tiffany defied everyone’s expectations and her own body by carrying our children full-term.
I thought about Rainbow Extensions and how the one thing they’d managed to do right was to bring Tiffany and Eric into our lives.
I thought about the unlikelihood of Drew and me meeting in the first place.
I thought about a teenage boy who was miserable in his own skin and how he could never have imagined a future that looked anything like this.
When we started the process of having kids, I wanted to have a truly remarkable story to share with them about how they came into the world. Now I had that. It was a story full of love and surprises, of fear and of the greatest happiness imaginable. It was uniquely ours—the tale of our family—yet in another way, our journey was just like anyone else’s. Isn’t that how every baby comes to be, through a million little moments of serendipity, coincidences of geography, and the completely unforeseeable whims of the human heart? These babies were no more special than any other, and yet they were the most important creatures in the world because they were ours.
The odds of experiencing this moment, of there being a Bennett and Sutton Tappon-Mahoney, seemed so astronomical, but then again, it felt like a forgone conclusion. Of course we had a family. Like Karyn said, it couldn’t have felt more right.
I put my arm around Drew and looked down at our two sleeping babies, swaddled so tightly that only a tiny segment of each of their faces was exposed. “I think we won the lottery,” I said. “Twice.”
As we prepared to leave the hospital the next day, we received our children’s birth certificates. On the line marked “Father/Parent,” the name “Andrew Tappon” was filled in. Below it, the line “Mother/Parent” read “Gerald Mahoney.”
Hospital regulations required new moms to leave in a wheelchair, holding their infant in their arms. No one was quite sure how that applied to us, but eventually, the administration decided that one of us would have to exit in a wheelchair, holding both babies, for liability reasons. Having already accepted my role as the “Mother/Parent,” I volunteered.
I settled into the wheelchair, making sure to get myself comfortable because I knew once I held the babies in my arms, I wouldn’t move a muscle. Susie handed me Bennett, and Mrs. Tappon handed me Sutton. I cradled one in each arm as Karyn grabbed the handles and pushed me toward the elevator. “Here we go, guys,” I said to my kids.
Outside, Drew pulled our minivan up to the patient loading zone. Pioneers, I thought. In a Honda Odyssey!
Sutton and Bennett squinted, gently taking in the sights of the outside world but bristling from their first exposure to sunlight.
We strapped them very carefully into their car seats, snapped the car seats into the bases, made sure they had pacifiers and blankets and that the seat-back mirrors were aligned so we could see them from up front.
“Do you want to drive?” Drew asked me.
“No way.”
“Me neither,” he said. “But I will.”
At least an hour separated us from our condo, if traffic was kind, but never before had the stakes felt higher for this kind of trip.
Drew took a deep breath and climbed into the driver’s seat. He turned off the radio, set the air conditioning to a comfortable level, and buckled his seat belt. The kids were silent, gazing around. Every single thing they focused their eyes on was something they’d never seen before, except for me and Drew. When they saw us, they instantly looked away in search of something more interesting. Oh, those guys again. They’re always here.
Drew pulled up the GPS menu. He tapped a single button, the one labeled “Go Home,” and then we let the robot-voiced lady inside our car guide us back to the freeway.
Epilogue
As we turn off the interstate toward Philadelphia, Drew and I begin to panic about the flower girl dress. For weeks, it’s all we’ve been talking about. The gray sash. The silky fabric. The fact that it’s so special you only get to wear it on one very important day. Every time we mention it, Sutton acts like she might spontaneously combust from a surge of little girl glee. If we mistakenly say that the dress is white, she’ll quickly correct us. “It’s cream-colored.” Right now, the dress hangs from a hanger in the back row of our minivan, blocking Sutton’s view of the window. She doesn’t mind, though. She’d rather stare at the dress than the Jersey Turnpike. The dress is elegant, shimmering, perfect. The problem is that we only have one of them.
“I’m going to be a flower girl, too!” Bennett insists. Now just over three years old, our son i
s sweet, sensitive and incredibly stubborn. “I want to wear a dress!” Perhaps we’ve made too big a deal about the dress.
“You’re a ring bearer,” I remind him. “You get to wear a white shirt and some really handsome suspenders and . . .”
“No!” he shouts. “I’m a flower girl!”
Sutton does not help our case. “I think you’d make a beauuuuuutiful flower girl, Bennett!” she coos.
It’s not that Drew’s brother Peter or his fiancé Ali would mind having a male flower girl at their wedding. After his initial hesitation about our plans to make a family, Peter has rallied to become our biggest champion. He dearly loves his nephew, a tough, outgoing boy who loves to play with both trains and dress up clothes. One thing my son excels at is his ability to defy people’s expectations of him. If that’s a result of him having two dads, it’s one I fully embrace.
This wedding is one of the reasons we moved back to the East Coast. After nearly two decades in Los Angeles, Drew and I packed up everything and relocated to the suburbs of New York so we could be closer to our families, so we’d be here for all the weddings, births, and happy moments. Just as everyone had warned us, having kids upended our priorities in ways we never expected.
When we arrive at the hotel, we’re greeted like celebrities. All of Peter’s friends and Ali’s family are eager to meet us. Peter has been sharing our story with them for months. “You guys, this is my brother Drew,” he announces proudly, “and his family.”
We’re not the only ones to upstage the bride and groom, though. “Grace!” Sutton squeals, darting across the room, almost as excited as she was the first time she saw the flower girl dress.
Drew and I gaze over at one of the other reasons we moved back to the East Coast, a tiny, gorgeous girl with giant happy eyes who’s carried into the room by Susie, her mom.
“Grace, you look so beautiful!” Sutton says.
After all of Dr. S’s warnings, Susie got pregnant without even trying. She had just moved in with her boyfriend and was taking birth control. Somehow, though, Grace’s need to be born was stronger than Susie’s fertility issues, stronger than the pills. My sister-in-law wasn’t quite prepared to be a mom, but when she learned the news, she embraced it fully. Things didn’t work out with her boyfriend, and now she was living back at home with her parents.
Nothing about Susie’s life has been a fairy tale, except for motherhood. She’s only been a mom for six months, but already, she doesn’t look complete without Grace in her arms. They dance together, laugh together. They own the room.
A moment later, Drew is hugging Susie tightly. They’re both in tears, as they are nearly every time they get together. Nothing is said, yet they manage to communicate everything they need to.
It’s almost too perfect a moment. Drew and Susie hugging, just a few feet from Bennett and Sutton, who are singing songs from the Broadway musical “Matilda,” which they’ve learned by heart. Sutton is performing the role of Matilda, and Bennett is playing Miss Honey, her good-natured schoolteacher. It’s taken me three years to appreciate it fully, but what Susie has given us is so much more than just a couple of eggs. It’s something more special than we’d imagined, more wonderful than I’d ever realized. It’s a brother and sister, tiny, perfect, and gradually forming a special bond all their own.
A moment later, Drew is hugging his brother Matt. Together, they’ll be Peter’s Best Men, alongside a half dozen of Peter’s macho buddies as groomsmen. Privately, I joke to Matt’s partner Casey that we got left out because the wedding party had filled its gay quota.
While the brothers bond, Casey and I talk about fatherhood. He and Matt are right where Drew and I were a few years earlier, trying very hard to have a baby with a surrogate. Susie offered them her eggs, of course, but Casey nixed the idea. They went with an anonymous egg donor instead.
Casey shakes his head, informing me that their third in vitro attempt just failed. They need to find a new surrogate, but the laws are trickier in New York. It’s illegal there to pay someone to carry a baby for you. Virtually the only way to make an agreement is to find someone you know who’ll do it purely out of love. They were lucky to find their first surrogate. How would they ever replace her?
“I’ll carry the baby for you,” a voice says from beside us. We don’t even have to look over to see who it is.
“Susie, are you serious?” Casey asks. Susie just smiles and shrugs. We all know the answer.
The next day, Bennett marches down the aisle in suspenders and a white shirt, soaking up the compliments about how spiffy he looks. Behind him, Sutton spreads rose petals for her new aunt to walk on. Drew and Matt stand at one side of the altar beside Peter. Susie is on the other.
Six months later, she will be pregnant again.
Acknowledgments
One of the many valuable lessons I learned from my peerless agent, Laurie Abkemeier, is that agents always read the acknowledgments section first. Therefore, I will not keep her waiting. Laurie, I could not ask for a more enthusiastic, tireless, encouraging advocate to introduce me to the world of publishing. If the day you sold my book was the most exciting day in my writing career, then number 2 would have to be the day you read my query and responded in record time. Thanks for everything, and thanks also to Brian DeFiore and the rest of the staff at DeFiore and Company.
To Flannery Scott, thanks for believing in this book and for all the guidance you’ve given me. You’ve made my first publishing experience everything I hoped it would be, and I couldn’t be happier to be on this journey with you. Thanks also to Karie, Kalen, Sam, Rick, and the rest of the staff at Taylor Trade Publishing.
Enormous thanks also go, naturally, to Drew Tappon, for being my partner both in becoming a dad and in writing it all down. Drew, I couldn’t have done either one without your love and support. Thanks for being the most awesome “Other Daddy” in the world.
To Susie Tappon, thanks for your generosity not just in creating our kids but in letting me share your story. If there’s one thing I want the kids to take away from this book when they’re old enough to read it, it’s what an incredible woman Aunt Susie is. (As if they won’t already know.)
To Tiffany Ireland, another incredible woman, thanks for letting us into your life, and thanks for saying “yes.” Thanks also to Eric and Gavin for being part of our extended family.
I also have to thank everyone who allowed me to write about them, even when I wasn’t portraying them in the most flattering light. To Greg Scordato, who doesn’t remember telling me he couldn’t be friends with someone who was gay and who feels awful about it, thanks for letting me put that in anyway. To Jessica, thanks for being a good sport and for talking us out of the wipe warmers. To Eric S., thanks for giving me the last word—until you write your book, at least. To Dr. S—you know who you are—thanks for being just the guy we needed to get us through all of this, and thanks to your entire staff for their professionalism and friendship. Thanks to Katye and Jenn for being such amazing people.
To my family—Mom, Mary, Kathy, Larry, Kiernan, Megan, Bridget, Mr. & Mrs. T, Mrs. Shoe, Matt & Casey, Peter & Ali, Grace, Lillian, and those yet to come, thanks for all the support you’ve given me throughout this journey. The love you’ve all shown me is what made me so eager to start a family of my own. And to my dad, Jerry Sr., who loved kids and who loved to read more than anyone I’ve ever known, thanks for passing on your love of both to me. I hope you get to read this somewhere. I wish you could’ve been here to witness it all firsthand.
Thanks to my fellow Barracudas—Dave Boerger, James Dutcher, Julie Singer, Victoria Strouse, Adam Tobin, and Janice “Sassymama” Bech for making me a better writer.
Thanks to the friends who might as well be family—Tia Lauren, Janice & C.B. Browne, Drew Greenberg, Michael Messer, Robin Sindler, Chuck & Meredith Stephenson, Alex Cobo, Tom Kenney & Dimitry Grushko, Matthew Allan, and Michael Markow
itz. To anyone who’s looking at this list and saying, “Aw, man! Why didn’t that jerk mention me, too?,” the answer is because I know you’re too humble to be called out directly. But thank you most of all.
Thanks to Daniel Jones and the Modern Love column for convincing me there was a story here worth telling. Thanks to Richard Suckle for being one of the good guys. Thanks to Melissa Kagan for making me a “mom.”
I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t also acknowledge everyone who’s read, shared, followed, linked, reblogged, aggregated, upvoted, stumbled upon, commented on, or in any other way supported my blog. Thanks to Jill Smokler, Karen Alpert, Sandra Parsons, Paula Turner, Charly Walker, Kelly Suellentrop, Lovely Lici, the Good Men Project, Lifetime Moms, everyone at Raising America with Kyra Phillips, and everyone else who’s been nice to me one way or another. And OK, thanks to @fender_splendor, who tweeted that he wanted in on the acknowledgments action. There you go.
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