by Sara Connell
“Then trust me,” she said. “This is going to be good.”
My cell phone screen lit up. RMI’s number.
“Oh, god,” I said. “It’s them.”
“Pick up!” my mother said, dropping her sandwich onto her plate.
“Not here,” I said, glancing around at the crowded tables, hearing the clinking of utensils on ceramic plates. I picked up the phone and asked Tracey if we could call her right back.
“I’ll call you,” she said, her voice giving away nothing. “Five minutes?”
I flagged our waitress for our check. My mother and I half-ran to the car. I tapped Bill’s number into the screen of my phone.
“Sweetie,” I said, breathing hard, “Tracey is calling us in about two minutes. Can you take the call?”
“Conference me in,” he said.
My mother and I loaded ourselves into my car. There was a lot of street noise, so I pulled into a convenience store parking lot, hoping for a quieter spot. Before we had a chance to park, my phone screen lit up again. I looked at the dilapidated fence with peeling wood and the Dumpster on the side of the convenience store—not the desired ambience for this potentially epic moment.
I answered and asked Tracey to wait while I conferenced Bill in.
As we waited for Bill to pick up, I focused my ears on the RMI line, trying to discern if Tracey was alone.
“I’m here,” Bill said. He sounded wired.
“And your mother’s on the line, too?” Tracey asked. Her voice came through clear. No background noise at RMI. Just Tracey. My shoulders threatened to collapse forward. I checked that the car was in park. My hands were shaking again.
“I’m here, Tracey,” my mother said. I put the phone on speaker and placed it on the seat next to my mother’s thigh. I wanted to hold her hand but also keep mine free in case I felt the need to leap from the car.
“We have the results,” Tracey said. “I made sure we looked at yours first.”
And? I thought.
“The HCG numbers are high,” she said. My mind raced to compute this information. I heard some commotion on one end of the line and wondered if the crew on Bill’s set had found him.
“Sara, Bill, Kristine,” Tracey said above the voices, “you’re pregnant!”
I screamed. My mother waved her arms above her head, saying, “Oh! Oh!” Bill yelled something I couldn’t even make out through the phone. We heard Rachel’s and Carli’s voices from the lab.
“The whole team is here,” Tracey said. “I won the bet to make the call, though. Dr. Colaum is in with a patient but sends her highest congratulations.”
Tracey told us the numbers. “On Friday you were a twenty-eight point two. As of today’s test, you’re sixty-nine point one. As you know, anything above a five is positive for pregnancy, and the doubling shows strong advancement.” I also knew the numbers indicated a single pregnancy, versus twins. “Kristine, congratulations—you and Sara and Bill are really, truly pregnant.”
We hung up with RMI and I jumped out of the car. My mother followed me out and we spun around in the parking lot. My mother let out a loud whoop, opened her mouth like the picture of the ostrich, and jumped up into the air. Bill cheered through the phone. My mother stopped suddenly to steady herself against the splintery fence.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be jumping,” she said.
“Right, because we’re—you’re—pregnant!” I squealed, running to her and kissing her stomach through the front of her shirt.
My mother confessed later, much later, that she’d gone to CVS Pharmacy that morning and taken a home pregnancy test. Bill and I were shocked. Rachel reminded us every cycle that home pregnancy tests were forbidden, and we’d come to regard the rule as inviolable.
“I had a feeling,” my mother said, “and I just had to know.”
Chapter 9
The first person I told we were pregnant was a mentor of mine, another therapist. My mother had flown back to D.C. for a brief visit with my father before our next prenatal appointment. In her absence, my old pregnancy fears surfaced like hungry sharks.
Dr. Richards specialized in trauma recovery and was known for giving unorthodox assignments to his clients. When I described my anxiety, he asked what I would do if I was not afraid of losing the baby.
“I would read to the baby,” I said. “I would read or sing to the baby every day.”
“What would you read?” he asked.
“Harry Potter,” I said, surprising myself by having so ready an answer.
“Then do it,” he said.
I wrapped my arms around one of the mohair pillows on Dr. Richards’s couch.
“I expected you to say to wait until the second trimester, to hold off on that kind of thing until we see how this progresses,” I said.
“For what reason?” he asked.
“If I start reading to this baby, I will get attached. I will already fall in love.”
“As if you could prevent that,” he said, his eyes boring into me over his wire-framed glasses. “As if you aren’t already.”
He was right.
I drove straight home and, without removing my sweater or putting down my bag, walked to the bookshelves in my bedroom. I squatted in front of the bottom shelf, where I had been amassing a children’s-book collection for the past seven years. I located the first Harry Potter book, The Philosopher’s Stone. The price sticker from Waitrose Bookstore in London, where I’d purchased it, was still stuck to the cover. I pulled the book from the shelf, dusted it off, and put it under my arm.
The day was warm and the June breeze was gentle. I walked toward Hamlin Park and made my way to the center, where three small pear trees stood in a row. It was the same spot where I used to lie in the sunlight during our early IVF cycles. I sat down beneath the center tree, resting my back against its trunk, and dialed my parents’ number in Virginia.
“Sweetie!” my mother said. She sounded tired but excited. My father had told me she’d hardly been out of bed since she’d arrived home.
“It’s a good thing she’s shipping back out to you next week,” he’d said. “She says you are much better at giving her the injections, and all she wants to talk about is the pregnancy.”
“I’m calling to see if you and the baby would like to start having story time,” I told my mother.
“Well,” she replied, “I don’t know for sure about the baby yet, but I am always up for a story. Maybe it will take my mind off the nausea.”
I hated thinking of my mother being nauseous and knowing I couldn’t take away her symptoms. I wished there were some way for her to carry the baby but not have to do any of the hard parts. In certain moments, I worried that the sacrifices she was making were too much, but she affirmed over and over again that she was giving this gift willingly, and I could feel the veracity of her words.
“I never forget what I’m doing this for,” my mother said during our early calls. “I feel so honored. I just think about the vision.”
I did my best to focus on it, too—on my mother’s vision of fulfilling her calling, and Bill’s and my vision of having children. We wanted this baby to come out alive and thriving in the world like we wanted to keep living.
“Have you picked out a book?”
“Harry Potter,” I said, holding the book up to the phone as if she could see it.
My mother and I had read Harry Potter several times already, but this series about magic and a world in which natural laws are not limited to those we know in regular human life felt right for the moment, and reading it to our baby was the purest form of love I could offer. When I read, my fear and past experiences were blotted out and I could establish a direct connection to my child.
“Hogwarts!” my mother said. “The baby approves.”
“Okay, then, baby,” I said, the word “baby” making my heart thump like a kettle drum, “here we go.”
“I’m putting the phone on speaker,” my mother said. “We’re snuggled on the yellow c
ouch in my auxiliary bedroom.” I took a moment to imagine them there. My parents had converted my childhood room to an annex of their master bedroom, with a comfortable sleeper sofa, built-in bookshelves, and a window seat. It had become a reading room. And on one shelf, also near the bottom of the bookcase, she’d stacked the family library of childhood favorites: Pippi Longstocking, A Wrinkle in Time, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden—ready, my mother said, for when her grandbabies came to stay.
I touched the screen of my phone for a minute. Then I tucked it back against my ear and opened Harry Potter with both hands.
“Chapter one,” I said, and stopped. My mouth was open, my lips already poised to read the first sentence.
“What is it?” my mother asked.
“It’s the title of the chapter,” I said. “It’s been so long since I read this, I’d forgotten . . . ”
“I don’t remember either,” my mother said. “What is it called?”
“Chapter one,” I said, feeling like white water dropping over a cliff, “is called ‘The Boy Who Lived.’”
My mother flew back to Chicago on Monday. I picked her up from the airport and we had lunch at Jerry’s again, before heading back to the house. When Bill came home from work, he found us in bed in the guest room. I was curled around my mother’s body in a half moon, both our hands resting on her belly. Harry Potter lay on the duvet next to us, and I was reciting some Shel Allenstein poems I still knew from memory.
Bill looked at my mother, whose skin was slightly green-tinged and pale. Her eyes were half closed and her body folded in on itself as if she were the one gestating in the womb. “Whoa,” he said. “This is real.”
After dinner, before my mother headed back to the guest room for the night, I handed her a bag of ice for her backside and drew a syringe of progesterone for her injection.
“How long do I take these?” my mother asked.
“I took them for the first nine weeks. I think Dr. Colaum keeps the shots going for most of the first trimester,” I said, remembering the soreness and occasional radiating pain. My mother turned her back to me and I felt around for the coldest spot.
“I wish I could take them for you,” I said.
“You’ve taken enough,” my mother said. “Besides, the way you do it, I hardly feel it.”
We had planned on seeing Dr. Allen for the pregnancy, but my sister had convinced us to meet with Maternal-Fetal Medicine (MFM), the high-risk specialist team at Northwestern, where she worked.
“Prentice is one of the top maternity hospitals in the country,” she told us. “It’s ten minutes from your house. Please have your baby there.”
Prentice, the women’s hospital of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was built to handle the delivery of 13,600 babies a year. The building took up the good part of a city block and looked more like a museum of contemporary art than like a hospital. The delivery rooms contained sleeper sofas for partners and flat-screen TVs with iPod docking stations. Friends reported that delivering at Prentice was like giving birth at a luxury hotel. As long as we would be somewhere different than where we had the twins, I was happy to go where my sister recommended.
“I just want to have a baby,” I said. “If you think Prentice is best, we’ll go to Prentice.”
As much as I understood that MFM would be an excellent choice for us, I still bristled at the term “high-risk.” We’d been high-risk in our first pregnancy, and that had not gone well. I kept thinking of Dr. Baker’s always worried face, the label of “incompetent cervix,” the failed cerclage. I’d liked that Dr. Allen’s practice in Evanston handled the whole spectrum of pregnancies, so we would be just another member of the family, as we were at Dr. Colaum’s practice. Whatever I felt, though, I understood the best care for our pregnancy was more important, so I called Northwestern for a consultation.
A receptionist put me through to a physician’s assistant, who offered us the next available appointment with a Dr. Gerber that coming Friday.
“Can you be here at eleven?” she asked.
I told her we could.
Maternal-Fetal Medicine was on the fourteenth floor of Galter Pavilion, two blocks from Prentice Hospital. The waiting room was small and institutional. A seasoned-looking receptionist with lined skin and a gravelly voice sat behind a long counter. She introduced herself as Francis.
My mother and I took seats in two vacant chairs. A very pregnant woman sat across from us, reading Fit Pregnancy magazine.
“Kristine,” Francis called out. We met her at the front, and she walked us down a short hallway into an examination room.
Dr. Gerber appeared several minutes later. She looked like my sister: fair skin, freckles, and blue eyes that looked cut from tourmaline stone. She took a seat across a table from us and spoke rapidly, as if we were a couple of old girlfriends who had dropped by for tea.
“So lovely you know Brooke,” she said, mentioning my sister’s colleague who had called on our behalf. “We adore her. Haven’t met your sister yet—she’s in sports medicine; is that right?”
My mother and I nodded, but Dr. Gerber had already moved on. “So, tell me how you came to pursue this unusual surrogacy.” She gestured for my mother to begin.
The mood shifted in the room. Dr. Gerber pulled back in her chair and studied us through slightly squinted eyes as my mother spoke. I started to worry that she thought we’d taken an unconscionable risk. I was hoping she would embrace our pregnancy, as Dr. Colaum and Dr. Allen had. This consultation was not a guaranteed entrée into the practice, however—it was more of an interview.
“How far along are you?” she asked.
“Almost eight weeks,” my mother said.
Dr. Gerber placed her hands in front of her on the table. She was quiet for a moment. She drummed her fingers on the metal desk for a moment, considering.
“We’ll take you,” she said reinstating eye contact. “We can work with a doctor in D.C. or Virginia for the first part of the pregnancy. But we’d want you here full-time by week sixteen. Preeclampsia can show up around then, and we’d need to have you local if we need to prescribe hospital visits or bed rest.”
When we returned to the waiting room while Dr. Gerber filled out some paperwork, my mother and I analyzed the meeting. “She seemed on the fence for a minute, and then warmed up.”
“I’m just grateful she took us,” I said. I liked the quietness and order of the waiting room, Dr. Gerber’s succinctness, and the coolness of the hallways, which gave the impression of an elite operation.
“I think we’re in with the A-team,” I said.
We attended our final appointment with Dr. Colaum the following Wednesday. The baby was growing. It now had a clear heartbeat, a little head, and a body that curved along its spine like a freshwater shrimp.
When Dr. Colaum said that my mother could stop the progesterone shots, my mom let out a “Hallelujah!”
We celebrated the end of the injections that evening with nonalcoholic beer and lasagna.
As I packed her bag and printed out her boarding pass, I asked, “Are you sure you feel okay to fly?” Aside from her doctor’s visits and the short walks we took together in the afternoons, my mother spent the majority of her time in bed, feeling nauseous and tired.
“Dr. Colaum wasn’t kidding about the fatigue,” she said. “I feel like I’m being held under a truck, and this baby isn’t even an inch big yet.”
“I don’t want to be away from you and the baby,” I said. When we were together, I felt almost pregnant myself. I felt the connection when we were apart also, but it wasn’t the same. I knew the baby would be fine. In fact—although I didn’t feel ready yet to say this out loud to anyone—part of me thought the baby was better off snuggled inside my mother, where the paralyzing anxiety I’d experienced in my last pregnancy couldn’t touch him or her.
Still, physical distance was hard. Being day-to-day in the same space, my mother was so available, I truly felt as if we were doing the pregnancy togethe
r as one, the way she said she’d envisioned it on her rock.
“We’ll see you in D.C. for the twelve-week appointment,” my mother said. “We’ll have story time every day. I’m basically just babysitting.”
She wasn’t, of course, but the idea lifted me and sparked an image of a time, maybe a year or two in the future, when Bill and I might want to go away for a day or two and could take our baby to stay with my mother. What we were doing now didn’t feel so different. I liked it.
“I just get to start nine months earlier than other grandparents,” my mother said.
I put my hand on her belly then, feeling better and wondering how soon it would visibly swell.
Before she left for the airport, I bent down to my mother’s stomach and placed my hands on her right and left sides. “I’ll see you in ten days, baby,” I said, pressing my face into her sweater and kissing the place where I imagined the baby was curled into a ball.
At eleven weeks, according to BabyCenter, our baby was the size of a fig and about one and a half inches long. In the ten days since I’d seen my mother, I had called to read Harry Potter every afternoon. Sometimes I would call from my office after my sessions were over for the day. Most often, I would call from the guest room where my mother stayed during her visits. When my schedule was hectic, I would pack the book into my bag, protecting it with a section of silk fabric I’d found at a store in Glastonbury years before. When the weather was agreeable, I’d take the book with me on a walk and read over the phone as I wove through the streets.
My mother would always tell me where she was in the house, along with any new foods she’d discovered that did not make her feel sick, and she’d report on any new pregnancy symptoms (though they were mostly always the same ones: nausea and exhaustion).
When we came to the end of chapter one in Harry Potter, I cried.
“J. K. Rowling is deep,” I said.
Our twelve-week ultrasound was scheduled in the middle of July in D.C., with a Dr. Aiken, an OB-GYN in Georgetown.