by Sara Connell
My father picked me up at Reagan Airport.
“I don’t know how your mother seemed when she was with you in Chicago two weeks ago,” he said, “but she is a sad sack right now.”
The car swerved as my father changed lanes two or three times. I was grateful she was not in the car for this ride. Even I was nauseous.
“She sounds good when we talk on the phone,” I said. She hadn’t mentioned anything more than the nausea and the fatigue, which Dr. Colaum told us would subside in the second trimester. I felt sick at the idea that something more serious could be going on, with her or the baby. My stomach lurched as my father took a sharp turn to the exit ramp off the highway.
“Have her symptoms worsened?” I asked, though part of me didn’t want to know.
“No,” my father said. “She’s just wiped out. She goes out in the morning with her walking group and then gets back into bed or lies on the couch for the rest of the day. She hasn’t done a thing in the house since she got pregnant, not even sitting up to have a proper dinner.”
I’d never experienced my father as a complainer, and I couldn’t tell if he was worried or just needed to vent. I felt pained that the surrogacy was disruptive for him.
“That sounds hard, Dad,” I said. “What can I do?”
My father’s face cleared. His shoulders dropped a few centimeters. “I just want to make sure she’s okay,” he said. I continued to study his face. He wasn’t upset about needing to be the one to wash the kitchen floor; he was worried about my mother’s health.
“When you go to the doctor tomorrow, make sure she tells them honestly about the severity of her symptoms,” he said.
My trepidation joined guilt as I walked toward the house. The temperature had climbed into the upper nineties, with a humidity that hit like a wall the moment you stepped outside.
My father walked ahead of me with my suitcase and opened the door with his key. A blast of cold air hit my face as we walked inside. He rushed me in and shut the door quickly with his body, as if the heat were an intruder he was trying to keep out. I removed my shoes at the top of the entryway stairs and in bare feet walked down the hall toward the annex where my mother now spent most of her time.
I found her asleep on the yellow couch. She lay on her side, her legs curled up into her stomach. A small TV was tuned to some interior-design show, with the volume turned down low. The room had been recarpeted in a soft blue since the last time I’d been home; the walls and built-in bookcases were painted white. My mother’s vision board with the ostrich hung on the wall. I walked over to look at it. There was the image of the healthy woman exercising and the words WOMEN AFTER MENOPAUSE HAVE A CHOICE. There was the young woman with her new baby, next to which she’d written, “Sara’s baby,” and the ostrich’s quivering mouth stretched open into a giant yawp of excitement.
“You’re here,” she said, stirring. She opened her eyes in a squint. “I wanted to come to the airport, but”—she smiled and swept her hands across the couch—“I needed another nap.”
“Dad says you’ve been feeling awful,” I said.
“Your father isn’t used to seeing me so inactive. And I think it scared him. I haven’t been taking care of the laundry and all the things I normally do. I’ve been going to bed for the night at seven,” she explained. “But I am fine. Honey,” she said, shimmying her shoulders back and forth until I smiled. If she was making jokes, things couldn’t be so bad.
“I’m fine,” she repeated. I scanned her body. Her eyes were clear and her cheeks were their normal-looking shade of peach. I lowered myself to the floor next to the couch.
“Dad is a trouper for putting up with this,” I said. “I want to help while I’m here. Put me to work.”
“What I’d love,” my mother said, “is for you to take me shopping for some maternity clothes.”
“It’s not as noticeable when I’m lying down,” she said stretching the black cotton of her shirt over her belly, “but I think I’m beginning to show.” I looked at her belly from every angle from my position on the floor. I couldn’t see a bump. My mother let me search for a minute and then began to hoist herself to sitting.
“Don’t get up, Mom,” I said. “I can see later.”
“I’m getting up so we can go shopping,” she said. I helped her to her feet and agreed, with a thrill, that I could indeed see just the tiniest convex curve forming in her abdomen.
“Wow,” I said, continuing to stare.
“You can look while we shop,” she said. “I am designating you my official maternity stylist.”
We found a small wardrobe at a boutique maternity store in Old Town and rounded out the collection at Old Navy and the Gap. When we returned home, we laid out my mother’s new clothes on the yellow couch: one pair dark denim jeans; two thick wool sweaters (“for when I come to Chicago,” she said); two cotton V-neck tops, one purple, one black; three extra-large bras; and my favorite purchase of the day: a soft, bathrobe-style fleece jacket in black.
She patted the elastic top of her new maternity jeans. “What relief.”
I remembered the moment I’d surrendered my regular jeans in my pregnancy with the twins. The soft fabric extension had both contained me and allowed my belly to expand. I was grateful that that pregnancy gave me a way to identify with my mother now. She made an exaggerated ah sound, and I laughed at her delight. She put her hand to the waist a few more times, marveling at the advancement.
“When I was pregnant before, the style was to show nothing,” she said. “We basically wore muumuus.”
My father came into the room to investigate the hilarity. My mother modeled her new jeans for him, showing off the low waist and expandable cotton attachment. “Let’s go out to dinner,” she said.
“Out to dinner!” my father said. “You haven’t made it to the dinner table in our house in two weeks.”
“I’m feeling rejuvenated,” she said.
“It’s just because Sara’s here,” he said, pushing his shoulder into mine. He looked relieved to see a familiar scene, my mother and me shopping and conspiring about clothes.
I felt a giddiness rising in my body. I searched to remember a time when I had felt so happy. That night in the car, before we went into the restaurant, I hugged my parents over the back of their seats, pressing my head into the space between theirs, the way I had a vague memory of having done when I was very little, recalling the way my dad would say, like a radio announcer, “Family huuuug.”
“I’ll drive you right home if you feel nauseous,” I said when we stepped inside the foyer of the restaurant. We’d chosen a place less than a mile from the house, an upscale bar and grill that specialized in seafood. But my mother said she felt great. She ate two jumbo crab cakes and an ear of corn. “Maybe I’m turning a corner.”
The next day, my mother and I drove to Georgetown for the first-trimester genetic screening test and consultation with Dr. Aiken, an experience that left much to be desired. The offices were cluttered and spilling over with patients. The waiting rooms reminded me of Dr. Bizan’s office from many years before. The office had no record of our files’ being sent from Dr. Colaum, even though I had sent them via registered mail and had received a confirmation notice.
The genetic-screening blood test took so long that we nearly missed our doctor’s appointment. The staff began closing up the office at ten minutes to five, and the hallways and rooms looked deserted by the time Dr. Aiken came into our exam room at 5:01 PM. He was a pasty-looking man and wore a sour expression.
“I’m not sure what I can even do for you,” he said after we explained we’d be there for just two appointments.
“Whatever you do for the twelve- and sixteen-week prenatal appointments is great,” I suggested.
“Well, we really don’t do anything,” he said. “As long as there aren’t any problems.”
I prodded my mother to tell Dr. Aiken about the fatigue.
“I feel extremely tired,” my mother said. “Exha
usted, actually. And nauseous.”
“You’re sixty years old and pregnant,” he said in a monotone. “How did you expect you would feel?”
With that statement, Dr. Aiken left the room.
I waited until I heard the click of the door before speaking.
“That was weird,” I said.
“Did we offend him in some way?” my mother asked.
I couldn’t imagine how.
I offered to contact another doctor for the sixteen-week appointment, but my mother said she was content to see Dr. Aiken again. “It’s just one more meeting.”
It turned out to be two.
I returned to D.C. for our sixteen-week appointment. In the three weeks since I’d seen her, my mother’s belly had swelled to a distinguishable bump.
“The second trimester is great!” my mother said.
“She’s still really tired,” my father said.
“I think he’s anxious about me leaving for four months,” my mother said when he left the room. My father said he’d be fine, and truthfully, he was so immersed in the mediation techniques he’d learned from the conference held earlier in Chicago that we knew he would be engaged and entertained. But I also knew he’d miss my mother.
“I wouldn’t want to be away from Bill for that long,” I said. “Let’s invite him to come to the appointment.”
The day was sweltering. If July was a wet mop of heat, August felt like someone was holding a blowtorch over the city. When we arrived at Dr. Aiken’s, his nurse-practitioner, Aimee, told us he’d been called away to deliver a baby. She gave us the most thorough prenatal checkup we’d had to date and was able to confirm that we were in the lowest-risk group for genetic abnormalities. Because we’d used my egg and I was under thirty-five, no further genetic testing was needed.
“I’m so impressed,” Aimee said as she weighed my mother on the digital scale. “You’ve only gained three pounds.”
At the end of the appointment, she let us listen to the baby’s heartbeat. Afterward, my parents and I went to lunch and walked around the cool floors of the Georgetown Park Mall until we got a call from the office that Dr. Aiken had returned and could sign off on the sixteen-week exam.
“I’m going to try and warm him up,” my father said while we waited in the exam room. He prided himself on being able to get a laugh out of anyone with a rough exterior, and was usually successful. But Dr. Aiken retained his dour demeanor and had nothing additional to request of us. He asked if we had any questions, and my father cleared his throat. I braced myself for some kind of antic. My mother turned her head to the side so she wouldn’t catch my eye.
“What advice do you give to the spouse of a sixty-year-old pregnant person? You must see this kind of thing all the time.”
“I do not,” Dr. Aiken said, without cracking a smile.
We passed the seventeen-week mark. Then eighteen. As we neared the twenty-week mark, I gave myself a kind of mental scan. After the twins died, Dr. Baker had told me to plan for the twenty-week mark of my next pregnancy to be challenging.
“When a woman loses a baby late-term,” she’d said, “the old emotions of that loss, along with heightened anxiety and grief, can surface—similar to what people experience on the anniversary of a death.”
I wondered, as the day approached, if this would be true in a surrogate pregnancy. I didn’t notice increased anxiety as we rounded the twenty-week mark, nor did I feel a decrease in the levels of anxiety that I’d now accepted was part of the pregnancy experience for me. From the beginning, fear would strike erratically. I would feel peaceful for several days and then find myself being pounded by uncomfortable chest flutters, or a fit of spontaneous crying that would last for a few minutes and leave me feeling vulnerable and tense.
Nighttime was the worst. One night, when I was sleeping in the basement during the sixteen-week visit, I heard the floorboards squeaking upstairs. My mother had gotten up to use the bathroom, but by the time I’d raced up the stairs I was convinced I’d find the lights blaring and see bedclothes soaked in blood.
I charged toward the bedroom and almost bowled into her in the hallway. She jumped in her cotton pajamas and put her hand to her chest.
“Honey!” she said. “I am just going to the bathroom. You have got to calm down.”
Back in Chicago, I thought about what I could do to relax. I began doing relaxation meditations morning and night. A colleague, Angela, who’d gone through coaching training with me, told me about a woman she worked with who’d given birth to a stillborn baby at full term. “During her second pregnancy, she bought a heart rate monitor so she could listen to the baby at home,” Angela said. “And she created a mantra: It’s different this time. It’s not the same as the first one. She repeated it many times a day.”
I wished the mantra would work for me, but my mind did not feel calmed by “different.” “Different” didn’t equal live birth. Different left too much space for possibilities.
I invented my own mantra: The anxiety I’m feeling has nothing to do with this pregnancy. It has nothing to do with this baby. I tried it for a few days, and the words sung like truth in my bones.
The following week, my mother unknowingly provided a key to allow me to lighten up. We’d begun book two of Harry Potter, and when I began a new chapter, she yelled for me to stop.
I had no sense of what was happening on the other end of the phone. I stopped and waited, the seconds counting themselves one by one in my head.
“Now read the next line!” she said. I remained perplexed but assumed she and the baby were okay if she wanted me to continue.
I resumed where we’d left off, speaking slowly.
“He kicked!” my mother said. “The baby kicked! He’s kicking at the sound of your voice!” I attempted to continue, but I couldn’t concentrate. I’d worried secretly sometimes, mostly at night, that the baby wouldn’t know me, that I would be a stranger after nine months inside someone else. And yet here he was, ostensibly recognizing, or at least responding to, me—my voice.
“Has the baby kicked other times?” I asked.
“Nothing like this,” my mother said.
My mother referred to the baby consistently as “he.” She said she meant it as the universal pronoun, to avoid saying having to say “he-she” or, worse, the impersonal “it” for nine months. Bill was convinced we were having a girl and used “she” if ever a pronoun was needed. I’d intended to think of some kind of gender-neutral nickname, but since early on—I think ever since we’d started reading Harry Potter and “The Boy Who Lived”—I’d had the feeling the baby was a boy.
The next day when I called, my mother placed her iPhone on her stomach while I read; she thought the baby would hear better that way. This time, the baby kicked the phone so hard that it bounced off her stomach and onto the floor. I heard a thunk and then my mother’s laughter.
The following Monday, my mother sent me a text to call her right away. Again, nothing emergent was happening with the pregnancy.
“You will never believe what I found,” she said when I reached her. In one of her TV marathons, she’d come across a show called Pregnant at 70.
“It’s one of those low-budget reality shows, like A Baby Story,” she told me. “And, okay, most of the women are in their fifties or sixties, but one woman from India was over seventy—and these are all people who are planning to parent. They’re not surrogates! I’ve watched every episode I can find. I even made your father watch with me. Can you imagine—seventy and pregnant!” she said. “I feel so young!”
Although Dr. Gerber had told my mother to move to Chicago by week twenty, we negotiated another plan as a family in October. My mother would fly out for the twenty-week ultrasound, and if all was well with the pregnancy, she would go home for one more month and move to Chicago near the first of November. My father was happier to have another month with her, and I think we all felt relieved to have thirty more days of our regular routine before we moved in together for the
final trimester.
The night before my mother flew to Chicago for the twenty-week appointment, I received a package from my friend Sandy in Santa Fe.
Out of a large packing box filled with tissue paper, I pulled a box hand-painted with swirls of copper and gold. Inside were two pacifiers, one pink and one blue. An accompanying note explained that if we were planning to find out the baby’s sex, we could bring the box to our twenty-week ultrasound and have the technician put the pacifier that corresponded to the baby’s gender in the box. I liked the idea, and Bill and my mother thought it would be fun to bring props.
We arrived at the ultrasound appointment with the pacifier box and in a state of high anticipation, eager to find out the exciting detail about who was inside.
We gave the box to Kenisha, the technician, and asked if she would hand the corresponding-colored pacifier to Bill once she confirmed the gender. Kenisha, a new mother herself, seemed amused by the request.
I’d forgotten how many images and measurements the doctors required. As Kenisha swiped and clicked her mouse around the screen, my excitement gave way to trepidation. I forgot about finding out the baby’s gender and began to pray that our baby was simply alive and developing normally. Bill’s hand clenched mine as we looked at the screen.
My mother lay turned toward the screen. I could not see her face or know what she was thinking. Ten minutes became twenty, and Kenisha was still quiet, angling the roller along the baby’s image from seemingly infinite angles. Bill’s hand began to sweat. The moisture ran onto mine. I remembered the same sensation the day of our wedding, when Bill’s hands had grown slick against mine in the chapel in Scotland where we’d said our vows. I’d saved the gloves I wore; the leather bore a salt line from his hands.
Bill broke the silence and asked Kenisha directly if the baby was okay.
“I’ve been told I look very serious when I take the images,” she apologized. “The baby is just fine. Would you like to know the sex now?”