Bringing in Finn

by Sara Connell

  Bill fell back into his chair; relief pooled at my feet. My mother turned from the ultrasound screen and looked at our shaken faces.

  “I so wanted this to be easier on you, since I’m carrying the baby,” my mother said.

  “It is, Mom,” Bill said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Think what shape we’d be in if you weren’t.”

  Kenisha mimed a drum roll on the side of the machine and then held both pacifiers, pushing one and then the other out in front of Bill several times. She extended the pink one almost to the tip of his hands and then switched fast, delivering the blue pacifier into his upturned palms and saying, “You’re having a boy!”

  Bill and I shrieked in the exact way I imagine we would have if we had heard we were having a girl. Our baby was okay, and we now knew it was a he. Bill went into the hallway to call our brother-in-law and his business partner while my mother changed. She did not get up right away. She lingered at the screen for another moment, looking at the center, where Kenisha had saved a lengthwise image of the baby.

  “A boy,” my mother said, marveling. “I kept saying ‘he,’ but part of me thought the baby would be a girl, since that’s what I’ve always had.”

  “You finally get to carry a boy—as a grandmother,” I said.

  My mother continued to stare at the screen, a look of amazement on her face.

  We walked together to our next appointment, where we were scheduled to meet Dr. Julien. MFM aimed to have each patient meet all the doctors in the practice by the end of the pregnancy. If the action had been even remotely appropriate, I would have done cartwheels down the hall.

  Dr. Julien was a sturdy woman with a good sense of humor who informed us she was four months pregnant herself.

  “But I look seven,” she said, and made a joke about her size.

  She reconfirmed that everything was progressing ideally with our pregnancy and that she had embarrassingly few things to check at the appointment.

  “I will check your blood pressure,” she said, strapping the black cuff to my mother’s upper arm and squeezing the rubber pump at one end.

  “Incredible,” Dr. Julien said. “You have lower blood pressure than most nonpregnant thirty-year-olds.”

  I felt like early snow melting onto a warm sidewalk. Muscles I didn’t know I’d been tensing relaxed. For the second time that morning, my body flowed with relief. For the moment, everything was fine. My mother could return to D.C. for a month. And in a period of weeks, we would enter the place where we were banking on my mother’s body’s being able to do what mine had not: carry our child to term.

  More emotions would come. For now, though, I felt only sincere, depthless gratitude and the greatest hope I had known since we became pregnant with our twins.

  It was the gratitude that ameliorated the separation pangs I felt at the thought of so much distance between my mother and the baby for the next month. My bond with our child felt as strong to me as it ever had with the twins. Having seen the baby so vital on the ultrasound screen allowed me to trust more. I also knew it was the last time we’d be apart. When my mother returned to Chicago at the end of October, the three of us, along with Bill, would be together until the birth.

  During what we came to call our bonus month, my parents rented a house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and spent a week at the ocean with friends. Bill and I went to Arizona with his father and stepmother, to a resort built into a red desert mountain.

  “It’s your babymoon,” they said, waving to us as they dropped us at a private cabin on the property and told us they’d see us at dinner, if we wanted to come.

  “We want you to fully enjoy your last trip as a couple before the baby arrives.”

  We swam in the pool, I went to yoga, we hiked in the mountains surrounding the resort. The place was holistic and soothing. Still, I found it difficult to let go for more than a few minutes. My attention gravitated constantly to my mother and the baby. I felt a pull to them, tethered by an energetic umbilical cord. It was often only after I called for story time, my feet dangling in the tepid water of the pool, having heard my mother’s voice and a report on the baby’s kicks, that I would allow myself to jump into the water or take a nap or make love with Bill in our cool desert cave of a room.

  By the end of the week, I felt as if we were (sort of) like any other couple expecting a baby: excited, hopeful, and certain that life as we’d known it was about to change.

  “I think I really did relax, finally,” I told Bill in the car on the way to the airport.

  “Good,” he said. “Because we need to get ready. Your mother moves in on Sunday.”

  My father was attending a conference in Boston, so my mother’s friend Lissa, the one responsible for this whole thing, as my father liked to say, drove with my mother from D.C. to Chicago.

  They broke the trip into two days, stopping to see my cousin in Hudson, Ohio. When my mother revealed the reason for her trip, sweeping aside her coat to reveal her basketball-shaped baby bump, my cousin and her husband were stunned and thought she was pulling some kind of prank. My mother said she enjoyed the looks of shock on their faces as the fact that she was actually carrying their second cousin inside her that very moment took form in their minds.

  “It kind of brought me back to the beginning of the vision,” she told me later. “I’ve grown so used to the idea, I’d kind of forgotten there was anything unusual about what we’re doing.”

  My mother and Lissa estimated they would arrive at about five o’clock in the evening on October 30. It had rained briefly that afternoon, and our front walk was wet and matted with red, yellow, and orange leaves. Bill made a fire of birch branches and twigs, and the air smelled of chicory and spices.

  Any apprehension I’d had about living with my mother for four months had dissipated, but I felt a twinge of nervousness as I tidied the last of the pillow shams and towels in the guest room and straightened the stack of books and movies I’d collected to entertain her during her stay.

  “I would lose it within a week of living with my mother,” a friend of mine had said as I was preparing for my mother to come. “Aren’t you worried you’ll drive each other crazy?”

  I thought about how I would have thought the same thing five years earlier, how the entire situation would have seemed a ludicrous impossibility. I remembered Bill’s and my forty-eight-hour rule: no visits longer than two days. When I thought about my mother’s arrival now, however, the overwhelming emotion I felt was joy. Of course, my mother and my baby were inseparable at this point. I ran the vacuum cleaner one last time over the rug in what would now be my mother’s bedroom and thought about the conference we’d attended in Albuquerque and the afternoons we’d spent making art and reading sections of books together over the past three years. I would have been excited to have her come live with us for four months even if she weren’t carrying our child.

  My friend Jane seemed to find this fact as incredible as the surrogacy. “When I met you, you never spoke about your mother at all,” she said one afternoon when she’d stopped by for tea. “If anyone asked about her, your face clouded over and looked pained.”

  “For a time, I felt separate in the relationship,” I said. “I felt lost.”

  “It means there’s hope for all of us,” said Jane.

  The doorbell rang. I ran to the door. I flexed my arms preparing to help carry the “half a carload of stuff” my mother had warned me she’d felt compelled to bring. My mother and Lissa stood on the doorstep, wearing turquoise T-shirts and matching teal-sequined gangsta hats that looked like they belonged in a rap video. They both stretched the fronts of their shirts down so I could read the words they’d bedazzled on themselves in glitter paint. My mother’s read: I AM CARRYING MY SON-IN-LAW’S BABY, and Lissa’s read: IT WAS MY IDEA, with an arrow pointing toward my mother. They gave me a moment to read the messages and then doubled over, my mother holding her belly and Lissa slapping the side of my mother’s arm with her hat.


  “We needed some entertainment after all the hours on the road,” Lissa said. They’d found the sequined hats outside of Gary, Indiana, Lissa continued, and the inspiration had just flowed from there. “We’ve been laughing for three hours.”

  Bill was amused by the shirts and began taking in armloads of my mother’s things from the car.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” my mother called to Bill as he returned from a seventh trip. He’d brought in a TV table, a quilting frame, a photo scanner, grocery bags of DVDs, and a large duffel bag full of books.

  “I brought lots of projects to keep me busy during the day,” my mother whispered to me as Bill took everything up the stairs to the guest room. He’s probably afraid I’m never leaving.”

  “You’re carrying our child, for god’s sake,” Bill said, when we’d emptied the last items from the trunk and my mother had apologized again. “You can take over the whole house, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Lissa flew back to D.C. the next afternoon. Bill, my mother, and I handed out candy to trick-or-treaters in the neighborhood. Bill made chicken soup from his own stock; the smell of garlic, carrots, and leeks hung in the air. I carried the bowls to the dining room table, and we sat for a moment, waiting for the soup to cool.

  “This baby is so lucky to be coming into a home where he gets to eat like this every day,” my mother said.

  “Cheers,” Bill said, holding up his glass. As of that week, we were now farther along in a pregnancy than we had ever been before. And each day that passed brought us a day closer to this baby’s actually being born.

  Our twenty-three-week appointment was uneventful. We met Dr. Grobman this time. He was the youngest member of the practice and had full pink cheeks that reminded me of a cherub’s in a Renaissance painting. He asked if my mother had moved to Chicago yet, and we nodded yes, grateful that he did not ask the precise date of her arrival.

  My mother’s blood pressure was low to normal—about 100/70, the place it hovered for most of the pregnancy.

  “You have good genes,” Dr. Grobman said. My mother’s belly had grown to the appropriate girth for five and a half months, and Dr. Grobman could think of nothing else to discuss.

  “You feel good?” he asked.

  “Just tired,” my mother said. The fatigue had lifted significantly, yet many days she lay in bed, as she had done at her house in Virginia, rolling from side to side, logging hours of home-makeover shows on TV.

  Before bed each night, I would walk down the hall to the guest room and read Harry Potter. We were halfway through the second book, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione were on the brink of discovering the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets.

  I loved being close to the baby just before we went to sleep, lying in the dark with my mother for a moment, before returning down the hallway to my room, where Bill was reading in bed. I knew it was supposed to be strange that my mother was carrying our baby, but to me it felt natural now.

  When we had first contemplated the surrogacy with my mother, Bill had said it would be the next-best thing to my carrying our child. In quiet moments at night, after I read Harry Potter to the baby, I would slip underneath the duvet back in my room and wrap my arms around Bill’s chest. I did not feel as if this pregnancy constituted a “second-best.” Maybe “different” did not have to mean “lesser,” I thought. Or perhaps I was just trying to convince myself that what we were doing was as good as a traditional pregnancy because I was so tired of feeling broken and inadequate.

  All I knew as I lay in the dark, listening to Bill’s breathing, was that this pregnancy felt positive and hopeful and right. And I knew that the nightly ritual with my mother—story time, my face resting on the place where the baby kicked—felt like a real pregnancy and it felt holy.

  At five months, we started seeing the OB every three weeks instead of every month. At six months we would increase our appointments to every two weeks. In a typical pregnancy, women see their doctor two to three times total before the thirty-week point. At five and a half months, we’d been to the OB eleven times, counting the early prenatal appointments with Dr. Colaum. The frequency was standard in high-risk pregnancies.

  “The primary symptom we’re still looking for is preeclampsia,” Dr. Grobman informed us at the twenty-six-week appointment.

  My mother asked if there was a particular reason they were so focused on preeclampsia. Her blood pressure that day was 100/70.

  “Even though your blood pressure has remained low, the blood volume will close to double as the pregnancy continues,” Dr. Grobman said. “At any moment, we may need to intervene with bed rest or closer monitoring in the hospital.”

  “I can’t imagine what difference bed rest would make,” my mother said that evening, helping herself to another of the crab cakes Bill had made for dinner. “I’ve been on self-imposed bed rest since week one.”

  We saw Dr. Julien again. She was now five months pregnant, and her round belly bumped up against my mother’s as she leaned over the exam table to measure her stomach. She asked if my mother was seeing floaters or having interrupted vision, knife-edge-painful headaches, or any intense cramping—new signs of preeclampsia that could emerge at this stage.

  “You look good,” Dr. Julien said. “At our staff meeting this week, Dr. Gerber said she wished she had tolerated her pregnancy half as well as you have; she was on bed rest for months.”

  “Oh, I’m doing bed rest,” my mother said. “Let me be clear: I had all of these grand intentions of exercising, making photo albums and a quilt for the baby, reading a book a week, but I haven’t touched a thing. I am the definition of sloth.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” I said. “You should really be out accomplishing more. Just think: All you do all day is sit around being pregnant at sixty years old. You’re quite a slacker.”

  Dr. Julien laughed and handed my mother a pamphlet with some stretches she could do in case her low back started hurting.

  “I’ll just call in my live-in masseuse if that happens,” she told Dr. Julien. “Do you know I have a live-in personal chef and a reflexologist in the house? These kids really know how to take care of me.”

  “When can I come over?” Dr. Julien asked.

  A week before our six-month appointment, I went to see my mother in her room. I’d finished with client sessions for the day and had brought Harry Potter with me for an early story time. My mother was sitting blankly against the pillows on the bed. The skin on her face was blotchy, and she looked as if she had been crying. I dropped the book on the floor and approached the side of the bed. She scooted over a foot so I could sit down next to her on the duvet. The streak of light that had illuminated the sky a moment before was now gone, having dropped below the horizon line. The room was dark.

  “I’m probably just hormonal,” she said, wiping the corner of her eyes with her sleeve. “I feel fine physically. But I’m so tired and I feel so consumed with the physical experience of this pregnancy that I haven’t done a single one of the projects I brought with me. I feel isolated and cut off.”

  “It makes sense that you’re lonely, Mom. You’re here away from Dad and your routine and your friends. What can we do?”

  “Talking about it helps,” she said. “I wondered if you had a colleague you could recommend, someone I could see for some coaching?”

  I felt my neck tilt back and my eyes widen. I righted myself, doing my best to conceal my surprise. Even though my mother had come to one of my workshops and we now shared an interest in personal growth, she still, to my knowledge, remained skeptical of individual counseling. My heart brightened at the idea of her having special, dedicated support. I’d longed to suggest the idea before, especially in earlier years when she’d talked about her struggle to find a passion and a calling in her life.

  I imagined the less I said at that moment, the better. I scribbled down the names of a few colleagues, both coaches and therapists I thought my mother would like. As we ate dinner that night, Bill joined in to brainstorm ways my moth
er could feel more supported. We planned a lunch date with her at least once during the week. I suggested we try for a joint artist date on Friday afternoons as well.

  “I will come up with things to do on my own, too. I’m not really as infirmed as I’ve been acting,” she confessed.

  When I came in to say hello the next morning at eight, my mother had showered, packed a bag and a book, and put on a new purple maternity turtleneck and sweater. She’d already called one of the coach-therapists I’d recommended and had an appointment that morning.

  “I already feel better for having something to do,” she said.

  That night, I walked upstairs after my last session, surprised to feel trepidation. I fought with my desire to ask about my mother’s session with my colleague. I suddenly feared that she would discover that she regretted her decision to carry our baby, or need to spew about how awful it was living with Bill and me. The worry struck me as ironic. When I’d asked to go to therapy my senior year of high school, my mother had seemed cagey and upset. “Did they ask about the family?” she said when she picked me up from the first session. “Did they ask about me?” She’d seemed so concerned that a therapist would fault her for any problems I might have. At my next session, I had told the therapist that I’d decided not to continue.

  Now, I resolved to respect my mother’s privacy and committed to honoring any feelings she chose to discuss or keep private. I found her sitting in her usual spot on the bed, surrounded by little squares of fabric. She waved me over to the bed.

  “I had a great day,” she said. The heat had been turned up high all day, and the room was warm. My mother’s cheeks were pink, and she looked happy. “It was so wonderful meeting Joelle,” she said. “I think seeing her is really going to help me.

  “Let me tell you about my session,” she continued. I interrupted.

  “That’s for you Mom, I don’t want—”