by Suzy Becker
“Thirty-eight?” I had lost track of Steve’s age, but I knew it was older than mine.
“Six months quarantine—”
“My friend is older than thirty-eight.”
A moment’s silence. “A complete physical, semen analysis, and blood work, all subject to review by our doctor.”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted a third time. “Are you saying you don’t bank sperm for people who are older than thirty-eight?” You are a fucking STORAGE facility! No pun intended.
She did not respond. “Ruth”—I had written her name down on the top of my page—“can you pretend like you are trying to help me?”
“Would you like to speak with our director?”
“I would, please. Thank you.”
“He’s not available. I will let him know.”
Would you like a million dollars? How ’bout a pony? I was replaying the conversation for Lorene over dinner, a bon voyage dinner at my house, that night.
“Why didn’t you just say he was your husband?”
“I don’t know.” I did know, but I find my own earnestness so unbecoming.
“I don’t want to bring my baby into the world with a lie. The kid is going to have to answer so many questions—a lie just complicates things.”
“It is complicated.”
“A lot of things are . . . I don’t have a simpler way.” I felt like I might start to cry.
Lorene tapped my knee. “It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. You are going to do it. And you’re going to be great at it.”
I was going to miss Lorene. I hugged her dog, Vita, as we watched her get into her car. Three weeks with no dinners, no morning calls.
The phone rang at six o’clock two mornings later. I’d already fed Vita and Mister and gone back to bed. I could hear church bells ringing in the background. Lorene was just calling to get my shoe size. I fell back to sleep.
Lorene was sitting on my bed. She had presents for me: little pastel-colored tissue paper party favors that became animals and a metal letter holder with animal cutouts. I hugged her and she said, “I was looking for love in your eyes. I must have masticated this.” I knew she meant “fabricated.”
The dream was as unsettling as it was pleasant. I couldn’t be falling in love again—not with the best friend I’d made in a very long time. Besides, it was much too soon.
My Day 3 blood work was normal; I got the news on Day 4. My fertility was in question for less than twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Steve waited weeks for his results.
From:
Steve
Subject:
Testing, testing
Date:
June 5, 2001
Hi Suzy, Well, it’s done. I was escorted into a white room with a coffee table and a magazine called Home Girls, offering “50 Top Titties.” I was given a curiously small container, not that I was going to fill it—it’s just the mechanics of getting the stuff in there. The nurse said, “Are you sure that’s the whole deposit?” I’ve been staying up until 2 a.m. watching the French Open. Now she’s got me worried. I’ll let you know when I hear. Probably a week. I want Capriati to win the tittle, oops, title.
Love, Steve
Eleven days later:
From:
Steve
Subject:
Still waiting
Date:
June 16, 2001
My GP has a mystery illness, no one knows when she’ll be back and the results must come through her. The secretary assures me the results are not in; it could take another seven days. (The lab typist is slow.) I’m half-convinced I’m not fertile. Friends tell me the sperm pool is drying up due to pollution, preservatives, and pay TV. The way I see it, if I’m fertile, that’s great. Fine adventures ahead. If not, that’s also okay— other adventures ahead, but I’m hoping, a bit afraid.
Love, Steve
Another nine days later:
Hey Suzy, Guess what—I’m fertile! All the results came up okay.
More later, xxx, Steve
Lorene brought me shoes from Italy. And a baby board book in Italian. And my baby’s first toy. I was looking into his bead eyes, imagining that baby, when Lorene said, “I shouldn’t have. Here,” she reached for him. “I’ll keep him. I’m sorry. You’re afraid I’ve jinxed you.”
“No,” the thought hadn’t occurred to me. “I’m afraid.” I hesitated. “I’m falling in love.”
“Oh.” She laughed for a few uncomfortable seconds. “Me, too. But we know better.”
I agreed. Neither one of us was about to trade a lifelong best-friendship for another short-lived love affair.
And for a full fourteen days we didn’t. Then the night before I was leaving for Milwaukee, we kissed good-bye.
HOROSCOPE: LIBRA
When two Libras come together in a love affair, they form one of the most agreeable, romantic and well-balanced relationships around . . . Libra loves to be in love, and two together spells relationship bliss.
I would have a week on my bike, cycling through Door County (the tip of the thumb of Wisconsin) to consider, reconsider, and re-reconsider what we had done. But by the time I changed planes in Minneapolis, I was convinced I had done one of the best things in my life.
There was another sign written in the stars. We both loved the name Aurora for a girl.
Aurora
ORIGIN Latin; meaning DAWN, Aurora Borealis, Aurora Australis – Northern and Southern Lights named after Roman goddess of dawn. This name is popular in Italy, Norway, Switzerland.
I came up with DILLON (Steve’s last name) JEAN (Lorene’s last name) BECKER for a boy. Steve “quite liked the ring to it.”
“Dildo Pecker?” Lorene nixed it. “You can’t do that to a kid!”
In the month that followed, Lorene moved in little by little. A pillow, the dog’s bed, an extra cutting board, her favorite bowls, the popcorn popper. Her music would be drifting out of windows I had never opened when I came home from my morning bike rides.
We hadn’t decided that we would live in my house forever. Hers held a hundred years of family history and I was willing to move. But it was a decision we didn’t need to make for now. It was more than enough to know that we would spend the rest of our lives together. We planned to have a small civil union in Vermont the next summer, with a big after-party. And sometime before then, we each promised to propose to the other.
We spent the Fourth of July in 2001 at an old farmhouse in Vermont. It had been my college mentor’s retreat—no phone, no cell service, no TV. I had been given guest privileges in perpetuity. The weekend was unseasonably cold and rainy, and Lorene and I were wrapped up in a quilt, eating homemade strawberry ice cream in front of a fire. The dogs slept on the couch behind us.
“What are you thinking?” I asked, fishing for something to think about as I stared into the fire, possibly stumbling upon a big thought, like a whole new room in her head.
She took my bowl and set it down, and then she held my hands. “Will you marry me?”
The question took me by surprise; but I didn’t have to think about the answer. “I will,” I said.
We decided we would be married on that hearth, like the farmers up the road fifty-some years before us.
We met a couple of my old friends for dinner. I was starving by the time we ordered. Barbara smiled at me while we waited for our slices. “You got what you wanted.”
“Hope so. I was actually too hungry to know.”
The three of them were laughing. “I meant Lorene and the baby.”
Have you ever thought there were forms of happiness waiting for us to appropriate them by sheer recognition?
KATHERINE MOSBY
Private Altars
As You Wish, Jellyfish
Lorene and I bought copies of Taking Charge of Your Fertility and Alternative Families and an ovulation predictor kit (OPK). Having a partner added an element of accountability—no chickening out, no procrastination. We studied t
he books in bed and compiled a list of questions.
I dug out the notes from the artificial insemination seminar I had attended back when Karen and I were together. It seems I had recorded everything but the answers to our questions.
Lorene made an appointment with Liz, the woman who’d run the seminar and the Couples Considering Parenting Support Group. She was standing by a conference table when we arrived. There was a large bag on it, and a speculum and a syringe sitting on top of a folder next to the bag. She introduced herself to Lorene, and the three of us seated ourselves around the bag end of the table.
“Well, how long have you two been together?”
Lorene and I answered at the same time.
Liz smiled and opened the folder. “Tell me about the dad. He’s a friend?”
“Steve’s an old friend. He’s also a writer; we met on vacation in Greece. The tricky part is he lives in Australia, although his job has a lot of flexibility. He travels quite a bit.”
“It’s great that he’s up for it. It’s going to be an adventure!” She uncapped her pen. Real Question #1: “Have you figured out how much contact you’d like him and his family to have with your child—in general terms? What’s the most? What’s the least? These are the kinds of things that go into your agreement.”
I answered, “We want to start with the minimum. Whatever Steve thinks he can manage, that way he can always do more over time. We really just don’t want him to do less—disappoint the child.”
Liz’s pen was still poised above the paper, her eyebrows expressing some difficulty in summarizing my answer. “What about the father’s financial responsibility?” She skipped down to the next set of lines.
“None. We’re going to pay for all the insemination stuff. When there’s a real baby, I hope he’ll pay for his own travel, to visit . . . ”
“Insemination expenses aren’t normally covered in a coparenting agreement. It has more to do with visitation rights and financial responsibilities once the baby’s born.”
“Are there three-parent agreements?” I asked.
“I know of one or two.” She gave me the name of the lawyer who had drawn them up.
“All right.” Liz was forging on. “Shall we go over insemination?” We nodded. “You’ve been taking your body temperature? Have you tried the ovulation predictor kit?” We had. “And have you been watching your cervical mucus?” Gross. Do I have to?
“You want egg-white consistency, clear and stretchy. You can record the amount and quality right on your temperature chart.”
Liz unzipped the bag and set a woman’s midsection on the table. She turned her upside down and looked to make sure everything was in order. Then she picked up the speculum. Lorene was laughing at me. “You’re pink,” she said.
“Don’t make me red.” I was nervous, not embarrassed.
Liz inserted the speculum. “The cervix feels kind of hard, like the tip of your nose.” With egg white on it. She turned the midriff toward us. “Do you need a speculum?”
“I still have the one we got in the support group,” I said.
“Now, you want Steve to abstain for two days before you inseminate. No lubricants other than corn oil. A tall clean glass container works fine for collection.” She picked up the syringe. “You take up a little air first—the air helps you get every last bit, and then when your syringe is full, you insert it.” She positioned the syringe inside the speculum, which was inside the midriff’s hooey. “And that’s all there is to it. You can prop Suzy’s hips up on some pillows, stay that way for twenty minutes or so.” She looked to see if we had any questions.
“I still need to have an HSP—”
“HSG.”
“What if one of my tubes is blocked? Do you know what the procedure is, how much time it takes to recover?”
“Cross that bridge when you come to it, and you only need one tube.” She smiled and pushed her chair back. “Keep me posted!” It was time for us to go.
The drive home was quiet for a bit, then Lorene blurted out, “If something happens to you, I want custody. I don’t want Steve raising our child. I’m the coparent.”
“Definitely. I’ll call the lawyer tomorrow.”
“Oh, God, what if something happens to you? There were times I wish I’d been a better mother to David; I’m lucky he turned out the way he did.”
“Everybody makes mistakes.” I was grateful for her experience. “Besides, nothing is going to happen to me.”
I spoke with the lawyer the next afternoon. She would be happy to draft something; however, she wanted to be up-front about the fact that none of these three-parent agreements had been court tested.
That night I e-mailed Steve the list of tests he’d need to take to screen into a sperm bank and mentioned the coparenting agreement. I wondered whether he could verbalize how much he wanted to be involved as a parent.
From:
Steve
Subject:
Radical idea
Date:
July 13, 2001
It’s all really happening, isn’t it? It’s almost impossible to know where to begin. I figure I’d take a chance and throw a grenade . . .
We’ve been concocting this wild scheme through e-mails, letters and dreams, and we haven’t seen each other for, I don’t know, ten years or something. I think we need to get together before we embark on this creative act. If we really want to do it, we need to talk about how it would work and all those thousand questions we both have.
If we go ahead, I’ll probably have to come to the States because that’s where your doctors are, which means the prelude get-together should be here. Your return trip to Australia—a week, or two—we could book a place in the country, near the sea. It’s winter, but it’s atmospheric.
There it is, the grenade in the pudding. I haven’t changed my mind, I’m not getting cold feet. But this is a pretty big thing we’re talking about here and for the sake of Junior, we need to really know what the hell we’re doing. What do you think?
Love, Steve XO
The “if we go ahead” landed with a thud in the pit of my stomach. The impossibilities of spending a week away swirled around on top. I was organizing and training for a 5-day, 500-mile bike-a-thon. How could I do that with no bike, no phone, no Lorene, and who wants to go to Australia during Australian winter? I called Lorene.
“You have to go.”
“I cannot possibly go. Ride FAR—”
“The week after the 50-mile training ride. Want me to look up flights?”
“I don’t want to go without you.”
“Of course you don’t. We have the rest of our lives—the rest of our lives—together. You’ve picked a thoughtful father for your child.”
Ride FAR was the country’s first HIV/AIDS bike-a-thon. Every two years, 25 of us (and 10 land crew) rode 100 miles a day for five days. The ride raised over $1,100,000 for HIV/AIDS service organizations.
Ten days later, I was on a plane heading west. Lorene had draped her compass necklace over my neck at the airport; I held on to it, already missing her. The international dateline would swallow up Sunday, one less day I’d be away, as long as I didn’t count the extra Sunday I’d be socked with on the way back.
I slept for ten hours. When I woke up, I took my temperature and entered it into my chart. The pilot announced we were an hour outside of Melbourne. Time to zone in. What was the zone exactly? It isn’t a sales trip. Oh, yes it is; I’m not going home without a father. It is an open-ended preconception retreat.
Not recognizing Steve after ten years skittered across the realm of possibilities as I shuffled through the international-arrivals doors. Then I spotted him raising his cup of coffee, a newspaper folded under his other arm. His hair was a little shorter, more temple showing, but otherwise he looked exactly the same. We hugged, coffee, newspaper, and all. “You still a coffee snob?” he asked.
“Probably worse.”
“This one’s atrocious. We’ll drop your stuff and go
straight to a little café in our neighborhood. It’s very good—well, you’ll tell me what you think.”
Steve’s street is lined with one- and two-story Australian-Victorian houses. Neat stucco cottages with wood trim, tiled roofs, and well-kept gardens on the other side of garden gates. I was able to pick his out before we parked.
The insides hadn’t changed much, although Gary was gone. The two of them had split up a couple years after I’d last seen him. The Greco-inspired murals they had talked about painting over were still intact, but the bedroom beyond the bathroom was empty.
“I just finished cleaning that out last night,” Steve said.
“Not for me, I hope . . . ”
“No, Mark is moving in the week after you leave.” Mark was Steve’s new partner.
“Good timing!”
“Yes, I think so. It’s a little full on.” He laughed. “He’s looking forward to meeting you tonight.”
After breakfast, we went back home so I could rest and Steve could pack up. We were heading to Fish Creek for our retreat the next morning. I stationed myself on the couch in the living room with an open book on my lap, which gave me the options of reading, napping, or talking while Steve crisscrossed the house, gathering up his belongings.
We talked easily, with the lack of urgency the beginning of a whole week alone together affords two people who haven’t seen each other in ten years, especially when one of them does not want to appear overeager. Steve made us toasted cheese and to-mah-to sandwiches in the afternoon. And I drank his homemade apple-carrot-fennel-parsley juice. A true testament to my open preconception mind.