This went on for months. And for the first time in my relationship experience, this was something that I could do nothing about in terms of satisfying her need. I got to the point where I wasn’t going to beat my head against the wall over it anymore. I was in Montreal doing a show, and I came to the realization that Julie was still seeing this man, and it became very clear that she was going to do whatever she wanted anyway. So, I finally told her to go and do whatever it was that she wanted. It wasn’t good.
Five years later, she admitted to me that she had slept with this man. I asked her why she never told me, and she said that I never asked. All I could say was, “Fuck you!” Montreal was the beginning of the end for us. Though I did my best to ignore it, our relationship was a slippery slope from that point on.
Your Little Secret
• • •
ON THE SURFACE, THOUGH, EVERYTHING WAS FINE WITH Julie and me. While we struggled to discuss and diffuse our issues, biology began to rear its ugly head. After we moved in together, we would fantasize about having children, but “eventually” was always the key word. We had acquired our family pets: two dogs and two cats. The cats came first. Julie is more of a “cat person” than I am. And then we got our first dog, Angel.
Julie and I were in Sacramento, California, for a show. When I’m on tour, a list gets posted backstage for items that anyone might need a runner to go out and get. We get very little free time on the road, so there is a person who is available to get toothpaste, deodorant—whatever. I was being smart-alecky one day, and I decided to write “One small warm puppy” on the runner’s list. Later that day, my tour manager walked in with this tiny, cute, sweet-faced puppy. We played with her for about an hour, and my tour manager said that he had to take her back to the pet store. She was only on loan. Right before I went on stage, Julie said to me, “I feel like I just gave away my best friend.” While I was on stage, she went to the pet store, and, the next day, we took Angel home with us. Bingo came along a few years later, just before Julie got pregnant for the first time. Bingo was a street dog that a friend of ours had rescued and brought to our house. Angel and Bingo played around in the yard and they loved each other, so we adopted Bingo. Being “mommies” to our animals was enough for us—for a while, anyway.
I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to have kids at first. I didn’t know what it would be like, and I think I was afraid of the impact it would have on my life. I didn’t have any concept of what becoming a parent would mean. It is a life-changing miracle, but I didn’t know that then. I went along with the fantasy at first, even though a part of me disagreed with the idea. I had always felt that maybe I was too professionally and personally self-centered to have children. I couldn’t imagine taking nine months off to be pregnant, and not being able to work. I just couldn’t imagine myself doing it. I wouldn’t have pushed for it, but I would never have denied my partner the opportunity to be a parent either. But the idea of sharing that kind of bond was intriguing to me too, because, like a lot of couples, I thought having a kid might help our relationship.
After I released Yes I Am, our standard of living radically improved, and I sensed that, no matter what, I would be financially sound for the rest of my life. Julie and I had settled into our life together. We had been together four years, and she started talking about and exploring the idea of having children. She was in her early thirties and was beginning to have strong maternal feelings. I had gotten to a place in my career where, if I chose to take a year off, I could do so at any time. Financially and careerwise, I had reached a peak. I had done it. I had achieved everything I set out to do.
When Julie came to me and said that she was seriously ready to have a baby, we talked about this need of hers to still be with men sexually. She reassured me that she wanted to have a family with me, and that desire was stronger than her longing to be with a man. I believed her. I persuaded myself that if she wanted to have children with me, then she must want me forever. That’s how I made things right in my head. Children are a pretty serious commitment. Children meant forever, in my mind. There was never a thought that there could be any other way.
I had definitely sowed my oats. I was living with this fantastic woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life. For so many years, I had defined who I was by my partner. And my partner wanted kids. Our fantasy was quickly becoming a viable reality. It had entered the realm of the possible. We hadn’t planned it out yet, but it was there. It was closer. I could tell that we would definitely have children soon.
In early 1994, Julie and I took our first trip to Hawaii. We stayed in a lovely hotel across the bay from Graham Nash’s house. Graham had given us the name of a real estate agent to call because Julie and I were thinking of renting a house the next time we vacationed in Hawaii. When we spoke to the agent, she informed us that David and Jan Crosby were staying at Graham’s house and gave us the number to call.
There is a running debate, between David Crosby and me, about whether I first met him while I was playing in Toledo, Ohio, or at a benefit concert for Voters For Choice, in Washington, D.C. He says it was in Toledo while he was performing with Stills and Nash. I was on the road, and I got a call that it was David’s birthday. Would I come over and sing “Happy Birthday” to him, on stage, during his show? Of course, I said yes. David thinks that’s the first time we met. But I think I had met him earlier, at the Voters For Choice benefit. It’s so bizarre that neither of us is sure which meeting was our first. The truth is, we can’t remember. I do recall walking out on stage and singing “Happy Birthday” to him in Toledo. He was really surprised. And it’s funny because he’ll laugh and say to me, “I didn’t know anything about you. And I kind of had a fancy for you.” Turns out that he ended up being the father of my children, so there.
Anyway, I contend that the first time we met was at the Voters For Choice benefit, and since this is my book, I’m sticking with that story. Julie and I were in the van with him, driving from the hotel to the concert. David is a wonderful, personable man who has a larger-than-life personality. He’s completely fun-loving. We had gotten caught in traffic, and in order for us to be on time for the show, we had to get out and walk to the concert with everybody else. It was quite unexpected for everybody to see David Crosby and Melissa Etheridge just walking through the entrance gate. We had a lot of fun with it. We said “Hello” and thanked everyone we met for coming to the show. It turned out to be a bonding night for us, and we became fast friends after that.
Not long after that benefit, David’s wife, Jan, got pregnant. Around that same time, David was told that he needed a liver transplant. And as if that wasn’t enough stuff to deal with at one time, right after Jan had her baby, David discovered that he had a thirty-six-year-old son he knew nothing about. It was an insane year for David and Jan. We’d see them socially as often as we could, but it wasn’t as often as we would have liked. Julie and I thought the world of David and Jan. They are two incredible human beings who have been through a lot.
We wanted to go over to visit them because David was still recuperating from his surgery, and Django, their son, was barely six months old. We had a great time visiting with them during that week, and having just had a baby themselves, the topic of kids came up. We confided to them that we were seriously thinking about having children.
Until that point, Julie and I had had some deep discussions about how we would get pregnant and what our parenting philosophies consisted of. I couldn’t imagine getting pregnant at that point in my career, but the ticking of Julie’s biological clock was getting louder by the month. She was ready to do it. For a lot of different reasons, we decided that she would be the one to carry the baby. She wanted to do it. She wanted to have that experience. We also decided that artificial insemination was, for us, the best method for getting pregnant. I was still having some major issues with Julie’s desire to be with a man, and the thought of her making love with the father of our baby was too much for me to handle. It would have b
een a wedge between us, and, I also believe, between the child and me. If Julie had insisted on having intercourse with a man to get pregnant, then because of our past and as difficult as it would have been for me, I resigned myself to accepting that method, as long as I could be there at the conception. It was important to me because it was something that I would never be able to give to her myself. I wanted to be as involved as possible. We had also discussed the idea of harvesting my eggs, fertilizing them, and then having Julie carry the embryo through the miracle of in-vitro fertilization. The surgery to harvest the eggs is a major operation, and the recovery time for me would have been fairly significant. I also had fibroid tumors in my uterus, which made my periods very painful, and they were getting worse and worse. My doctor told me that I would probably have a difficult time getting pregnant. In the scheme of things, I knew that it didn’t matter to me one bit where our children came from, Julie’s body or mine. They would always be our children. The blood connection didn’t make a difference to me at all.
We talked about using a sperm bank, but we felt it was important that our children know who their biological father is and understand their lineage and the people they have come from. Their father would not have to be in their life all the time, but when they asked whether they have a daddy, we wanted to be able to say to them, “Yes, and this is who he is.”
David and Jan started asking us if we had considered anyone to be the donor, and we told them that we had. Aside from Brad Pitt, who was mentioned in a tabloid rumor, we were considering any number of people from Jackson Browne to an old high-school friend of Julie’s to my tour manager, Steven Girmant. We never had a conversation about this with any of these men, so none of them even knew he was on our list. We were just musing about possible donors. People have asked me whether a musical background was an essential factor in our decision. The truth is, it wasn’t ever really a factor. I don’t believe that there is such a thing as an inherited music gene. Other than myself, there’s no musical talent to speak of in my family, so I never gave it much thought in making this decision. Looks didn’t play a big part in our decision, either. It wasn’t like we were trying to find someone who had features similar to my own so that the kids would truly resemble both of us. It was really a special situation and only a very special person would understand that being a biological parent did not obligate him or include him in parenting the child in any way, beyond the biological gift. We wanted someone who could understand and accept that he is the child’s biological father, but no parenting is involved. That’s not an easy situation for anyone. It is a difficult line. Some men would be fine with it, in theory; others would simply not be able to separate the two roles.
As we continued our talk with David and Jan that day, Jan said to us, “Well, what about David?” Julie and I just looked at each other—none of us had given any thought to this before. David stood there for a moment, contemplating the idea, and then said, “Yeah, what about me?” We couldn’t believe that he was being serious. They had just had a child themselves, and they knew the glorious miracle of childbirth—the blessing of it. And David’s life had just been saved. He had a whole newfound love of life, because someone had just given him a new liver. Now he could give us something so that we might have a life as parents. It was very beautiful. The gesture was selfless and pure. When we left the house that day, we reminded ourselves that they had made the generous offer rather quickly and offhandedly. Maybe they didn’t realize what they were offering. Julie kept asking me whether I thought they were serious. I just kept saying, “Well, I don’t know.”
We talked about it for a year or so before we made the decision. It was such an incredible offer. We had some concerns about David’s past health issues. We considered his earlier addiction problems, but we knew that he was fully recovered and had been sober for eight years. Julie researched everything we needed to know about sperm. She found out that sperm regenerates itself every seventy-two hours, so anything he had done in the past would not be an issue for this pregnancy. We knew that addiction can be inherited, and because Julie and I both have family histories of addiction, transmission of an addiction gene would have been possible anyway. We were willing to take that chance. David and Jan had a new baby who was in perfect health. We knew this couple, we respected and loved them, and they were not a part of our everyday life. We decided that we would call them and see if they were serious. Turns out, they were.
Pregnancy
BEING THE PERFECT VIRGO, JULIE STARTED THE PROCESS of preparing her body for pregnancy with precision and perfection. She started marking charts of her ovulation cycles. She knew exactly what day she could get pregnant. Then she factored in my touring schedule. By this time, my next album, Your Little Secret, had come out, and I was getting ready to go on an eight-month tour of America and Europe. We backdated nine months from the end of my tour (January 1997) and we figured that the first date Julie could get pregnant would be in May 1996. After my eight months of touring, I’d be home and available to take some time off in January.
We decided that we would try to get pregnant in May. Julie had it all worked it out, right down to the day. She made the call to the Crosbys. It just so happened that David was to be in L.A. on the exact day that Julie was ovulating. He was rehearsing with Stills and Nash for a show. He said that he’d come by the house that afternoon and drop “it” by. I remember that we had painters working on the house, and we wondered what they would think when David Crosby stopped by the house to deliver a curious-looking brown paper bag.
We lit some candles in the bedroom, and we were nervous waiting for David to bring the stuff. David drove up in a big black Suburban. Sure enough, the painters were having lunch outside, and they saw David Crosby get out with this brown paper bag. I answered the door, he handed it to me, and gave me a big hug and a kiss. All I could say was, “Thank you so much.” I was really moved. He got back in the Suburban and drove off.
Julie had been to the fertility doctor before the day of conception, so she was fully aware of the procedure. Our doctor was the same doctor Jan and David had used for the birth of their son, so he knew that David’s sperm was good. Julie had asked the doctor if the procedure had to take place in his office or if we could do it ourselves at home. The doctor reassured us that as long as we got the sperm in the right place, we could easily get pregnant at home. David had delivered the gift in a plastic prescription cup that had a lid on it. We had the little baby-size medicine syringe. We made love. We took that gift and placed it where it needed to be, and we waited. We stayed in bed for a little while, and I asked Julie, “Well, are you pregnant?” Of course, we wouldn’t know for two weeks, but Julie was convinced that she could feel it happening inside her later that day. She kept saying, “I know it’s happening. I can feel it right here.” She insisted that she felt herself getting pregnant.
She obviously knows her body. I thought we’d be doing this for months. I couldn’t believe that it could be so easy. Every day for the next two weeks, Julie kept checking to see whether she was pregnant. She went to the doctor, who reaffirmed that it was too soon to know. She peed on a stick. She had a blood test. She was just so anxious to know. After about ten days, she was getting frustrated. Two weeks after we had made love, Julie got out of bed really early. I think it was around six in the morning. I remember lying in bed and hearing the rustling of paper, and something opening. I thought, “Damn, she’s started her period.” I turned around and I went back to sleep. The next thing I heard was Julie saying, “Melissa, come in here. Can you read this? Tell me what it says.” It was like that television commercial where the couples find out whether they are pregnant! I was like Dick Van Dyke. I fell out of the bed and went to the bathroom. “Is that two lines?”
“Yes,” I said, “that is definitely two lines.” She got dressed, went to the doctor, and got a blood test to be sure. She called me later and said, “Yes, I’m pregnant.” It doesn’t always happen like that. We have known couples who tr
ied for months, and even years. If you’re lucky, it takes. Julie always said she had fertility guilt. Boom! First try. We called David and Jan and gave them the news. They were thrilled for us.
It’s such a journey when you’re pregnant. The first twelve weeks of pregnancy are the riskiest in terms of miscarriage. We didn’t tell anybody that we were pregnant until after the first trimester. We didn’t tell our parents. We didn’t tell anybody. I think Julie told her closest, closest friend, but, for the most part, we were definitely lying low. Toward the end of the summer, word of Julie’s pregnancy had leaked. I was about to begin touring in Europe with Bryan Adams, and Julie was four months pregnant, with raging hormones. Just before I left, we were faced with a sudden barrage of questions from the media.
The gist of the media position was: “Whoa, two lesbians; well, that’s okay. But you’re going to have a baby?” Everyone wanted to know how we did that. It certainly wasn’t immaculate. It was a really intimate thing between the two of us, and we weren’t ready to talk about how it happened. There were the big jokes that just seemed to go on and on and on. We’ve always had a very good sense of humor about everything. Even though we weren’t looking to get any publicity out of Julie’s pregnancy, there seemed to be a lot of questions, so we thought that we would agree to do one television interview and one print interview so that there would be no misconceptions about the birth of our child. We figured that if we gave these two interviews, everyone would leave us alone, and Julie could have a peaceful pregnancy and birth. We did 20/20 and Newsweek. We turned out to be the cover story of Newsweek.
I went to Europe and I basically toured the whole time Julie was pregnant. I think that was the biggest mistake I made. A pregnancy is an incredibly emotional, crazy time. Julie had never been pregnant before, and I think she felt I had left her all alone. It wasn’t my intent; we had planned for me to be gone. But I was wracked with guilt over it. Being apart was very, very hard for both of us. We hadn’t realized the impact being pregnant would have on our lives, on our relationship, and on each other. That I worked while Julie was pregnant is probably the only regret I have from that time. I tried to compensate by not working during her second pregnancy or for a year after our son Beckett was born.
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