Page 8 of The Surrogate Mother
Is this girl kidding me? This is far from the first time I’ve fielded a call from a lovestruck coed, and usually, it’s funny. Sam and I laugh about it. But right now, I don’t feel like laughing.
“Listen,April,” I hiss into the phone. “This is Dr. Adler’swifeand I would appreciate you not calling him at his home ever again.”
“Oh.” The girl’s playful tone disappears. “Sorry, I didn’t realize—”
The lock turns in the front door. Sam finally managed to park the damn car.
“And,” I add, before he can come inside and stop me, “you are never, ever to bother Dr. Adler again. If I hear you have contacted him—either here or on campus—I willmake sure you’re reported to the dean for harassment. Understand?”
Sam walks into the apartment in the middle of that sentence. I’m not sure how much of my little tirade he heard, but his brown eyes go wide. Enough, I guess.
“Okay,” the girl says softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Good,” I say. And then I slam down the receiver.
That’s the best part about having a landline. You can slam it down. You don’t get the joy of slamming a phone down when you’re on a cell phone. What can you do—press “end call” really angrily?
Sam runs a hand through his hair, but does the thing he always does where he stops midway through his scalp so that his hair stands up straight. “Uh, who was that?”
“One of your students.”
His mouth falls open. “You talked that way to my student?”
“Yep.”
I stare at him, daring him to scold me further. I don’t want to fight with Sam right now, but I will. It would be only too easy.
But he doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he crosses the room and plops down next to me on the sofa. He reaches for my hand, and just like that, all the anger drains out of me. And all that’s left is sadness. And emptiness.
I can’t believe we’re not going to have our baby. I had so wanted this to happen. More than words can express.
Ironically, it was Sam who initially pushed for us to have a child while I resisted. Not that I didn’t want children—I definitely did, but not until I was at least thirty-four, when my career was on solid footing. Denise had ranted long and hard about what motherhood would do to my prospects at Stewart, and it had left an imprint. Iwanted to wait.Thirty-five,I told Sam when we got married.Maybe thirty-four, depending on how things are going.
Sam felt differently about it. His own father had been forty when he was born and then died suddenly of a heart attack when he was in high school. His dad never got to see him graduate high school or college, never got to see him become a professor, never got to be at his wedding. Although he’s in much better physical condition than his father ever was, Sam was terrified of being an “old dad” and missing out on large chunks of his children’s lives.
“I don’t want to die when my kids are still in school,” he said, his voice breaking.
So right after we got married, he started gently pushing for us to try for a baby. I was only twenty-seven at the time and it felt inconceivable. But when Sam hit thirty, his pleas became more insistent. And then Shelley and Rick decided to start trying, so I finally gave in.
When I first stopped my birth control pills, I was some combination of nervous and excited. I joked with Sam that I hoped it took more than a month or two to conceive. Still, I was surprised when my first pregnancy test was negative. As a healthy twenty-nine-year-old woman, I had always assumed that the second I missed even a single pill, I’d be instantly knocked up. It was a reprieve though—one extra month without worrying about the responsibility of impending motherhood. Sam and I laughed it off, saying this way we got to have more fun trying.
After six months, we weren’t laughing anymore.
Sam went to get his sperm checked. His boys were perfectly fine, and due to our relatively young age, my OB/GYN encouraged us to keep trying for another six months before we got too worried. Those six months wentby, Shelley gave birth to her first child, and I still didn’t have a positive pregnancy test. It was time to investigate further.
And that’s when it all went downhill.
My doctor told me I probably had suffered some sort of infection that left deep scarring in my uterus and especially my fallopian tubes. Natural conception, she told me, would be impossible. We went straight for IVF, even though I was warned even that had a low chance of success given my “inhospitable uterus.” Sam gave me hormone injections at home to stimulate egg production, but when they retrieved my eggs, those too were deemed to be “poor quality.”
I felt like an absolute failure as a woman. My uterus was damaged, my eggs were poor quality, and all our attempts at IVF were expensive disasters. I was wracked with guilt that my “normal” husband couldn’t have the child he wanted all thanks to me, even though he swore again and again that he didn’t blame me. Meanwhile, my boss Denise was utterly unsympathetic about my need to rush out to appointments with the fertility specialist, or about the meeting I had to reschedule when my single successful pregnancy aborted itself after three short weeks.
For a time, I was obsessed with trying to conceive. I dove into it with the same intensity that had made me so successful at my job. I went vegan for a while. I drank something called “fertility tea” that tasted like the dust from our coffee table. I visited every infertility forum I could find and became well-versed in the lingo: TTC meant “trying to conceive” as in “I’ve been TTC for three years with no luck.” AF meant “Aunt Flo”—the dreaded monthly blood that meant another failure. DPT meant “days past transfer” after an embryo was transferred into my uterus—a countdown until the next time I could POAS (“pee on a stick”).
And then every time a woman on the board wouldannounce her pregnancy, we’d all congratulate her, but I’d get a sick feeling it would never be me.
If it were up to me, I might have kept going with IVF until we were destitute, but it was Sam who brought up the idea of adoption.It will still be our child,he said. I resisted, having heard horror stories from other women on the forums about adoptions gone wrong, but Sam again pushed until I gave in. He was right—we wanted to be parents and this was our only option.
Once we became immersed in the adoption process, I grew cautiously optimistic. I had wanted a child for what felt like forever now—it was a dream come true that it would soon be a reality. Unfortunately, nothing in the adoption process was quick. After carefully deciding on an agency, we had to complete a homestudy, which was the full body cavity search of the adoption process—the agency’s social worker visited us repeatedly, requesting every legal document that had ever been issued to us in our lifetime. I didn’t understand how they couldn’t just look at me and Sam and realize we’d be good parents, but I guess there are guidelines.
