The Junior Project

The Kids Will Be Alright

A version of this piece was originally published on American Circus.

In about a month, the wails of newborn baby boys will swell through a Connecticut delivery room, completing a circle that began two years ago when my husband Lin and I first pitched ourselves into the thicket of gestational surrogacy. Then, starting a family this way seemed fantastical, and came up mostly in late night talks, where the quixotic and the practical softly battle it out. Now, we're about to be fathers to twins.

* * * * *

After our wedding in 2010, a friend told us over drinks that she'd given it a lot of thought, and was willing to be our surrogate, the traditional kind - her egg, our seed, her pregnancy. Pondering the "kid question" was new for us, but as we were already leaning toward procreation, her offer spurred us to get serious. We were happy but cautious at our seeming good fortune, and waited to see if her offer came up often, and soberly enough, to be considered real.

For a while it looked like it might actually happen, until suddenly it didn't. In the end she was fine with everything about the process, "except the pregnancy," which is understandable. Lin and I were momentarily sad, but could see that the arrangement was probably untenable in the first place; too much for her to offer, too much for us to accept. Still, we'd been bitten by the baby bug, and started searching for other ways to grow our family.

We learned early on that traditional surrogacy is basically extinct in the US, and has been supplanted by the newer, shinier process of gestational surrogacy, in which embryos created in vitro from donor eggs and sperm are transferred to a biologically unrelated "carrier" to ripen. It seemed like a strange but interesting potential path to daddyhood, and we looked into it further.

The practice has recently gained a lot of cultural visibility, but it is still quite rare—gestational carriers give birth to only a thousand or so babies each year, nearly all of whom go to straight couples with fertility issues. The main impediment to widespread access is the cost, of more than a hundred thousand dollars, all told. In our case, it was only a wildly optimistic survey of our finances that permitted us to opt in, with loans and miscellaneous debt following in short order. And even when money is not an issue, gestational surrogacy is complex and often wearying, as idiosyncrasies of biology, legality and personality converge to up the ante of an inherently high-stakes affair.

Still, we went all in and hired an agency to draw up contracts and match us with a carrier, a process that took about eight months. My sister offered her eggs to our effort, making her my eternal hero, and solving one of the larger pieces of the surrogacy puzzle in a way that allowed Lin and I to both be related to our kids. As a bonus, there was no hand wringing over who the bio-dad would be.

But before the medical magic could start, there were psychologists.

Lin and I were compelled by our IVF clinic to spend a day with their comically supportive, in-house social worker, Terry. Her questions were gentle yet persistent, and had the apparent aim of burrowing as deeply into our histories as possible.

As kids, Lin and I endured divorces, custody actions, and other internecine skirmishing. But sitting with Terry, in her soothing office, it was apparent that most of our historical wreckage had been cleared from the road long ago. We'd dealt—so much so, that, if I'm not mistaken, she seemed mildly disappointed by our relative actualization, and the degree to which we enjoy an easy love and support from each other and our families.

The only time Terry nearly managed a therapeutic foothold was when, in an attempt to sate her thirst for dysfunction, I threw out that we have no gay friends. "I seeeeee," she slavered. "Is that something you'd like to explore?"

* * * * *

It's true. The queer community and its members are basically non-existent in our daily lives in New York. And our straight friends, who have more gay friends than we do, rib us about it. "That's soooo weird!!!" they snicker, and Lin and I laugh along, because it's implausible and, sure, it's weird. To Terry's chagrin, though, I greet warily the idea that my lack of gay friends presents a problem in need of a solution.

I came out in my early twenties, obliquely, by revealing a specific hurt I was suffering that made my orientation obvious. I'd been in love with a friend for a couple of years, in a relationship characterized by plenty of platonic affection but rife as well with soul-crushing longing, at least for me. I hadn't talked to anyone about it, least of all him, and I'd been ground down to a nub.

I had talks with friends over several months, and unpacked bit-by-bit the reality I'd kept hidden. Many of my women friends had a fluid sense of sexuality, and were happy for me in an uncomplicated way. The boys were also accepting, and worries I'd carried around about being viewed differently soon faded. The most halting response to my news actually came from an otherwise straight guy I'd been fooling around with for years, who could have done without my vocal embrace of deviance. But overall my friend community was robust, and I didn't fix to trade it in.

I came out to my mother as we drove, movie-style, over the Golden Gate Bridge. A brief, endless silence followed my finally spitting it out, punctuated by my mother noting innocently, "I think I've been attracted to women," which says more than I can add to. My father, if not quite as enthusiastic, was supportive, and flew to San Francisco from the East Coast soon after he got my letter. We ate sushi, crashed a party in the Mission, and drank our weight in alcohol—in a good way. He saved the letter and recently gave it to me, preserved in the envelope I sent it in some fifteen years ago. I remember being so pleased with it at the time that I considered advertising my services as a parental coming-out consultant on the back page of the SF Weekly; reading it now, it seems almost dull.

At the time, though, it was not. On his visit, my dad told me how he and my step-mother cried together as they read the letter, for reasons that were common then and seem dated now in large swaths of the country: for the pain and loneliness I would surely face, and most of all, that the menu of human experiences open to me would not include the joys and sorrows of marriage and family.

So I was finally out, which presented as many questions as answers. Determined to keep sexual orientation from becoming my defining characteristic, what did "out" really mean for me? Being free to seek sex and love from men openly was huge, yes. But beyond that, I had little interest in weaving my life into a new community. I was much more concerned, for instance, with making sure I had tickets to the next Pavement show than in cozying up to a culture that, from the outside, appeared to require a fierce dedication to house music, or, at the very least, Erasure.

Issues of musical taste aside, I found myself resenting that after doing the difficult internal work of processing my orientation, I sensed from some a low buzz of expectation for a second, Technicolor out-fest, where I'd energetically embrace my sexuality, and carve out for it a more substantial piece of myself than it had ever occupied before. But if having same-sex attraction was genuinely no big deal, as I believed, why all the bother?

Not jumping headlong into the community presented pitfalls. Getting laid was harder, for starters. And the threat of falling for straight men was constant. In my case it happened more than once and predictably ended badly, never more so than when I managed to temporarily nudge one my way on the spectrum. (It's safe to say that if, as a recently-out gay man, you find yourself in the candlelit room of your adorable, straight roommate at one in the morning, and he's giving you a massage, you've flown too close to the sun.) Openly gay but isolated from the larger community, I was fumbling about for a life, the contours of which I squinted to see in the distance.

Certain things complicated my journey. That I don't display some of the behaviors stereotypically ascribed to gay men was one. I was usually perceived as straight, and as such was constantly left wondering when and how to come out to any new person in my life. In order to be honest and open, a pronouncement about something I thought of as a non-issue was required, which aroused in me a good bit of cognitive dissonance. Community membership displays the clear benefit, in this regard, of functioning as a perpetual blanket announcement of your sexuality, such that you rarely have to actually reveal it. I wished at times I was more of a joiner; but if I wasn't feeling the gay community, it showed scant interest in me as well.

Once, I picked up a younger, recently-out guy named Jason at a friend's family-free Thanksgiving in Seattle. We begged off pie and whiskey and headed back to his apartment, where, at a moment when little was left to the imagination, he asked me, "So are you gay...or what?" Scratching my head, I laughed, and chuckled even more years after, when I read an article detailing how Jason was then going by Jake, and in the interim had scissored his way to queer icon status. Another time, I worked up the courage to get the number of an attractive guy I'd seen at several parties. I sheepishly left him a message, and got a call back, where he asked me, atonally, "So, did you just want to fuck?" I'd liked him, had a recently-out, schoolboy sort of crush on him, and was left feeling nauseous and exposed.

I entered a period of self-recrimination, where I felt I wasn't doing enough to put myself out into the community. But it was clear after a short time that my heart wasn't in it, that I'd never be able to exert the required effort. On the theoretical front, I drifted toward to the views of the Gay Shamemovement, which I discovered by way of spray-painted stencils on random San Francisco sidewalks. They rail against things like the sponsoring of pride parades by Anheuser-Busch, the commodification of rainbows, and the general transformation of gayness into a crass exercise in homogenized lifestyle marketing. If alternative sexual identity is co-opted by Madison Avenue in ways that render lifeless the idea that difference can be a good thing, what kind of progress is that, they seemed to say. And I agreed, abstractly, from behind my laptop. Mostly, I just lived my life.

I was in a four-year relationship with a guy I met, quaintly, through a print personal ad. I finished a long-languishing psychology degree. I cooked on a boat. I almost went to law school. I lived in France for a year. And eventually, I landed a private chef job in New York, and started building a life in Brooklyn that culminated in meeting Lin, by way of the dating site, OK Cupid.

We met on a Thursday and spent the next five days together, luxuriating in a new and fastly precious thing we'd stumbled into. It was easily the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. And both of us had been so perilously close to resigning ourselves to the okay-ness of being alone indefinitely, to giving up but studiously framing it as some kind of victory. Nearly five years later, I'm still dizzy with disbelief that I found him.

15 years after coming out, I view my sexual identity more or less as I did then; that it's something that's mine alone, and all the impressions and misimpressions and noise out there about what it means to be gay aren't very instructive in terms of my day-to-day life. This, with a deep appreciation that I've been privileged enough to spend my life in places where sexuality is more likely to be greeted with a shrug than a fist, depite tragic exceptions. And even if my take on the larger gay world could be dusted off—it was based, after all, on fairly slight first-hand knowledge—I'm happy with how my life as a gay man has sorted itself out. And I'm satisfied that I've navigated my own course.

When I stop to think, I'm blown away that I've ended up married, and now, with kids on the way. It's kind of like winning a contest I didn't realize I entered, having believed for years that my refusal to blend myself into the larger gay community was also an implicit admission that I could never myself reach the heights the community was aiming for.

Part of our day with Terry the social worker focused on how and when to talk to our kids about their life story. She said it's best told in bits and pieces, with details added when they're best able to grasp the concepts involved. As young as two years old, though, our boys might ask us questions as weighty as who their mom is. As a start, we'll explain that some kids have two moms, some have a mom and a dad, and some, like them, have two dads.

My lack of engagement with the gay community has always functioned as a bit of trivia; a curious aside that ultimately doesn't signify much about the totality of my life. So it's funny to now be in a position where, in order for our kids to feel normal, we actually do need more gay friends. Not relying on the community has been a minor point of pride over the years, so I'm now left occasionally bemused at where I've arrived.

By a circuitous route, Lin and I are in the nascent mainstream of what gay couples can do in terms of making families. There are lots of us, and we have plenty to learn from each other, and much to share. I hope when our boys are grown, the world they face will be genuinely "post-gay" in the way I hoped for, and have tried willfully to live in, since I came out in the 1990s. In the meantime, I'll be here living my life, and changing a great many more diapers than I would ever have imagined.

Clearing Hurdles

A version of this piece was originally published on Huffington Post.

My husband Lin and I are busily preparing for the arrival of twin boys, in June. Lin has started his baby reading project with a history of American child rearing going back to the days of the colonies, seeking context. I found an old BMW wagon online that will be good for carting the critters around, and even better for staving off mini-van drudgery. Registry items have been delivered, baby shower RSVPs roll in daily, and I'm almost ready to attack our disastrous hall closet. Our surrogate, Jeanne, is just about into the third trimester, and with little left but for the babies to "bulk up", we're in a lull, permeated by the occasional big deal.

Last Monday, Lin and I stood in a Connecticut courtroom, and were granted legal custody of our in-utero twins. A "Pre-Birth Order" has now been issued, directing the Norwich hospital where our kids will be born to list our names on their official birth certificates.

Despite the moment's obvious significance, until we were actually there, amid dark-suited lawyers and Family Court ennui, it was just another item on our unwieldy check-list. But being sworn in, and queried briefly by the judge and our lawyer, got it to sink in a little. The boys aren't expected until June, but on a very important piece of paper, we're parents in the eyes of the law.

The legal intricacies of our surrogacy ride have been multiple, starting with the fact that what we're doing would be impossible if our surrogate lived in New York. People often lump the Empire State in with other progressive trailblazers, like California (notwithstanding Prop. 8, which hopefully is headed down! this week), but with regard to reproductive technology, there are shortcomings. Most importantly, a woman who lives in New York and wishes to be a surrogate cannot receive a single shiny dime for her time and trouble, even for expenses. Needless to say, there are not long lines forming to endure this process forbupkas.

We settled on the surrogacy tag-team of Massachusetts, first-in-its-class legalizer of same-sex marriage, and Connecticut, also a marriage equality state, where Jeanne lives.

Early in the process, though, the bureaucratic backwater where institutional conservatism meets banal discrimination almost derailed our whole plan. We needed a medical loan to cover our IVF cycle, and were referred by our agency to a firm that funds such borrowing. With decent credit, and an ability to re-pay the loan, we assumed we were set. After all, with this sort of loan, the funds are deposited directly with the provider, and we would never even see the cash. Nary a chance to quit New York for a months-long stay in Paris, on them...

But after applying, we got a phone call from the woman tasked with reviewing our documents. They needed to know who the mother was, saying that there must have been some confusion in filling out our application. We explained that we were a legally married same-sex couple, and that the loan was for the IVF the cycle involving Lin, my sister (who, amazingly, acted as out egg donor), and our surrogate.

"Oh, we don't fund loans for that purpose," she said matter-of-factly.

I freaked -- we were being rejected because we were gay. The firm did fund loans for gestational surrogacy, all the time. Just not for same-sex couples, it appeared. A stream of tense emails and phone calls began, lasting several weeks. Without the loan, the tenuous financial framework we'd constructed to allow us to build a family using IVF, would fall apart. Being discriminated against in real-time infuriated, confused and demoralized me.

An interminable month later, we heard that our application had made it to the head of the firm, and that our loan had been approved.

It was a big relief, preceded by a big indignity. You either fund loans like this to credit-worthy customers, or you don't. If the legal and medical frameworks are in place for procedures like ours, and you're in the business of making such loans, you do so, without regard to the sexual orientation of the borrowers. OK?In the end, the firm, no doubt on advice from their legal team, described it all as a "misunderstanding."

Most of the time, Lin and I blissfully, willfully ignore our status as a "same-sex married couple." We're a married couple -- that's all. While the cultural laggards finish catching up to this reality, we live our lives as if that moment has already arrived, and do what we can to help make it so. But standing in that courtroom the other day, and having our motion to become parents ruled on and approved by a judge, with flowing robes and all, came with a crisp sense of progress, in real-time.

 

If any other same-sex couples involved in IVF are currently having similar experiences with regard to getting medical loans, please feel free to contact me, and I can direct you to the company that ultimately approved our loan.

Like Candy For A Baby

A version of this piece originally appeared on Huffington Post.

My first memory is of being in a laundromat in Fairbanks. I was 3, and had been spirited by my mother from the relative comfort of New England to the wilds of Alaska. Freshly divorced, and with a typically 1970s sense of “Me-ness”, she and her new, half-hippie, half-creepy boyfriend had found a rustic cabin deep in the woods for us to live in. And by rustic, I mean there was an outhouse.

At the laundromat that day, I asked my mother if I could have a candy bar from the vending machine. It was the kind you don’t often see anymore, with clear molded plastic levers that pull out only with some effort, and retract with a satisfying smack.  But as usual she said no, I couldn’t have any candy.  My misty recollection is of feeling dejected, and moping over to the machine to stare wistfully at the chocolate within.

I pulled a lever in vain.  Only it didn’t lock up. Instead, it extended all the way out and deposited a candy bar in the machine’s narrow mouth below.  Toddler confusion met exhilaration as I pulled a different lever. More candy. I walked over to my mother with a package of Reese’s peanut butter cups half eaten, a packet of M&M’s hanging from my pocket, and a grin of the sort mostly limited to childhood. Surprised, she scolded me for having accepted money from a stranger to get the goods. Noooooo! Come with me! Come see!!!

By this time, other patrons had taken note of the faulty machine and a frenzy of theft was underway. With no attendant in sight, sugary bounty flowed freely. My mother had misgivings about letting me keep any of the candy, but she reports that the whole atmosphere of the place had turned so atypically joyous and light that it took hold of her. Petty morality be damned, we kept some of the sweets.

*  *  *  *  *

There’s a point in life when you decide if you’re lucky.  For me, this was it.  Not consciously, but ever since that day more than thirty years ago, I’ve had a persistent sense that when I least expect it, success might be wrested from the jaws of defeat.

My husband Lin and I are now completing the final stages of the surrogacy labyrinth, with twin boys expected in June. Throughout, we’ve become accustomed to hedging our bets, celebrating only after good news has been delivered unequivocally, and generally remaining stone-cold cautious.

And with good reasons: it took us much longer than usual to be matched with a surrogate, the costs regularly startled us even as we knew what to expect, and our first embryo transfer last summer ended in an early miscarriage. But oh, the energy we’ve deposited into all that wariness, on calibrating the line between positivity and all the possible caveats. 

I’m done with all that now. Nature is doing its thing. The babies are gestating away, entering their third-trimester “bulk-up” stage. We have picked names and bandy them about to anyone who asks, and we’ve picked colors for the nursery.  So we’re getting the overpriced stroller, and the Boppies, and the baby books. We've done all we can, and now I’m counting on luck to carry us the rest of the way home.

Sexing Day

A version of this piece was originally published on Huffington Post.

Over the holidays I was toasted by someone I respect a lot.  He congratulated Lin and I on our impending parenthood, and said that we’d soon encounter a kind of love we didn’t even know was possible.

 Until joining the pre-parent club, I’d never heard it put precisely that way. It came almost as a sympathetic warning, that the love we’ll feel for our children will be seismic in its impact. It goes a good step beyond that which we’ve all heard so often: that the second you see them you fall in love, and everything shifts...  Expect a flood, I thought.

I wonder exactly how I’ll feel when our twins arrive, most likely in June, with the help of our surrogate, Jeanne.  No doubt it’s a useless exercise – it will be whatever it’ll be, and will likely elude adequate description anyway – but as someone drawn to emotional topography, it’s a like sack of catnip to gleefully bat about.

You see, surrogacy busywork mires you down early in the process – in my case, enough that at times I could scarcely envision the Pack ‘n Play at the end of the rainbow.  Now, with a baby shower in the works and a deepening compulsion to ogle every stroller that happens by, concrete reality is finally emerging, and with it the luxury of imagining what my interior life as a father will be like.

But for the most part, we do a lot of waiting these days. With much of the mystery that’s  amply afforded early in the process now over and done, Lin and I have settled into a rhythm of quotidian anticipation, content in the no-news-is-good-news sense, while greedily ingesting what nuggets of new information come our way.  But a few days ago we discovered the sex of the twins, a definite red letter day.

I always imagined our kid as a boy when we started all this, without thinking or analyzing or even realizing it at first. It was just a bouncing baby “he” dancing in my head. And even after talking about it with Lin, and grasping my sub-conscious partiality, I copped to a slight preference for a boy.  It’s what I know, after all.  

That all got turned on its head, when it hit us just how many of our friends are women close enough to be sisters, how much inspiration we draw from them, and how cool it would be to raise a girl with their help and advice.  With that, we arrived honestly at the “we don’t care, as long as it’s healthy” camp. And then it was twins.

One of each! After all, two men raising twin boys was, as a friend in California noted, hella dudes.  And Lin and I raising two girls seemed like the artistically shaky yet marketable premise of a situation comedy; Two Men and Two Little Ladies, they’d call it. 

 

*                  *                 *

 

I snuffed out the 5:20am alarm on the morning of the reveal, and dragged myself into the living room to wake Lin’s mom, Patty, who’d flown in from Oregon to attend the appointment with us.  We got ready and made tracks for the asphalt patchwork that so often takes us northward... B.Q.E., L.I.E, Van Wyck, Hutch, Merritt,95….

We got to the ultrasound office first, stopping only for gas and a pre-celebratory Krispy Kreme at a Mobil station along the way. The receptionist, who seemed slightly dazed at first by the arrival of two men and a woman past child-bearing age, warmed when she realized we were the intended parents of Jeanne’s twins.

My step-mother, Patti, arrived from Massachusetts just after us, completing our merry band.  The Patties are a current and a retired public school teacher, and they hit it off in a big way at our wedding. These days, they’re peas-in-a-pod, and were off and running in no time.

Jeanne and her husband James arrived, and with introductions made, they disappeared into the ultrasound suite.  A few minutes later James was back and we were ushered in, with the procedure well underway. The doctor barely acknowledged us, as he busily measured hands, heads, and heart valves, clicking around and saving images as best he could amid the twins’ constant flapping, and stopping occasionally to print the best images, for us to take home. This was the major second trimester “anatomy scan,” and there was plenty to accomplish.

“You want to know, if I see, right ?”  Yes. 

Minutes lazed by, as Lin and I struggled to figure out what in the world we were seeing on the screen, and the doctor offering no favors.  “Everything looking ok ?” I finally said.  “So far,” he replied, unburdened by emotion. Then…

 “There’s one boy,” he said lackadaisically, like it was the 9^th miniature scrotum he’d identified that morning. 

Just like that, half the puzzle solved! Lin and I looked at each other with that “Wow!” look.  The doctor plodded on for about ten minutes more, working the ultrasound wand and occasionally coaxing Jeanne’s jellied abdomen this way or that, in order to secure a better vantage.

“There’s another boy. You can’t miss that.”, he said in a tone that passed for enthusiastic, pointing to a tiny penis visible on the screen. I squeezed Lin’s hand.

We brought in the Patties and let them squirm for a second before Lin said, pointing at the screen,  “There’s one of the boys.”  Smiles all around.  What a moment. Boys having boys, in the most modern of ways, with two of the three grandmothers there paying witness. Sometimes, a moment is as much as you’d like it to be.

Two boys.  TWO BOYS.  XY, XY… 

That’s hella dudes, I thought, smiling.

Showing & Telling

This piece originally appeared on Huffington Post Gay Voices.

Jeanne, our surrogate, is at seventeen weeks now and just starting to show. Two weeks ago she had a routine OB appointment, the kind we don’t usually travel to because they’re quick, and reveal little. But when she got to the office, she was told that ultrasounds would be performed at all remaining appointments. Because she’s carrying twins, the doctor needs to note the babies’ positioning, and observe the heartbeats individually. That way, anything unusual can be attributed to either A or B, as they’ve been lovingly termed by the medical community.

 The ultrasound room itself buzzes with mystery.  Lights low, machines whirring, and a sense of hushed anticipation.  But when the wand made its first passes over her abdomen, something seemed odd, she told us.  A & B  were bonking each other about their heads, kicking up a storm, and stretching out their tiny in-utero hands to touch their womb-mate’s. They were p-l-a-y-i-n-g ! Even the doc, not usually a wellspring of joyous observation, noted that so much gestational clamor is rare at this point.

 I was driving back to Brooklyn from Rhode Island when I got the call from my husband, Lin, with the details. I jettisoned a ton of accumulated baby stress I didn’t even know I’d been carrying. I hooted, hollered, and let loose a ferocious yeeee-haaaa like you can only do when barreling down the highway alone. I-95 never felt so good.

In the past few weeks Lin and I have gone from keeping the twins a bit of a secret to letting more people know, which is exciting and vulnerable-feeling all at once. If everyone loves a baby, everyone is certifiable for twins. So we talk about it.  A lot – about sleep training (with twins, hell yes!), about must-reads (Baby 411 seems to come up a lot), about how inconceivably exhausted we’ll be, and how we have no earthly idea “what we’re in for”–  the last part is typically accompanied by head-shaking and a tone of foreboding commonly reserved for unhappy events. 

Because we are invisibly pregnant, telling people is always a choice on our part. While Jeanne will have to negotiate a minefield of queries from countless strangers over the next five months, not a single person will rub my belly uninvited, flash me a knowing smile, or offer me surprise congratulations. We may be telling, but we’re not showing. 

And telling is a delicate dance, one that reminds me in ways of my coming-out experience years ago. Those closest to me knew first, and everyone else needed to be sized-up and judged fit to trust with something deeply important and personal to me. It helps that the response to the news, this time, has been universally greeted with glee. Yay progress!

Of course, there are upsides aplenty to not actually being pregnant. We aren’t curtailing coffee or oysters, or shying away from stinky cheese or the occasional stiff Manhattan. And I can happily report that there should be no need to up-size my shoes for the sheer quantity of liquid reposed in my feet. But I do wonder sometimes if having a whole lot of biology going on doesn’t pleasantly distract expectant parents from the main event – those seconds and minutes and years after baby’s first halting breaths have been drawn. Is it possible that Lin and I have too much time to anticipate the joys and pitfalls of parenthood?

Being a parent, a dad, one-quarter of a very modern family; it rattles around in my head a lot these days, and has since we began this journey. I want to be ready, whatever that means. Recently, my internal dialogue began reflexively assuming a parental perspective over the reliably rebellious one I’m used to. It was a shock, then a comfort, to know that my circuitry is busily updating itself in the background, even when I’m not looking. Of course teenagers shouldn’t be able to drive!! My parents will chuckle to hear that one.

I’ve been thinking about them a lot, too. My own parents did plenty of things right, and flubbed others with a flair all their own.  But when I do find issue with my parents’ methods, some thirty years ago, I console myself that while I’ll inevitably repeat some of their mistakes, I’ll probably repeat much of the good stuff as well.

Jeanne, Lin and I will be in that ultrasound room again in a week, when we’ll find out the sex of the little pugilists. I really just hope I get to be a non-theoretical parent in June, and until then we’ll be waiting, telling, wondering, hoping, freaking out, laughing, crying and otherwise going about our lives until the day comes when everything will change in a moment, and become very, very real. 

Stay tuned…

HuffPo: Our Junior Project

This site will remain, but I'll most likely be posting Junior Project-esque updates to HuffPo from now on, and co-posting here...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-leandro/our-junior-project_b_2439928.html

First HuffPo piece...

At a Rhode Island wedding ten years ago, I ran into an acquaintance. Amid small talk about our adopted homes of San Francisco and Seattle, she mentioned that she'd recently had a kid, and asked if I had any. My exact response was a quasi spit-take, "No... obviously." It was awkward that she didn't know I had a boyfriend, not a wife. Of course I don't have kids!

Gay folks having kids barely registered with me at the time. To the extent it seemed possible at all, the only candidates seemed to be lesbians with their embarrassment of riches in the womb department, or maybe wealthy gay tax attorneys who'd identified appropriate loopholes to net themselves a child -- but me?

It stung, though, that I considered it such a ridiculous question. Why don't I get to take part in fatherhood? I'd never felt constrained by my sexuality, living on my terms and ignoring anyone who might wish less for me; but this was a limit I was placing on myself. I brooded my way through cake and dancing and left in a bit of a daze with something stirring deep down.

What a difference eight years make.

In 2011, my husband Lin and I decided to become parents. After considering our options, we settled on gestational surrogacy. It could take years, and would rely on a delicate financial framework of agency and medical fees, but with a surrogate's help we'd end up with a kid of our own and it would all be worth it. My sister even offered to be our egg donor, and with Lin as the bio-dad, we'd both be genetically related to the little whipper-snapper... the holy grail of same-sex parenting, deserved or not.

But first I fended off some doubts. I had no business being a parent, I thought. I'm selfish, and I get bored and often don't follow through well, or at all. And pangs of inadequacy aside, Lin and I had talked about getting round-the-world plane tickets someday, with nary a diaper in sight! We'd even shared dreams of ditching city life and getting jobs at bookstores or cafés in some small hamlet.

Then I took the emotional equivalent of a deep breath... How could I not have a kid with this guy? I might be selfish, but am I also stupid? Lin's going to be the best dad a kid could hope for; it was so clear from the moment I first saw him with my nephews Jesse and Quinn. Kind, gentle, funny, sweetly meeting them at their level but also elevating them to his a little; serious dad material. Fissures of optimism bled through my hesitation. I might be pretty okay at the dad thing, too. All I really wanted was to share whatever awesomeness Lin and I found together with a kid, and this was how we could do it! I relaxed into the idea, and even began to get excited.

Until the babymaking started, Lin and I never had to dig very deep for patience. We met on a Thursday and spent the next five days together, signed a lease on an apartment after nine weeks, and got married with lots of fanfare after a year and a half. Then surrogacy happened. Surrogacy, with so many moving parts we could barely keep track of them all, much less control them. This took some adjusting.

We signed a contract with an agency in Boston; New York, in all its progressive glory, does not recognize surrogacy arrangements of any kind. We quickly met and moved forward with a surrogate, only to have her back out after four months, when contracts and legal obligations came calling. Then we talked to and liked another possibility, only to discover that the agency had not properly vetted her insurance, and she wasn't even an option for us.

A nine-month emotional whirligig ended when we finally connected with the surrogate we'd be taking our "journey" with. Jeanne (not her real name) was ready-made for the task; solid, serious, and blessed with a sunny disposition and seemingly a core of steel. She'd also already been a successful surrogate for another couple, and had endured multiple rounds of IVF for own kids. She knew the protocol backward and forward, and we sensed right away that we'd lucked out.

Our last embryo transfer happened in October. The previous one, in May, ended in what's called a "blighted ovum," an early miscarriage usually resulting from a genetically damaged embryo. We were a little hardened, a little more cautious on our second go-around. Hopes were not sky high. Then we got a phone call from Jeanne a few days after Hurricane Sandy. She was bleeding heavily. She'd scheduled an emergency appointment for the following day, and wanted us to go with her.

We deflated, cried some, prepared for the worst. I waited in line for two hours to get gas for the trip, but the station ran dry, leaving us to scramble for last-minute Amtrak tickets. The ride was mostly silent. Only when we got into that exam room that next morning, there was a surprise. The ultrasound detected one embryo, looking just fine, and then another! Whoa... twins.

The enormity of it all still catches me off-guard sometimes. But most of the time it feels like a construction job that's gone over-budget and has fallen predictably behind schedule. And when I think back to the "me" at that wedding ten years ago, scoffing at the notion that I could be a dad, I occasionally allow myself to feel a little bit proud, a little in awe of what Lin and I are doing.

In four weeks we have the big second trimester appointment, when we'll find out the sex of the babies. To be continued...

Kumquat, Fig & Lime.

Each week a site called BabyCenter emails us an update, which, among other things,  likens the size of our fetuses to various fruits and nuts.  Those above represent weeks ten through twelve, and coincidentally seem like they might also go nicely together in a compote.  Jeanne's been feeling good recently, with the exhaustion of the first trimester starting to finally wane.  And we're anticipating with excitement and lessening trepidation our next big appointment, on February 5th, when we'll find out the sex of the little whippersnappers.  In an exciting development, Lin's mom Patty is going to fly in from Oregon for a couple of days to attend the appointment with us.  At our wedding Patty hit it off famously with my stepmother, Patti, and wanted to see her, so we invited her along too!

My nerves are still a bit on edge, and it didn't help that I got really sick this past week, finally having to submit to antibiotics. It had been a long, lingering chest cold lasting for weeks that reared into a flu-like banshee at the end.  My fever's almost gone and I'm actually feeling better than in a while now, so that's nice. And the nerves, really, they're fine, to be expected...normal, everyone says.

In totally unrelated news, we went to Saturday Night Live last weekend.  A friend was unable to use his tickets and with the help of an acquaintance who works for the show we got them transferred over. Martin Short was in rare form as the host, and Paul McCartney was the musical guest. The stage where the band plays is to the left of the main stage, and our seats were in front of the piano he used for the first number, a sweet, recent love song called "My Valentine".  I'd had a funny interaction with Sir Paul while getting frozen yogurt a couple of summers ago in Amagansett; there were few people around and suddenly I'd locked eyes with someone that turned out to be him.  Pretty much involuntarily I said, "Hi there..." and he responded with a long "Hiiiii."  It was surreal.  Anyway, he also played with the remaining members of Nirvana in the Kurt role, like he had earlier in the week for the Sandy benefit.  At one point I asked Lin who it was that had formed a tight circular huddle just a few feet beneath us, where the stage entrance/exit was; when the huddle broke it was Paul and Dave and Krist that emerged, and made for the stage to play.  It was a sight to see, and the song was pretty good too - Paul can still wail.  Also after the show wrapped, Paul and his band took the stage again and played not one but two(!) Beatles songs,  "Birthday" and "Get Back" - by that point all the chairs had been cleared out from the floor, and probably 200 staffers, vips, and who-knows-who, occupied the floor and it was an exhilarating 8-minute concert.  I won't soon forget it, and I also won't forget how genuinely cool and humble and playful and sweet Paul McCartney is.  Good egg, him.

But all in all, things are good.  The holiday season has revved up, the city is filled with shoppers jamming up the works, and there's plenty to be cheerful for.  A work trip of mine to Idaho got cancelled, replaced with what will be my last trip to the Hamptons, followed by a final trip to the Bahamas. Followed by a couple of more weeks at work in the city and then... on to a little rest and then something new, to be determined...

Merry Christmas! 

 

 

 

Bleating Heart.

I've been dreaming a lot. The other night it was that I had a baby goat and no clue how to feed it.  That it was my goat was clear, but I was doing a horrible job taking care of the thing.  I said in my sleep something about a bleating goat, which probably sounded a hell of a lot like bleeding goat to Lin, bemused by my side.  The night after I dreamt that I had the two developing embryos in my possession, each in its own quart-sized ziploc bag and floating in liquid, which seemed reasonable at the time. Thing was, I lost and then couldn't find them.  This was less a dream than a loop that replayed unceasingly throughout the night. Pregancy and parenting anxiety is strongly indicated.

It's been a great few weeks, though.  Lin switched to working days, at least temporarily, so we get to do things together during the week, which is a treat.  We saw a production of The Exonerated, which shook and inspired us both, we hosted a beaujolais nouveau party which evolved into a 2am dance party, we spent a weekend outside Woodstock with friends and another in Harbour Island over Thanksgiving.  The holiday season is upon us -- even if it was unsettlingly 63 degrees today - and there is plenty to celebrate and be grateful for.

We had another ultrasound this past Tuesday.  What Google Maps advised us would be a two-and-a-half hour drive to Norwich, Connecticut in fact took four hours, but we made it to the tail end of the appointment, in time to see those heartbeats again - still two!  We also heard them in all their rabbit-fast glory!  No gasp from Lin this time, but Jeanne's friend, who was also in the exam room, said our faces were something as we comprehended the sound. It was wild.

It's a delicate process, letting ourselves get excited again.  Last summer's setback is increasingly in the rear-view, but we don't want to get burned again.  That said, the doctor told us that the chance of an early miscarriage at this point is "very low", and he even offered us his congratulations. Which is a load off. But being at only 10-and-a-half weeks still, I expect another twisted dream or two in the near future.

At this point Jeanne has been "released" to her own doctor, and our frequent trips to Boston are at an end. The IVF clinic will be there for us if anything goes awry, but at this point it's just like any other pregnancy, with standard check-ups and appointments along the way.  As aided by science as this pregnancy has been, it's now gliding into the deliciously humdrum state of: routine.

It's been fun telling a wider circle of friends  and acquaintances about the pregnancy.  The response is universally happy, and inspiring to us. People seem to think we're going to be pretty good parents. Maybe I can record a few saying such things, and play it back to myself as I fall asleep. 

I leave for two weeks of work travel on the 19th of December, after which I'll be phasing out of the job I've had for nearly six years.  With twins on the way, I won't be able to travel as I have, and new opportunities and adventures of all kinds should be unfolding in the new year. I'm excited.

Happy holidays, y'all.

two heartbearts.

11.12.12

Thing One & Thing Two.

 

Goodness gracious.

What a couple of months.  What a last few weeks!  Hurricane, election, out-of-town guests, a snowstorm, a job in flux... cue the frogs.  It's all very agnostically apocalyptic. 

Since the miscarriage in July - it feels harsh to just lay it out like that after so long apart, dear reader, but that's what it was - there was a long, event-less lull in the junior project.  We went to San Francisco and Los Angeles, celebrated getting a year older, got colds (together), had a visit from my wonderful old neighbors from Normandy, re-elected a president I'm proud of, went out to some exceptional dinners, cooked a few, had a weekend in Newport, and mulled living in LA, though it may have been a passing fever.  A lot of life happened, if not a lot of baby-making.

Until a few weeks ago when we had our second embryo transfer. Yes, we did. This was our first and ideally last "thaw cycle", where two of the previously frozen embryos get defrosted and transferred to the surrogate, in this case our dear Jeanne.  We implanted two 6-day blastocysts, which the doctor told us were pretty awesome-looking, even better in fact than the primo ones that punked out on us last time. 

In the interim we changed doctors within the same IVF clinic, as Jeanne felt in the  immediate aftermath of the failed cycle that she was handled with a lack of delicacy and sensitivity.  And in many ways, she was.  We like the new doctor a lot.  Whereas Doctor #1 was universally positive (stunning uterus! incredibly successful egg cycle! super high chance of twins!) , Doctor # 2 is temperate and kind, and though he too is optimistic for us, he doesn't heap on an excess of sugar.

The embryo transfer itself was as uneventful as last time, and our lunch with Jeanne and her husband Frank afterward at Bertucci's was, as ever, totally edible.  To our surprise the first "Beta Test" to determine whether she was indeed pregnant was not the dreaded two-week wait (2WW) like last time, because the embryos were a few days older.  It was only a week and two days later.

You may recall the confounding experience we had last time of getting a "maybe" result from the first beta test. They look for a reading of 50 and above, as a measure of hCG pregnancy hormone level.  In July the first result was 47, unkindly close to okay but not quite there.  We did two more tests, three days apart and the number did in fact double as they hope to see, and even quadrupled by the third test, somewhere around 800.  It turned out the be the "blighted embryo" as we discovered at the first ultrasound, the day we walked dazed around Marshall's and saw the new Batman movie in the most literal manifestation of "escape fiction" ever.

This is time the first number was 274!

And the second test was 680!

On track. But no naming them this time - Oingo and Boingo had come up short, and maybe Thing 1 & Thing 2 would feel less pressure to perform. We'd been burned before, but Lin and I, and Jeanne too, all had the mellow mien of veterans who'd seen battle and no-doubt some awful shit, but had kept an in-tact sense of hope. We were pretty chill, and all of us were quietly confident that this time might be our time.

We had a hurricane a little less than two weeks ago, you may have heard.  While our neighborhood was left relatively unscathed, much of the rest of the city got a thrashing, and it's taken a long time to get her back on her feet. She hobbles a bit even today.  An unexpected and delayed after-effect was an ongoing, 70's-style gas shortage,  the result of debris-laden shipping lanes and shuttered refineries in cruelly devastated New Jersey. Then last Sunday, while Lin was at work due to a tight deadline, he got a call from Jeanne.

She'd been bleeding.  Heavily.  And passed a clot. She'd contacted Boston IVF and had scheduled an emergency appointment for the following day.  He called and told me and we talked and I hung up the phone and got that feeling.  You know the one. Everything sort of stops for a second, or maybe it just slows way down.  Tears well up involuntarily.  God damn it. And then it was over, I pulled it together.  After the first  call Jeanne phoned Lin again and asked if we would accompany her to the appointment.  Lin asked what I thought and my first thought, and word, was "No."  I didn't want to be in that room.  And we both had pressing work obligations, Lin on that deadline for a show to air less than two weeks hence, and me going through a transition at work and wanting to be available without fail.  How would we even get gas? There was mile-long, three-hour line at every goddamned station on Atlantic Avenue, and our needle was already on "E". 

Then I realized that we had to go; this wasn't a situation where we got a choice.  I bucked up and called Lin, who agreed, and we talked about telling our bosses what was up and figuring out the bizarrely complicated logistics of simply getting out of New York.  

I got in line at one of the filling stations.  Our car is a 1989 Saab, and though it has low miles, some of the gauges bobble at random.  I wasn't sure if I was on reserve or if maybe I had an eighth of a tank.  But safe to say it was a tense wait, moving in fits and minuscule starts, with the ignition turned off in between.  The station ran out of gas at dusk, after I'd been in line for about 2 hours. I was notified by a random passerby, who was kind enough to let people know.  Much kinder than the fucker who tried to sell me 5 gallons of gas for $80.

I was frazzled, my wit's end in the rear view. I didn't think there was enough gas to  wait in line at another station, assuming any of them even had fuel still.  I took the car back to our lot, and had a surreal, hollered argument with the attendant who refused to let me borrow a 5-gallon plastic gas can that another customer had left ("this is an emergency! we need to help each other right now!"  Nothing. He took the can and hid it, as I called and left a message for the parking lot's office that I probably wouldn't be proud to listen to now.)

Back at the apartment and I called Lin, still at work.  Last option, if I could even make it in time, was to spend over $500 on the Acela Amtrak from Penn Station an hour later.  I threw a change of socks and underwear and a toothbrush and Lin's jammiepants into a backpack and ran to the just-restored 2/3 train.  I had about 4o minutes and things looked okay until we got into Manhattan and it was running on the 1 line, local, and I swear to fucking God this train stops every ten feet. But I got to Penn with about 4 minutes to spare nd met Lin, and soon enough we were eating gross train food and marginally enjoying a cocktail. (Nothing like a hurricane, an upcoming nail-biter of an election, and surrogacy mini-crisis #37 to throw the best-laid plans for healthy living into oblivion and beyond.) 

Tom, or perhaps we should call him St. Tom at this point, picked us up at South Station at a quarter-to-eleven, and transported us back to their place in Somerville. We had the customary cocktail and chat, then bed.  Next morning I awoke to their incredibly adorable three-year old daughter River, smiling in the kitchen,  " I haven't seeeeen you guysss in a little while!"

To Waltham, small non-city of big dreams and Costco.  Jeanne and us pulled into the parking lot at the same time and hugged and said hello and walked inside.  We were called in pretty quickly, to a room we hadn't been in before, for an ultrasound - exactly a week before the normal 6-to-7 week ultrasound had been scheduled.  She slid into the table and the lights went off and the screen flickered on, the screen that jarred us so last time with its negative space.

This time I did look at Lin, and we held hands and watched.  We were prepared for it.  She'd clearly had a miscarriage and we'd be starting anew, again, and that was going to be okay after it sucked a lot.  The nurse probed around for what seemed like a very long time, saying nothing, except for occasionally asking Jeanne to push on this or that side of her abdomen to allow for a better view.   One of Jeanne's ovaries likes to hide, she says, and this nurse was determined to find it.  And then there was a oval-ish black area on the screen, and still the nurse didn't talk.  Then a second similar area, as she clicked around on the machine and seemed to be taking the equivalent of screen-shots.

There were two yolk sacks.  At this early stage, this was consistent, she said,  with what you'd expect to see.  What you'd want to see. You wouldn't see heart activity at this point, but both areas were embryos that had implanted and seemed to be developing just fine.

What the what?!!!?

We caught a break.

We talked to the doctor after, and bleeding in the first trimester is common; even pretty heavy bleeding with clotting at times.  He walked us through the screen shots in detail and explained as the nurse had that everything looked ok.  He even noted that often with implantation bleeding there will be residual clotting visible around the embryos and there wasn't any in this case. 

Big exhale.

As we were leaving the office he said "congratulations" to us, which had to be the most excellent this we could've heard.  Jeanne was so relieved, we were all so relieved.  If anything we played down just how relieved we were,  not wanting her to feel how freaked out we'd been for the previous 24 hours.

A quick pubby lunch with Tom and River and baby Quinn in Somerville then back on the train, back home, and another ultrasound this coming Monday.

Good vibes welcomed.

xo.

 

 

 

Dog Days.

{I learned today that the blog will be featured on the main Typepad site for the next week, so if you're a first-time reader, Welcome! This blog been a labor of love, and almost a psychological necessity, as we've proceeded through the surrogacy process.  Until this point, our dear readers have been mostly friends and family, plus a few random travelers that have stumbled upon the site. I hope you'll enjoy it! And a note, the whole thing is chronological, in backwards order from how it appears.  There's a definite narrative, so I imagine it might be odd to read in the order that it appears, and not a little confusing. I encourage you to visit the first post to get a sense for what's going on, and click forward from there as you wish! Glad to have you.  Thanks, Marc}

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

It's a beautiful evening in Montauk, where I work for most of the month of August. With summer winding down, Lin and I are looking forward to some time away in the form of a trip to San Francisco and LA in about a week.  Summer means a lot of time spent away from each other, and with Lin working nights, what time we do have together when I'm back in Brooklyn consists of the tail ends of mornings into afternoons usually, with an occasional Sunday dinner thrown in. We manage though. And better than we managed a few years ago, that's for sure.

As for the Junior Project, we're creeping slowly out of our holding pattern, with Jeanne having recently had her first natural menstrual cycle since the pregnancy, a pre-condition to proceeding with the next IVF cycle.  This time it will be a  "frozen" cycle, implanting two of the embryos that were frozen on the fifth day after fertilization -- technically called blastocysts  -- which we are told look pretty great.  I've shaken off the surprise and sadness of the last cycle's failure; this is how things go in this business.  What's important is that Lin and I have redoubled our intention to do this, and we're in it for the long haul; in it to win it; eyes on the prize...all that jazz.

In fact, just today we had a talk with our new IVF doctor at the clinic; we switched as a courtesy to our surrogate, who had a few "issues" with the last doc.  This new one was calm and reassuring and instilled in us a confidence and sense of direction that we've been low on since the miscarriage.  With luck, we'll begin the new cycle within about a month, and aim for an embryo transfer by the end of October.

Onward and upward. AGAIN.