The Junior Project

Y.H.G.T.B.F.K.M.

The rest of the summer flowed by.  Work took me away from the city as often as usual, but by then Lin and I were pros at the apart/reunite  routine , and even took joy in it occasionally.  Time passed quickly in that August heat, though, mainly  because we had found our surrogate, Amy, and we were terribly excited. The absence of any baby duties -- paperwork, phone calls, check writing -- was a bonus.

Every year after Labor Day I take two weeks off,  and since 2009, Lin and I have taken a trip together during that time.  That first year we got engaged, in 2010 we went to a friend's wedding in Germany followed by honeymooning in Paris and Barcelona, and in 2011 we were back to the West Coast – California and Oregon – to celebrate Lin's 35th and my 40th.  It's then that we started spreading the news among friends and family that The Junior Project had taken off, and that with any luck we'd have an embryo transfer by November! People were psyched for us, and it felt good.

Our first stops were Portland and the Oregon Coast. Lin's parents had recently gotten a cabin on a lake, and we spent a night there with the whole Sorensen clan, including Lin's brother Colin and his fiancé Amy, and Lin's incredible grandmother Faye, and her husband, Frank, who were in from Idaho. We kayaked and ate crab and drank beer and generally got waist-deep in the kind of bonding you hope for when marrying into a family.  Lord did I luck out with this bunch.

Next to San Francisco, where I somehow still had my North Beach apartment.  On September 8th, my birthday dinner with mom and friends, was at Bar Tartine, followed by drinks at the always-engaging Zeitgeist. (My, though, how little it resembles the place I first stumbled through 12 years ago! Real bathrooms?!) The night was full of mirth , and it was great to be back in San Francisco, where in ways I had in fact left my heart. Even if turning 40 had managed to mess with my head a bit, this was a pretty good night, I thought.  The friends I have there never fail to  nurture me, and generally  bring about spontaneous bursts of happiness. 

For Lin's birthday on the 11th, we went back to Chez Panisse, 2 years to the day after our engagement dinner.  We got the same table we'd had in 2009, but switched seats, in an esoteric nod to symmetry, or a concrete attempt to see things from each others point of view, literally. The food was good, very good, but not the transporting experice we'd had the last time.  Afterward we went to Spec's like we had two years before, and it turned into a sort of magical mystery reunion of neighborhood characters I hadn't seen in years.  A bit of a shuffle home, as I (barely) recall...

Next to L.A. for a few days, where Lin had lived 10 years before, and where I was for several weeks in 1996, after my San Francisco housing fell through at the last minute and I was sent to stay with my cousin Patrick. (How Downton is that?), We spent the first night with Lin's old friend Eitan and his wife Natalie, and their son Mirko on a hill above Silverlake.  A more adorable, smarter or kinder young family I challenge you to find anywhere.  And L.A., hmmmm, weren't you seeming much more charming than I'd ever found you before?!

We spent the next two nights at the Château Marmont, but if I told you any stories I'm sure their secret police would presently slay me where I type.  Ah, who cares? It was pretty awesome.  We were in the Room 68 -- where Shelley Winters'  husband fled during their honeymoon to tryst with an Italian ingenue --  until the next day, they downgraded us to what I referred to as the broom closet, which actually wasn't so bad.  We had a big dinner in their courtyard on Saturday with a couple of Lin's friends and a couple of mine, and had a petite soirée upstairs afterwards, like you do.  I think we made the most of it, mainly because when the hell are we going to spend that much on a place to lay ours head again?

On our last night I even managed a requsite L.A. famous-person encounter, with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver,  in a bathroom backstage at the Shrine. Our friend Colin plays in the band, and was nice enough to get us into the show, and somehow we ended up with all-access badges rather the the expected after-party-only ones.   So right after the lush, tear-worthy performance we ended up in a desserted area behind stage right, where it took about 3 seconds to realize we should be elsewhere. But I had to use the bathroom, and did, only to bump into Justin on my way out of the tiny stall in the tiny room. Annoyingly, no words came ot of my mouth, except maybe a small grunt, when he, surprised a little,  said "hi".  So that was weird. But what a show.

Getting back to Brooklyn after this two-week blur of friends and family and eating and drinking and life-affirming positivity, we reveled in how much we loved the West and our people there.  My friend Karen said to me once that you never come back from a trip the exact person you were before you left, and I felt that a lot this time, in a nearly jarring way. Deep fun therapy.

And then reality.  The time had arrived to sign the 40-page surrogacy contract with Amy, and start the cycle in earnest. She had always been middling in terms of communication,  specifically in getting back to us, but we thought we'd taken care of that with the help of an agency intervention back in August.  But this was worrying; it was go time! if ever there was one, and she was a veritable possum.  WTF turned into YHGTBFKM, when after two weeks of little to no contact, we heard from the agency that she had backed out.  From the agency we heard this - the woman who'd agreed in principle to carry our kid didn't bother to tell us herself that she'd thought better of the idea.  We were deflated, and mad, and sad. But you said!!! , went the bratty kid in my head.  After a day or so I joked, halfheartedly, that with a young daughter, a full time job, and being a student, what she'd actually done was "come to her senses".  

The afterglow of our vacation shifted into a pall that didn't lift for weeks.  We were fraying a little, and it started to show. The agency told us to settle in for a wait, and with what good spirits and unconditional positive regard  for the process we could muster, we trudged forth, with visions of our recent vacation seeming ever more fantastical and remote...

The State in the Way.

Just six weeks after our initial phone consultation with the agency, we got an email that two profiles were ready for us to view. This was quick. We'd bunkered down for a four, five, or six-month wait - but 6 weeks!

The profiles were extensive 15-page affairs detailing to a minute level the surrogates' health and life histories. They made for interesting reading.  On reviewing the first profile, though, we became convinced that it had been planted by the agency to find out just how desperate we were to have a kid.  STD-carrying former drug users weren't high on our "wish list", so we decided to take a pass on that one. But the other profile was great; she was healthy and active, and came across as a genuinely happy person.  We decided to overlook the fact that she was from Connecticut, which, as a Rhode Islander living in New York City, I've come to refer to as "the state in the way".  Everyone has their faults, so we proceeded with a phone call.

I should've been more freaked out.  It's not every day you phone up the woman who may carry your baby.  And let's face it, it's really an interview as much as its an introduction, for all of us. But call we did, and talk we did, and do you know what? Pretty nice, pretty easy conversation.  I mean, it's not as if the discussion topic was a surprise to her.   Sure, it's weird to bandy about terms like "selective reduction" over speakerphone at 10am on a Tuesday,  but all in all it went well, and we decided to have lunch the following week. 

On the ride up, Lin and I dipped back into a conversation begun weeks before about the kind of person we hoped to find as our surrogate.  All those Mary Poppins requirements, of course, but in reality, we weren't planning on being too picky. We liked the idea of someone who'd gone through the process before, but it wasn't a must.  A bright-line notion for us, however,  was that it shouldn't be someone in dire need of cash. If that were the case, it might feel like decision was coerced on her part, due to circumstances.  And we didn't want that. Really, we were searching for someone we liked.  That, and an easy rapport with a mutual sense of trust, would go a long way.

Lin and I also talked also about why a woman would choose to do this.  I think there exists the rare surrogate who does this entirely out of  an altruistic fount of goodness, inspired only by the desire to help a childless couple have a kid.  But it must be very rare, indeed.  In reality, the agency told us, money is almost always a factor, though it is never the only one.  And anyway, the pragmatist in me respected the woman who is brave and giving, and also wants to make a chunk of change.  That money, after all, would likely go to helping out their own families, and what's more honorable than that? Lastly, surrogates also were universally described to us as women who enjoy being pregnant, and who possess what was described as a  "specialness".  You'd have to be a special person to even consider this, we thought. 

We met Amy (not her real name)  in Cheshire, Connecticut, near where she lives, and had lunch.  The email accompanying the profiles described her thusly:

She is a first time carrier with experience, that lives in Connecticut, she is lovely and warm, easy to speak with and has many interests. She is a single mother with 1 child. The base fee she is asking for is $20,000 plus health insurance. She works as a PCA, and has her license as a massage therapist.

"With experience" means that she had worked with another couple before us. In this case, the couple moved on after a failed first attempt, and she did not give birth to a child for them. The experience had been okay, she said, but odd in ways.  They were a gay couple in London who were not huge on communication, but apparently were huge on contractually detailing precisely how she would live her life while pregnant.  In my view, things like cigarettes and alcohol are of course off-limits, but when someone is doing you this kind of favor, maybe it's best not to micromanage them with too great a fervor? 

During lunch, when it came up in conversation that she co-owned the house she lived in with her parents, any liberal guilt we may have had about this surrogacy arrangement  dissipated greatly.  Not only was she not in dire need of money, she owned a house!  As we couldn't forsee a time when we'd be able to own a place of our own, we felt somehow better about accepting her kindness, if it came to that.

So the lunch went very well.  And apart from the expected initial nervousness, conversation flowed.  She seemed like a good mother, a good daughter, and a pretty serious person in general.  She was industrious, too; in school full-time and with a forty-hour-a-week job. I think we became actually sold on her, though, when she un-selfconsciously mentioned how much she liked taking her 6-year old daughter to monster truck rallies, because it was fun to "see things destroyed".  Surely someone so into destruction must also appreciate the act of creation! We liked her, and upon driving away we felt like we'd lucked out, and ahead of schedule at that.

Over the next week we mutually decided to move forward together.  My sister Sara, wouldn't be available to start the egg-donor cycle until she was back in Boston in September, and that timing seemed to work well for Amy too.

Or did it?

Questions and answers...

I wasn't able to get the question out of my mouth fully before Sara interjected, "I know what you're going to ask and the answer is yes."  That's how we found our egg donor. And it was a pretty great moment. Me,  freed from the nagging vision of Sara having to go through a pregnancy and give birth, and Sara freed from the very same thing.

The blissful number-crunching/realization-of-possibility night gave way to reality.  Yes, we could do this.  But man, was it was going be a lots of dough!  About $100,000, all told.  Like I said, spending an amount like this on anything short of a house was entirely theoretical to me.  But over a couple of  days and weeks, it just became "the plan." Yeah, it's a lot.  Yeah, we'll go into debt.  Sure, my Mom gasped out loud and then was uncharacteristically speechless when I told her the figure.  And friends, too, might look at us like we'd drunk some kind of baby-crazy Kool-Aid.  But fuck it, we were moving forward.

I contacted a few lawyers I'd talked to back when we were looking into traditional surrogacy, and asked for advice on how to proceed. A few agency names came up repeatedly.   Since Sara was in Boston, and New York --  in all it's progressive glory --  doesn't grant legal recognition to surrogacy contracts, we quickly realized that Massachusetts was where we'd be spending much time in the coming months.  In terms of legal precedents and legal standards, they are way ahead of most any other state due  same-sex marriage being legalized way back in 2004. We settled on a place called the Center for Surrogacy and Egg Donation.  They would find us a surrogate, this was their job. And they would also draw up the myriad contracts, and go to court for us and procure what's called a pre-birth order, deeming that both our names would appear on the birth certificate at birth. That alone was quite a concept to absorb...but I'm getting ahead of myself.  It is possible to find your own surrogate, yes, but the legalities and complexities involved made both our heads hurt, and with any error potentially resulting in massive, thickety problems, the agency fees seemed to be money well-spent.

We had an hour-long talk with the director of the agency, a lawyer who's also gay, and a dad to three kids born of surrogacy. He was affable, competent, smart, and left us feeling in good hands.  A few days later, we filled out a 2o-page questionairre, which would be packaged with our photo and be shared with potential surrogates.  It was our Intended Parents profile, one phrase among a pile of shiny new nomenclature soon to be tucked into our vernacular.

 

     What Do You like to Do in Your Spare Time?

     What Goals Do You Have in Your Life?

     What Is Your Philosophy of Life?

     How Did Your Parents Discipline You?

A sampling from the questionairre... can't imagine that they expect fully-fleshed out answers, as that would be pretty hard.  The exception was my answer to the last question above, which was easy: Inadequately.

We finished it up and emailed it back. They told us the waiting period to be presented with potential surrogate profiles varied, but to expect at least a few months wait.  We weren't then, and aren't now, so great with waiting. But we burrowed in, resolved...

 

 

Reboot.

Over that weekend, with Lin having taken to bed, and me all mopes-alot, I drove out to JFK to pick up our friend Stef.  We'd only recently gotten a car, and somehow it still seemed like a good idea to drive in a rainstorm, while depressed, to the very end of Atlantic Avenue to the airport.

Stef was getting back from a marginally enjoyable trip to France and Berlin, and was happy to be getting home.  I asked if she wanted to go to a new restaurant down the street from us called Dean Street, and she did.  The whole scene, the whole night, was moody. Not bad, just moody.  I confided in her that Sara had decided not to be our surrogate, and told her how I was simultaneously relieved and crestfallen.

Stef's the kind of friend who’s deeply in the loop on pretty much everything in our lives.  She was my anchor -- and really -- my savior, when I arrived in New York, and the dream job I’d come to NYC for on 24-hours-notice gave way to 5 months of intense unemployment. That she’s continued to be very important to my time here is an understatement.  She also met Lin within days of me meeting him, and they became thick as thieves instantly, which I loved.

Anyway, she’s great to talk to, and I talked her through what had happened, and where Lin and I found ourselves now. And she and I started to break it down, and talk it out in a real way.   Did we really want kids at this point or had our small defeats made us think better of the idea?  Yes, really we did. At least, I knew I did, and I think Lin still did too.  Were we really opposed to adoption? Not in theory, but for us, we didn’t feel like we were there yet.  Maybe, but I didn't think so.  Why did we want kids?  The junior project had taken on a life of it's own by this point, and this was a good thing to consider again.  We just did.  Though it also crossed our minds that, being somewhat older parents, our children would feel extra-obligated to take care of us in our old age and infirmity. So there was that potential benefit. 

We started talking figures.  We talked about how envious Lin and I were of those who were able to just decide to go the gestational surrogacy route, those yuppie bastards, and how it made me bitter, and how I didn't like my joyful desire to have a kid co-mingled with all that bitter.  And Stef asked, was it definitely not possible, or was it something that we just figured we couldn’t do, so hadn't even crunched the numbers?

No, we hadn't crunched the numbers, mainly because the important number, that of the entire cost of gestational surrogacy, seemed like monopoly money to me.  Should you think about whether it would be financially possible, even if it isn’t plausible?

So we ordered another pint, and there, at our new neighborhood's latest-entrant-to-the-gastropub-frenzy,  Stef and I crunched the numbers.  Savings? Yeah, we had some. Nothing insane, but pretty significant, but man did I feel good to have and not be spending that savings, financial train wreck that I’d been  for most of my life! But in terms of “possible”,  maybe that would cover 25% of the cost.  Do they offer loans? I think I'd read something about that, yeah,  for some of the medical stuff.  Are you willing to go into real debt to do this? Not something we'd even considered to this point, but I guess we could if this was fundamentally important to us. I mean, most of our money seemed to go to eating out with reckless abandon.  Some weekends we'd dared to actually add up what we'd spent and it made us both blush.  Surely, if we could eat burgers at Minetta Tavern, we could also put our money into something slightly less evanescent, like a goddamned human life! 

We'd probably ordered one final pint by this point, but for the first time in several days I felt a spark. HOLY SHIT. If we were willing to tighten our belts significantly, and budget the hell out of the process, there was a very narrow pathway to gestational surrogacy!

Stef and I finished up and I walked home through the rain and woke up Lin, who was delirious with sick and sleep.  I started in about how, maybe we could do it, maybe we could make a baby!  It took him about 15 seconds to dart straight up in bed, and smile for the first time in days.   And we hugged, and kissed, and got up and made a makeshift cocktail with whatever we had around, and we toasted.  We toasted the hell out of the idea, and it was good.

Maybe we even knew someone willing to be our egg donor...

Down and out?

For a few days after talking to Jamie, we were both in a mild funk.  We'd felt the joys of  a slight sense of momentum, only to watch it vanish over after-dinner drinks.  At least we hadn't gotten further into the process, we consoled ourselves.

It wasn't but a few days later that a phone call shook things up once again.  I was talking to my sister Sara, a college student in Boston, and had mentioned about Jamie and what had gone down with that.  She said something to the effect of, I'm glad you brought this up,  because I wanted to talk to you about something...

Hmmm...

Sara had been thinking about the topic, too.  It was something she could do to help us, she said,  and she was interested in being a traditional surrogate for us.  Well, this was a surprise.  And not that we hadn't already thought about how the only path to having a kid related to us both would be to involve Sara - but it's something we would never have asked.  How do you even do that?  Anyway, I was happily taken aback, and processed as quickly as I could what she was saying.

I said how honored I was that she'd even consider this, but that it was a HUGE decision and just a an enormous thing in general, and that the best thing to do was to take it slow and not jump into anything.  I said let's talk about this again in a month and see if you still feel the same way,  after fully considering all the realities involved with carrying a child that is genetically half yours and then surrendering it for all time.  Plus the general physical "inconveniences", which are not insignificant, I'm told.

We sat on it for a month or so, and in the interim Lin and I had a lot of time to think about whether this was a gift we were able to accept.  I feel so strongly that people's decisions are their own,  and though Sara was only 22, I couldn't help but think how infuriated I would be if, when I was 22, someone told me I didn't have the wherewithal to make a big decision like this.  I felt it incumbent on me to present Sara with as many worst case scenarios as possible in an effort to tease out any doubts, or misgivings about her offer.

When we talked a month later she said that she was indeed serious, and wanted very much to do this for us.  I started in with the scenarios:  1. You decide to do this, and immediately after medical interventions have taken place and you're definitely going through with it, you meet the man of your dreams, and he's offended and disgusted by the whole idea.  Her response: "Well then he's not the man of my dreams."  Wow, good one, okay.  2. Certain relatives may not look kindly on the arrangement, and Sara could face the real possibility of being written out of wills, etc. Her response: "That would be lame but I'm okay with that possibility" Ok.  3.  What if we move back to San Francisco in a couple of years and you will only be able to see the little one very infrequently? Her response:  "It would be just like how I don't get to see Emma (our brother Jay's daughter) in Colorado.  It would be a little sad but I would make the most of what time I had."  Well, okay, she really did seem to have some pretty good answers to my queries.

Now what to do?  Should I go ahead and start looking in to the legalities and realities and how one goes about doing this, I ask.  Yes, she says, I should. Ok, I say, but let's not consider this a done deal yet, you take your time and sit with this decision and we'll see where this all takes us, ok? Ok.

I sat at my computer late one night and drafted a letter which I sent about 50 surrogacy attorneys in Massachusetts, many of whom specialized in LGBT surrogacy.  By morning, I'd  already received 15 or so responses, some discouraging and some encouraging, and a few downright excited to work with our situation, which was much less common than we'd thought.  This is actually when we learned that nearly all surrogacy is the gestational variety, where the carrier isn't using her own eggs.  This was a situation where three people were acting in concert with the shared goal of  Lin and I ending up with a child.  It was cutting edge stuff, and the ambitious lawyers seemed ready to gnaw into it.

Lin and I talked more, and with something less than excitement, decided that if Sara indeed was serious about this, and wanted to give us this gift of gifts, then we were going to accept it.  Not without a lot of mental and emotional caveats,  some of which were hard to shake, but we weren't going to stand in her way, and we would be thrilled to end up with a kid related to us both.

 I talked to Sara the day after I'd heard back from the lawyers, which was about two weeks after our last conversation.  She'd texted that she needed to "talk to me about this",  and my heart sank a little.

In the fullness of time, Sara, like Jamie before her, realized that the timing was really bad, and that she too didn't know when it would be better in the near future.  And that maybe, just maybe, it was too much of a big thing to go through a whole pregnancy.  And she felt so bad, really sad, because this wasn't something we could do for ourselves and it was something she was biologically capable of, but not now, not soon, probably not ever.

Like the time before, I was sad for about 4/100ths of a second, and then I was relieved.  What was I thinking anyway, believing I could accept this kind of thing from her?  She was only 22, and maybe she didn't even have the context and emotional maturity to agree to this in an informed way!  I felt bad we'd ever accepted and happy the she had felt comfortable enough to back out.

But still, we were back to square one twice within a few months, and at this point, there seemed to be very few options open to us that involved a genetically-related baby.  Lin and I got blue over that weekend.  He took to bed like a Victorian lady, and I moped and moped. The rain that weekend was interminable, as if by design.

We'd promised ourselves from the very first conversation that we would not become baby-obsessed!  We would NOT be those people.  And after all, our life together was so great and so fun and in so many ways idyllic that we knew we'd be fine, utterly fine and with, let's face it, more European vacations, so why was this even a cause for disappointment???  Sometimes logic fails and emotions take over.  To hell with all that, this was a huge blow, and we were rattled.

Dusting ourselves off thankfully took less time than we'd feared, however...

Us, Sara and my Dad from the wedding, May 2010.

 

 

Everything but the pregnancy...

Over those next few weeks and months, Jamie and us, we danced around the topic of her being our surrogate.  There's an important distinction at this point, too...  A huge percentage of surrogate pregnancies these days are achieved using a gestational surrogate, meaning that the eggs are procured elsewhere and fertilized in a Petri dish (not a test tube!) then transferred to her waiting , hospitable womb.  What Jamie was offering was to be a "traditional surrogate" - her egg, our seed, her pregnancy.  It was, needless to say, an enormously generous thing to offer.

When it looked like it might actually go down this way,  after assurances and caveats and understandings had been expressed and comprehended on both sides, we met for dinner to talk about proceeding.  I had been absent for a lot of the substantive talks, so in terms of knowing for myself how into the idea Jamie was, I was at a bit of a disadvantage.  It was a weird dinner, honestly. When you're hanging out with a good friend, where normally the decision of the greatest import is  whether to get both desserts,  or whether to order the Totally Unnecessary Digestif© , well, this was new territory.  And it was palpable that we were now on the precipice of going from talk to action.  It weighed on all of us.  And the topic stubbornly refused to come up.

It took until an after-dinner drink, at a bar down the street, for Jamie to tell us that though she truly wanted to do this for us, the timing was not cooperating, and she was having a hard time figuring out when it might. She also mentioned that she was fine with all aspects of the plan, except for the actual pregnancy. Indeed. It was disappointing for about 3/100ths of a second.  First, who the hell offers to do this kind of thing, outside out movies and fairy-tale existences - but no one.  And it was such a wildly wonderful and giving thing to even consider doing, that it was impossible to feel anything other than love for Jamie, sweetheart that she is.  And she really is.

 But we found ourselves back at square one.  And having considered and, at that point, decided not to adopt, plus the fact that the whole gestational surrogate business was prohibitively expensive, well, we re-grouped, and probably loosened our grip on the whole idea of kids.  After all, we were having a ball without them, and like I'd said a couple of years before, it's a choice not a necessity.

Now we're cooking with gas...

What happened was that we didn't talk about kids again in a real way until months after our wedding, in May of 2010.  I could devote an entire other blog to the planning and enjoyment thereof, but I'll compress it wayyyyy down and throw in a link to an Audio Wedding track from right before the ceremony, a link to some photos, and a video of my friend Hannah Vaughan singing and playing guitar during the ceremony!

 The lead-up to the wedding was predictably  intense - that we planned it to take place at my Dad's house in South Dartmouth, MA,  with events in Newport the day before and the day after - well, there were some logistics to tend to. A great many!  Lin and I tried, and I hope succeeded, to maintain perspective and remember often that the idea was to throw a great party for our friends and family, and share with them what we'd found in each other. Simple.  Everyone seems to have had a pretty great time, and even if the toasts did go on for EVER, we were pretty happy with it all. :)

But there was a definite coming-down period afterwards. When you've put months of time and energy into something that occurs over 72 hours and then is done, there's a feeling afterwards, at once liberating but also little wistful of...what next?

 What next?!?!?!?!?! is sort of how I felt. And if that sounds like a discontented person, I wasn't. I was, and still am, just so damned excited always, to see what comes next for me and Lin.

 KIDS?

 I went through a couple of weeks, if not months, convinced that I shouldn't be a parent, had no business being a parent.  I am too selfish, I thought.  I'm capricious, and get bored with things, and sometimes don't follow through well, or at all.  None of these traits boded well.  And we'd talked about taking six months and getting round-the-world plane tickets someday! All by our lonesomes, with nary a diaper in sight! We’d shared  dreams of ditching the typically ambitious,  driven,  exhausting city life, and both getting jobs at bookstores or cafés! I grasped at the last, flailing tendrils of my youth  - wanted to stay out all night, smoke a cigarette or 10, get so drunk I'd lose the whole next day! Then I took the equivalent of a very, very deep breath...

How could I not want to have a kid with this guy, I thought? I may be selfish, but am I also stupid? No, really, Lin’s going to be like the best Dad any kid could ever hope for.  And stripped of all my youth-finale defenses, I decided that with the task in front of me I just might be pretty okay at it myself.  It's sappy, almost lugubriously so, but what I started to think, and said to Lin, is that I really just wanted to share with a kid whatever magic it was that we'd found. And once I started thinking that we might both be pretty good at this whole baby-raising thing, I relaxed into the idea, and ultimately started to get real excited about it.

But wait..what?!!! We can't make a baby by ourselves?! What the hell to do???!!!

That's when a dear friend of ours said she'd have a baby for us.  She wasn't kidding; she was serious. And sure, we'd all had a few drinks, but she'd thought about it and wanted us to know that she wanted to do it.

 TBC...

 

Missing Suit!  - This is a track from the awesome, hour-long Audio Heirloom our friend Evan Roberts produced and edited. This is about a 5 minute track, occuring immediately before the ceremony; Lin realized he'd forgotten his suit back in Newport, and hilarity ensues...or something.  (May take a few seconds to start, pretty large .WAV file...)

 

Wedding Photos by Michael Galinsky

 

  

The marriage franchise...

The summer of 2009 was stressful, as I learned to balance my work, which took me away from Brooklyn for days and weeks at a time, with a still-new relationship I was greedy to lavish with attention.  It was additionally stressful because in June,  I'd decided to propose to Lin during our September visit to San Francisco. Now there's good stress and bad stress, and this definitely falls into the first category, but all in all, there was a lot buzzing around my head in those months. 

Marriage, like the idea of having kids, was theoretical to me, and over the years I'd vacillated between the notions that it was an outmoded and constraining vestige that same-sex couples should be happy to be free of, and the equality-hungry desire that even if it was all these things, I wanted into the franchise.  Now, having fallen deeply for Lin, things changed dramatically. Not only did I want to be able to marry him, I was uncomplicatedly excited by the idea, and the intellectuallizing aspects melted away.  I spent countless hours thinking about what I'd say and how and where I'd do it, tapping into the most Virgo-y aspects of myself.  I've never thought that perfection was a particularly useful goal, but I wanted it to be "right"; it had to be that.

San Francisco was our first big trip together, and since Lin had also lived there, we had a full schedule of seeing friends, comparing notes, and generally filtering what we encountered through the new filter of "us".  I'd kept my North Beach apartment sublet after decamping for Virginia, France and ultimately New York, in 2005, so we had a good  SF home base to strike out from. I decided that Lin's birthday, September 11th (!), would be the perfect time to propose; we could go to a nice dinner at a surprise location, and he'd chalk it up to his 33rd and nothing more...

We kept a trip journal for this vacation, and maybe this calls for some excerpts rather than try to tease it out of my memory..

 From me:      We left Tiburon sort of late-ish, which had me in a bit of a nervous state. Mom at one point said to "just call and tell them you'll be late to which I could only sigh, and probably snap a little.  Anyway the traffic was easy and we made it totally on time.  As we parted ways in the Andronico's parking lot in Berkeley, I pulled Mom aside and told her, by way of explaining my nervous state, that I was going to propose to him later that night.  She shrieked, super loud, and thankfully Lin didn't ask any questions. Chez Panisse was warm and golden brown and inviting as ever.  We were seated at the front, left table. It was perfect and the waitress set the tone beautifully. The first thing we received was a wild fennel-infused prosecco, which was so delicious, the ideal apéritif.  We talked about the day's surprises, and what an amazing time we'd already had.  The first course was a deconstructed tomato sandwich of incredible heirloom tomatoes, an aioli toast, three kinds of basil and some fresh mozzarella - followed by a shrimp sauté with some scallions and other veg in an incredible broth. OH - I brought a bottle of wine with me that I ordered online, a 2002 Bond St. Eden - an offshoot of Harlan, a classic Bordeaux blend, and really really wonderful.  The main course was a delicious duck breast in a plum (?) reduction with incredible succotash with lima beans! The whole thing, classic Chez Panisse.  Before dessert we took a stroll through the kitchen, which was filled with friendly faces + amazing smells.  We went back to the table, dessert arrived soon - as I'm writing this, I can't recall what even came, preoccupied as I was with what was to come.  Throughout the meal I occasionally fidgeted with my courier bag, making sure that the ring box I'd planted there was easily accessible. At one point, I even pulled it up into my lap and Lin was like, "What are you doing?" and thankfully was satisfied with my "looking for something". Anyway I'd been looking for a segue, and finally Lin provided it by saying, "What an amazing DAY" - to which I replied, "Actually, it's been 296 amazing days so far." At this point Lin sort of gave the tilted-head confused-dog-look and said ----- "How'd you know that?" No turning back now.  I continued,  saying that they had been the most amazing of my life thus far. And how happy I was, and how with the most amazing lack of any shred of doubt, I was wondering if he would do me the honor of agreeing to marry me and spend the rest of his life with me.  At some point after noting the 296 days and before actually proposing, I'd plopped a ring box in the middle of the table. At the point that he realized what was happening, his hand raised to his mouth.  There were some quickly repeated OH MY GODs, and tears began to flow.  And tears flowed for me too.  So Karen had offered me the rings a while back, the wooden rings that she and Stephen had used. It was really special and touching. Not sure exactly where the wooden ring tradition came from, but the basic idea is that wood serves as a placeholder for the more precious metal ring to come. I started to explain to him about the ring (which btw Karen had mailed to Green Street and had arrived only the day before!) -- and realized that he hadn't responded yet (!) - upon pointing that out, Lin said, phew, " I would love nothing more." SMILE.

From Lin:         Marc left to go to the bathroom, the ringing in my ears diminished, and the rest of the room came back into view. I was a little dazed. As I remembered that there were other people around, and as I wondered how loud I had been in my shock, a woman at the table behind us said to me, "Excuse me, were you just proposed to?"  And I thought, wow that's what happened, isn't it? and said "Yes." And she asked, "Did you accept?"  and I smiled and said "Yeah".  And she and her husband offered their congratulations and asked if I was in shock and then she said, "I think I know him from Newport." And I was surprised for the 38th time that day and she said, "Yeah, I think I worked with him at the Clarke Cooke House. Is his name Marc??" And I said, "Yeah, and he grew up working at the Clarke Cooke House!"  So by the time Marc came back from the bathroom we’d struck up quite a conversation about what a great guy Marc is, and made our introductions, and I could tell that Marc, "This is Lisa Kelley, remember?"  But he didn't really though he made a good show of it. And after a celebratory glass of champagne we grabbed a cab and headed for North Beach... It was a long and amazing day, the best birthday ever, and the day I learned to stop worrying about surprises.

So that's how it went down.

 

Note about photo: We left Chez Panisse in a state, so much so that we forgot our menus, which we wanted to keep as mementos. I called them from the cab and they agreed to mail them to us in Brooklyn; when we got home 10 days later they were there, and had been signed "Congratulations!"by Alice, who wasn't even there that night. It was a nice thing for her to do.

A courtin'...

Does anyone really want to hear the details of someone else's whirlwind romance?  I'm not convinced. And does anyone who's experienced that kind of thing really want to share all that much, and force into narrative terms something that by definition disorients and leaves you changed?  In the words of Doug Martsch, my inclination is to "keep it like a secret", illuminating the outer edges of the courtship, and paying forward (sorry, but it fits) the positive effects of meeting Lin. But protecting what's ours and only ours.  That said, when we found each other, something clicked instantaneously. We met on Thursday and saw each other the next 5 days straight, each time staying up late into the night, luxuriating in this new and fastly precious thing we'd found.  There was wine, too, lots of wine.  And in this case the wine may have been both an enhancer and a form of self-medication, as all the natural chemicals flowing through my body in those first few weeks threw my body and mind into all sorts of glorious disarray.  What am I saying here? It was great. It was the greatest thing in the whole world that's ever, ever happened to me, meeting Lin.  And both of us, perilously nearing the point where we'd begun to resign ourselves to being alone, to trying to accept the okay-ness of being alone, to giving up but studiously framing it as some kind of victory -- well we were blown away...BLOWN AWAY... that there might be someone for us. And that it might be someone who seemed so perfect...well that was a cause for great joy and great trepidation all at once.  Caution was thrown to the wind very early, but not without pangs of wondering if I was setting myself up for a monumental disappointment. Alas, something I said to Lin via email, after out first date when it was clear that something was there…"Trust." So we tried it.