The Junior Project

Delayed Reaction.

My emotional state resisted crumbling on that day. I wasn't numb exactly, but I wasn't all there either. That I felt the urgent need to walk around Marshall's says a lot.  Probably says enough. That I managed to get a bit of joy from finding a set of olive-wood Laguiole steak knives for a song also says something. I was alive, after all.

Like Lin said, we didn't look at each other in that exam room once it was clear things  hadn't gone to plan. I knew that if I did look, and saw in his face that he was about to lose it, I certainly would lose it myself. And there was Jeanne. We needed to be there for her, to make clear with our words and actions and our combined affect that we weren't too saddened or shocked, or god forbid, upset with her. 

We talked things over on the ride back to New York, and started to get a handle on it. We were resolved in wanting to continue with another IVF cycle, and in an instant we  jettisoned into the ether the minor neuroses that had accompanied us to that point. Yes, damnit, we do want a kid, really badly.  We're still in.

That night I had a dinner meeting with some neighborhood friends that I'm doing some restaurant consulting for.  I had enough time to get home from Connecticut, get ready, hug Lin repeatedly, and leave. We were interviewing a prospective chef for a place they're opening, and it was a welcome escape for me. The interview itself went from good to weird to comic, and after the candidate left we went for a beer to de-brief. Lin came and joined for a little while and then we went home together and went right to sleep.

The next morning we had a phone call with the IVF doctor.  He was his usual clinician-upbeat self; authoritative yet approachable, and in this instance, feeling our pain. Our hopes of succeeding with IVF now rested with one the 9 embryos on ice in Waltham making in through the process. He told us that 3 of the embryos they'd frozen on Day 6, three days after the transfer, were gorgeous. Better than the ones they'd implanted. These were our go-to guys now. It was a plan. I felt immune to positivity at that point, but it was the functional equivalent of good news, and I took it in.

I left in the early afternoon to head back to the Hamptons for work.  When I got to the house, the head housekeeper asked me how the appointment had gone.  I froze. I hadn't yet had to tell anyone in person what had happened. Every lizard-brain emotion which til that point had remained buried threatened to erupt all at once.  I managed to get out a "Umm, not...good...not...pregnant...anymore."  And the look on her face got terribly sad and when that registered, I got even sadder and spun quickly from room and outside, now swallowing involuntarily, breathing sharp and quick, with tears insistent, and a tightly clenched jaw all that stood between me and an hour or two of deep, infantile wailing.  I was supposed to be going  straight to the kitchen to cook dinner! I ran back to my room, not wanting to be anywhere this might leak out uncontrollably.  I called Lin, who was at work.  "I...sniff sniff swallow grunt...think there was..sniff snort... a delayed reaction..."  And I let it out a little on the phone with him.  And he was wonderful and great and more than anything just  hearing his voice did something essentially buoying, and  helped me pull it together.  But I was floored by the force with which what had just happened, happened. I'd been dutifully "processing things" and "gaining perspective" and "moving forward", and other Zagat-like nuggets of pop-psychology, which were meant to ameliorate what had happened -- and since what had happened hadn't killed me, in the aftermath I was supposed to be stronger even! But we're not always rational creatures, we're hurt and damaged and messy and confused at times, with a quivering lip and a pain in your gut that just won't quit.

As quickly as it came, it lifted. And a couple of minutes later, I was boiling penne and thinking how things weren't really all that bad after all.

Ultrasound Day.

Hi folks, this is Lin, the husband.  I’m gonna talk a little about Ultrasound Day, and then Marc will be back to bring this story up to the present day.

In the summer, because of our strange work schedules, Marc & I usually only have Tuesday and Wednesday during the day to see each other.  But the ultrasound appointment gave us a whole Sunday night and Monday together, and in the middle of it, we were going to finally see evidence of the embryo (or embryos) that The Numbers told us had been growing.  It was like Christmas in July!

As we drove out of town toward Connecticut (on a route that we’re developing a commuter’s sense of navigating), the skies grew dark and ominous.  Well, maybe not ominous, because, as I had to remind myself, the world’s weather systems know nothing of “foreshadowing.”  Our optimism was hard-won, over the past year of false starts and setbacks, and we were keeping a pit bull’s grip on it.  But before we even left the state, the traffic slowed to a frustrating crawl, as we realized that the flash flood pouring down around us had washed out an entire lane of the highway.  Now our expectations dialed back from “Will there be 1 or 2?” to “Will we even get there on time?”

The drive through the downpour was uncharacteristically quiet.  I was revisiting some anxieties that seem to stand up in the back of the class and wave their hands frantically whenever we approach a milestone in this process: “Is this really happening?  What’s life with a baby gonna be like?  Is this, in fact, a terrible idea?”

Fortunately, the “flash” in the flood’s name asserted itself, and the skies mellowed to a dreary humid gray.  We arrived at the expansively-named Hospital of Central Connecticut with five minutes to spare.  Jeanne was already there, and we met her among the Get Well cards and ceramic angels of the gift shop.

She looked great, apropos of nothing.  I’d heard about this “maternal glow,” and while I wasn’t sure she had that, she seemed to have lost some weight and looked healthy (beneath the surface of nervous excitement).  Having been to this facility before, she led us through the labyrinth of carpeted hallways and gently-swinging doors and hospital beige – and, honestly, if she hadn’t, we would still be looking for the exit to this day.

We let Jeanne take charge of the proceedings, as she was definitely the patient here, and we settled into the waiting room and our strange role as… what?  Not husband, more than donor, not yet fathers.  The clinic literature says “Intended Parents,” which makes me think of how men used to describe their fiancées: “My intended.”  To me, it implies a lack of follow-through, and worse – waiting.  So much waiting.  But before long, we were invited into the room where Jeanne was in position, and we were introduced to the very kind and comfortable doctor (the daughter, it turns out, of the man who oversaw Jeanne’s previous surrogacy).

Now, after the blood test fiasco/series-of-unnecessary-panics, I had made sure to ask more questions about what we were looking for with this ultrasound, to regulate our expectations.  The optimal scenario was a visible heartbeat (hard to imagine in something the size of a blueberry…), and obviously how many of the embryos implanted.  I had looked at pictures of 6-7 week embryo development, to be prepared.  (We’re talking “tadpole-stage” here; they’re gross, if you’ve never seen one, suspiciously like the creature in Alien.)  But, remembering the surreal experience of watching the ultrasound of the implantation, I knew that we were totally dependent on the doctor’s explanation of what we were seeing.

So, with a quick intake of breath, in goes the “divining wand,” and video starts showing up on the monitor.  It’s the usual security-cam, grainy black-and-white blobs and shapes.  One of us was supposed to be recording this on his phone, but neither of us moved.  We waited.

And there was silence.  On the monitor, and in the room.

Then the doctor said, “I’m sorry guys, I don’t see anything.”  In fact, I had been thinking the same thing.  I didn’t see anything.  She explained that there was an enlarged “yolk sack,” that she could see where one embryo had implanted, but it was no longer there.  The enlarged yolk sack was an indication of what she called a “blighted embryo,” a false start, an embryo with chromosomal problems that the body, in its mute genius, rejected because it would not develop properly.  She said again, “I’m really sorry.”  And we did not look at each other.

Optimism comes naturally to Marc; it’s his default position.  But it does not come naturally to me.  As I have learned from the beauty of being with Marc, optimism can be its own reward, regardless of the outcome.  But it did not feel that way at that moment.  It felt like an “I told you so.”

I asked some more questions, because I realized that, once again, I didn’t know enough to process what was happening.  Or maybe knowledge is, for me, a salve – I doubt anyone who knows me would argue with that.  The long and short of it was, the pregnancy didn’t take and needed to be stopped.  Jeanne’s body still thought it was pregnant, and the hormones she was injecting daily were contributing to that.  Maybe her body could “pass” the failed pregnancy on its own, but that was risky and should probably be sped along.  It is, after all, hard to fiddle with the dials of nature and then stop.

When we have since told this story to friends who have been through the IVF process, they have all said, “Once you have the baby, you won’t even remember this part.”  And while I understand that this is an outcome of rolling the dice (“the most common type of first-trimester miscarriage,” we were told), I have to admit that it is hard to shake the memory of looking at that monitor, trying to make a constellation out of the disparate stars, and coming up short.  The human mind is mercifully, brilliantly capable of looking into the night sky and seeing either patterns or a void, but never both at the same time.  It is a sad night when it’s the latter, but there is always that chance, when you look over tomorrow’s edge.  Eventually, it will become a pattern, it will become “the way it was supposed to be” -- we love narrative too much for it to be otherwise.  But for now, it was emptiness.

We were sent out of the room first, and shared a long hug in the waiting room.  I went to the restroom, feeling nauseous.  When I came back, Marc was with Jeanne, who looked distraught.  Marc later told me that she was on the brink of tears, that she said she felt so bad for us.  I still can’t wrap my brain around what she’s doing for us, and to think that her sadness was for US, while it was HER body that was still deep in the process, is a testament to her incredible generosity.

We continued with our plan to go to a nearby diner for lunch, a metal-sided throwback in the heart of downtrodden New Britain, CT.  The sky was still bruised and pouting; it felt right now, a soft drizzle falling.  And the diner offered the much-needed greasy burgers and sandwiches, the limp fries and oily coffee.  I think I had a salad, as if my diet mattered at this moment.

And we talked our way through it, the three of us.  Jeanne at one point said, “Well, everything was going a little too well…” which is my kind of fatalistic thinking.  But it started to build the story – as I later mentioned to Marc, at each turning point in this process, we’ve never gotten it right the first time.  And, as sad as we all were, we found things to talk about, and we stumbled our way through what happens next.  Strangely, I’ve never felt more at ease talking with Jeanne.  We were clearly in this together.  And so it goes: You put one foot in front of the other and, before you know it, you find yourself moving down the road.

Earlier in the week, we had decided that, after the appointment, we would go see The Dark Knight Rises.  Maybe an odd choice, but there was an IMAX theater in the neighboring town, and I didn’t know when we would have enough time together to see it before the end of summer.  But I was having second thoughts about going to a movie, or doing anything distracting.  So Marc, at the wheel, drove us to the mall that housed the theater anyway, and we found ourselves wandering in a daze around Marshall’s.  It made me realize that, really, this is what malls are for.  They exist outside of time and experience, they are life’s Gift Shop, where you figure out what you’re going to do next.

We made a few phone calls, which was hard because it makes it real to tell someone.  Marc found a great deal on jeans -- $8! – and we decided that maybe the movie was just the thing we needed.  To “check out” for three hours, to be assaulted by light and sound, to witness the artful destruction of New York City (again).  And I will say, it was strangely gratifying to watch people aggressively, passionately beat the shit out of each other, to save the world.

Afterward, back on the highway, we started to find our footing.  We talked about how to proceed, how dedicated we still were to the process, what this new future would look like.  We looked each other in the eyes and started to make plans.  We vowed to do things differently next time, because vowing feels like control.  And I felt all those silly anxieties about having a kid dying a quiet death in the back of my brain.

One of the things I said I needed was to include fewer people in the process, to not update nearly everyone we knew on the day-to-day ups and downs.  I realized why conventional wisdom says to wait until after three months to share the good news.  But our “coming out” about the pregnancy started when we decided to begin the process.  Because, after all, it would be hard for us to suddenly say, “Guess what?  We’re pregnant!”  Or maybe it’s just difficult for us because we’re compulsive sharers.  But, thinking about all the people I would now have to share the bad news with, I shuddered with the perpetual reliving that would follow.

Before the movie, I had a great conversation with my father, who was practical in a way that I needed.  He said he would share the news with my mother, but later, as I was standing in the mall parking lot, she called anyway, because, as she said, “I just had to hear your voice.”  (Which, I might add, may be the single greatest reason to call a person ever.)  She's no stranger to prenatal disappointments, and when I told her about my plan to tell fewer people in the future, she, in her wisdom, said, “Oh, you can’t do that.  You share your joys with your friends, and then you share your sorrows.  That’s how that works.”

So, here they are, friends: the joys and the sorrows.  And I’m sure there will be more of both before this is all over.  But in the meantime… more waiting.

It's a Numbers Game.

Two weeks after the embryo transfer, a pregnancy test was ordered.  Not an at-home, pee wand thing, but a blood test peformed at a lab.  After that we'd know if Jeanne was pregnant;  if Oingo and/or Boingo had implanted, "taken", done their thing.  Lin and I went back and forth about whether we planned say we were "pregnant".  Initally we came down on the side of... no, that's dumb, we're not and it's silly to say so.  But between us, it often came out as, "After we're pregnant..." or "When we get pregnant..." so the linguistics were in flux.  At any rate, we'd been so encouraged by our doctor's description of our situation as basically ideal that we welcomed this test as a fait accompli, a confirmation of what we already knew to be true.

Hubris.

On the day Jeanne got the test, I was on the east end of Long Island working, so Lin and I crafted a plan beforehand for how I'd get the results.  We decided that after Lin got the call from the nurse, he'd send me a text saying, "I know - call now." We may not have been in the same place, but a phone call was better than SMS. We're modern, but that seemed a bridge too impersonal.

Only, I was impatient and couldn't wait and called Lin around 3pm, the time we were meant to have word by.  He sounded weird.  My heart sunk.  I was upset. What?!!! What could it be?? If it's negative I can take it just tell me for the love of god.  As the saying goes, you can't be half-pregnant, so lay it on me.  Or wait. Shit. You can???

Jeanne's result was technically a positive, Lin told me. But only barely. Her hCG level, the pregnancy hormone, was at 47.  Anything above zero is pregnant, by the book, but they want the number to be a minimum of 100, and it is commonly a whole lot more than that after two weeks. I was stunned stiff for a second.   Why didn't anyone tell us that there was a "maybe you're pregnant" option!  I was steeled for the bad and ready for the good -- I'd been saying there were likely to be tears either way -- but when the "big news" was that we'd have to wait three more days for Jeanne to take another test, I was caught unawares and came down hard.

Waiting is the essential characteristic of the IVF process.  You wait from the first moment; for appointments, for getting matched with a surrogate(s), for money to accrue and be disbursed, for screenings to be hurdled through, for contracts to be drafted and signed...  To this point, we felt like we'd put in our waiting time, and it was bratty, but this wasn't supposed to be going down this way.  And three days alone wasn't so huge a deal, but her number was super low, and maybe something was really wrong.  When I called the nurse coordinator, terms like "chemical pregnancy" and "ectopic pregnancy" were mentioned. I longed for a talisman against these nasties.  All we could really do though was wait and wonder and occasionally perseverate on the odds of the many of possible negative outcomes against the one single positive outcome. We were told that on Monday we should look for an hCG level that had at least doubled, which would be a sign of a developing pregnancy.

On that Monday afternoon I'd just pulled into the gravely parking lot of a makeshift Whole Foods on Route 27 when Lin called. The results were in. The new number was...210. The number had quadrupled!!! This was cause for relief!! The embryos or at least an embryo seemed to have implanted.  Maybe it implanted late, who knows, and that was why the number was initially so low. We had no idea what was going on in there, but I was just happy that the number went up, and by a factor of four. This was good! There would be a 3rd test in three more days to check her number again, but time went by much more quickly and with a lot less agita.

851! On Thursday we found out that the number had quadrupled again! This was very good news indeed, Things were solidifying, taking root, growing; it was clear. We told a few people, family and daily-contact friends, and accepted their well-wishes with mostly open arms. It was still a very early pregnancy, and all sorts of things could happen, but with each passing day the woods were further behind us.

The next step...Monday, July 23rd, 2012, a week from yesterday, we went to a hospital in central Connecticut and met Jeanne for the first ultrasound.  This is the appointment where you can see the rudiments of the circulatory system (a beating heart-like thing!) the placenta, the fetal pole, all the miraculous stagecraft of reproduction. We got into the car and headed northeast. The car almost drove itself by this point...

 

Oingo & Boingo.

We left South Dartmouth headed for New York, stopping only briefly for some dinner at the Clarke Cooke House in Newport. I had to get up early the following morning to drive back to the Hamptons for work, so time felt compressed and the road like my second home. The next 2 days blurred and  I have no real memory of them, except that I got back into my car on Sunday afternoon and headed for Orient Point on the North Fork of Long Island to catch the car ferry to New London. There, I picked up Lin who'd Amtraked in and we hit the interstate for Boston, again.

We got to Tom & Heather's late, having encountered some of the late night construction New England seems so fond of. I'd stopped at my favorite Hamptons farmstand on my way out to pick up some wildflowers and jam fot them, and Lin was toting a bottle of Balvenie Rye from Brooklyn, small tokens of our immense appreciation for all the love and house-guestery. We sampled some of the hooch and went to bed.

In the morning we stopped by our new favorite store, Costco, and picked up some flowers to give to Jeanne after she'd been technologically knocked up. She and her best friend Annie pulled into the center just after us.  Annie had been with Jeanne during  last succesful embryo transfer;  she was a human good luck charm, and we were happy to have her. Sitting in that same, now-very-familiar waiting area we exchanged small talk and occasionally paid attention to the nasal intonations of The View, kvetching behind us.  We all agreed that the blond one, the adorable fascist, or whatever they call her, was loathesome.  It was the closest we'd gotten to talking politics with Jeanne, a topic that given my leanings, could have been a showstopper if we'd discovered a chasm too vast.

Our names were called and we went into the back.  The area was broken into three or four consultation areas, each centered around a big semi-reclining exam chair,  separated by semi-circular curtains.  We were given two folding chairs and sat by Jeanne. A friendly nurse came and chatted us up for a bit, saying the doctor would be along soon, and in the meantime Lin and I donned lightweight scrubs over our clothes, and kept hair nets and masks in reserve for the operating room.

Soon enough the doctor came over and introduced herself; she was friendly and exuded competence, and we liked that. She said that of the 34 eggs, 17 had fertilized and 6 were of a quality good enough to transfer. Of those, a 7-cell and an 8-cell were primo, and they would be implanting those two. Both lacked something called fragmentation,  the bane of IVF, where bits of the cell walls slough off in a way that makes their edges appear somewhat rough. Ours had the embryo equivalent of a strong jawline, it seemed.

Soon, we were ushered into the pleasantly dim operating room. Jeanne slipped into the stirrups of honor, and Lin and I sat by her side.  Since we'd gotten into the consult area, two or three nurses had come up and verified Jeanne's name, DOB, and how many embryos we were transferring. And now for one final time, another nurse checked that they had the right patient. It seemed like overkill at first, until I imagined the shitshow that would result if they ever put the wrong embryos, or the wrong number of embryos, into a surrogate. Whoopsie.  

The doctor explained what was about to happen, and showed us on a video monitor exactly what to look for.  After she'd put the ultrasound wand in place, we could see Jeanne's uterus and bladder as dark and light areas, respectively.  The doctor then said some things to a couple of technicians who were splitting their time between the room we were in and a smaller room well-lit room in back, where I assume they kept the little darlings on ice.  Before we knew it, there was an ultrasound-guided catheter visible on the screen, and a nurse was pointing out a bright area emitting from its tip.  Those were our embryos, she said. To be honest, I could barely make out the catheter and couldn't much tell the bright area from any other area of Jeanne's uterus, but they seemed to have handle on it... and then it was done! 

It was done? We had to have been in that room for six minutes tops, and the procedure itself took mayyybe 30 seconds.  This was the moment we'd been waiting over a year for?  My brain went haywire, teasing out the cognitive dissonance stirred up by the realization that a process that had been so insanely complicated had just reached its crucial moment in the blink of an eye.  To make matters weirder, they let Jeanne get up right then and there and walk out with us.  Five minutes later, we were across the street with Annie having pizza at Bertucci's.  Whiplash moment.

But before that, on the way out the door, a nurse handed us a photograph. It was the 2 tranferred embryos in their first home, a petri dish. You could make out the individual cells, and see that blessed lack of fragmentation, and they were round and pretty and good. And to have a picture! We named them Oingo and Boingo...

Release & Refrain.

Sometimes the enormity of it all startles you. But it's silly to go around thinking about how you're "making a life", even if it's true.  And there's so much busywork that the process doesn't easily incline itself to a ton of reflection -- there are steps to take and you take them. If it occasionally feels like emotional mountain-moving, it more often feels like a basic construction job with a punch list, that's gone over-budget, and has fallen predictably behind schedule. 

But the day of the egg retrieval was different. Something big was happening, and the air was abuzz with a sense of occasion. Sara arrived at the Waltham center with her boyfriend, Zack, and her mom Patti, my step-mother. This was the first time we'd met Zack, and we liked him right away.  It didn't hurt that he'd been amazingly supportive of Sara throughout the process, and even helped combine and administer the various hormone medications she'd been prescribed. He was a mensch, it was clear.  And it was great that Patti was there too; the process of "growing our family" had become a real family project by this point. 

When they arrived Lin had already been ushered into the inner sanctum of the facility to "produce his sample."  Considering how important his contribution was to the general success of the junior project, it got relatively short shrift.  It was only a few days before that we'd even gotten around to asking the nurse coordinator about the timing of the whole thing, and for how long he was to remain "master of his domain" ahead of the big event. If it had been less than three days before the appointment, we were told, he was good to go. If it had been longer, he was to "release and refrain", which sounded very much to me like the name of  a mid-90s rom-com starring Bridget Fonda. At any rate, when Lin arrived in the room -- which, owing to the usual space being occupied was a routine exam room with a hard collapsible bed-table, complete with crinkly paper covering -- he was welcomed by a single, well-worn copy of the Men's magazine, Playboy. The "alternative materials" folder had come up bare.  Still, he managed.

Sara was looking relaxed and happy, which was great to see.  She'd been a real trooper, uncomplaining through weeks of daily injections and the resulting hormone-fed mood swings.  You see, normally each month a fallopian tube will transport one egg follicle into position, to either be fertilized or shed when the uterine lining is sloughed off at the next menstrual period. During an egg donation cycle, pharmaceutical intervention encourages the ovaries to release a slew of eggs all at once, with varying degrees of success. In Sara's case, 34 useable egg follicles were retrieved; a veritable ova-fest.  The level of her attainment was clear when Sara shared with us later that the doctor had not-so-subtly invited her to be a for-pay anonymous donor.  She would make $8,000 for three weeks of work, he said, and she could start a few weeks hence.  Now if this were me, at 22, and I was being offered $8,000, I likely would have handed over a kidney or half of my liver.  Sara, being as poised and responsible as I wasn't at that age, demurred. Good girl.

While she underwent the procedure we had about an hour to kill, and noticed a Costco across the street.  What better, what more appropriate, what more goddamned perfect thing could we do at that point, on the precipice of parenthood, than pony up the $45 annual fee and join that shit?  Bring on the 80-pack of Bounty, lasso that pallet of Charmin, you're coming with us.  The thrill was somewhat less for Lin, who spent a great many weekends there throughout his childhood.  My prior experience amounted to once accompanying a friend  to the San Francisco location to buy a hillock of party supplies. It was novel, and even though the rabid consumerism of it all makes me sad when I'm being reflective, I wasn't feeling at all like that at this point. I was feeling like I wanted a gallon-and-a-half of mayonnaise. So get out of my way, please.

After the procedure the four of us drove down to South Dartmouth, stopping on the way for a festive lunch. Sara may have been under anesthesia a few hours prior, but she was feeling great and so were we all.  The air was one of celebration and love, which felt both fitting and like something I should be very grateful for. We both were.   After, we went to the family house down the road, where Patti still lives. We hadn't been there since our wedding just over two years before, and it was comforting to hang out for those couple of hours and sit and talk and be a family, a very modern family.

Somewhere, cells were dividing.

 

Postmodern Pastry.

On the second day of the screenings Sara had a physical exam, a solo meeting with Terry the social worker,  a run-down of all the various hormones she'd be on and how to administer them, and finally another meeting with Terry for us all.  Jeanne was also there for Day 2, undergoing among other things a rorschach test, to her surprise and I think annoyance. But we were all of pretty good cheer, and it was cool when at one point in the afternoon, Sara got to meet Jeanne, and we all sat in that pleasantly colored, gently rounded lobby and made small talk for a few minutes.  From Jeanne's perspective, I imagine it was comforting to see that the woman whose eggs would be fertilized and placed inside her was delightful and adorable, and appeared to bathe regularly.

Jeanne and Frank ended up having their kids with them for the day, as their would-be babysitter came down with the flu.  Frank took care of the them mostly, and also had a meeting with Jeanne and, you guessed it, Terry.  At lunch the whole family, plus Terry, Lin and myself took over a conference room for a social-working lunch.  This is a pretty heavy duty meeting, so I asked Terry if it was okay that the kids would to be with us, given the conversation topics.  Oh it'll be fine, but aren't you just so thoughtful for thinking about that, she related.  Then, I swear to you, the third word out of her mouth as soon as we'd gotten our paper plates filled with Bertucci's and greek salad was "abortion", and whether or not the kids' mother Jeanne was okay with having one should that possibility should it arise.  There was no drama in her answer --  it's talked about incessantly at every stage -- but I nearly choked on my pepperoni, with those cherubic kids at the end of the table, until I realized they probably didn't know an abortion from a tennis racquet, and were prety well occupied with pizza and crayons to have absorbed much else. So it went well, and Terry shared with us in her special, sensitive way, how well-suited she assessed us to be, and how we had the makings for a successful relationship and outcome. 

I was happy, and even managed to allay the urges I'd had the day before to say  outrageous things to Terry just for the hell of it... Now tell me Marc, and tell me Lin, how is it that you first came to consider surrogacy as a means of growing your family? Well, Terry, I'd say, first we considered abduction, but that started to seem impractical... Her face would scrunch at that point,  and dark notations would be scribbled in our chart. I made what Terry would  consider a good, pro-social choice by not indulging in that particular impulse.  Would've been fun to see her face, though.

The last meeting of the day was us, Jeanne, Frank, and our newly appointed "cycle coordinator," Sharon. Her accent was a variation on the Massachusetts classic, filtered through what seemed to be a mouthful of soft marbles.  "Chart" was "chahuert", "period" became "peeuhrwhiod",   She seemed competent, though, and that was enough.  And we were so excited to finally be getting a schedule of when actual babymaking things would occur! There was talk of estrogen gels and patches,  progesterone suspended in sesame versus olive oil, and "trigger shots" from a space-age pen. In theory, I really wanted to know about all of this, but in the moment I just wanted to know that other people, and mostly Lin, had a handle on it so I could check out and worry about things I actually comprehended.  The science of this process is miraculous, until the details almost put you to sleep mid-meeting. 

We finished up,  and with that, the screenings were over, and another flaming hoop had been leapt through. Whether or not it was all successful, we'd have to wait to find out.  We knew that Terry pretty well had our backs, but it would take two weeks before Jeanne and Sara's genetic testing results came back, and only then could green-lighting occur.

We drove Sara back into town, where she lives on Hanover Street in the heart of the North End. It's a charming strip that reminds me a lot of North Beach in San Francisco, home to our budget pied à terre. We had plans to meet Patti, Sara's mom and my step-mom for dinner at Giacomo's, a wildly popular red sauce joint where you have to wait in line for 45 minutes before opening just to get a table. We popped quickly up to Sara's apartment, just long enough for me to remember how socially awkward college roommates can be, especially when there is a brewing feud about dirty dishes left in the sink.  (It's always about dishes, isn't it?)  We got in line at the restaurant and before long Patti arrived and we'd been seated.  It was great to see her. She and my father are in the midst of a divorce that's ending their thirty-year marriage. It's a sad and difficult thing for all involved and it was nice that something equally momentous yet positive was there to rally around and be distracted by.  The portions were also distracting in their enormity - a pound of pasta, nineteen shrimp, a head of garlic, a bunch of parsley! -- but delicious and perfect and timely.  After dessert at Modern Pastry, a classic old cannoli and coffee joint, we said our goodbyes and hugged our hugs and off  we went back to Somerville and not long after, bed.

Fuss No More.

March was flying by, and the mildest winter in memory persisted with sunny, snowless days that found us busy but not too busy to enjoy things.  I took a four-day trip to visit Karen and Stephen and the kids in Virginia, where our first kid talk had been sparked, and managed to squeeze in a night in D.C. with Hope, who'd had twins through IVF a year before.  Lin and I were also finishing up the insane endeavor of The Clean Program, a 21-day cleanse involving supplements, nutritional shakes, and a limited diet.  Severely limited, as in no red meat, sugar, wheat, alcohol, caffeine, dairy or soy.  The first few days are hell, then suddenly and continuously you feel better and even great, until you almost wonder why you ever loved bacon cheeseburgers.

What was really going on, though, was Lin and I being freed from the daily charge of monitoring  junior project progress. And it felt good.  Things were on track, later than we'd hoped for, yeah,  but on track and the fact that we can make a baby at all is pretty goddamned remarkable, so why don't we quit bitching for a half-a-second, ok?  I thought things like this to myself.

The last weekend of the month I was in the Bahamas for a quick work trip. That Sunday, Lin met me at Teterboro Airport and from there we headed directly to Somerville, and a night with Tom and Heather before the screenings began the next day.  And to the extent that a drive through the clenched fist of the tri-state area followed by 3 hours negotiating the craterscape of I-95 can be joyful, it was. For me there is something about travel accompanying big events in life, probably because I spent about 50% of my childhood being shuttled about in a car. If our IVF clinic was down the street, something would be amiss.  The kinetic energy of it all, against the backdrop of long-suffering northeastern infrastructure, said we were earning this.

Tom and Heather's has been our Massachusetts base at every stage in the process.  It's hard to say sufficiently how great it's been to have old friends and understanding faces - not to mention clean sheets and strong coffee --  to help see us through. And for me, being able to share the experience in real time with two of my oldest friends puts things in a historical context -- even if it's a context through which it seems unbelievable that I'm now doing any of this.  But it's nice to appreciate from time to time how you got to now, with people who helped you get there. Also, Tom and Heather are parents, great ones, and it's a pleasure to watch them sail those seas with humor, humility, and the occasional aid of adult beverages.

On the morning of Monday the 26th, we picked up Jeanne at her hotel and headed to the Quincy office of Boston IVF.  She went in for an ultrasound to assess the suitability of her uterus, after which we met with the doctor. There's no other way to say it, he was wild about her uterus. Extremely hospitable, there was no doubt. That, plus my sister's 22-year old eggs was a fine recipe for a baby, or maybe two.  He told us that the chances of getting one were about 70% on average, though a little higher for us given the  circumstances.  The chances of twins are usually about a third, but for us 40 to 50% was more likely. Holy shit.

Next we all headed to the Waltham office, a larger, impressive facility where all the medical procedures take place. This is where Junior would be conceived, we thought.  It was pleasant in a medical facility way, with a gentle color scheme and round-ish baby-bump angles abounding. Some of the other folks in the lobby had slightly greyish demeanors that were in sharp contrast to our Wheeeeeeee!-like energy, happy to finally be at the dance. While Jeanne underwent medical and psychological evaluations, we had a four-hour meeting with a social worker.

I wanted to be a therapist myself at one point, and owing to that I probably felt an affinity for the task at hand. But whatever it was,  I loved this part.  It helped that in answering the "big questions" it became clear that we had the support of each other and our families, and that many of the issues that often arise had happily not done so in our case.  In the most basic sense, after all, there are no straight couples whose experience at an IVF clinic isn't tinged at least slightly, if not heavily, with sadness. We felt comparably like lottery winners.

We finished up and headed out to the mall in Braintree, where we were taking Jeanne, Frank, and their kids Stacy, 4, and Billy, 7,  to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.  It was nice to see Frank again, and he was raffishly sweet as ever.  The kids were incredible - sweet, well-behaved, smart, and so happy!  Stacy actually told Jeanne she loved her eight or nine times over the course of the meal, each time more genuine and unforced than the last.  They knew them some child rearing! We took mental notes, and ate lots of focus-group tested,  universally-appealing food, followed by an abundance of the namesake cheesecake. It'd be easy to trash the place and say that everything was awful,  but it was was good! And the conversation was easy and real and enjoyable.  The only minutely awkward part was as we were leaving, when Stacy asked Frank as we were walking out the doors why they were in Boston in the first place.  We smiled the smile you do when a kid asks a simple question with a complicated answer.

Back to Tom and Heather's for a re-cap, a nightcap, and bed.  Day 1 had been a success.

Chasing Approval.

The lunch went well, but we were reluctant to throw a party quite yet. On the drive back to Brooklyn Lin emailed Jeanne, saying how great it was to meet her and Frank, and how happy we were to be moving forward. She definitely had email on her phone, so we hoped for a speedy, enthusiastic, confirmatory response. Here's the note:

Hi Jeanne,

We both had a great time meeting you and your husband today! We felt really comfortable with you guys too. We'll email the agency and let them know we're moving forward, so we can start scheduling appointments and get the ball rolling. Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with us, and we're really excited about working together!

All the best,

Lin & Marc

 

Several minutes passed, then an hour, then for the rest of the night, nothing. Oh come on, what's going on here? Given the past few months, we were delicate and maybe even hyper-sensitive, but it seemed that the fates were conspiring to goad our creeping doubts.  We got back home to guests, our friends Tom and Heather from Somerville, visiting for a night with their amazing daughter River.  It was great to see them as ever, but it was hard not to be preoccupied. We went to dinner at Flatbush Farm up the street, and managed to have a fun night all the same.

Sunday morning, we decided to text her to see if she'd gotten the email. Nothing for two hours, and then... a text saying she was sorry her mail wasn't working on her phone, and she hadn't checked it at home until that morning. She had just emailed us...

Hi -

We had a great time meeting you both too - kinda felt like I've known you for years :)  I'll email John too, since I'm sure he'll want to hear from us both.Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to go on this journey with you - I feel honored

Talk to you soon, Jeanne

WOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We hugged and squeezed and smiled and otherwise displayed how happy we were. This was BIG! It was real big, we'd found the woman who wanted to be our surrogate! And we liked her a lot, and had even come to like her formerly homophobic husband!

We emailed the agency that things had gone well, and they said they'd complete a "match sheet" and get Jeanne's medical records from her previous pregnancy over to the IVF clinic in Waltham, Massachusetts, so she could be given preliminary approval and we could schedule the two-day medical and psychological screening process for us, Jeanne, and my sister Sara.

We'd met Jeanne on February 4th, and on February 5th our agency contact had mailed all the needed documents to the clinic.  By February 10th, though, the docs still hadn't arrived at the clinic.  Having finally gotten some momentum going, we were feeling impatient with this delay.  Then, by February 15th, no records received at the clinic and no contact from the agency, definitely no sense of urgency that I could glean. We emailed, CC'ing the director, and heard back the following day:

 Hi Marc and Lin,

Here is what happened.  I did send Jeanne's information to Keri last week by US mail. We always send records and GC information this way and there are not any problems.  However, this time, as of yesterday, Keri did not receive the package.

When Keri let me know that the package was not received, I was able to email her most of Jeanne's records that I had saved as PDF files; emailing records has not usually worked in the past as Keri is never able to open the large medical records file.  This time she was able to open what was sent.  The problem is that I was not able to email the last pregnancy records because I can not find them.  It is looking like my assistant may have sent our only copy in the US mail to Keri and we will have to wait for that package to arrive.  In the meantime, I am re-requesting the missing records from the last pregnancy.  I believe that this is the only thing that Keri now needs.

I am sorry about the delay; I have spoken to Keri and she is going to let me know when the package arrives or does not arrive. Hopefully my package will get to Keri today and we will be all set.  If not, the new records should come in the next day or so and we will try to email them to Keri in small batches or fax them to her so she has them right away. I will be out of the office starting tomorrow so Karin will be able to give you an update while I am away.

Thanks and talk soon,

John

It's boring and technical, but sharing one of the hundreds of emails like this we've received seems fair at this point, dear reader. Basically, they sent her confidential medical records via regular U.S. Mail, without a tracking number without a"priority" or "express" designation, and they got lost.  And, he didn't make any copies. (Again, the would-be lawyer in me was incredulous.)  So he emailed most of the records, but "couldn't find" the crucial records from her previous pregnancy.  He suggested waiting until the end of the week to see if the docs that were sent by mail 10 days prior might arrive, before sending the newly requisitioned records from Jeanne's doctor. Fine.

At the same time, a parallel process started between us, Jeanne and the agency to draw up the surrogacy contact, a labyrinthine 28-page document stipulating every possible contingency and nightmare-scenario imaginable. And the financial details, of course, complete with a schedule of fees to be paid to Jeanne should anything go wrong. Or should things go very right; to wit, twins were $5000 extra.  In this process, that almost felt like 2-for-1, though  Go twins, we thought! When are we going to be able to afford, or want to go through this process again? And two little tykes seemed like double the fun.  Double the insane, double the sleeplessness, two of everything, forever, but still, fun!

By February 28th, the records issue had finally been solved and we were assigned dates for the screenings. March 26th and 27th, 2012.  And the contract negotiations were going along very smoothly. Essentially there were no negotiations; we provided everything that Jeanne wanted and she did the same for us.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.  For once.

Once we had screening dates., we were happy.  Another burning ring of fire, successfully leapt through! And Jeanne had really been great at communicating with us. At least once a week we said hi, talked about where we were in the process, and exchanged the sundry details of what was going on in our lives that week.  And that was really nice, it was really nice to develop that easy trust with Jeanne that we'd hoped for in a surrogate.

The month between scheduling and attending the screenings went by quickly, with me in the Bahamas a couple of times for work, and Lin busy in the editing bay and with freelance projects. It's hard to believe how excited we were getting about a process that would involve us sitting with a social worker for four hours in a single day! March 26th approached...

Mohegan Sunbeams.

Of the two of us, I'm the one who gets mad, complains, or otherwise overtly expresses  disappointment. Lin contemplates, percolates, and forms reasoned responses. But upon reading the latest profile, he called the agency and expressed how upsetting it was, after six months of waiting and two false-starts, to be sent the profile of someone not willing to work with us. 

The contact at the agency just happens to be one half of a "male homosexual couple" himself, and Lin made sure he acknowledged how hard it was for us to hear. It was the high-water mark of our disappointment with the agency; maybe I was being naïve, but it seemed to me that if you're paying someone a boatload to do one specific task, then they should do that task with breathtaking skill and precision. Oh, well.

But here's what happened... Lin called and expressed, and was met with, "Oh, no! I sent you the 'wrong version' of the profile!!!" The what?!?  Wait, so you have no-gay  and yes-gay versions?  The"temp didn't realize this one was going to us ??! 

He explained further.  When Jeanne (not her real name)  initially sent her profile to the agency a few years back, she had checked all those boxes, but only because her husband was not into the idea of surrogacy in general, and to get his approval, she had to go along with that particular condition. But what our contact told Lin is that a while back, she come to them and pro-actively asked to switch her profile to include all colors, shapes and orientations of intended parents.  Well that's pretty great, we thought....

Hurt feelings toward the agency lingered a bit, but I had to let that one go.  The next day, our contact said he'd talked to Jeanne and told her we'd seen the old profile, explained that she felt badly, and said we could talk to her about it if we wanted. But after the setbacks we'd already seen, and based on how great and genuine she came across in her profile, we decided to table our agita and go ahead with a phone call.

All the first calls elide into one at this point, and I don't remember a lot of specifics of the call with Jeanne. It's true, though, that because of the "rogue profile", and knowing that she knew that we knew, things started off a little more awkwardly than the other times. But we talked and shared and were serious and even laughed some, and dealt with the two mandatory contingency topics; termination and twins, okay with both.

She impressed us on the call with how well she knew the process, having gone through it for two of her own kids, and for the other couple as a surrogate.  It gave her the kinds of real-world experience that are invaluable in this bizarro process.  She was also solid and kind and we liked her, asked if she wanted to meet in person. She was in eastern Connecticut, and we'd be going to her.  We asked where there was a decent place to eat nearby and without skipping a beat she answered - the casino. Yes!

Two weeks later we were in the car and headed for the Mohegan Sun in Montville, Connecticut.  It the first time there for both of us,  and I'll be damned if it wasn't pretty compelling. Massive, rough-hewn poles and beams littered amongst Mashantucket Pequot artifacts from days long before lady luck collided with their tribe. The way these naturalistic markers contrasted with the crass glare of slot machines and computerized jingles and chain smokers, well it was something.

We'd agreed to meet outside Todd English's Tuscany which I found online, and seemed to have a pretty nice-looking lunch buffet, even if Todd English is rumored to be a serious dick. When we got there we also discovered that it was entirely encased by an enormous rock edifice/fake waterfall! Oh yeah! Trouble was, they were closed for lunch on weekends. Weird, right?

We'd arrived to the casino early, and called Jeanne to let her know the deal, and to ask where we should meet. We'd done a little scanning around ourselves, but at 3pm on a Saturday there were surprisingly few places still serving.  She had a suggestion though, and it was open... Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville!!!  So weird and perfect that words almost fail.

We arrived first and planted ourselves at the bar.  Lin and I were plainly nervous, much more so than when meeting Amy. This was mostly because Jeanne's husband Frank,  the source of the checkboxes of yesteryear, was also coming to lunch.  I ordered a beer, and quick enough it worked its beery magic and calmed my nerves a little. Lin did the same.  When they entered I recognized her from the profile picture, but she didn't see me so I looked away and collected myself, rather than make clumsy eye contact for the next 8 seconds while they traversed the huge restaurant.  When they reached us we made brief introductions. Frank didn't venture a smile, and his eyes darted around focusing on anything but us.  Jeanne seemed a little nervous too, but friendly.  I talked to the hostess and thankfully there was table available right away.  We hightailed it there, hoping the new setting might wash away the weirdness of those first few seconds.

I can tell you that Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville is a wonderfully twisted place.  Every 30 minutes an enormous, circular storm cloud of molded plastic suspended from the ceiling begins to spin, and thunder claps rumble loudly through the sound system. Then, out of the floor rises an equally enormous blender, until the two almost meet, and the cloud starts shooting a stream of "margarita" downward into the receptacle.  Then the song plays, and the blender runs.  But hot damn if they didn't have the best frozen margarita I've probably ever had.  And it was only after those four margaritas arrived at the table -- oh yes, we all had one -- that the social chill lifted and we all started to talk and engage. Frank warmed up a lot, and it became clear very soon that he was a total softie, and a hilarious smartass to boot.  Lin mentioned later that Frank doesn't have the good behavior people usually put on for occasions like this, he has his behavior only, take it or leave it. And we took it.  By the end, when we reached for the check against their protestations, I jokingly said, "Unless you guys do this for a free lunch every weekend!" I was meeting him on smartass common ground, and it worked.  He reached his hand above the table and met mine for an epic high-five. "Duuuuuuude...", he laughed.  I felt like I'd made not one friend but two.

We did talk about surrogacy.  But only after covering our respective jobs,  where we were from and the idiosyncracies of those places, and how the food was tasting, in detail. In fact, when I headed to the bathroom at one point, the topic still hadn't been raised. But when I came back they were all talking about it freely. Excellent! I think they wanted to know what kind of parents we'd be, and I hope that they got their answers as much from how Lin and I are together as from the words we said.  I got the sense that they were into it. 

Lin and I decided beforehand that if things went well, we'd give them the chance to say  then and there if they wanted to proceed, while letting them know that if they wanted time to think that was fine, too.  So at the end of the meal, we popped the question.  Jeanne, who was holding Frank's hand across the table at this point said to him, " So what do you think?" For about ten interminable seconds, he sat speechless, and my stomach knotted.  Anything less than a clear yes was not a good sign, and probably was a bad sign. Shit. "I'm game!" he said, and we all laughed and smiled and exhaled fully.

After that things moved quickly. We paid and all walked out the door together and said  what a good time we'd had and how nice to was to meet and that we'd be in touch real soon.  And then they were gone into a bramble of video poker machines.  Lin and I, in a daze, questioned whether we'd really sealed the deal. We did, right? Right?? Yes, I think we did.

 

Fall Back, Fall Forward, Fall Down.

The surrogacy process begins with you standing at the opening to a long, pitch-black tunnel that you must negotiate. Only, you don't know what's inside, or how long it is,  or what's at the other end.  You have hopes, though, and they are your compass. And there are guideposts along the way, of course, revealing possible outcomes to possible scenarios, doing their very best to buff a sheen of scientific gravitas onto something that ultimately involves an enormous amount of inter-personal and intra-uterine uncertainty. But most of the time you don't let yourself think that way.  Hope does its job and powers you through.

Except when you "lose"  two surrogates in the same number of weeks.  Then the chaos of it all nudges its way into your psyche whether you want it there or not.  That's where we were after Jen.  Dejected, rumpled, a little tired, and probably indulging in some self-pity. Just for a bit, then you dust yourself off and remember that, entropy aside, these agencies and clinics have actual facts and figures which exclaim loudly that most often, this stuff really does work out!  And then you remember about that bouncy baby you want, how much you feel you both have to share with the little thing, and you right your ship.

For the next next eleven weeks though,  there was radio silence from the agency. And while we weren't exactly waiting by the phone, we did want it to ring.  Thankfully, we also had a torrent of amazing guests from October through December, visiting from all over.  And we had a pretty great time with them all.  Discovering and going to Isa  in Williamsburg  for dinner three times in four weeks may in fact be the culinary apogee of our collective time in New York. (Seriously, go, with an open mind and a sense of playfulness.)  My point is, life went on with aplomb, even if  in the dual-processor recesses of our minds there existed a tinge of dread, a wonder about what might next go awry.

As usual, work took me away for two weeks at Christmas and New Years, and at this particular point breaking up my routine was probably a good thing, even if I did miss Lin daily, sometimes hourly. We'd taken turns being moody and emotional about the whole process, and turns supporting each other through.  Thankfully it was rare that we were both down and out at the same time. And we grew together, learning more and more about the deep thickets of each others' interior lives. It bonds you like the trenches, this stuff.

January 10, 2012.  We got an email saying that two new profiles were ready to view. They'd said things would pick up after the holidays, and it was happening! And one of the profiles they were particularly jazzed about - one of their "absolute favorites" was available again, after having a surrogate birth eight months prior. She was experienced!

The email described her this way:

We love this carrier; she is one of our favorite GCs. We have known her for four years and have stayed in contact since her delivery last April. She lives in CT and  is a stay-at-home mom. She is warm, wonderful and will be the best at communicating with you, it will be so easy to move through the process with her. She is well-educated and lovely to speak with. This carrier does have health insurance to cover the pregnancy costs.

Once bitten, twice shy, sure;  but sounds pretty good, right? We felt okay enough to exhale a little, and stop worrying about when the other shoe would drop.  The three factors that probably led Amy to back out - working full time, in school full time and being a single mom -  this carrier had none of those, and had been through the entire process before. This was good.

I was at work when the profiles arrived in an email.  Lin was home, and tore into them.  The other profile seemed great also, but her fee was higher than we could afford, and she didn't have insurance, placing her completely out of reach.  Fine, easy, moving on...

The first profile was good,  though, really good. In addition to to the raves from the agency,  she seemed really smart and compassionate, in her own words.  She'd been through IVF for her own children, in addition to having recently been a surrogate.  She knew the ropes, seriously.

I'd opened the profile on my phone and was scanning as much as I could on the tiny screen, when I got a text from Lin.  "Call me."  It was incongruous, given the moment.  Normally even in the worst of times we include some little nonsense word or silliness in our texts, but this felt serious.

In getting to the end of the profile, Lin had stumbled on something. 

Please, no.