Inconceivable (26 page)

“Do any genetic members of your baby have diabetes, blood-clotting disorders, or heart eurythmias?”

I don’t know.

“No.”

“Are you going to breast-feed or bottle-feed?”

I think he’s being bottle-fed? Not sure.

“Bottle-feed.”

“Who will be his pediatrician?”

I don’t know that either.

“Kiron Torsekar.” The name of our pediatrician.

“Will you have him circumcised?”

God, I hope so.

“Uh…I think so?”

“What is the name you have chosen for your son?”

Then it hit me.
I don’t know his name. How could I not know his name?

“Not sure yet.”

He’s not coming today. You can do this.

“Okay, last question. Is there anything else you think we need to know about this pregnancy?”

I pressed my hands to my face in an attempt to push back my tears, but I fell into sobs in a matter of seconds.

“Well, you see, this baby isn’t mine. I got pregnant with the wrong baby as a result of a botched IVF. My fertility doctor put the wrong embryos in me, and now I’m pregnant with someone else’s baby.”

I could hardly get the words out. The nurses exchanged glances.

Finally one of them asked, “Are you giving him up for adoption?”

This question flabbergasted me. “Hell no. We want him, but he’s not ours. His genetic parents want him. We know who they are. They know who we are. They are taking him away as soon as he is delivered.”

By this time I was so hysterical that my nose had turned into a faucet and my blood pressure soared to its highest reading yet.

“I tried not to say anything about this to you. But the truth is, I don’t know the answers to any of the questions you asked. I’m not ready for this. I can’t have this baby today. I’m not ready to let him go.”

The nurse doing my vitals was sympathetically rubbing my arm and asked me to roll over on my left side to lower my blood pressure. I did as she asked and wiped my face with a tissue and looked over toward the nurse asking me the questions, who was sitting on the couch with her head in her hands, quietly crying.

I looked at the other nurse, who was trying to maintain her composure, but miserably failing. Within another minute, we were all crying and no one could talk.

A few minutes had passed when one of them said, “Well, we are a sorry bunch.”

The comment enabled us to laugh halfheartedly.

“I am so sorry,” said the nurse who was asking the questions. “I didn’t know that could happen. You see, I’ve done three IVFs and a number of frozen embryo transfers to try to have a family.”

“Do you have any children?” I asked.

“Yes, but we never had one of our own. We finally gave up and adopted.”

“Oh. That’s wonderful. Congratulations. How old is your child?” I asked as I wiped my tears away.

“We have a two-year-old son. He is the love of our lives. Do you understand what a tremendous gift you are giving to this other family?”

“Yes. We get it. We know what is right, even though it is breaking our hearts.”

“Well, I get it too. What you are doing is amazing. I hope this other family has been kind to you. Do they understand what you’ve done for them?”

That was another question that I didn’t have an answer for.

“I don’t know. I hope so. Time will tell.”

We finished our cry fest just as Sean walked in with my bag. I explained that I had had a bit of a meltdown, but in spite of my hysterics, the baby looked great on the fetal monitors. We had pretty much been told that we wouldn’t be delivering that night but had to
wait for Dr. Read to come to the hospital, lay eyes on me, and give them permission to discharge me.

When she arrived, it was well after midnight, and we were exhausted.

“I’m so sorry I made you wait. I had a delivery across town and knew I couldn’t be here right away, but needed to see you for myself to make sure you were okay.”

“No worries. This was a good dry run. I never even called the Morells. I knew he wasn’t coming tonight. It did make me realize that I needed to get more prepared for this. I wasn’t mentally ready.”

“Well, everything considered, I think you need to get ready. If your blood pressure is elevated at any time from now forward, that would be enough to call for the C-section considering the drop you’ve had in your fluid.”

“I figured that. You know, I think I need one more week. Thirty-six weeks would be a great accomplishment for me. I think September 24 or 25 sounds like a good day to be born. By then I will have cleared all of my goals. I will have made it to term, gotten past Drew’s fifteenth birthday, and hopefully gotten ready to say good-bye.”

Dr. Read told me she understood how important it was for me to give the baby that week to grow, but she said I had to recognize that, considering all the other factors, we could expect a delivery any day.

We drove home from the hospital that night, exhausted and relieved. My Little Man was still with me. I knew I needed to drink up these last few days with him.

C
HAPTER
17

The Best Way Out Is Through

CAROLYN

M
Y UNEXPECTED ADMISSION TO
the hospital forced us to face the fact that the baby could be arriving any day. There were many ways in which we were very well prepared. Sean had handled the logistics on all fronts in a way that left nothing to chance, but emotionally I felt as though perhaps there was no way for us to prepare for this loss.

Although Little Man had only been with us for a short time, he meant so much to us. He had profoundly affected our lives and our family, and I could not predict how he would change our future. After he left us, surely we would grieve, but what would that grief feel like?

I’d known mothers who had a baby stillborn, and I’d seen them grieve the emptiness that created. The baby who dies becomes the container for all the unfulfilled potential in life. Some mothers mourn by idealizing that child, conjecturing what kind of person that baby would have become and how much joy the family would have had as the child grew. Though we thought we were facing that kind of loss, we knew that the baby would live on beyond that moment, but nurtured by other parents. How do you mourn the
loss of someone who still lives? And who goes on to give joy to another family?

People sometimes compared our situation to putting a baby up for adoption, yet that was so off the mark from what we felt. Women who give their babies up for adoption have very specific reasons for doing so. Of course their feeling of loss is great, and many of those women grieve over the fact that they couldn’t afford or accommodate the new life they created. But we had the means and the space in our hearts and in our home to keep this child.

As the baby spun and twirled and kicked inside my womb, I had moments of pure pride for having managed to bring him this far. I was the woman who was about to launch this powerful Little Man into the world. That ecstatic moment when I’d hear his first cry, see him take his first breath, would be a victory for Sean and me. But what would the moments after that be like? When they cut the cord that connected him to me, he would never be mine again legally, physically, or emotionally. Yet as far as I was concerned, he would always be our baby. I knew Sean felt the same way. What kind of empty space would his departure leave behind? Every time I thought about it, I had to turn my mind away. I could feel myself falling into that loss, and there was no way out, no place for my hands to grab on to that would allow me a chance to pull myself back out.

One morning I was about to leave for our appointment with Kevin when I realized that I hadn’t given myself my morning shot of blood thinners for my blood-clotting disorder. I’d recently had to switch to twice-a-day shots of Heparin because the perinatologist said Heparin was safer in the third trimester.

At first giving myself shots had been fine, if a little stomach-turning. But when I had to do it twice a day, I had a hard time finding a place to insert the needle. The injections toughened my skin. My stomach and thighs were covered with welts and bruises that made the injections become more and more painful. Just before MK
was about to wake up, I sat in the bathroom, syringe in hand, trying to find a bruise-free place on my leg, when I dropped the syringe and it plunged into my foot.

The pain was unimaginable, as if someone had just stabbed me in the ankle. After I pulled it out, I threw it at the wall and burst into tears. In that moment, I had nothing left. How could I endure all of this and not get a baby? After a few minutes, and many tears, I quieted down. I was stronger than this. I had proven it already, and we were almost done. I took a deep breath, loaded a new syringe, eventually found a place to take the shot, and switched to the task at hand: packing up MK for our final prenatal visit with Kevin Anderson.

I felt depleted and gloomy as I pulled into the church parking lot for our appointment with Kevin. I was weary physically and emotionally. On the one hand, I was so happy that Little Man and I had made it this far, and there was so much of me that wanted the pregnancy to be over. Then there was another part of me that didn’t want the pregnancy to be over. I wanted to stay connected to my Little Man. I was so weary of all of it and of having to be counseled. There had been sessions when we were feisty and combative, and others when we sobbed. We’d even had our share of laughter at the absurdity of some of what was going on. This session felt somber. We almost didn’t know where or how to begin.

“I’m so scared,” I said. “I don’t know how I’m going to handle everything that happens to me after the baby is gone. My body will be a wreck, and my hormones will be raging with maternal instincts that are too powerful to turn off.”

“Night after night the same vision comes to me,” Sean said. “A series of quick scenes flash in my head: Carolyn being carted to surgery, me with her in the delivery room, and then a fog comes with me not being able to picture anything. Then I’m shutting the door behind the room the Morells are in with the baby boy. A wave of anger flashes through me, and I become disoriented. I walk down a
hallway with a storm blowing up inside me. With all of my force, I shove my fist as fast as possible into the wall. As my fist hits the wall, I scream, ‘No! No!’ I see a dent as I put my back on the wall and slide down it. When I hit the floor, I take my knees to my chest and place my hands in my face and cry.”

Kevin looked at the floor, folded his hands, and thought in silence.

“Who would blame me? How am I supposed to give a baby away? How is anyone supposed to give a baby away they want to raise? I’ve kept all of this bottled up the whole time Carolyn has been pregnant because there were more important things for me to manage than these emotions. The only question that remained was whether my fist would punch a hole through the wall or if I would simply make a dent. Yet I know a lot of people will think we will simply be relieved this is over. We should just get on with our lives as though nothing ever happened. I don’t know how we’ll ever be able to do that.”

“‘The best way out is through.’ Are you familiar with that Robert Frost poem?” Kevin asked.

“No,” said Sean quickly. Once again, Sean looked cranky that Kevin was citing a passage from spirituality or literature that he didn’t know. He looked at me, the language arts teacher, as if I ought to know the line, but I hadn’t a clue.

“It is a line from the poem ‘Servant to Servants,’” Kevin said. “It’s about a woman who shoulders a big burden of work.

By good rights I ought not to have so much

Put on me, but there seems no other way.

Len says one steady pull more ought to do it

He says the best way out is always through

We looked at him for a few seconds, waiting for him to explain to us what he meant.

“When I consider the options that have been available to you, those lines seem to fit your situation,” he said. “You see, you could have made the choice to terminate, because it would have been easier. You didn’t because that would have been wrong. You could have made the choice not to reach out to the Morells, because it would have been easier to protect yourselves from the people who could hurt you the most. You didn’t because that would have been unkind. You could have refused to develop an attachment to this child because it would have lessened the blow of his departure. You couldn’t because you love him. Now you are faced with the unknown. What lies ahead? Your surrogate could miscarry. The Morells could take the baby, never allowing you to see him again, and your actions could be exploited by others for personal gain. All of that could go wrong, but my guess is that you’ll get through those possible disasters.”

“Well, of course we’ll survive them,” I said. “We’ll still be alive, and we’ll still have our family and our work. But through? What do you mean by through?”

“You have to face it, all of it, all the emotions,” he said. “When people tell you that you should be feeling a certain way or behaving in the way they would, that’s not where your focus should be. Whatever you are feeling, if it’s sorrow or grief or that you want to punch your fist through the wall, all of that is completely justifiable. Don’t restrict the way you feel to fit someone else’s agenda, someone else’s idea of conduct. The best way out is through these emotions. Fully experience them, fully feel everything you feel. Only if you do that will you be able to get to the other side of this traumatic experience. The best way out
is
through. You will get there, and in the end you’ll be all right.”

We knew Kevin was right. We’d been fighting and kicking every day as new developments occurred. We had yet to surrender to what was coming. We didn’t need to fight it. We would get out, some day, but first we had to go through.

Would we ever get past “the through”? Time would tell. I was sure scared of what was coming with the delivery and prayed again that I would have the strength to get through it.