I met Megan for coffee this morning. I brought her cocoa butter for her stretch marks, a gift certificate for an expensive massage, and three jars of pickles. I also bought coffee. She brought my baby.
She ordered a decaf caramel macchiato--the largest one possible--with three extra caramel pumps. She shrugged and smiled at the barista. “The baby likes caramel. What can you do?” I smiled because Megan ordered her macchiato like that before the baby. Except with the caffeine. Extra caffeine.
“How far along are you?” the young and very pretty barista asked.
“Not as far as I want to be,” Meg said. “Seven months and counting.” She turned to me, “but what are sisters for if it’s not carrying each other’s babies?” That’s her way of including me.
I reached my arms around her big, round belly and I hugged her. “She’s my surrogate,” I told the barista.
At that point, you get a variety of responses. People ask if I’m gay, people ask me what’s wrong with me, or they ask what that means, or they look around uncomfortably, but mostly people gush over how selfless Megan is, and they tell me how lucky I am to have her in my life--as if I don’t know that.
This barista just took my order and made our drinks and said to neither of us in particular, “Good luck with the baby!”
We found a table and sat down. Megan told me how much her back hurts, and she lifted up her enormous feet to show me. “If I didn’t have spogs before, I sure do now!” She was already a size 11 before the baby. “You’re going to owe me a new shoe wardrobe if this swelling doesn’t go down.”
“They better be cheap shoes. This baby is going to need diapers, you know.”
“Get reusable. My feet are more important.”
So we talked about of course I’m buying reusable, and I told her about the colors for the nursery--green and yellow. Meg knows the baby’s sex, but James and I are waiting for the surprise. People always ask us what we’re hoping for. I’m hoping for a baby.
I told her the names we are thinking about. We like Biblical names mostly, or else names from Victorian novels. We haven’t narrowed it down at all. We just throw them out as we think of them. We’ll know what the baby’s name is when we look at it, right? I don’t know--this is our first, and it’s happening all crazy. We’re making it up as we go.
Megan’s a gestational surrogate. That’s what they call it when it’s my egg and James’ sperm, but it’s Megan’s uterus. Mine’s no good. Megan never wanted to give birth to children, but she volunteered as soon as she heard. She’s that amazing.
Sometimes I feel like I let James down.
It makes him uncomfortable that Megan is the one having the baby. A woman who’s not his wife is pregnant with his child. I get that that’s weird. Especially since it’s my sister, but there just wasn’t another way to do it. I couldn’t let a stranger have my baby. People say we should have adopted, and maybe we will next time around. We certainly can’t afford to do this again. The in-vitro, I mean. But the people who tell us we should adopt are always the people with the big families, made up of their own biological children that they conceived by having sex with their husbands.
Megan told me a story about her flirting with this guy, who seemed really uncomfortable. She couldn’t figure out what his problem was until after she left the grocery store and realized she never told him that she was carrying the baby for someone else.
“You forgot you were pregnant?”
“No, I remembered that! I told him that we could get drinks after the baby was born!”
“Megan! You didn’t!”
“Oh, I did.”
“So he’s imagining you abandoning your newborn to go out and meet guys, then coming up to get your baby drunk with your vodka laced breast milk.”
“Correct,” she said.
We were dying. It was so funny. So Megan.
“Oh, the baby’s kicking!” She grabbed my hand.
I hate that I have to use my hand to feel my own baby kick.
Sometimes I dream that I’m pregnant. In those dreams I can feel the baby kicking, and I wake up and my stomach is flat, and my first thought is that I’ve misplaced the baby, or someone’s taken it away from me. I look through the covers and over the edge of the bed before I remember that the baby’s with Megan.
James thinks this whole thing was a mistake. He says, “I didn’t know how hard it would be on you,” and then I feel bad for not handling it better.
Being with Meg was such a welcome break. We laughed. She did the craziest things; she always has. She makes friends with everyone. She broke out in song in the middle of the street. She wanted to go dance next to the man playing the saxophone, and she said I have to go with her because she’s having a baby for me. So I went, but I just laughed while she danced. She let two women walking by touch her belly. She lets everyone touch her belly. I wish she would ask me first. What if I don’t want everyone to touch my baby?
I wonder if I’m ever not going to owe her.
I spend a lot of time with her these days. Because it’s a break, and because she needs help now that she’s so big, and because I want to be near the baby. James feels left out. It’s his baby too. He never really liked Megan. Sometimes I think this whole thing was a mistake.
But I’m grateful. I’m so grateful. And I tell myself, and I tell James, that when we bring this baby home from the hospital and it has my eyes and his chin, then this will all be worth it. And he tells me that he wanted the pregnancy to be something we went through together. And I tell him that I wanted pregnancy to be something I could go through at all.
It was easier at the beginning. That first ultrasound. We just held each other, and neither of us could stop smiling, and we put the picture in a frame by the bed, and we had sex three times in a row--no birth control, no need--and we just kept saying, “Oh my god we’re going to be parents!” And I was so happy I cried.
I don’t know where all of that went.
Megan gave me name suggestions. Chauncy for a boy. Or Oscar after her dog. She suggested Barack, and I spit cappuccino across the table. When I regained composure, which wasn’t for a while, I asked her what I should name it if it’s a girl. She said, “Well obviously you have to name it after me.” I laughed, but that was much less funny. I do not want to name the baby after her.
James and I have talked about how life never turns out like you plan. But you have to make the best of it. That’s not how you should talk about having a child. You shouldn’t have to make the best of having a child. We talked about how no one is really normal. What’s normal anyway?
And I don’t know. I don’t know what normal is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. But I know what normal is not. Normal is not this.
I went home after coffee, jittery from the caffeine I sometimes use to fill the void. If I can’t have a baby, at least I can have all the caffeine I want. I don’t even like caffeine; it gives me a headache.
I pulled the car into the garage, and found the makeup remover I keep in my purse, and the eye drops that take the red away. I practiced telling James how much fun coffee was and how beautiful Megan looked and how excited I am about the baby, and when I could do it without crying, I washed away the smeared mascara, and re-applied it so it looked like new.
Is this normal? Normal’s always changing. Trying to have a baby used to be normal. Negative pregnancy tests used to be normal. Now normal is Megan will always be the martyr, and I will always be the broken one. And I will always owe her. I hope the baby will be a boy. So that we can name it after James. I hope the baby will be a girl, so we can name it anything but Megan.
James and I are putting the crib together tonight, and he will drink and I will cry, and we will have sex because we are lonely, and it won’t help. We will ask each other, “are you okay?” a million times each. And in nine weeks we will have a baby that will be mostly us, but a little bit Megan.
I don’t know what normal is. I’ve never seen it. I’ve definitely never been it. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve ever been happy either. Unless this is it. It this it?