“It’s like your life was napping,” Jeff said, “but then it woke up and had to finish everything by 5.”
He was talking about the week we met two-and-a-half years ago.
That Wednesday, I decided I was going to quit my job (in threat assessment, of all things). On Thursday, Jeff and I went on our first date. On Friday, I made the harrowing choice to put down Minnie, my devilish little wire-haired rescue mutt and best friend of 10 years. On Saturday, my brother and his husband flew from Oakland to Los Angeles and made their first attempt to impregnate me. On Sunday, Jeff and I decided to dive in and make our relationship official.
A couple months earlier, my brother told me that his third attempt at I.V.F. using a surrogate and his sister-in-law’s egg didn’t take. They had been trying to have a baby for more than three years and were out of viable embryos, so they asked me for my eggs.
I know what you’re thinking: How offensive that they asked your sister-in-law before you! That was my petty first reaction, too. The excuse was that she already had a child, so her fertility was less of a gamble, which is admittedly reasonable.
My second thought was about how much I didn’t want hormone injections, both for the practical reasons and the fragility of my mental health. But I really wanted to help them; I knew they would be the best fathers.
The most logical alternative was my next suggestion: “Why don’t I just have the baby for you?”
We spent the next weeks considering this, then I had to go off the pill and start tracking my ovulation cycles. I considered some of the wonderful side effects of being pregnant — unparalleled girth, mood swings, physical inflexibility, bladder leaks, gas — and the damage they might wreak on my dating life. But none struck me as a surrogacy deal breaker.
Right around that time, a cute guy on Hinge saw a picture of me in Joshua Tree National Park and told me I “look neat.” We talked for two weeks while he was visiting family in Illinois. Two other men I was messaging with during this time referred to my situation as “too complicated.” Not Jeff.
In Los Angeles, a city of dreamers waiting for their big break, I often felt like someone’s placeholder while dating. Jeff, an I.T. guy at a real estate company who designs video games in his spare time, never made me feel like anything but the main event. By the time we met, I had been living in this city and dating unsuccessfully for a decade. At the end of my first date with Jeff, he asked me to meet his French bulldog, which I took as a good sign because his dog is the thing he loves most. (I later learned this was less a compliment than a test, which I thankfully aced.)
When I left my second date with Jeff to go put another man’s sperm inside me, he barely flinched. He did ask me to clarify that I wasn’t going home to have sex with my brother’s husband. Once I set the record straight, there was no more flinching.
My brothers and I did what I lovingly refer to as D.I.Y.-I.U.I. That’s when both the doctor and the lawyer are too afraid of the negative outcomes to condone what you’re doing, so your brother-in-law goes into a bathroom, ejaculates into a Tupperware container, and you, flying blind, shoot the sperm from a syringe as close to your cervix as you can, then lie upside down for half an hour, doing a crossword puzzle and hoping for the best.
For months, when my peak ovulation period seemed imminent, they would fly into town, and we would attempt insemination about twice a day for two or three days. Then they would fly home, and we would wait two weeks to see if my period came.
In December, after four months of trying, my period missed its usual mark. I took a pregnancy test, then took another the next day for good measure. Both were positive.
Jeff was the one who drove me to the hospital when the painful cramps and bleeding started less than a week later. He couldn’t come in with me because of lingering Covid restrictions, but he cooked chicken and rice and brought it for me when I was forced to wait seven hours for the doctor to tell me what I already knew: that I wasn’t pregnant anymore.
The next month, Jeff and I went to Illinois where I met his family. On the first day of my menstrual cycle, we told each other for the first time that we loved each other. On the last day of my cycle, I found out I was again pregnant with my brother’s baby. This time it stuck.
I spent nine months focused on one thing: having a healthy baby. I did other things in the nine months — worked a part-time job, finished grad school — but my priority was the baby. I knew the immense guilt I would feel if the baby didn’t come out perfect.
I decreased my medication dosage, stopped eating sliced turkey, started doing something resembling yoga. I tried hard not to ask Jeff for midnight ice cream runs — which was easy, since usually it was him asking. Once I had a specific craving for vegan breakfast sandwiches that were out of delivery range (even though I am not vegan), and he dutifully went out and got two for me.
I went into labor in the waiting room of the swanky Beverly Hills office of Jeff’s company. I was waiting for him so we could go to lunch. His office was right by the hospital, so he came in with me. Around the time I got my first dose of fentanyl and dozed off, he went home to eat lunch, take the dog out, and get my phone charger. He came back, even though the hospital was an hour from home, and waited with me until my brother and his husband arrived from their six-hour drive south.
I delivered a baby boy who was a little sensitive and had to spend some time in the NICU. It was nothing serious — I had been on anxiety medication, and this baby took his food a little gently. Yet even knowing that it was just standard procedure, the guilt of potentially having delivered an unhealthy baby crept up on me until he was released. It was less than 48 hours, and he even got to participate in an adorable NICU Halloween celebration. Now, one and a half years later, he is a happy, healthy, fast-growing boy.
Early on, when he was just a few months old, I visited them at their home in Berkeley and started crying as I watched my brother-in-law give him a bath. It was mundane — my brother-in-law was making up nonsensical songs, splashing around, and doing every silly voice in the book to get a smile. He used to be an actor, and it seemed he found the part he was born for.
The amount of love in the house felt suddenly overwhelming — mine for my brothers and for the baby, my brothers’ love for me, and, most of all, my brothers’ love for the baby, a longstanding dream they had feared might never come true.
Coming home from that explosion of love to a dark, empty, Minnie-free house with postpartum hormones firing on all cylinders might have just broken me. Instead, coming home to Jeff, and his (now two) puppies, only made the love grow.
Back when I was at Jeff’s office, having my contractions, a few of his female co-workers noticed the very large pregnant woman in the lobby and asked him about it later. He explained that his girlfriend was having a baby for her brother. They asked him how long we had been together, and he said it had been a little more than a year.
Rather than marveling at my sacrifice, they marveled at his — a man who spent almost his whole relationship with a woman having another man’s baby.
Whenever Jeff received this type of compliment, he said the same thing: “It doesn’t have anything to do with me.” He means that in the best way possible, that this is my family’s story, that our relationship is separate, that he is just a minor character.
Sometimes, as a surrogate, I also felt like a side character in someone else’s story, the story of two people desperate to create their family. But Jeff always makes me feel like the romantic lead. And, despite his protests to the contrary, that’s how I have always seen him too.
Tamar Stevens works in communications strategy for nonprofit organizations in Los Angeles.
Modern Love can be reached at [email protected].
To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.
Want more Modern Love? Watch the TV series, sign up for the newsletter and listen to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify. We also have two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”
The post My Strange Saga of Dating While Pregnant appeared first on New York Times.
