An Excellent Choice Read online

  ALSO BY

  Emma Brockes

  She Left Me the Gun

  What Would Barbra Do?

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Emma Brockes

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Brockes, Emma, author.

  Title: An excellent choice: panic and joy on my solo path to motherhood / Emma Brockes.

  Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018006198 (print) | LCCN 2018009187 (ebook) | ISBN 9780698402621 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594206634 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Brockes, Emma—Health. | Fertilization in vitro, Human—Biography. | Infertility, Female—Patients—England—Biography. | Mothers—England—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | HEALTH & FITNESS / Pregnancy & Childbirth. | HUMOR / Topic / Marriage & Family.

  Classification: LCC RG135 (ebook) | LCC RG135 .B74 2018 (print) | DDC 618.1/780599092 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006198

  The names and identifying characteristics of certain individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.

  Version_1

  For my family

  Contents

  Also by Emma Brockes

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1: “Are You Going to Do It, Then?”

  CHAPTER 2: Origin Story

  CHAPTER 3: The Selfish Gene

  CHAPTER 4: Tubes

  CHAPTER 5: Sperm

  CHAPTER 6: January 2014

  CHAPTER 7: Drugs

  CHAPTER 8: Waiting

  CHAPTER 9: Falling

  CHAPTER 10: Rising

  CHAPTER 11: England

  CHAPTER 12: New Year’s Eve

  CHAPTER 13: Neonatal

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  EIGHT P.M. IS A DANGEROUS TIME in my household. If everything has gone well in the preceding few hours, two out of the three of us will be sleeping, but it’s a light sleep, easily broken. If everything has gone badly, two will be wailing. There is an indeterminate stage, when one is asleep and one wakes up, in which case I have approximately four and a half seconds from the sound of the first murmur to rise from the sofa, skid down the hall in my socks, cross the bedroom in two Spiderman-style leaps and soothe her to sleep before she yells and wakes up the other one. This is what it is to be outnumbered by one’s children: you are always ready to run.

  The anxiety of bedtime is known to all parents—the fact that for babies under two, the trajectory from afternoon into evening must be negotiated with the precision of a space shuttle reentering the earth’s atmosphere (too steep and you will trigger the baby’s indignant rage; too shallow and she will bounce off into overtiredness, never to return)—but it is felt most acutely, perhaps, by single parents. For us, the danger of evening isn’t only in the wailing, the stress and the tiredness. It is in those close-of-day hours when we are inclined to feel the strangeness of our circumstance most keenly—in my case, the manifold strangeness of being a Briton in Manhattan and a single mother of twin girls, with a partner, or partner-of-sorts, who lives with her three-year-old son in the apartment upstairs.

  This scenario is not the fruit of careful planning. Even five years ago, when I first started thinking that if I wanted a baby then I’d better get on with it, all my imagination would stretch to was the blurry outline of a small, portable infant whom I could pop into my bag and take with me on jobs to L.A., or out to dinner in New York, where it would lie quietly in its car seat under the table. It would have my surname and dark hair like me, and if it was a boy, I’d raise him gay so we could watch old musicals together on Sunday afternoons. If it was a girl, she’d be bookish and serious with straight bangs across her forehead, like a smaller version of Amelie, or Matilda without the telekinesis.

  How this baby would come into being I had no idea, but given that I was, at the time, living alone in a walk-up in Brooklyn, with unstable immigration status and a fluctuating income, I had a few things to figure out first. I was also in a relationship with a woman. L was three years older than me and wanted a baby, too, which would seem to offer an obvious route toward a somewhat conventional family arrangement. The only problem was this: we didn’t want the same baby.

  Before I go on, I should say that L is not a writer and finds the endless use to which I put my own life distasteful—I can’t imagine why—and so, in the story that follows, the ins and outs of our relationship aren’t something I can get overly into. What I can say is this: she and I were not twenty-two-year-old newlyweds. We were women in our late thirties who, when we met, had been around long enough to know our own natures and be somewhat unflinching in regard to accommodating them. She did not want a baby as an expression of her love for me. I did not want a baby as a reflection of my love for her. I wanted a baby because I wanted a baby, and if I’m forced to give more of a reason than that, the best I can do is to say that, as in most things, from how I make scrambled eggs (with water, not milk) to how I fight (indirectly), concede (grudgingly), compete (overly), love (jealously) and hate (over decades, and with an overdeveloped appetite for revenge), it probably has to do with the relationship I had with my mother. Anyway, whatever it was, it had nothing to do with the person I was seeing.

  Clearly this presented me with a number of problems. The choices available to thirty-six-year-old single women who want babies have not, historically, been wildly attractive. You can get lucky. You can get promiscuous. You can, as women essayists pop up every few years to remind us, “settle” for a partner you’re not wholly into, that is, if you can find someone abject enough to agree. You can turn your life upside down at the first whiff of romance. In the past few years, I have watched as friends, or friends of friends, have moved from New York to St. Louis, the West Coast, London or, in the most extreme case, Bali to be with a man. (“I win!” said the one who went to Bali.) These women, all aware of and grimly amused by this trend, put it this way: you can live in New York and never meet anyone or you can move to the other side of the world, change your job, abandon your friends, but win the jackpot of being in a couple. (The landscape is slightly different for single gay friends, who have better luck in the cities, but suffer the same uncertainty as to whether the person they’ve met is the “right” one to have kids with.) No man I know has, in the early stages of a relationship, ever moved to where his girlfriend was living unless he had at least one other good reason for doing so.

  There are two further possibilities: resign yourself to the fact it’s not going to happen, or pull the emergency cord and do it alone.

  I should pause here to acknowledge that being a single parent is still, for the most part, not a matter of choice but of unforeseen circumstance and as such makes what I’m talking about—elective single motherhood—laughably decadent, a bunch of well-heeled professional women fretting over how to have babies, when the vast majority
of single mothers are just trying to get by. Of the ten million single parents in the United States, eight million of whom are women, nearly half live below the poverty line.

  The very definition of single parenthood exists on a sliding scale, and because competition over who has it worst is often as fierce as it is over who has it best, I should also own to the fact that having L upstairs insulates me from many of the anxieties of raising babies alone. Single mothers with no help at all will feel superior to me, just as I feel superior to divorcées with big alimony settlements or anyone with fewer than two babies or women who have their own mothers on hand, and we all feel superior to married women who say things like “Dave’s off golfing and I’m a single mum for the weekend!”

  This petty machismo is, in my experience, outmeasured by the solidarity among women raising kids on their own, but in any case, this is not a book about my life as a single parent, the difficulties of which are comparatively small and ordinary compared with those of the period immediately preceding it. These were the months and years of my mid- to late thirties when every day seemed to bring another set of terrifying and uniquely irreversible decisions. Am I really going to do this? How am I going to do this? How much will it cost? Can I afford it? How alone will I be? Where will we live? Is it too weird? What if my kid doesn’t look like me? Is it immoral? What if it doesn’t work? What if it does work? Can I use it as an anchor baby? Am I ready to be a single mother? How I negotiated these decisions in the midst of all the advice, scolding and general hysteria that still attends the way in which a woman has, or doesn’t have, children is the main concern of this book.

  I will not be writing about elective single dads, not out of any bias against them but because I know so few—one, in fact. It is, however, fair to assume that aside from the stuff about vaginas and ovaries, most of what I’m saying here applies equally to them. In fact, because of assumptions about men’s nurturing abilities and the narrower range of biological options available to them, men wanting children alone probably have it harder than we do.

  Still, the vast majority of people choosing to become single parents at the moment are women. As I write, two of my oldest friends are pregnant with babies conceived the same way that mine were, two others are trying and it’s no exaggeration to say that, of those who want children, every other single or kind-of-single woman I know is considering it. “It’s the death of men,” said a (married) friend recently, a little caustically, I thought. “No,” I said. “It’s the death of crappy relationships for the sake of having a baby.” It’s the death of back-against-the-wall decision making. It is, potentially, the death of a lot of unhappiness, although ask me again in thirty years’ time when my own children’s memoirs come out. In any case, it is the rise of options where latterly there were none.

  What it isn’t, I’m pretty sure, is the THIN END OF THE WEDGE, the slippery slope into eugenics and a master race and curated children with no sense of belonging. In Denmark, where they have, of course, been doing it for years, one in ten babies conceived with donor sperm is born to a single mother by choice and nascent studies show that the kids are all right, performing across every metric as well as or above children from traditional two-parent families. Even so, the notion of a sperm donor, while more socially acceptable than that of an egg donor or a surrogate, comes with hefty negative connotations. It is selfish. It is existentially troubling. It messes up the children. It messes up society. It encourages women to leave it later and later to have a first child, with the concurrent risks to both mother and baby. Since my babies were born, I have been informed by one news outlet or another that they pose a threat to democracy, god’s good grace, evolutionary design, the sanctity of marriage, human diversity, common decency, male self-esteem and themselves. Not bad for two people who can’t say their own names yet.

  To them, then, I offer this scene, a fade-out from the bookish, dark-haired baby of my dreams to two flame-haired toddlers in a Taco Bell off I-495. We have stopped for dinner on the way out to Long Island, where we are vacationing for a week with L and her son. She is holding two children, one hers, one mine, both grabbing at her car keys while she tries to order three Meximelts and a chicken burrito. My other daughter is squirming in my arms, pointing to people in the restaurant and, in an accent none of us knows how she came by but that has for the past few months made me feel as if I were living with a small, angry German woman, shouting her signature phrase, “Oh no! Vhat’s THAT?”

  For a week we will sleep, eat and play together on the beach, and when we return from vacation, we will ride up in the elevator together until my children and I get out on the seventeenth floor and L and hers proceed to the eighteenth. As I do every night, I will put them to bed alone, hovering outside the door like a criminal to ensure they’ve gone down before eating dinner in front of the TV and doing the 101 things that go into maintaining two toddlers. I will rinse the bottles and put them in the dishwasher. I will tidy the toys and grill chicken for the girls’ lunch the next day. I will worry about the rash behind the smaller girl’s knees and why the bigger one isn’t walking yet. Before I go to bed, I will look in the fridge, curse myself for forgetting to buy milk and wonder whether, come the morning, I will be noble enough to give what’s left to my children or, in the manner of fix-your-own-mask-before-helping-others, use the last dregs in my coffee. At ten p.m., I will go to bed alone and by the morning there will be three of us in the bed, our breath rising and falling in unison.

  That none of this makes sense doesn’t diminish its power to amaze me, not because of how I got here, although god knows there were enough ups, downs and pharmaceuticals along the way. Instead, what I wonder at in the off hours is how a contingency plan, a so-called measure of last resort that I was supposed to hope against hope wouldn’t be my fate, somehow became my first and best choice.

  ONE

  “Are You Going to Do It, Then?”

  THE HARDEST THING about having a baby alone isn’t the expense, the fear or the loneliness. It isn’t the process of getting pregnant, with its cycles of raised and dashed hopes, or the term “sperm donor,” with its unsettling connotations. It’s not even the queasy feeling, indistinct but pervasive, that what you are doing sets you apart from other people and that the reason you are doing it is not because you are a powerful, rational, resourceful woman, but, as a friend of mine put it recently after considering and rejecting the idea of having a baby alone, because “I couldn’t get anyone to shag me.”

  All of these things are hard, but they are not the hardest. No. The hardest thing about having a baby alone is making the decision to do it.

  “So are you going to do it, then?” says Rosemary. It is late in the summer of 2013 and we are drinking whiskey in a hotel bar in Edinburgh. Rosemary is in the city to attend a panel at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where I am promoting a book. I have spent the afternoon in a deck chair on the festival lawn, watching literary men with large hair sail by and trying to figure out a strategy for getting up.

  “Yeah, probably,” I say. “I mean, I might do. Are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I haven’t seen Rosemary for a few months and we have a lot to catch up on: her new job, my new book, the fortunes of all the people we both know. It is only after more whiskey, however, and with a casualness that belies the cold, flat terror underneath, that we reach the main order of business: our ongoing discussion, part lament, part spur to action, over what to do about having children. That is: if, when, how and with whom, or rather, since we are both, for the purposes of this conversation, single, “with” “whom.” (Neither of us yet knows this, but there are more air quotes in the world of assisted fertility than there are in a vegan cookbook.)

  “The thing is,” says Rosemary, “what if it turns out fugly?”

  “You get pictures of the donor. Also, I thought you said your friend was obese.” The last time I saw Rosemary, she told me she’d been thinking of using
her best friend, a larger gentleman, as a sperm donor, since when he’d got a new girlfriend and nixed it.

  “He is,” she says. “It’s different when you know him, though.”

  I have always known I wanted children. From the time I was old enough to conceptualize my future, motherhood made sense to me, the way books made sense to me and equations did not. It was always one in my imaginings and never part of a fantasy about marriage, and while everything else in my life changed over the years—the country I lived in, the kind of work I did, the gender of the people I dated—the distant outline of a child remained steadfast. For a long time it was in the deep background, a passive assumption rather an active desire, and yet on the rare occasions I allowed myself to inspect it directly, the idea that it might never happen made me feel giddy with loss.

  There is deciding you want a baby in the far distant future, however, and there is deciding to have one right now, alone, and those two things are wholly distinct. I should say at this point that despite surface indicators to the contrary, I am pretty conventional. I began paying into a pension fund at twenty-three. I bought my first property at twenty-five. I didn’t start moisturizing until too late, but in most other respects, I spent the bulk of my twenties conscientiously working my way through the world’s most sensible to-do list. Before the question of babies came up, the most radical thing I’d ever done was to resign from my job of eight years and move from Britain to America, a less risky move than it sounds given that on the day after my resignation, I signed a short-term contract to do the same job for the same company but on slightly worse terms.

  I was thirty-one years old and America was, if not the shining city on a hill, then the promise of every eighties movie I had ever seen. When people asked why I had moved, the flippant answer I gave was that it was a result of coming of age in the era of Working Girl and Desperately Seeking Susan. There was probably some truth to this. It was almost impossible to grow up in Britain in the 1980s and not see New York as a city of outlandish good fortune, a place where people dried their armpits under the hand dryers in the Greyhound bus station toilets or took the Staten Island Ferry to work, walking in as the secretary and out again as CEO. Where we had Kim Wilde, they had Madonna. Where we had the BT Tower, they had the Empire State Building. They had hustle, we had wait-your-turn and be-grateful-for-what-you-get. And while the New York media was, I was sure, the red beating heart of the entire universe, by the time I left London, its British equivalent had started to feel like a fish tank that didn’t get cleaned out enough.