Despertar

mine and only mine

A lady at my office, Kelsey, is having a baby for somebody else. She has done this twice before.

Here is how I was introduced to Kelsey on my first day: "This is Kelsey," said my supervisor when we ran into her, a short, pregnant pixie with hair dyed platinum blond, in the hallway. "She has a baby in her body." We laughed, all of us, and as Kelsey walked back to her desk, clutching her steaming cup of tea, he and I resumed my tour of the office.

Later, I ran into Kelsey in the kitchenette. She was making herself another cup of tea, and I was pilfering Luna bars. "Congratulations," I said when we made eye contact, since I hadn't said it before.

"Oh," she said, touching her belly. "This? No. I'll tell you--"

*

The term she prefers is gestational carrier, which, in trade lingo, indicates the babies she carries aren't legally hers. The first one, a boy, she relinquished to an older couple in San Jose, who finished off her college loans by way of compensation. The second one, another boy, went to lesbians in Berkeley, at a time when she "just sort of needed a little extra cash."

That was six and two years ago. This third is a girl, headed, a la Baby Mama, to the home of a corporate drone named Courtney. Courtney calls Kelsey every day at lunchtime; following these chats, Kelsey always turns into a tremendous pain. She is whiny and sensitive, she bitches at her neighbors about minutiae and her tea intake goes up twofold.

She calls this the best decision she ever made. She hasn't had to worry about money in years, and what's more important than that?

*

"Would you ever do that?" Justin wanted to know when I told him about it on the phone. "Like, if the parents offered to pay off your law school loans, or if you were really broke and you just wanted the extra money?"

I'm sure he was sorry he asked. It took me half an hour to convey to my satisfaction that no amount of money, no level of altruistic fervor, nothing and no one could ever, in a million years, coerce me into a situation where every day, some woman named Courtney called me at work to ask how her child was faring in my womb.

I could see maybe selling eggs, maybe, under the direst of circumstances, like if all my job prospects had dried up and I were in danger of imminent starvation. Maybe then I could donate something inchoate and insignificant, something personal but not strictly real. Kelsey isn't starving, though; she makes close to six figures at a job rich with benefits, she lives in a nice apartment in a nice, liberal city. She takes the time, every couple of weeks, to retouch her blond roots.

Which, really, is what bothers me. How can she possibly care what her roots look like, but not mind gestating a baby she's going to give away? How is it possible that another human can be okay with doing something, three times, that I'm sure I couldn't do even once? I know without even ever trying it that there isn't any amount of money for which I would actually grow a baby, one that was naturally mine and that looked like me, eat and breathe for it and watch myself get fat, hear its heartbeat and feel it move, talk and hum and play music to it, only to turn it over, later, to some woman named Courtney. You could offer me a billion dollars, we could write up a shrewdly worded contract avoiding use of the terms "mother" and "baby," and I'd still know exactly what it was I was doing.

*

But I'm sure if Kelsey can do this, three times, and if other women make this their main source of income, this process, then it must be all right, somehow. It's just totally confusing and foreign to me, and it makes me want to get to know Kelsey better, even though I don't like her much. I just want to figure out how it's possible that she believes this is okay.

I don't know why it bothers me so much. I think it's because it makes me question whether that whole thing, making a baby, is as special and as sacred as I want to believe it is. So now I'm watching "Special Delivery" on Discovery Health, and watching how excited the moms are, and reassuring myself that, one day, it's going to be the most amazing thing that ever happened to me.