Having watched The Boys from Brazil you are a little conflicted about this, but apparently not conflicted enough.
You start to get excited. You start to emotionally invest. You start to paint the guest bedroom blue and/or pink in the pigments of your imagination. Then, just before the egg is scheduled to be transferred, you get a call from the company saying the donor’s father is refusing to let his daughter donate. To which you reply, “What?! He has no say in this. She’s twenty-four, she’s signed every paper, she’s taking the shots, she’s a grown woman, it’s not her dad’s damn decision!” But it turns out the dad is a medical lawyer and is unwilling to let his daughter go through the “risk” of the procedure—“risk” in this case being nothing more than going under general anesthesia. Maybe he has an ulterior moral or religious motive; you don’t know. You do know that even though he has no legal leg to stand on, he may threaten to sue, and given how protective David and you are of your identities you don’t want this dragged into court.
Because that’s the other thing. Throughout this entire surrogacy process you are passionately maintaining strict secrecy. All it takes is one person to talk to someone in the press and suddenly your private quest to fulfill a dream becomes a public story about a gay celebrity couple looking to have kids. And if that were to happen it would take on a life of its own, and you’d be trailed everywhere you went. Maybe you’re just being paranoid, or maybe you just get off on adding a little Mission Impossible–ness to everything. But whenever you go to the clinic you use aliases, and David arrives fifteen minutes before you, and when you get there you use a back entrance, meet him on the wrong floor, go down a staircase to a side door, and knock. Then the door opens up and you enter with the furtive stealth of two junkies about to purchase five kilos of heroin.
Oh, and for aliases you choose Jack and Sydney Bristow, ’cause why not.
* * *
To see what could happen if the press knew you were trying to have children, go HERE.
To continue the story, go HERE.
So now all that precaution and security seem to have been for naught. You’re back to square one, older and wiser and sadder, the guest bedroom still its neutral, all-too-ironic eggshell. But Growing Generations feels bad about what happened. They start reaching out to their A-team—the past egg-donors who might be coaxed into doing so one more time. Ova’s Eleven, if you will.1 And that is how you meet Ms. Right. She is a multiple egg-donor who truly loves helping couples have kids, and she’s fifty times as gorgeous as the person you were going to use (take that, anonymous medical lawyer father!). Her pictures and video are very impressive, and her impressive track record of previous surrogate pregnancies clearly shows those are some Grade-A eggs right there.
So for the second time you enter into the sciency phase of the operation. The egg-donor and surrogate get on the same cycle, and they both start taking fertility shots to fill them with let’s-have-a-baby juice. (Although maybe it should be called something different? “Let’s-do-this serum,” maybe? It’s been a long time since you practiced medicine.) And then you go a-harvestin’. Harvesting eggs is like a Vegas crapshoot. You can put in and scrape and get 0, or put in and scrape and get 11. And you do this four times, and it’s thousands of dollars every time.
The other end of the fertility equation is a lot cheaper, and in some ways a lot less technical. Quite simply, you and David each individually go into a private room in the clinic and hump a cup.
[NOTE: The following paragraph contains graphic details of masturbating into a cup. Parental discretion is advised. Which is pretty ironic if you think about it.]
It turns out that for all the miraculous scientific and technological advances behind the twenty-first-century surrogacy process, when it comes to the sperm-collection phase there is still no replacement for, or improvement upon, whackin’ it. So you enter a very sterile medical-ish room with a stack of porn magazines and a binder of porn DVDs of every orientation and description. Whatever anyone might need to get the job done. You choose a perfectly functional piece of wank material for your chicken-choking purposes, featuring a strapping young man who … does something for you. And as you go about your business, you find two radically dissonant thoughts going through your mind: (1) I’m about to ejaculate the actual sperm that will be used to father my child, so for reasons of karma I should fill my mind with extrahappy, extrasmart, extrawholesome thoughts; and (2) Damn, that guy’s smokin’ hot! He looks like David! And to fulfill your dreams of parenthood, you must block out number 1 and focus entirely on number 2. Which yes, yes, yes, oh your god yes, you do.
A few days later the doctor tells you and David your sperm counts are both above average. (How did they count the sperm? Did they sit there staring at a petri dish in a magnifying glass shouting, “One, two, three …”? You don’t know, but you’re sure they know what they’re doing.) The doctor also brings the happy news that your sperm testosterone counts, too, are both above average, although yours are a little higher.
“Wait, mine are higher?” you say.
“Yes,” replies the doctor. “You’re 62, he’s 51.”
“62 to 51?”
“Yes. They’re both good.”
“That’s so interesting, because David is generally more sexual than I am.”
“That doesn’t make much of a diff—”
“So does that mean that I’m more ‘masculine’ than he is? Or not masculine, but … rugged? More of a he-man?”
“Okay, easy there, tiger,” chides David, correctly.
The next steps are very technical and lab-oriented, but the jism gist of it is that through a series of tests the fertility doctors isolate your and David’s best, healthiest individual sperm. “Neil,” they say, “you have two A+’s, three A’s, five B’s, and a C. David, you have six A+’s, four A’s, and three B’s.” Meaning David’s sperm have better grades than yours. So what? you think. His sperm are a bunch of apple-polishers. My little guys can outmacho his any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Then finally comes the momentous day when they mix one of your A’s with an egg, and one of David’s with an egg, and prepare two hot, fresh zygotic omelets, and implant them both in the surrogate and see if they cook.
You cross your fingers and wait. And wait. Wait for it. Wait for it. W—
* * *
If reading that last line made you think about Barney Stinson and you’re suddenly anxious to hear from him, go HERE.
But you should probably stick around and go HERE. It’s about to get really exciting.
* * *
1You needn’t.
Phone call! They take!
Both embryos take, and you’re having twins—one biologically yours, one biologically David’s, but in the most meaningful way, both equally both of yours. Looks like you’ll be painting that guest bedroom after all. And the spare office too!
During the pregnancy you and the surrogate visit each other regularly. After a few months you head to the fertility doctor to find out the sexes of the babies. The timing of this revelation leads to some professional awkwardness. That very same day you’re supposed to be filming a guest-spot on a Joss Whedon– directed episode of Glee where you will sing “Piano Man” at a bar with Matthew Morrison. The plan is to go the doctor with your surrogate at 8:00 a.m., find out the babies’ sexes, and get to the set by 9:00. But David calls and says, “Sorry, I was wrong; her plane lands at 8:00 a.m. There’s no way she’ll be at the doctor before 9:15.” Which means you’re going to be very late for work, which is something you pride yourself in never ever being. So you call your pal Joss and say, “Joss, I have to tell you a secret that almost no one knows—we’re pregnant, today’s the day we find out the sexes, I hope you understand and I’m so so sorry but I have to be here for this.” A few years later, you will use the opportunity of writing your memoirs to publicly apologize to the cast and crew of Glee for pulling a Sheen and keeping them waiting 2½ hours.
And the sexes are …
one of each! Again, you completely luck out. You couldn’t ask for a better situation: had it been two boys you might have wanted to do it all over again so you could experience having a girl, and vice versa.
Now the anticipation really starts to build. The time alternates between going way too fast and way too slow. Finally it’s October 2010, and the surrogate goes into labor in a small hospital in northern California … in a town called Paradise. (Seriously. In the future, if anyone asks you how to get to Paradise, tell them it’s just east of Chico.) Security is still a paramount concern of yours, perhaps comically so. You actually hire a company whose specialty is whatever specialty guarding the newborn children of gay couples from paparazzi is considered. Your team cordons off a little section of the hospital without even telling the nurses what’s going on. When they show up to work they must think there’s been some lethal flu epidemic, because all of a sudden there’s a big taped-off plastic barrier across the hall reading DO NOT ENTER. Anyone who wants to get close has to show a little badge and use a special entrance. You’re afraid some nurse’s assistant will take a camera-phone picture of the two-hour-old babies and a tabloid will pay $10,000 for it. Or, even worse, only $5,000.
Are you a little paranoid? Why, who’s been saying that?!? Yes, no question about it, you’re a little paranoid. But the experience you had with your half-coming-out/half-outing is still fresh in your mind. You figure it’s better to be safe than sorry, to make sure your little family bubble is safe and secure, and you don’t have to add that tension to the natural stress of witnessing your kids being born, instead of shrugging and not worrying about it and finding a picture of your twin newborns dangling from their umbilical cords on the tabloids with the caption “Stars—they’re just like us!”
The surrogate will be having the babies through C-section, as her vagina has nothing to do with you.1 You hope they will be born on the tenth, because that would make their birthdate 10/10/10, and you find something magnificent about that; 10/10/10 and 10/10/10, that’s six perfect gymnastic scores right there. But David and the doctor both tell you, “Yeah yeah, that’s great, Neil, mystical numerology and crap, but it’s also important to keep the babies inside the womb for as many days as possible.” They have a point, you suppose.
The two children you have been waiting for your whole adult life are born on October 12, 2010. The boy comes out first. The girl comes out a minute later and, to one-up her brother, immediately stops breathing.
You will never forget the emotional vertigo of that moment. You’re sitting next to the delivery table wide-eyed, the room bright and antiseptically clean, everyone competently doing their job, because after all these people just sit around birthing babies all day long, right? And they bring out the first one, and he’s amazingly beautiful in a gross purple gelatinous kind of way, and you cut the cord, and it all seems fine. And then the girl comes out and all of a sudden nobody’s panicking but everybody’s rushing en masse to some other piece of equipment, and while you don’t know what’s happening you detect a very strong energy shift from “Miracle of life” to “Uh-oh, this baby may die right now.”
But you experience it for only forty-five seconds. Then you hear her cry. And suddenly there you are in this little hospital room in Paradise, David and you and these two little life-lumps with cute little smushed-up faces: Gideon Scott Burtka-Harris and Harper Grace Burtka-Harris.
Why do you choose those names? You’ve spent a lot of time scrolling through nomenclatural websites and concluded it’s pretty hilarious what passes for actual viable names these days. America? Amerika? Mongolia? Really? Yes, you’re looking for unique names, but not necessarily countries. You also want them to have an unambiguous spelling, to spare them the week of life you’ve wasted telling people “it’s Neil with an ‘i’.” (Interesting side note: people named “Neal” are bad, bad people.) Most important, if less objective, you want names that won’t automatically leave other people with an impression of who they are or what they are like. You feel like “Gideon” could be a scientist or an investment banker or a bassist, and that “Harper” could be a girly-girl cheerleader or a tomboy pro-volleyball player. They’re both names that, at least to your ears, don’t come with any kind of stereotype. As for the rest, “Scott” is your mother’s maiden name, “Grace” you just like, and the last name is “Burtka-Harris” because if one or both of them ever do choose to be in the industry as actors, when they’re listed alphabetically they’ll be higher up on the list, and it’s important to you that your children outrank other people’s children in as many ways as possible.
Minus Harper’s forty-five seconds of breathlessness, the whole thing goes off with neither a hitch nor a leak. You break your good news to the world in the same timeless way people have done it for thousands of years—via tweet. Two days later, the four of you fly back to LA on a little private plane (another pricey part of the master security plan). You are terrified that when you wake up there will be fifteen paparazzi outside your door clamoring for a picture or a slice of souvenir placenta. Nope. When you finally make it back home, the celebrity gay couple with its new surrogate twins finds no fewer than zero reporters waiting for it. You’d arranged for a security car to be driving in front, a dummy car to be driving in another direction, and a few other bits of trickery that appealed to your magician’s nature, but all that proves utterly moot. The world is apathetic. It’s wonderful news.
And so your lives as new parents begin. You hire a remarkable woman named Libby to be your baby nurse/sleep specialist. She tells you that with twins, the most important thing is to get them on the same sleep schedule. Not for their well-being: for yours. Because if they’re out of sync with each other you will literally never sleep. One sleeps, one cries; one cries, one sleeps; repeat as necessary until both daddies are dead of exhaustion. So she helps you with that. Her swaddling lessons are particularly instructive. Swaddling and shushing, you discover; those are key.
Of course David has done all this before, so his abilities are tremendous. Even so, you find that everything they say about raising infants is totally true. You don’t ever get enough sleep and you always feel supercranky and you don’t ever get enough sleep and wait, did you say that already, yes you did, but you don’t care you’re just so bloody tired. As any parent could have told you—and many of them have, and do—your days and nights are spent sitting on a big giant exer-ball, holding one and/or another wailing and screaming baby, shushing in her or his ear for 1½ hours, shush, shushhhhhhhhh, for god’s sake will you shushhhhhhh. It’s a little embarrassing, at least in your own mind, to watch yourself living out the new-dad cliché you’d seen in a thousand bad sitcoms and movies, but the truth is undeniable. Clichés are clichés for a reason. And to top it all off, you and David can’t breast-feed. You try and try, but after a week all you have is four grotesquely chafed nipples, and all they’re oozing is blood. Clearly there’s something wrong. The two of you haven’t felt so inadequate since trying and failing to impregnate each other.
And now all of a sudden you’re sitting at home writing this book and Gideon and Harper are 3½ and going to preschool. You’re going to write that sentence again, this time in italics: Gideon and Harper are 3½ and going to preschool. You know intellectually that the earth has revolved around the sun 3½ times since that frantic day in Paradise, and as you scan your brain you vaguely remember living through a series of developmental milestones like sitting up and crawling and walking and talking. But you find it nearly impossible to furnish your memoir with in-depth anecdotes about those things, because in classic parent style the weeks and months and years have all accumulated in your memory in a kind of mental accordion folder that while neatly organized grows ever more compressed. Yes, they babble; yes, suddenly they’re saying words; yes, suddenly they’re saying complete sentences. But those stages all blend together. The individual memories are vivid, but they form a continuum, a kind of irreducible transcendent totality. You are living in a constant now in whi
ch Gideon and Harper are always glorious and fantastic, and the mere fact of their existence overwhelms you and strikes you as a miracle and a cosmic grace.
You wouldn’t have believed it before, but everything everyone says is true. The cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon.
* * *
To further bask in the awesomeness of Gideon and Harper, go HERE.
To watch Bret Michaels of Poison get whacked upside the head, go HERE.