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On Surrogacy

 I can't speak about everyone's surrogacy experience, but my own has been endlessly surprising.


When Leah began this process with Marc and with me, her two kids sent us Crayola images. One is a tiger ("tie-ger"), and another is a tropical bird, maybe a parrot. Finally, there is an image of Leah, with a tiny speck inside her belly; the speck has a line with an attached caption ("We love you!")

I have therefore appointed myself as an art teacher to the two kids (I'm sure they're not crazy about this), and I like to ask them about their sketchings. When they visited me in New Jersey, they went on an intensive search for pencil sharpeners, then one child produced a portrait of my dog, Salvy. The kids also produced impressions of my babies; one of the two would mimic Susie's hesitant walk and her inevitable tumbling.

We all trade movie recommendations. The kids wanted me to see Uncharted -- and, just to be clear, this is Antonio Banderas, Mark Wahlberg, and the Spider-Man guy racing through beautiful buildings in Barcelona. How could anyone argue with the recommendation? I've started a campaign on behalf of Little Mermaid: 2023 and Disenchanted, though I haven't seen either film yet. I just have a really strong hunch about these two titles.

I'm not going to turn on the sap machine, but I did recently ask Leah what her thoughts on surrogacy were, now that the process is finished. Leah doesn't mince words, so I expected an honest answer. And she surprised me by saying she was glad the last pregnancy ended with a C-section; she said, otherwise, if the doctors had avoided the intervention and then had given her a go-ahead for several additional gestational adventures, she would most certainly have said yes, and then she would drive her own family up the wall.

I'm not sure when Leah's family will return to the East Coast -- or when I personally will return to La Crosse, Wisconsin, home of many appealing restaurants and, also, Pearl Street Used Books (where I have spent more than a few hours). But I hope one of these trips will happen soon.

From where I'm sitting -- this is what surrogacy is like.
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