« In Which the Possibilities Are Not Exactly Endless »

photo by Anna Jones 

Tiny Things

by JOSIANE CURTIS

The baby was full-term, healthy, born four days before her due date. She weighed five pounds, 14 ounces. This is very small, although not technically underweight, the cutoff for which is five pounds, eight ounces. It seems morbid, disturbed even, to recall that I looked at her in my arms, a few hours old, and thought that I could crush her head in my hand. I would never, obviously; I was overwhelmed with love, and an immediate willingness to protect her at all costs. But these feelings only magnified her fragility. I looked from her face to my hand, my arm, barely flexing under her weight, and thought about the few times I’d caught a softball in high school gym class. She would have fit inside a catcher’s mitt.  

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Boys are carried out, and girls are carried up. The first-born looks more like the father. Men inherit baldness from the maternal side – so men, look at your mother’s dad for a glimpse into your future. A woman is deemed most attractive when she is at peak ovulation in her monthly cycle. Women, correspondingly, rate men’s attractiveness more highly on average while ovulating. Each woman has a finite amount of eggs at birth, and will ovulate approximately 300 to 400 eggs in her lifetime, before reaching menopause. A full-term pregnancy is actually 10 months after egg implantation, not nine. Sudden infant death symptom (SIDS) is exactly what it sounds like: the sudden, unexplained death of an infant. Doctors used to think it could be caused by babies sleeping on their backs. Today, they think stomach sleeping may be a leading risk factor. There is so much we don’t know.

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When I was 25, I donated my eggs. Egg donation is not exactly what it sounds like, because the donor is always paid. “When I was 25, I sold my eggs,” sounds callous, but I wouldn't have done it for free.

My profile was chosen within minutes of uploading my initial background information and photographs. I can’t say I wasn't flattered.   

From start to finish, the process takes between two and three months. The donor is examined weekly throughout the last month, with an endoscopy and blood samples taken daily for the last week. During the final week, the donor is also required to self-administer hormone shots up to three times a day. I cringed at the prick of every needle into a gathered skinfold of my stomach, and also at the irony of using the baby changing table in the office restroom to mix hormones before loading them into the syringe. Donors are restricted from high-impact exercise during the last two weeks of the cycle, so I exchanged my morning jog for swimming laps at the community pool across the street from my house. Toward the end of the process, I became aware of eyes lingering on my bare midsection, which was painted a leopard pelt of bruises from the shots. 

It was comforting knowing the recipient would undergo an even more difficult process. Not because I desired commiseration, but because it meant that whoever would be getting this baby wanted it so badly. It would be so loved. I felt happy to be able to give that gift.

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Growing up, I knew of my father, but never knew him. Perhaps because of this, I've always leaned more toward the side of nurture in the nature/nurture debate. In the clinic-mandated pre-approval therapy sessions, I believed it when I said that this would not be my child.

photo by anna jones

The donor is required to provide a detailed medical history, at least two generations back, from both the maternal and paternal sides of her family. About halfway through the donation process, I spoke to my father for the first time in years. Over the phone, he told me that his parents had died of natural causes and no they didn't have any specific ailments or allergies and yes, he still has a full head of hair. I heard myself in his cadence.

I imagined that sometime down the road, a teenager might appear at my door wanting to know why she smiled crooked or threw her head back when she laughed. I would invite her in.

That I came to terms with the full weight of what I was doing, that it felt good to give such a gift, isn't to say that it wasn't emotionally draining. I began to look at the children around me differently, especially the blondes. I wondered, since I would not ever meet the recipients, if three years into the future, I might pass a couple on the street and see my own green eyes looking back at me out of a stroller. In my mind it was always a girl.

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My egg retrieval was a success, meaning my ovaries produced plenty of eggs (above the average number for donors at that clinic, I was told), and they were harvested from my body successfully. However, the implantation was a failure, meaning the clinic used all the harvested eggs in attempting to fertilize and implant at least one into the recipient’s uterus, but the end result was not a pregnancy. This is not necessarily a reflection of the donor’s ability to bear children, I was also told. There are many factors at play, and many women seeking in vitro fertilization may have difficulty with the implantation stage. I’d be lying if I said it didn't scare me anyway.

In egg donation, the donor is always paid, regardless of the end result. Let me tell you something about guilt.

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Apparently, it’s not entirely uncommon to think of babies in relation to sports equipment. In the hospital, while the tiny baby’s mother, my best friend, rested, the baby’s father swaddled her in a yellow blanket with grey elephants, tucked her gently into his elbow, and said something about the way a running back’s most important job is to protect the football. Later, after most visitors had come and gone, he sat and gazed at her as she slept peacefully on the tops of his thighs. “I wonder what you’re gonna be like,” he whispered.

photo by anna jones

If you have siblings, it’s a fun pastime to note your similarities and differences, and think about all the possibilities for other offspring your parents could have had. My brother and I have near-identical features, and have often been confused for twins, though he is three years older. Among friends who come from larger families, the differences between siblings can be both subtle and striking. Imagine how those possibilities multiply exponentially when you consider one parent’s genes combined with any number of partners. As a child, I sometimes wished for a different father, one who was around. If true, it would mean, biologically or psychologically or both, that I would not be who I am. Who else might I have been?

The possibilities for the baby I could create are not exactly endless, given the finite amount of eggs a woman will produce in her lifetime, but close. There is so much we don’t know.

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There are some things I do know. People say we come into this world alone and we leave it alone, but I know that’s not true. The baby is almost three weeks old, and she has never been alone – not for one second since she was born. She looks more like her father than my best friend, and she sleeps on her back. She is gaining weight, but her nose, lips, fingers are still remarkably delicate, doll-like. She fusses, as babies do, when she is hungry or needs to be changed, but she quiets if you saunter and slide across the hardwood floor in socks, bouncing gently to the beat of Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble.” She quiets everyone else, too; people speak softly in her presence. She quiets the sound of the bills through the mail slot, the crash of the garbage truck outside on the street, the mental din of work and emotional clatter of a recent breakup, of money problems, of time and worry and wondering if you will ever make anything as beautiful. She will be so loved.  

Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about an end to flight.

Photographs by Anna Jones. You can find her website here and her instagram here.

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