Amelia 
A GREATER-GOOD ENDEAVOR
I FOUND OUT I WOULD never be a mother on March 17, 1996. Back then, I got upset about girls being mean at school or making a bad grade on a test or generally feeling flustered and afraid about life. I was a teenage girl, ready to cry on my mother’s shoulder. But that’s the day everything changed. Because the minute I heard the news, I knew somehow that it was going to be more difficult for her than it was for me. In the most ironic way, the day I found out I couldn’t perform a core womanly biological function, I became a woman. I had to protect my mother. I would never cry on her shoulder again.
That moment split things open inside of me I didn’t know I had. It was a single lightning strike that sank an entire ship. Minutes earlier, I’d assumed I would grow up, fall in love, get married, have children.
From the time I was born, practically, I had dragged a baby doll around, and, as I got older, arranged my life around its fictional feeding times and diaper changes. I remember the doctor saying, “But with the advances in technology, you are perfectly capable of carrying a baby, Amelia. You’d just have to use someone else’s egg.”
I was fourteen years old, barely capable of understanding the reproductive process, and ignorant about anything related to sex. I had been horrified to even tell my mother that my period, which had arrived two years earlier, had suddenly stopped. And I was sitting in a paper gown in this cold exam room being talked to about things that I was entirely too young to process. Primary ovarian insufficiency. The word “insufficiency” bounced around in my head.
My mother could process these things that I couldn’t. And that, I think, was why I had to be strong for her. Because my mother had had real babies. She had given birth to Robby and me. Carried us. Raised us.
Studying me on the examining table from where she sat on the rolling stool, her purse on her lap, she wore a look on her face that I had never seen before. When one is fourteen years old, it is really something to see a brand-new look on one’s mother’s face. That blankness, I know now, is the expression she wears when she has so many emotions she doesn’t dare let a single one show. I give her credit for that. She was as strong as I had ever seen her. But that was because she didn’t know what I was thinking.
As we got in the car together that day, I thought about Sunday school. I thought about what Mrs. Applegate said about God’s will, about how he’s always telling us what we need to know if we’ll just be still and listen. God was sending me a message now.
“How about some ice cream?” Mom asked.
“Okay,” I said. I turned up the radio. I was trying to act nonchalant, like the news didn’t faze me.
Mom turned to me as she pulled out of the parking lot. “You can always adopt, you know.”
I looked at her then and, without so much as a crack in my voice, I let the dream—the certainty, the platitude—that I would have children one day fly out the sunroof as I opened it. “You know, Mom, I think maybe this is a sign. I’m just not meant to be a mother.”
I knew the look she gave me then. Shock. Dismay. Disappointment. Those were looks with which I was well acquainted. She patted my hand. “It has been a big day, darlin’. And you are only fourteen, after all. You have plenty of time to decide.”
The cold of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard helped to numb my pain. When we got home, I walked straight upstairs, my mom calling, “I’m here if you need to talk.” But I didn’t need to talk. I needed to act. I needed to plot a new course. The first step? Pulling the giant Rubbermaid container of baby dolls, the Madame Alexanders and American Girls, the ones I’d been saving for my daughter, out from underneath the bed. I dragged them out, let the container drop, with a thud, step by step by step, down the stairs, and put them in the closet by the back door. That closet held all the things we never wanted to see again, which The Salvation Army dropped by four times a year to collect. By next month, all my dolls would be gone. I closed the door, brushed my hands off, and turned back upstairs.
Needing to take my mind off of the day, I opened the Vanity Fair magazine that Mom had left on my dresser. She always left her magazines for me, but I rarely read them. I was surprised to find myself lost in the pages, in the stories of Hollywood glamour, presidential scandal, the loss of a golden couple.
And, just like that, I had found my new calling. I was going to be a journalist. I was going to investigate what was wrong with the world and change it. My inability to have children wasn’t anyone’s fault. I was going to fix the problems that were.
I pulled out the little pink-and-purple journal that I kept between my mattress and box spring. Why I kept it there, I couldn’t say. I didn’t have any secrets—until now. In it, I wrote Goals: 1. Become editor in chief of a magazine. 2. Find a man that loves me even though I can’t have children.
Then I went downstairs and asked Mom if I could get a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, to Vogue, to any publication that mattered. I started reading that day. I wrote my first investigative piece in September of that year about how the female lunch ladies deserved equal pay to the male janitor.
A mother died. A journalist was born. So how was it that reading Greer’s letter had made an old flame flicker in me again, the one that thought maybe she wanted to feel those things she knew she never would?
After tossing and turning for hours, I must have finally fallen asleep. When I woke up, I picked up my phone and discovered it was nearly ten in the morning. I hadn’t slept that late in years. As I yawned and stretched, it all came flooding back to me. The dance with Parker. The surrogates. My decision to ask him if I could carry his child. I could imagine the eyebrows I would raise with this.
My friend Martin, who I had met at a party six years ago and clicked with instantly, was the only one who would understand, so he was the one I called that morning. My other friends would pretend to understand, but they wouldn’t really. They all wanted husbands and babies and traditional lives. They would say that I was ruining my chance at all that. They would view my choice as a response to my bad divorce, a bitter hangover that would clear—as soon as I found the right man. Martin really got what I was going through because his husband had left him for a woman.
So I was a little shocked when Martin—free-spirited, live-your-truth Martin—said, “Liabelle, have you lost your mind?”
Martin went home with me two years ago for Christmas, right after his separation, and still can’t get over that my family calls me Liabelle. “I mean, maybe. Maybe I have. I guess after getting unceremoniously dumped from the job that has been my life for the past thirteen years and being traded in for Chase, maybe I’m not doing all that great. So yeah, it’s possible that I’m losing my mind.”
“If you want to do something nice for Parker, send him flowers when the babies are born. Bake a casserole in an oven. Don’t be the oven.” Before I could say anything else, he said, “Look. Meet me at Café Boulud. Let’s have a good omelette and a glass of wine and talk through this.”
Café Boulud had always been our emergency spot. Martin was friends with the head waiter, so we always got the best table, in the center of the restaurant, where we could see absolutely everyone. With its perfect wineglasses and unforgettable food, it was a good place to go to forget your troubles.
An hour later, I was sipping a glass of rosé across from Martin, who was clad in fitted black pants, a thin black cashmere sweater, and a pair of Stubbs & Wootton smoking slippers. He said, “You know you’d have to give up booze for nine months.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course I know that, Martin. I’m not an idiot.”
“And cheese and deli meat and sex and sushi.”
I could feel my brow furrowing. “You don’t have to give up sex.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. If I’m paying you to grow my unborn child, I don’t want some man’s skanky sperm mixed in there with it.”
“I don’t sleep with people with skanky sperm,” I said, realizing that I hadn’t thought about any of this. “Plus, I’m not going to let him pay me.” I hadn’t even considered payment in this ill-conceived plan. But no, this was a greater-good endeavor, payback, a nice gesture to right my stance in the universe, which had seemed shaky as of late. I would not let him pay me. But I would let him give me a baller job.
Martin studied me. “Is there something more to this? Have you decided that you want to be a mother after all? Because you could adopt or have an egg donor or a million other things. I know you and Thad didn’t want children, but you’re allowed to change your mind.”
I considered it briefly, but I didn’t think that was it. Over the years, I had moved from simply coming to terms with not being able to have children, to embracing that that wasn’t the life I wanted anyway. I shook my head. “I still don’t want to be a mother. But this will be like the investigative piece of a lifetime. It’s, like, the story you never think you’ll get, and then it lands in your lap.”
He put his hands on the table and said, “Look, I don’t want to be the one to ask this, but it has to be asked.” He looked at me inquisitively. “Are you in love with Parker?”
I had to put my napkin to my face to keep from spitting my wine across the table. “I mean, really? Parker is the annoying kid brother I never wanted. No. I am not and have not ever been anything resembling in love with him.”
I looked out at the sun streaming on the bald head of Mac Montgomery, Mrs. Judy Lanham’s paramour. Yes. Her paramour. Her husband was in a nursing home, and she had made no bones about moving on, whether her husband was alive or not. He was no longer available for the season’s activities, so he might as well have been dead.
I handed Martin the folder. “Just look at this. He can’t hire these women. They’re strangers.”
He flipped through the pages and said, “It’s Greer McCann’s beautiful, brilliant egg. Who cares about the surrogate?”
“But don’t you think it has to matter? I mean, don’t you think that somehow the woman who is growing the babies has to get mixed in there a little?”
He looked at me like I was deranged and held up the photocopy of Greer’s words. “May I?”
I gestured, Be my guest.
A few seconds later, he dabbed his eyes and gasped. “You have to be her oven. You could be the hero that brings this great, dear, departed woman’s dreams to fruition. You could give her the life she never got to have. You can give Parker the life he never got to have.”
I rolled my eyes. “You change your tune really quickly. You know that, right?”
“Honey, you’re just lucky you get to hear me sing my song.”
If ever there was a time to mull, to consider, to make pro-and-con lists, this was the one. I was considering becoming pregnant, for heaven’s sake, growing a baby inside of me and becoming attached to it and then not getting to take it home from the hospital. I was considering trading my taut belly and stretch-mark-free breasts to make someone else happy.
But, if I was honest, I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so sure, in my heart, in the depths of my soul, in all the places that really mattered.
So I didn’t overthink it. I dumped out all the papers in Parker’s folder, took a beautiful picture of me Thad had taken out of a frame in my bedroom, and put it in the folder. Who needs a picture of herself, anyway? I got in the car and drove toward Parker’s feeling certain. Sure, my mother was going to have a stroke. But I was thirty-five years old, jobless, and untethered for the moment. What did I have to lose?