As a nongestational mother, I often feel like a semi-rare bird. Perhaps a cormorant. Not entirely out of the ordinary but still surprising and a bit odd in its burst from the seemingly quiet current.
Most portrayals of motherhood are still deeply tied up with the physical experience of pregnancy. But nongestational parents certainly exist: Nongestational mothers can be heterosexual and adopt or use a surrogate. Most fathers are also commonly nongestational parents. And in my case, I am in a lesbian relationship, and my wife carried our daughter S. during pregnancy.
Before my daughter was even conceived, it was simple to envision the connection that my wife would have with our child. First, she would have nine months to become intimately acquainted with the fetus in her womb. And then upon birth, my wife, who had always planned to breastfeed, would immediately become the baby’s primary source of nutrition and comfort.
Most portrayals of motherhood are still deeply tied up with the physical experience of pregnancy.
I always rolled my eyes when inevitably a gestational mother-to-be would ask for advice on Facebook’s Queer Parenting group to alleviate her wife’s fears about connecting with a future child. “Well, it’s your kid either way,” I would scoff, but deep down, if I were really honest, I felt the same exact fear. I just disguised it as resignation. I assumed that my relationship with my future child would begin after birth. That the baby would not depend on me for survival. I assumed over time we would get to know each other and slowly develop a relationship. In my worst fantasies, my child, as a teenager, would snap at me, “Who are you to me anyway?”
Boy, was I wrong.
As with all my best-kept emotional secrets, my wife immediately picked up on what was going on. From early in the pregnancy, she asked that I read the baby a nightly bedtime story. Neither my wife nor I were big “belly talkers.” I struggled to come up with a topic of conversation with a protruding stomach. The storybooks and kids poems I read, many of which were chosen from my own childhood favorites, were perfect because they were pre-scripted.
As the months went by and my daughter grew, she began to turn toward me during this nightly ritual—a sensation my wife described as truly nauseating. I was excited that we were already beginning to interact somehow with each other before she was even born. On a certain level though, I was hesitant to accept the gravity of these moments because I couldn’t easily feel her movements from the outside. I felt this fledgling relationship between us always required my wife as an intermediary.
But I still didn’t really understand the depth of our connection until she was born. After 36 hours of labor, S. came out of the moon roof in an unplanned C-section. At some point during either the extended labor or the operation, she had inhaled meconium. She couldn’t cry, let alone breathe. With my wife still open on the table, the baby was immediately carted off to the NICU. I followed, barely breathing myself. From there, things got worse before they got better. My wife developed postpartum preeclampsia that was nearly missed by the hospital staff. She needed emergency treatment, and it would be days before she could hold her own daughter.
I felt this fledgling relationship between us always required my wife as an intermediary.
As I waited for the NICU nurses to get S. connected to oxygen and settled in, she grasped my outstretched finger in her fist. I suddenly felt an intense, mutual love radiating between us. It wasn’t the nuanced or complicated relationship I had imagined. And it wasn’t just that the threat of losing my baby gave me clarity. I was my daughter’s person and she recognized me from before.
It shook me out of my ambivalent image of our relationship. I was surprised how quickly my daughter knew me and depended on me. While I had assumed that the first thing a baby would gravitate toward was a source of nutrition, what she ended up needing most during this difficult time was the safety of my presence. It filled my heart to be exactly what she needed, exactly enough, just how I was.
During her 36-hour stay in the NICU and my wife’s treatment for preeclampsia, I was the only one around to comfort S. when she began to cry silently into her intubation tube. A nurse showed me how to hold her arms folded against her chest—it was the only thing that calmed her. She quickly figured out my smell. Even when she was released from the NICU, if I stepped out of the room where we all ended up together in Mother and Baby, she was apoplectic.
While my daughter seemed to spring back quickly from her ordeal in the NICU, my wife faced a months-long recovery with intense physical limitations. I dubbed myself “calmy mommy”—partially an ironic reference to my frequent hyperventilation during our week at the hospital, partially because I was the only one who could physically or successfully rock my daughter to sleep when we got home. While my wife valiantly fought to be S.’s “yummy mommy,” despite all the challenges to breastfeeding connected with the traumatic birth, I was S.’s personal napping and nighttime bed for months.
It filled my heart to be exactly what she needed, exactly enough, just how I was.
It turns out that S.’s relationship with my wife wasn’t solely based on nutrition either. S. quickly discovered my wife’s playfulness and that she had a way of being able to teach S. just about anything to help her interact with her world. I watched with pride as my daughter became one of the most curious and joyful people I know. I love her nearly breathless laugh that I heard for the first time about two months in. As I transitioned into S.’s stay-at-home mom for the first nine months of her life, every day I was awed at our ability to be in tune with each other. She could communicate her needs to me without words and without too many tears. I still delight in getting to know her and finding that our love hasn’t just grown from some imagined baseline but is overflowing.
All this is to say—my fellow nongestational mothers and mothers-to-be—I’ve stopped rolling my eyes. If there were no fear, insecurity, and irrational projections, it wouldn’t be motherhood. Reach out to your little one as a fetus, as a newborn. There is so much joy there for you when they reach back.
And like the cormorants we are, be ready for the plunge: the deep-diving, openhearted hurtle to love.