For my final year of high school, instead of developing a case of "senioritis," I was struck with baby fever. My hardest assignment wasn't the SAT, my college applications or prom—it was helping my mother through in vitro fertilization, since her then-husband, my stepfather, was in Mexico for work. So, at 17, in New York, while my classmates crammed for exams and toured campuses, I stepped into his place instead.
As a teen hiding my own secrets and eager to better understand my mother’s peculiar marital arrangement, I became a spy in my own home, pressing my ear to doors, learning what the adults said when they thought no one was listening. One night I heard my mother and grandmother discussing, in low, thrilled voices, a teacher's gay son back in our motherland, the Dominican Republic. They talked about how his father had beaten and disowned him, how the story spread like a telenovela recap, how the son had "contaminated" the family and would never marry or have children of his own.
"It breaks my heart how he was damaged," my mother said. "But God forbid my child turns into that."
I was gay but closeted, counting the ways my life didn't fit the one being described in that low, certain register. That was also the year I learned why she never made my father pay child support. "A son raised only by a mother is doomed to become a faggot," he had told her, repeatedly, throughout their divorce. I filed these sentences away.
...
Though my mother’s new marriage was rocky, she was desperate to have another child, so she turned to IVF in his absence, using a sperm donor. With her husband in Mexico and no one else to sit beside her during the frequent appointments and injections, the job fell to me.
"I will never be able to thank you properly," she told me, her eyes welling up. "You'll be a big brother-godfather. You can even name the baby." I said yes before I understood what I was agreeing to.
The first time I walked into the medical office, I was struck by the tranquil shade of beige on the walls, the posters of babies and the almost magical complexity of a diagram of the female reproductive system framed near the front desk. My eyes drifted to a stack of carefully curated celebrity magazines announcing their own "miracle" pregnancies, right before a nurse bolted through the treatment-room doors to call me back. I was there for an orientation on how to deliver intramuscular injections. My mother needed daily hormones to optimize the egg-cultivation process, and I also needed to learn about tracking her cycle, the dosages, the dates, the side effects. The nurse wanted to know that I was comfortable. I was the only teenager there, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, with my SAT prep book and backpack, in a room full of older, suited men with briefcases.
I thought of my mother mixing aspirin and bleach in a syringe when I was a child, "medicating" her floral arrangements to delay their inevitable decay. Now she was the one being injected, and I was the one holding the needle. It became a second job, color-coded on a calendar the way other seniors color-coded one for finals. The doctor warned her that the hormones would make her skin lumpy, could even scar it, on top of the mood swings. My mother, who prided herself on staying trim enough for her size 8 power suits and stilettos, let me joke that her classic Coca-Cola-bottle figure would turn into a crushed soda can.
"When you want something badly, sacrifices are the price," she said.
With every needle I plunged into her lower back, I injected my own wish for freedom right alongside it. I desperately needed her to have a straight son, one she'd never have to be ashamed of. On the days I didn't want to go with her to another appointment, I told myself every good checkup brought me one step closer to my own freedom. The day before her insemination, my college acceptance letter arrived. I took it as an omen. That desire for a brother wasn't only about her. I had been helping my mother since I was six, parentified before I even had the word for it, translating for her, managing her moods, absorbing whatever version of the family story needed absorbing that week. I had spent my whole life standing in a role I never applied for, and I badly wanted to resign. A brother could grow into that role eventually. He could take my place as the good son. And if he did, I could finally stop performing and pretending to be someone other than the son my mother and grandmother described in their hushed, horrified voices at the kitchen table. I could come out.
Instead of a pregnancy, the first round of drugs delivered migraines, mood swings, severe acne and lumps the size of golf balls along my mother’s hips. She wanted to try again immediately, but doctor's orders meant a four-week wait. I was apprehensive; beyond the physical toll, the treatment could cause ovarian cysts or liver damage, and I begged her to stop, or at least to consider adoption.
"It's not the same," she said, writing the check for round two. "Nothing replaces the experience of having a child grow inside you."
...
The second round worked. Twins. We held each other and cried, though I couldn't quite let myself feel it beside her. I stayed a passenger in my own body, relieved and terrified at once, watching a future arrive that I had helped build. We went shopping that same afternoon, for blue and pink, for yellow and green, for "neutral occasions." At my high school graduation, my mother was one month along, in an azure suit and kitten heels, glowing under the June heat. Four months later, she miscarried.
"I had already felt them growing," she said, her voice flat with exhaustion. "A boy and a girl. I can deal with physical pain. Not the loss."
There was no brother coming. No one to take my place, no understudy waiting in the wings so I could finally walk offstage. Whatever door I had hoped someone else might open for me, I'd have to open myself. I came out at 22, five years later. It wasn’t because a sibling arrived to take over my role, but because I finally understood that no one was coming to relieve me of it. I had spent my senior year learning how to hold my mother's hand, injection by injection, appointment by appointment. In time, I became my own doula and finally delivered myself.
Emillio Mesa is a writer based in Orlando, Florida, working on a memoir about his life with his mother's husbands.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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