Sweet Child O' Mine

As she watches the sphere of her life expand with the birth of her twin baby girls, Lisa Ray writes of the overwhelming yet very delicate experience of motherhood through surrogacy

- Lisa Ray

MY TWINS WERE BORN JUNE 22 ND IN TBILISI, Georgia by surrogate—the culmination of four long years’ efforts. India, our original choice, banned commercial surrogacy officially in 2017, during which I started cultivating a sense of moral superiority predicated on living through interminable waiting and unpredictable obstacles.

We have paid extra for a room with an atrium in the Chachava Clinic. The room crackles with keyed up expectancy. There’s a flat-screen TV playing the World Cup in a corner when my husband, whom I nominated to be in the operating theatre for the birth, bursts in, flushed: “Girls! We have two baby girls!” My mother-in-law drops her knitting, “Now will you tell me their names?” she holds up a blank square of the blanket she has been working on, “I need initials.”

On cue, my mind fogs up.

Names? I didn’t even know the gender of our babies until now. It was all so dreamlike, this period of gestation. While my girls grew in another woman’s womb, they slowly grew in my mind.

I don’t have names because I never thought I’d have kids. Particularly now, at the biologically geriatric age of 46.

Since 16 I’ve grappled with an ambivalent view of procreation, finally deciding in my early 20s to guard myself against breeding: The loss of autonomy implied by maternity and the victory of mustardy diapers over freedom and self-definition.