“I did.”
The Surrogacy Secret
For several seconds, nothing made sense.
“You gave birth to me?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re my mother.”
“No. I was the gestational carrier.”
I stared at her.
“The embryo wasn’t mine,” she explained. “Maria was your biological mother. Your father was Frank. I carried their embryo.”
I grabbed a chair before my knees failed me.
“Tell me everything.”
Maria had been twenty-eight when emergency surgery after a ruptured ectopic pregnancy caused severe uterine damage.
She could still produce viable eggs.
Doctors believed carrying a pregnancy safely would be extremely difficult.
Frank desperately wanted children.
Maria desperately wanted to become a mother.
This was the early 1990s.
Fertility treatment was expensive, complicated, and far less common than it would become later.
Eleanor was thirty.
Single.
Healthy.
And devoted to Maria.
“My sister asked me to carry the pregnancy,” Eleanor said. “At first I said absolutely not.”
One viable embryo was created using Maria’s egg and Frank’s sperm.
It was transferred to Eleanor.
She became pregnant with me.
“When I was born?”
“I handed you to Maria.”
Eleanor looked down.
“She was your mother. That was always the agreement.”
“What did you feel?”
She hesitated.
“Don’t protect me.”
“I loved you.”
I looked away.
“From the moment I felt you move.”
She had gone to therapy while pregnant.
She reminded herself constantly that I was Maria’s child.
When I was born, Maria held me first.
A hospital photograph I had seen all my life suddenly made sense.
Maria was holding newborn me.
She looked exhausted emotionally, but there were no medical monitors near her bed.
No visible hospital bracelet.
“Where were you?”
“In the next room.”
“Why don’t I have photographs with you?”
“You did.”
“Did?”
“Frank destroyed most of them.”
Maria developed ovarian cancer when I was five.
For two years, she endured treatment.
I remembered hospitals.
Head scarves.
My father becoming quieter.
Then Aunt Ruth telling me one summer morning that Mom had gone to heaven.
During Maria’s illness, Eleanor had been nearby.
She drove Maria to treatments.
Picked me up from school.
Cooked.
Stayed overnight when Frank traveled.
A memory returned.
A tall dark-haired woman at my fifth birthday wearing a red blouse.
She had given me a wooden train.
I had assumed she was one of Maria’s friends.
“That was you?”
Eleanor nodded.
“You remember?”
“Barely.”
She had visited every few months.
Then Maria’s condition worsened.
Six months before she died, Maria asked Eleanor to promise that if something happened to both parents, Eleanor would raise me.
Maria also wanted the truth about my birth revealed when I was old enough to understand it.
Frank resisted.
After Maria died, Eleanor asked when he planned to tell me.
He told her never to mention it.
At first, she accepted that I was seven, grieving, barely sleeping, and not ready.
Then Frank began erasing her entirely.
He started telling people Maria had been an only child.
Eleanor threatened legal action for visitation.
Frank fought back.
And then Eleanor discovered another secret.
Frank had been having an affair while Maria was dying.
Not with Diane, the woman he later married.
With a woman named Celeste Romero.
Celeste worked for Dalton Earthworks.
And Frank had been moving money through accounts connected to her.
