Eggs, Planes and Far Off Places

When I was living in California as a teenager–I lived around the corner from a girl a year older than myself. She was adopted. And she drank, messed around with boys, dyed her red hair black, got a tattoo. I did none of those things. I spent most of my days curling my hair with my cordless butane curling iron (which I found fascinating), putting together kicky outfits (lots of turtlenecks and knee length straight skirts) and seeing how long I could last on one large chocolate chip cookie and a single diet coke (as it turns out, not that long). I found out later that she slept with a boy that I was dating - had sex with him on a couch the next morning after a party. This was the boy I made hide in the closet when my mother unexpectedly came home–even though we weren’t actually doing anything and hadn’t actually done anything and wouldn’t actually do anything in the future, either. She also introduced me to Amnesty International, an awesome alternative rock station and U2. After high school she moved to San Francisco, enrolled in college there, lived with roommates and got pregnant. The father was a young, incredibly good looking skate punk with long blonde hair. Sometime in between, she also worked as an "escort", walking on men’s backs with high heeled shoes. She assured me that no actual sex was involved. She found a very wealthy family in Manhattan to adopt the baby and moved in with them until she gave birth. She returned to San Francisco, had an affair with a woman, dropped out of college and worked in a cheesy tourist trap on Fisherman’s Warf. Around this time I decided that upon graduation from college I would take a solo month long backpacking trip through Ireland. She decided that she should come along with me. I was less than enthusiastic. However, she sent a plane ticket, likely paid for with money from the Manhattan couple. But I didn’t ask and we flew to Dublin. On the flight she informed me that she was pregnant. Again. This time, she was a surrogate, using her egg and the couple’s sperm. She was constantly nauseous, hungry and tired. You know, pregnant. She wanted to go to the wax museum and I wanted to see the tower where the opening of Ulysses takes place. She wanted to sleep and I wanted to go to the Abbey. She wanted to stay in bed and breakfasts and I could only afford hostels. I was thrilled, in the end, that she was only there for a week and I had more than three weeks to myself. I was really too young, too selfish, too weirded out by the situation to be anything but annoyed with her. And I knew she was doing it solely for the money. And I found that distasteful. Sometime passed and she came to visit us in Seattle. She was pregnant again. And again as a surrogate. She was critical and harsh, as she usually was and it was beginning to wear thin. And so after she left, I began ignoring her letters, her phone calls. I don’t know what became of her. More than ten years later, myself and my husband have become one of those couples–much like the recipients of her babies–contemplating adoption, in vitro, surrogacy. How strange that I would have known someone on the other side. And although I was so judgmental at the time, so disgusted by the very idea that her motives were anything but altruistic, my view of her has softened. If the end result is the same, if a couple who wants a baby gets a baby, does the woman who puts herself through the process of egg retrieval or surrogacy need to be doing it for only the most saintly of motives?