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.
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