I went to bed at midnight. I jumped from my sleep by two twenty-five from the dream of horror.
I dreamed that after the birth I got a cart with crying and screaming coming from it, and being full of excitement and happiness I did not open the cart to see the kids, but rushed out of the clinic, hailed a taxi and start driving towards the hotel I was staying at. But then, when I lifted the lid of the cart, inside the taxi, I find in it not babies, but four furry, crying kittens, hungry for food.
I scream. I Cry. The taxi driver stops and asks what happened. I look at those kittens. Each one of them is painted with a different color. Red, blue – shocking turquoise, green and yellow. They look like a nasty joke.
I ask the driver to bring me back to the address were he took me from, to the hospital.
But when I get there, I see that everything is gone. The scene is stripped, the equipment already collected as well.
What I thought to be a doctor’s office is a rented office in front of another hospital. The grand foyer with laboratories, the laboratories themselves, the room I gave sperm at, the living room, the hallway leading to the examination rooms, the lawyer wearing a turban, the surrogate, the customer service representative and the accountant, it was all a fraud. They demanded my full payment before I came to Delhi, so that they can rob me out. They demanded that I pay extra to freeze sperm, which prepared me in advance, and loss of host embryos of the first and replacing it with another, and the dilution of embryos, and it was a scam, a sophisticated show, meant for only one thing – to extort money from a tourist like me, who yearns so much for a child.
Why didn’t I check them first, I ask myself. After all, I turned to this clinic directly, via the Internet. I read blogs, which sound alright. Now I know they are probably fraudulent, too (I am writing such a blog now myself, ha ha ha).
My God, I catch myself. After all, I was so happy in the process that I sent those people. Unconsciously, I brought others to fall where I fell.
But what do I do now, I ask myself. How to deal with it. With myself, with all the people waiting with me for the children, with the bank loans I took and the expectations I raised among friends and acquaintances, with the long preparations at home, collecting equipment, my inner-work, the separation from my partner, was it all in vain, in vain!?
I try to enter the clinic, maybe I’ll find someone, get some explanation, or evidence, to what happened here. Maybe I can save my four remaining frozen embryos.
Then I realize. There were never 12 embryos, nor four. It’s all one big fraud. But my brain refuses to absorb it.
I meet a skinny girl. She was the one who corresponded with me as the clinic’s representative. The clinic’s staff members have always written me from Gmail e-mail addresses, and even then it made me suspicious. They also have not signed a contract with me, but made me sign a contract with the surrogate, and asked me to write on the forms of electronic transfer of money, that the payment is for ‘professional expenses,’ not on surrogacy.
I grab and shake her and ask what happened here. She confesses. She tells me that that is what they earn their living of. Manipulating unsuspecting tourists like me, who want children.
“But the reports, the monthly and three-dimensional ultras sound?” I ask, amazed.
“Everything is copied. All made up,” she admits ruefully.
I do not know what to do. Go to the consulate, go complain to the police? The police here is also corrupt. I’m afraid to even call my father and tell him that. I am completely stunned.
I woke up at two-thirty in the morning. I washed my teeth, made me tea, cut a piece of cake of milk and poppy seed, and sat down to write this frightful dream.
It happened on 27 February 2012, at 2:53 in the morning.
I woke up worn out, and I wrote all my wildest dreams, the nightmare that I never had children, that I was cheated, that it is all false.
I hope my fears arise from the distance from the surrogate, and that they are not one of my premonition or prophetic dreams. If they cheated me all the way, it would be awful.
Perhaps this is a dream, related to the very nature of the pregnancy process. Something ‘there’ evolves in its shell, brewing, and we, men, are no part of it. They tell us it’s ours, but we can not know this, and should comply with what ever comes out of there, ours or not.
This is an extreme situation of uncertainty and lack of control, a state of helplessness. I have no control over the results. This is very threatening.
Apparently it is felt and shared by all men, who in their closest surrounding such a miraculous process takes place, and they have no hand in it. In my case it is more extreme, because I do not live with the woman who is pregnant and bear my kids.
At least I realize these things and write about them.
This morning I spoke with Maya, a senior lactation consultant. When I told her about this dream, and how I woke up in the middle of the night, she laughed and said, “Ilan, you’re pregnant.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She told me that many women dream, while pregnant, that they will have kittens instead of children. And many others are also starting to like me, get up at crazy hours all night, because by evolution, the body prepares itself for mid-night infant care.
Perhaps that’s why, in the last few days. I do not want to get out of bed. I’m lounging in bed, sometimes returning to nap in it, as I had never done before. Perhaps I am accustoming myself, now, a month and a half before the expected birth, to the absolute change my life that will happen soon.
