21

Today is the 21st birthday of my beautiful daughter, Amy.  To celebrate, I am reprinting the letter I sent out with her birth announcement, explaining why she is such a miracle.

Amy Alison Androw

May 23, 1997

San Diego, California

Okay, so by then I was 47, which is a great age if you’re a woman but a bad age if you’re an ovary, and it made me just crazy all those infertility treatments that didn’t work anyway, so we went to a barbecue at my friend Jacquie’s house and her friend Denni told me about her sister who had a baby by a surrogate mother and when I called the sister she couldn’t talk because her kids were yelling so she called me back the next day and told me about the Center for Surrogate Parenting so Mark and I went to LA and it turns out the Center is in Beverly Hills, which is the scariest place on the planet next to Beirut, and we thought there would be a bunch of Gucci dealmakers to negotiate a baby for us, but it turned out that all the people at the Center were smart and compassionate and were probably born in Kansas they were so normal, so we decided to try it even though we were terrified, and we waited a year and then Connie called us, and Connie is married to Mike and they have Courtney who is 8 and David who is 3, so we flew to San Diego to meet them and of course there’s no chapter in Miss Mannersthat tells you how to behave when you meet the woman who is going to carry your husband’s child, so we just bought some flowers and held our breath and met this warm and wonderful woman and I kept looking for some dark part of her heart but all I ever found was kindness, so we all hugged each other and agreed to try this improbable thing and Connie got pregnant immediately, which as far as I’m concerned, is a much greater achievement than splitting the atom or reading any of Umberto Eco’s books, and Mark and I didn’t tell anyone for a long time because it was such a strange thing and we just couldn’t believe it was really true, and when Connie had an ultrasound the baby was a girl and I wanted to name her Lucy but my sister said it sounded too bossy because of the Peanuts cartoon, so we decided on Amy Alison Androw, triple A’s like the motor club, and then we had to start telling people about having a baby but I wasn’t having the baby myself personally and I bought ten thousand tiny pink baby clothes and in May we went to San Diego for the birth but Amy was late and meanwhile we were staying in a really bad hotel and the longer we stayed there the more I thought we were stuck in a Coen brothers movie so we moved to a golf resort which I thought was just a different kind of bizarre movie, but finally Connie went into labor so in the middle of everything the nurse brought in a blue tumbling mat and Mark took a nap on the floor, but he was awake at 2:19 PM because everyone in the room was crying, the doctor and nurses and Mike and Connie and Mark and me and Amy, except she wasn’t overjoyed like we were, she was pretty much mad at everyone but she stopped crying when I held her close to me and for the next three days Mark and Amy and I stayed in a hotel on the ocean and everywhere we went it felt like we were tiptoeing on magic and then it was time to say good bye to Connie and go home but it wasn’t sad and it wasn’t awkward, and there’s no way any of this makes sense no matter how it’s explained, except that sometimes the universe surprises you, sometimes there’s a moment of random benevolence, the kind that passeth all understanding, and that’s what it was.