Four New Lives--at Last : Families: Despite years of infertility, tragedy and sorrow, Shelley Smith and Reid Nathan kept the faith. The big payoff? Twins Nicholas and Miranda.
It is a moment so simple and peaceful--husband and wife relaxing quietly on a couch in the fallow light of late afternoon. Time has lost form and loosened its grasp, the way it does at journey’s end.
Shelley Smith holds son Nicholas in her lap, while Reid Nathan leans back, holding daughter Miranda in one arm. A mother, a father and newborn twins. A family, at last.
Arriving at this moment required all their courage as well as a willingness and trust in scientific advances addressing infertility.
On March 13, Smith gave birth after years of futility, utilizing her brother’s sperm and donor eggs.
They hold bottles to the babies’ mouths, gaze at them, talk to them with their eyes. They still laugh when the babies burp. Twins can be a handful, they say, as evidenced by the time Smith found herself with a baby at each breast, a telephone at each ear. Now, she notes, she has a headset.
There are long pauses in the conversation as they observe and reflect on twins and parenthood. Projectile vomiting. There’s a topic. Were it a formal competition, Nathan says, Miranda would set the standard. Laundry, so much of it. Sleep, so little.
There are times when they still can’t believe moments like this belong to them. In the past, it was always some other couple, some other family whose joy they shared. And that would only make them want children more.
The births of Nicholas and Miranda resulted in four new lives, as Smith and Nathan, both 45, began seeing the world through new eyes. There would have been video of the blessed event, but Dad screwed up with the camera. It would have shown Nicholas, the first to arrive, being held up to Mom.
“We’re so glad you’re here,” she said.
Then came Miranda, and Dad still had not discovered that the record button was not engaged. It is no big deal now. Nothing seems important compared to this new moment and these babies.
In 1989, their first child, Justin, died three days after birth. On that day, too, in the same Cedars-Sinai operating room where the twins were born, Smith held her baby close. “Goodby,” she said.
There were more tragedies. Miscarriages. Infertility caused by Smith’s advancing age. In 1993, using Nathan’s sperm, a donor’s eggs and a surrogate carrier, twins were conceived. The heartbeat of one vanished during the first trimester.
Tests showed a chromosomal anomaly, which created overwhelming odds that the second twin would be born with mental incapacity and massive disfigurement. Smith and Nathan consulted with four geneticists, who ordered more tests. But the answer was always the same. The couple wanted this child more than anything but questioned what kind of life it would have. The challenges it would face seemed insurmountable.
Smith and Nathan searched within their souls and, with the surrogate in agreement, decided to terminate pregnancy during the fifth month. Then, too, Smith held the fetus in her arms. This time, she asked for forgiveness.
Their desire for children had pushed them forward on shallow paths carved by science and doctors, leading only to heartbreak. When they needed it most, hope came by way of Dr. Joel Batzofin of the Huntington Reproductive Center in Pasadena.
It was evident, Batzofin told them, that the chromosomal anomaly could only have been caused by sperm, even though Nathan had two children from a previous marriage.
They decided to try again using a sperm donor and, because of Smith’s age, donor eggs. The couple wanted a genetic link, however, and that’s when Leigh Smith’s telephone rang in New Jersey. Shelley’s younger brother, father of three, was scheduled for a vasectomy later that week.
He knew how important children were to his sister, having seen how she interacted with his own; so when she called, he did not hesitate to agree to serve as donor. This time, science and hope won.
“I’ll never forget the moment of looking into this little boy’s eyes,” Shelley Smith says, as she holds Nicholas in her lap. “He wasn’t fussing or crying. He came straight down from heaven, and he just looked right at me.”
There was a lifting of darkness. The words exquisite and perfect formed in Nathan’s mind. Smith did not cry as she thought she would.
“When I held Nicholas, he was healthy and OK and he was beautiful,” she says. “We had been through the shadow side of daylight--and he was daylight.”
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Even now, they think about Justin. When Nathan finishes with the twins’ 4 a.m. feeding, he rocks them back to sleep, then slumbers in the approaching dawn. When Smith takes over, he leaves on his morning run.
When they lived in Westwood, he would always set his running course past the cemetery where Justin is buried. He takes a different route now that they live in Hancock Park, but still the rhythm of his stride and the rush of early morning air brings his thoughts back to his son.
When Justin died, Smith, a former model and actress, started a support group for couples healing from the deaths of their newborn. She returned to school, received a master’s degree in psychology and became a licensed marriage, family and child counselor. In 1991, she and Nathan, a lawyer/certified public accountant, started the Egg Donor Program and, a year later, the Surrogacy Program, which they operate out of their home.
“At that time, it was very unusual to be able to get a lot of information about the donor,” she says. “Usually a doctor just came and said, ‘Your donor is available and she’s 5 foot 6 and she has brown hair and brown eyes,’ and that’s about all the information that was given. So I thought that if people were given more control and got a lot of information about egg donors, they would feel more comfortable doing this, and I started a program with that premise.”
An egg-donor procedure in California costs between $11,000 and $14,000, while surrogacy costs range upward of $35,000, Smith says.
Many opponents of surrogacy liken it to selling babies by contract, enticing brokers and surrogate mothers interested only in whatever profit might be gained.
“They don’t understand that there are women who so love being pregnant and so love giving life to the world that they want to help other couples,” Smith says. “These are people who have hearts that are unbelievable. They just want to see the faces of the couple when the baby is born. That’s why they do it.”
Since Justin’s death, assisting others in bringing babies into the world has helped them heal. But the loss of their son will always be with them--the pain of telephoning friends and relatives who were expecting good news, the heartache of going home from the hospital without him too fragile to speak or even look at each other as they disassembled his crib and packed his things away.
On this seamless afternoon, as they marvel at perfect faces and tiny, pink fingers, there is no controversy, no questions. In Nicholas and Miranda, they see and feel only answers and the certainty of their convictions. They are blessed and whole. As Mother’s Day approaches, they float through this new journey.
