First Glee story! I was kind of disappointed with how the Rachel/Shelby plotline was handled, and this story has been running through my head constantly. It was irritating me immensely, so I decided to splurge it out here.
Disclaimer: Clearly I don't own it.
Once upon a time, there were two men who were very much in love, and they wanted a baby very badly. They couldn't have one by themselves, and for some years, they tried very hard to adopt a baby. When this failed, and they had lost all hope, they met a very kind young woman who said that she would help them. To their great delight, the kind young woman became pregnant with a beautiful baby girl. When the baby girl was born, her daddies took her into their arms and knew that she was everything they had ever hoped for. The kind young woman smiled at the baby girl and her daddies, and said that although she was leaving her precious baby girl to be raised by her fathers, she would always love her little daughter from afar. The End.
That's what my dads used to tell me. It was my favourite bedtime story. I first heard it when I was four. My daddy had taken me to the playground, and while he chatted to some of the other parents on the bench, I wandered over to the sandbox. There was another little girl, playing with a chipped teacup, playing tea parties. I sat next to her, and we played amiably for a while. After a while, she started looking at me weirdly.
"Why is your daddy here with you instead of your mommy?"
I started slightly. I hadn't played so much with other children. I spent a lot of time around adults, and since they all knew about my birth, naturally they didn't ask about my mother in front of me. So when this ponytailed little girl asked me why my mommy wasn't there, I didn't know. I'd always known other people had mothers and I didn't, but I suppose it had never occurred to me to ask my fathers where *my* mother was. So that was how the story came about. A sweet fairytale for a four year old child, the details skipped out.
I believed that that was the whole story for years. In my ignorance, I thought that my mother really had just borne me for my fathers, no payoff, just out of kindness. When I was six, and fully into my fantasy stage, I recreated the story for myself. This time, my mother was secretly a Queen of a faraway kingdom. There was a great war in the Queen's kingdom, and although she needed an heir, the land was too dangerous for the baby. Fearing for her child, she came to America, and decided to have her child and give her to two kindly men to raise for her. When the little girl was all grown up, and the Great War was over, the Queen would come back, and the little girl would become a princess. Her daddies would live at the castle too, and they would all love each other very much and live happily ever after.
When I got a bit older, I realised that this was kind of stupid, but it was always in the back of my mind. As my love of musical theatre grew with me, my fantasies of love, drama, and great peril grew too. By the age of 11, my daydreams of my mother involved a woman who was a cross between Patti LuPone, Xena Warrior Princess and Grace Kelly.
It was when I was 12 that I first knew about the money aspect of surrogacy. The mother of the girl sitting next to me in class volunteered in the school, and must have mentioned to her daughter that I had two gay dads.
"Rachel? You know how you have two dads? Where's your mom?"
I was kind of used to these questions by now, so I answered her as I drew my diagram. "Oh, my mom was a surrogate. She had me for my dads."
"Whoa," said the girl, eyes wide with that particular preteen love of drama. "I've never met anyone who was born by a surrogate before. Your dads must be really rich."
I was confused by that last bit, and stupidly asked her what she meant. "What do you mean they must be really rich?"
"My Auntie Sylvia adopted a little boy, but she looked into surrogacy first. Surrogate babies cost, like, $20000 each."
That night, I asked my dads to tell me straight, and to give them credit, they did. They paid my surrogate mother $16000 to have me, then got her to sign a contract saying she'd never contact me, at least not until I turned 18. They paid her the money, she signed the contract, and they hadn't seen her since. I couldn't sleep that night. I guess it's hard to have your childhood dreams shattered. My mother was have been a kind woman, and maybe the money wasn't the reason she did it, but it was pretty clear then that she saw me as someone else's child. That she wasn't coming back for me. I remember being pretty devastated at the time.
It got easier. I had my dads, I had school, my numerous extra-curricular activities. She was always there, though. I'd wonder if she looked like me, and if I watched a new movie, I'd wonder if it was the kind of movie she liked to watch. Going around town, I watched how mothers interacted with their little daughters, wondering if my mom would have chided me like that, or if her hugs would have picked me up off the floor. My mom wasn't there, though, and even if she lived somewhere between my conscious and subconscious, I had decided I was okay.
My life was never perfect, but it remained "okay", without my mother in my life. Until Jesse St. James showed up.