Pretty Girl Complex: Preface

My name is Katie Washington. I grew up thinking I was perfect, until my mother told me that I wasn’t. I must have been nine or ten when I slipped into my mother’s bedroom to try on her red gloves made of cowhide. I wanted, for some reason, to try on her gloves, pull up her stockings, and wrap one of her scarves around my neck. I wanted the scarf and many of my mother’s hats to match the cowhide. Instead, I simply did my best, trying on her fabrics and picking a black straw hat. It was the closest thing I could get to perfection and the symmetric beauty we little girls dream of. I’m talking about Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, because no one wants to look like Cruella De Ville in 101 Dalmatians.

Anyway, I ran downstairs and into the kitchen, spreading my hands up in the air. My mother was by the counter making pancakes and slicing butter with a knife that had a strange little goose head attached at the end.

I looked over, gave a frown and asked, “What’s that smell?” I asked her.

She walked over, tilted my hat, and told me to taste her black coffee with chicory. The black water tasted bitter, and it coated my tongue with a film that I knew a toothbrush couldn’t clean.

My mother must have seen my face as I drank her coffee because she stopped slicing butter. Frowning back she said, “What’s that face, Katie?”

“Mother, the coffee is bitter,” I told her.

What she said afterward would scar me for the rest of my life. She looked me in the eyes and announced“The only thing that is bitter is you. Take that frown off your face. It's ugly.”

I froze dead in my tracks, with my tongue out. Suddenly, I dropped my cup and mom started crying.

“Look at the mess you have created!” she shouted. “I can’t look at you!”

I can’t tell you what happened next, but what I do know is that I killed the porcelain geese and hens in the kitchen and the memories that came with them.

I used to tell my mother that I wanted to be a dancer, because I loved watching this woman as she put down the toilet seat, wrapping her legs around it in preparation for her morning makeup ritual. The lipsticks were neatly arranged in a row matching the color of boxes of eye shadow. My mother would close her eyes and say “eany meany miney moe”, the nursery rhyme every American girl understands.

She was so beautiful, with the pink curlers in her bangs that made her nose look small, her teeth and smile large, and those eyes of hers… fierce but cute. Every dancer I knew from the television screen was so beautiful and had similar eyes to my mother’s, and that smile... the world drooled over. I knew back then, as I know now, beautiful girls belonged in front of the camera, on stage, and in the dance room.

So far in my life… I’ve been a dancer. I’ve been the busy director of an internationally renowned music festival, staged every year in Miami. I’ve been an earnest cheerleader for girls straight off the street—the doormats of society and flies on the wall everyone wanted to destroy—teachers turned escorts, married woman turned single moms, junky teenagers turned sober. I’ve been the unlikely product of a working-class Latina and a wealthy Englishman, who remained together, while being separated for over two decades and who couldn’t pick between Miami and London to settle. I’ve been the curious co-parent to a little girl, Olympia, through a non-romantic arrangement I made with a man named Luke, who built satellites and dreamed of a life on Mars. I’ve been the pretty sister to a woman who wanted my looks and would trade anything, including her confidence, to get my assets. And until recently, I was the happy surrogate mother for my best friend, who couldn’t have children—a job that is not officially a job, but that nonetheless has given me a platform like nothing I could have dreamed of. It challenged me and humbled me, reducing me to a fly on the wall and, at the same time, lifting me up for people to feel my beating heart from a mile away.

I’m only beginning to process what happened over the past few years—from the moment in 2009 when I took the stage in Miami and performed with over two dozen girls for an audience of 70,000—a number that has doubled in less than a decade—to a few years later, meeting the man that would become the father to my daughter—an engineer, whom I would never sleep with or feel romantic about, to making the tough decision of becoming a vessel for others—making babies I could not keep but loved every minute of the enduring journey.

When you are a surrogate, America shows itself to you in extremes. I’ve been to clinics that encouraged me to invisibilize myself—to control the arrangement of creating an inequitable relationship. I’ve been to agencies that left the “invisible mother” stigma at the doorstep.

I’ve visited families who lost all hope of having children, desperately in search of women who could match blood types, values, and personalities, to find the one who would safely deliver their babies. I’ve met many couples, who went as far as India for surrogacy arrangements, and I’ve met others who have had to change hometowns to hide pregnancies from their neighbors and relatives.

I’ve interviewed dozens of women across many countries, from the United States to Britain, Spain to India, Poland to Ukraine… who stepped into commercial surrogacy. The stories vary, from women getting the hormonal treatment that triggered depression, vomiting, ovaries getting punctured, followed by an emotional imbalances… to becoming accepted as part of another family, treated like a queen, and getting perks in restaurants and grocery stores.

Since stepping into commercial surrogacy, I’ve been labeled as the most courageous “superheroine” woman in the world, and I’ve also been beaten down as the unethical “scammer” and the insensible woman putting her own life at risk. I’ve been asked to host workshops Her Body, My Baby on childless couples crossing borders and paying women in third world countries to carry and deliver a child, from the patio of my backyard. I’ve been drilled with legal questions on gestational surrogacy (bun in the oven!), from within the walls of the dance studio locker room. I’ve even sat at the bar, debating whether the baby should genetically be related to the mother. Even more, I’ve pondered if it's moral to shop for carriers, crossing state lines and country borders. In most states in America, this industry is illegal, but growing. In Europe, it too is banned from most countries, but growing.

There is still a lot I don’t know about this life, of the conditions in which the lucrative and sometimes illegal market thrives, and what the future might bring. But I do know myself. My father, Christopher, taught me to work hard, laugh often, and keep an open mind. My mother, Belinda, showed me that looks precede everything. My sister, Rhea, showed me that without confidence, you are nothing. Together, in our small, three-bedroom home in Coral Gables, south of Miami, they helped me see the value of my story and of the larger story of women around the world, trapped between tradition and modernity. Their story of contrast, of the beautiful and the ugly, is all they have. Your story is what you have, and no one can take it from you.

For three years, from the time I turned thirty, I have been a surrogate, a world with more visits to the doctor than I can count—plus home visits, medical shots, and legal paperwork. My meals were the best I ever had. The friendship I developed with other families, some of them complete strangers, are ones I could not replicate, even with my own family. Through all this, I would get calls at night from my best friend, Amy; we were each other’s therapists… until she took her own life.

There were months, where my own family refused to lend me an ear; my mother couldn’t understand my choices as she “had not grown up that way”. Rhea was in her old world, working on baby number three and infusing romance back into her marriage, smoothing the rough patches with her husband, John. And my father… Well, he was traveling on business trips around the world and coordinating time zones, not only becoming a creative exercise in patience, but also the determination to stay close. As for my daughter, now eight, and her father…? They have come to terms that mommy is different. Although Luke still loves me, I refuse to rest on my laurels and give in as a romantic partner.

So let me start here, with the strange thing that happened a little while ago. I was in Luke’s backyard with Olympia, in Palmetto Bay, only a minute drive from my childhood home in neighboring Coral Gables. Olympia was climbing the satellite he built, reaching for the eight-foot diameter dish that took three men to shear with one bolt.

Pointing to the sky, she said, “Mommy, look!” Olympia was mesmerized by the moon.

I was settling, being pregnant for the third time, and only on my second surrogacy. What was strange about this evening was that Luke and Rosa, his maid, were gone, and the gay couple for whom I was conceiving had not called. It was just me and Olympia, trying to advance onto that giant frisbee in the sky. I was alone with her… and someone else’s baby.

I was thirsty. I got up from the hammock and walked inside the house. Squeezing fresh lemon and mint into a glass, I could hear Olympia laughing. A cat started meowing somewhere, and it was then that I felt a kick. It was a strange feeling—the one you get when a woman senses something move inside of her. I thought about if the child would understand who it’s mother was. Would it accept me? I was thinking about Olympia and if she would become a sister. I was thinking about who I was becoming, more beautiful and secure—something I have neither felt nor accepted.

In that moment I knew… Something was starting to feel different, in this pregnancy, and I could finally breathe again. And I could say, I am perfect just as I am.

To get your e-book and paperback visit https://amzn.to/2s82aG9. I would love your review!!