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womb.
Five days went by ...
^ane honored her contract. She signed all the papers proffered to
"cr, and received her $10,000 fee. She flew home to Arizona,
having her raven-haired daughter behind.
140 ANN RULE
Diane immediately broke one of the rules. She bought an
expensive layette for the new baby and mailed it to an address
she'd ferreted out for the legal parents. The package came back
marked: "Moved. No Forwarding Address."
Diane seemed to have no trace of postpartum depression, no
grief over giving up her child. She felt only joy and such a sense
of well-being.
She could hardly wait to be inseminated again.
CHAPTER 13
ic... it's never totally successful. In fact there usually
is a grief reaction with the women Pm following.
So far, there have been no severe psychiatric reactions
when a woman gives up the baby. I mean--no one's
ended- up in a psychiatric hospital. But it's only a matter
of time."
--Philip Parker, M.D. psychiatrist, on surrogate mothers
Diane went back to work in Arizona three weeks after she gave
birth. It was June and full summer. She was slim again and feeling
wonderful. She shouldered her heavy mail bags easily. Willadene
was to have kept Christie and Cheryl while Diane recuperated,
but Diane was lonesome. She sent for the little girls and fetched
Danny back from Steve's care.
Diane sold the Palomino Street house back to Steve. She had
the $10,000 payment for the baby, but she still owed Mack $5,000.
She used the rest of the baby money for a vacation and a down
Payment on a new mobile home. The expandable mobile home
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I had beige siding that blended into the scrabbly half-desert just
beyond the manicured splendor of the Sunshine Valley Trailer ^rk at 18250
South Arizona Avenue in Chandler. When its two halves were joined, her mobile
home was as big as a mediumsized
house.
Everything inside was new--most of it on credit. Diane's
iving-room furniture was heavy, rough-hewn wood and leather¦k
vinyl, the cushions of sturdy brown and tan plaid. She hung
142 ANN RULE
white organdy curtains in the kitchen window and planted scarlet
bougainvillea so that it would espalier against the outside walls.
Space 363. The Four Musketeers were locked safe inside.
Diane recalls how they played games in air-conditioned coolness^ Outside it
was unremittingly hot, and the sky above had no clouds
at all.
Nor did Diane seem to have any clouds in her life. The trailer
removed the pressure of the hefty mortgage payments. Everything
smelled so new and clean it enhanced the illusion of a fresh
start. She had never lived here with Steve. At last, they were
divorced!
Five years after the fact, Diane had expunged her guilt over
the abortion of Carrie. She hadn't accomplished that with Clanny's
birth, because she'd kept Danny. But she'd given Jennifer--- her name for the
surrogate baby--away, symbolically undoing
any harm she'd done. It was a mystical process, and it had taken
her a while to figure it out.
Diane realized that she could trade babies for babies after all!
If there was ever a time when Diane Downs had the opportunity
for a new start--her guilt atoned for and all of the negative
influences that depressed her relegated to the past--it was the
summer of 1982. She was surrounded by choices.
Almost without exception, Diane chose the wrong doors.
"I wanted to study pre-med . . . My dad said I should go to
summer school to see if I really liked college. I went two nights a
week from seven to nine. Steve took care of the kids."
She took English and math courses first. She had been out of
school for a while, and she needed to brush up. Diane's English
course was basic composition. She wrote several papers: one on
women's liberation, one on her aversion to "dumb rules," and a
long essay on child abuse. She was quite good--particularly when
her prose was compared with that of other freshmen who were
eight years younger.
Diane's essay on "dumb rules" helped her vent her anger
when she was not allowed to fence her yard at the trailer park,
and when postal employees were forbidden to hang out in the
coffee room when they were off duty. Diane had hated rules
throughout her childhood; she had somehow expected that adults
would be free of them.
She was particularly incensed about the new post office rules:
"The most recent ideas they came up with are the absolute
SMALL SACRIFICES 143
dumbest. Try this one: 'After an employee punches off the clock,
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