But rather than elation, that first precious touch of her newborn son’s skin triggered panic and pessimism.
‘I have to admit,’ she confides, ‘as I cradled him, it felt like there was a glass screen between us. I felt really detached from him.
Great expectations: Surrogate mother, Zarayna Lee with Oona
It’s a complex reaction because, at 45, Baroness King of Bow, as she’s known in the
House of Lords, had to rely on a surrogate to deliver her baby.
She had previously spent more than £70,000 on six failed attempts at IVF and she and her husband, Tiberio, had adopted three children: Elia, eight, Kaia, six, and two-year-old Ariel.
That would be more than enough of a handful for most women — but Oona persisted with her dream of having her own biological child.
A controversial decision — and one she is speaking about publicly for the first time today.
She insists she was not gripped by an insatiable desire to have her own biological child, but simply didn’t want to discard embryos she and Tiberio, 51, had frozen when going through IVF.
‘It’s just that we paid £1,500 a year to freeze our embryos and I couldn’t bear the thought of destroying potential life.
‘I felt my family was complete, yet something stopped me sanctioning those eggs being destroyed. When the chance of surrogacy came up, we went ahead.’
Not that Oona had ever truly believed she would end up with her own healthy baby at the end of it.
‘When you’ve been through so many failed attempts, you never believe there’ll be a happy ending,’ she says. ‘That’s why I felt so detached from our baby when I held him. I just assumed he was going to die.
‘There were a few emergencies when he stopped breathing, but he has since been declared healthy by doctors. Yet I still can’t relax.’
And what about leaving it until halfway through her fifth decade — doesn’t she worry about being an older mother?
‘Not at the moment, no,’ she insists. ‘We’re both very healthy, very fit and very young in our attitude. I’m sure the years will catch up with us, but for now we feel well able to cope with the arrival of a brand new baby.’
Oona claims that, where others see problems, she sees challenges.
And achieving her dream of having a bustling family has certainly been that: one complicated by her high-profile career, the stress of which even led to the temporary break-up of her marriage.
‘Yes, it’s been tough,’ says Oona. ‘But nothing compares to the joy of having a family, so it’s all worth it.
‘The stress of my work was obviously a factor in my not getting pregnant — although it couldn’t have been the only explanation.
‘But I’m a determined person; more than that, I’m resilient. It’s a quality that helps both personally and professionally.’
Happy family: Oona King and her husband Tiberio with adopted children Kaia, 6, Ariel, 2, and Elia, 8
This from the politician who knew she wanted to be an MP from the tender age of four.
She and her young brother, Slater, grew up in Camden, North London. Their father, Preston King, an African-American who was active in the civil rights movement, and her English mother, Hazel, a teacher from an Orthodox Jewish family, split up when she was four.
She attended Haverstock comprehensive, where she met fellow pupils David and Ed Miliband.
True to her childhood wish, she went on to work in Brussels for the European Parliament in 1991. It was there, at 23, she met Tiberio Santomarco, then 28, an Italian fellow trainee.
They were friends for two years before romance blossomed: they married in July 1994 in Naples, near where Tiberio is from.
Having settled in East London, they focused on their careers — hers working for the GMB union until 1997, his working for a media company — and family wasn’t their ‘top priority’.
She says: ‘If anything, Tiberio was the broody one. I wasn’t yet 30 and I felt I had plenty of time for babies.’
It was a year before they started trying for a family — ‘well, we stopped using contraception’ — and two further years before Oona fell pregnant naturally.
Sadly, she miscarried at three months. ‘It was the first and last time I was pregnant,’ says Oona. ‘I was distraught, but the doctors assured me that, as I’d got pregnant once, there was no reason I wouldn’t get pregnant again.’
At this point, Oona still ‘wasn’t in any rush’ because she worried about juggling motherhood with her career: ‘I think Tiberio took it worse than me. He’s from a very close Italian family and was under gentle but persistent pressure to have children of his own.’
In 1997, Oona had swept to power as one of Blair’s Babes, winning the Labour seat of Bethnal Green and Bow at just 29 — and becoming only the second black woman to be elected to Parliament.
However, her success is surely tinged with regret as she admits that her stressful job was ‘obviously’ partly responsible for her not getting pregnant.
None of the experts they’ve consulted over the years has been able to give them a conclusive reason for their infertility.
She
adds: ‘There are few things in the world more depressing than not being
able to have a family. It’s something couples with children often fail
to understand.
New arrival: A delighted Oona holds her surrogate son, Tullio Jahan
‘Infertility is such exquisite torture. You can’t even quantify what you’ve lost. You’re grieving day in, day out, for something you’ve never had.
‘If a woman has a stillborn child, it’s the most traumatic thing that can happen to her. Everyone, quite rightly, has sympathy for her.
‘But, if you haven’t even got to first base, you’re somehow not given permission to mourn.’
Oona says it was even worse for Tiberio: ‘We seemed unable to have children and he didn’t have a wife, he complained, because I was married to the constituency.’
In fact, such were the difficulties that he walked out on their marriage in the summer of 2003.
Oona recalls: ‘He said: “What’s the point in being married if you’re never at home?” And he was absolutely right.’
It’s a startling admission: not only could she not give her husband a baby, he felt she couldn’t be a proper wife, either.
‘We were only apart for a month, but we were miserable,’ she says. ‘I suggested counselling — which we did for six months — to discuss a better work/life balance.
‘I worked hard at giving more time to Tiberio and less to my constituency work.’
They then embarked on IVF — spending more than £70,000 on six failed attempts in as many years.
Oona, then 32, at first felt full of hope, but by the third attempt she began to struggle: ‘It was incredibly painful. When they were removing the eggs from inside my body, it felt like I was haemorrhaging.’
The fourth attempt was even more gruelling because it coincided with Oona fighting — and failing, owing to her pro-Iraq War stance — to retain her seat in Bow against George Galloway in May 2005.
She explains: ‘Tiberio was fantastic; he couldn’t have been more supportive. But it was very difficult — I had to top and tail each day with getting my blood taken as part of the treatment.
‘They often couldn’t find a suitable vein so they’d be digging around with a needle.
‘Although I had wanted to win [my seat], when I lost, my overwhelming feeling was of relief.
‘It wasn’t the hormones that troubled me, but tiredness: I was working 100-hour weeks.
‘But, when the IVF failed yet again, that was truly one of the lowest points of my life.’
Although she says she’s not one to cry — ‘it’s not in my nature’ — she confides: ‘I did feel a profound depression. To keep going through an invasive procedure only to be met with failure has a cumulative effect.’
After the failure of the fifth and sixth procedures, Oona and Tiberio, now 50, decided to adopt. After a rocky start, they found a supportive social worker. She insists: ‘We weren’t wedded to the idea of having our own biological child. We were just as happy with the idea of adopting children.’
After two years, 13-month-old Elia with ‘his halo of dark curly hair’ came into their lives in August 2006.
But it wasn’t all plain sailing: Elia had ‘loved his foster family to bits’ and wasn’t happy about leaving them.
Happy day: Oona and Tiberio dance at their wedding in July 1994
Oona says: ‘People often imagine it must be like something out of a fairytale. But for his first few weeks with us, Elia decided he was a daddy’s boy and all he wanted was Tiberio.
‘I felt almost as though I’d been jilted. I’d waited ten years for a baby, then all he wanted was his father.
‘Now he’s our little prince, a startlingly beautiful, wise little boy blessed with heart-stopping good looks. He changed our lives.’
By then, Oona was working as a policy adviser to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which meant she finished at 5pm and had more time for her family.
Just over two years later, their daughter, Kaia, now six, joined them, also at 13 months.
Oona says: ‘That was much harder. She didn’t smile for the first year. Clearly, she’d been badly damaged by being removed from her foster family.’
That’s why there’s a gap of four years between her and their third adopted child, a little girl called Ariel: they waited until Kaia had adjusted emotionally.
Ariel arrived in January 2012 aged just five months and slotted into the family with ease.
Ironically, it was at this point that surrogacy became a real option for oona and Tiberio.
They had discussed it over the years but had faced hurdles. Then, Elia’s foster mum, with whom they had stayed in touch, unexpectedly offered to be their surrogate.
‘But after we started the process, we got the chance to adopt Kaia so we decided to postpone the surrogacy for a year,’ says Oona. ‘What were we going to do? Gamble on a child who had never made it out of the freezer, or give a home to a child who already existed? No contest.’
By the time they went back to their potential surrogate, her circumstances had changed and she no longer wanted to proceed.
‘We understood absolutely, but I don’t mind admitting it was like a dagger through the heart. I’d lost the only opportunity I thought I was ever going to get to have my own biological child.’
Honeymoon: After the failure of the fifth and sixth IVF procedures, Oona and Tiberio, now 50, decided to adopt
It was when they mentioned this to Ariel’s foster mother that she put them in touch with a family friend: Zarayna Lee, a 24-year-old mother of two boys under six, who agreed to help.
The timing of this opportunity, though, must have felt far from ideal: ‘The very day when the last of the adoption papers went through on Ariel, we started the process of discussing surrogacy in earnest with Zarayna.’
But Oona says they focused on the fact that ‘at last this could actually happen’: they could give the fertilised eggs a chance at life.
She says: ‘Zarayna was young, healthy, fertile and yet mature enough to understand what she was taking on. She seemed an ideal candidate.’
They agreed to cover her expenses during any pregnancy and recompense her salary should she give up her job working with autistic children.
Oona says Zarayna was driven by the urge to do something worthwhile.
There were 14 embryos in total, which the couple delivered themselves across London, carefully preserved in liquid nitrogen, from the Lister and Homerton hospitals to the Hammersmith, where Zarayna would receive the treatment.
After all the years of dashed hope, this is when Oona finally broke down.
‘We handed them to the nurse at the hospital and that’s when everything overwhelmed me,’ she says.
Oona King with Elia whose foster mother unexpectedly offered to be their surrogate (pictured in 2007)
‘I’d been fine up until that moment, but as I saw her carrying my “babies” through the swing door, I just cried and cried. They were wheeled off into an embryology clinic and I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling I’d never see any of them again.
‘The idea that any of those tiny specks would ever be transformed into a living, breathing baby seemed like a delusional fantasy.’
She was right to expect difficulty because, although Zarayna fell pregnant the first time, she miscarried after six weeks.
And even when she successfully conceived again five months later, the pregnancy was fraught with difficulty. Thankfully, acute pains at six weeks, 22 weeks and 28 weeks turned out not to be harmful to the baby.
‘We were terrified,’ says Oona. ‘But the nurse explained that quite often surrogate mums who’ve had no problems with their own pregnancies have all sorts of false alarms and scares when they’re carrying another woman’s baby.’
As this month’s due date approached, Oona was on tenterhooks, ‘jumping’ every time the phone rang.
Then earlier this week — two weeks prematurely — Zarayna started having contractions. She was finally admitted to hospital, accompanied by Oona and Tiberio, on Thursday.
‘It sounds ridiculous as we’d had nine months to prepare, but I didn’t even have any clothes for our baby,’ says Oona.
‘I had to rush out to the all-night Tesco to buy some Babygros. I didn’t want to tempt fate by getting things before he was born.’
After Zarayna went into full labour, it was six hours before their son arrived weighing 6lb 9oz. They had already chosen his name: Tullio Jahan, or TJ for short.
Tullio is Tiberio’s father’s name and Jahan is Sanskrit meaning ‘the world’ because he ‘means the world to us’.
‘My husband and I were both present at the moment of birth,’ says Oona. ‘When our son didn’t cry as he emerged, I really started to worry.
‘The nurses told me because Zarayna had been given Pethidine as pain relief he was really tired so didn’t have the strength to cry.
‘I just thought: “He’s paralysed or about to die.”’
Tullio was handed to Tiberio first, as Oona stood and watched.
She was encouraged to go and get a bottle of champagne from the fridge next door, but when she did she heard the baby alarm sound. Tullio wasn’t breathing.
‘Eight nurses stormed down the corridor,’ she says. ‘I just thought: “I knew it: he’s going to die!” Thankfully they were able to stabilise him with oxygen.’
She was then able to hold him for the first time, triggering her mixed feelings of betraying her adopted children and distance from her new baby.
‘It’s nothing less than I expected,’ she sighs. ‘I never thought it would go well.’
Over the next couple of hours there were three further emergencies when Tullio turned blue and required resuscitation. He was then transferred to an incubator and yesterday afternoon was declared healthy and well by the doctor.
‘We spent the whole night sitting by his incubator and stroking him,’ says Oona. ‘I’m always surprised at how unattractive newborn babies are but — and I suppose I would say this — our son is pretty cute.
‘He has an impish face and everyone says he looks like me. He certainly has my African nose and chubby cheeks. And lots of dark black hair.
‘Still, my husband and I are holding back. We’ve been through so much — we can’t dare to think this is real.’
And with an exhausted sigh, Oona concludes: ‘I’m sure when I feel confident Tullio is alive and well, I’ll be absolutely mesmerised.’
No comments:
Post a Comment