[DIS]ORGANIZED CHAOS
🌷When people think about surrogacy, thoughts don’t often go much further than the idea of someone else carrying someone else’s baby. When we started this journey, we learned there is SO much more to the process. First, you must find someone. If you go through an agency, this can take 18-24 months. Next, once you are matched, everyone (the intended parents, the gestational carrier, and her partner) must go through intense medical testing and screening. After that, there are multiple psychological screenings, where the couples meet separately and then together. IF everyone passes all the tests, the intended parents hire an attorney for both them and a separate one for the gestational carrier. The parties negotiate the 50+ page contract, discussing everything from money, miscarriage, elective termination, genetic testing, STDs, birth plans, you name it. If at the end, the team is still together, the process of prepping the carrier (mainly, with hormones) via a fertility clinic begins (which takes around 2-3 months). When she is fully prepped, the embryo transfer occurs. If the embryo transfer is successful, and there is a pregnancy, there is another 8 weeks of monitoring and hormones, to confirm the pregnancy is viable.
Pregnancy via gestational surrogacy is no small feat. (And to think so many people get pregnant in minutes.)
When we found Kimmy (on our own, with the help of my dad and without an agency,) we felt like we won the lottery. She was healthy, in a happy/supportive marriage, already had 3 healthy pregnancies and children, a job in healthcare, and most importantly, she felt a calling to help a couple start a family. In our eyes, she was an absolute anomaly. We still feel this way.
Even with a perfect carrier, and perfect, genetically normal embryos … and making it through the medical, psychological, legal, and hormonal process, the experience has been fraught with difficulty. We miscarried our first embryo, our second embryo did not stick, and our healthy baby girl was our final transfer opportunity with Kimmy.
And now, during the 33rd week of pregnancy, as we feel like we “have this surrogacy thing down,” there are still massive bumps in the road. Our carrier, being the kind soul that she is, did not tell us that she lost her insurance coverage over 5 months ago (I’m guessing she did not want to worry us). Information that, if we had had, we could have helped navigate in a way that would not have put so much stress on her and her family. A situation now which we all must navigate, and one for which the lawyers must reconvene. Our goal is one, to get our daughter here healthily. Two, make Kimmy feel loved and supported, (after all, she is helping us bring our daughter into this world). And three, make sure that we understand our financial obligations. It’s a tricky situation for us to navigate – figuring out how to financially and emotionally pilot unchartered waters.
One of the tough things about the gestational surrogacy process is that while it is long, tedious, fraught, and all-consuming, it is running parallel with the rest of life. So, while we figure out this bump in our pregnancy, the rest of our lives continue. We have jobs, families, and bathroom mold remediation to navigate (we found a massive mold issue in our bathroom which has resulted in the entire thing needing to be removed and reconstructed.)
While there is a piece of me (or a large slice) that is getting a overwhelmed, I could not be happier. At the end of this week, we will be celebrating our baby girl, via a baby shower hosted by my mom. The fact that we are HERE, as the point where we can have a baby shower, is so blissfully overwhelming in the absolute best way possible. All the other stresses (which are very real) seem so underwhelming, when I think about the magnitude of where we are today. What it has taken to get HERE. A baby shower. Two years ago, even a year ago, I didn’t know if we would get to this point.
And if the shower wasn't enough (it is), we got to see our little one in 3D. The first thing the tech said was, "she has so much hair". Then, girlfriend immediately licked her lips when Kimmy took a sip of coffee. Nothing is more magical than seeing her.
So, while life throws all these curveballs at us, surrogacy has taught us that if we can manage to get through the hell of infertility and the crazy, wild ride, of having someone else carry our baby, we can get through anything. Perspective, at its finest. 🌷
