The Green Eyed Monster and Surrogacy

The other night I got an e-mail from a woman asking how I dealt with the feelings of jealousy when it comes to surrogacy. Dealing with these feelings is one of my major concerns during this journey because I do not want jealousy to cloud the experience for anyone involved. Moreover, I see this as my own personal problem, yes there is going to be a special relationship that the surrogate gets to experience with my child that I would love to experience. When we first started talking about surrogacy this was something that I thought a lot about.

I concluded that if this was going to be a happy experience for me I had to find a way to deal with my feelings. In thinking about this issue, it occurred to me that:

1. Our surrogate had no intention of keeping our child, she was doing this to help us have a family
   
2. Our child was never going to remember having this *relationship* with our surrogate
   
3. I was the one who had the problem with the situation
   

At some point, it became a ridiculous idea for me to be jealous. Sure, this is not the path I planned to motherhood, but it was the option that I chose and one that I was comfortable with. Spending nine months waiting for my biggest dream to come true is going to be hard enough. Spending those nine months bitter and angry because I was jealous of a situation that was only real for me felt ridiculous, especially when I could be spending it happy and relishing every detail while I enjoyed a good relationship with our surrogate. This is not saying that I will not at times be jealous I am human after all. I just have to keep telling myself that this is my issue and reminding myself that nothing good comes out of me focusing on these feelings.