Tuesday, October 7, 2008

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.

2 comments:

Cyn said...

Jaymee, I am just continually impressed with your ability to deal with and sort out your feelings. You do such a great job of 'putting it out there' for us all and really helps us see the process of preparing for surrogacy as an IP.

You are right. Even at birth the twins didn't care who I was, they were only concerned with who was meeting their needs and loving on them.

You are going to do great and it will happen!

JW Moxie said...

What a lovely post. I love reading about all the ways in which you are processing the intricacies of a surrogacy journey. Your surrogate will be a very lucky woman, indeed.