birther of dreams

A little over a year ago, we were sitting in the office of a surrogacy agency; the place that we believed would be our salvation. No decision we have ever made about creating our family was ever taken lightly, every turn we have taken has been calculated and thoroughly researched and debated. In truth, this is how we live our lives; we deal with highly emotional situations by taking them to a very cerebral level and working everything out while standing outside the whole ordeal. It is called protection, without this method I would have been nothing more than a bundle of nerves in a padded cell years ago. The agency turned out to be a bitter disappointment, an utter train wreck of a situation. One that almost made us make the decision to live the rest of our lives childless, we just could not deal with that type of pain again. The fact is that we were being taken advantage of because we were in a vulnerable situation, and to me there is nothing lower than those who seek their fortune on the backs of others desperation and misery. That was over a year ago though.

Now life is so incredibly different, we are in a good place, which frankly is even more frightening. I know disappointment and failure, they are very good friends, so good in fact they are on the Christmas card list. We know how to fail, it is success that we are uncomfortable with, and it is just something that we never really learned to excel at because we were always so much better at failing. This is no ones fault but our own, we constructed our lives to ensure that failure was always the outcome.

I wrote a post some time back about how lonely this world of surrogacy can be. We are out on the third rail, in the place where we have given up and are not doing anything that appears to be for the common good of humanity. I understand these feelings, I have had these feelings, but at the end of the day we made our decision. In writing that post, something amazing happened, something that I would have told you was impossible a year ago.

I got an e-mail. Just a simple note from a complete stranger asking me to be part of a support group. She was someone whose blog I had commented on, someone who gave me hope that surrogacy was not as frightening as I once believed. I cannot recall how long it had been between my finding her and her finding me, but I know it could not have been that long. The night that I found her, I read every word she had written. I had found someone who took her job of being a surrogate very seriously and still managed to keep a sense of humor about the whole thing. This is tough on either side, and if you are unable to laugh, you are going to lose your mind. Sabrina did this with such ease that I was in awe. I mean, who tags themselves as "like the tooth fairy only fatter"? This was the kind of person that I needed by my side, and I was prepared to do whatever it took to keep her there.

I joined the group and watched as she grew two beautiful babies for P-Daddy, and at the same time grew their relationship. I was envious I wanted that relationship with my surrogate. After all, this woman and her family are going to forever be a part of my family. When she gave birth to the princesses I cried, P-Daddy was now a daddy and Sabrina was officially the "birther of dreams."

We e-mailed, talked on the group, and became facebook friends. She did not know that I had made the decision that I would wait forever for her to carry my child. I would have walked through fire to have the honor of having her care for my child while I was unable, and at the same time I felt that I would never live up to P-Daddy. Let's face it, I am not a single man, and carrying another woman's child is a whole other ball of wax, than carrying a child of a man who is not your husband. This was something that I have always understood. Us women come with complexities that men do not, there is the obvious jealousy that is bound to show up and then there is the whole micromanaging. Face it, when women get pregnant they TALK and TALK about everything and I have heard more dos and don'ts of pregnancy that I should have at least ten kids following me around. Then again, none of this is me. I started this process knowing where my feelings belonged, they belonged to me and were not anyone else's problem and I have no right to go around throwing these feelings all over someone else.

I was just grateful that Sabrina was going to be there to walk down this road, helping me to navigate our surrogacy adventure.

Wait, what is this, a facebook message with Sabrina's number. What an honor, I was going to speak with Sabrina, the woman who had most likely unknowingly, pulled me out of a hole. I was actually in such a hurry to talk to her that I did not even bother to read the rest of the message. We talked forever on the phone, and while she knew all my crazy to an extent, she really learned just how nutty I really am. We talked about it all and then some. It was one of the best conversations I have ever had with someone, and at the same time one of the strangest, we knew each other and yet this was the first time we had ever heard the others voice.

A week later, I was cleaning out my e-mails, and there is was the words that stopped my heart. Sabrina had offered to be our surrogate. She had chosen to go through another pregnancy so that we could be parents. I had not asked, she had just offered. Now what was I going to do? I had spent hours on the phone with her and not once mentioned that I would love for her to be our surrogate, that it was my dream, that I would have given the world to have her carry our child. There was no one else in the world that I could even imagine doing so. Of course if she had not wanted to that would have been fine and I would have found another wonderful woman. In the end, I would still have Sabrina in my life and at the end of the day that is what mattered. So I called her again, with monster sized butterflies in my stomach, I thought she was going to say no. I mean I cannot even finish reading an e-mail what would make her think that I was going to be a good parent. I told her that I felt like an idiot and that we would be honored to have her carry our baby. I know that she said yes a millisecond later, but it felt like a million years.

So here we are!!! The amazing Sabrina is our surrogate. We are aiming for August to do our transfer. I say aiming because I make no firm plans when it comes to baby making. There is nothing that means more to me than becoming a mother, and no one else that I would rather have to carry our child than Sabrina.