Growing By Four

This post is long overdue because I have just had a hard time getting it to sound right. I am so happy, which is not something that I am entirely used to feeling.

Meeting Sabrina and her family was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. When we first started this adventure, we had every intention of treating our surrogate well, sending some updates, but other than that we really did not want to have a big relationship. Not that we wanted to be cold, but we just felt like we needed to have our family to ourselves and with all the problems we have had there was a need to insulate ourselves. After all the time that I have spent reading stories of relationships like this I knew that this was no longer what we wanted. It was a dishonor to our child and their life-story to have this kind of relationship with the person that played such an important role in bringing them into the world.

This weekend cemented our commitment to make this a lifelong relationship. I must confess that this is for purely selfish reasons on our part. The whole weekend was like being with people that we had known all our lives, and now they are stuck with us. I cannot imagine not having this entire family be apart of our child's life because they will enrich it in so many ways.

As we were on the way back to the hotel, exhausted from spending the day at the zoo Joe-Bob said it perfectly. "You realize that our family just grew by four."

It makes me sad to think that there was a time when I was in a space that would have made this relationship impossible. On an intellectual level, it makes sense to protect yourself, your heart, and your family from everyone when it has been such a long road. In reality, a family can never have too many people who love them and care for them. This world is not always a nice place and the more people you have who love you the better life becomes. We could not have custom ordered better people to share this experience with, and I am so grateful that this worked out so well for us.

So many times we hear the tragic stories of surrogacy, and sadly I think that some people do not pursue this avenue because of these stories. I know that is scared me to death. Over the past few years I have chipped away at a lot of the fear and the mysteries that surround surrogacy. Meeting Sabrina and her family laid any reservation we ever had to rest.