Hi

I would like to introduce you to Thomas Edward or just Tom as we will call him. He was born at 11:45 PST 8 pounds 8 oz and 20 inches long!!! We are just completely and madly in love! Still at the hospital waiting for someone to pee. I promise a picture just as soon as I get to a real computer.

4:33

At the birth center. Water broken and just waiting.

internet therapy

Sometimes F.acebook is the best therapy ever.  A friend of mine just posted the following.
"Make peace with the here and now. Let go and stop resisting. It doesn’t have to mean you’ve given up on the possibility of something better. It just means you’ve decided to pursue it from a place of freedom and peace."

That was exactly what I needed to hear at this moment.

Floating For Now

I have been in Oregon for almost a week now and am finally settled enough that I can post.  Settling has been a bit overwhelming, I had to get everything at home ready to bring the baby home and then had to do a lot of it all over again here.  Now I am just trying to enjoy these last few days before the real adventure begins.

Just being here has really made me feel so much better.  I no longer have to worry about missing the birth and just being near Sabrina and Cletus really takes away so much stress.  The thing that I am dealing with now is letting down these walls so that I can feel like this is really happening.  I am so excited that Sabrina is having a baby in just a little bit, but I am still having a hard time letting myself feel that I am about to become a mother.  The title that had eluded me is so close and yet I am unable to let myself really believe.

Unlike the other times that I have felt disconnected I am not afraid.  I know that this will all go away the second I hear my son scream.  For right now I am just going to go floating along because I have the ability to float!  For years I was drowning in the longing and fear of never being a mother.  Now I just have to convince my psyche that this is real and that it is okay for me to let those defenses down, but I am also sure that this will work itself loose.

I had a very interesting experience the other night.  Sabrina and I went to her last birthing class, which was a small class taught by Sabrina's doula.  The setting was comfortable and I was not nervous because at least there was a big belly sitting next to me.  Trying to do "mommy" things in a surrogacy situation is not always easy.  People often have a hard time disguising their feelings when you bring up the topic of surrogacy.  The majority of them try to be supportive, but there is often an underlying judgement that comes out in some way.

At the birthing class I was the one feeling a little weird.  It is not always easy to know that your role is as an intended mother.  Yes, I am the one who will raise my son and I am the one that will have the honor of being his mother, but I am not the one that has to bring him into the world.  My job only begins when he gets here and until then I am really nothing.  I know that sounds bad, but it really is not I am just still having a very hard time explaining what this feels like.  Of course, I will do whatever I can to make this easier for Sabrina, but she already has a HUGE support system that is much more capable of supporting her.

For right now I am just going to float and hope that the path is clear of power lines!  We have a midwife appointment tomorrow and I will update then.

Emotional Speed Bumps and Surrogacy

I need to blow off the cob webs around here. I cannot believe I have taken so long to post. So sorry to all of you who are still reading here, I have a million reasons but I think I will just start writing again.

Some of the reason that I have not been here for a while, other than just being plain busy, was that a few weeks ago I had a very emotional day that has taken me a while to process enough to be able to write about. Infertility quickly teaches you the lesson of longing and feelings so intense you feel physical pain. Once I finally got to the point that Cletus was really coming and that I was really going to be a mother I forgot about those feelings. Years of my life have been wasted on living in the emotional sludge that infertility brought into my life and all I wanted to do was but that all behind me. Then the bomb dropped and I found myself slammed with this feeling of longing like I had never felt before.

This being that has ruled my life for all these years is finally an almost reality. My comfort for those many years was the belief that once I became a mother that somehow I would no longer be the infertile woman who could slip into an emotional state at the drop of a hat. Not that I thought I would escape these feelings in motherhood, just that those sharp pains of longing would leave. Yet, there I was ramped up so much that I was crying uncontrollably and having some thoughts that really scared me.

From the moment that I got to know some really fantastic surrogates, I never once understood how someone could just take their child and never see the person who helped give that child life was infuriating to me. There I was sitting in the middle of my son's room and the only thing in the world that would make me feel whole at that moment was to have him. I wanted him all to myself, I was just done sharing anything anymore, or what the husband calls hitting the "Kindergarten Wall." My soul and body were hurting like they never had before, I just felt so empty and defeated.

A couple of days later the reality of what had really happened terrified me. What I believed I would never feel, what I had not felt at all until that moment, had slapped me straight in the face. I just wanted to have this all be over and I wanted to finally hold my child I have fought so hard to make a reality. My child that has no connection to me other than the fact that I have willed him into being, and for the first time I felt that my intention to be his mother was no longer enough. I was just this thing floating out in space and feeling so disconnected from everything that was causing me so much pain. It is not something that I can easily describe, but I can say that it was possibly one of the worst experiences of my life.

Like all of these intense bouts of longing and feeling of defeat these went away. As horrible as all that was, what has happened since had been fantastic. Difficult to work through yes, but here on the other end I am really much better for having been there. On this side of those horrible feelings is this place of just knowing that it is all going to be just fine. I should have known this, because it always has been, every horrible moment over all these years of me being so close to becoming a mother. Infertility has stolen many chances from me, but I will not let it steal one moment of joy and happiness out of these next few weeks.

Surrogacy is the closest thing to true altruism that I will ever know. A woman who was a perfect stranger volunteered to put not only her life but her family's life on hold so that our family can grow. All the nasty pain and heartache are just being cleaned away by our own BumpFairy, and there is nothing in this world that can ever express the love I feel!

3rd Trimester, Baby Shower, and JOY!

I did not fall off the end of the internet, things have been soooooooooo busy around here. 

First, we are in the third trimester!  I really have a hard time even thinking that without getting teary.  I never thought that we would be here, so close to holding our son.  Guess I forgot to do that whole big post.  We are having a boy and we could not be more excited! 

Second, I had the most amazing baby shower EVER!  Being surrounded by so many people who love us and who already love our son was just amazing.  We are so lucky that so many people in our lives have been so accepting of whatever fertility decisions we have made.  Really, I could not have designed a better group of people if I tried.  Having so many of them in the same room was just something I will never be able to describe and I am not even going to try.

I will give you a few highlights and pictures!!

My sister and mom playing Mad Hatter Croquet!  My sister is also wearing one of the aprons I made for my guests.

Just pure joy!  The night before the shower a bunch of my friends came to my house to get the final touches done.  Nothing like making centerpieces with 2 pairs of scissors and 1 wire cutter!

My sister, my Nana, Sabrina, my mom and me!

I am so lucky that I still have my Nana to share this with us.  She kept looking at Sabrina and saying, "That is my baby."  Nothing could have made that moment more perfect!

I am just so lucky to have so many amazing people in my life.  3 of my friends from high school came from out of town, we had a blast being together.  So many other people were there and it was a BLAST!

I have so much more to talk to you all about and I promise I am going to get better at coming by here.

navigating a relationship

As we seem to be approaching the birth at the speed of light (25 weeks tomorrow) many people are starting to question the relationship that we are going to have with Sabrina after the birth.  I know that people are coming from a place of love and concern, really I do get that, but at the same time I find this to be the most invasive questioning and really it is something extremely personal.  So what does one do with such a personal question?  Writes about it on a public blog!  I know that seems insane but really I try to be very open about things and this is the easiest way for me to do this.

All things in life are only understood through the frame of reference which someone has to understand what they are experiencing.  Surrogacy is becoming more mainstream, or that could just be the fact that I am just seeing it more, but still more people know others who have gone down this particular path to parenthood.  Of course, more people just know the horror stories that make the news.  Ours is the farthest thing from that kind of story.  That is not to say that we are skipping through a field of daisies all the time, but when there are things that we do not view the same way we are able to be respectful of that and still express our opinions.  In the end we either just agree to disagree or one of changes the other’s mind. 

This is a relationship of friends where one person just happens to be carrying a baby for the other.  For purely selfish reasons I want to keep Sabrina in my life.  Then there are the multitude of reasons that I want our son to know the family that completed our family.  I will also be the first to say that when we first started looking at surrogacy I was perfectly happy with having someone have the baby and that would be the end.  My only frame of reference was that of adoption, which does not fit into surrogacy very well.  As an adopted child I knew that having my birth mother be part of my childhood would not have been good for me or my family, not that I have anything against open adoption. 

Adoption is only a good reference for surrogacy in that it teaches you that genetic makeup has nothing to do with who you consider your family.  Other than that there is nothing similar between these two paths to parenthood.  This pregnancy began as ours.  Yes, our son is the genetic product of an egg donor and the husband.  Yes, he is being carried by Sabrina.  But I literally willed him into being.  I worked through all the years of emotional sludge that comes with infertility and got myself to that place where parenting was way more important than pregnancy.  Without my intention to be his mother Cletus would not exist. 

Along this journey there have been those moments when I have felt the twinges of jealousy.   I do not think there has ever been a woman in my position that can honestly say that they have not felt the same.  Then one day I realized that there were always going to moments in his life that others are going to experience with him first.  I am just a little ahead of schedule with this particular mommy moment.  In a perfect world I would never have had to deal with this, but we do not live in a perfect world. 

Sabrina is currently playing the most important role in Cletus’s life.  I will be doing that for the rest of his life.  She loves him like she loves a few other people’s kids.  I am filled with this amazing warmth and light and unbelievable amount of love every time I look at that picture of Cletus as a five day embryo.  We all have people in our lives that have made a huge impression and have made our lives better for being in them.  All I can hope is that Cletus has Sabrina as one of those people in his life.  To me denying the existence of Sabrina would be the same as saying we were ashamed of how our family was created, which is the same as saying we are ashamed of our son on some level.

Honesty with our child about how they came to be was really the first big surrogacy question we ever asked ourselves.  For us part of that honesty was maintaining a relationship with the woman who carried for us.  In the end this is the story of how we became a family until Cletus draws his first breath, then it becomes his story which is not ours to edit.  I am not going to pretend that it will always be easy to tell him this story.  I know that there will be times when it is downright painful to help him process what this all means to him, but we are prepared as his parents to do whatever we can to help.  We made this commitment to ourselves and our child from the first conversation we ever had about surrogacy.

Then there was the moment in the ultra sound where I was holding onto the husband, also holding Sabrina’s hand, Cletus was on the screen, tears streaming down my face, and it felt like this was just the way it was meant to be.  I am not sure that I have the words to adequately explain what that moment was like.  All I know is that any worry I ever had about being able to handle surrogacy and whatever came after just melted away.  That squirming little image on the screen was all that mattered to any of us and he was perfect.  I cannot imagine anything that would make me ever not want to continue having those moments.  So Cletus might just be the first “insert brilliant thing here” to have both his mother and surrogate at his “insert fancy award ceremony here”, but I would not have it any other way.  I will always be his mother and she will always be his Aunt Sabrina who spent nine months growing him under her heart.

I will spend the rest of my life trying and falling miserably short of repaying this gift.