Are You Afraid of Surrogacy? So Was I.

Brent Love is a new member of the Hope Surrogacy team. He’ll be sharing stories on our blog about parenting through surrogacy. Have a story to share or a question you’d like answered on the blog? Email brent@hopesurrogacy.com. We can’t wait to hear from you!

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Sitting in the middle of month four with my new babe, it is difficult for me to think about how I was feeling when the word “surrogacy” first floated into our lives. Our girl is blowing raspberries now, and she just figured out she can put her toes in her mouth, but long before she got here, there was a lot of fear when surrogacy first came up. It felt like walking into a dark room with the lights off, blindly waving your hands out in front of you. Frankly, I was scared.

We are family men, my husband and I. On our first date we talked about family for hours, and our dating life was full of family dreams. But without a uterus in the relationship, the HOW question was always front and center. It wasn’t until after our wedding that our ‘surrogacy’ journey got serious. My husband hit the search engines. I sat next to him on the couch, a bit more afraid than he, gazing over his shoulder at his laptop screen.

There was little out there to read. We found a few surrogacy agency websites, some reddit threads, a few Instagram handles with mentions of the surrogacy journey in the profile description. And there were wild speculations about the cost. The speculative numbers with all those zeros hit me right in the gut.

There were other surrogacy fears, too, and plenty on the internet to prod them. What if our embryos didn’t take? What if our surrogate hates us, or worse, what if we’re never matched with a surrogate at all? What are the laws around surrogacy and who is making them? How many appointments and doctors and how long will it take and can we do this? The fear of the unknown grew like a rolling snowball every time I googled.

And the biggest fear of all was this – were we really smart enough, brave enough, able and willing to take this journey and keep the dream of our baby alive until we finally held her in our arms? In those very first days, before we met a doctor or an agency and so very long before we met a surrogate, I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to climb the mountain at all.

The surrogacy journey seemed so incredibly daunting. And then we met Mary.

Mary is not anything like the reddit threads or the comment boards on the internet. Mary is a brave and incredibly sweet woman who is passionate about helping parents and surrogates build families.

When we met her, Mary looked us right in the eyes and said, “Oh, guys. This is going to be so great.”

I remember that meeting. It was just outside the hotel lobby where Mary was staying. Four simple chairs, me next to my husband, a pile of research and written questions in his lap. After she covered the surrogacy basics, Mary opened the conversation for our questions. All we had been holding inside fell right out. Every anxiety of mine came out in a question, all the fears we had about surrogacy spilled from our hearts right in front of her.

And Mary… she held every question and fear carefully, addressed them, and with joy, she said, “Oh, guys. This is going to be so great.”

And she was right. Looking back now with my four month old in my lap, I can say it – Surrogacy was so, so great.

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If you want to schedule your first meeting with the Hope Surrogacy team, contact us here. You can also find more information about becoming a parent through surrogacy here.

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