Brooke and Alex share what brought them to surrogacy.

A few weeks ago, we shared the story of Brooke and Alex, a couple ready to start their family. This week we will continue to share their journey and what brought them to surrogacy in the first place.

First comes love! Then comes marriage! Then comes the baby in the baby carriage!

Remember the little ditty you sang in grade school to tease those classmates making googly eyes at each other? It went like this: First comes love! Then comes marriage! Then comes the baby in the baby carriage!

Oh, how this seems so easy and simple and straightforward, right?

You fall in love. You get married. And – if you want to – you have children.

If only it were that easy. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

For Brooke and Alex, the first two steps were a cakewalk. Fate literally threw them into each other’s path not once but twice to ensure a love connection was made and solidified.

In 2002, the first chance encounter happened when they were in college. Although both attended school in Indiana, they were at different colleges. It was a mutual friend who Alex came to see that was the connection between the two, but Brooke was scooting out the door for field hockey practice as she was a varsity athlete when Alex initially arrived and ….

Full disclosure: Brooke has no recollection of this “meeting.” Whoops! Alex did, though, and when they met again in Chicago after graduation, he quickly reminded her of that “introduction,” and she didn’t let him fall off the radar again.

They began dating days later. She met his parents weeks later. They were engaged only months later and eventually walked down the aisle, all within a relatively tight timeline. Boom!

So, check off Love! Check off Marriage! Now, let’s get cracking at the Baby in a Baby Carriage.

Alex and Brooke were all in on this next step but also had high hopes to pursue their professional dreams: she in psychiatry and he as a corporate executive. While they traveled down this path, they “grew up together”; they both knew they wanted to be parents… so much so that Alex ended a relationship because his previous partner didn’t want children in her future. Alex, though, was all in.

Here’s where the hiccup comes in.

When Brooke was about 30 years old, she was having some medical issues that went undiagnosed, and, as she says, they went “gallivanting around” trying to figure out what was wrong, and this was like being on a huge “stress freight train.”

At 32, she was finally diagnosed with hypermobility syndrome (sidenote: when I first heard this, I had to admit that I feel like most women are ALL in a hypermobility state because, you know, we have all the tabs open in our brains at all times … but Brooke’s diagnosis was much more serious in the real world) and while it could be looked at as a significant obstacle or even a deal breaker for having children, they never felt discouraged and instead decided to pursue other ways to have a baby. Even though little voices were chiming in, questioning if this was what “God would have intended,” among other things.

Hmmmm … well, Brooke and Alex have always done things outside the box and were okay with approaching parenthood in a way that might not be the most traditional or expected. You see, when someone has this diagnosis, their ligaments are a bit looser than the average person. When a woman is pregnant, ligaments naturally become looser, and the combination of this syndrome and pregnancy would be a little bit too loosey-goosey. Not to make light of it. The pain that Brooke was in at early diagnosis could potentially increase if she got pregnant. Not to mention that steroids and other medications that could help with this pain would not be an option to take if pregnant.
Her diagnosis was the deciding factor that they would try a different way to have a baby.

Enter surrogacy.

If this was a way to get a baby in the baby carriage, then so be it.
This meant that they would go through the regimen of having eggs and sperm meet “scientifically” to make embryos that they would keep frozen until they could be matched with a surrogate to carry their child through a pregnancy and delivery.

Never discouraged, Alex and Brooke honestly felt like this was just a part of their path to becoming parents. And they embraced it. By their mid-thirties, they had frozen embryos and are now ready to go.

Become a surrogate!

If you would like to learn more about becoming a surrogate, please click here to see if you may qualify! You can also give us a call at 608-514-9150 or text us at 608-469-0018. We would love to talk to you about surrogacy!

Written by Cindy Joers