Do You Still Talk To Her? – Surrogacy and Friendship

Last week I shared the number one question people want to ask and are (almost) always afraid to. 

Now that our baby girl is smiling in our arms, there’s another question we hear over and over – “But, the woman who carried her… do you still talk to her?”

Most people are curious about surrogacy relationships, and if you’re a surrogate, a surrogate partner, or an intended parent waiting on a match, you are definitely wondering what kind of relationships you’ll have with your new baby team.

My answer to the “Do you still keep in touch?” question – Yes. We do. We’re like family.

My husband and I and our surrogate and her husband… we have become incredible friends. We are well past the pregnancy now. Our baby is growing fast, and still we text with our surrogate two or three days a week. We share photos of our baby girl learning to crawl or sporting her cutest new outfit. Our surrogate sends updates from her kids’ karate practice and their latest and greatest achievements at school. Now that all of us are parents (a fact that still catches me off guard – I’m a dad!), our surrogate, my husband and I commiserate over the whirlwind of parenting – the dirty diapers and the crazy schedules and the sweet cuddles on Saturday mornings. You may or may not find us on Friday nights catching up over Facetime, each of us nursing a glass of wine after the kids have gone to bed.

I had no idea we would all be so close when we met. Like every kind of meeting in life, you don’t know before you meet if you’ll actually hit it off. “It felt like dating,” one surrogate told me recently about her own Match Meeting. And in this case, it’s like dating with the help of a matchmaker. That’s part of the magic the women at Hope Surrogacy bring into the process.

The women of Hope, Mary, LeeAnn and Amy, work hard to get to know surrogates and intended parents. Through the process I remember talking to the women of Hope about so many different aspects of parenting, pregnancy, surrogacy and birth. I’ve heard since then that many of the same questions were asked of our surrogate, so that by the time we met, the women of Hope Surrogacy already knew that my husband and I would be a great match for our surrogate.

“Still,” Mary told me later, “you can’t guarantee a friendship.” I’ve talked to many surrogates who, as in our case, have incredible friendships with the parents of the children they carried. And I’ve talked to many surrogates who have a more distant relationship with their intended parents after the birth. The reasons for distance are many. In some cases, parents have struggled for so long that once they approach surrogacy, the baby born comes at the end of a long, long, long journey which they need to leave behind.

“I found out that the mom had been trying to have a baby for over two decades,” one surrogate told me. Two. Decades. This woman worked with her intended parents for almost two years of that twenty year journey. As a surrogate, she was able to join this family in the last part of their journey to parenthood. She was the person they turned to with all the hope they had left. “It was so beautiful to finally see them with the baby,” the surrogate told me. “And then… they needed to move on.”

Some surrogates don’t stay close to their intended parents. Some become the best of friends. You can’t be sure what kind of relationship you’ll have with your surrogate until you start building one.

But – I can tell you this.

This morning I was feeding my baby, thinking about growing up gay. In those years, I heard a lot of difficult messages from the world around me – that gay men shouldn’t have babies… that, even if I wanted to, as a gay man it’s impossible to have a family.

But today, I held my baby in my arms. Today, I fed my daughter a bottle, humming “Rainbow Connection”.

In moments like these, I think of her, our surrogate, who helped make the dream of this moment, and so many more moments, come true. And as a parent I can guarantee – no matter what kind of relationship parents have with the surrogate they met on their journey, they, like me, carry a spark of gratitude into those special moments with their kids, every time remembering the miracle that made it possible.

No matter if you call her friend, sister, distant auntie or simply ‘Our Surrogate’, you will think of her with gratitude beyond measure for the rest of your family’s life.

—

Brent Love is the newest addition to the Hope Surrogacy team. We’re so excited that he’ll be sharing stories from his surrogacy journey on our blog. Have a story to share or a question you’d like us to answer on the blog?  You can email Brent at brent@hopesurrogacy.com.

If you want to talk about what to expect on your own journey into surrogacy, give us a call or write to us here.