Surrogacy - it's happening!

Suddenly I'm back to this blog again. I'm making myself type a post in order to make something which seems unreal into something real. For the last eighteen months my husband and I have been planning to do gestational surrogacy in the United States - and now it's happening. At the end of this week. Everything is sorted - finding the agency, the surrogate, the egg donor, the clinic, the lawyers. But the truth is that I never believed that any of this would actually happen. I just couldn't allow myself to believe. But now it is happening and I'm in a total panic. I realise that I have no idea what I'm meant to be saying or doing in this situation. I feel that I'm in totally uncharted terretory. Elton John has done this but not many other people in England have. I realise that I'm going to have to find some sources of support and I'm also realising that (as in the stillbirth world) the internet is more likely to be of help than those around me. In particular I just want to give our wonderful surrogate the best support I can. Very few people in my real world know what I'm doing. That's because I don't want to raise expectations but also because I just don't feel robust enough to deal with any criticism - although I now I need to get over that pretty quickly now.

Anniversary

Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of our daughter's death. By this time five years ago I knew that she would die but I still had to go through the labour. The odd thing is that I'm not upset at all. I've just spent an hour reading posts on the SANDS (UK stillbirth charity's) website. Usually I finish up having a good cry if I do that. But no! Of course, it's stupid for me to be upset because I'm not upset. I should just make the most of it in the certain knowledge that there will be a day when - randomly - I'm really upset. I know that some people would assume that I'm not upset because five years have gone by. But actually it is only eighteen months since the last miscarriage - and the final, final knowledge that we were at the end of the road. I think that the truth is that for the last two years I've just been entirely frozen. Loss has piled up on loss and I've just ceased to have any reaction. I don't look as though I'm frozen. In fact, I look quite normal but I really don't feel anything about anything. After Laura died, I promised myself I'd write a letter to her every year on her birthday and that I'd put all the letters away in her special box. But last year I didn't write the letter because I didn't have anything to say. This year is pretty much the same. My husband is away. So I'm here on my own with my son. I keep thinking I'll call someone but I don't really feel like it. Maybe I'll just go to bed and read a book.

The cricket team

Suddenly it has all come to bits because of the cricket team (I ask you - the cricket team!) and I'm sitting here crying when I haven't cried in months. The story is that my son (age 7) isn't in the cricket team. He's nearly a year younger than most of the other boys in his class and many of them are a whole head shoulders taller than he is - so although he's really keen on sport and tries really hard he isn't in the team. And it tends to happen at his school that if you aren't in the team at the beginning then you're never going to be in the team. There's this clique of big, beefy, hearty, sporty, loud boys who are in all the teams and my son is small and quiet and thoughtful but he really wants to play sport. But I can't even bear to hear myself say all this because I've always had a total contempt for all those pushy parents who care so much about whose child is clever / sporty / top of the form in this or that. And yet here I am in tears because my son isn't in the team. But, of course, it isn't really about any of that ..... I just tried talking to a couple of other mothers and they made comforting noises about how some children are good at some things and some are good at other. But for them there are children. For me, there's a child. And I know I'm lucky there is a child. I can't explain. It's too difficult. I suppose the thing is that it's the fifth anniversary of Laura's death on the 19th May and I was talking to my husband about that the other night. I said, 'It hasn't got any better, has it?' I expected him to say something comforting about how things have got a little easier with time. But instead he said, 'No, it hasn't got any better.' And that's just it. And now I start getting upset about the stupid, stupid cricket team.

Surrogacy

I'm making myself type this post when I don't really want to. The truth is that we're looking at surrogacy. No, the whole truth. We're quite far down the line with the whole surrogacy business. We are looking at the US rather than the UK because in the UK surrogacy is virtually unknown. I don't know why I find it so hard to admit to this. I think it's because people I know will think that it is really weird / extreme / desperate / sad. Also I'm really frightened, really frightened of someone saying something horrible about it, or chucking a bucket of cold water on the whole thing. I vaguely tried it out on two friends. One said something derogatory about 'the kind of woman who would do something like that.' (In other words be a surrogate mother). This woman, of course, has three live and healthy children. The other friend said something chilly about the difficult psychological effects for the child. And actually I hadn't even said 'surrogacy' only 'donor egg.' I find these kind of comments amazing. Given what my husband and I have been through, I just thought people would cheer from the sidelines, no matter what they really think. On the upside, my Mum thinks it is a great idea. Also one dear friend here is whole heartedly supportive. Needless to say, she is a bereaved Mum. At the end of the day, I'm not really going to be influenced by what anyone says. But I could do without yet another thoroughly isolating experience.

Letting go - again and again

To me it seems like this - you start out on the whole business of having children and you have an idea of how you want it to be. Ideally you want two children, a boy and a girl. To begin with all goes well. The boy is born and you love him more than you can say. But then the girl dies and suddenly you have to readjust your ideas about how you thought things would be. But still you expect to have another child. Then you miscarry and you miscarry ....... and all the time you are having to change your expectations. Then you think donor eggs. Yes, but you can't use your own eggs. So actually you're never going to have another baby that is your own. So then you think adoption might be better. But you are told that there are no babies in the UK. You'll have to adopt a child who is two or older. Once again you readjust. You can adopt a baby abroad. A Chinese baby, you think, that would be good. But nowadays it's very difficult to get a Chinese baby so you'll have to have a Russian baby ...... OK fine. But have you seem the admin you'll have to go through? So maybe surrogacy ...... And so it goes on. But the point is that, at every stage, you have to let go of an idea of how you thought the world would be. And that letting go is difficult and it takes time and there really aren't any short cuts. At each stage, as each piece of bad news hits home, you say, 'No way. No way at all. I'm not doing the donor egg thing / the overseas adoption thing / the surrogacy thing ......Never in a million years.' But then over time you see that actually there may be no choice. And slowly you come to accept the new reality. You talk yourself into the fact that it may be a good idea. Of course, the lesson is that you shouldn't ever have an expectations of how anything will be. But of course we do have expectations because we see what other people around us are doing. Wanting two children isn't like wanting to win the Booker Prize / the Pultizer Prize, nor is it like wanting to win millions on the lottery. It's a reasonable expectation - but dangerous all the same.

The human will

About a year ago a thought came to me. The thought was this - 'In all of this I have reckoned without the force of the human will.' I think that in our generation the human will is a bit unfashionable. Everybody has to be allowed to feel what they want to feel, to express everything, to process everything. Certainly in my twenties and thirties that was the way I thought. And that view does still have its value. But there are things too big to process. Sometimes the only way to survive is to get up and walk off. You can decide just not to think about certain things. And it also becomes apparent that you can also decide to be happy - although when I was younger I never thought that you could. In fact, the human will is incredibly strong. I feel now that I understand my mother and my (departed) grandmother in a way I never did before. They are war time women and they have very English stiff upper lips. They are busy, practical, efficient, nothing gets them down, they smile no matter what. Five years ago I'd have criticised them for 'denial.' Now I'm a grown up myself and I understand that sometimes it is better to smile and pretend it never happened.

The end of the story

I feel as though I need an end to our story. Or perhaps it is more the case that other people need an end to the story. Usually stories like ours end with the birth of another baby. Of course, people who have suffered a stillbirth know that a new, living baby isn't the end of the story at all. But I think that, to the outside world, it looks like some kind of ending. But we, sadly, are not going to get that ending ..... So some how we need another. We need - or other people need us - to be able to say, 'Yes, all these horrible things happened but now we have ....... established a charity for disadvantaged children / started a course in environmental science / taken a year off and travelled around the world / written a book about what happened / become involved in a campaign for better medical research .......' (Fill in any number of other possible suggestions). We some how need an outcome, a story to tell which has an ending. I feel that if we had that ending we would find it easier to re-engage with the world. But no big project presents itself. Ideas come to us but we feel unable to commit to anything in particular. So instead the days drift on and we seem stuck in the same old place. Not desperately unhappy but just numb, disconnected.