Welcome Home Waffle- A Surrogacy Birth

Chris-That moment when the impossible is realized, when your wall of Jericho comes tumbling down, when “that flag was still there,” that is kind of where Candace and I are.   We feel like we found our pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, twice!  I’m not trying to be overly dramatic but, really, we didn’t think the surrogacy thing would work for us in the first place, like before we brought Jellybean home over five years ago.  Now, I get to tap it out on the keyboard again to say that we got lucky enough to catch a second unicorn.  Who has that kind of luck in the blessings department?

Of course, this story cannot be all dreamy and sunshine.  Candace and I have been kicked in the face plenty in this journey.  A brief trip down memory lane, shall we?  We will start with when we brought Jellybean home.  Candace and I had “arrived.”  We were parents.  Sure, there was all the fear of being the ones responsible to keep another human alive, that bit of uterine cancer with partial hysterectomy, brain tumor, and the bajillion dollars we spent to bring Jellybean home.  BUT, our Wonder-Surro swooped in, got knocked up at the hands of our RE, and BAM, nine months later, we had our Jellybean. 

Where could we possibly go from there?  Of course, we talked about a bigger family.  But we had abandoned the wishes of having more than one child before Jellybean was born.  Just not in the cards.  Then, in what we thought was a miracle (spoiler alert, this decimated us) someone came forward and offered to be our surrogate for a second child.  WHAT!?  And, her insurance would cover some of the transfer procedures and the pregnancy.  Amazeballs right?  Well, we jumped in.  Candace went through a stim cycle with no uterus or fallopian tubes.  As a result, it hurt like hell.  Candace chomped on the stick between her teeth and pushed through though.  I romanced a plastic cup and we had them, 3 blastocysts that were determined to be genetically viable. 

As fate would have it though, Miss Fortune was there to literally rip our family building dreams from our souls.  On day one of the would-be transfer cycle, as we were driving to where I had my second brain surgery due to the alarming return of some of my symptoms, our would-be surrogate backed out.  Although now that is simply a festering jagged schism in the psyche of our recent past, it was literally as if all the anything was sucked out of us.  Of course, we couldn’t really express this since we had a beautiful Jellybean blessing child running around.  And really, we struggled with the idea that maybe we should even feel this immense pain because, after all, we already had one.  Side note, that flickering thought was quickly put to rest.  This sucked … HARD.

Then, it happened again.  We have already written about the details of how this miraculous partnership came to be (check out that post here), but it literally felt like a unicorn bit us in the ass. It was that kind of blessing that forged the way for our Wondrous Wombmate to bravely undertake our second surrogacy.  We went through the requisite countless tests and blood workups.  We waited until transfer day, then that happened.  We waited for that phone call after the two week wait, then that happened.  We waited for the ultrasounds, and the bloodwork, and the tests, and the doctors’ office visits, and the this and the that.  Then, we got that call (it may be best to let Candace tell the story around the call, suffice it to say, we got THAT call), and we were off to the hospital.  After several hours, and countless prayers, God and our Wondrous Wombmate did it!  Our Waffle was born!  This all started with Candace and I thinking we couldn’t even begin to consider surrogacy and here we were, with TWO daughters born via surrogacy.  Even if you don’t believe the things you are asking for … he, (the man upstairs) turns them to reality. 

We still look at our daughters and say, “I don’t want to wake up.”  This dream is too sweet, our current existence is far too compelling to think that it is simply the result of a subconscious thought.  If this is a dream, if we are in some kind of Matrix-like situation, then 1) why can’t I do any cool moves like in the movies? And 2) don’t let us know, our life is way too blessed to be burdened with facing an alternate reality. 

Candace- Surrogacy is complicated. It is a sacrifice. It is beautiful. Unbeknownst to me, Chris had received a “pre-labor” call in the wee hours of the morning. Did he wake me up to tell me this? Nope. If it’s not obvious, I am still a bit salty about that.  Thankfully, he did eventually wake me up only to be greeted in a state of panic as I flew out of the bed in that “oh shit, this is happening” state of mind. We called in the recruits to take care of Jellybean and then headed to hospital.

Many people have asked me what experiencing a surrogacy birth is like. For me, it feels like two women laboring at the same time. Behind the curtain, I hear our Wonderous Wombmate in excruciating pain. She is vulnerable, she is scared, and she is brave. I can’t imagine what she is thinking and feeling at that time but I am sure the mix of emotions and physical pain she is experiencing is unbearable. Gestational carriers are angels among us.

 

On the other side of the curtain is me, a woman laboring mentally. The feelings of immense guilt increase with each passing contraction on a level that is indescribable. I feel imprisoned by a body that has failed me in the ability to carry my child. I am also restrained in my ability to be able to trade places with her, so instead I watch it all play out helplessly unable to take her pain away.  To reassure everyone in the room that everything is OK and that we are in this together, I slap on a smile and stay visibly together and not dare show a sign of the flood of emotions that is happening inside.

The room begins to fill, and our Wonderous Wombmate begins to push. At the sound of the first cry, my breath is knocked from me and all of those feelings exhale out of me. Our gestational carrier passes the torch and now it was up to us to nurture and watch over this tiny, perfect human. She was here.

Here’s what a surrogacy birth looks like through the eyes of the insanely talented Lovell Productions. 

 

Words have failed me over the past several weeks –which is hard to accomplish. Really, I am basking in the impossible made possible. I will be real, that impossible has forged our bank account into an iron wall of debt but we are parents again, and that is priceless. Not everyone has their rainbow and sunshine happily ever after. IVF, doesn’t always work, adoptions can fail, and surrogacy is not an answer for some, but it was for us and we went for it. We made ourselves vulnerable, and that vulnerability is why I am called mom.

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