It took us around a month to find someone we felt was right for us. A first-time surrogate, photographer, and mum-of-two based in Las Vegas, Summer ticked every box. A video “date” was set up and chaperoned by our surrogacy agency, and after a conversation that ran well over the allotted two hours, we knew we’d found our match. Sweet, funny, kind, strong, calm: our surrogate was, and continues to be, everything we could have hoped to find in the person who was going to be babysitting our future child.
Mounds of paperwork, hours of legal meetings, health checks (for the surrogate and her husband), FDA testing (for our embryos, myself and my husband), mandatory counseling sessions, and still more mounds of paperwork followed. Our embryos were flown from London to the US, carried by hand from door to door in a tiny temperature-controlled freezer. Six months after that first meeting with Summer, we dialed into the embryo transfer via video call. Just two weeks later, she peed (privately) into a cup and held a pregnancy test up to the camera, so my husband and I could see two blue lines developing in real time.
It’s as surreal as it all sounds: Being pregnant but also not being pregnant. Someone pointed out recently that I’m experiencing pregnancy much like a man does: sitting on the sidelines waiting for my baby to arrive. I like thinking of it this way. The feelings of grief, loss, and shame that come with infertility are real, and what could be more bougie than outsourcing baby baking?
It feels very much like “something only celebs do,” as my (very excited and supportive) mom put it when we first told her. While Summer was dealing with nausea and fatigue during the first 12 weeks, I spent the holidays emulating Race Across the World, visiting friends and toasting our happy news with chilled Pét-nat. The biggest and most overwhelming feeling—after excitement, of course—is my sense of our huge privilege, and if I’m truly being honest, guilt. For wanting more than my fair share. For most, a broken uterus would abruptly end any hope of starting or expanding a family. Surrogacy is not a journey everyone can pursue, not least because of the eye-watering costs involved. Being able to, and having an incredible woman with a super uterus doing all of the heavy lifting, feels like an extremely fortunate position to be in.