It’s a marathon, not a sprint

It’s been a while since our last post, so we wanted to update everyone on where we’re currently at. As always, these words are our honest truths…we didn’t call this The Bumpy Road for nothing.

Our most recent post told of our attempt to create embryos with our exceptional egg donor that unfortunately didn’t yield the results we were hoping for. We’d be lying if we said this didn’t affect all of us; it would’ve been impossible for it not to. In fact, as we mentioned in that post, so many couples/women have felt that time and time again, which is so important to have a heightened awareness of when considering building families. Nonetheless, we took some time to process and re-think before planning what our next steps might be.

The balancing act of everyday life also became more prominent as we entered into the busiest periods of the year for us both work-wise. We are as committed as anyone in a similar position to make this happen for ourselves, but ultimately, there’s only so much of our energy that we can devote to certain things at any given time. It would be so nice if this could just ‘happen’, but it can’t, and we struggled to tell ourselves it was ok to not be ‘working’ on this more than we were. This is where the complexities of domestic surrogacy come in. Intended parents are continuously told to be very active and present within online communities like Facebook pages and forums, as without doing so that special surrogate is unlikely to notice you. We accept that that’s the nature of the current landscape here, but in a rapidly growing space (there are new couples introducing themselves constantly), we found that weight of expectation quite overwhelming. So we felt a bit stuck – aware that what a surrogate would be doing for us would be one of the most immense things one person could do for another, but that without putting in a lot of time and effort to be an online presence (something that also doesn’t come naturally to either of us), it wasn’t simply going to just happen.

This is when we started to think more seriously about international options, which wasn’t an easy call to make. We’d met some wonderful people through our experiences here, and had built some really lovely relationships, and didn’t want it to seem like it all became too hard and we’d jumped ship. We also knew very well about the monumental financial cost of doing this overseas and whether that was something we could rationalise. Something we remind ourselves of all the time is that the fact that we can entertain the idea of international surrogacy speaks to our inherent privilege. There are so many people out there who would make phenomenal parents but would be priced out of such an option. The money is big, and it hasn’t just been handed to us – we’ve been diligently saving with this in mind for a long time, but we have an acute awareness of the small portion we fit into that could set a goal like this and work to achieve it.

Over the past couple of months we’ve been slowly working our way through with an agency in Canada. It’s hard because no one can offer us the certainty we so desperately desire, but we feel as though we’ve been asking the right questions and preparing ourselves appropriately for what might lie ahead. There’s all sorts of talk about matchings and timelines, but we’re taking things one step at a time. If we allow ourselves to get caught up in the hype, we’ll open ourselves up far too much…again, it’s called The Bumpy Road for a reason.

Also, someone we met at one of the conferences we went to earlier this year put it so well when we were airing a few frustrations at one point…she simply said that ‘it’s a marathon, not a sprint’, which was so important to hear. Because of the amount of planning involved in this, it can sometimes feel like a job, and with jobs you want productivity and you want to meet targets. This bumpy road couldn’t be further from providing us with that, so it’s comments like the aforementioned one that keep us grounded and remind us that there’s no rush here and also that, as we said from day one, we can/do/will live lives full of contentment with or without this hoped for baby…but hopefully with!

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays veryone,
Dan and Lachy x