We’re currently visiting Aruba for a week of scuba diving and fun in the sun for our ‘babymoon’- and as I watch the sun set on the Caribbean Sea I can’t help but think about how incredibly lucky we are to have reached this point in our journey. That, and how despite it feeling like a story that is ‘ours’, it is so much bigger than that.
It’s natural through health and fertility struggles to place yourself at the centre of your experience. The past few years of my life haven’t been easy – there is a unique pain in aching to build a family and not knowing if it will ever happen. Even when things go right, they are rarely a guarantee that fortune will continue to favour you. Transferring our ‘best’ embryo and having that end in an early loss was proof of that. But today, with about 12 weeks to go until we meet our long awaited baby, my heart is incredibly full.
As I stare into the sunset and gain perspective, I’m more aware than ever of the dozens of other people who can say this is their story too. My parents and in-laws, who didn’t know if this moment would come and certainly never got a playbook on how to support children going through these kinds of challenges. Our grandparents, who couldn’t even conceptualize gestational surrogacy when they were our ages, but whose hearts broke for us as we struggled and who learned the ins and outs of surrogacy in an effort to show us they care. Our sisters, for whom this baby will upgrade them to ‘aunt’ for the very first time, who moved mountains trying to share our story and connect us with a surrogate. Our friends, who helped us through the rough moments when we needed to feel like we were more than the challenges we were facing. And mostly, to Ashley and her family whose lives will be forever intertwined with ours because Ashley was brave and selfless enough to send us a message and make the offer of a lifetime for our family.
This story, the story of bringing Baby Colt into the world, is not just mine and Zane’s. It belongs to so many of us. And one day very soon, it will belong most of all to our child.
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