The Safari begins

Why the word safari I hear you ask? In the surrogacy world and facebook group Australian Surrogacy Community, we often refer to surrogacy as a ‘journey’. One day Bonny asked us, “what would we all call surrogacy if ‘journey’ wasn’t a word?”

Some of the suggestions were:

Adventure

Marathon

Quest

Minefield

Trip

Roller Coaster

Pilgrimage

 

Being the nerdy teacher that I am, I used a thesaurus and found the following extra options.

Campaign

Expedition

Odyssey

Sojourn

Ramble

Safari

Venture

Voyage

 

I decided that I liked the sound of a Surrogacy Safari. I squirrelled this away with the plan to call my own journey a safari when the time came. Well that time is now! I have found two glorious Intended Fathers, Matt and Brendan, (IFs) to go on a safari with and I hope to use this blog to share our evolving story with friends and family, and to perhaps also educate the wider community about surrogacy.

 

Who makes up our team and how did we get here?

In late March 2018, Matt and Brendan shared their introduction post in the forum Fertility Connections and then in the Australian Surrogacy Community facebook group. One of the things that drew me to the guys, other than their beautiful photos and smiles, was the fact that Matt had been a sperm donor for his best friend and her partner in Melbourne. These two mums now have two children thanks to Matt’s generosity and Brendan’s support. This struck a chord for me. Perhaps it was that I was in the middle of my third egg donation and here was a couple that already understood what the donation world consisted of. Matt had helped his friends altruistically just as I was looking to help make a family via altruistic surrogacy. Box one = ticked!

 

As is the etiquette in the surrogacy world, that surrogates initiate contact with potential Intended Parents, I sent Matt a message on April 12 to say hello. I had organised drinks for the South Australian branch of the surrogacy community for the following night but the boys weren’t able to make it. That gave me an opening to strike up conversation to say I was sorry they couldn’t make it etc, and bam, little did we know that our safari had begun.

 

Between April and now, the start of November, 6 months later, so much has happened. The guys and I met two weeks later and talked non-stop for over 5 hours. It was like catching up with old friends. Another good sign that we had potential as a team. At the next catch up, I said that I’d like to officially ‘date’ them for surrogacy. From my own experience of having watched other teams for 1.5 years up to that point, and working on what might be called a best practice model, I wanted to get to know them for about 6 months before officially offering to be their surrogate. This meant we wouldn’t start the counselling and legal process that goes with surrogacy.

So in those months we had a variety of catch ups. We had numerous catch ups with my husband, Glen, and the kids, Emily and Ewan. Sometimes at a park, sometimes at our house and sometimes at their house. Most memorable was when they came up to help us build a sand pit for the kids. Matt looked after and played with the kids for a couple of hours, allowing Glen to get some jobs done, while Brendan and I levelled the area and prepped it for the sleepers for the sandpit. I might elaborate on this in a future post!

Among these catch ups, we were also catching up as just the adults so that we could discuss the hard questions about surrogacy. Experienced surrogacy Psychologist Katrina Hale’s Suggested Agenda was a great resource to guide our conversations, as well as the other ‘classic’ list of questions from our surrogacy community. As a team, it’s important that everyone has similar expectations for their surrogacy safari, otherwise it’s not a good team match. For example, views on termination during a pregnancy, the type of antenatal care, body autonomy for the surrogate, future expectations for the relationship post birth, how to manage pregnancy expenses, support for the surrogate and her family during/after pregnancy etc.

We were all on the same page about basically everything – winning! The topics where our opinions varied slightly, we were able to respectfully discuss what each party wanted, have some time away to further digest, then regroup and come to a mutually agreeable solution. Obviously this is a summary of how we’ve got to this point! Perhaps I’ll elaborate in future posts.

 

We are now right in the thick of all of the paperwork that goes with surrogacy: counselling, legals, Fertility clinic, Obstetrician check etc.

 

After 2 years in this community, it is exciting to finally be ‘doing’ surrogacy.

 

Until next time xx