Last weekend, the start of December, the start of summer, our team had a great weekend together. Actually, I should back track to the Tuesday before that as my IFs, Matt and Brendan, helped out with the kids. A post on acronyms, like IFs, is coming soon!

Tuesday

Glen was out to the Year 12 formal and I have a yoga class on a Tuesday night. M&B have been at our place a few times now when the kids go to bed and they’re familiar with the bedtime routines. As a team, we wanted to invest this time so that the kids were comfortable with other people putting them to bed. It’s paid off. It also means that once I’m pregnant, if Glen and I have a Date Night, we don’t always have to use up babysitting favours from grandparents or pay for a babysitter, as the boys can help out. Or if I’m tired and grumpy (inevitable with pregnancy!) and we need a hand one night during the week, one of them might be able to come up after work and help out with the kids.

So my IFs joined me for a hectic dinner and then they dived into bedtime routines with reading stories, pyjamas, teeth, toilet, nappy for Ewan, antics to get into bed “you can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread man” and oh yes, how could I forget Ewan missing the toilet and …..uuu hummm…. a little nugget on the floor! They both took it in their stride (after Ewan had dirtied his strides) and sorted it out. I didn’t step in and washed the dishes in peace before heading to yoga. They did a brilliant job! Any parent to a 2 and 4 year old knows that it takes a lot of trust and time for kids to be comfortable with other adults, especially at bedtime and feeling safe with just them in the house when both parents are out. I arrived home 1.5 hours later to a quiet house and had a great chat to the guys. We’re ticking boxes as a team that’s for sure.

Saturday

We all headed up to the Adelaide Hills and met in Hahndorf for Strawberry picking at Beerenberg Farm. It was hot and windy, but we still had a great time. Shouts from the kids of when uncovering yet more giant strawberries, “Brendan, I got a big one!”, were delightful. I’d like to think that one day we’ll do this same adventure when the guys are dads after I’ve birthed a surro bub for them. The photos from this day say it all.

We then swapped cars so that Glen and I could visit our surrogacy lawyer, Megan Sweetlove, to sign our part of the paperwork. M&B had used Kate Bishop and had already signed their names on each of the 17305868 pages of the document. OK, not quite, actually 27. Just that act, of switching cars so that the guys could have the car seats for the kids, takes trust. Trust on both sides to allow others to drive your car. For us as parents to let others drive our kids around. I think these are important milestones for all teams to reach.
Megan is just the bomb! She is confident yet so calm. I want to just be around her to emulate her calmness a little more. Add in crazy Anna, and getting hubby to take silly shots while I signed the agreement, and it was the opposite to Megan.

Megan asked me how I felt when it was signed and I got a little emotional. I’ve been in the surrogacy community for over 2 years now and on that day, I finally signed the legal work to become a fully fledged surrogate. Megan asked when do surrogates think that they become a surrogate? I wonder what everyone else thinks. For me, I think it will be when I’m actually pregnant. Having the counselling and legal work done though is certainly closer to becoming real. Does one start to become a surrogate when they make that mental step that they want to investigate surrogacy? If wanting to do it for strangers, is it that point where you start seeking out new friends? No right or wrong answer here.

After signing our agreement, and taking with us a certified copy for the boys to take to Repromed for an appointment with their egg donor friend Ms J during the week, we mat at Patch in Stirling for lunch. So the paperwork is complete! How long did that take us? I officially offered to be their surrogate on September 8^th, after 5 months of dating. So essentially 3 months to do all of our counselling and legals. It has felt like the right amount of time.

For a more detailed overview of the legal requirements of surrogacy, have a read of Marian’s post titled Lawyery fun.

Sunday

Brendan is a keen decorator and had the first (of his many) Christmas tree put up on the weekend of the Pageant at the start of November. Having two munchkins, we’re much more behind the times. Brendan was horrified by this fact so we invited him to come up and help us out with that task! Our whole street also does Christmas lights so we needed to start lights outside the house too. We get 10,000 people in the street in Christmas Eve! Matt is a keen GoPro-er (now a word!) and recorded some of the day, check it out. He’s got such a great eye for capturing key elements and then splicing it all together. Matt and I worked as a team outside the house. Getting the boxes of lights down from inside the shed, unraveling the power boards, rope lights, solar versus LEDs, reindeers and so on. We worked as a great team – perhaps I’ll hire him each year to help out 😉 Brendan spent the afternoon inside with the kids decorating the tree. Definitely not in the same sophisticated style as the one in their house but one that fills me with joy as the kids loved helping. In the video, I get all warm and fuzzy seeing Brendan lifting each of my kids up as they help put the ornaments on the tree. I had a moment of imagining him lifting his own son or daughter up to help decorate a tree in years to come. It’s future memories like that that confirm for me why I want to be a surrogate. To help my friends to become dads.

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

This is an edited version of the Introduction post that I wrote in the forum Fertility Connections on September 11, 2016. It is a bit of my background as to what has brought me to surrogacy.

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Hello everyone! I’m Anna, I’m 35 years old, live in Adelaide, married to Glen and have two lovely (well lovely most of the time!) children, Emily (4.5) and Ewan (2.5). We now have the two children that we want to raise but I would like to help others by becoming an egg donor to one family and a surrogate to another.

(Since this intro post, I have since been an egg donor 3 times and am on my way to becoming a surrogate)

Glen and I are both maths (and occasionally music) teachers….at the same high school! How romantic! No, we didn’t meet at work, we met through singing in the same choir. We both continued to sing in choirs until recently when getting to evening rehearsals is tricky with two young kids. So although choirs are on hold for a while, we are still a musical household. I did classical voice in my music degree (and Pure Maths and Latin in my other degree) so sometimes I think I sing more to my kids than talk to them! I also occasionally play the Harp and some piano. Glen can play the Cello, Bass Guitar, Piano and Bagpipes! But don’t hold the Bagpipes against him, he’s really a lovely person. We live in the north east of Adelaide and we have a big block for suburbia. We have two fur babies as well, the cat Glorfindel and a black Labrador called Thorondor. The names are obscure characters from the Lord of the Rings of which we are both big fans. When not at work or marking maths tests at home, we love to spend time with friends and family (I also have a twin brother), pottering around the garden, reading books for a monthly book club, playing computer games, baking or enjoying a night on the couch with Indian take away, a glass of red wine and a good movie.

I started investigating surrogacy while on maternity leave in 2016 so I could use the time to start to understand the journey I would be embarking upon with surrogacy and egg donation. My plan was to continue breastfeeding until Ewan was 12 months old and then I would donate potentially from about March 2017.

Surrogacy is something I have wanted to do since I was 14. A friend from school said she never thought she would be able to give birth as she had a low pain threshold, so in casual conversation I said I’d surrogate for her. I think I planted a seed in my own mind because this grew into an idea that I feel is a calling for me. My own two pregnancies have been fairly smooth and my births natural, especially my second (home, water, hypno) birth – but more about that later. It saddens me that I can casually say that my pregnancies and births were smooth while many of you have had health and fertility struggles. Fertility really is not fair. There seems to be a biological urge to raise children and most of us would assume growing up that this is something we will all be able to do when the time comes. But clearly mother nature makes some people jump through (enormous) hoops.

Aside from wanting to be a surrogate for nearly 20 years, after Ewan’s birth, I was even more convinced. His birth was the most empowering experience I have ever been through. I did a HypnoBirthing course during the pregnancy and this helped me to grow in confidence with planning my home, water birth. Although I’d read the HypnoBirthing book for Emily’s pregnancy, doing the course was so much more valuable. My gay friend Josh came with me to the classes and he was also my doula on the day. So not only have I always wanted to help another family by being a surrogate (and all that would go with that journey – physically, emotionally, mentally), I admit that I would love to give birth again because it was amazing. I also have a mental image (perhaps naively), of having another water birth, birthing the baby, and being the one to pass the bubba to its parents. The thought of the joy in that moment would be a life defining moment.

Being in education, perhaps that’s why I decided to film Ewan’s birth to use as an educational tool for others. There can be such fear associated with birth and I like the idea of doing my little bit to challenge and change misconceptions. So my video is actually up on YouTube!

I edited the video and all of the text in it is written by me. Rest assured, you don’t actually see the birth and there is no real nudity. I kept my bra on the whole time. Remember – I’m a high school teacher so I have to accept that a 15 year old boy might grab a screen shot of any part of the video and stick it up as a poster around school! So I tried to make sure there wasn’t anything too inappropriate. I’m very proud of the video and of the whole birth experience. I feel that it would be an honour to be able to share that experience with another family as their surrogate.

As with this home birth video being an educational tool, I think about what it would be like to be a surrogate in an educational setting. A school with nearly 900 students and 100 staff. I love the idea of young people being able to learn about surrogacy from a teacher at their school – even if they think I’m crazy! Perhaps they might go home and have a conversation with their family, perhaps this might bring another surrogate/donor out of the woodwork, or perhaps if they have fertility struggles in their life, there will be someone out there to help them on their journey. So again, perhaps this is naïve of me, but I now love having conversations with people about how birth doesn’t have to be full of pain and fear, and I like the idea of being able to have conversations with others about egg donation and surrogacy. The more seeds that are planted in different minds, the more potential surrogates and donors might emerge.

Self-promoting here: an an article I wrote for HypnoBirthing article I wrote for HypnoBirthing . My dad also wrote a reflection about the homebirth and a link is at the bottom of my article. Yes – my mum and dad were at Ewan’s birth! 9 people in total, including my daughter Emily and my sister on Skype in New York.

Yes, that’s right, my 2 year old daughter was at Ewan’s birth and it was the most natural thing in the world. It was the adults that were more worried in the lead up to the birth. Emily and I read simple books about home births and had talked about it a lot. It is probably due to that part of the experience that I realise that children are a lot less hung up about surrogacy and/or the idea of where babies come from and who parents are. There seem to be so many lovely books for kids out there to explain that some families are made in different ways, and from my positive experience with my own child with a home birth, I anticipate that my children will not be fussed if I become a tummy mummy.

One other inspiration for launching into surrogacy came indirectly from a student that I have taught. Michael is 23 now and has been battling cancer since he was 14. He was a part of a group of Year 12 students that I clicked with and we used to catch up for dinner as a group a couple of times a year. In 2014, his cancer struck again and he took a year off Uni to fight it. When I caught up with Michael and his mum one day, it really hit home that there was basically nothing that I could do to help him in that battle. It was up to him and his doctors. I felt helpless. So although I couldn’t change Michael’s life, it confirmed for me that I wanted to try and help to change someone’s life in a big way. Surrogacy was the path for me.

Regarding who I would be comfortable surrogating for – possibly anyone. However in South Australia I believe the law prohibits me from being a surrogate for same-sex couples and single women.

I think I always anticipated I would be a surrogate for gay men since Josh (aka doula for a day) has been a part of my life and my sister always had so many gay friends. But that might have meant interstate IPs and that wasn’t my ideal situation. So a couple in SA would be my ideal scenario. I guess I should also be honest about another point, I believe I feel more called to donate/surrogate for a couple who don’t already have children. That may seem overly harsh, and I apologise to those that this may offend. But I suppose if this journey is something which myself, Glen and my children are entering into, it needs to be one which we feel most at peace with. That being said, it’s also about meeting the right people/person.

Update in September 2017. As of April in 2017, it is now legal in SA to carry for a same sex couple. This is great news for gay couples in SA…..and for me! As it means my options have expanded. Also, my initial feeling of wanting to carry for a couple who don’t already have children has totally disappeared. It’s about finding a couple in Adelaide who are the right match for me and and my family. That we ‘click’, have similar communication styles and give/receive our support to each other in ways that we both need. Having two kids myself, I also now value the wonderful/challenging relationship of siblings. So who knows who I’ll be a surrogate for?!)

My egg donation journey began 2 years ago. My older sister has lived in New York for 15 years and with her now husband for half of that time. She was in her early 40s when they decided to try for a child but it wasn’t meant to be. They tried a few cycles of IUI and one attempt at harvesting eggs, but none were viable. I offered them an egg (assuming I had some to offer) and after some thinking time, they gratefully declined. It struck me though that if I was willing to offer an egg to them, why not others? So I would like to go down this track too.

Regarding my husband Glen, he is onboard but was initially more comfortable with egg donation than surrogacy. When I first started investigating surrogacy, it was only 7 months previously that I was pregnant, and he was able to recall what the impact was like for him in terms of juggling a toddler and a heavily pregnant wife – well he didn’t literally juggle me 🙂 Glen is the type of person that is cautious about most things. Our home birth is one example. He likes to gather the facts, do lots of research, have time to digest, weigh up our options and then move forward. Once committed to anything he doesn’t jump out of his skin with excitement – that’s my job! But he does commit and is a firm supporter of the different things I pursue in life. When we first started seeing each other, and the first year was long distance while I was teaching in Katherine in the Northern Territory, he told me he was my Oak tree. He wasn’t someone in whom love blossomed quickly to then consequently be gone in the next season, he was there to be a sturdy, slow growing, dependable Oak tree. And he has certainly been that.

I look forward to becoming a part of this wonderful community. Having adequate support was one thing that Glen was most worried about, but I sense that the people and families here will offer such strength.