Hellobee

With two little girls due in only a few weeks, I’m feeling reflective regarding the similarities and differences between the pregnancy that I’m carrying and the one that our surrogate is carrying for us.

Left: my surrogate, Right: me

It’s probably easiest to start with the greatest similarity between the two pregnancies, which is that I have the exact same feelings of excitement and awe for both. This has been the case from the very beginning. I cried tears of joy when I received the positive pregnancy results for both babies, I look forward to each and every doctor appointment and update (whether I’m physically there or not!), and I love talking and thinking about the milestones that each baby makes during the pregnancies.

Interestingly, a lot of the other feelings that I have about the two pregnancies are similar but stem from different sources. For starters, I have a lot of feelings of anxiety about both pregnancies. But the areas of worry vary a great deal between my pregnancy and the surrogate’s pregnancy. For the pregnancy that I’m carrying, I mostly worry about the health of my uterus and if the baby will be able to overcome the poor environment. In contrast, for the surrogate’s pregnancy, I mostly worry about bonding and attachment – things generally associated with the long distance that exists between us and our baby during the pregnancy.

Another area like this is my feelings of guilt. For my pregnancy, I feel guilty if I let my diet slip, if I don’t do my yoga practice, if I don’t regularly read a book to my belly/baby. But for the surrogate’s pregnancy, my feelings of guilt are much more centered on our surrogate. I feel guilty that someone else is suffering with uncomfortable pregnancy symptoms and there is very little that I can do about it; I feel guilty for any impact that her pregnancy may have on her marriage and family; I feel guilty whenever she has to take time out of her everyday life for doctor appointments.

There are certain feelings that I feel exclusively for the surrogate’s pregnancy and don’t associate with my own pregnancy at all. The biggest one of these is inspiration. Whenever I think about our surrogate and what she is doing for us, I feel a huge wave of gratitude. Our surrogate has never complained about pregnancy symptoms to us, she is always super excited for us and our baby, and she is taking extremely good care of our daughter despite her own pregnancy discomforts. To think that someone would selflessly do this amazing thing for us always leads me to an overwhelmingly positive feeling, quite unlike any other feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life, and one that is extremely difficult for me to describe here!

On the flip side, if I’m being honest, there are some more negative emotions that I feel when I think about the surrogate’s pregnancy that I don’t have with my own pregnancy. A big one is envy, and this one rears its ugly head when I think about my daughter moving around and kicking in our surrogate’s belly and not my own. I’ve recently been filling out the baby books for our little girls and one of the question prompts is when mom and dad first felt baby move –this is something that Mr. Starfish and I will never feel with the surrogate baby and that sometimes makes me sad. That said, we are lucky that our surrogate really goes out of her way to let us know when our girl is making her presence known (last week it was hiccups!), and focusing on that and a healthy active baby certainly helps to take the sting away.

Two other areas are very different as well, financial stress and logistical stress. A surrogate pregnancy is definitely way more expensive than a non-surrogate pregnancy. I would say that a lot of intended parents worry about costs running up past initial expectations, which can happen if a complication arises. This anxiety continues throughout the entire pregnancy, and even after the pregnancy as final bills roll in from the hospital stay. In addition, logistics are extremely complex for a surrogate pregnancy – there are so many people involved in so many different locations. There are also legal considerations and insurance issues that rarely exist in a non-surrogacy pregnancy. I’ve written about some of these things in past posts and have tried to organize my thoughts, but I have to admit that it can be pretty overwhelming to think through all of these issues at times.

Despite the various similarities and differences between surrogate and non-surrogate pregnancies, the outcome is hopefully exactly the same – a healthy and happy baby! No matter how a couple gets there, holding a newborn that very first time will no doubt be an incredibly special moment, and the path to get there will be exactly what it needed to be for that family.