“Does the change come while we’re waiting? Everyone is waiting. And when we're done soul searching and we carried the weight and died for a cause, is misery made beautiful right before our eyes? ”
~Sarah McLachlan
Some of the most meaningful moments in my life have come from bearing witness. In college I was surrounded by some seriously bad ass women. One evening I came home and discovered my roommate blasting the song ‘Witness’ on repeat from her room. It was fall of 2001, only a few short weeks post 9/11 attacks in the US. The lights were out in the whole apartment. Smells of nagchampa crept through the hallway. Her bedroom door was slightly ajar. Candles flickered creating dancing shadows on the ceiling. She was laying curled up and several of our other dear friends were around her. An intense gust of grief hit me as Sarah McLachlan wailed out her lyrics “does the change come while we’re waiting” and I stood there waiting in the doorway and witnessing. There was something almost ceremonial about their expression of friendship and support. I’ve come to understand these experiences as divine feminine connection- and that they have nothing at all to do with gender.
The last four years of our surrogacy journey has been 90% waiting. We haven’t shared much about our waiting process. We do have an occasional conversation about our path to fatherhood. It usually ends with everyone feeling powerless or full of radical ideas about how to make it happen. We officially signed a contract with Golden Surrogacy in January. They are a gay-owned and operated surrogacy agency. Their office is based in Illinois, but they have been attempting to recruit surrogates in Oregon, specifically for our journey. Nearly 9 months later, we’ve been told that finding us a surrogate match in Oregon has been quite the challenge. The culture of surrogacy and the laws that govern the process vary from state to state. This means that things like a surrogates base compensation and other costs can be pretty different depending on geographical location of the surrogate and intended parents. The staff at Golden has been incredible. They are working hard and rooting for us. But that doesn’t take away the fact that we are still just waiting to be matched with a potential gestational surrogate.
We have seven healthy embryos hanging out in a freezer just waiting, waiting, and waiting for a body that has all the right parts to help one of those embryos grow and birth a baby.
I was recently reminded of that Sarah McLachlan song. Is she asking a rhetorical question or does she really want to know if the change comes while we’re waiting? I mean, change has been the only reliable thing about our process really.
We had to move this year. Our 600sq foot bungalow in North Portland, which we had been renting for 7 years was pretty much ready to fall down. It needed a new roof, mold was growing down our bedroom wall, and we started to have a legit rodent issue. We primarily stayed there for so long because our landlords were great in some ways and the rent was super cheap which allowed us to continue saving for surrogacy. It became clear to us that we needed to keep pushing our lives forward. It simply became untenable to put off other important life choices while we waited to maybe get matched with a surrogate. So we moved to outer South East Portland into a house 3x the size of our bungalow and into a completely different neighborhood. It’s been an adjustment and we feel incredibly grateful.
The only thing that doesn’t change is the waiting.
