My Intended Parent Journey and How I Became an Intended Parents Support Coach
Hello! Thank you for your interest in my personal journey to parenthood through gestational surrogacy, and in finding out more about what an Intended Parents Support Coach is. I would like to share my story, in brief, and along the way, share how I could have used a Support Coach, and how I was able to access support in various ways throughout my journey.
Since there is very little support for IPs, unlike for pregnant women or even surrogate mothers, I had to hunt and gather for resources, modifying support that was designed for pregnant mothers to fit my own unique situation. Since I already have done much of that work during my own journey, I want to now share this information and resources with other IPs so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. And since I’m a therapist and coach, as well as a yoga and meditation teacher, my wish is to directly support IPs on their own journey, with emotional and logistical coaching and guidance, using my personal experience and my professional skills. I lost hope along my journey many times, and I don’t want other IPs to have to walk this challenging journey alone.
I’ll begin my story with my own unexplained infertility. Since our culture doesn’t really talk about early menopause, I had just assumed that at age 37, when I began a committed relationship with my now husband, I had plenty of time to get pregnant. Even when my doctor told me I should consider freezing my eggs, I dismissed her as alarmist. Then, when my husband and I decided we were finally ready to start trying to get pregnant at age 42, we failed month after month. This took a huge toll on me, and us, emotionally and psychologically. After a year of failure and all the tests, I couldn’t do it anymore. We didn’t have the resources to try IUI or IVF, so we gave up the dream of having a child together.
Three years later, in 2020, my beloved father in law passed away from cancer at the age of 75. We were devastated and in grief. But this sad turn of events revealed that my husband had been holding onto the hope of having a child through the process of surrogacy. When he shared this with me, I immediately rejected it. Why would I want another woman to carry my child? I felt threatened, jealous, and not interested. But over time, when I realized that this was our last and only hope for having a child together, I began to soften my position.
We Googled ‘surrogacy agency near me’, and got connected with Jennifer White, of the podcast “I Want to Put a Baby In You”, as well as the founder of a local surrogacy agency. We chatted on the phone, and she asked if we already had embryos. This unexpected question made us realize how little we knew about the whole process, and how much we had to learn to even begin to consider surrogacy. At age 46, we felt way behind.
Although we had some financial resources due to my husband’s inheritance, when we heard the average cost of egg donation and surrogacy, we were astounded. Surely there were more affordable options? When we researched international surrogacy, and discovered some lower cost options, we felt heartened. My husband had always been interested in the country of Georgia in Eastern Europe, and when we discovered that Georgia has a thriving, legal international surrogacy situation, we decided to explore further. I found a surrogacy agency in Georgia whose name spoke to me, and we reached out in January of 2021. All of this was with the mediocre support of Google, and the random algorithms of search engines!
Thus began a long and winding road to welcoming our son into the world in June of 2023. Those two and half years between finding the agency and his birth, were filled with roadblocks, disappointment, excitement, confusion, international travel, large expenses, writing a blog, and so much more - all of it done with very little support from anyone who had ever been involved with surrogacy before.
Some of the roadblocks we encountered, that we managed to muscle through on our own but could have really used some guidance and support through: legal and logistical hurdles with international surrogacy in the time of Covid; asking my sister to be our egg donor but then discovering that she wasn't a good candidate; the start of the war in Ukraine, which was anxiety provoking for many reasons, since Georgia borders Russia and had been invaded by Russia before, as well as the fact that all the surrogacy programs in Ukraine moved to Georgia, creating long waitlists for surrogates and other hurdles; the first IVF cycle with our egg donor resulting in no surviving embryos; when we finally got matched with a surrogate, 3 months after the creation of our two embryos, she didn’t want both of them to be transferred even though we wanted to try for twins…and many other details and challenges and delays along the way. So much waiting!! And that was before our surrogate had her positive pregnancy test!
Once we got that positive test, in October of 2022, then the real waiting began. Not being close to the surrogate gave rise to a lot of worry and concern, as well as the beginning of our attempts to bond with her, and our baby, from afar. I had no idea how to do that, but was inspired to send our surrogate YouTube videos and music to listen to over WhatsApp, and we got to talk with her after every checkup, and she sent us videos of the ultrasounds. We were all trying our best to stay connected, and positive, and supportive, even through the language barrier and time zone differences. It would have been so helpful to have been connected with someone else who had gone through this, and knew how to navigate developing a relationship with a surrogate, and how to start to bond emotionally with a baby from across the world.
In January of 2023, at the beginning of the second trimester, I was inspired and felt ready to start writing a blog about our experience, partially to share the news with our friends and family who we hadn’t told yet, partly to be able to update everyone efficiently, and partly as a record for my husband and I, and our future son, to have as a keepsake. I am so grateful that we did this, as it helped us to process what was happening, and begin to try to create the village we were helping would support us after the birth.
In February, I gathered my sisters and mom and mother in law, and we had a blessing ceremony for our surrogate (in absentia) and our baby (in utero). A friend who is a birth doula helped me to design the gathering, as well as a woman from our spiritual community. We created a blessing book for the baby, and a bracelet for me and for our surrogate, and it felt like an important, relevant and supportive ritual, in lieu of a baby shower. It also helped to make the whole thing seem more real, given that I wasn’t pregnant, and that our baby was being gestated thousands of miles away.
In March, I began to feel confident enough that this was actually happening, that I researched baby items we might need, and started a baby registry. As usual, I had no idea what I was doing, but did my best and tried to decide between bottles and diapers and strollers and car seats and other equipment and all the things that are out there. In retrospect, I wish I had made different decisions, and wish that I had had someone to talk over those decisions with.
In April, I discovered an online summit on infancy and parenting, and took a deep dive into all the new research out there on best practices for bonding and birth and the post partum time. I had no idea what I didn’t know! But it gave me a jump start on all these topics, especially the importance of a post partum plan, and I reached out to my doula friend and she agreed to be our post partum doula and help us develop a plan. I also began to find ways to more intensively bond with our baby: visualizations, talking to him throughout my day, sending more music and voice notes, knitting a blanket, making a stuffed animal. And reading and researching attachment parenting, and learning about the importance of bonding with our baby right after he is born, especially given that I hadn’t been carrying him. With all of these ideas and research, I had to translate what I was learning to fit our circumstance of having a child through surrogacy.
In May, there were some medical issues, including that the baby had the cord around his neck, and our surrogate’s cervix was shortening, a sign of early labor even though the due date wasn’t until July. She was in and out of the hospital, and I was very concerned. I really began to up my daily practices around surrender, faith, and anxiety relief. I connected with my own faith tradition more deeply, as well as the faith tradition of our surrogate, which really helped me to calm down and stay sane as we waited for news every day. Breathing techniques, walks in nature, and actively practicing letting go of control, all helped me to survive that period.
And then we finally made it to June. Our surrogate told us on a WhatsApp call that she had given birth to her daughter three weeks early, so with that alarming news, we rebooked our flights and made plans to leave home earlier. We arrived on June 15, and did our best to settle in, adjust to the time change, and get some groceries. We were scheduled to meet our surrogate in person for the first time on the morning of the 17th, but on the night of the 16th we got an urgent call from our agency coordinator saying that our surrogate was in labor and if we wanted to be there for the birth we had better get to the hospital right away. She also told me that no, she would not be at the hospital, and that we were on our own to navigate the birth and postpartum period from here.
I didn’t have time to be shocked by this news. After all my planning, and after thinking that I had asked every question that could ever be asked, I had assumed that our agency coordinator would be with us at the hospital. But that very important detail I had overlooked.
We raced around our Airbnb, packing our things for an indefinite period of time. I called a taxi, and we sped through the city in the middle of the night to a hospital we had never been to. Our coordinator sent me a message in Georgian that I could show to the taxi driver, telling him where to drop us off. We entered the building and the night attendant brought us up the elevator to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. We were shown to a bare room with a bed and a couch and a changing table, and told to wait there. After about 15 minutes of pacing and confusion, a nurse who didn’t speak English came and got us, and we walked down long empty corridors to the Labor and Delivery area of the hospital. My husband was told to wait outside the room, as that is the policy in Georgia, and I was led into the room where I saw our surrogate in person for the first time. I raced to her side and held her hand and did my best to comfort her given our language barrier and what an intense moment we were meeting each other in for the first time.
Very shortly after I arrived, our baby boy was born. I had not had the chance to communicate my preferences for what would happen immediately after his birth, nor could I in that moment because of the language barrier. If only I had had a birth plan, and someone to advocate for me, and an understanding of what the hospital’s procedures were! The cord was cut and he was taken away by a nurse and I had to race out of the room to follow him, although I desperately wanted to stay and make sure our surrogate was ok. I felt terrible abandoning her like that - and it turned out that I would never see her again. I had wanted her to hold the baby, and for us to be together for some time, but that was impossible to communicate. The nurses ignored me as I pantomimed wanting to hold the baby, and went about their business of weighing and measuring and toweling off and putting him in an incubator. None of this was happening the way I had wanted it to!
My husband was allowed in to see the baby at that point, and when the nurses were finally done with all their procedures, our son was placed in an incubator, against our wishes, and wheeled out of the room and we followed him to our room, where we would end up staying for the next three days.
Those three days were very challenging. Thankfully, a Georgian nanny who I had contacted before leaving the US, came to the hospital that same day that our son was born. She was our only support for those three days, and she was a lifesaver. She held him while we took cat naps, she cooked food and brought it to us, and she was a kind and experienced child care provider. I mention this because she was the only postpartum support that we had, and it was critical. Even though I hadn’t given birth, I was exhausted, starving, and lonely, and very much in need of support. In addition, the bonding hormones started kicking in almost immediately, and I was teary and emotional and in a very heightened state of anxiety. Why was his head so oddly shaped? Was he getting enough formula? Why wasn’t he pooping? What was that rash all over his body? So many fears, and worst case scenario thinking, which was normal, but totally overwhelming. I felt like I had been drugged, and quite literally, the chemicals and hormones in my brain and body were undergoing a huge and shocking change. (See the section on matrescence and patrescence referenced on my homepage).
My husband and I had not been able to agree on a name before our son was born, so we spent part of the next few days discussing this very important topic. We even sent out a survey to our close family members to option ideas. This was not an ideal way to connect with our baby, not having a name for him in his first few days, and if I could do it over, I would have sorted that out before the birth. I offer support with this as part of my expanded coaching support offerings.
After we finally left the hospital and settled back into our Airbnb, we spent the next two months bonding, learning how to prepare formula, trying to fit in self care and sleep, and sharing time with some of the intended parents we had connected with. Our nanny came three nights a week and gave us a break and time to sleep. I joined an online group of new parents, which was very helpful, and watched lots of YouTube and Tinyhood videos on infant care. My husband and I struggled with not having much time alone together, plus all the stress around how to take care of a baby. We didn’t have our parents or community around, and we often felt lonely and homesick.
We finally arrived back in the US in mid August, and went about trying to build our village once we were back home. Which was challenging. We didn’t know many other people with babies, and most of our friends were older and out of the child rearing phase of life, and not particularly interested in being around a baby. Plus, we had a house and yard and pets to attend to. I managed to find a babysitter we trusted to come once a week, and our moms helped out a few times a week, but other than that we were on our own. According to anthropological research, this “normal” situation is not how human beings were meant to be raised, but it is what it is, and we knew we were fortunate in comparison to how many people don’t have any support at all. In retrospect, I wish that I had lined up more support, and gotten clear commitments from people for help. This is one of the most vital areas that I hope to support intended parents with, because I believe that the level of support that parents get is in direct relation to how well they can take care of their child. Which is why it is my mission to support IPs in as many ways as possible, so that their miracle children can thrive and the whole family can truly enjoy and appreciate the amazing journey they are on.
Now that our son is a toddler, I can turn my attention back towards my career and work in the world, which is helping others. Having gone through such a life changing journey, I am called to share my experience, and support others going through something similar. Surrogacy and egg donation are becoming more and more common, and yet there is not enough support for Intended Parents in the world. My goal is to change that. Contact me for a free consultation and I look forward to exploring how I can support you as an Intended Parents Support Coach!
