I’ll be honest. I was against it. Not because I didn’t support my wife. Not because I didn’t think she was capable of doing it. And honestly, it wasn’t even because of the pregnancy itself. My wife has always had fairly easy pregnancies. She’s one of those people who, for the most part, handles pregnancy pretty well. She doesn’t spend nine months complaining about every ache and pain. She doesn’t make you feel like you’re living with a ticking time bomb. She just…does it. So that wasn’t my concern. My concern was what would happen after. I kept wondering how she would feel about growing this little human inside of her for nine months and then, one day, just saying, “Okay. Bye!” That sounded impossible to me. I know my wife. I know the way she is with our girls. I know how deeply attached she is to them. How protective she is. So I couldn’t wrap my head around how she could carry a baby for nine months, feel it move, talk to it, think about it, worry about it, and then hand it over to someone else. How could you do that? How could you not fall in love? How could you just…let go?
Those were the questions that kept running through my head. And it wasn’t like I had some great argument against surrogacy. I wasn’t sitting there researching studies and building a case against it. This was much more personal than that. I was scared for my wife. I was scared that she would get hurt. I was scared that she would become attached and that, when the time came, she would struggle with giving the baby to the intended parents. I was scared that nine months of pregnancy would turn into a lifetime of wondering, “What if?” And I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. We had a lot of conversations about it. A lot. Late night conversations. Conversations in bed. Conversations in the car. Conversations where we went around in circles and ended up right back where we started. “What if you get attached?” “I won’t.” “But how do you know?” “I just do.” “But what if you do?” “I don’t know.” And there it was. The answer I didn’t want to hear. “I don’t know.” Because the truth is, neither of us knew. You never do. You can talk about it all you want. You can make plans. You can convince yourself that you understand the process. You can tell yourself that the baby isn’t yours and that you know exactly what you’re getting into. But until you’re actually standing in that hospital room, you don’t really know how you’re going to feel. It took many late night conversations for me to get over my initial feelings. And when I say “get over it,” I don’t mean that the feeling completely disappeared. It didn’t. If I’m being honest, a small part of that fear never really went away. I just learned to trust my wife.
Eventually, her confidence became more convincing to me than my fears. Then came the first journey. My wife delivered the baby, and we stayed overnight in the hospital. The next morning, we woke up and I helped her get ready. She was tired. I was tired. The entire experience had taken a lot out of both of us. Eventually, we decided to go back to bed. She climbed into the hospital bed surrounded by all the beeping machines, tubes, drips, and whatever other equipment hospitals seem to attach to people. I got the luxurious alternative. The hospital couch. You know the one. That uncomfortable, barely reclines, “technically this is furniture but we’re going to pretend it’s a bed” lumpy piece of crap that hospitals somehow expect you to sleep on. So there we were. My wife, who had just given birth, laying in the hospital bed. Me, passing out on what I can only assume was designed as a punishment for people who don’t have medical degrees. I eventually fell asleep. And then I woke up. Except my wife wasn’t there. At first, I was confused. Then I was concerned. Then a nurse and a doctor came into the room and asked me where she was. “Where is who?” “Your wife.” “Uh…” I looked around the room. No wife. No explanation. Nothing. Just an empty room with 3 confused people. So, naturally, I made a joke. “She probably went downstairs for a cigarette.” She has never smoked a cigarette in her life. Apparently, the joke did not land as well as I had hoped. But then I realized, she was probably with the intended parents. And she was. We all walked into the room together. And that’s when I saw her. She was sitting on the couch holding this little human that she had just brought into the world. And I wish I could tell you that my first thought was something beautiful. Something like: “Aww.” “Look at the baby.” “That’s so sweet.” “How incredible.” Nope. My first thought was: **”OH FUCK!!!!”** That was it. That’s what went through my head. Because suddenly, all of those conversations came rushing back. All those late nights. All those “what ifs.” All the questions about attachment. All the things I had been worried about. It was all happening right in front of me. My wife was holding the baby. And she looked completely…fine. Eventually, the baby started fussing. Then crying. And my wife stood up. I watched her walk over and hand the baby to the intended parents. And this was the moment I had been afraid of for over a year. The moment I had imagined in my head over and over again. The moment I thought might break my wife. But it didn’t. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t try to take the baby. She didn’t suddenly decide she needed to soothe the baby. She didn’t say, “Give it to me.” She didn’t try to feed the baby. She didn’t start changing the diaper. She simply handed the baby over to the people who were supposed to be holding the little one. The people who had been waiting for the little one. The people who were ultimately responsible for little one. And I remember watching that happen and feeling something inside of me finally relax. It was like someone had turned down the volume on a voice that had been screaming in the back of my head for years. That voice had been saying: “What if she gets attached?” “What if she can’t let go?” “What if this is harder than she thinks?” “What if this changes everything?” And suddenly, I had my answer. She could let go. Because, in her mind, there was nothing to let go of. She wasn’t giving away her baby. She was giving a baby back to the people she had carried it for.
I think that distinction was something I couldn’t fully understand until I saw it happen. My wife had never been confused about who this baby belonged to. I was the one who was confused. I had been looking at pregnancy through the lens of motherhood and fatherhood. I thought about what it would feel like for me to have a baby, to hold that baby, and then give it away. But that’s not what she was doing. She wasn’t becoming a mother and then choosing not to be one. She was helping someone else become a parent. And there is a huge difference between those two things. Watching her that morning changed something in me. It didn’t make every fear disappear forever. But it gave me something I hadn’t had before. Proof. Proof that my wife understood what she was doing. Proof that she could separate the pregnancy from motherhood. Proof that she could carry a baby, love the experience, care deeply about the child, and still understand that the baby was never hers to keep. And, maybe most importantly, proof that she was okay. That moment probably did more for me than years of conversations ever could. Because sometimes you can talk about something until you’re blue in the face. You can say, “It’ll be fine.” You can say, “I know what I’m doing.” You can say, “Trust me.” But sometimes you just have to see it. I needed to see my wife hand that baby to the intended parents. I needed to see her walk away from that moment without falling apart.
That’s when I finally started to understand. My wife wasn’t losing a baby. She was completing a promise. She was doing something incredibly difficult for someone else. And when the job was done, she gave that child exactly where it belonged. To its parents. I think that was the moment I stopped being “against it.” I didn’t suddenly become some surrogacy superfan overnight. I just finally understood my wife’s perspective. And I realized something else, too. Maybe I had been asking the wrong question all along. I kept asking, “How could she give the baby away?” But the better question was: “How could she not give the baby to the people who had been waiting their whole lives to hold it?” Once I looked at it that way, everything started to make a little more sense. And somewhere between the hospital couch, the terrible sleep, the beeping machines, the cigarette joke that definitely wasn’t funny (to some people, I still contend it was a solid joke), and my wife’s simple reassurance of “I’m good,” I finally started to get it. She really was good. And if she was good, I was good too.
-The Bus Boy-
