My darling child,
One of the most important reasons I've always known your Daddy was the one for me was because he was just as passionate about having a family as I was. We didn't know how or when, but we knew we were willing to do whatever it took to bring you home. After dreaming you up in our heads for years - your gender, your name, what you'd look like, which one of us you'd be like - it was time to get to work.
There are only two ways for two daddies to have a baby in Texas, either through adoption or gestational surrogacy (traditional surrogacy, where a surrogate carries a baby made with her own egg, is not something most doctors will help with because the law cannot protect you). Adopting was a very scary thought. Just the thought of potentially waiting years to be matched with our child was more than I could bear. I did a lot of research trying to figure out if adoption was right for our family, but in the end, there were just entirely too many variables that were out of our control. What if people thought we were too young? What if people didn't think that two daddies could raise a baby? While I never give too much thought to what others think (and neither should you!), knowing that people and their opinions could keep me from you made me think really hard about how to find you.
The reason gestational surrogacy was not the first place we started was due to one very large hurdle - money. I hate to break it to you kiddo, but your Pappy and Daddy are just regular ol' middle class people. All I've ever heard about that process was that it would cost well over $100,000. You could have said $3,000,000 and for us, it would have made no difference - either way, it was more money than we'll probably ever have in our bank account at one time. But just like with adoption, I decided to do some research anyway.
I started with researching IVF. It turns out that Houston is a great place to live if you're needing IVF to help begin your family. There are many renowned doctors in the city that can help, and to keep themselves competitive, some of them offer some fairly substantial pricing incentives. We even found doctors that only charge $8,500 for the first round! (We would later find out that this didnt include many other procedures that have to take place beforehand, but we'll save that for a later date). Even though this was still a lot of money, it was at least believable that we could come up with it. But before we could even book a consultation with a doctor, we knew that we were missing two very important things - an Egg Donor and a Gestational Surrogate.
We started looking into some online resources for finding a donor and surrogate and quickly learned that this is where the unbelievable pricetags come into play. The amount of money that these agencies charge to help people who need it is just insane! Don't get me wrong - surrogates themselves deserve every penny of compensation and more paid to them, but we learned that surrogates often don't even see half of what is paid to the agency. How is that even legal?! At any rate, we learned quickly that an agency was out of our reach.
Your daddies have a friend that told us for many years that if we ever needed her, she would love to carry our baby for us. But could we really ask a friend to do that? We would compensate her as much as we possibly could, but would our offer be offensive? We decided we would discuss it with her and without hesitation, she agreed! We were ecstatic!!! Maybe this was a possibility after all! (We would later find out that this friend was unable to help us, but it gave us enough hope to book a consultation.)
That left only one detail left to tend to - a donor. This is one of my favorite parts of Your Story. So much so, it deserves its own chapter. Stay tuned!
With both a donor and surrogate in mind, we sent an email to three different local doctors to get a feel for who we wanted to have our first consultation with. Even though we knew we still had a very long way to go, we could already nearly feel you wrapped so tightly in our arms.
We love you to the Moon and back,
Pappy and Daddy
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