Issue 38: This one is the one
Saturday March 02 2019
You know when you find your perfect home? And you mentally move all your stuff in. You know exactly where the sofa would go and you work out you can host three barbecues before the weather runs out and . . . and then you get gazumped. It sucks. It feels as though you’ll NEVER find a home as amazing as that one you just lost and you’re destined to be miserable for the rest of your time on Earth. Until you find your actual home and realise this was why you went through all that crap with the last one because THIS home is THE HOME.
What I’m trying to say is, we have a new surrogate. And this surrogate is THE surrogate and there is a very good reason for all that came before.
This is going to sound a little fruit-loopy, but there was a shining beacon on Lydia’s profile that convinced us she was perfect before we had read beyond the first page. A sign from the surrogacy powers-that-be; her birthday is on the 22nd.
OK, a little backstory here. I have a (beautiful, perfect for gifting FYI) candle brand called No 22. It is called this because 22 is like my weird special number that follows me wherever I go. My mum spent my life telling me I was born at 11 minutes to 11 on the double 11th day of the 11th month (November 22 if you need a summary). I notice it everywhere. I pick up my phone and it’s 22.22. I get upgraded to premium economy (this happened once) and the seat number is 22. Arsenal signed a new player and his number is 22. All the best people are born on the 22nd too. Mr B was — it’s how I knew it was going to be OK to marry him. Our cats were born on the 22nd. And now Lydia too, our master number saviour, surely.
Tenuous? Odd, in fact, to hook all our hopes on a number? Maybe, but at this point I’ll take any sign and cling on to it like Leonardo DiCaprio and that floating door.
Superstition does not feature heavily in my philosophy of life, but, for whatever reason, this number feels significant and I take comfort in seeing it pop up. Sure enough, we keep reading and there’s nothing on Lydia’s profile that conflicts with a potential happy ending. She has three children and, while she categorically doesn’t want any more, she adores being pregnant.
Her husband is an EMT — that’s American for paramedic (she’ll be in good hands) — and is fully supportive of her wish to be a surrogate. She has read our profile and is keen to meet us, and so we arrange to do just that. We may have only just arrived back at square one, yes, but this time we feel more confident about it than we expected to last week when everything was still, well, a steaming pile of poo.
Thinking back over everything that we’ve gone through, I feel overwhelmed about the amount of work there is ahead of us to get back to the point we fell apart last time. But, as with any new relationship that you can’t imagine ever recovering from, that new bit, when you’re getting to know each other and finding out how you’ll fit around each other, feels exciting and special. Every person is different and so every journey must be too. There’s no point comparing, right?
It’s so weird that we are pretty experienced in this craziness. We can skim a profile and extract the important details like a career social climber scanning a room. We can recite a surrogacy timeline by heart. We’re veritable veterans, having been on the books of our agency for a year — longer than anyone else it has signed up — but without any tangible results. We’re advanced beginners. Do we get a badge? Because we need to get something at some point.
Just because this ain’t our first rodeo doesn’t mean we know exactly what happens next. That bit is up to the four of us: me, Mr B, Lydia and her husband. It’s like day one in the Mother Project household (again) and Mr B is in the diary room. “Oh my effing God, she reminds me of my sister, this is amazing. She’s got three kids, same as my sister. Even her tattoos remind me of hers.” He’s right, her photos do kind of look like his sister. This feels fantastic too. We’re comfortable with even the picture of her, because it feels like we know her already. He’s still talking. “Then her birthday is the 22nd, and I kind of can’t look at the rest cos there will be some red flag or something, but it’s all bloody perfect.”
He’s got a sparkle back in his eyes that I haven’t seen for the past few weeks — or months, if I’m honest. It occurs to me, not for the first time, how amazingly resilient we can be on an endless emotional rollercoaster such as this. I imagine some people might feel a bit queasy by this point, they’d want to get off and be sick behind a bin. Not us, surprisingly (I’m not great with heights). Nope. We want to stay on and go around again please. Just make it faster this time.