Issue 56: How to make a good impression (and a baby)

Saturday July 06 2019

I’ve been married for almost seven years, so I may be out of practice when it comes to first dates, but I still know one when I see one.

Apprehensively nursing a drink in a fancy bar while I wait to meet a stranger to make a baby with surely counts as one, right? OK, so I am sitting here with my husband, Mr B, which gives it a whole other spin, but still. This is monumental and has the potential to be monumentally awkward, as first dates tend to be.

I am determined not to let this angel from north London feel nervous about meeting us, so I try to dissipate the profound weirdness of the situation by forming a welcoming committee of one, hopping from one foot to another at the bar entrance, while Mr B rolls his eyes at me from the table.

This is certainly unexpected. When our agency matched us with our American surrogate, Lydia, we were convinced that this was it. This was the person we would realise our dream with. This was the woman who would be a fundamental part of our story forever more. Now, after being advised by Dr Fernando to seriously consider starting again after two unexplained failures, meeting someone else feels sort of clandestine. It’s like a crazy platonic love triangle (a “like” triangle?).

Am I putting too much emphasis on feelings here? Surely Lydia ultimately wants the best chance of success for us, surely her motivating force was altruistic: helping a recurrently unfortunate couple of strangers have a baby. If it’s not working with her and we have one precious embryo left, she would want us to work out the best chance and take it, right?

The difficult part is that we are reluctant to ask Lydia her opinion about moving forward for fear of hurting her feelings (risk our future happiness out of politeness? Yes please, we are British). So, we wait for Rebecca.

I spot a yellow leather jacket from across the street and have a feeling it’s her. “Rebecca! Hi, it’s Sophie. Are you nervous? Don’t be nervous. I am a bit, but don’t you be.” Oh for God’s sake, it’s the kind of banal introductions the Love Island contestants make on their way into the villa.

Rebecca tells me she feels like it’s a first date and I squeeze her yellow leather shoulders in sympathetic agreement and guide her to our table.

What comes next is the kind of dream date you immediately phone your friends from the toilet about. “I LIKE HER! SHE’S SO FUNNY!” Rebecca is the kind of woman we dreamt of knowing a couple of years ago before we resorted to America. For all the talk — the true talk — of the law pushing us out of our own country, we had one huge reason for not doing this thing over here: no one to do it with. Surrogates are not easy to come by in the UK. Short of a friend or family member offering to help to make our baby, options are pretty limited. The thought of joining charitable organisations who throw “match” events, where intended parents vie for the attention of surrogate strangers, feels pretty far-out.

But as we talk and talk to Rebecca, as if we’ve known each other for ever, the benefits of being able to do this in our own country start to seep through the cracks like warm honey. The cracks that, by the way, were caused by repeated knockbacks and struggles and failures and mistakes and time differences and lack of communication and all of the things that we were promised wouldn’t happen in America.

Warm honey feels so soothing right now. The more we talk, the more I imagine being present at sonograms, being able to feel a pregnant belly more than once in the whole nine months, just being included in this process in a way that an entire ocean kind of gets in the way of.

Rebecca had contacted me on Instagram before she had even run it past her husband. “He’s a mensch,” she says, “just a really good guy, he’d do anything for anyone, so I knew he’d want to do this.” She was right too. Jack is at home right now looking after their two children while Rebecca dedicates her evening to showing us cynical souls that she wants to help us as much as we want to be helped. But will we need her help? That is the difficult question right now.

We part ways and go home thinking of Lydia. How would she feel if we took the doctor’s advice and considered investigating other options for our last chance? There is definitely an argument for sticking with what we know. It would certainly be the “easier” option (as if that’s a word we can ever associate with this experience). But it’s the emotional connection that really makes our decision difficult. We trust and care about Lydia. We’ve come this far, we want it to work with her, even though it now feels like it really might not. Silly? Who the hell knows? That’s the thing about IVF; there are a thousand variables and one simple decision could be the winning or losing strike. What if third time lucky is right? What if affection is the feeling that last embryo is looking for when it decides whether to settle in or not? We decide to sleep on it and hope to speak to the doctor again for a little more professional help in clarifying our best options.

A couple of days later, before we get a chance to schedule a Skype call with Dr Fernando we get a WhatsApp message from Lydia: “Guys, we need to talk.”

Please let this be the first time in the history of that sentence that something positive follows.