Surrogacy Screening Trip

Oh crap, has it really been almost a month since my last post? Don't tell BlogHer. To be fair, it's been a hell of a few weeks. Between Quentin's birthday, my surrogacy screening trip, and Thanksgiving, that week alone was enough to last me a few weeks.

On Saturday night (the 21st of November), the fam and I packed up and headed to Michigan. On Sunday, we celebrated my oldest baby's FIFTH birthday. (Which needs a post of its own, which I naturally have not written.) My 14-year-old sister stayed the night with us at Luke's parents' house and we all slept TERRIBLY on Sunday night.

Monday morning, Luke and I awoke at 3:30 a.m. Michigan (Eastern) time, which was 2:30 to our bodies. We had our bags packed and ready, so pretty much all we had to do was dress and go. We made it to the Grand Rapids airport in plenty of time to make our flight to Milwaukee in the second-smallest jet ever.

Both our puddle-jump to Milwaukee (we got to walk out on the tarmac instead of boarding from the terminal - I think because the plane was so damn small!)

and our 4-hour flight to Los Angeles were pretty uneventful. I think I slept a bit over Utah but surprisingly little. I took about eightybajillion pictures of the clouds and mountains. Have I mentioned that I've never been further west than the western Chicago suburbs? Here, let me illustrate. The dot furthest east is where I grew up (west Michigan), the next is the furthest west I'd been before my trip, and the western dot is LA. Quite a jump.


View LA in a larger map
As we left Grand Rapids International Airport, we flew away from the sunrise. It was way more beautiful than I could capture with my wimpy little blackberry, but I tried.

While we craned our necks to watch the sunrise, Jude ate cupcakes. (My sister/babysitter sent this to my phone)

Our plane from Milwaukee to LA was your standard medium-sized jet. It was comfortable enough, and I watched TNT all morning. :)

Luke, ever the gentleman, insisted on taking the window seat since I'd had it on the 1/2 hour trip from GRR to Milwaukee. That's ok, I just leaned across him a lot to take pictures. Click on the photo below to see my awesomely fantabulous gallery of clouds, mountains, and Los Angeles.

I want to stay here forever and ever.



Ahem. Now that I've spent the past four hours editing photos so that I could finally finish this post, I shall do so.

Landing in LA was a snap, and we were carted off in a Limo-style SUV to the fertility specialist. We promptly waited over an hour to see the doctor (Please note we hadn't eaten since the plane, where we each had an apple turnover.) Once we met him, though, we were willing to forgive the wait.

I don't know about you, but I RARELY meet a doctor with good bedside manners. Surgeons are the worst, but I've had my share of less-than-fun OBs, as well. This guy was amazing. He instantly put Luke and me at ease (we're kind of not people-people), which was a relief.

Then I got naked.

I would SWEAR the nurse gestured to the lovely giant napkin thingy (if you're a woman, you know what I mean and if you're not, you DESERVE to pay alimony just for the joy of never having to wear one) and then said to me, "undress completely."

So I grumble to Luke ("why do I have to get all the way undressed just for a freaking ultrasound?") but do as I'm told. Then I lay there on the table, freezing my arse off, for a good 10 minutes while I listen to the office staff discuss their Thanksgiving plans. "I'm wearing a NAPKIN here, people!" I say half under my breath and half really loudly, "Can we HURRY IT UP?!"


Eventually the doctor and nurse come in and they both stop for a second and then the doctor goes, "you didn't have to undress all the way, you know." FUCK! So now not only am I known as the pink-haired freak, I'm the pink-haired freak who got entirely naked for an ultrasound. Oy.

The rest of the afternoon wasn't really any smoother, though the rest of the appointment was. The doc said the ultrasound looked good, no one passed out after giving blood for testing, and we hopped a cab to our hotel, which turned out to be in a really awesome little residential neighborhood in West Hollywood.

Since our room wasn't yet ready (itinerary fail), we chilled on the rooftop deck for a little while (we were WAY overdressed for that - it had to have been 80º up there) then decided to walk a bit. We thought we'd hit Del Taco for lunch, and since I'd forgotten our phone chargers at the in-laws' house we figured we'd hit the nearby mall in hopes of finding a Sprint store or Radio Shack.

Well SCREW YOU GOOGLE because there is NO Del Taco at 370 North Robertson Boulevard! There was, however, at the next corner, REALLY YUMMY COFFEE. I highly recommend finding a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf if you're ever in California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, or Texas. Way better than Starbucks, and I'm kind of a Starbucks snob.

Luckily, the mall was where it was supposed to be.

After walking (ok, escalating) up past five floors of parking garage, we finally came to floor one of three of the mall. We found our charger and started to feel faint from a lack of food. We called a cab and headed to our recommended dinner joint - Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. It was exactly what it sounds like and it was fabulous.

Instead of taking a cab back to the hotel right away, we thought we'd wander a bit (I mean, come on, we were at Sunset and Vine!) We happened by the Walk of Fame, which was really neat, stopped in at Borders, of all places, and just generally wandered for a bit, keeping a halfhearted eye out for cabs. Did I mention that I hadn't brought my camera to dinner since when we left the hotel, we were planning to eat lunch and go back to the hotel before dinner? F. M. L.

We eventually took a few turns in an attempt to track down a cab, but never saw one. We ended up walking a GOOD four miles back to the hotel, entirely missing Sunset Strip, even though it would have been a perfect route, out of sheer ignorance. It was a beautiful walk, but GODS did my feet hurt by the time we finally made it back!

Since our dinner had been at something like 4 pm and we walked 4 freaking miles, we were a bit peckish by late evening. We stopped into the hotel's dining room for dessert and a drink. Luke actually ended up ordering a burger and Buschmills, I had two scoops of chocolate ice cream and a vodka cranberry. HOLY SHIT THE BILL WAS ALMOST $50 (including tip)!!

We crashed hard after that, having been awake something like 20 hours. We woke up at 6, and our room service was delivered at 6:30. The eggs were runny and the bill was almost as much as dinner the night before (or maybe it was more, I can't recall.). I wish we'd eaten at Urth Cafe, but we didn't think about it until we'd had another too-long walk for coffee (we wanted to go back to the Coffee Bean but found it took longer when we had somewhere to be - we went to Kaffe Wien).

We hurried back to our room, grabbed our things, and hopped our cab to the psychological screening. It was surprisingly uneventful (other than a 500+ weird-ass question personality test), but there was a nice view. Also, reflections suck and my lens needs a good cleaning.

Another cab back to the airport, and the we had the most fantastic plane ride (free upgrade to business class on a 777) followed by a most cramped plane ride on the WORLD'S SMALLEST PLANE EVAH. If you can't tell, Tuesday was far less eventful than Monday, though no less long.

I was SO glad my kids were with my mother when we got back to the in-laws' after midnight on Tuesday because I did NOT want to deal with waking up with them. We totally slept in and it was bliss.

Going to California

In one week, I will be getting on a plane with my husband for 30 brief hours in Los Angeles. Since I am way too excited about going to OMG-LA to keep my mouth shut, I'll be explaining why we're going a bit sooner than I had actually intended.

If you read this blog, you know that we have two, TWO beautiful monsters children and are DONE. However, we're also ridiculously fertile. Other than stubborn kids who like to do things on their own time and in their own way, my pregnancies have been wonderfully uncomplicated and actually kind of fun. One day after we'd decided we were DONE, I said to Luke, "It seems like a shame to stop having kids when we're so good at it. I wish I could just sort of take my fertility and give it to someone who needs it." Despite the growing population problem, I just cannot imagine looking at two people who want to have biological children and telling them, "No. No, you can't have this joy that we have." So, giving my fertility to someone who needs it is exactly what I plan to do.

I am in the process of becoming a gestational surrogate. I am working with an agency, who will match me up with a couple in need. The agency is in California, and they are flying Luke and me out there next week to go through their medical and psychological screening processes. (We're going to have to be up and out the door at 4 a.m. on Monday and won't be back until after midnight Tuesday)

Gestational surrogacy, unlike traditional surrogacy, does not use the surrogate's egg. Only my womb will on loan to a couple's baby (and my hormones, my nausea, my ice cream cravings), who will be conceived through IVF using a donor egg. I haven't yet been matched with a couple - that happens after the screening process is complete. I am hoping, though, that we will sail through the final stages of screening and match with a couple within the next month. And then - another trip to LA to meet them! YAY!

I'm planning to blog the entire process, but so far I've been hesitant to do it here. I wanted to get through all of the preliminaries before posting about it at all, just in case something went wrong. But I just couldn't resist expressing my California-giddiness out loud and then everyone wondered WHY I was going to California. Well, now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

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Daily Gratitudes

- I never had any trouble conceiving my children (in fact, quite the opposite)

- My husband is awesome, supportive, and generous

- My family is fantastic and wonderful and helpful

- CALIFORNIA!!

Gratuitous catch-up post

Oh, hi November. You've been deep and meaningful so far, haven't you? Kind of sucked the inspiration out of me for a minute there.

It's a good thing my posts are all buried in feed readers Internet-wide as souls braver than my own attempt NaBloPoMo (that sounds like something you shouldn't do in front of your mother, doesn't it?). That said, I got my VERY FIRST BlogHer ads check today. It's tiny. But I'm still excited. :)

I tell you what. Since I don't have anything interesting to say, I'll give you PICTURES! I know, Halloween was two weeks ago. I'm a slacker.

Quentin INSISTED on being a ghost again this year. Strangely, he seems to be tired of my photography already.

Another recycled costume, this one from Quentin's 2-year-old Halloween. Jude? Doesn't care. He's got pizza, yo.

That said, I cannot even BEGIN to explain to you how adorable it was to watch these two knock on doors together. Jude even seemed to completely grasp the concept that OMG STRANGERS GIVING ME CANDY!

Sadly, candy did not stop the tantrums which resulted from trick-or-treating on 1/2 hour of nap-sleep. It also didn't help Mommy's camera auto-focus in the dark.

At the end of the night, we were all happy to go home. See that bucket the ghost is carrying. That's the candy bucket the kids shared (I know, I'm awful). And it was gone in a week.

Happy Fall!

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Daily Gratitudes

- My son is almost 5. FIVE! It's bittersweet.

- My son is almost 2. TWO! It's mostly bitter. But also kind of sweet. Because, you know, he'll be civil soon, right? RIGHT?

- Grocery shopping alone. Even though it's kind of a pain in the ass, it's also kind of BLISS.

- Making plans for the future. No matter how everything turns out in the end, there's just this kind of hope that comes with making plans and having dreams. It's nice.

A crisis of faith

Ok, so evidently I'm not that good at metaphor. On Sunday, I blogged something incredibly spiritual and heartfelt, after composing in my head, in my Moleskine, in my head some more, and finally here on blogger. I never do that.

But no one really seemed to *get* it. Everyone read it and kind of went, "man you really suck at writing fiction," but that's too mean to actually SAY, so they just kept their collective mouth shut, as their mothers taught them to do.

I considered explaining at the end of my "story" what it was I was writing about, but it was already so damned long, I figured a little confusion would be better than tl;dr, yeah? But now it's time to explain things to you, because dammit, no one ever comments. If you haven't read You Can't Go Home Again yet, please do so before you continue, otherwise it will make no sense.

Did you read it? No cheating, now.


Ok fine. Here you go. I suspect this is not going to be a whole lot more eloquent than Sunday's post anyway, which is why I put it in that form in the first place. Don't say you haven't been warned.




I am Mary, and Christianity itself is Christian. The story wasn't fiction so much as metaphor, and our relationship was very real and very tumultuous. I know that in the end, Christianity didn't change; I just discovered a part of it I never really knew before, and by that time, well, it was just too late for me. Even though I did attend with a friend an extremely liberal Christian church on Sunday, the kind that should have spoken to someone like me; even though I attended with the most pious of spirits and the most open of hearts, that love is lost and it's just not who I am anymore.

A few people I know and love dearly have asked me the usual questions atheists and agnostics get asked by Christians who just don't get it. "Why do you hate God?" "What do you have against Jesus?" "Aren't you afraid of going to hell???"

Well, in short, No. As you read on Sunday, I have no lingering bitterness for the religion itself (as a whole), and I certainly don't hate God or Jesus. I just don't, can't believe in the Christian god anymore (I tried, yeah?), and I don't love the religion the way I used to. As for Jesus, his mythos is far and away one of my favorites.

Something else I wrote in my Moleskine on Sunday, when I was purging the plethora of thoughts that had run through my brain all morning while I was at church, was, "What is a crisis of faith?"My crisis of faith wasn't when I left Christianity, because even then I wasn't sure what I believed about God. I still had a lot of lingering feelings and worries, as you do when a long relationship ends. In my mind would ring the idea I expressed to others so many times as a Christian - God's always waiting, and you'll never fill that hole inside with anything else.

My crisis of faith is right now. When I've opened myself up to the possibility, when I went to church, lost myself in it, and said "hey God, speak to me" and all I heard were the echoes of silence. The hardest part of all this, for me, is that I DO have a hole. I still hunger and thirst for spiritual fulfillment. But contrary to everything I believed ten years ago, Christianity and the Christian God can't fill that hole or fulfill that need for me.

I had fulfillment that reconciled with my current self, at one point, at my Unitarian Universalist church in Detroit. NWUU took excellent care of my mind and my soul and my spirit. I miss them dearly, but none of the UU churches I've attended here in Chicagoland have met that need or felt like home to me. They're all too intellectual, too focused on the mind, to focused on politics and the world. That's fine for some people, but that's a need I can fill on my own. That's not what I go to church for.

I had many more thoughts as I was thinking over my experience Sunday morning. Anger that I was raised in such a literalist version of Christianity (maybe if I hadn't been, I would never have left), sorrow at not feeling comfortable enough to join in communion, jealousy of the people who still had it in them to believe, a sense of longing for spiritual fulfillment and peace, hope for those I love to find a middle ground, curiosity as to where I'll go from here.

So many thoughts to organize, and the best way I could think to do it was in a poorly written pseudo-fictional blog post. It would have been so much easier just to pray!

You can't go home again

Mary* had always had "men" issues. Her father abandoned her before she was born, and repeatedly thereafter. She never had a truly good father figure nor male influence as she grew up, and as a result always seemed to be trying to fill that gaping void.

Like most girls with "daddy issues," Mary fell for a string of "bad" boys. She always fell hard, and the endings were always devastating. Christian* was different, and also not different at all.

Christian was probably the only "boy" Mary's mother ever approved of. He seemed sweet and kind, generous, and protective. He made Mary feel safe, loved, and worthy, something rare for her since early childhood. Christian took good care of her, and she soon lost herself completely in her passion for him.

Though Mary's mother approved of Christian, some of her friends did not. They saw his behavior as controlling and jealous where she saw only safety and love, and a sense of self-worth. Mary was happy to change who she was for Christian - after all, he loved her. If Christian didn't like her music, she wouldn't listen to it. If he didn't want her spending her time with people who didn't like him, she wouldn't. If he had an opinion on the way she dressed and how she spent her time, he deserved to be heard and his opinions respected.

Christian became irritated when Mary talked to other boys, and positively irate if she attempted to befriend them. He seemed always to have something negative to say about the way other people chose to live their lives, and he insisted Mary stay away from the friends he deemed a bad influence lest they bring her down with them. If she questioned him, his motives or authority, he would brush her off with responses worthy of a politician. Sometimes he would even threaten her with pain, torture, and threats of leaving her to be alone forever.

Young and naive though she was, Mary soon became weary of this behavior and began to distance herself from Christian. He fought back with violent fury, causing tumult and upset in her relationships with her family. They still adored him and he seemed to delight in making them choose between himself and Mary. She was finally left so brokenhearted that even when she tried to move on and find solace or love with other men, she could only think of Christian and the hurt he had caused her. Inevitably, she would pull away and be alone again.

As she retreated into her self-imposed solitary, she still followed and studied Christian's life with an almost pathological curiosity. She watched others be taken in by his sly charm and protective facade. Sometimes she was angry for them for falling for the same tricks she had, but she often found herself defending those others when her friends would sneer at them. After all, she understood how easy it was for someone hurt and in emotional need to be taken in by Christian's seemingly genuine promise to love and protect them even if they weren't worthy of love.

Over the years, though, Mary began to slowly heal. Instead of being angry or defensive of those people falling for Christian's tricks, she found herself pitying them. She was sorry their lives were such that they needed his control over them to feel safe. She wished they - and she - could find someone to truly love and accept them just as they are and not to try and change them to suit his needs.

As she kept her finger on the pulse of Christian's life, Mary started to hear different rumors about him, rumors that he was changing into exactly that kind of man she had been wishing for. They said he was getting help, becoming more accepting, and letting go of his angry, violent ways. They said he was still making people feel safe and cared for, but without the controlling behavior. They said he was learning to truly love.

Then one day, Mary's friend Hope invited her to coffee with Christian. She was ridiculously nervous about seeing him again, after all this time, but she breathed deeply and opened herself to the possibility that things would be different now. She knew that those who were close to this new Christian truly loved him, and that it wasn't the dysfunctional love she herself had experienced all those years ago. She knew they felt safe and protected by him as she had, during their lovely beginning, that he was the best friend many of them had. And how she wanted that back for herself.

So Mary went to coffee with Christian and Hope, with a heart wide open to love him again. She was surprised that, despite her nerves, when she sat down and began talking with him, she didn't feel much of anything. She glanced at Hope and saw the radiance on her face when she looked at Christian or talked about him. She saw admiring glances tossed his way by others in the shop. But no matter how hard she tried, Mary couldn't seem to feel an inkling of the love she had once had for this man who had been her life.

She truly believed Christian had changed for the better, but she could see with a clarity uncertain to her before this day that he was no longer the man for her. Though she found herself mildly jealous of her friend's relationship with Christian, she new it wasn't him she missed, but the love and peace he had once brought to her. Whatever the reason, she thought, that relationship, that love was gone for her, never to return. She and Christian no longer belonged together.

Mary harbors no lingering bitterness toward Christian. She truly believes he has changed and for the better. Or maybe, she thinks, maybe it's not Christian who has changed but herself. Maybe somewhere during their long separation she lost whatever part of herself made her cling to him so desperately in the past, that had made her open to what he offered her. Perhaps if she had asserted herself sooner, she could have found the good in Christian for herself, while there was still love to be had between them.

But it's too late for "what-ifs" and Mary has to move on and find her own peace now, and her own place in the world, without him.

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*names have been changed to protect the "innocent"