The One Where We Kept It Quiet | Part 21
We'd done the three bad years. It was time for the curse to be lifted!
Gosh, even writing this just feels like a bad dream. I can’t believe that the same year I got married is the same year Trump was re-elected, I was going to Colombia and ERAs came to Melbourne.
Let’s backtrack.
We were on our honeymoon in the Gold Coast, a smaller trip considering we had already done Hawaii after our online wedding, and that we would soon be heading to Colombia to get our baby!!
The previous year, we had spent a lot of time researching surrogacy agencies, with the TL;DR being that Colombia was the only viable option in terms of money, safety, integrity and communication.
Unfortunately, the last part fell short, at least for me. The previous year, I had undergone two rounds of egg collections to make embryos, of which we ended up with just three. These were then - wildly - shipped to Colombia for the surrogacy process, which even writing now, feels insane, but we were out of options.
The process was extremely painful - albeit not physically. The emotional turmoil of communication around embryo pick-up, transfer, arrival, when the surrogacy would begin, who it was, our communication, dates and timelines, was more of a shambles than Ashlee Simpson on SNL.
I could write about how this entire process left us so mentally drained we didn’t sleep straight for months. So much counselling, so many tears, so much anger, hurt, frustration, with the money insane yes, but the total unknown and fear that we were insane so, so much worse. The constant, 24/7 cycle of anxiety plagued us constantly.
Emails unanswered, delayed text messages, a constantly changing timeline, poor translations and what came across as passive-aggressive replies filled me with more anxiety than the Ticketmaster spinning wheel of death. While in July 2022 we were told it would be a matter of weeks to get started, the actual first embryo transfer was a full six months later, which, as previously written, failed. We found this out in the same breath as finding out our dog Maple was terminal. I promptly crashed into a parked car.
The second embryo that was transferred a month or two later in 2023, this time with a new lovely surrogate we met online, was successful.
We saw our baby’s heartbeat, ultrasounds, appointments. We kept it quiet; we didn’t want it taking over our big day in April and wanted to wait until we were around the 13, 14-week mark to cement our plans. The agency asked us when we were coming to Colombia. We started planning around work, when we could finally tell everyone, and went into our wedding so excited that we had a 10-week old little baby on the way.
On our honeymoon before bed one night, I looked at Will excitedly.
“This is it, love,” I said, “The wedding, a baby… it took a while, but this is our year!” We went to sleep dreaming about Colombia and baby names.
We woke up to a text message from the agency.
She’d lost the baby.