The road less traveled

Sometime in early 2008 a sweet friend of mine mentioned that she and her husband were going to seek out a gestational carrier in order to try to become parents.  As she was telling me the steps they would go through to try to find someone, my thoughts were on another dear friend of ours.  This friend became an amazing parent because someone had been willing to carry his children for him.  Before I knew it I was offering to carry a child (or children) for my friend and her husband.  Initially she laughed, and thanked me, but left it at that.  I remember telling Chris about the conversation at dinner that night and he also laughed a little, telling me that was something he could see me doing, but not saying much more about it.  A couple of months went by and no one brought it up again – until one day she showed up in my office to ask if I had been serious.  I told her it wasn’t the kind of thing you joke about, and on that day we found ourselves starting to journey down a road that would twist and turn but would eventually lead to the birth of two perfect little angels.

As we started down that road we found it marked with legal contracts and life insurance and physiological questionnaires and blood work and medical exams and even a medical procedure.  Once we really got moving we found ourselves making multiple trips to Jacksonville, wearing hormone patches, giving ourselves injections and having conversations about how many embryos was the right number to inject.  The first attempt didn’t work out and that was heartbreaking.  We took a couple of months off and then started everything back up again in January of 2009.

There will never be a Valentine’s Day for the rest of my life that will just be about hearts and flowers and candy again because that was the day that I did a home pregnancy test (several actually) that indicated it had worked!  At the moment when I saw the positive result I felt the deepest joy for someone else that I have ever felt before.  I can’t even describe it.  All the things that my friend had been through in her life with her own medical struggles and all we had been through together to get us to that point disappeared into that tiny blue line.  I sobbed tears of joy like I have never done before and might never do again.  When I called to tell them the news I couldn’t even say anything more than the word positive – but that’s all she needed!

The months that followed required lots of blood work, lots of self injections, lots of ultrasounds and lots of extra sleep – but those little miracles were growing and thriving.  It was a tremendous honor to witness my friends as they fell in love with those little people on the ultrasound screen, to hear my friend as she would talk to my belly in the mornings at work and to sense her compassion and care for me as I helped make this happen for them.  It wasn’t always easy and everyday wasn’t ideal – but this wasn’t a road that had a lot of maps to help lead the way for us.  Sometimes we were on uncharted territory and just had to do our best to make it through.  I respect my friend in ways I don’t any other person I know because of what we went through together.  I watched her be as strong as a person can be on the days that were tough and I watched her manage all the details so I didn’t have to.  I got the attention she likely longed for as I got bigger and I can only imagine how hard that was.  I pray there was never a day that I did something that made that harder than it already was, but I probably did.  What matters though, is on delivery day she was a rock for me and she continues to be a rock for me to this very day.

If there was to be a map created of our delivery day it would contain a lot of u-turns and yields and again – uncharted territory.  At 37 1/2 weeks labor was induced because my blood pressure was all over the place.  I wanted desperately to give birth vaginally.  Throughout the entire pregnancy one of the babies was always flipping.  It seems like every ultrasound would find her in a new position – even up to that very last day she was constantly moving around.  The problem with that on delivery day was of course – where was her head?!  Some random complications from the medications to induce labor combined with those to keep my blood pressure down caused me to have a couple of seizure like episodes and when I came out of one of them I had temporarily lost my vision.  There was not much time to dwell on that though because whatever had just happened had also opened me up and it was time for the girls to be born.  Much of what happened next is literally a blur because of all the voices and the activity and pain and bleeding – but my Dad was there with me on one side and my sweet Chris was on the other.  My friends were standing by in another part of the room waiting to meet their baby girls.  I remember hearing the girls as they cried that first time – it was such a beautiful sound, and then they were gone.

I knew that was the plan, I didn’t have a problem with the plan – but to say the next few days were not full of tears of hormone release and confusion and sadness would be a lie.  I remember lying in the hospital bed staring at the place on the wall where the clock was, just waiting to be able to read it.  My vision was coming back slowly, but I had to have a lot of tests and see doctors that don’t have anything to do with giving birth to babies.  This part of the journey was not going as I planned and I just wanted it to be over.   Selfishly, I wanted to move on and get back to my family and my life but I think this part of the road might be what shaped me the most.

I love this quote by Robert Frost, “two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”  The road I walked down was the one less traveled, and it did indeed make all the difference.  My capacity to love, my perspective, my goals, my priorities, and most importantly my faith have all been affected by this journey.  As I reflect on it now, three years after their birth, I can’t help but get a huge smile on my face and thank God for the roads we are allowed to travel with friends and also for the roads we are privileged to travel just with him.