It is at about this point where I catch up to myself!
Friday night was an interesting one for us, and many others in Brisbane - a ‘serious weather event’ (aka a storm) flooded many parts of the city and hubby and I took about six hours to get home, with my cousin and a work colleague hitching a ride. We were luckier than some, though, who were on the road much longer than us - in some cases all night!
An early start the next day, and we were at Charmaine’s for our second counselling appointment, which was our group session.
The session started with a bit of good news - hubby and I came back as completely normal in our personality tests! Phew!
Discussion centred around all things pregnancy, birth and post-partum, as well as our plans for the longer term. We discussed hospitals and options for medical care, what we hoped for from the birth experience, and how we would handle things if they didn’t work out exactly as we wished.
We spent a lot of time talking about our expectations around the birth in particular. Hubby and I have not had children of our own, so it would be fair to say we are both a little 'vague' on the specifics of labour and birth. Charmaine and Darren on the other hand have a lot of experience of natural birth! We talked about some of the details of what could happen and what was important to each of us, if we were lucky enough to have an ‘ideal’ labour and birth.
We also discussed the possibilities of how our expectations may need to change if things do not go exactly as we hope - things like whether hubby and I would be allowed to be present, especially if there are complications, and whether this may affect our ability to all be together when we meet the baby for the first time. It was such an important part of the session to get an understanding of what these potential curveballs would mean to each of us.
We spent a long time discussing the birth, because it does feel like an important thing to get as ‘right’ as we can. We know we can’t control everything (or very much at all, in reality!), but we agreed we can all put plans in place to help us cope with the unexpected.
Then we moved onto the next part of the journey, and how the birth is ultimately a gateway to a much larger adventure! How we could support each other and the baby during those first days and weeks after the birth, our hopes to continue to be in each others lives and how we can introduce the little one to the amazing story of how they came to be here …
I felt this session was such a valuable thing to do. It gave us all an opportunity to put our cards on the table and talk about what we were hoping for and how we could try to make that happen, while still acknowledging many parts of it could be outside our control. It also helped us to make some really practical decisions about how to move forward.
I think our counsellor thought we had done well too! She advised she would be preparing a letter this week to the clinic to advise them we had completed this part of the process - another tick in the right column!
I hope I will be able to update regularly, especially once we have the real excitement of transfers and hopefully a BFP! I’m not sure if our surrogacy journey (from an IP’s perspective) will be interesting to everyone undertaking a similar journey, but I hope that sharing my experiences may answer some questions for others in the same situation and maybe reveal a little bit about the magic that happens ‘behind the curtain’, which I am certainly finding out as we go!
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