I’ve spent many hours deep in conversations with my parents trying to ask the right question to unlock the right insight to understand why they did what they did when they had me via traditional surrogacy. The right question and right insight doesn’t exist. There is no tidy explanation. Instead, there is the system of surrogacy that carefully put up guardrails to have them not think too hard about what they were doing and instead to focus on the outcome: a child. In the same way other forms of harm feel so obvious when looking back historically (racism! sexism!), I can feel the ways in which the clarity I have today makes it hard for me to appreciate the world my parents were living in at the time they decided to have me. A therapist once had me read The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler to help me better understand what context my parents had. The only problem is the book is about adoption between 1945 and 1973. I was born in 1993, twenty years after the book ends, and nothing about my story fit the book. If anything, it was ridiculously painful to read story after story of birthmoms agonizing over how they were never the same after being manipulated into giving their kids away at such a young age when my birthmom signed up to do it willingly, likely with pride, and at an age where she knew what was going on. I couldn’t read the entirety of the book as it felt like some sort of weird fantasy land.

A few years ago, I met the husband of my birthmom at the time I was born. My birthmom had relinquished a half brother of mine, their first child together, long before me. In talking to him, he remarked to me something to the effect of both “we would have done anything to keep him” and “you couldn’t have paid us any amount of money to keep you”. What a wild thing to say to me! It stung and still does. It’s also a perfect reflection of the reality of everyone’s understanding of the system of surrogacy. It reflects them being the perfect people to go through surrogacy and the messaging working (ex: “our surrogates have a complete family” aka they are done having kids aka there’s no sense they will keep me).

It’s taken me a long time to have compassion for my collective parents. It’s come in waves and it doesn’t always persist. It’s there though. I recognize they weren’t told and they weren’t made aware. No one in the process brought up hard questions about what they were doing. They couldn’t know what they weren’t told and it’s part of my why for writing on this site. I don’t want anyone to say they didn’t know. I know I’ve written about this in various ways before but for some reason it felt important to restate today.