The promised land

I've been looking for a time to sit down quietly to ponder and write about this amazing ride, but as one would expect, a baby takes up a lot of time. How do I even begin?

I suppose I should start by doing a little rewind to 2 weeks ago. When I last posted, I was resigned that A. would not deliver for a while. I settled in with a new knitting project, bought a paint by numbers set, ready to wait another week for our baby to arrive. However, at A.'s next OBGYN appointment, the doc decided to stretch her cervix. Boom, that did it. Suddenly those two weeks of preparing and twiddling my thumbs went out the window. We were told to meet her at the hospital in an hour. In a nutshell, the delivery went incredibly well. A. was amazingly strong and calm and collected. I, on the other hand, felt light headed and was terrified I was going to faint at the sight of blood. I imagined what a complete embarrassment it would be if I passed out before seeing our baby born. My husband had already warned me to repeat our mantra, "K.I.T.!!-- KEEP IT TOGETHER!"

Nothing could have prepared me for the melt down I would have watching our baby born. It was truly incredible. The flow of tears came relentless down my face as I couldn't believe what A. had done for us. I couldn't believe this baby was mine. There are really no words to describe this.  

Now fast forward to day 2 after delivery and the adrenalin and shock finally were subsiding.  I can honestly say that there was a clash of intense emotions. When you have a baby via donor egg, you prepare and prepare and stress and stress over how you are going to feel when you see your baby. I can only describe it for me as a really strange mix of total bliss and deep loss. On the one hand you are gaining this amazing new life, and on the other hand you keep searching for yourself in the baby and know you won't find it. Granted, understand that this is all purely physical. When a baby is born there is not much else you can see about the person besides her physical attributes. So I found myself feeling sad I couldn't find anything physical of myself in her.

Soon this emotional tug of war was interrupted by pure logistics. When doing surrogacy out of state, the baby being born is just the first step in this orchestral feat. Next we have to get the baby home. In this case, my parent's house where we planned to stay for a couple weeks while our apartment gets renovated. As word came in that a huge historic snow storm was about to hit our destination, we had to pull it all together to jump on a plane and get there before we were snowed in. For all the years of fuck-ups, this was pay back time. It all went beautifully smooth -rescheduling the tickets, getting the birth certificate, getting to the airport, flying on the plane, and driving to my parents. We beat the storm, for once. Finally the universe is cooperating.

Now fast forward to today. Our baby girl is two weeks old, and that clash of emotions has been fading. It is so true that once you take care of your child that you begin to see her as her, not all the baggage you have been carrying through years of infertility. I am sure there will be many more bumps in the road because of the fertility choices we've made, but that's the name of the game.

It got me thinking about what this blog will be moving forward. There are plenty of good parenting blogs out there so have to think a little harder about what I want to continue to write about. But there is time. Let's just take it moment by moment. As she naps beside me, I can only think of how exciting it will be to watch her grow. I have reached the promised land.