Here I Am!

Well, as the domain name suggests, this is a blog about my journey to become a 'tummy mummy' aka a surrogate.

I'm a first timer and although I've researched it to death for years now, spoken to a ton of people both professional and with personal experience on both sides of the surrogacy fence, I remember being utterly confused about the whole thing and not knowing where to even begin. So, I thought this would be a good blog to follow my journey from start to (hopefully!) finish.

I guess it'd be good to start from the beginning, right? OK, well I've always been interested in surrogacy, just the thought that it must be wonderful to help someone else achieve their dream. I think I first knew about it and gave it serious thought before I even had kids of my own. Ironically it took 5 years to conceive our first child, that only served to fuel my surrogacy calling - knowing what it felt like to long for a child and think it would never happen.

So, back to the story....Over the years, we've (hubby and I) discussed it on and off but hadn't completed our own family and so it was just talk. I did google every so often and joined a board or two to lurk and read but never took it any further.

We realised we were done having children ourselves when we had our 3rd in March 2008. Our hearts were full, our sanity stretched paper thin and our purse strings very much at breaking point. So hubby had the big snip, actually whilst I was still carrying baby#3, and that was that. The baby factory was closed here.

Again, thought of surrogacy drifted in and out of my mind again until just before Christmas '09, I decided I'd actively look into it and google and FB search became my friends. It's still very much underground, if you do google and find sites, they are mainly American as that's where surrogacy is more acceptable and you can legally advertise for/as a surrogate. There are 2 main UK groups but they are mainly closed to non-members, IPs (Intended Parents) have to pay to join but surrogates get in free. I didn't like not being able to view before I took the plunge so I didn't hang around for long.

I always said I could only do Host Surrogacy (aka Gestational Surrogacy) where you use the IPs egg and sperm but the more I researched, the more I felt differently. I could do Traditional Surrogacy. When you consider that a lot of women won't do TS, use their egg, and that most people searching for a surrogate don't have eggs or can't use them then that's a lot of people you might help, being denied straight away. And when you add up the cost of IVF for the surrogate and the cost of getting the IM cycling with them, for HS, you can see why most IPs go the TS route. It's cheaper, more straight forward, faster and has a better success rate as you're not introducing 2 entirely foreign things (sperm and egg) into a foreign environment.

I know some people baulk at the idea of using their own egg, that's biologically related to them and I understand that. As long as you've researched and played out all the scenarios in your head and thought about it long and hard, if you're still ok with being a TS, go for it I say.

So, back to my journey, I did find the courage to put my profile on one site and had contact from one lady, we exchanged just 2 e-mails and she went silent on me. To this day I don't know what I did or didn't say or do but it did hurt my pride and took a few days for me to realise that it obviously wasn't meant to be.

I found several on FB though and saw people basically advertising themselves which actually, is illegal in the UK but still, social networking knows no bounds! LOL So I made contact with one lady who was advertising, to make friends more than anything, and it snowballed from there...Soon I was getting more well known, surrogates are in demand and IPs talk about ones they know who are yet to be matched and I was invited to a more private board.

That was where the real surrogacy journey began...