Our Lives
After years of hear tache, I was about to give up hope. Then a single text changed ever ything.
My breath caught in my throat as I opened the envelope and pulled out an invitation.
It was to a friend’s baby shower, and it had a little teddy bear holding a balloon on it.
But before I could read the words, my eyes blurred with tears.
My husband, Ryan, gently eased the invite from my hands. ‘Don’t worry, our time will come,’ he said, hugging me.
When we’d got married, we’d both been in our early 30s and thought starting a family would be easy.
After a year of negative pregnancy tests, we’d gone for investigations. But no one could explain it.
Over the next years, desperate to become parents, we’d pinned our hopes on fertility treatment.
But so far, we’d endured four failed IUI attempts, a miscarriage, and nine failed attempts at IVF.
Now, as I stole another look at that invite, I thought: When will it be us?
After our 10th IVF attempt failed, our doctor finally had some answers.
‘Your womb lining is too thin to get pregnant or carry a baby,’ he explained. ‘All your embryos are healthy, but they just can’t hold on to it.’
So my body is to blame, I thought.
As I focused back on what the doctor was saying, there was another blow.
‘I’d advise you to look into surrogacy,’ he said. I shot a look at Ryan. ‘I’m not ready to give up trying,’ I blurted.
So I had a procedure to boost the blood flow to my womb and thicken the lining.
Doctors thought it looked promising, so we tried IVF again.
But after another devastating miscarriage, and when our 12th IVF failed, we made a decision.
‘Let’s try a surrogate,’ I agreed.
After four years of dashed hopes, we had nothing to lose.
So we did our research, and
found an agency. They sent us two different profiles of potential surrogates, and I felt immediately drawn to one of the women,
‘I’m t the rier’ whose name was Leigha.
She had two children with her husband, Josh, and had been a surrogate once before.
Reading from her profile, I told Ryan: ‘She says it’s been a wonderful experience, and that she’d be happy to stay in touch with the next family she helped.’
We both liked the sound of her, so the agency arranged a video call between us, Leigha at that invite, I thought: When So we did our research, and and Josh, and the surrogacy coordinator.
Ryan and I clicked with them immediately. Leigha’s eyes flashed with warmth. She was friendly and funny too.
‘For me, it’s like having a little hitchhiker on board,’ she explained. ‘It’s your baby, I’m just the carrier.’
