In Search of the Perfect Surrogate

The comedy Baby Mama is about a woman who is unable to conceive, so she hires a surrogate mother to carry her baby. Last weekend, Giancarlo and I went to see it, and it was fun and cute and after all, how could we go wrong with Tina Fey and Ami Poehler?

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We have our own surrogacy story of sorts in our family.

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In 2002, Giancarlo and I decided we would like to have another child. He had always wanted the experience of nurturing an infant into toddlerhood and beyond. There had been no babies in his immediate family, in fact, his father's blood line would end with Giancarlo if neither he nor his brother had a child. Therefore, we agreed that Giancarlo should be the biological father.

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Well, we tried and tried but I just couldn't conceive. I even tried standing on my head afterward a few times. Nothing. The doctors said there was nothing we could do, I just "wasn't built for having babies." Hmmmmph.

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So we began to entertain the idea of surrogacy. We spoke to many different doctors, agencies, and attorneys about the process and we started having phone conversations with potential surrogate mothers. This is not a slow heartbeat, dry-palmed experience. Every time we spoke to someone new, my brain would constrict and I'd get tunnel vision, especially when we talked to somebody who seemed like a possible match. Talking to the doozies wasn't nearly as nerve-wracking. And boy were there were some doozies. Many of them just seemed desperate for cash while giving the pretense that providing an oven for somebody else's baby was their first priority.

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Finally, after a few weeks of phone calls we had narrowed it down to a woman named Debbie who lived at an airforce base with her husband and three kids out in the middle of the desert. Through our conversations we felt quite assured that Debbie would be the one; the time had come for us to meet. So we threw third grade Amelia into the back of the car and took a road trip.

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Since Debbie lived on a military base, we had to meet them just outside the base at a Dairy Queen. As we sat at the sticky table, our wide eyes glued to the door, we watched every person entering and wondered if she was Debbie, or if he was Debbie's husband. This was worse than waiting for the worst blind date ever.