We thought finding the right carrier would be the hardest part. We were wrong.
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From the outside, our relationship looked the way it had for 24 years: solid.
After our first surrogacy experience ended in stillbirth, our friends were convinced we’d be fine because we were the “most together couple” they knew. I wasn’t so sure. For months, it had felt like my husband Ethan and I were two bodies fumbling to find each other in the dark. At home, our orbits rarely intersected. My eyes barely landed on Ethan. Once, he didn’t realize I was right behind him and he closed the door on me.
It felt like we were suspended in the quiet between the cracks and the crumble. We weathered life-altering challenges together in our 20s and 30s due to my whole-body symptoms from endometriosis, adenomyosis, early menopause, and a medical system that trivialized them all. My condition rattled our intimacy, upended my career, and made Ethan my caretaker. Being undiagnosed for decades also cost us my fertility, depleting my ovarian reserve and leading to miscarriage after miscarriage with IVF and IUIs.
Though we weren’t living the life we dreamed, and I felt guilty for the weight I foisted on Ethan, we managed to maintain the joie de vivre we’d had since we first met—until we turned to surrogacy.
Our decision to opt for an egg donor and a surrogate was an act of compromise. Though I’d always been ambivalent about motherhood, the idea of coparenting with Ethan had gradually filled me with tenderness and curiosity. But by then, after years of illness, I wanted a hysterectomy. Ethan still really wanted to be a dad. Neither of us wanted to jeopardize my wellness with more hormonal treatments and pregnancy losses, so we took what people called the “easy way out.” Though I was criticized by my doctors for giving up on my eggs and my uterus “too soon,” our decision to pursue surrogacy felt liberating—at first.
We thought finding a gestational surrogate would be the hardest part. Turns out, we were wrong. Instead, we were totally unprepared for the ways surrogacy was going to change our marriage.
Neither of us verbalized the red flags we saw.
Our first surrogacy experience was the kind we now caution other intended parents against. We entrusted an agency with our fate and our funds, putting them in charge of introducing us to a surrogate and acting as the intermediary who would reimburse her for pregnancy-related expenses on our behalf. At the time, we were unaware of their proven fraudulent history.
Not only were Ethan and I new to surrogacy, but we also felt vulnerable—maybe even desperate. We were privileged to have found someone who wanted to do this for us, and we wanted to be generous and grateful. You also don’t have much control when your baby is in someone else’s womb and your funds are in a corporation’s bank account. So we ignored the red flags we noticed with the agency’s inflated reimbursements and our surrogate’s jarring mood fluctuations.
If we’d shared our worries with each other early on, we may have had a chance to course-correct. At least I wouldn’t have felt so alone carrying this angst in my bones. At one of our second-trimester ultrasounds, I resented Ethan for being his jovial self while he talked to our active baby boy through the screen as I stood hunched against the wall, struggling to feel present. It wasn’t just that the pregnancy felt unbearably abstract for me as a mother who didn’t contribute her genes or her womb; I was also increasingly skeptical of the agency and walking on eggshells with our surrogate, who’d keep us at arm’s length one week and accuse us of not being supportive enough the next. I’d never gotten this far in a pregnancy and it should have been a happy time. Instead, I bottled up my distress and couldn’t breathe from the weight of it.
We didn’t equally share responsibilities.
During our first surrogacy experience, Ethan let me bear the brunt of the conversations with our surrogate. He thought he had a supportive role, but his not being in the foreground put extra weight on my shoulders and took my time, energy, and headspace while sparing him. I was also the one who handled all the legal and financial paperwork, and the communication with the agency. Ethan was grateful and proud of me for managing what he considered more in my wheelhouse than his, but I felt paralyzing stress and resentment having to tackle these hard tasks on my own at such a vulnerable time.
We resented each other for our different ways of grieving.
Our breaking point was brought on by our different ways of grieving. While I naturally tend to dig deep into painful topics and emotions to make sense of them, Ethan prefers to compartmentalize. At the hospital after the delivery, Ethan preferred to leave the room when I stayed to spend a few minutes with our stillborn. I wanted the loss to feel more tangible, while he wanted to hold onto the joy from other memories, like when we saw him on ultrasounds. Neither of us was wrong, but we were disconnected.
The months that followed were agony because none of the doctors would counsel us on why our baby had died simply because I wasn’t the pregnant patient, as though we weren’t his parents and didn’t have the right to know. I spiraled into depression and was furious every time Ethan would tell his parents that we were fine. He didn’t want to burden them, but I didn’t want to mask our reality for the sake of others’ comfort. For 24 years—through long distance, sickness, and grief—we’d been the “strong couple” who never argued. Now, in the complexity of surrogacy, we kept snapping at each other because Ethan needed a semblance of normalcy and I needed to dwell in darkness.
So how do you come back to each other when who you were didn’t survive? Over nearly a year, thanks to our self-awareness, deep respect for one another, and therapy (which Ethan hated attending but did when required), we made three tiny shifts that saved our marriage.
We formed a better team for every step of the process.
When we met our second surrogate through a more ethical, transparent, and supportive agency that did not demand funds in trust, Ethan and I formed a true trio with her. It helped that she considered us a team and wanted our involvement in appointments, decisions, and her daily life. She’d use the word “together” so often that it initially triggered us; it felt so foreign to us after our first surrogacy journey, and we couldn’t tell which of the two experiences was the anomaly. Ethan made it a priority to participate in our conversations and replied to our group texts if I couldn’t. We all shared freely—our fears, dreams, victories, recipes, and silly inside jokes—and the three of us built an intimacy I never expected. When it was just the two of us, our surrogate was never far from our thoughts, as if our marriage had expanded to include her.
Ethan also started to help me with the challenging legal and financial tasks. He kept up with emails he was CC’ed on during the day and sat with me if we had paperwork to tackle, his hand on my back if I got overwhelmed.
We learned that grieving is turn-taking.
When we lost our baby with our second surrogate at the end of the first trimester, we grieved as a unit. Our trio sat intertwined, our hands piled on my lap. At home, Ethan was more receptive to my needs on my bad days. Just watching him witness me in those moments, even if all he did was listen and sigh, brought us closer together. I was more understanding when he clung to his social activities to blow off steam. Ethan was more honest with family and friends about our emotional and financial distress. He agreed to ask for help and for a loan to help us get back on our feet after two surrogacy journeys and thirteen years of fertility and ongoing health expenses.
We decided not to talk about surrogacy on weekends or right before bed to give our nervous systems a chance to unwind. Dark humor helped us grieve: We’d sometimes whisper jaded comments to each other when triggered. When we imagine something creative we would have done with our kid, we say, “File it under never!” During the holidays, Ethan toasted me with, “Cheers to not losing a child this Christmas!” Holding space for our contrasting ways of grieving and meeting in the middle helped dissolve the resentment and tension between us.
We made sure to remember that we are not (just) what we carry.
Fertility treatments and surrogacy can become all-consuming for a couple, especially after decades of illness and loss. Being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after our first surrogacy experience further shook my identity. We started making a conscious effort to remember what was special about our life and our love before all this. We are more than what we carry and what we’ve lost.
Besides carving out periods of play, nature, and grief-free talk, we also pushed ourselves to keep money aside for leisure and travel—not just for our living expenses and surrogacy costs—so we can look forward to something in our calendar and savor new experiences together.
We found, though, that the least daunting way of rebuilding our future is to simply take care of our present. Often, all we can handle is the next half-hour: where to take a walk, what to make for supper, how to support each other right then. I worked hard to keep my eyes focused on Ethan until it became natural again. Even now, as we grapple with whether and how to continue with our surrogacy journey, when we start acting like passing ships because of our full heads and aching hearts, we drop everything, hug, touch.
I never expected our strong marriage to be impacted by the most tender gift we gave each other: the chance to grow our family through surrogacy. We’d naively thought what awaited us would be easier than the road that led there. Our experiences with surrogacy have changed how we show up for each other, both in joy and in grief.
I can’t say for certain that our marriage is now strong enough to survive anything that lies ahead. What I know is this: We’ve built what we’ll need to recalibrate our direction to find each other in the dark.
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Kristina Kasparian is an Armenian-Canadian writer, health activist, and entrepreneur with a PhD in neurolinguistics. Her work has been published by Roxane Gay, Condé Nast, Travel + Leisure, SELF, Electric Literature, Longreads, The Rumpus, HuffPost, NY Post, BUST, Fodor's, Catapult, Newsweek, Business Insider, Elle, the Globe & Mail, and other ... Read More