Dads: A gay couple's surrogacy journey in India (20 page)

but this is supposedly part of your inner workings, your plumbing… :)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. It's a small price to pay for soon being re-united with you, but I hope you do well. Please be good to your surrogate, and keep the pregnancy easy on her. She's had to endure enough, not any of your wrong doing, no blame, but five pregnancies puts a toll on any mother.

Dear child, your dad and I are so ready for you. Alex keeps talking about you, the meetings we need to have before we fly to India, with the family court, lawyers, the immigration bureau and others. Not to mention that we need to get visas, book our flights, reconfirm our hotel booking and buy some more stuff so that we're ready when we get back.

We ordered a nice stroller for you last weekend. You'll like it. Black and dark blue, with inflated tires, making for a smooth ride. It's the only stroller we could find that allows us to stretch it into a stroller for two, if we decide to do this again, and fix you up with a little sibling.

Here at home, we've measured out the space to fit a crib into our bedroom and we've been to IKEA to look at a couple of different options, but we haven't bought it yet. To see the empty crib next to the bed would feel awkward. But the bed is pushed aside, leaving plenty of space on my side of the room, while your dad has three months to get used to not having any space at all for the next 18 months or so.

I hope you're doing well. Do me a favor and grow. Grow into this amazingly strong and kind human being that I know you'll become. Eat, sleep, learn, listen to your surrogate's voice, her singing, listen closely when she plays you music, listen to our voices so that you will recognize us when we finally meet. It's only three more months, only 96 more days. Be strong, be brave, for us. Soon we'll be united.

I love you!

Bappi

PS: With all those funny images that we get from you, I figured I owed you a picture as well. So here's a nice shot from the mountains where your dad and I spent Christmas… And yes, the guy to the left is your dad! :)

The Bernina massive, towering at over 4,000 meters above sea level, marking the border between Switzerland and Italy.

“Dear Hans,

The doctors will be planning [name of surrogate mother]’s delivery in the end of March. Shall keep you posted about the date of delivery.”

Sweeter words I have never heard, or read for that matter, and all of a sudden it seems we've crept two weeks closer to becoming parents. Needless to say, I've been walking on small fluffy clouds all day.

This is really weird, because just a few weeks ago, I was so
worried
about becoming a father, about whether or not I would be up to the whole parenting thing, not just mentally, but with all of my heart, but for the past few days, I have felt how I have changed, how I am more than ready, can't wait now.

Maybe that's just it. It takes time. Time for the thought and prospect to properly settle in. We got additional information and after the cervix was stitched up, all things seem well. Our dear surrogate is still on certain vitamin & supplements such as iron, calcium and she's on a high protein diet. But all things are well, and that is reassuring. Her health and well being are very important to us, and I'm glad that this process allows for her health to be checked a little bit more regularly than she otherwise would've been able to. A positive side effect, so to speak.

In other news, an
article
in a Norwegian newspaper threw us off track yesterday, but after discussing this with our doctors at the agency in Mumbai, it seems as if things had been blown out of proportion. But there are so many dark forces at work out there, one of them quoted in the Norwegian article, that it really cannot come as a surprise that the Indian government has come under pressure. I just pray that they can withstand, knowing how many people have surrogacy as their last hope to ever become parents. It would be a shame if one of the few countries with a decent healthcare system, rigid legislation and a tolerant attitude came under fire, forcing couples to go elsewhere, as e.g. the Ukraine which by any standard is anything but a stable democracy.

Anyway, here's the response from our
agency
which put my mind at ease, for now:

“Dear Hans, there has not been any notification from Indian Govt. I am not sure where this is coming from. I have received a lot of emails today from different Norwegian clients. But from Indian side, it is the same for us.

So I am not sure what to respond. For us, no major changes have come in to stop surrogacy.”

Love and light, may they shine on our planet forever!

Approaching parenthood is exciting. It's a time of joy, it's a time for being scared (can we do this, how will we get enough sleep, will there be 1-1 time for us left, etc.), and of course, plenty of work to do with all the paperwork we need to put in place before we actually get the baby into the house.

In these past months, we've been asked a lot of questions about our pregnancy, about our family, most of them perfectly legitimate (is it exciting?), others, well, not so much.

The most common question is, of course, and I've written about it before, about the sex of the child. While I understand the psychology behind the question, would you mind if I asked you to think twice about the implications of that sort of question?

Some ask it merely to pick the right color of clothes (well, news flash, there ain't no such thing as a wrong color) stuck in some Victorian belief of pinks for girls and blue for boys. The gender views are so ancient, so outdated, that it drives goose bumps all over my skin!

Of course, it matters if you are male or female, but not before you are born. I won't be any less happy or unhappy no matter what sex the child born of my loins will have. In fact, after having been asked so many times, I'm still no closer to knowing if I do have a preference. There're ups and downs with both sexes quite frankly (the gender issue aside).

Naturally, we also get questions about paternity leave and strollers and people announcing the “end of our lives as we know it” (we'll see…), but sooner or later, the questions return to the mystic qualities of gender, and I'm not talking about the age old question about who's the man in your relationship and who's the woman, which by the way, must be just about THE stupidest question on earth, period!

I mean, give me a break. I'm gay, male, and one of the whole points of being gay (not by choice, it's what I am) is to be attracted to males. So how does gender come into bearing? Is it so impossible to fathom that two male, manly men, well endowed with hair on their chests, live together, fuck every now and then but mostly watch football and do whatever it is macho guys do in the book of “preconceptions”? I mean, why the need to fold even the manliest of male couples (or the girlies of lesbian couples) into the conformity of preconceptions and expectations? Why? I just don't get it…

Needless to say, I've tried hard to answer the question, to myself for a looong time. Normally, when asked, I growl so hard at the person that s/he never talks to me again, particularly not after asking, “Nice to meet you. You must be the village idiot?” 

I only wish. I'm not as witty as this when it comes down to it. I'm usually just silent, stunned by the question, and the hurt.

To this day, I have no valid or accurate answer, quite frankly because our roles (our, as in Alex & mine) are so fragmented, so volatile, that it makes no sense to apply antique gender rules. They simply don't apply. We're two men sharing a household and our lives and we both do things that are “traditionally” considered girly (cook, wash, clean) and we both change light bulbs and take out the trash. We're gay, we don't do expectations very well, but I guess if they're stupid enough to ask me the question, they won't understand the answer anyway, right?

But recently, on more than one occasion, I've been asked about who is going to be the mother and who is going to be the father to our child, a definite #2 on the list of the most stupid questions on my list.

It, too, leaves me speechless. The only dignified answer I might think of is, “you're certainly not going to be an idiot in my child's life!” But how could I (or my husband) ever be a “mother”? That is a “mother” in the traditional, preconceived way… I mean sure, we'll be caring and nursing and I can't wait to hold the baby to my naked chest when feeding it, giving it the necessary chances and time to bond, but I know Alex will do so, too, just as most sensible dads would in the 21st century. Will we both be changing diapers? Yes! Will we both be taking paternity leave? Yes! Will we…? Yes, we will. And as queer as we may be, we'll successfully install the child seat and build the crib despite IKEA's best attempts at fooling us with unreadable instructions!

Thing is, behaviors are not limited to whether you have folds between your legs or junk hanging in various sizes. Believe me, it doesn't. Heck, I read that men could even breast feed if hormonally stimulated long enough (which we won't, no worries). So, I guess the most sensible answer to the question will be that we will both be mother and father to our child. Whether it'll be 50/50 or 48/52, who gives a rat's ass anyway? Is a mother changing light bulbs unfit as a mother? Of course not. Neither is a father who rocks his baby to sleep, singing lullabies…

The real problem with questions like these is that people don't think. And they hurt. They hurt me and every other gay person something fierce. Just because we're wired differently in what we find sexually attractive, doesn't mean we're not fully capable of loving and caring, doesn't mean we're not as male or female or manly or feminine as the next person. Being gay isn't about what we have between our legs, it's what's in our hearts, what we seek in others, not our own behavior. Can be, if you think about a butch dyke or a really camp twink, but the butchest women might be straight and the campest guys straight, you never know.

So next time, don't make any assumptions based on age old gender roles. Two guys living together are most likely just two guys living together and they most likely will make great fathers! I know we will...

Today's the first day of week 29 of our pregnancy, ten more weeks until our child is born, during the final week of March, year of the snake, Aries.

While last weekend was joyous and fun with the two ultrasound films with very revealing 4D images, the past week brought a lot of worries and work.

The first thing is about the ongoing (rumored?) changes to surrogacy legislation in India. Mother India was one of the first countries in the world to legislate surrogacy and although the country doesn't recognize same sex relationships (maybe not surprising given the state of e.g. women's rights), it did allow for us to use the “loop hole” of single parents to fulfill our dreams of parenthood.

It now seems that the
Indian government
is under a lot of pressure to close that loop hole, either from right wing pressures from within the country (the ruling Congress party in need of extremist Hindu parties to govern) or outside (plenty of American and European hate groups with lots of money out there).

I don't really know what is going on and as I've written before, the news coming from India is conflicting and there is no “official” news from either the agencies nor the government. Personally, I hope that this will all blow over and that this vital industry for India can continue to develop in a healthy way.

I can't fathom how people can spend so much time hating, keeping people from achieving happiness, contributing to society, fulfilling their dreams. If only those people would direct their creative energies to helping the underprivileged…

Needless to say though, it has been a week plagued by nightmares about our child, getting him out of the country safe and sound, not to mention about the sister or brother we had hoped to start working on in March… After all, we still have plenty of embryos in cold storage!

Setting those fears aside for a while, I started to deal with various government agencies and insurance companies:

Swedish Immigration authority. I feel pity for the poor sod who is responsible for all our cases, and felt a certain fatigue in his response to my e-mail. But we need to be nice to the man who will decide upon the citizenship for our son.