Meeting My Surrogate and Feeling My Babies Kick

My clinic explained that most intended parents don't want to meet the surrogate. In places like the US and Canada, it's the intended parents who choose their surrogate and are there for every step. In Kenya, the process is different — more clinical, more distant.

But I needed to meet her. I needed to look her in the eyes and say thank you. This woman was carrying my daughters. The least I could do was show up.

She placed my hand on her belly. And then — there it was. A kick. Two kicks. My daughters, moving, alive, real. After years of waiting, failed transfers, and more uncertainty than I knew how to hold — this was the moment it became undeniable.

I cried. I'm not ashamed of that. I stood in a clinic in Mombasa, Kenya, with a woman I'd just met, and I cried because my babies were real and they were coming.

I don't have words for what that was. I've tried. I've written and deleted versions of this paragraph more times than I can count. What I can tell you is that it was the first moment the whole thing became completely, undeniably real. Not a plan. Not a process. My daughters.

There is no adequate way to thank a surrogate. No gift, no amount of money, no words in any language. She was carrying the most important thing in my life inside her body — and she was doing it with grace and warmth.

I left that meeting changed. Not just as a future father, but as a human being. The generosity of what she was doing — what she had agreed to do — humbled me in a way I still feel today.

I flew home with something I hadn't had before: certainty. Not about the outcome — there were no guarantees, and I knew that. But certainty that this was real, that they were real, and that whatever came next, I was already their father.

That's a different kind of knowing. It doesn't come from paperwork or timelines. It comes from a moment like that one. The emotional side of surrogacy is the part no guide can fully prepare you for.