The Waiting
Nobody warns you about the waiting. The months between transfers. The weeks between calls. The years between the decision and the day your children arrive.
Surrogacy is mostly waiting. That's the part nobody tells you. You imagine the transfers, the pregnancy, the birth. You don't imagine the months in between — when nothing is happening and everything is happening and you have no control over any of it.
What You're Waiting For
You wait for the agency to match you with a surrogate. You wait for the legal contracts to be signed. You wait for the donor cycle to complete. You wait for the transfer. You wait for the results. You wait for the next transfer.
Each wait has its own texture. The matching wait is full of anticipation. The two-week wait after a transfer is full of dread. The wait between a failed transfer and the next attempt is full of grief.
What You Do With the Time
You try to live your life. You go to work. You see friends. You pretend, convincingly, that you are a normal person doing normal things while your entire future is being decided in a clinic on the other side of the world.
You Google things you shouldn't Google. You read forums. You find other intended parents and compare notes and timelines and outcomes. You find that this helps and doesn't help in equal measure.
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The Specific Loneliness of Waiting
Most people in your life don't fully understand what you're waiting for. They know you're doing surrogacy. They don't know what that means day to day — the specific anxiety of not knowing, the specific grief of each setback, the specific hope that keeps you going.
You become fluent in a language most people don't speak. And the waiting happens mostly in that private language, mostly alone.
What the Waiting Teaches You
That you are more patient than you thought. That hope is a practice, not a feeling. That the things worth having are worth waiting for — not because waiting makes them sweeter, but because the waiting is part of becoming the person who can receive them.
My daughters are worth every day I waited. I know that now. I knew it then too, even when it didn't feel like it.
Joseph Tito
Creator of The Dad Diaries. Gay dad of twins. Writing about fatherhood, surrogacy, and the beautiful mess of real life.