M D

Dear Prospective Surrogate,

Thank you for taking your time to review our profile. We hope that our story will give you a glimpse into our everyday life and give you the opportunity to get to know us. My name is M and my husband’s name is D. We have been together for almost 5 years and married almost 4 years in October. Daren and I love to travel, ski, and experience new things. We are both in the medical field. I’m a family nurse practitioner and D is an emergency medicine physician. 

A little about me. I was born in Georgia and I have a very unique story about my birth and how I was raised.  When I was just 7 days old my father’s sister adopted me and raised me as her own from that point forward. I was 4 when she found out she was pregnant with my brother and 2 years later she was blessed with my sister. I am very close with both my adoptive siblings.

I have 3 children from previous marriages and now I feel like for the first time in my life that I finally got it right. D is my soulmate. We are very much alike in so many different ways. We enjoy the same things and have the same goals and ambitions. Most people tell me I’m crazy for wanting to start over raising children, but I love D so much and we desperately want a child together.

A little about D. He was raised in Georgia, D’s parents are still living and he has a younger brother. He is blessed to still have a grandmother left as well. Daren also has 3 children from previous marriages. D loves to be a dad and is very excited to get the opportunity to raise another child. 

A little about our fertility and surrogacy journey. This is the part that is extremely hard to tell you about. We wanted a little one, a manifestation of our love. Our journey started in February 2021 while on a ski chair lift in North Carolina. We saw a little girl there that had very similar features to us and D looked at me and said I bet that’s what our child would look like if we had one. I Think he could see the look on my face and in my eyes that I was interested. He asked me if that’s something I wanted and for the first time in my life, that was the easiest yes, I ever said. We knew it would be challenging due to medical problems I have previously faced. We met our Embryologist that October. She believed that she could do surgery on my uterus and repair the damage and give me a chance to carry our child myself. We found out 6 weeks later the surgery failed and our only option would be to use a surrogate. Now we had to create embryos. After numerous rounds of egg retrievals we finally had 6 healthy good grade embryos, 4 boys and 2 girls.

Now we had to find a surrogate. I became a member of the surrogacy support group for GA on Facebook. I saw a lady that was looking for IP’s to match with. She was also from Georgia and only lived a little over an hour away from us. We hit it off from the beginning and had a wonderful relationship. We transferred our first embryo, a little girl, in February 2023. Heartbreakingly, that pregnancy ended in a chemical early miscarriage. We transferred our last little girl in March 2023. The pregnancy was going beautiful or so we thought. We were getting a lot of ultrasounds and were never told of any issues until 24 weeks gestation. We were then called into a small office where our lives were completely shattered. We were told that our little girl, was completely deformed. Our daughter had Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita. It’s a deformity in where their joints are stiff and they can’t move them. Both of her legs were fixed straight with both of her feet clubbed. Her arms were fixed below the elbow with both wrists pointed downward. We thought there is no way this could happen. We had the embryos genetically tested. The chance of this diagnosis is less than 0.3%. There is no exact cause as to why this could have happened. It can be related to several different diagnoses. The problem with this disorder is the child is completely neurologically normal. They are literally just trapped inside their bodies with no way to move their limbs. We were sent to a high-level OB and the diagnosis was confirmed. We were heartbroken. D and I had an extremely hard decision to make.

With both us being medical we knew without a shadow of a doubt, we loved our little girl too much to ever let her suffer. We made the hardest decision of our lives which was to terminate the pregnancy. I called my surrogate, bawling tears and she told me that she would do the same thing if it was her child and she thought we were making the right choice. She actually told me she was waiting for the call. She knew how much we loved her. We already had everything bought for her and her nursery completed. Due to the pregnancy being so far along, we were not left with many options. We had to fly to New Jersey to have the procedure. The hardest thing was we were not allowed to go into the center with our surrogate. We were defenseless. That whole trip will forever be etched in my brain and my heart. The one important piece of knowledge that I’ve learned after going through this, is to always show grace and kindness. You never know what someone could be going through and why they are making the decisions they are making. By the time you may read this, we will have passed the one-year anniversary of losing her. It’s still as hard one year later as it was that day. There’s not one day that passes that I don’t think of her. I dream of her often, sometimes the dreams are so vivid that I can literally smell my baby’s skin. In my nightstand, I keep a bracelet with her name on it that I had made for her. I love to garden and, in her memory, I have made a garden for her with about 100 flowers in it. It is so beautiful. Maybe I can show you pictures one day. I would love that. Everyday as I go to water them, I see several butterflies and hummingbirds. Each reminding me that she is never completely gone from me. She is in the butterflies and birds and telling me that it’s going to be okay.

Unfortunately, our tragedy doesn’t end with her loss. To help me, D planned a trip to kind of get my mind off of things. We went to Exuma which is an island close to the Bahamas. It was not quite a month after losing our little girl. We got the phone call on my birthday that our house had burnt down. So, we have been living in a RV for the last year waiting for our house to be rebuilt. I try my best to believe everything happens for a reason. One of the rooms that were highly destroyed, you probably guessed it, her nursery. To see her things ruined was devastating to me. Seeing them take my baby’s room apart and all her furniture away was like losing her all over again. But I think God may have done this to help me move on. I had already planned to never touch her nursery. I didn’t want anyone in there touching anything. So, I think the lord knew I would make a shrine out of her room literally and in some way, I believe it happened for that very reason. To help me move on.

I want to thank you again for taking your time to read this letter. It was definitely hard to write. Tears rolling down my face telling you about our beautiful daughter. But I know she is smiling down on her dad and I and she wouldn’t want us to give up. Although we have been through a lot in this past year, we don’t feel it’s our time to give up. We still believe with all our hearts that we are meant to have a child together. With the love we have for each other, it’s hard to see it any other way. I want you to know I still keep contact with our surrogate. We text often. We love her and will never forget the sacrifice she made for us through the surrogacy and also the tragic loss. She has 3 littles of her own and we felt she had already been through so much with us, it was selfish to ask it again of her. We look forward to hopefully getting an opportunity to get to know you and build a relationship with you as well.

With all our love,

M & D