July 12, 2012

I haven’t posted in a long time because nothing is happening. So I decided today that I would post about the fact that nothing is happening.

The Egg Donor has had our contract for almost a month now. According to our surrogacy agency’s policy, she was supposed to have her requested changes back within five days. The agency has been in contact with her and assures us that she is working on the contract. They say that she has started her medications, which she is not obligated to do until the contract is signed. They say that she is just being “meticulous”.

Honey, I get meticulous. You are about to create a life. You will most likely never meet this child and you are entrusting him or her to a couple of people about whom you only have a few pages of information. But you knew the deal when you added your name to the registry of potential donors. It became more real for you when you were chosen and you got to see pictures of the two people who will raise the baby you will help to make. It got damn real when a doctor gave you a pelvic exam during your medical screening. You have had many chances to pull out along the way, but you have continued the process.

Sign the contact.

Under our original timeline – the timeline that included five days for donor contact review – B., our carrier, would have delivered the baby around the first of May, assuming the first embryo transfer was successful. This would have allowed Alberto to take his two weeks of paternity leave and then a small, unpaid leave of absence before his summer vacation started. If the first transfer was unsuccessful but the second transfer worked, the baby would be born about two weeks into Alberto’s vacation. In either of these scenarios, we would have had a few months with the baby before we would need daycare. Every week that you wait to sign the contract reduces the amount of time we will have with the baby before he or she needs daycare and makes it more important that the first transfer is successful.

Sign the contract.

In addition to the timing issues this delay creates, there is also the psychological effect of waiting. We don’t know if you are having second thoughts. We don’t have a back-up egg. None of the other donors we looked at were as good a fit. If we need to go with a different donor, that only adds more weeks to the journey. We keep having our weekly Skype conversations with B. and she’s waiting to move on to the next step of this process, too.

Please, sign the contract.