I’m looking at a small, round, plastic container. In about ten minutes I’m going to be holding this container in one hand, and doing something with the other hand that’s none of your business. My thoughts in those moments will be equally private, so I want to tell you a little bit about my thoughts right now.

Less than a month ago, my husband Alberto and I signed a contract with a surrogacy agency and dropped it in the mail with a huge check. I mean a massive, giant check. A check that could have been the down payment on a charming three-bedroom house in a nice, leafy suburb.

Since then, things have moved quickly. We expected to be “matched” with a surrogate in two-to-six months. By that time, we would have chosen a fertility clinic to perform the embryo transfer, signed wills to ensure that if we die during this process someone will care for the child (or children, but more on that later), and had a lawyer examine our health insurance to see if our medical plan will cover any of this. But either the agency or God worked faster than we expected. Now we have to have all of those things done immediately.

And, I have to have my semen analyzed, hence the container.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll recount how we got here. Not just from the moment we signed the contract, but from the time we decided to pursue surrogacy, more than five years ago. We still have a long way to go and I’m trying not to get so excited about how close we are to having a child that I spend the next year of my life praying for the time to fly by, like a kid waiting for Christmas. I’m going to record this journey so that I don’t forget it in the future, and also to slow myself down in the present.

I will not, however, say any more about the container and its contents.