Letter #3: When we said "yes"

Mateo -

:: Sent on February 16, 2021 - A Text from Robert::

FertyCare.

+52 55 4492 27**

She is a patient coordinator or something like that.

I called the following day, and the voice on the other side sounded frantic. I could hear a crowd in the background, and the first question after I introduced myself was, "Who gave you my personal number?" I paused for a bit and gave her the name. She sounded surprised and told me she would call me right back; she was on her way home on a packed metro.

I waited anxiously. I paced up and down our living room.

It was after work hours when she finally called back. After talking for an hour about the process and the work, I agreed for her to set up a formal meeting through Zoom. Minutes later, she confirmed the meeting, letting us know that the owner of FertyCare would love to meet us the following day.

Perhaps it was her tone, the words she used, or her personality that perfectly mixed business with compassion, but Vicky, the owner of FertyCare, was it. She made us feel comfortable, informed, and taken care of. The meeting was not just the surrogacy spiel, but she spent an hour answering our questions. She knew this was not our first agency, so she used the time to talk about her agency and its procedures. It never felt like a business transaction, it felt like we were both going to embark on a life-changing experience.

We felt understood. It could have been the previous years of research on our end, but we got more than the basics from this meeting.

We didn't have the prices yet, but as the call ended, Papi Martin and I knew this was happening. We were willing to let go of all our material assets to give this a shot. We understood that anything could go wrong– an embryo might not attach, we could be tricked out of thousands of dollars, there could be medical complications, etc.

Our minds were constantly thinking of the worst, but our hearts were always thinking of who you could be... who we could be.

Aside from the finances, the decision to go through this process is also ethical. Martin and I spent hundreds of hours and conversations answering the question, "Should we be doing this?" We dug deep into our consciousness and values to ensure we were okay with going through this process.

More important to me was that you, Mateo, would one day have your own values, beliefs, and consciousness. I worried that you would disagree with our decisions. We would go outside the norm and the biologically established human evolution process. We would pay to utilize all medically and scientifically created procedures to make this happen. And we worried some would see this as unethical, or simply wrong.

Despite all of the unknowns, we were certain of one thing: we would love you unconditionally.

Before you were created, you had already dictated many aspects of our lives.

Having grown up in two conservative, religious families, this wasn't something Papi Martin and I grew up thinking about. To some extent, we educated our family on the process as we started it. Occasionally, the process was lonely, because we didn't personally know people who had gone through this. Papi Martin and I relied on each other through the entire process.

Ultimately, we focused on what the future could look like. Mateo, life can be exciting.

Your dad and I have been blessed to come from two hard-working families. Both of them immigrated from México in search of a better educational and professional future. They left their country to work in the crop fields, doing work that many wouldn't and couldn't do. They endured physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion so that we, their kids, could have opportunities that they never saw possible for themselves. Going to school and getting our doctorate degrees is our way of letting your grandparents know their sacrifices were not in vain.

Their example of hard work and perseverance is what drives us. From traveling the world to the jobs we have, we recognize we are in the position to do all this because of our parents' decisions.

We hope we make all the right decisions for you. We hope to offer you a life full of curiosity, love, and passion. We will do our best not to focus on material gifts, but to instead give you experiences that will make you happy, develop you as a human being, and allow you to experience this world at its fullest.

But before any of this could happen, the next step was to say yes to the process. By March 1, we were all in a Whatsapp group: Vicky, Papi Marcos, Papi Martin, the coordinator, and other staff that were going to help with the process.

Beyond feeling like we said yes to an agency, or this process, it truly felt like we said yes to you. Yes to you being in our lives forever. Yes to leaving the only life we knew to live a full life next to you.