How the Dream Started

Wanting to be a father has been a dream for me for years. I am the second child of 4 in our family. My older sister is only 16 months older than me. Then my younger brother and sister were born when I was 10 and 13 respectively.  We helped our mom with the younger ones (babysitting, feeding, even changing diapers). From a very young age I knew how much I love babies. Even my friends and family always say how good I am with kids. The same thing is true about my partner.

Originally I'm Middle Eastern and I moved to the US when I was 18. So growing up accepting my homosexuality was particularly tough as I knew it will be hard to form a family and being a father that I have always wanted to be. Keep in mind back in 80's and 90's surrogacy didn't exist and adoption for gay people was rare, or at least I had not heard of.

In 1997 (when I was 27) I met my partner and I knew he's the one for me. When I was in my early 30's, we met a gay couple having a baby through surrogacy in California. I was so happy that the option is there despite the huge cost associated with it. Since then on and off we have discussed the idea of becoming parents one day. I set a goal for myself to be a dad by the time I'm 40 (my partner being 3 1/2 years younger). Meanwhile we had to save money; I had to come out to my family; and we wanted to move from Texas to New York. I always felt raising children as a gay couple in Texas would be hard and I didn't want to expose the children to the discrimination and homophobia that I have struggled with all my life.

So I turned 40 in March of 2011 and I could not believe I was still without a child! How did all these years pass by?? That year I promised myself to do something about this dream. So I did a lot of research. Meanwhile one of my good friends adopted a baby girl, Olivia. That inspired me so much to follow his path. My friend suggested I should join the support groups here in NY for both adoption and surrogacy. I finally woke up. It was so great meeting so many LGBT single and couples either having babies or planning to have a family.

The good news: we have so many options to have a child.
The bad news: every single option is hard!!
Here are some of our options: Adoption, Foster care, co-parenting, Domestic gestational surrogacy (where 2 women are involved), foreign gestational surrogacy, and traditional surrogacy (where 1 woman is involved, being both egg donor and carrier). We soon realized domestic surrogacy is too expensive, so our best options were foreign surrogacy and adoption. While I started preferring surrogacy, my partner favored adoption. He started questioning why we should create our baby if there are so many babies out there who need home. I thought it would be a good idea if we try both surrogacy and adoption at some point in our life. To me adoption is noble. Meanwhile I have always wanted a child biologically related to us. We argued and could not agree on a journey for a while....