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.... 

Catching Up...

So it's been few months since we have started our surrogacy journey, but I was not sure if I want to blog about it as I have been afraid of failures and wasn't sure if I want to expose my intimate feelings during this journey with the outside world. In reality, I had NEVER blogged about anything in my life. However after reading so many blogs of other IPs (Intended Parents) who have been through this process or are in the middle of their journey, recently I decided to give this a try. There are many reasons for doing this:

1. I must say I have made friends through the blog land and I have learned from others. So it makes sense to give back to the blog community, and hopefully someone will learn a few things from our journey. I'm hopeful our circle of friends will grow.
2. I hope to share this blog with friends and family in the future and hopefully share pictures once  the baby arrives. As I have heard from other IPs, it's a great tool to look back at the journey and see how it all started.
3. I hope one day to share this blog with our future children when they are old enough to understand things and want to know how they were brought into this world.
4. I find blogging and keeping a journal / diary very therapeutic. I have written private diaries in the past. However this would be the first time I'm sharing my thoughts and emotions with outside world.

So in my next few postings, I'm going to back track and hope to catch up to the present day soon.

Introduction

This is a story of a Brooklyn couple, S&P, traveling from Brooklyn, New York, all the way to New Delhi, India in the search of their dream of having a baby through surrogacy.

We are a same-sex couple who have been together more than 15 years. For years we have talked about how wonderful it will be to have a family, but we realized having a baby is not going to be easy for us! In recent years, our love for children have intensified when our sisters started having babies. Together we have 2 nephews (ages 7 and 2.5) and a niece (2.5 years old). We love them dearly. Finally in 2011 we were determined to make this happen so we joined various support groups and explored our options with adoption and surrogacy.

I love this picture as it represents flags of 3 nations:

1. India - Where my partner is originally from, although he was born in Brooklyn, New York! (and hopefully the birth place of our future child).
2. Iran - My home country where I grew up and lived until age 18.
3. USA - Our current home.

This flag truly symbolizes our future baby, the melting of 3 great nations!

Thank you for sharing this journey with us.