I only fell off my bike really hard once when I was a kid. I skinned my knees badly and embedded some small rocks and sand deep into the base of my palms. I bled more than a little and walked my bike home several blocks, too rattled to get back on. It wasn’t days and days until I tried again; I was a kid with places to go! But I do remember mentally committing to trying again. It hurt to hold my handle bars and my knees were big scabby knobs. I thought for a moment about not doing what I was doing. And then I kicked that fear my kickstand aside and flew down the block.

The metaphor here isn’t about something awful that I have kept a closely guarded secret from our first surrogacy; to the contrary, that was an incredible experience; beyond words, really. No, my point here is about fear.

Fear is a funny thing. It can keep us alive just as easily as it can keep us from truly living. It teaches us about rules and respect, risk and ruin. I was in some notable pain when I got back on my bike at 7 or 8. I knew I could fall off. I knew I could get hurt again. I did it anyway. The same trait saw me go on more than one first date. Right now, my pride is a little raw because I tried a variation on sourdough that ended with me dumping dough that never rose, a rare failure in my kitchen between myself and Amanda.

But I got back on my bike, asked out other girls, and made more bread because the rewards so far outweighed the risks.

So we’re back on the bike.

In a mind-numbingly fast 45 hours, our alarms went off, we went to the airport, flew to LA, made new friends, ate great food, saw neat things, walked on the beach, slept in a comfy bed, had a very uncomplicated and equally uneventful doctor appointment, got on a plane back home and went to bed.

Surrogacy is a lot of work up front and then nine months of waiting and then you have a baby (a squishy one!). And overall the last journey was pretty smooth sailing. But there are ample opportunities for risk to turn into pain. We’ve been there during a failed transfer. And we were there for a short while during a really scary bout of bleeding that we both thought was a miscarriage. You can only approach this whole experience with hope. Things can go wrong, and one or two probably will. But the risk is so worth it.

Skinned knees be damned.