Tonight, I did something I really never thought I would do. I accidentally auditioned for a reality TV show. Going into the interview, I was under the belief that we were talking to a producer about a documentary. Heh, a documentary hoping to air any shred of dirty laundry our, as it happens, entirely boring and non-scandalous midwestern family might be trying to keep from prying eyes.

“We’d like to interview any naysayers; can we have their contact information?”

“What do you fight about? In regards to your marriage? In regards to surrogacy?”

“Tell us about what fears you had going into surrogacy.”

“What is it like to have sex with your wife knowing that the baby bump in front of you carries somebody else’s child?”

No. On so many levels, no. Sorry to disappoint our fandom, but that’s not the surrogacy story we are hoping to tell. We were asked to betray our families’ trust. We were asked to come up with examples of drama. We were asked to dish on any crumb of conflict we could think of in order to make a reality TV show about a surrogate and her family. In a nutshell, we were asked to Kardashian-ize our lives. I don’t exactly work on making our quiet corner of the Minne-burbs as boring as I possibly can–actually, you know what? That’s exactly what I do.

I’ve never tried so hard to tank an interview. I succeeded. We weren’t going to get a callback, but I guaranteed it twice: once with the horrendous interview responses and a second time with the email to the producer thanking him for his time.

And just in case anyone is wondering about the answers to the questions above…

We love our naysayers. We don’t have very many, but we care about them. We don’t agree with them, but that doesn’t mean we are willing to have them be framed as loonies in a reality television circus.

I can count on one hand the real fights we’ve had in that last year that could be categorized as ‘general marriage material’. They were probably stupid; I don’t remember what any of them were about. I do remember loving my wife more after they were done for how stubborn determined she is and how she doesn’t back down from anything. Fights about surrogacy? We don’t have them. For about 30 minutes, somebody was pretty irritated with me for wanting to work remotely during our most recent outing to L.A. I ended up not not working, by the way, because COVID has made vacationing pretty near impossible, so I had more PTO banked than I realized. It was a great decision. We were galavanting all over beaches and dystopian downtown so much that I didn’t even care about how much Tartine we ate. And Sidecar Donuts.

We don’t have fear going into surrogacy; we have faith.

And baby bumps? Some questions are better off not asked. Hollywood folk, amiright? #eyeroll

Visiting Los Angeles last week was great. This winter hasn’t even been that bad, but hot dog did it break up the pandemic doldrums. This was our medical screening trip. It’s been long enough since our last surrogacy checkup that we needed fresh blood work for each of us and an ultrasound from one of us. The one of us that can have a baby; don’t be weird. A week later, completely unexpectedly, we already have all the results and they are great. I don’t have hepatitis B this time around like I did for exactly two days during our last journey when that clinic mixed up my results with somebody else’s.

Between our now three journeys, this one is far and away the fastest and smoothest. Given the current pace, we could transfer as early as March!

Stay tuned. Good things coming soon.

Squishy things.

And if you’re just joining us and/or haven’t read the blog for a while, that (‘squishy’) is a running reference. It’s probably a little jarring out of context. 😀