Zander will be 7wks old tomorrow, and is out of hospital and doing much better. Time is such a strange, relative thing. It simultaneously feels like an eternity since I was pregnant with him and worrying about having to give birth, yet just yesterday that he was pushing and shoving against my insides. I have plunged myself back into our family business after taking a bit of time off to recover, and have a dozen orders/projects that I'm trying to work on at the same time. This is all great, and very normal - but it means that I don't actually spend a great deal of my day thinking about surrogacy stuff anymore. It kind of feels like that was simply 'something I did', a part of my story, but not something that I'm living and breathing so much anymore.
I think when you're pregnant with your own child there's a tendancy to become totally absorbed with all things baby. I think the same thing happens when you're pregnant with a surrogate baby, only the absorption is with all things surrogacy and the exciting unknowns of the journey.
I remember the taxi ride home following the embryo transfer back in July last year, and wanting to tell the driver what had just happened. That I was quite possibly pregnant with someone elses child. It's a similar feeling on the flip side. I get about doing the daily errands, and at times I just want to tell people 'I was a surrogate. I gave birth 7wks ago. I gave a family a baby'. But I don't. Slipping a birth story into small talk with a cashier is not something I'm great at!
When there was a baby-bump it was obvious I was pregnant and I was able to choose how much information to disclose to curious strangers. Now I just have a slighty-flabbier-than-usual-belly, but there's nothing outwardly obvious to say 'I gave birth'. There's no newborn in a pram, or packets of nappies in the trolley... It's just my story. A piece of the puzzle that is my life, that is now a narrative told in past-tense. Its a curious thing really... how a life-changing, life-giving scenario becomes 'just a little something that I once did'!
I suppose I could look at it in a different light though... that I've simply passed the baton of this story onto Zander himself. This isn't my story anymore. This is his story. This is the start of his life and everything that he will become. I am the opening sentence in the novel of his life and it is up to him to write the rest.
