Who’s the Daddy?

Published February 4, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

At the beginning, when my husband and I first started talking about the possibility of having children at all, I was the first one to say that I felt a paternal, genetic link was something that I really wanted to have.

I cannot fault his reaction. He didn’t even blink, or think about it for two minutes, or even hesitate at all and think of himself. He was utterly selfless and went “Well, you can be the Daddy then”.

I think I had half expected a tussle.

I mean, this is two people who can manage to have a meltdown if the waitress brings 3 pieces of bread to that table, or when there is only enough rice left for one of us to have seconds. We’re not a couple who are particularly prone to taking the moral high-road and just letting the other one have their fair share.

In a lot of ways, I think that’s healthy. It means neither of us is ever really in danger of becoming a doormat. If anyone is, to be honest, it’s me. When my husband inevitably reads this and decides to protest, I will feel it is necessary to remind him about the our experience with airlines meals.

This is how that works:

Step 1. The air hostess asks us what we want. He takes his first choice, and I am required to choose whichever hot meal he didn’t choose.

Step 2. We will both defoil our hot meals and examine the sundries and sides. If he decides that my hot meal looks more appetizing than his does, then obviously we swap. If he doesn’t like what he was served, then he offers it to me.

Step 3. He takes my bread roll.

Step 4. He takes my dessert.

Step 5. He offers me the slimy seafood and over-dressed salad that he didn’t want anyway as recompense for pillaging my dinner tray.

Step 6. The drinks trolley arrives and he asks me to make sure I get myself a beer as well as anything else I want to drink, so that as soon as the trolley dolly has moved on, he can have both beers.

Step 7. He takes the cheese and biscuits, but only if they’re cheddar.

Does this sound like someone who selflessly offered to let me be the paternal father of our children? And yet, when it came to something really, really important he was totally up for me to be the father, and he didn’t even seem to think about it much. 

I am incredibly proud (and more than a little bit surprised) at how beautifully generous my husband can be when it really matters.

So… I’m the Daddy?

So when we started the process, we had determined that I would be the paternal deposit provider (such a romantic term). So we decided to specify egg donor statistics and characteristics that would optimize the chances of the eventual children looking something like the two of us.

Which is why we had a list of surrogates all of which were fairly short, blonde, blue-eyed, petite-framed and with perfect teeth. Our initial goal was to make a baby which looked a little bit like both of us.

Then we spoke to the Doctors

At the time of our first appointment with Dr. Ringler, we were still quite firmly set on this course, and we told him exactly that on our initial consultation. He then patiently explained the process, which I am sure you are all now aware of thanks to my helpful posts, and we absorbed it and moved on.

Part of this explanation was where he explained to us that he recommended implanting two embryos, so as to maximise the chances of success in the first cycle. This came with the increased chance of twins, of course.

I don’t know whether it occurred to Matt, but the implications of what he said hit me pretty much immediately.

An incredibly selfish 24 hours

Over the next day or so after we had that consultation, I kept dwelling on what Dr. Ringler had said in his session with us. I wasn’t sure that what I had imagined could be done, and once I had spent some time researching the answers on the internet, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to mention it, or talk to Matt about it.

I don’t mind admitting, I was pretty overwhelmed with the whole thing. We had settled comfortably and amicably on me being the father of our child. We had tentatively said that we would probably go for a second child afterwards, with the unspoken implication being that the second child would be fathered by him, of course.

If I said nothing, then we would proceed as planned. I would be the father of our first child. Which, when matched with an egg donor who looked like Matt, would mean we would probably never bother to tell anyone who was the biological contributor. In fact, Matt and I had agreed that that would be the case – we imagined that people might guess, but we would never condone such guesses by giving them air. We would always refer to our children as “ours” and never let people think otherwise.

But further internet-based research told me that the chance of twins with a double implantation was also quite high. If we ended up with twins from just my contribution, we would have two little mini-me’s and we’d be quite unlikely to go back and have a third child. Two really is twice as many as we’d hoped or expected, let’s be honest.

A deep breath

I decided I needed some perspective, so I took a long walk home from work one night, and I called a friend and had a good chat. It was with a good friend, someone I can trust to air the selfish side of my psyche, and who I knew wouldn’t judge me for exposing that. I explained that if I said nothing, I would soon be the father of one or two children, and that Matt would have his turn to be father in a couple of years time.

I also expressed my fears. I worried that if I suggested we change our course, and that it turned out that I wasn’t the father of our first child, that Matt might get over the idea of having a second child. That it would be something that we perhaps couldn’t afford to do a second time, or which, once scarred by the first-born, we decided not to do again.

If we only had one child, and it wasn’t mine, would I be resentful? Would I be more than slightly disappointed? People who adopt seem to love their children just fine. As do people who co-parent children from previous marriages. They seem to wear their non-biological-parenthood as a badge of pride as far as I can observe from outside. It almost feels like their love for their children is somehow purer because it isn’t biological and hormonal.

I’m more selfish than them, I think. I think if I didn’t get to have a child of my own lineage, that I’d be actually totally gutted. I see traits in myself that I inherited from my parents and grandparents. Things like my Dad’s eternal optimistic outlook (that he shares with his brothers and my brother as well). My Mum’s enormous capacity for love. My maternal Grandmother’s resolve and explorer’s spirit and my paternal Grandfather’s love of music. I want to create a mini-me that encapsulates and picks and chooses from these traits and makes their own unique mix of the above and all the rest on offer in my DNA.

So I had a choice to make. Possibly one of the biggest I’ve ever made. 

Do I stay quiet and be the only father of our first child? Or do I suggest to Matt and the Doctors that we both fertilize one embryo, and in doing so, take the risk that I wouldn’t get to be a father at all? Maybe not ever?

Fertilizing one each, the chance of me being a father dropped from near 90% to near 60%. I know that sounds cold and analytic, but sometimes cold and analytic is who I am. I’m not quite sure which grandparent I get that one from. My maternal Grandfather, I suspect.

As I walked home in the freezing cold, in my head I just kept remembering how amazing he had been when I had said it was important to me. Right at the start of this whole process, he had been completely understanding of my needs, and my urges to be a father, and he had been utterly, completely selfless.

Admitting Selfishness, and accepting the risk

As soon as I got home, I mentioned to Matt the thought processes that I had been going through, and suggested to him that we both fertilize one egg from the initial two embryos being implanted.

As I knew he would, he happily and gleefully jumped on the idea and was really stoked that I had been the one to suggest it. And so that’s what we did. We would let nature decide.

It was a step for me, emotionally. I took a deep breath and let it out, and accepted that I might not be the biological father of our child when it arrived. I accepted that if life took different turns, I might never actually be a biological father. There might not be a little mini-me to carry on my Grandfather’s love of good carpentry and have his flawless ear for music, or my Dad’s robust optimism that has carried me through all of life’s corners and spills. I would still be a father, and a parent, but it might be to a little mini-Matt instead, with his unique quirks from his family and not mine.

And I let that breath out, and accepted that I was fine with that.

But I think from that moment onward, I was secretly, desperately hoping for twins. With twins, there was no downside. There was no “We might decide to stop at one”. There was no “We might not be able to afford it”, and there was no easy out clause for whoever didn’t get to be Daddy the first time around. I didn’t even really hide it much, I think everyone in the relatively small circle of friends I was able to talk to about this knew that I was dead keen for twins from the moment we went through this thought process.

I mean who doesn’t like a bargain, right?

The down-sides

There was, of course, at least one down-side to this process. We had already selected our egg donor profiles, and we were already sifting through the options and so forth. It didn’t make much sense to turn down perfectly good candidates simply because we’d chosen them for physical characteristics that matched Matt and not me.

So while we had stacked the odds in one respect, in another respect, some things were less certain.

I’m fairly sure we’re going to have blondes.

Our “Seeking Surrogate” Profile

Published February 10, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

At the start of the surrogacy process, before we were matched with Natasha or the Egg Donor, Matt and I had to provide to the agency a piece of writing that somehow summarized us as a couple, and as intended parents.

This document, which really only had to be about a single page of A4 size, had me paralyzed for about 3 months. Seriously, I must have written and rewritten this profile for us about 5 times. I sent it to friends (whose confused silence told me they were out of their depth), I sent it to Matt (he’s rubbish at feedback, by the way) and I even tried to get feedback from the agency we were using.

The Impossible Requirement

The precis for the document was simple: Explain who we are, in an honest way. But also in a way that is likely to attract the kind of surrogate we wanted to meet. But also in a way that is likely to attract the kind of egg donor we wanted to meet. Without overstatement. Or being pushy. Or needy.

Let the reader know you’re really serious and committed but without being too obviously needy. Make sure they know you’d be good parents, but at the same time don’t be too gushy or they’ll think you’re stalker material. Make sure that you show that you have the material means to support the child, but at the same time don’t come across as snobby or materialistic. Make sure they know you’ve got a good job and you’re not going to lose it, but at the same time don’t make them think you won’t have time for the children. Talk about your family in an honest way, but make them kinda seem like a Brady Bunch suburban sitcom family at the same time.

It was a minefield.

Four times the recommended length is good, right?

In the end, I settled on a document that was around four times as long as recommended. I felt that the length alone should convey the message we were hoping to convey about neediness. I also rewrote it about ten times to rephrase the family connections part as well. I wanted people to know that our families were ready to welcome the kids into the world, and were supportive of our life-changing decision, but there was definitely no hiding the fact that we lived across the other side of the world from our folks.

The most important thing I ever wrote

I think part of the reason I was paralyzed by the task was the realization that this might actually be the most important piece of writing I would ever pen. If this document was ultimately successful in making us seem appealing to a great donor and an amazing surrogate, then it would change our lives in ways that a few pages of text should not normally have the power to do.

I wanted to write something that stood out. Good surrogates are hard to find, and I wasn’t really sure how many surrogates were particularly interested in partnering up with gay guys from across the other side of the world. I didn’t want this profile to be sitting in a drawer gathering dust while other couples got picked.

Four months of write and rewrite went into this, so without further ado, I present the most nerve-wracking document I ever wrote.

Here ’tis:

My partner Matthew and I met 15 years ago in our home-town of Adelaide, South Australia. While it may seem impetuous in hindsight, within 24 hours of knowing each other, we’d moved in together and have lived together ever since.

Within a couple of years of living together, we decided that there was a lot more of the world to see than we could find in Australia and moved together to London, in the United Kingdom.

Working and living in London together, we explored everything that Europe had to offer, travelling to see all the major landmarks of the old and new world, exploring the UK, Europe and anywhere we could reach from London’s airports.  Our insatiable curiosity about new places kept us scouring the map for new places to visit, and new people to meet.

After some time in London, Matt’s family in Scotland encouraged us to live up there in Edinburgh, where I began a long period of working on a big project for a large bank. In the time we were there, the travel lessened and our focus shifted more and more towards making more permanent connections, friendships and commitments. Our love of history and architecture steered us to buy a 200 year old cottage in the city. Several of our friends from Adelaide had also moved to Edinburgh and it felt like a nice city we could settle into.

During this time, after our anniversary of 10 years together as an inseparable unit, we decided to celebrate our relationship by having a small civil ceremony with a friends and family. 

After 8 years in Edinburgh, we finally decided to follow our passions on the next step in our lives and bought a ruined barn together in rural France, which we still have. Over the next 2-3 years we built the barn up into a home and followed business opportunities in the local area – starting a travel agency, then taking over managing a bar and turning it around, and finally adding a taxi company to the bar we were managing together.

In 2010, after years of living in such a small village, we craved the city life once again and decided that the incredibly beautiful nearby cities of Switzerland appealed to us, and so I sought work in my old field of finance with the large banks based in Zurich. While we initially intended this to be a dual life, spending some time in Zurich while retaining our home in France, we have ultimately decided that Zurich is where our future lies.

Which brings us to today. We’re living mostly in Zurich, but still return to our converted barn in France once a week or so to make sure our businesses are looked after, and to enjoy the peace of the French Alps as a contrast to the faster pace of the city.

I work in Finance once again, as a team lead of a large and growing group within the bank, and I find my work very fulfilling, albeit demanding. Matt, while still bearing the major burden of looking after our businesses in France, has also recently decided to return to take his studies further.

We started thinking and talking about children about 5 years ago, when we went on a 1000km hike together across the Pyrenees. The hike was a well-known pilgrimage – The Camino de Santiago – with 8 hours or more of walking each day through some of the most beautiful terrain in the world. It gave us finally a chance to spend a lot of time together, talking over the things that you never bother to make time to talk about in the normal course of day to day life.

We both have very strong and very active families, and have always imagined our lives would involve a large number of children in the form of nephews and nieces, second-cousins and so forth.

My parents are originally from the United Kingdom and emigrated as children in the post-WW2 era, while Matt’s parents are both Australians. My father, now retired, worked in telecommunications, while Matt’s parents were both in Academia. His father is a published author in his field, while his mother now works in senior management in social services. Both sides tended towards large families and our childhoods were both filled with Uncles and Aunts.

We’ve also been blessed recently with a nephew (the first), the son of Matt’s younger sister Kelly. We can see the joy that it brings her, and the changes in her that having a child as the centre of her life have made. We’ve seen the happiness and contentment that it has brought her and her husband, and both sets of grandparents.

While I had initially put thoughts of children away from my mind, Matt’s ‘never say never’ attitude and research into surrogacy has made me confront and dissect my feelings on the idea of being a parent, and I am now absolutely certain that this is the right course of action for us, and we feel that the time is right for the two of us to become fathers.

I personally feel, that raising a new human being, through childhood and development to become a healthy, happy adult to enjoy this rich and wonderful world is perhaps the greatest creation I will ever achieve.

We are emotionally stable, both as individuals and as a couple. We’ve been together without pause or crisis for 15 years. We are unquestionably entwined in the eyes of each other and in our families and friends. We both have supportive and accepting parents who would be delighted to be surprise grandparents to a child of ours, and settled siblings who would make amazing aunts and uncles.

We also have wide circles of friends in many cities of the world, in both Australia and Europe with particular groups of friends (many with children) in those cities that we’ve lived in – London, Edinburgh, France and Zurich.

It goes without saying if we’re pursuing this course of action, but we’re also quite financially stable and have been for a number of years.

While we considered adoption, we both feel that a genetic connection to our offspring is an essential component of what makes the relationship so incredibly rewarding and so our first choice is definitely surrogacy.

There it is.

I don’t know whether it was good or bad, but it worked. Maybe if I get a chance, I’ll ask Natasha whether she got to read that, and if she did, what it made her think and feel, and what made her decide that she wanted to help us achieve our dreams.

I guess I won’t ever know if it’s good, but I do know it worked and I don’t have to write another one.

The IVF 2-week wait

Published January 27, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

This is part 3 of my attempt to describe the IVF Process as it applied to us. Part 1 – Before The Magic Happened and Part 2 – Transvaginal Aspirations are to be found earlier up the blog chain.

At this point in the process, I almost feel like it isn’t really my story to tell anymore. The involvement that Matt and I had, and all the decisions we had to make and things we had to arrange were in the past by this stage. Once the process of implantation had occurred, I felt like it became Natasha’s story, and her journey. It almost feels inappropriate me writing about it.

The first Family Photo of the twins

On the day our implant was scheduled, I sent Natasha a long and probably incoherent e-mail letting her know how much we had wished we could be there with her, and to let her know we were thinking of her non-stop and wishing her well. She had her parents there with her on the day, so she wasn’t going into the great unknown alone, for which I was extremely relieved and grateful. After the medical bit had been completed, she was happily out and sending us messages from the car pretty much immediately. As I think I mentioned, we heard from her long before the poor staff at California Fertility Partners had time to write up their reports and scan in the images to send us.

Speaking to her while she was in the car on the way home, she was inspiring. Although she was nervous herself, she actually did a really good job of calming me down. She told me that while she’d always felt nervous about going to the fertility clinic, this time she felt really good about everything and her calmness had a knock-on effect on me as well.

And so once she was home, we began the most nerve wracking part of the whole process. To see if it had worked.

To say we had a lot riding on this was the understatement of the century. We had used 2 of our 4 fertilized embryos. The process and procedure had involved months of hormone injections for Natasha that would have had to be started again, putting her through all of that again to have a second round. And that would also mean Matt and I going through the emotional roller coaster of trying not to get our hopes up, while secretly daring to hope as well.

Home Pregnancy Tests

In normal IVF, where the woman carrying the child is also the egg donor, there are some cross-overs from the egg aspiration medication and the possible results. So there are strict rules about how soon you can use a home pregnancy test before the results are definitively reliable and not a by-product of the injected hormones.

We were having none of that. We told Natasha to test as often as she damn well liked!

The next 5 days were pretty tense for me. Matt and I were chatting to Natasha a lot, and I was over-educating myself on the process as my way of coping. I think it’s fairly safe to say that I now know more about home pregnancy kits than most gay men have any reason to. I was aware of what they test for, how it’s produced, how it occurs naturally in the female body and so forth.

The take-home from my research was that the Home kits test for the presence in the urine of something only a placenta makes.

So – the only reason for this particular hormone to show up in a test is if there is a placenta somewhere attached to that bloodstream or system.

Unfortunately, home pregnancy kits are blunt instruments, and being so, quite imprecise. They are designed to be used once a menstrual period (or two) has been missed. In normal usage, women don’t use home kits until they’ve had some reason or inkling to suspect that they’re pregnant. So the level of detection in these home kits is tuned to that. A home kit is perfect for detecting a pregnancy that has progressed around a month since ovulation. They’re pretty much fool proof at that part, but a lot less so earlier in the process.

We were now hoping they would detect a pregnancy that was technically no more than 5 days progressed, and of course, the additional tension wasn’t making either Matt, Natasha or myself any less forgiving of these uncommunicative chemical testing pens.

Too Faint to Call

My reading convinced me that detecting anything before the 5th day after implantation was scientifically so impossible that it wasn’t worth even getting my hopes up. So I spent a tense and fraught weekend, knowing that even if everything was proceeding perfectly according to Dr. Ringler’s carefully laid plan, there would be no positive home kit test until Monday at the earliest (the 5th day after implantation).

On Monday, while at work, desperately attempting to concentrate on things that suddenly didn’t seem all that urgent, I had a few facebook messages from Natasha. The home kit had changed, but the line it formed was incredibly faint, and so it didn’t really match what the Home kit instructions said was a “positive”.

It was at this point that I was very glad of my extensive reading of the science behind how these kits are manufactured and what they’re testing for. Knowing that they were not designed to be used this early, and knowing they were an extrapolation of how a litmus test works, I knew that a faint line simply meant that the pregnancy hormone was present, just not in as strong a concentration as the test was designed to look for.

The only way that hormone gets into the urine for the test to pick up, is if it’s made it into the bloodstream. To make it into the bloodstream, considering it’s made in a placenta, means that one (or, as we know now, two) of the blastocysts had hatched from their shell, floated over to the uterine wall and embedded. At that point the placenta dips it’s little microscopic tendrils into the wall of the uterus to borrow it’s food and nutrients from the bloodstream (and in doing that, pass on it’s pregnancy hormone, which triggered changes in Natasha’s body as well).

So even a tiny, faint line at 5 days was reason to hope.

I started smiling inanely at this stage. Which was incredibly annoying to everyone around me. It was also annoying to me, because if you think it’s early to tell people when we did at 9 weeks, you really, really don’t tell people that you might be having children when you’re at the 5 day mark. That tiny little line lifted my mood and broke the back of some of the built-up tension that I had been feeling that I hadn’t even realized was there.

In years to come, when making embarrassing speeches at their weddings or birthdays, I will be able to genuinely say that from that first faint line on a litmus test I was lifted up knowing they were on their way into the world.

Repeated, still faint

On day 6, Natasha repeated the test and the test result was pretty much the same. A faint line, not as strong as the instructions said to look for. We had all secretly been hoping that within 24 hours that faint line would have become a super strong dark line, and so everyone was pretty tense for this 24-48 hour period.

On that day, despite the science telling me not to panic yet, and that still “Any Reading is a good sign”, I was tense and irritable. I couldn’t really focus on what I was doing, and I was prone to drifting off into my own thoughts. I was useless at work, unable to stay on the treadmill at the gym, and constantly checking my phone to see if there were any messages or updates. Hormones staying the same level would not have been a good sign, but the home kits just aren’t designed for the kind of precision that would be needed to detect a change between day 5 and day 6.

So while I had no reason to think anything was wrong, I also had no reason to think things were going right. It was a thoroughly unpleasant 24 hours to say the least. Chatting to Matt and Natasha helped a lot. I did feel like the three of us were in a sort of holding pattern for those 2 days. I know Natasha was talking to her sister at the same time (who has a medical background) and we all just tried to get through the day.

The 7th Day

On the morning of the 7th day after implant (there is a shorthand for this in use in the IVF community, but I’ll spare you), the morning test that Natasha did came back very strong positive. I think you could hear the collective sigh of relief of all three of us in three different time-zones. At that point, we could be pretty sure that at least one implant was successfully attached to the uterine wall, and was happily slurping away at Natasha’s poor bloodstream for it’s nutrients, while feeding her some of the hormones it makes to bring about changes in her body to suit it’s needs. Which, when you put it like that, does sound a little creepy.

It was at this stage that I think I told Natasha that I had an inkling it was twins for the first time. Matt and I had been discussing the possibility since the very beginning, but since there was no basis in thinking it was anything more than me projecting my fears, I hadn’t mentioned it to Natasha. We let her in on the fact that we’d registered a domain “The T-Word” which we were going to use if it turned out to be twins. I think it’s quite telling that we didn’t bother to think of a name we would call the blog if we just had one baby. Maybe “Who’s The Daddy?” (I suspect that might be taken).

We decided we couldn’t wait until the scheduled appointment to confirm pregnancy and so a few arrangements were made and Natasha was able to go in and get a blood test earlier. Withing another 24 hours, the blood test had confirmed what we suspected, she was definitely, provably pregnant.

High Levels means… what?

I might have mentioned a couple of times so far – the hormone being detected by all these tests is produced by the placenta. We could tell from Natasha’s very first blood tests, and the fact that she was reading positive on home-kits a few days before she really should have been, that her levels were higher than expected.

At this point, the science on the internet failed me a bit. The levels of “normal” that are acceptable for this particular hormone are really wide. You can have crazy-high levels and it’s perfectly normal. You can also have really low levels and it’s also still perfectly normal. Every woman and every baby is different and the OK ranges were very wide (like “300-2400″) for the stage of progression.

There was no real reason to suspect twins, but still, I was deeply suspicious.

To me, the most logical conclusion for really high levels of a hormone in the bloodstream being produced by a placenta was… two placentas.

This was further reinforced by the follow-up blood-tests. They were also off the scale towards the high end. By the time of the second blood-tests, I had pretty much convinced myself that we were having twins already, which is why it didn’t really come as a surprise when we later found out.

The utmost respect for those undergoing IVF

Now that we’ve been through the process and we’re comfortably sailing towards our birth date, I wanted to stop and say how much respect I have for those other couples who have been through IVF. I think this is one of those things that you don’t and cannot understand until you do it. The stakes are so high, there are so many unknowns still, and the human psyche is fundamentally geared to want this so badly, that there can be no roller-coaster which is rockier. The highs are higher, the lows are lower and there is no getting off once you let yourself start to hope you might have children.

For us, with the science we invoked, and the situations created we had the numbers and good chances of success. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for people trying to conceive late in life, or with a situation where their bodies place impediments on the process.

Before we went through it, I never really understood how invested I would get in the success or failure of the process.

If this is some inkling of what parenthood is like, then I’m in for an emotional ride.

What next?

Now that the last two busy weekends are out of the way, next post I intend to start answering some of the other big questions people ask me. Like “What the F–k were you thinking?”, “How do you find a surrogate?”, “How do you choose an egg donor?” and of course – “Who’s the Daddy?”