Dear Daughters

Published July 9, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

So I’ve a confession to make. I’ve been writing, and fairly regularly – just not for this blog.

You see, for my birthday from Mother-in-law Heather, I was given a hand-crafted blank book, bound with leather and with hand-made paper for the pages and stitched together in a very old fashioned way with a brass clasp. When confronted with a book of this kind, which was probably the result of hours and hours of painstaking labour from its creator, I wanted to think of an appropriate content that was equally old world.

This is the diary that my mother-in-law got me for my 41st birthday.

So I decided to rekindle the now quaint-seeming art of diary keeping with an old fashioned ink-based pen, but with a specific purpose.

I wanted to record in this old world pen and ink creation, who I was, for the audience of my children.

I am a pragmatist at heart. I know how the world works, I am aware of the risks people take every time they cross the road, or board a bus, or walk down a dark street. I am aware that life is fragile, and that health should not be taken for granted. I want to record who I am into that book, so that if something were to happen to me before my daughters reach their intellectual adulthood and maturity, that they would have this artefact to know me from.

Morbid? Absolutely.

Pragmatic? Also true.

So I’m writing a “Dear Daughters” diary.

I’m incredibly, brutally honest in it. When I write in it, I’m thinking aloud as if talking to them when they are in their 30’s or their 40’s. I assume they are adults and more than that, my equals, my peers in life-experience, wisdom and maturity. I write the way I write to no-one else in this world. It’s the literary equivalent of the dancing you do when no-one is watching.

So far I’ve told them about their creation, the motivations behind Matt and I pursuing the bumpy course of parenthood. I’ve told them about their namesakes, and explained all the thoughts and meanings that have gone into their chosen names, as well as the life stories of the people whose ancestor names they have. I’ve told them how Matt and I met, how I knew it was love. How he is different to every other man I’ve ever met, and why our relationship works. I’ve tried to decompose my feelings towards him onto the page, so that they see this snapshot of what their parent’s marriage was like.

I told them about the first time I was worried about them. Knowing it’ll be a first of many, this was fairly special to me. It brought with it an awareness that I was going to have to change. Being scared for them every time they took a flight of stairs, or skipped across the road, or coughed or sneezed wasn’t going to be very neurologically healthy for the next 20 years. I can’t imagine how parents go through decades of this, this deep-seated fear that something out of your control might happen to them. How do you people get any sleep at all?

I started to tell them about my childhood, about how I remember my childhood and what was good and bad about it. The stories that I want to hear from my parents, and so rarely get the chance to ask about. The stories I know I regret not asking for more of from my Grandparents. I want them to have this right there, at their fingertips when they need it for solace or they wonder what life was like “back then”. I barely got through the earliest memories before my hand was cramping, so I can tell that’s going to be a series of much longer entries over the years to come.

In my most recent entry to the “Dear Daughters diary”, I talk about my friends here in Zurich. Matt and I have so many friends, that there was no way to tell them about all of you in a single entry, so I decided to try to break it into digestible pieces by telling about particular friends by location, starting with where we live now, and moving backwards through France, Scotland, London, then finally Adelaide.

Talking about my friends to them feels trivial, but I think it’s important. The purpose of this diary is to give them something tangible that gives insight into my mind. A lot of the time, we see ourselves as we’re reflected in our friends eyes. So yeah – that’s you guys.

It’ll be a record of the first years of their life

In the next, change-laden year, I intend to use the Dear Daughter diary to tell them about their first year. To record at the end of each long and tiring day (or more likely, when I’m up at 4 am and writing by candlelight) what they have made me feel that day. What they did that was so special and how they melted the heart of this old cynic. Maybe it’ll be full of wisdom for them when they raise their own children, and maybe it’ll just be full of overwhelming gushiness. I don’t know yet, I’m not that person yet.

But I think it’s a task worth doing.

So, I apologise. I’ve been getting my creative outlet, and making this amazing artefact at the same time. A download of my brain, my thoughts and feelings, and it smells like leather and paper and ink and age. It’s a gift that will take 20 or 30 years to prepare and I don’t even know if I will ever give it, or I’ll just leave it amongst my things to be discovered when I shuffle the mortal coil.

I will try not to let it stop me writing this blog as well, as I know there are so many people we care about who live so far away from us and who want to keep up to date with what’s happening.

The last month

We’re currently at the 33rd week of the pregnancy, and poor Natasha is having to make more and more room for these growing little ones. Each scan has come back healthy, each check-up is full of good news. We’re optimistic that they will stay where they are until full-term (which should be around the 37 week mark). I spoke to the Doctor on the phone the other night, and he said that his role now is to watch and wait. Ensure that growth is steady and that the risk profile is managed carefully. Natasha is now visiting for quick check-ups more than twice a week, and that’ll continue until the full term is reached.

At home here in Zurich, the nursery is now basically prepared. We’re missing one or two pieces of furniture but other than that, we’re good to go. I had a delivery on the weekend of 4 crates of baby arse wipes. They were on special at 50% off, so I just ordered an entire couple of month supply at once. We have the storage, and I sense that baby arse wipes are something you can never really have too many of.

I keep remembering things we’ve forgotten, but I don’t think that’s going to change soon. Nothing of vital importance has been overlooked so far. Oh crap, except Nappies. But Matt said he’d sort out a bulk delivery. Oh, and linen for the cot. Oh, and singlet/vests. But we could arguably get on a plane tomorrow and it wouldn’t that problematic.

Which is a good thing, as these things rarely go according to plan!

9 weeks to go…. maybe… just… poor Natasha

Published May 31, 2014 | By Matt E. Hodgson-Fopp

If we are lucky  I’m sure the amazing Natasha wishes right now it would be over tomorrow!! The poor thing must be cursing Greg and I but is always so positive. We cannot thank Charles and the kidlets enough for supporting Natasha throughout this process. We don’t for a moment think it has been easy for them but Greg and are every so thankful.

Actually everyone has been amazing and so so supportive. The process of surrogacy is so foreign to people but people are just genuinely interested. The surprise when we tell them one is Greg’s biological child and one is mine is always priceless. These 2 girls will be welcomed into the world with so much love it will be amazing.

***Off topic ramble finished***

So it’s the 31st May and I am on my way to Siam Reap in Cambodia to visit Deb. Apparently we are going to “turn the town red tonight” *lol*, I’m thinking I am certainly too old for this but will try my best 

As we sit at 40,000ft I wonder if this will be my last “holiday” as a not-daddy or if I can squeeze in 1 last trip before life is turned upside down with the twiglets. I think I can squeeze in one last trip  Bindy here I come (hopefully), sorry Greg. Will life change? Oh course it will but does that mean we can’t go on holidays? No. Absolutely not. I’ll just get to go with Greg and the twins which will be amazing. I would love to bring them to Cambodia and I cannot wait till Australia at Christmas.

It all seems so surreal. 2 years of planning, lots of tears, many sleepless nights and god knows how much money and in 9 weeks (ish) Greg and I will be Daddies and Papa’s. A little bit scary but any fear is forgotten when I think about how exciting it all is. It all seemed like a dream when we started the process and it’s weird to think one adventure is over but another one is about to start. What on earth will I worry about now that the unexpected lawyers bills won’t be coming in? Oh that’s right, another unexpected twiglets bill.

Omg. How much will university fees be? !!!

Anyway…. We are bout to land in Cambodia. I cannot wait. No idea what to expect but I am sure it will be amazing!!

Bye bye for now!

Why we’re having kids, not girls.

Published May 10, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

What are you having?

It’s the first question you get asked when you tell people you’re having twins. You all know it. You all asked it, thought it, and were delighted to find it out. These days we have ultrasounds, so we know long before the children appear in our lives, what will be between their legs.

And I think this is actually part of the problem.

We’re anticipating babies. It’s the most life-changing thing we’ve ever done. It will rock our world, then completely destroy our world and we’ll make a new one from the pieces (and vomit, formula milk, excrement, brightly coloured predatory animals and lost pieces of Lego).

Anticipating the event takes up a lot of brain time, a lot of thought. A lot of planning and a lot of preparation. I’ve spent whole days and nights unable to sleep just ticking over in my head all the things we’re looking forward to (and/or scared to death by).

And the single fact that we know about these children is their sex.

And that makes it important, doesn’t it?

When we’re spending all this daydream time, thinking about what the new life will be like, we wonder what we can expect, we envision what our lives will be like, and as we do this – we only have this one fact to cling to.

At the risk of repeating – it’s the only thing we know about the kids we’re having, and so it’s central to everything we imagine we’re getting.

We can’t yet picture their hair colour, their eye colour. We can’t imagine their little voices, or their facial expressions. Will one have my dark, broody eyes, or the solid blue of Matt? Or will they both have the crystalline green eyes of their egg donor? We can’t imagine what their interests will be. Will they be shy? Will they be a playground tyrant? Will they be introspective and a deep thinker (my mother says I was – she used to call me “her little thinker”, and many other things as well, I’m sure). Or will they be a cannonball, ricocheting off the walls at every opportunity in hyper-manic bursts of energy?

Because we can’t know any of this, we place an unrealistic and disproportionate amount of importance on the one thing we do know – their gender.

So without them even being born yet, I’m having to consciously repel stereotypes in my own head of what they will or will not be like. We’re making decisions and buying things based solely on their gender.

Kids absolutely do pick up on this

The little people in our lives are built to learn. Their brains are hard-wired to recognise categories in the world, assign them importance and react accordingly. It’s survival instincts at play, and the baby years are when they learn the most.

They see us adults divided neatly into men and women. They see that this categorisation is somewhat arbitrary and they don’t quite get why people join one category and not another. But by the time they are two or three, they will have learnt that the world is divided permanently and meaningfully into two major sub-groups of people.

They will also understand that they belong to one of those subgroups.

And they think this is really important because we reinforce it everywhere (sex-typed clothing for adults, long hair and no beards for women, pink clothes, pink bedroom, flowers instead of cars on the t-shirts, girl-specific toys, female-specific toilets in shopping malls, the list is endless).

Because we place such an implicit importance on it, they will learn that and assume the following:

They will assume that gender is the most important thing about them

Not whether they are smart or dim. Not whether they are quick or slow, or even white or black.

The first question everyone asks when they see you pushing a baby:

“Oh, is it a little boy or girl?”

Every time they hear that question, they are being told “Your gender is the most important identifying trait you have”. Every. Single. Time.

And that’s why we’re having Kids not Girls

We all know that what’s between their legs is not their most important identifying characteristic. And yet though our choices, our actions, and most importantly of all, our language, we are sending the subtle message that this is the case.

I can’t stop people in the street saying “What a lovely little girl”, but I can combat it my own way.

So I will find ways to self-edit my language, de-categorise the world and change the way I speak to our kids.

I will not buy everything in one colour. I will reduce the amount of times gender is used as an identifier on clothes, books, toys, furniture, everything. I will make sure to talk to the kids in a gender neutral way, and I will compensate for the inevitable flurry of gender-themed clothes, toys and gifts by buying alternatives, so that they have both to choose from.

My kids will assume ownership of every colour in the rainbow.

When they get to the reading stage, I’ll be sure to get a big fat pen out and cross out “fireman” and replace with “fire-fighter”. I will make sure that books with Doctors and Nurses don’t always feature male Doctors and female Nurses. I will notice gender stereotypes and have conversations with them about it, explaining that some stupid people seem to think Girls can’t be Scientists, Engineers or Professors.

And most of all, I’m not going to identify them by their sex constantly. It starts so early and is so easy to do. I could easily hear myself saying things like:

“How is Papa’s little princess?”

“Who’s a good girl today?”

Everyone of these statements reinforces the idiocy of  gender being their primary and most important trait.

Yes, that’s right folks. I’ve become “That Parent” already.

This is going to be so incredibly annoying to my poor husband.

Addendum:

If this topic interests you, I recommend:

Beyond Pink and Blue

Egg Donor, Part 2: Save the Cheerleader, Save the world

Published May 3, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

Probably best to read part 1, first.

In Part 1, I covered my moral descent from good parent to eugenicist, where I found that when faced with meaningful life choices about which egg donors to pick, I quickly became the flag-bearer for a new designer super-race. A position in which I was a little uncomfortable.

Ruling out the obvious, the less obvious, the ones with bad vibes, and the ones with dodgy answers, we were still left with more than a small pile of profiles for which we could find no valid reason to reject.

So ultimately, once we’d skimmed down to the basics (and we’d been e-mailing each other back and forth a bit with the same profiles attached), we made a pretty human decision.

The Gynaecological Hot-or-Not

Each profile had between 3 and 10 photographs attached. And they did vary quite a lot. There’s something so much more human about skimming photos, than there is about reading massive attached medical histories. Even before we had thinned the ranks, I had started using the photos as instant-reject/accept criteria. It was like a gynaecological Hot-or-Not, like some of the dating apps.

Like the photo? Swipe left.

Not a good vibe? Swipe right.

Not a good vibe? Swipe right.

We were literally ‘screening’ these candidates based upon how they smiled, how they looked at the camera. We were also screening them based on their choices of photos.

Published May 3, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

Probably best to read part 1, first.

In Part 1, I covered my moral descent from good parent to eugenicist, where I found that when faced with meaningful life choices about which egg donors to pick, I quickly became the flag-bearer for a new designer super-race. A position in which I was a little uncomfortable.

Ruling out the obvious, the less obvious, the ones with bad vibes, and the ones with dodgy answers, we were still left with more than a small pile of profiles for which we could find no valid reason to reject.

So ultimately, once we’d skimmed down to the basics (and we’d been e-mailing each other back and forth a bit with the same profiles attached), we made a pretty human decision.

The Gynaecological Hot-or-Not

Each profile had between 3 and 10 photographs attached. And they did vary quite a lot. There’s something so much more human about skimming photos, than there is about reading massive attached medical histories. Even before we had thinned the ranks, I had started using the photos as instant-reject/accept criteria. It was like a gynaecological Hot-or-Not, like some of the dating apps.

Like the photo? Swipe left.

Not a good vibe? Swipe right.

We were literally ‘screening’ these candidates based upon how they smiled, how they looked at the camera. We were also screening them based on their choices of photos.

Not our egg donor

A donor who chose to send us her modelling portfolio, complete with semi-topless shots? Straight to the rejected pile. Then again, she was the one who also said her biggest regret in life was not being taller, since she was unable to be a fashion model. Someone whose biggest regret is not being a model isn’t going to be someone I want to spend 20 years raising the miniature version of.

A donor sending us frat-party photos from her facebook profile? Um. No. Shows a tendency to make poor life choices right there. Not the frat-party, that was probably a great life choice, she certainly looks like she’s having a GREAT time. But the choice of sending those particular photos without cropping the beer and cigarette?

A donor who sent a dozen photos, all selfies. Sorry, but the Me-me-me generation and I don’t really get along that well, so I am afraid her profile and her dreams hit the trash as well.

Also in the reject pile were more interpretative elements that are harder to describe or quantify. Matt didn’t like the way one girl smiled, so she was rejected before we’d even read a line of her profile. Ultimately though, we had to make some sort of screening so we could wade through the volume and get to the details.

And ultimately, we chose based on that

There was one candidate in the very first batch of profiles sent to Matt and I, who had registered on both our first skim-reads. I liked the way she smiled. It was a genuine, honest, smile. She included about 5 photos in the application that were all cropped photos taken straight off her facebook page, I assume, as they were all casual social occasions.

In all of them, she just looks genuinely happy. She was also fairly fashionably dressed, beautifully made-up, and adorned with a very tasteful sprinkling of jewellery and a healthy sporty tan.

I’m a firm believer in reading facial expressions carefully. People will often tell you things about what they’re thinking without realising that they are doing so. It’s not as easy in a photograph as it is in real-life, but you can still get a read off of people in some ways. For her photos, what I read was confidence and happiness. She was comfortable in her own skin, and you could tell that straight away.

Only after we’d both agreed she was a prime candidate did I even start to delve into the copious amount of details that we had about her. Which, as it turned out, were all pretty good too. She was healthy, sporty, had a big family. All her brothers were over 2 meters (6’4″) tall. All had green eyes and blonde hair. She was pretty much the Egg Donor for the ‘Great White Baby’ that everyone dreams about.

Four words on her profile ended up settling it for me as well – “Head Cheerleader” and “Homecoming Queen”.

Now I actually have no idea how American schools choose these quaint titles, but I’ve watched enough American TV to know that they denote some sort of popularity contest. Why would that attract me?

Well, I think it says “Charisma”, something almost impossible for photos, medical profiles or psych profiles to really measure. I liked the level of leadership they implied. That she wasn’t just a member of these things, but when participating in things, she gravitated towards leading them.

Then again, perhaps it was the glimpse of cold-hearted evil manipulation that I saw (am I picturing Diana Agron’s character in Glee). Or maybe it’s flashbacks to the TV Series “Heroes” – Save the Cheerleader, Save the World?

Not our Egg Donor

Also not our Egg Donor

I showed her photographs to a couple of the guys at work, and they agreed that she has exactly the assets we were looking for. One or two of them asked if I would contact her and ask if she was interested in making babies with them as well.

“Traditionally”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be

By the time we contacted her via the agency, she was already committed to being an egg donor for another couple. We were told she was ‘in cycle’ and unavailable and so we went back to the profiles and started our skim read all over again.

We were a bit gutted. It had felt like such a good match for us.

We picked out our second choice and arranged for her to be sent to Doctor Ringler. She couldn’t go to see him straight away, so it was around a month later when the visit actually occurred. accepted our terms, and duly arrived for her medical screening, and sadly was “washed out”.

Doctor Ringler determined that she would not be a good candidate for egg donation, due to having follicles that were not very large. I wasn’t even aware this was an issue, but I suppose it’s one more thing that we can attribute to supply-and-demand. Follicle size probably isn’t relevant in normal IVF, because you’re going to always try to use a particular woman. But when you’re doing Donor Egg IVF, you have these dozens and dozens of applications, so you can afford to be a bit biologically choosy as well.

We were a bit gutted by this, and the clock was truly ticking now. A couple of months in total had passed, and Doctor Ringler wanted to start synchronizing the cycles of the Egg Donor and Natasha (who we had already met by this stage).

So we reluctantly turned back to ask for more Egg Donor profiles from our agent.

The first one Matt sent me was…. the Cheerleader.

He pre-filtered the initial list, and the first one he said “I like this one” about was actually the identical profile to the original cheerleader who we had selected and then were told we were unable to use. She had different photographs the second time around, but I put them up side by side with the original PDF that I still had, and it was most definitely the same woman.

We never asked (since she’s an anonymous donor) whether her first cycle didn’t go ahead, or whether she finished it and was available a second time.

All we did was make a swift, definite offer to ask her to be our Egg Donor. And since she’d already had the medical clearance, we were able to move fairly swiftly into the first cycle.

It was a weird coincidence, to see her profile again. Matt is more fatalistic than me, and he said “It was obviously meant to be”.

I’ll go with that.

I sometimes pull up the pictures we have of her (which I won’t share, because her request was to be an anonymous donor, and we have no intention of someone ever stumbling across them here by reverse image search). If anyone is really curious, they’re welcome to ask me and I’ll be happy to show them off, I just don’t think it’s appropriate to post them here.

I look into her features and I try to imagine them on a little girl, or a little baby.

I’ve been doing this a lot since we discovered we were having twin girls. I am trying to fix her features in my mind, so that when one of our girls develops a certain cleft in the chin, or a certain arch of an eyebrow, or turns out to have her green eyes, then I can see it for what it is, the true genetics of their shared biological donor.

Along with their names, picturing them like this is helping to really make them seem real.

Addendun – Natasha told me today they’re kicking constantly. Fiesty little girls, apparently.