Mama

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I thought I would share some of the things I'm most excited about with becoming a mama. This is long, but I would love if you read it to learn a little about how I feel!

One of the things I'm most excited about is seeing Ronald be a dad, I know he is going to be amazing at it! Just seeing him with our nephews shows how kind, and encouraging he is. He always reminds them that they can do whatever they want at times when they feel discouraged and I just love that! I know parenthood is going to make our love and affection for each other even stronger (not sure how that can happen with how much we adore each other now) but I think it will.

I'm also just excited to figure out how to be parents. I know it will be utterly exhausting, super hard, and confusing. But I also know we will learn what our baby needs and what makes them happy and that will be an amazing discovery.

I'm excited to not be like my parents. Ronald is one hundred percent not like my father, and I am one hundred percent not like my mother (thank heavens for that!). We will always make sure our child feels supported and loved. We will never let them go without the things they need, or be emotionally abusive to them. I also know that through the process of being a mama, a lot of the pain I carry due to my childhood will heal. I will treat our baby the way I deserved and desperately needed to be treated as a child. It's going to be beautiful!

I'm also excited to bring a little human into the world! We have actually debated quite a bit about whether we want to bring a new life into this world. There are so many problems, so much danger, but we have decided to live in hope. I can't wait to see how our baby develops and what their personality will be like. We will foster compassion, courage, and freedom to be themselves. We are hoping to raise a fighter, someone who stands up for the oppressed, someone who is woke, someone who never gives up. 

We are also planning on having only one biological child and then adopting one or two other children. We have always wanted to adopt, and have talked about adopting older children who most often get trapped in the system. Even a teen who is 16 or 17 just to love them and help them have support in their adult years. Our hearts are so into it that just thinking about how we could help makes me cry. We both have a lot of experience with dealing with trauma and therapy so I think we are especially equipped to deal with a child who may have more issues.

We already have a lot of ideas of things we want to do with our baby. One of them being that we want to make a playlist of the first music our baby listens to on the way home from the hospital. Of course our baby will have no clue, but we can tell them when they are older. One of the songs on the list is She's Like a Rainbow. I also think, Hey Jude should be on there. Lots and lots to choose from!

We also really want to teach our child about diversity. We are talking about getting them books on having two moms or two dads, feminist women, the list goes on and on. I'm so happy those books exist finally!

We have already bought our baby's going home outfit. We have also bought them a toy from our trip to Disneyland, and I found a whole bunch of adorable clothes at the thrift store a lot of Gap Kids line with the tags still on! We have also bought some decor. Some vintage paper lanterns, a macrame banner that was on clearance at Target, and a porcelain wall plaque of two blue parakeets. I really am going for a bohemian theme. Lots of plants and natural elements. But I also want it to be colorful, the lanterns are red and magenta and I just love the idea of bohemian but less neutral than how it is done traditionally. I also want some sort of rainbow art work for their room. Rainbows are so beautiful. 

I love that I have a gift for design and I just can't wait to set up the nursery! Currently the room is a pale pink because it was going to be used as my dressing room, but that never happened. If we find out we're having a girl, we'll keep the pink. If we are having a boy we are still debating on keeping the pink as we believe no color is for male or females, or we will do an emerald green accent wall with maybe white or cream on the rest of the walls, or even a pale mint green. 

Moving forward with having our baby has really given me a lot of hope. Ronald is amazingly supportive when I get full of self doubt, and my psych/therapist is too. He has told me that he has no doubt that I will be a great mom. That is like one of the best things I can hear, and Ronald knows I can do it as well. Knowing that the people who know me the most believe in me, really helps.

We may have to do things a little differently due to my health issues. Maybe we will need to have a nanny to help part time so I can get some rest or go to therapy. Maybe Ronald will have to carry a little bit more of the work than I do at some points. Maybe we will put our baby in daycare at one, who knows, but we do have ways to make things go well for the baby, as well as my health. 

We also want our child to go to preschool starting at two years, maybe just part time so they can get that socialization and learning that is so critical. We also want our child to go to public or perhaps private school. I was homeschooled and it was extremely traumatic. Especially because my mom was abusive and I had no escape or support network outside of my fucked up family. I also had to teach myself everything by myself so even though I am very emotionally intelligent, there are some areas that I am not that strong in, like math. It really is a point of self-consciousness for me. But I am also very well spoken, good at debate, good at understanding concepts and learning, good at science, good at writing, and art, so those are all pluses for sure. Just had to write that so I didn't get down on myself for not understanding math. ❤️

Anyway, by how long this post is, I'm sure you can see how insanely excited I am! 

So here is how surrogacy will work. I just had some blood work done and then I'll get off birth control and we'll do IVF. I will have a procedure to harvest my eggs (usually four are taken), they will all be fertilized so we will have four embryos. They will be tested for health issues and we could actually choose the sex of our baby if we wanted to. The little embryos are frozen. Then we find a surrogate through an agency, have a ton of paperwork, see if we click with the surrogate (we can interview several). And then the embryo is put in the surrogate and we wait nine months! Pretty crazy! 

It's also terribly expensive and we aren't sure how we will pay for it. It could be up to one hundred thousand dollars. Luckily we have several hundred thousands of dollars in equity in our home. Which is amazing! We live in the Bay Area, so there's like no house that isn't worth a million dollars! 😳 We bought our house right when the housing market crashed. So we totally lucked out. But just because we have the equity, doesn't mean we could afford the monthly payment of the loan. Right now there is just no way we could, we are totally maxed out. But we are hoping we can work it out.

Anyway, if you read this far you are a champ! xo