Dads: A gay couple's surrogacy journey in India (25 page)

Dear boy!

The mere anticipation of finally being able to hold you, this fantasy of ours, one I've played out in my mind for months now, is tearing me up as I think about it yet again.

Someone asked me today if I was nervous… Well, the above pretty much

answers that question, doesn't it? I'd love to see Alex's chart for the past

ten days. I have a hunch it looks the same!

I see a smiling nurse walking into our nondescript waiting room at the hospital with a tiny blue bundle of joy in her arms, placing it in Alex's arms, as we stand close to each other, my arm around his back as he says hi to you for the very first time.

This very scene, captured in the one sentence above, has played out in my mind so many times in the past months. Six days from now, it will finally become reality. I have a hunch that reality will be a tad more chaotic than my dreams, probably less serene and tear-filled (that I'm sure of…).

Today is the final “work day” before we head out to Mumbai. Tomorrow we'll spend doing laundry, packing, going over some final arrangements, and hopefully going to bed reasonably early (although I doubt that) before we head to the airport early on Sunday morning.

This is how we started, or you rather, the first sonogram of you

and your twin from last year, from late August 2012!

This morning we've received the first “order” from our agency, to show up at their office at 11 am on Tuesday, to review all the documents needed for the hospital social workers. And then, two days later, we get to meet you, at last!

It's funny though, one of the couples following our journey, they got pregnant one month after us, but have already become dads as their twins were born last Saturday, w31, prematurely.

By late September, you already looked human,

with a touch of “alien”… :)

Apparently the boys had lapsed in reading my posts about the importance of getting visas in order in time (we got ours in January!) and they're still stuck at home, hoping to travel to Mumbai tomorrow to meet their kids who are in the NICU unit at the hospital. We look forward to meeting them in person next week. Imagine what blogs can do?

You know, when I first started blogging about our journey to fatherhood, I figured it would be nice to have a record of our feelings and to remember the details so that one day, when you're old enough to read this, you can do so in your own time, and hopefully understand why we did what we did, understand why you have two dads instead of a mom & dad, and hopefully not hate or resent us for it (as some would suggest), but just understand.

By week 14, your features were fully human!

I happened to find an old journal this morning, one that I kept for a few months after I moved to the US back in the eighties. Trust me, to read your own words after almost 30 years is quite amazing…

This is the latest image we have, from last month…

Next week, we'll leave the world of sonograms

behind and start taking real photos!

Earlier this week, we had another meeting with the lawyer helping us through the adoption process for Alex and with the family court helping me with the custody and fatherhood process. To make it short, here's the process that we'll need to go through to make this happen:

1.In Mumbai, we need to request Swedish citizenship for you, for children to Swedish fathers born abroad. To do that, we'll need some evidence, e.g. DNA tests. We also sign heaps of other papers that we'll need when we get back to Sweden.

2.Back in Gothenburg, the first step will be to go to the tax authority to get you a social security number (you're not alive in Sweden without one!) and get you registered as a resident.

3.With the social security number, we then get the family court to register me as your biological father.

4.Once I'm the registered father, the district court will then hopefully (and swiftly) grant me full and sole custody over you (to get you meds, and a real passport so we can go visit your grandma and grandpa!)

5.Once I have sole custody, we'll be able to start the adoption process for Alex ending up in the two of us having shared custody over you… Trust me, this will all take a while, but in the end, it's all worth it. All you have to do is eat, shit, sleep and grow! :)

Next Thursday, our journey to fatherhood (notwithstanding the legal proceedings) will probably be over, when you're handed over to us after your birth, and we start the next journey, together, our little family.

The journey to that distant day when you move out of our house to begin that next journey, the journey that might ultimately end up in you becoming a father yourself. No pressure! :) There will be college, love, heart break, work, stress, discoveries and disappointments.

But I truly hope that the time we'll get to spend together will help us prepare you to withstand all of that, that you will understand just how much we truly love you and that, no matter what, your dad and I will always be there for you, to catch you if you fall, pick you up again, comfort you, push you, encourage you to be the best of whatever it is you truly want to be.

But before we commence that particular journey, your dad and I will need to wind down those final days of being DINKS, a couple, relish in that. We need to close this particular chapter of our lives so that we are ready to immerse ourselves in the next one, no regrets, no ifs, no buts!

All you have to do is to be ready, and hopefully healthy, ten toes, ten fingers and all that…

I love you!

Bappi

We are back in Mumbai, and apart from the hiccups we had with Lufthansa and our flights , all has gone well…

These beautiful flowers were waiting for us in our room last night!

It is amazing really how fast immigration works here, at least once you have your visa. To get it is another story, but really, we were in and out of the doors of Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport in no time. The longest delay was for the bags, and ours were three and four. After a forty-five minute drive, we got to our hotel at three am (the airport of Mumbai is north of the older parts of town) and by the time we had unpacked, after all, we're staying for a month, it was four in the morning, or almost midnight for our bodies… Five hours of sleep later, it was time to brave the day before the day before the day!

Tuesday means a relaxing arrival massage followed by a trip to the office of SurrogacyIndia where, no doubt, we'll be given a thorough introduction to everything we'll need to know to survive the next few days. We'll also need to do some last minute shopping for our arriving family member, mainly a carry-on bag, diapers, and formula.

When we got to the room, we found a beautiful bouquet of flowers sent by doctors Yashodhara and Sudhir. Very kind, making me, once again, feel very welcomed. I got a similar bouquet last July… Which makes me think, has it really been nine months already? Does time really fly by that quickly? What was only a hope, a dream, is now two days from becoming a 3 kilo reality in our arms… Unbelievable!

On the flight last night, the attendants on the Lufthansa crew were very kind and gracious, helping us in any way possible, despite the fact that we'd been given one of the old planes (no reason for the change given), which was sad. Since the in-seat TV screen was broken, I read a book instead. It was about a father and his six-year-old daughter who suffers from leukemia and their struggle to beat the cancer and find happiness. I cried on page two! Once or twice, I even had to go to the restroom to stop my sobbing. It really hit me on the plane yesterday: 48 hours from now, I'll be a dad, with all the worries that entails, worries I hear only grow as the child grows older… Given what we've been through in the past nine months, I sometimes question if that's even possible, but then again, my teenage problems seemed insurmountable, and in hindsight, they were merely cute.