He was someone slowly convincing himself that love meant never saying no to his mother, and somewhere in there, without either of us noticing exactly when, he stopped asking what saying yes was costing me.
The Ask
One night in March, Ethan sat across from me at our kitchen table with his laptop open, the blue light of the screen making him look younger than he was.
“My coworker’s cousin was a surrogate,” he said. “She made fifty-eight thousand dollars. We could pay off Mom’s house. We could actually breathe, babe. A real vacation. A new beginning for us.”
He made it sound like a door opening instead of a door closing. Because I loved him, and because I was tired of watching him carry his mother’s fear like it was his own personal failure, I said yes.
I remember sitting in the intake office at the surrogacy agency two weeks later, filling out a medical history form while a coordinator named Renata explained the screening process. “You’ll need your husband’s signature here, and here,” she said, sliding the clipboard across. Ethan signed both lines without reading either one, already checking his phone for a text from his mother about a leaking pipe. I noticed it then and told myself it didn’t mean anything. He was busy. His mother needed him. That was all.
The agency, New Beginnings Surrogacy Partners in Denver, matched me with a couple named the Bennetts inside of six weeks. They were kind. They sent me a card every trimester. The pregnancy itself went about as smoothly as something like that can go—morning sickness through week fourteen, then nothing but swollen ankles and a due date that came and went two days late.
I was compensated $58,000. Combined with what we’d already saved, it brought Diane’s balance down from $61,400 to just under $9,000. Ethan hugged me in the hospital parking lot after I handed the Bennetts their daughter and cried, actual tears, and told me I’d saved his mother’s life.
