One of the most nerve-wracking parts of surrogacy(so far) was the being matched part. Now, we'd done this once before, and had an idea of what was going to happen. I thought I'd be less nervous, but I wasn't.
I'm horribly impatient. With the larger agency I was with before, I was surprised and impressed by how quickly the matching process went. It seemed that they mush have had couples waiting in the wings for a carrier to apply. I was afraid that it would take longer to get a match with a smaller agency- a lot longer. And I truly do suck at waiting. I had heard stories from friends about so-and-so who was listed with this and that agency, but never got a call with prospective IPs.
But Tess was great and had our profile together and out to some of her waiting IPs in no time. (Tess is my "Anna". She said I can absolutely use her real name and that she does NOT look like an Anna. She's right, she doesn't....) The hard part was waiting for the IPs to get back to Tess. Once a set of prospective parents has a profile, then they contact Tess and tell her whether or not they're interested. Some places put time limits on how long both the IPs and the carriers have to review each others' files. Some agencies don't have any time limits. I think I emailed Tess daily, and bugged her with the "have you heard anything yet???"
One morning, not very long later at all, I had a message from Tess. "Call me when you get this." Someone had seen our profile on a surro-site Tess uses, and was interested in me. Specifically in me. Tess had a phone interview with him later that morning, and if all went well, I could maybe be talking to him by later that afternoon. Holy cow!!!
Sure enough, later that afternoon, I found myself talking to Ben (made up name... ;)). Ben lives across the country from us, and is extremely excited to be a parent. Ben had also started a surrogacy journey that fell through- about the same time that Chris and I had last year. I felt like that gave us an almost instant connection. Like before, I was super nervous before our phonecall, and I paced the whole time. It happened so fast, that I didn't have anything put together. No list of questions to ask, no game plan for what we might talk about. I was flustered. So much so that I totally forgot to have him speak with Chris on the phone at all!!!
Overall, the call went well. I felt good about Ben, and I was pretty sure he felt good about me. I wasn't going to decide anything without talking to my husband, though. No matter what, this is an experience that doesn't affect just me. It was a couple days before Chris and Ben could talk, but they seemed to like each other well enough. Ben and I spoke again, too, and we got along well. I got the sense that the both of us were being cautious- maybe because we'd done it before and had things fall apart.
It happened more quietly, and with less, oh... fanfare, I guess, than the big agency. But after our phone calls and some communication with Tess, Ben was matched to our family. Or maybe our family was matched to him.
And I thought, Let the adventure truly begin......
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