Sadness

Today, I was thinking about having Logan and Natalie’s baby, and I got so sad. I am not second-guessing my decision. The sadness of the whole thing, though, felt like a weight on my body. So much of it is sad and broken. My broken, weird family, which is how I know Logan at all. The sad acknowledgement that Logan and I were never supposed to marry into nice families, which we undoubtedly did. We deviated from the plan in doing that, and no one, least of all us, quite knows what to do about it. That deviation is somehow both happy and sad. It highlights the brokennness and complication of our families.

The sadness of Natalie’s illness, which nearly killed her and most of her very nice family. The ways it limits her life every day. The way having a baby will never be a simple thing for them. The way they have to have awkward conversations and beg favors and use huge amounts of money and travel and planning and heartache…before the baby even exists, in any sense.

The sadness of the idealized baby who will never exist and the screaming changling we all get in its place. Is the idealized baby’s pedestal too high to survive the fall to reality when the baby is so desired and requires so much effort and resources just to be born? I worry that Natalie and Logan don’t understand–because none of us do, before we are in the trenches–how unspeakably hard it is to care for a seven-pound dictator.

The sadness of nurturing and growing a baby and saying goodbye to it. A joyful gift, an exciting journey. But a sadness also. The few surrogates I’ve talked to have insisted it wasn’t like this for them, and I hold to their words with hope. But I also know myself, and I believe that I will be very sad indeed. Not sad enough to not do it. Not sad enough to fight it. But sad, nevertheless. It will hurt. But it will give joy that will be greater, I hope, than the hurt of it.