Gestational Surrogate’s Diary
Surrogacy meeting. Join Rayven Perkins’s Gestational Surrogacy Video Diary as she describes meeting potential intended parents for the first time in her 4th and final surrogate motherhood journey.
Transcript of Surrogacy Meeting Video
Hello. Rayven Perkins here fromInformation-on-Surrogacy.com.And I’d like to welcome you to our next installment of my Gestational Surrogacy Video Diaries.
Today I met my potential intended parents for the first time. Now, again, I won’t be using their real names but we can call them Rachel and John, and they have a six year old son named Kevin.
Now, I met them in a very strange place.
It’s a couple of days after Thanksgiving and I actually met them at the airport of all places.
Coincidentally, they happened to be flying through the airport nearest my town.
So it seemed to make sense to just go and meet them there.
We met outside the gate so that we didn’t have to go through airport security, at a restaurant to get to know one another. It’s really important that you take the time to meet your potential intended parents in person before you’ve committed to anything.
They can sound wonderful on the phone, on paper, or in an email, but you need to actually meet somebody in person to be able to pick up those personality traits that may or may not work well with your own personality, and feel if there might be something off about them as a potential set of people to work with. This doesn’t matter whether it’s a surrogate mother or the intended parents. You really need to meet them in person, via a surrogacy meeting, to determine if you’d like to match.
Since I am working with an agency, we would usually meet online or via a three way phone call with the agency first, before meeting in person. But because of the unique circumstances surrounding the fact that they happen to be in my town and it was so convenient to just meet up first, we did that instead.
I did bring with me a gift for Rachel and John and for Kevin. I bring gifts, especially when I’m meeting people for the first time. It’s something that shows a little bit of my personality and is something that I like to do. I like to bring them something local, to say that I was thinking about them, and remind them of me after we part.
In this case I brought them a box of chocolates with a Florida theme since we’re in Florida here.
And I brought their son a necklace with an alligator paw on it, which is just something for him to bring to school and show off and have a little fun with.
It’s something for them to remember me by.
I think the surrogacy meeting went very well. They’re wonderful people and I instantly bonded with the intended mother. It’s very important to have some sort of a bond there. These are people that you would want to hang out with if it wasn’t for a surrogacy journey; people that you’d like to go out and do things with; that you’d invite to your house for dinner. Those are the type of people that you’re looking to match with.
It’s extremely important that you be yourself. The last thing you want to do is pretend you are somebody else – especially somebody you think that they want in a surrogate or likewise in a set of intended parents meeting a surrogate. Reason being is if you’re all fake and that’s not how you really are, when it gets tough – and it will get tough – during the course of a journey, it’s going to be a lot more difficult.
You want to match with people that think the same way that you do and feel the same way on important issues, such as selective reduction. If you feel that you would never under any circumstances reduce the number of babies that you are carrying, then it’s important to let them know that. There are lots of intended parents that feel the same way, and likewise there are lots that don’t.
But it’s important to have that out there in the open and on the table so that you know once and for all if these are the right people to work with. It’s also important for you to look for any red flags. Again that’s anything that feels odd to you.
For instance, one of the questions that is pretty common among the intended parents for a potential surrogate is, “Does anyone in the house smoke?” Well, it’s very important that nobody smokes in the house. Neither second hand smoke or first hand smoke are good for a fetus and it’s a very logical and normal question to have.
And if the potential surrogate says no one smokes, but then the intended parents can smell stale cigarette smoke on her clothing or her husband’s clothing, then this might not be somebody that you’d want to work with. So, you’d want to look for those types of red flags. Other red flags can be just avoiding eye contact on certain topics, that type of thing. It could be something that maybe you can’t precisely put your finger on, but something that doesn’t seem right.
So that’s why it’s very, very important to meet each other in person, for a surrogacy meeting. And usually you can walk away with from such a meeting knowing if you really do want to work with that person or if this is something that you need to pass on. You need to trust your instincts and they do as well. So again we met Rachel and John for the first time today. We are looking forward to seeing if this is a match and if they feel the same way.
Related Surrogacy Meeting Pages
- Matching – Finding a Surrogate Mother
- Meeting a Surrogate Mother in Person
- Red Flags – Facts About Surrogacy
- Questionnaire for Meeting a Surrogate Mother
- Questionnaire for Meeting Intended Parents
